by Amy Sorrells
Peter’s whole body worked to cough and inhale air, and a trickle of blood ran down the corner of his cracked lips.
Jakob looked away and hoped Peter couldn’t see the anger that threatened to overshadow his grief. How could Peter suggest they believe in the God who’d abandoned them, let alone forgive the maniacs? Let alone forgive himself?
“Forgive … and believe. Don’t let … hate … win …”
Jakob let go of his brother’s hand, stood, and walked toward the window, then looked down at the patients on the lawn basking in the sun, unaware of tragedy in the room above them, aware only of their own promise of recovery as they rested or leaned against a tree, lost in a book, a story, a hope.
“Jakob …” A fit of coughing, more feeble this time, drowned his words. More blood trickled out the side of his mouth and his nose. “Jakob … you must … forgive …”
Peter’s life left his body along with those last words, and it was then that Jakob picked up the prayer book on the bedside table and turned to the earmarked page. He grasped his brother’s limp hand, the warmth already leaving it. Jakob’s whispered words echoed against the walls of the room as Peter’s body grew even colder.
Magnified and sanctified be His great name.
In this world which He has created in accordance with His will,
may He establish His kingdom during your lifetime,
and during the life of all the House of Israel,
speedily, and let us say, Amen.
Let His great name be blessed for ever and to all eternity!
Blessed, praised, glorified and exalted;
extolled, honored, magnified, and lauded.…
He is greater than all blessings, hymns, praises and consolations
Which can be uttered in this world; and let us say, Amen.
May abundant peace from heaven descend upon us,
And may life be renewed for us and for all Israel; and let us say, Amen.
He who makes peace in the heavens, may He make peace,
For us and for all Israel; and let us say, Amen.
Jakob loosened the aquamarine from Peter’s lifeless grip, then kissed his brother on the forehead.
As he had kissed Mama.
Zahava.
Ilana.
Tova.
And as he wished he could have kissed Faigy good-bye too.
He found Mama and Papa Stewart in the hallway on the bench. “He is gone.”
Mama Stewart burst into tears, trying to stifle her sobs with a lace handkerchief. Papa Stewart pulled her into his arms, and Jakob wandered toward the stairs. He played with the strings on Papa’s tzitzit, winding them around the end of his finger and watching the tip turn blue, then releasing the blood to flow through to the end again.
* Jakob … come … here …
SPRING 1995
South Haven, Michigan
CHAPTER 25
Nel sat on the front steps and watched Mattie working in her front yard, her back hunched as she edged the front flower beds by hand with a spade. Her wide-brimmed straw hat was outlined by a scarf she tied under her chin to keep it in place on the breezy spring afternoon. Tendrils of her gray hair curled against her coat collar.
“One of these days I’m gonna buy you a gas-powered edger, Ms. Mattie,” said David, ambling up the driveway.
“Won’t ever work as good as my own two hands, and you know it, Mr. Butler,” she said over her shoulder. A smile spread across Mattie’s face, wrinkles morphing into multiple parentheses highlighting her joy of sinking her fingers into the dirt again after winter.
David extended a steaming cup of coffee toward Nel. “Brought you a little pick-me-up.”
“Thank you.”
The time they spent together had increased to near daily as winter turned to spring. Sometimes he’d bike into town with her to the library as she continued to check out and special-order books on Ukraine. Sometimes he surprised her with lunch as she worked away, forgetting the time, on her jewelry orders. Sometimes he visited Jakob with her at Lakeview.
“Everything okay?”
“Oh. Yeah. Sorry.” Nel ran her fingers through her hair and exhaled audibly. “I can’t believe Dad’s really coming home tomorrow.”
Careful to avoid her coffee, David sat next to her on the step and pulled her close to him. “It’ll be fine. I’ll help. Mattie will help.”
“I know. I’m ready from that perspective. I’m just worried he’ll fall again when I’m not around, or something worse …” Nel sipped the coffee, grateful for the earthy taste and the warmth of David beside her. Her recent, marathon efforts to finish more prototypes and commissions left her feeling dazed and worn out. She wanted to finish as much work as she could before Jakob came home so she could devote the majority of her time to getting him settled.
“I know. But you can’t think about that. You’ve gotta take one day at a time.” He grabbed her hand and pulled her toward his truck. “Like today, for instance. Come see what else I brought you.”
He pulled out a long, thin bag from the bed of his truck.
“What’s that?”
“You’ll see. This way.”
“David, I don’t have time—”
He pressed a finger gently to her lips and led her down the path and the steep stairs to the shore.
The late-afternoon sky shone deep blue, and she was glad she’d grabbed her down parka as the wind pushed against her. Tree limbs edged with the chartreuse of spring buds hugged the shoreline, and waves danced with froth on their tips. The shore was different every day, and it reminded Nel of a poem or a psalm with new meanings every time she read them.
She nodded down the beach toward a small stack of wood and Adirondack chairs tucked into a spot of sand surrounded by tall grass. “Someone has a good idea. It’s a great afternoon for a beach fire.”
“Glad you think so. It’s for us.”
She put her hands on her hips and tried to look annoyed with him. “David Butler. I have to finish those orders today.”
He ignored her qualms and handed her a roll of string, then pulled a kite out of the bag. “You wanna be the runner or the thrower?”
Nel hadn’t flown a kite in years. Perhaps decades. Not since Dad used to build his own and take Nel and her summer friends out to fly them. “I’ll run I guess.”
“Okay. That makes me the thrower.”
She ran hard into the wind, pivoting and running backward, facing him, as the string between them lengthened. “Now! Throw it now!”
He did, and the kite, a diamond of red, orange, and yellow with a tail of bandanna scraps, rose into the air. Back and forth it seized under the pull of crisscrossed currents of air. Diving and jumping and diving again, threatening to crash into the glimmering sunlight on the lake, the kite struggled with the wind. Nel’s legs strained to run farther and force it higher where it could rest and float, and when it did, she fell to her knees in the sand and laughed.
“Thank you.” Nel smiled at David, who’d joined her.
“You’re welcome.” They sat on the beach a good while and watched the kite waltz on the currents of air above them.
David broke the silence. “Hungry?”
“Starved.”
They reeled the kite in, then trudged up the beach to the campsite where David began to work on starting the fire.
“May I?” Nel nodded toward the picnic basket.
“Yep. Nothin’ fancy. Comfort food.”
She pulled out a bag of hot dogs; a container of potato salad; a baggie of fat, green grapes; a sack of marshmallows; and oatmeal-chocolate-chip cookies, still warm from being wrapped in foil.
“I made the cookies,” he confessed.
“Seriously?”
“I like to bake.” He shrugged his shoulders and grinned at h
er over the smoke rising from the kindling beneath the logs.
“What else do you like—besides baking and kite flying and bringing me food?”
“S’pose you’ll have to hang around and find out.”
The more time she’d spent with him, the more she realized she’d be happy to do just that. She twisted the top off a thermos and smelled the toasty scent of hot chocolate. The pinking of the sky, the emerging stars, and the rising moon were a perfect backdrop to the evening. She sat on her haunches and roasted a hot dog, spinning it in quarter turns until each side was a perfect brown.
“So, you ever gonna tell me why you moved back from Florida?”
The marshmallow David roasted turned into a blazing torch.
He blew out the flame, and the fingers of the bonfire reflected in his greenish-gray eyes, which Nel felt darken as they fixed on her from across the fire pit.
“Story is, I came back to start my handyman business. Fix places that haven’t been tended to.”
Nel stirred the fire, and sparks popped and danced on the heat rising up from it. “No one comes back to South Haven. Not if they don’t have to.”
“Some do. People who have no place else to go. People who realize they never should have left in the first place.”
She wanted to press him, but the way he said “no place else” stopped her. There was a sadness to it that felt fragile.
“So what’s your story?” David said after a few silent moments.
She shrugged. “I don’t have one. Unless you count the old saying ‘Time flies when you’re having fun,’ I guess.”
“I guess.”
Nel grew more uncomfortable as he gazed at her and was glad when he changed the subject. Clearly it wasn’t the right time for either of them to divulge details about their pasts, though they’d been dancing around them for months. Mattie’s advice came to mind: You know, some things are too painful, too shameful to speak of …
“Anything new with the research about your dad?”
“I haven’t heard anything from the church in Ukraine, and I’ve sent over a half dozen letters. For all I know, none of them ever got there. I may try to send another one. Or maybe I should just leave it all alone.” She furrowed her brow, discouraged.
“Have you asked your dad about any more of it?”
“I took the photo and ship manifest to Lakeview one day and showed it to him. At first I thought I saw a flash of recognition when he looked at the photo, but then he got agitated. So I haven’t brought it up since then.”
“Maybe he knows but doesn’t want to talk about it.”
“Maybe. Part of me wants to let it all rest, but part of me wants to know about where he came from, what he survived. It’s his story, I know, but it’s mine, too—is that selfish? It’d just be nice to know before it’s all gone forever.”
“Do you think he’ll be more apt to talk about it once he gets home and settled?”
“I don’t know,” she sighed. “I’m worried the move will make him confused again. But the doctors have said if anything, he might be less confused when he’s back around his own things.”
“I can see that. Everyone likes to be home.” He gazed past her at the churning lake.
“Yeah …”
He stood, brushed the sand off his jeans, and grabbed another roasting stick. “You ready for a s’more?”
“I guess I oughta be, since you’ve already had two.”
Instead of sitting across from her where he had been, he came and crouched next to her in the sand. He balanced the stick so the marshmallows roasted over cooler embers, then leaned toward her, brushing her hair away from her face. “You’ve gotten prettier after all these years, Nel Stewart.”
“Have I?”
“Mmm-hmm. Mind if I give you that after-prom kiss I should have?”
She answered by leaning in and kissing him first, then giggled. “Better check those marshmallows.”
“Dang it! I always do that.” He grabbed the stick and blew out the flames on the end of it. The marshmallows looked like charcoal. “Sorry about that.”
They laughed and abandoned the s’mores in favor of lying back and picking out constellations, which brightened and connected as dusk settled around them.
The next day, Nel tried to rub nervous emotions out of her arms as she sat on the windowsill in Jakob’s room at Lakeview. While she was glad to be bringing him home, she knew the risks of him falling again were great. And if he fell and broke the same hip, or something else, she knew he most likely wouldn’t recover.
The room already looked sterile with everything all packed away, a blank slate for the next resident to decorate with decades of a life propped up in picture frames, potted in decaying planters, and played out on cards and torn-edged coloring-book pages, scribbles of “Love you, Grandpa” in the unsure strokes of a preschooler.
Jakob struggled with the buttons of his argyle cardigan—the one she’d bought him for Christmas.
“Here, let me help you.” Nel pressed the buttons gently through the buttonholes. She bent and pulled his socks up, then let him push his feet into his house shoes while she rechecked to make sure his cabinet drawers were empty. She packed a few other leftover pieces of his clothing: a pair of stained, threadbare boxer shorts; a short-sleeved, starched, striped shirt he’d had since working as a manager at Brake-All; and a couple more Mr. Rogers–like cardigans.
“An old man can’t ever have enough cardigans,” Jakob had said when he’d opened the box from Nel at Christmas.
A young girl dressed in purple scrubs that hung off her thin frame pushed a wheelchair into the room and pulled an empty cart behind her. Silver piercings jutted out from the side of her nose, the right corner of her upper lip, and her left eyebrow, in addition to the rows of rhinestone studs outlining one ear. She hardly looked old enough to work. Her name tag flipped backward, and a photo of a baby with a giant daisy headband bigger than her head smiled from it.
“Hi, I’m Karrie,” she said to Nel. “Heard it’s moving day for Big Jake here.”
“You better believe it, missy.” Jake winked.
She patted Jake’s shoulder. “You ready, Big Jake?”
“Ready as I can be, except for leaving you. And I mean that in the most respectable of ways. You’re a special lady, Karrie. Don’t you let those dirty young men take advantage of you, hear? And lose a couple of those pierced things. You’re too pretty for those.”
“Yes, sir. I will.” She kissed Jakob’s cheek, then put her arms, like thin ribbons, around his thick body and squeezed him hard. A tear fell down her cheek as she backed away. “I wish they still made gentlemen like you.”
Karrie and Nel packed up the cart and helped Jakob into the wheelchair.
“Let’s get this show on the road.”
Like a macabre parade of strangers thrown together in a sideshow for the aged and decrepit, the troupe made their way past the recreation room, where fuzzy-headed women sat with blankets over their shoulders picking at yarn and needlepoints, hooked-rug and macramé projects. A few waved their hands. Most didn’t seem to notice. Heading for the front doors, the three of them passed the cafeteria, where a few straggling residents poked at frothy remnants of their pureed lunches.
“Bye, Big Jake.” The receptionist put a finger in the spot she’d been looking at in her magazine and closed it as Jake and his procession passed.
Jake raised his hand in a gesture of good-bye but never looked away from the glass doors and the trusty Crown Victoria beyond them.
CHAPTER 26
Nel breathed a sigh of relief. By the time she and Jakob arrived back at the house, David’s pickup truck was already parked in front, and he and Mattie were standing in the front yard waiting for them. David came alongside the car, opened Jakob’s door, and helped him out. He stayed next to Jakob, helped him unfold his walk
er, and held a hand loosely under his right arm as they shuffled toward the house. Although steady now—a marked improvement from where he’d started before rehabilitation—Jakob moved slowly, and any sort of large rock or dip in the terrain could buckle his leg and break another bone.
“Nice to see you, David.” Jakob coughed between steps.
“You too, Jake.”
“Well, well, well. Look who else has come to welcome my old bag of bones home.” He nodded toward Mattie, who was waiting for him at the top of the bright, clean wood of the new ramp David had built to the front door.
She blew him a kiss. “Made you some meat loaf.”
Jakob plodded harder and faster. “C’mon you two. I’m not dead yet.”
But his determination didn’t last long. A couple dozen stone steps led from the drive to the front door, and each one proved a near-mountain for Jakob, as did the ramp, despite the gentle incline David had designed. With each lurch, Nel wondered whether or not his hip would hold him up. Tears threatened as she questioned yet again what she might be getting herself into.
The meal Mattie made for Jakob’s homecoming rivaled Thanksgiving: her special meat loaf (better than turkey any day) smothered in gravy; homemade, smashed red potatoes; green-bean casserole; and yeast rolls filled the center of the old, round oak table in the dining room. Pumpkin pie, blueberry cobbler, and carrot cake on a cut-glass pedestal lined the antique oak sideboard in the dining room.
“Mom and Dad’s wedding china.” Nel picked a dinner plate off the top of the stack she’d pulled out of the matching oak glass china cabinet to begin setting the table and stroked the painted, tiny pink roses and gilded rim entwined with delicate ivy.
“She always said it doesn’t do anyone any good tucked away in a cabinet,” said Mattie.
“No, it doesn’t. Plus, in a way, having this out makes it feel like she’s welcoming Dad home too.” Nel turned toward the living room, where David sat reading the newspaper next to Jakob in his recliner. Jakob’s chin bobbed against his chest as he appeared to fight a nap in vain. “I’m worried about him, Mattie. As much as he’s improved, I can’t shake the feeling he’s not much longer for this world.”