by Beverly Bird
Adam’s throat had tightened to the point of physical pain. “His birthday was...is...June twenty-fifth. But he wouldn’t remember that.”
“No.”
“He just stopped asking?”
“After six months or so.”
Adam looked at him closely. “Was it hard for him? Changing? Doing things your way?”
The man’s smile was almost amused. “No. Our young children are not so very different from yours. They have no television, of course, and they work hard as soon as they are able. But the girls have their dolls and the boys have their toy tractors. And my home is more lenient than most in this Gemeide. I feel strongly that what we do within the privacy of our own walls is not particularly the church’s business.”
Adam remembered Mariah saying that he had moved to this Gemeide purely for his wife’s sake, so she wouldn’t be cut off from her own family. He nodded.
And then; without warning, the pain burst to the surface again. It wasn’t an explosion, more like a little bubble coming up in a boiling pot, popping open.
“He doesn’t remember me,” he said, his voice strangled. “Dear God, he looked right at me and didn’t know me at all.”
“Oh, I think he does,” Joe answered. “On some level.”
Adam looked at him sharply.
“The crazy anner Satt Leit is all he’s talked about for days, much more so than the other children. Something about you is touching him in a place. too deep for him to recognize or understand.”
Adam nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak.
Joe put his hat on again. “Could you give me a few days to talk to my Sarah? I need to break this to her gently. And then you should come to supper. You could meet him all over again. We could begin paving the way to telling him who you are. I think it will be far easier for him if you and Sarah and I put up a united front. Then we’ll decide where to go from there. Wednesday?” he suggested.
He was, Adam thought, a wise man, education or no education. He looked at Mariah. Her hands were clasped together in front of her again.
“No,” he heard himself say.
She looked up quickly, her breath catching. “Adam!” she cried, understanding. “I have no part in this!”
He shook his head. Maybe it was lingering anger over what he had witnessed at the church services. Or maybe it was something he simply could not look at too closely. But he wanted her there. Maybe he even needed her.
“What are you going to do?” he demanded, still looking at her. “Wait in disgrace outside the door? I won’t be a part of that.”
“I don’t have to go with you!”
“Yeah,” he said flatly. “You do.” At her tortured expression, he added, “Please. And if they won’t see you, then we’ll find another way.”
Mariah’s lip trembled. She looked frantically between him and Sugar Joe. “You don’t have to—” she began, but he interrupted.
“Actually, I’m not all that comfortable with a woman standing outside my door, either.”
“The Ordnung says you can’t eat with me,” Mariah whispered. She looked at Adam. “And Sarah’s father is a deacon. It’s asking too much.”
“The children can eat with you,” Joe replied. “You can do your actual ingestion among their company.”
Mariah shook her head. “But Sarah—” she tried again.
“My Sarah would slay dragons for the sake of her children.”
Mariah finally nodded, almost helplessly.
“Wednesday supper, then,” Joe said, then he tipped his hat to them, put it on and left.
Adam looked at Mariah. “Is what I’m asking so hard? So much of a...I don’t know, a taboo?”
She shook her head again. “It’s just...” She trailed off and covered her face with her hands. So much, she thought. There were so many complications in all of this.
“What?” Adam prompted after a moment.
“It’s a gift I never dared hope for.” Mariah lowered her hands and smiled at him. He thought her mouth trembled. “Thank you, Adam.”
Something about her smile or maybe her simple words hit him deeply. “I’ll be right back,” he said suddenly. He needed to get away from her, from her shimmering violet eyes, as desperately as he had ever needed anything in his life. He didn’t trust what he might do, what he might say next if he stayed.
He went outside and shut the door carefully behind him. Sugar Joe had just reached his buggy. A single horse stomped its hooves impatiently in the snow.
“Hey, hold on a minute,” Adam called out.
Sugar Joe turned back to him. He didn’t seem surprised that Adam had followed. Yet once Adam was standing beside the horse, the pungent steam of exertion wafting off the beast, he had no idea what to say.
“Did you tell the people at the services where you were going?” he asked finally.
Joe smiled and waved a hand at the enclosed buggy. Adam peered inside and saw a boy of about eighteen.
“That’s Nathaniel, my oldest,” Joe said. “He got taken with a sudden bout of the flu. Needs to go home and rest. Imagine that.”
“So...he knows.”
“Yes, I told him. He’s old enough now to understand and to act as my accomplice on those occasions when I need him. I think, when all is said and done, he’ll probably go back to Berks to take his baptism. He’s strong and open-minded, my Nathaniel, and he’s uncomfortable in this rigid Gemeide. He chafes a bit.”
“I don’t want to hurt any of you.” He had said that earlier, but Adam felt as if he needed to repeat it.
“You can’t help it,” Joe said without rancor or anger.
Suddenly Adam was furious again. “How can you be so damned complacent about all this?”
“How can you not be?”
Adam narrowed his eyes. “It can’t be that easy. Believing. Accepting.”
The man leaned back against the buggy and crossed his arms over his broad chest. “It’s all in the mind-set,” he explained, “in how you decide you’re going to feel about something. I live by their rules, Mr. Wallace, by what this Gemeide ordains. That doesn’t mean I have to embrace all that down here—” he thumped a fist against his heart “—where no one else can see.”
“That’s more of a blasphemy than Mariah believing with all her heart and being shut out for something stupid,” Adam argued, his temper burning.
“No. Not really. I’ve been married to Sarah for nineteen years now. We’ve lived here all that time. And the strangest thing happened, Mr. Wallace. Somewhere along the line nearly all of their Ordnung has come to be my own. It pervaded me, you see. Slowly. While I wasn’t paying enough attention.”
“You came here for her. For love of a woman.” Adam almost snarled it and was immediately embarrassed. It was none of his business. He started to turn away. “Never mind.”
“You don’t understand,” Joe said, as though he pitied him.
Adam looked back at him. “No. I really don’t.”
“Life is a tangle of compromises, my friend.” Joe balanced his hands like two sides of a scale. “You come to a fork in the road. You didn’t ask for that fork, never saw it coming, but there it is. And the road behind you is suddenly blocked. That’s God’s will.”
Adam was a little jolted. He’d used the fork-in-the-road analogy himself not too long ago, talking to Mariah. And he’d thought a great deal about roadblocks lately.
“What you do with that fork ahead of you is your own will,” Sugar Joe went on. “So you weigh it. Or at least I did. I could go left, join with my Sarah, and live by rules I didn’t necessarily agree with at the time. Or I could go right and take her back to my own Gemeide. But I would cause her great pain by taking her from her family. They would have shunned her, you see, for...well, for marrying down. Perhaps she would even have come to hate me for that after a while.” He finally dropped his hands. “I couldn’t bear that and I couldn’t hurt her, so I joined her world instead.”
“The lesser of two evils,” Adam said
hoarsely.
“No. There was really no evil about it. As long as she’s in my life and she’s happy, everything else is secondary.” He finally opened the buggy door. “And so, my friend, we all compromise when something is important enough to us. Will you come by on Wednesday, then?”
It was a simple question. Why, then, did Adam feel as if there were too many complex answers? “Yeah,” he answered finally.
“Good. We’ll look forward to seeing you. About five o’clock will be fine. We eat early, as soon as chores are done, because we need to get up well before dawn the following day.”
Adam nodded absently. Sugar Joe’s horse clop-clopped away. Adam watched it for a long time before he returned to the schoolhouse.
He found Mariah hunkered down by the stove. He shoved his hands into his pockets again. She didn’t look up. Her hands just began to work faster.
“Why don’t you wait here and keep warm?” he suggested. “I’ll walk back for the car and bring it to you.”
“It’s always so cold here on Monday mornings,” she fretted as if she hadn’t heard him. “On school nights I always bank the fire so that it lasts into the night. It’s never quite as frigid on those mornings. But Mondays are like a slap in the face. So I thought I’d try the same thing as long as I’m here today. Although it’s early. The coals probably won’t last much past dusk. I—”
“Mariah,” he interrupted.
She looked over her shoulder at him. “Yes?”
“You’re babbling.”
She flushed and looked back into the stove, scowling intently. Then she closed the door almost too carefully and got to her feet, wiping her hands on her apron.
“Any particular reason?” It was rare to see her this flustered.
“No, of course not. I...” She trailed off and smoothed back a wisp of her dark hair where it had come untucked above her ear. She heard Sugar Joe’s voice again. Blond and quite attractive. One thing was for certain, she thought with angry frustration she rarely succumbed to. Jannel Wallace probably had not trudged through life in black hose and sensible shoes.
“Mariah?” Adam said again. When she looked at him her face took on a serene expression that seemed forced and deliberate this time.
“I’m very happy for you, Adam,” she said stiffly.
“Thank you.” He crossed the room to stand in front of her. “What is it?” he asked again. “What’s wrong? Is it going to their house? Is that what’s bothering you?”
“No. Yes. It’s—I should be thanking you.” She looked away from him. “For having a care about whether they’d leave me standing outside the door or not.”
“Mariah, it’s no big deal. I just don’t approve of the way they treat you. Maybe I’m just a plain, old Catholic, but we’ve got this thing about forgiveness.”
“Have you forgiven your wife?” she blurted. “This...Jannel?”
His heart kicked. He needed to move away from her now, but he stepped a little closer to her instead. “Maybe,” he answered, and he realized, stunned, that it was suddenly true. “Yeah. I think someday I will, when all this is settled. I’m getting closer.”
Then she touched him and shattered his thoughts. It was only a feather-light kiss of her fingertips along his cheek, but she seemed to be searching for something with the caress. “It’s almost over, Adam,” she said almost wonderingly. “Your pain. Your problem. I don’t think it’s going to take as long to set things straight as we thought.” She paused to swallow. “If Bo remembers a little, as Sugar Joe seems to think, then perhaps it won’t take long, at all. You could nearly be to the end of your road, Adam.”
Roads again, he thought, and panic tried to flutter inside him. “Yeah.”
She dropped her hand and looked away. There was something underneath there, he thought again, something in her eyes, hiding behind her calm expression, that he couldn’t put his finger on and couldn’t do a thing about.
“I’ll get the car,” he repeated hoarsely.
This time Mariah let him go.
She’d been wrong, she realized, hugging herself. She didn’t have time. It was slipping through her fingers like sand.
Chapter 10
Adam called Dallas as soon as he got back to his room. His pulse danced. His head throbbed. If Mariah had been the only one to understand the impact of what had happened the first day he’d seen Bo again, then only Jake could understand the enormity of being this close to reclaiming him again.
He found his brother easily this time. Jake answered ChildSearch’s phone.
“What are you doing there?” Adam asked warily. “What’s happened now?”
“You gave Diana the day off, remember? It’s Sunday. Listen, it’s no problem now, but I’ve got a paying job that’s going to need my attention in about an hour or so.”
“Put the answering service on.”
He thought he could hear Jake shrugging. “Yeah, I already called them. I just wanted to make sure the expense would clear the coffers. Listen, speaking of money, you know that real honest-to-God paying case we have? Amber Calabrese? The girl from North Carolina?”
“Yeah, I remember her.”
“The service took a call last night. Somebody thinks they saw her in Phoenix. Berry checked the school records there. No Amber Calabrese, but there’s an Annie Perez who matches her description pretty closely. The kid was enrolled twelve days ago, right after Amber was snatched. According to the girl’s file, her mother’s supposed to be dead. No siblings.”
“That was easy.” Sometimes it happened. “Sounds like the father took her. The mother was right.”
“Yeah,” Jake answered. “So anyway, Berry contacted that guy we sometimes use with the LAPD. He’s off on Thursday, so he says he’ll drive over and see what he can see.”
“Tell him to fly and charge the company account.”
“Huh?”
“You heard me.” Adam couldn’t have explained why, but suddenly he had an urgent, immediate need to put that little girl back with her mother. Maybe it was just having his own Bo so close now, within reach but still not his.
Amber Calabrese, he thought, had been gone less than a month. She would still remember her mother.
“Sure. Okay,” Jake said slowly.
“And while you’re at it,” Adam went on, “hop on a plane yourself.”
“What the hell is happening up there?” Jake burst out.
Adam finally said the words, the sweet, sweet words. “Looks like I’m going to have dinner with Bo Wednesday night.”
Jake’s silence was long and appropriately awed, as Adam had known it would be. Then his brother swore softly.
“You know, this might be the first thing that’s actually gone right in our whole wretched, rotten lives,” he murmured.
Adam was surprised. Jake rarely spoke about their wretched, rotten lives.
“He remembers you after all, then?” Jake went on.
“The guy who’s been taking care of him thinks he might, a little bit. Probably not consciously, though. We’re going to start closing the gap. This guy’s been...helpful. He’s a good man. There’s no bitterness there that I can see, and if there is it’s buried so deep I don’t even think he knows about it.”
“Well, that’s good. That’s great.” Another silence. “So what do you need me for?”
Adam hesitated. “Jannel’s not here. I need to find her. I need closure, Jake.”
A part of him wanted to do as Sugar Joe had suggested—let it go, let it die, rejoice in simply being reunited with Bo. But it just wasn’t that easy.
Once he had wanted to shake her, to hurt and punish her for what she’d done. Now he felt only a certain disgust when he thought of her, that she had failed him, their child, herself so miserably. It was why he had realized, talking to Mariah today, that he might finally be able to forgive her. He should have been able to close his mind to her now, but...
Something was nagging him. It was all so unfinished, a thread just dangling. Somethin
g didn’t feel right. There was something else at play here, he thought, and though he couldn’t put his finger on it, he needed to find out what it was.
He told Jake in quick, concise terms what Sugar Joe had told him, how Jannel had said she’d come back, but she hadn’t. And how a man had turned up looking for her two years later.
“One of her drug friends,” Jake muttered.
“Yeah, that was my first thought,” Adam agreed.
“There’s a ‘but’ in your voice, bro.”
“I need to be sure.”
“I’m off on Thursday and Saturday. I’ll see what I can do about getting Friday, too, and coming up. Worst case, I’ll have to trade off my Saturday for Friday, and I’ll only be able to snoop around up there for a couple of days.”
“I think that’s all it’ll take.” Everything felt close now, he realized. “If you just ask around, you know, maybe you could get some physical pointers on this guy. Something. I have a gut feeling he’s the key to all this.”
“Yeah,” Jake agreed. “Sounds like it.”
“I ought to warn you, though. You were right. These people are a pretty private bunch. Most of them.” In spite of himself, he thought of Mariah again, saw her in his mind’s eye, though he’d promised himself he would put her out of his head until Wednesday.
“Hey, they’ll talk to me,” Jake answered, snagging his attention again. “I’m a nonthreatening guy.”
“Right.” At his best and most charming, there was still something vaguely menacing about his brother, a wildness just beneath the surface.
“Well, one way or the other,” Jake answered, “I’ll see you Wednesday night.”
Adam’s heart hitched. By then he would have had dinner—supper, they called it—with his son. “Perfect timing.”
Mariah’s hands trembled as she tied her apron into place late on Wednesday afternoon. She’d rushed home from school, her feet fairly flying over the snow. She’d bathed, and now she was doing something unconscionable. She was...primping.