“Go on in and see her, Anna,” Joe said. “But don’t stay long. We’ll be here if you need us.”
They stood at the door and watched.
Anna plopped herself onto the side of Rachel’s bed and began to stroke her face and hair. It was as though Rachel were a kitten that Anna felt needed to be comforted.
As Anna sat there, Rachel looked up at her and whispered something. Anna nodded with understanding and whispered back, their faces close together.
“Should I go in?” he asked.
Bertha watched the interaction between Anna and Rachel with rapt attention.
“Not yet,” Bertha said. “When Rachel was young, she would talk to Anna about things she would not speak of with Lydia and me. It was like one child talking to another. There was a great trust between them.”
When Anna came out, her normally sunny face looked troubled.
“What did she say?” Joe asked her. “Did she give you any idea what’s going on?”
“Uh-huh.” Anna nodded.
They waited for Anna to say more, but she didn’t volunteer anything else. Instead, she appeared to be deep in thought.
“What did Rachel say?” Bertha prompted.
Anna startled. Then she frowned. “Rachel is afraid.”
“Of what?” Joe asked.
Anna shrugged and twisted a handkerchief in her hands. She did not answer.
He glanced at Bertha. “What’s going on?”
“Anna has trouble putting things into words,” Bertha said. “Sometimes we have to wait awhile before she finds those words.”
He left the sisters standing in the doorway and went back to Rachel’s bedside. His wife was curled into as much of a fetal position as she could get at three months’ pregnancy. He smoothed back her hair, tucked the thin blanket a little more firmly around her shoulders, and kissed her on the cheek, but Rachel never acknowledged him. She had gone away again.
Chapter 25
“You should go home, Joe,” Bertha said. “Get some rest. This has been a hard day for you. I’ll stay with her tonight in case she awakens.”
“I should be the one who stays,” Joe insisted.
“No.” Bertha shook her head. “She still might not know who you are, but she recognizes me and I can comfort her.”
Bertha looked so tired. The woman was far from young and had carried so much responsibility for so long.
“I hate to leave you here,” Joe said.
“Bobby needs you to be with him. He will be frightened that Rachel is in the hospital. Lydia and Anna need to go home, and their driver has left. Please take them with you, and I will stay.”
When Bertha made a decision, there was little use in arguing with her. He went to take Lydia and Anna back to their house, but as they walked to his car, Anna seemed agitated and kept looking around as though searching for someone.
“What are you looking for, Anna?” he asked.
“Is the bad man here?”
“What bad man, Anna?” Lydia asked.
“The bad man.” Anna stomped her foot, frustrated with trying to make them understand, and then she began to cry.
Anna rarely cried, but when she did, she didn’t seem to know how to stop. He drove, grimly, while Lydia absorbed Anna’s tears in the backseat—but they could get no more information out of her.
He could only hope that “the bad man” to whom Anna was referring was not himself. What was going on in Rachel’s mind?
After dropping off Lydia and Anna, he went downtown to the car show to get Bobby. When he got there, he found his son bedded down in the backseat of Darren’s fancy car. The festivities had ended for the evening and only a few people were left, but his brother was sitting in a lawn chair next to his car, keeping watch over his little nephew.
“I won,” Darren said, without any real enthusiasm.
“Good for you.” Joe couldn’t have cared less.
“How is Rachel?” There was real concern in Darren’s voice.
“No better.” Joe settled in a lawn chair beside Darren. It was surprisingly comforting, having his brother beside him, especially after the day he’d had.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Darren said. “Any idea what happened?”
“The ER doctor ruled out everything he could of a physical nature. But one of the things he asked me was if she’d recently experienced anything particularly traumatic. He said that sometimes if a person is going through something traumatic or stressful, the body protects the brain with a form of temporary amnesia. He says it’s rare but very real. The brain will be so emotionally traumatized that it will actually swell, temporarily wiping out their memory, because it simply cannot accept the terrible news. He says usually the person will simply awaken from the amnesia with no knowledge of what happened.”
“Do you buy that?”
“I don’t know.” Joe lifted the lid of the cooler sitting between them. “You got anything to drink in here?”
“Water, soda, a couple of sandwiches… Help yourself.”
Joe dug a foil-wrapped sandwich out of the cooler along with a bottle of water. He pulled the wrapper off, discovered a steak sandwich, took a bite—and realized that he wasn’t just hungry, he was famished. Darren waited patiently while Joe bolted the food and drained the bottle of water.
“Feel better?” Darren asked.
“Yeah. Thanks.” Joe leaned back in the lawn chair and stared up at the star-studded sky. “To answer your question, I’d rather it be that stress-related amnesia thing than finding out Rachel had had a stroke or heart attack…but if he’s right, what is Rachel so stressed about? We have some challenges in our life but nothing traumatic enough to cause that. Rachel is a strong woman. It would take something truly horrible to have that kind of effect on her. She was standing there talking with me like everything was perfectly normal…and then suddenly she fell to the ground in some sort of catatonic state.”
“She has a stressful job and has taken on the responsibility of a ready-made family. To someone as responsible as Rachel, it might be more pressure than you think.”
“She’s also pregnant,” Joe said.
“You’re going to have another kid?” Darren sounded envious. “You lucky dog! I hope he or she is as much fun as Bobby.”
“I’ll just be happy if the baby is healthy. I wondered if the pregnancy had anything to do with what happened, but the doctor said he didn’t think so.”
“Maybe there was a trigger of some kind that you didn’t notice.”
The two brothers sat in silence for a while, considering that possibility.
“Anna said something strange,” Joe said.
“What was that?”
“Rachel and Anna talked privately at one point. Afterward, Anna said that Rachel was afraid of the bad man.”
“Who is the bad man?” Darren asked.
“I have no idea,” Joe said. “Anna couldn’t tell us.”
“What happened right before Rachel fainted?”
“Just a lot of antique cars and owners setting up chairs, plus a crowd of regular people milling about, looking at them. She did seem a little puzzled by one guy, but there was nothing about him that seemed threatening to me. She made the oddest gesture before she collapsed, though.”
“What was that?”
“It looked like she was starting to reach for her gun.”
Chapter 26
Rachel slept a lot, waking for short periods of time. As her body rested, her mind and memory began to come back in snatches. Each time she awakened, Bertha was sitting in the chair beside her bed, and Rachel felt comforted and knew it was safe to crawl back into the cocoon of sleep. Everything was safe as long as Bertha was keeping watch.
At one point, she remembered a nurse helping her dress, and then some man came and they got into a car. She dozed in the car and awoke only when they got back home. The Sugar Haus Inn did not look like what she remembered. They led her to a bedroom she did not recognize.
Bertha
stripped back the quilt on her bed, helped her lay down, and then pulled the quilt up to Rachel’s chin. It struck her again that Bertha was looking awfully old. She wondered if Bertha might be sick.
“Where am I?” she asked.
“You are back home with us,” Bertha said. “This is Sugar Haus.”
“No, it isn’t,” Rachel complained. “Where is my room?”
“There was a bad fire, Rachel.” Bertha’s voice was weary. “Our people rebuilt the inn for us after it burned.”
“I’ll stay with her now,” said the strange man who kept coming in and out of her room. “You’ve done enough.”
“No!” Rachel felt a stab of alarm at that statement. She grabbed Bertha’s arm.
She did not want this man to stay with her. She wanted her aunts, and she wanted her daddy. It seemed odd that her daddy hadn’t come to see her, but there was a darkness in her mind whenever she tried too hard to think about her daddy. There was also a darkness in her mind when she realized that her belly was bigger—that was scary.
“Anna and Lydia and I will take turns,” Bertha said. “It will be all right.”
Rachel was surprised when she saw tears on the stranger’s face. Why was he crying? Who was he?
“It will be okay,” Bertha told the man. “The Englisch are fond of their computers, but those computers are nothing compared to the human mind. Our Father created our brains to have the ability to heal…with time.”
Rachel did not understand what Bertha was talking about. What was a computer?
“I feel so helpless,” the man said.
“We are all helpless right now,” Bertha said. “I believe she will come back to us. Gott will lead her out of the darkness, but I cannot predict when.”
Something niggled at Rachel’s mind as the two grownups talked. Something bad had happened. Something very bad. It crouched in the corner of her mind, lying in wait to pounce, but her mind refused to acknowledge it. She thought she remembered talking about something bad with Anna, but now she couldn’t remember what they had talked about. The harder she tried to think, the sleepier she got. Aunt Bertha’s quilt smelled of sunshine and soap and safety. The grownup voices receded as she fell back into the safe cocoon of sleep.
“Any change?” Darren turned off the TV when Joe came home. His brother had taken over the care of Bobby while he dealt with Rachel.
“None. It’s like she’s a child.” Joe threw his keys onto a side table. “A very sleepy child.”
“Is she regressing even further?”
“It seems that way,” Joe said. “She’s afraid of me now. Doesn’t want me in the same room.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Would she be better off in some sort of treatment facility?”
“Some doctors would probably say so, but the ones around here tend to be a little more holistic in their approaches to medicine. The one at the ER said he believed a treatment facility for adults could traumatize her further. He thinks we should at least try allowing her to rest for a few days at her aunts’ and see what happens before we talk about other options. Rachel has a strong will. I have to believe she’ll fight her way back to us.”
“Bobby wants to see her.”
“Where is he?”
“Playing in his room. I told him you’d be back soon.”
“Thanks, Darren. I’ll go talk with him.”
Joe was more grateful to his brother than he had ever expected to be. The rocky relationship between them had smoothed somewhat the past couple of days, and he was glad. He didn’t want to dislike his only brother. Losing Grace had made him see everything through different eyes. People he loved didn’t always stay alive. People he loved could be lost in an instant.
Bobby’s door was open as the little boy played with action figures on his floor. Usually his son was quite animated as he spoke in different voices for the various toys, but Joe could tell that his son’s heart wasn’t in it this time.
“Hi, buddy.”
Bobby glanced up, his small face alight with hope. “Is Rachel all better?”
“Not yet.”
Bobby didn’t say any more. Tears welled in his eyes and he looked down at the action figure he held in his hands.
“Don’t be sad,” Joe said. “She’ll get better.”
“Mommy didn’t get better,” Bobby said. “Mommy died.”
So that was what Bobby was thinking. He had lost one mother and now he was afraid he would lose Rachel.
“Rachel will be okay,” Joe said. “It’s just taking some time.”
“Can I go see her?” Bobby asked.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea, son.”
“If I was sick, Rachel would come see me,” Bobby said. “Even if I was really, really sick. She wouldn’t leave me.”
He made this statement with such utter conviction that Joe’s heart squeezed with pain from the truth of it. If she were well, Rachel would turn heaven and earth to get to Bobby if he needed her. In fact, it would tear her apart to know that she was causing the child any pain.
“We’ll go see her in the morning,” Joe said. “Right now it’s time for bed and prayers.”
He did not think Bobby’s presence would have any effect on her when his own had not, but at least tomorrow his son could see that she was still alive.
“Can I pray for Rachel?” Bobby asked.
“Absolutely,” Joe answered.
He welcomed Bobby’s prayers. If God was going to listen to anyone, it would be his tenderhearted little son.
Chapter 27
In the end, it was the smell of bacon and coffee that awakened her. Rachel opened her eyes and was surprised to see the plain white walls and wooden furniture of her aunts’ inn. Why on earth would she be here instead of at her own house? She didn’t remember having come here last night.
In fact, she couldn’t remember last night at all.
And she was wearing a nightgown. She didn’t own a nightgown. She preferred to sleep in a tank top and underpants. That way, in an emergency, she could pull on her uniform and be out the door at a moment’s notice. The nightgown had become all twisted and uncomfortable as she slept.
Everything felt so odd. Her mind was fuzzy, and that wasn’t normal for her. As a cop, she had always been grateful for her ability to think clearly.
She threw back the covers and set her feet on the floor, but when she tried to stand up, she swayed and had to grab hold of the oak bedstead. It took a few moments to get her balance. Once she did, she went to get a robe that was hanging on a hook behind the door. As she passed the window, it surprised her to see that there were blossoms outside. She had somehow had the feeling that it was fall.
All this was very disturbing.
As she wrapped herself in the robe and tied its sash, she heard footsteps on the stairs and then a knock on the door.
“Come in.”
Bobby came hurtling at her.
“You’re not sick anymore!” The little boy encircled her waist with his small arms and hugged her hard. She hugged him back and then saw Joe standing in the hallway. There was an odd expression on his face that she couldn’t read.
“What’s going on, Joe?” she said. “What’s happened? Have I been ill?”
A look of immense relief passed over his face the moment she said his name.
“Bobby wanted to see you and make sure you were okay.”
“Okay from what?”
“There’s a lot to explain. Maybe it would be best if you came downstairs first. Your aunts have fixed breakfast. They’ll be thrilled to see that you’re up. They don’t have any guests this morning, so you don’t have to dress.”
“Come on!” Bobby grabbed Rachel’s hand and tugged her down the stairs behind him.
The silence in the kitchen bothered her as she entered. The aunts were usually bubbling with conversation and laughter early in the morning as they planned their day.
“Rachel!” Bertha said. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m fine.” Rachel was still puzzled. She sat down, and Bobby scrambled to sit beside her.
“I think she’s back,” Joe said. “Although I can’t be sure.”
“Back?” Rachel asked. “Back from what?”
“Let us give thanks for our food first,” Bertha said. “And then we will explain.”
Obediently, Rachel bowed her head for the silent prayer, but her mind was whirling, trying to figure out why everyone was acting so strangely. And why couldn’t she remember yesterday?
When Bertha said “Amen,” Rachel lifted her head and glanced at the wall calendar. Anna had a habit of crossing off each day right after supper. It was one of her little rituals. She enjoyed counting things, and crossing off each day’s number helped her keep track of what day it was. She had done it religiously for as long as Rachel could remember.
So it startled her to discover that it was June thirteenth.
But it couldn’t be June thirteenth. Had Anna started crossing off days that hadn’t happened?
“What day is it?” she asked.
“June thirteenth,” Lydia answered softly. “Monday.”
“That can’t be.” Rachel glanced around at each face. All of them were still wearing a look of concern for her, even little Bobby.
Suddenly she remembered what was supposed to have happened over the weekend she had apparently missed.
“The Fifties Fling!” she said. “Anna and Lydia were going to be helping with the food booth…but I don’t remember any of it!”
Rachel could feel her mind starting to cloud over again, and she knew she had to fight against the dark mist that suddenly threatened to consume her. She jumped up and rushed out the door, barefoot. She needed to walk. She needed to breathe. She almost made it to the barn before Joe caught up with her.
“Rachel!”
She turned and confronted him. “Tell me exactly what happened, Joe. I need to know.”
“Okay.” He leaned against the fence and described everything to her. Then he said, “The doctor told us there is something called ‘stress-induced amnesia.’ He said there might be something going on that your brain needed to shut out in order to protect itself. Do you have any idea what it might be?”
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