by Beverly Bird
It was also perfectly reasonable.
It was the way he chose to voice the request that had drummed alarm into her blood, she realized. She didn’t like being needed. She didn’t want to be needed. Dear God, she had her own problems right now, she thought for what had to be the thousandth time in the past couple of days. And the simple emotion of need implied a drawing in, a snarling of joined goals, of shared efforts. She was reminded of what she had said to Jake and Adam last night: Eleven years ago we never paid any attention to one another. It was each of us for ourselves. And she’d learned to be comfortable with that.
Yet both Jake and Adam had apparently gone on to care about someone else. She felt incapable of it. It terrified her. Was that why she had reacted so strongly to Joe’s suggestion? Because she liked him? Because she could so easily come to care?
“Kimberley.”
She looked up sharply and saw Joe approaching. He held a blanket out toward her. Solicitous. Caring. Ruggedly handsome, with need in his eyes.
“I saw your misstep at the creek,” he explained.
“I’m fine.” But she reached for the blanket, snatching it from his hand, wrapping it around herself. Her teeth were chattering, probably as much from nerves as anything else, she decided.
He sat on the boulder beside her. Too close. Much too close. Unfortunately, if she inched away, she’d be bottom first on the cold, hard ground.
“I didn’t say that very well,” he admitted. “I’m at the end of my rope. and finesse is currently beyond me.”
She nodded. She didn’t entirely trust herself to speak, either. She cleared her throat. “It w-wasn’t you. It’s m-me.” She closed her eyes, witting the shivers to stop. “It’s not just you,” she amended. “It’s everything. It’s Jake and Adam. They’ve gone on. I haven’t,” she acknowledged. “I can’t. I don’t want to get all...enfolded here. I can’t risk it. Especially not now. There’s too much else tearing me up inside.”
“It wasn’t easy for either of them,” Joe said quietly. “They struggled hard. I witnessed both battles.”
“I’m cold,” she persisted, as though she hadn’t heard him.
“We’ll go back.”
“No, not that way. I mean...cold. I’m not what you need.”
Perhaps she wanted to be cold, he allowed. He thought he could accept that much. He remained silent, letting her try to convince herself.
“I’m selfish. I didn’t come here for some grand reunion. I came to save Susannah.”
“You wouldn’t overwhelm me with care and kindness,” he told her. “Well, I’ve had enough of that anyway.”
She gave a choked laugh. She couldn’t help it.
“Kimberley, just think of the practical aspects of this. Think of all those things I said so ineloquently back in the kitchen. And...be selfish. Think of it from the angle of what’s in it for you.”
She looked at him warily.
“If you go home, you’ll be going back to a physician who’s inferior to the one Jacob has found here,” he stated.
She stiffened. “Not necessarily.”
“Is this Parra an oncology expert?” he asked. “Or is he...” What had they called the doctor who had taken care of Hannah after Sarah had died? “A pediatrician?”
“He’s a pediatrician,” she mumbled. “But I’m sure he could find us an expert.”
“But Susannah’s chances are better with this man, right? Jacob said Coyle was the best in the country.”
“He said Children’s Hospital was the best in the country.”
He watched her with one brow up. “You’re splitting hairs.”
“There are oncology experts all over the country, Joe,” she said, suddenly weary. “I can certainly find one in California. This all just hit me hard, out of the blue. When I took Susannah to the doctor again three weeks ago, for more tests, I wasn’t expecting her blood work to come back saying that she was dying. I guess I knew it was bad, but...” She took a breath and collected herself again. “I certainly never expected Parra to tell me that my family was the best chance of saving her life. So I just...reacted,” she admitted. “I didn’t look for a better doctor or a second opinion. I just set out on a wild quest to locate the kin who might help her. That doesn’t mean I can’t go back now and find a specialist.”
Joe said nothing.
“What?” she demanded, searching his face.
“California,” he murmured. “So that’s where you’re from.”
She nodded warily, watching him.
“Quite a distance,” he observed. “Is it true there are palm trees?”
She frowned. “In some places,” she replied. “Earthquakes? I read that somewhere.”
She nodded dazedly. She was reminded all over again that for all his fascinating depth and contradictions, he’d spent his whole life in this cloistered environment.
“An interesting existence.”
Then he changed the subject again so suddenly her head swam.
“None of us asked you this. Is there a man you must go back to?”
“A man?”
He was damned if he was going to hold his breath while he waited. “Someone of the male gender who you are...uh, currently romantically involved with.”
“I...no. Not for a very long time now.”
“A job?” he asked, trying hard not to sound relieved. Telling himself he certainly shouldn’t care one way or the other.
Kim shook her head. “I took...well, sort of a leave of absence. My boss had someone who could work temporarily in my place. He’ll hire me back when that girl has to return to school. And it wasn’t a real coveted job to begin with. Except in the world of cocktail waitresses.” It had taken her a long time to inch her way up to the hotel lounge she worked at now, a place with a reasonably good benefits package and substantial perks.
“You serve cocktails?” Joe asked.
“What’s wrong with that?” she countered defensively.
“Not a thing. At least, I imagine there wouldn’t be in your world.”
“Well, then.” She let her breath out and decided not to tell him that a lot of people looked down their noses at her.
He changed the subject again. “Adam paid the doctor when we left. They both want badly to help you.”
Her spine went ramrod straight. “Paid him? But I have insurance through my job. I gave that woman my card on the way in.”
“It was a hundred dollars. They called it a...co-pay?”
She wilted, covered her face with her hands and groaned. Between that and what she owed Jake for the car, her expenses here were running sky-high, and she had been here only a couple of days.
She had so little money left. Too little to get them all the way back to California. But that was going to be a problem if she left today or six months from now, she reasoned.
“I’ll pay you a salary,” Joe said again.
It was almost as though he had read her mind. Kim flinched and dropped her hands. And she heard herself say something she’d had no intention of saying, something that implied agreeing to his maybe-not-so-crazy plan. “That’s not necessary,” she murmured.
Joe shrugged and let the subject go. They could talk about that part later. “I have one last argument,” he said. “A very, very good one, if I must say so myself.”
“What?” she asked, sliding her eyes to him again. And she found herself thinking that their shoulders were flush, braced against each other, and that it felt in an odd sort of way as though it were the two of them against the world.
“If you’re not going to rely solely on those computer lists,” Joe said, “if you choose the avenue Jacob mentioned about canvassing a community, then you’re certainly in the right one. How many German people do you know in California? You’ve already thought of this, Kimberley. You questioned me this morning.”
Her heart started thumping too hard. “Susannah needs someone who’s German and Irish.”
“Well, I can’t help you with the Iri
sh part. But if you would care to check out a few Germans, I can probably offer you hundreds to choose from. And I can guarantee you, you won’t find them listed with any computer registry.”
She wanted to laugh at the way he put it. “What are you going to do? Snap your fingers and have the entire...the whole settlement or gemeide or whatever you called it line up at the curb to have blood drawn?”
“Something like that.”
He wasn’t kidding, she realized, her head swimming. “They don’t even know me!” she protested.
“As I said last night, that wouldn’t matter.”
“It should!”
“Should it? There’s not one person—in my gemeide, anyway—who would not go to hell and back to save a child, Kimberley. Which is not to say the old one wouldn’t have proclaimed that your daughter’s illness was God’s will. But we broke off from them over precisely this sort of issue. We broke away because we couldn’t tolerate that way of thinking, that extreme adherence to nonresistance where a child’s life and safety are concerned.” He paused. “Besides, this isn’t about you. It’s about Susannah.”
She felt her skin go warm, because he was right. “We don’t need to be here for the people to be canvassed,” she remarked. “And if their marrow matched, it could be flown to California.”
“Do you have a good reason to complicate this?”
She scarcely heard him. She was too busy thinking of other arguments. “Even if someone matched, then it would require surgery to take the marrow from them,” she said. “An operation. General anesthesia.”
“Well, they’d do that, too.”
“For a stranger?”
“For a child,” he said again.
She was overwhelmed. And suddenly, she felt petty and small. Because as he had said, this had so little to do with her own fear and hang-ups. It had everything to do with Susannah’s life. There was no way in hell she could turn away from what Joe Lapp was offering. How could she refuse the opportunity to live rent-free within two hours of the best pediatric oncology facility in the country?
“And the way I understood it,” Joe was saying. “Dr. Coyle is putting Susannah’s antigen list into that computer system to scan against Irish, German, Chinese, Polish and Italian backgrounds—to scan everyone in there. I’m just suggesting that we try some German folks who wouldn’t be listed in that network, widening the search.”
She swallowed carefully. “That’s true.”
“So what can it hurt to draw blood from everyone here, while you’re waiting to find out what those donor lists contribute?”
Her throat closed. Her eyes filled. “It can’t.”
He said nothing to indicate that he had obviously just won a point.
“There’s still her grandmother. Bobby’s mother,” she said.
“Yes. Perhaps that will pan out.”
“And maybe it won’t. And if it does, I should probably have Dr. Coyle perform the surgery.” She realized she was arguing herself into it now, and she just felt weary.
“How long are children generally hospitalized for something like this?”
She scraped the heel of her boot in the brittle grass. “Awhile.”
“Exactly how long is ‘awhile’?” he persisted patiently.
She dredged for what Dr. Parra had told her on their second visit after Susannah’s diagnosis. “Something like a week for the conditioning regimen—for the chemotherapy and whatnot. And most patients stay in the hospital for one to two months after the engraftment. But in a lot of ways, this Coyle is much more stringent than Parra was.”
Joe looked a little overwhelmed. “My Lord, how are you going to manage that co-pay thing on something like that?”
Her eyes filled. She scrubbed at them. “I’ll be paying the bills off for the rest of my life, no doubt. But if she lives, you’ll never hear me utter a word of complaint.”
“Of course not.”
They were quiet for a moment.
“No need to run up an immense motel bill while you’re at it,” he said finally.
Kim sighed. “What would you want me to do here?”
He answered without hesitation. “Help Dinah. I want her to be able to go to a church social now and again. And Gracie. So she doesn’t have to get up at night with the baby.”
It was such a simple request, she thought, shaken, and it was all for his daughters, not for himself.
“And make those women go away,” he finally said.
A chuckle escaped her. “They didn’t seem too enamored of me.”
“Which is why they’ll give you a wide berth. You’re an outsider. You might contaminate them with your heathen, worldly thinking.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Is the whole settlement going to feel that way? Am I going to be treated like some kind of pariah?”
His expression turned pained. “Not at all. It’s just that the sisters...you’d be invading Sarah’s kitchen. Hallowed ground.”
Her heart hitched. “Presumably.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re assuming I can cook on that stove contraption.” She paused. “What about your children? Aren’t you worried I’ll corrupt them with my...uh, worldliness?”
He met her gaze. “I thought about it, but no. Unlike a lot of parents here, I do want them to be exposed to all avenues of life. I want them to be able to make educated decisions about baptism when the time comes. And I trust myself as a good judge of character. Amish or not, you have solid values.”
She snorted at that, but the compliment made her heart skip an uncomfortable beat.
“Anyway, the sisters consider me a heathen, as well,” he added. “They’ve never approved of my Berks County upbringing. As I said, folks are much less stringent there. Then, to add insult to injury, I led that uprising and pulled a hundred or so families from the old gemeide earlier in the year. Sarah’s family came with me, but most of her sisters consider me a little wild because of what I did.”
Kim realized that she’d like to hear that story one day.
“I’ll give it a shot,” she said finally. “I mean, as long as we leave the arrangement open-ended. I’m not going to commit to any precise period of time, Joe. Let’s just see how it works out. It could turn out to be a disaster.”
Joe realized he had been holding his breath. “Good enough. Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me until you’ve tasted my cooking. And if you think I’m doing all this without benefit of Pampers, you’re crazy.”
“Pampers?” He scowled.
“Disposable diapers.”
“You throw them out afterward?”
“Precisely.”
“What are they made of?”
“Some kind of absorbent paper.”
“No kidding.” He seemed bemused. “That could work.”
“Trust me—it definitely works.” She got to her feet, took a step, then looked back at him. “You’re going to send Jake and Katya home, aren’t you? No matter what you said back there in the kitchen about my spending time with my brothers.” She figured if he really wanted to get his house back to normal, then booting out that faction of the Wallace clan might be one place to start. There were six of them.
Joe stood, as well. “I’m certainly going to try. Actually, I suspect Jacob is going to have his own mountain to climb, once he realizes that his wife is pregnant.”
“That’s going to blow him off his foundations, huh?”
“I think so.”
They began walking, side by side. Together.
“Disposable, huh?” Joe said after a moment. “I wonder where that fits into the ordnung.”
Chapter 9
“I’m not going home,” Jake said twenty minutes later. He looked around at them as though they had all just changed color. “Are you nuts?”
“There’s nothing you can do here,” Kim said. “You don’t match.”
“I can give moral support if nothing else,” he said stubbornly.
“I
can handle that end of it,” Adam said.
Kim noticed that Joe was exchanging a pointed look with Katya. He finally glanced back at Jake. “It seems to me that you’d be of more use to Susannah in Dallas,” he suggested. “ChildSearch has one of those newfangled computer systems, doesn’t it?”
“A web site. Yeah,” Jake said slowly. “We flash bulletins of missing kids on it. Advertise an E-mail address for people to anonymously send in tips.”
“Can you flash a bulletin for a child in need?” Joe asked. “Can you do this to search for an Irish-German marrow donor?”
Jake’s eyes narrowed. “I could do that.”
“That’s a wonderful idea!” Katya exclaimed.
“I can do that from here,” Jake said. “A few phone calls to tell the staff what I want to transmit—”
“Jacob, I’m the staff! Well, for the most part.” Katya threw her hands in the air. “I want to go home. I need to go home. Especially now that everything is covered here.”
He looked at her dumbly. “You don’t want to help anymore? You broke your neck dragging us all back up here in the first place!”
“That was three weeks ago, and something has changed.” She stood from the kitchen table. “Come upstairs. We need to talk.”
Jake watched with an immense scowl as she left the room. “What’s going on here?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but got up to follow his wife.
A few moments later, they heard his shout from upstairs. It was impossible to tell if he was astounded, overjoyed or terrified. Kim and Joe exchanged looks. Kim’s mouth tugged into a smile, though she would have sworn it wasn’t possible.
“I’m missing something here,” Adam said slowly.
“Katya is pregnant,” Kim volunteered.
Adam’s mouth hung open. “Katya? Jake? Jake’s going to be a father?”
“Well, I do think he already is,” Joe said. “To Katya’s children.”
“Yeah, but...” Adam trailed off. He felt stunned. “Wow,” he said at last. He looked at Kim. “How did you know?”
She thrust a thumb at Joe. “Old Sonar here picked up on it.”
“Sonar?” Joe repeated, scowling. And that simply, that quickly, she was overwhelmed again by what different worlds they inhabited.