Saving Susannah

by Beverly Bird

  There had been no real terror until those final moments, when everything had gone wrong. There had been fear, certainly. But not the terror of knowing well in advance that, barring a decisive miracle, Sarah would die.

  He could barely imagine Kimberley’s almost sure certainty that Susannah’s death was right around the corner. My God, how did she even begin to hold up? Where did she keep dredging courage from? It was the single thing that had him coming into the kitchen that morning, when he had vowed to keep going straight to the bathroom to wash up.

  “I can do that,” he said quietly, coming to stand behind her. He needed to help somehow, any way he could.

  Kim had been lost in thought and she hadn’t heard him enter. She jumped, wielding the butcher knife as she came around to face him. “I can handle it,” she snapped, because she had pride, and she refused to give in to her need to get these birds off her hands. So much for her idea of doing the cooking part of things. Joe had brought the birds in to her first thing this morning. “Mariah was right,” she continued. “This is better than tiny pieces. And this time, at least, they were dead for a while.”

  “I just want to help.”

  “You have. You are. And damn it, will you please put a shirt on? There are no services today!”

  “What?” He looked at her dumbly.

  She realized what she had said and her face flamed.

  “I was on my way to wash up,” he explained slowly when she didn’t answer. “And what does that have to do with church?”

  “Nothing,” she muttered, turning back to the chickens. “I’ve already got feathers stuck to every inch of my skin. I’ll finish. No sense in both of us getting garped up.”

  He didn’t want to imagine feathers stuck all over her skin. The image should have been ludicrous. Instead, he imagined taking them off. One by one.

  Why wouldn’t he leave? He was breaking the rules, she thought desperately. He never came near her anymore when the kids weren’t around. And where the hell were the kids? The house was stone quiet.

  “Kimberley,” he began again.

  “Go away,” she whispered.

  But he didn’t move. Instead, she felt his hand in her hair. After the initial leap of her heart, she spun around again, fully prepared to lay into him and bite his head off. And the sobs came out of nowhere, clogging her throat. She threw the knife down, and herself into his arms.

  Joe caught her because he couldn’t do anything else. Nor did he want to.

  She clung, and he felt the tremors of each of her ragged breaths against his chest. He closed his eyes and stroked her hair. And he needed, and he wanted, but at least half of it this time was a strong desire just to make everything right again for her and her daughter.

  “What if—” She broke off, started again. “What if this doesn’t work, Joe?”

  “I don’t know,” he said honestly. They both knew the odds. Irish and German. They both knew it likely wouldn’t work. There wasn’t any Irish gene to be found in the community, except hers and Adam’s.

  “I...can’t...let her...die. I can’t. In all...my life...she’s all that’s...mattered. She’s all that’s been...good.”

  “I know.”

  But he didn’t know how to help her. He didn’t know how to save her from this.

  She drew in one last, rough breath. She tried to pull back. He wouldn’t let her go. He decided there was no real need for her to stand on her own two feet right now. He thought it entirely possible that she might hit him for it. That would be okay, too, if it helped vent some of what was inside her. But she didn’t. She struggled a little more, then she went limp against him again, just holding on.

  “Let it out,” he said inanely.

  “I am.” And she hated it, hated it. “I’m not weak.”

  “I know.”

  “I can handle anything.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “Anything but this.”

  He didn’t tell her this would be a damned good time for prayer. He buried his own hatchets with God and prayed for her.

  By nightfall, it was pretty much over. Kim was vaguely astonished by how seamlessly the whole process had gone. Two white minivans from Children’s Hospital had pulled up in front of the farmhouse at noon. The community began descending upon them at the same time. There was one brief, easily fixed glitch when the technicians told her that everyone should have a glass of orange juice after giving a sample. Not that they were taking all that much blood from any one person, but those who had never done it before—which was the entire community—might feel a bit woozy.

  Adam had saved the moment, thrusting some cash at her so she could run into the village and clean out the refrigerator of the small market there. She’d cried again, hating herself for it, when she’d thanked him, and had vowed to pay him back.

  She’d counted the people as they fell into line, one by one, rolling up their sleeves. Joe had gone first, and her throat had slammed shut. She knew he was doing it to show everyone how easy and painless the process was. He’d told her that he had done this once before, when Sarah had needed blood after Matt’s birth. When the technician inserted the needle into his arm, she knew he had to be remembering.

  She counted up to 170 people in the line, before her eyes crossed and her brain fogged and she lost track. They rolled up their sleeves for a child because they felt their God would want them to do so. Because, Joe told her, community and family were inviolate here.

  “This doesn’t make sense,” she murmured finally, sitting on the top porch step. Joe had come to stand on the walk in front of her. The people who had already given blood were inside eating. Some were simply carrying their plates around with them as they greeted friends. Neither Joe nor Kim had any appetite.

  “How so?” he asked.

  “If I understand everything you’ve told me, then God’s will is that my daughter should die,” she said flatly.

  “Not necessarily.”

  She looked up at him, her eyes hot. “Well, I didn’t give her leukemia.”

  One corner of his mouth crooked, but it wasn’t a pleasant smile. “No. He did that, all right. But He has also given us this means to remedy it. That’s His will, too. That’s what this gemeide chose to believe when we branched off and looked for our missing children.”

  Kim gave a guttural sound of distress. “Wasn’t there a philosopher somewhere who said that the human mind can rationalize anything, twist any theory to its own purposes?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “I never encountered philosophers in high school. But I do know that if God gives you the means to fix something, you should probably grab it.”

  She watched him steadily for a long time. “Like birth control pills?”

  He paled. His eyes went doggedly back to the people. “Something like that.”

  Maybe she needed to push him because it took her mind off her own fear. Maybe she needed to save him because she might not be able to save Susannah. Maybe she needed to heal him because she cared.

  She went on stubbornly. “God gave you the means to save Sarah. You took it, didn’t you? The doctors must have given her pills, and she took them; right?” She had to wait a long time before he nodded.

  “She had the pills,” he agreed. He had never admitted it aloud before. The threat of the meidung still haunted him.

  “And she got pregnant and died anyway.” She watched his jaw go rock hard. But he nodded again. “Sounds to me like that’s God’s will, Joe, at least as you just explained it.”

  She reached up for his hand and tugged him down to the step just beneath her. He resisted a moment, then he sat and rested his arm on her updrawn knee.

  “Hannah looks like her,” he acknowledged finally, bitterly, and could scarcely believe it when he heard his own voice. “She’s starting to look just like Sarah, and I can’t stand it. I think that’s what gets to me most of all.”

  “Maybe that’s God’s way of letting you keep a piece of her.”


  “Either that, or He’s cruel, making sure I never forget my mistakes. I can’t decide.” It was a blasphemy to say so out loud, and he winced as soon as the words were out. They were bald, anguished, honest. But then he looked at her.

  She wasn’t shocked. She wasn’t offended. Kimberley just nodded understandingly.

  Chapter 15

  Kim knew that it would take at least a week for all the results to come in on the community blood tests. Dr. Coyle had warned her. But that didn’t stop her from going to the pay phone every day now to ask about the results and any potential donor registry matches. Susannah was pretty much down to her last chance.

  By Tuesday, the hospital had completed testing on roughly twenty percent of the community samples. There was no match. On Wednesday, Joe began dropping whatever he was doing to ride to the phone booth with her. On Thursday, fortyfive percent of the samples had been tested, and there was still no match.

  On Friday, Kim fell apart.

  Oddly, it wasn’t so much the waiting or the fear that did it to her. It was a phone call she made to California. Maybe it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. She needed to tell her boss that her situation was still far from resolved and she wouldn’t be back anytime in the near future. He argued with her. The extra girl he’d hired was about to go back to college on Monday. Either Kim could come back to work by then, or they would have to hire someone permanent to replace her.

  “I can’t do that,” she said desperately. “My daughter...” She trailed off before she could embarrass herself by begging him. Besides, it was even more than Susannah, she thought. She had made an agreement with Joe. Joe still needed her. But how could she explain that to this man?

  He fired her. Sometime during his shouting, Kim realized that she’d been gone a whole month already.

  She went back to the farm feeling overwhelmed and shell-shocked. She had no more savings. Now she had no income to go back to, either. All along, she realized, she’d been clinging to the idea that she could go home, back to work, and collect tips—cotd, hard cash. She could do that whenever she chose. It was one thing to take charity when she knew she’d be paying everyone back. It was something else to admit that she was as destitute and without prospects as she had been eleven years ago when she had fled Dallas.

  Joe saw it in her face as soon as she stopped the car in front of the house. At first he was angry that she had sneaked out to call Coyle without him. Why did she always have to be so stubbornly independent with her fear? He came across the road, still wearing the heavy apron he used to shoe the horses.

  “Who do you think you are?” he demanded. “Wonder Woman?”

  Her eyes took a moment to focus on him. “What do you know about Wonder Woman?”

  “I went to public high school in the seventies.”

  She shook her head absently. She started toward the house.

  It wasn’t quite the reaction he’d expected. “Aren’t you even going to tell me about it? What did he say?”

  “Who?”

  “The doctor!”

  “I didn’t call the doctor. I called the place where I work. Used to work. I’ve been fired.”

  “Fired.” He struggled to find the importance of that. “So? You don’t need a job here.”

  Her temper finally sizzled. “I’m out of work, Joe. Out of money. Out of any means to support myself. Are you following me now?”

  “You said your job wasn’t that great.”

  “It was mine! It was all that stood between me and welfare!”

  “What’s ‘welfare’?”

  She drove both hands into her hair, tears finally threatening. Again. “I can’t stand this.”

  “I need to understand, Kimberley. I need to know why this bothers you so.”

  She gritted her teeth. “‘Welfare’ is what the government does to help people out when they’re dead broke.”

  “But you don’t need that. You’re here. We take care of our own.”

  “I’m not your own!”

  She started to run for the house. She saw Dinah on the porch with Hannah. No, she thought, she didn’t want to go there. She didn’t want to be nice. She didn’t want to be responsible. She didn’t want to take care of anyone.

  She swerved .the other way, crossing the road, racing right past Joe once more. He pivoted to watch her go. She veered into the first barn she came to. At least, he thought, it was the one for the horses, and smelled a bit better than the dairy barn. He went after her, untying his apron and dropping it over the paddock fence as he passed it.

  He found her on the bales of hay stacked at the back of the center aisle. They were a small reminder that Nathaniel was missed. Bo and Matt were too small to help him get them up into the loft. He’d been meaning to ask Adam for assistance—it was decidedly a two-man job—but he hadn’t gotten around to it with everything else going on.

  He’d thought she’d be crying again, and he had spent every step bracing himself for it. Somehow her absolute silence was worse. She sat cross-legged, with her face in her hands. He sat quietly beside her and waited.

  “I didn’t realize I’ve already been gone so long,” she finally admitted without looking up. “All that talk—we’d talked that this might take months, do you remember? But the reality of that just never really registered with me, I guess. Too much else to think about.”

  “I remember.”

  “I never thought of the practicalities of such a lengthy stay.”

  “As you said, your mind’s been full.”

  At last she looked at him. Her eyes were so bleak it hurt him.

  “I’m going to lose my apartment. The rent’s due.”

  “Yes.” But there was a question in his voice.

  “I’ve gone through all my savings. I can’t even get back there to arrange to have my furniture moved. I’ll lose that, too. Even if I could go back, I couldn’t afford storage for it.”

  He knew better than to point out that one of her brothers would likely float her a loan. For that matter, they’d give her the money.

  “It’s all gone,” she said dazedly. “Ten years of eking out a living with my dukes up. Ten years of standing on my own two feet. It’s all gone.” She’d lose her health insurance along with the job, she realized. They would take that away, too. And she couldn’t afford to extend it. How was she going to pay for Susannah’s care?

  She had to go back there. She looked at Joe, thought of Susannah, and knew that she couldn’t. It wasn’t because of Joe. She’d been lying to herself. It wasn’t because he still needed her, hadn’t resolved his own problems. She’d never made any promises to him about how long she would stay here. It was just that suddenly she couldn’t even contemplate going back to L.A. and coping with this horribly dwindling hope on her own.

  As the enormity of that hit her, she began to tremble. What had happened to her? What had she done?

  “Everything’s gone,” she repeated, her voice thin, on the edge of hysteria, and this time she meant so much more than just money and material goods.

  “No,” Joe said quietly. “Susannah is alive, over at Mariah’s school. And you’ve still got the heart and the courage that carried you this far in the first place.”

  She stared at him. Her eyes finally filled. “I...am...so... tired, Joe. The thought of...the thought of starting over again...I just can’t...”

  The thought of starting over again was what did it, she decided. It buckled her. It overwhelmed her.

  She couldn’t quite say the words—help me. She said them with her eyes. She said it with arms that reached for him. And sanity had no place in his response.

  There was no fervent collision of their bodies this time, though the desperation was still there. Her arms snaked around his neck slowly. His went around her waist easily. They eased together rather than dragged each other closer.

  “We’ll find a way,” he said quietly.

  We, she mused again helplessly. With him, it was always we. And it was
so easy for him.

  Their mouths met slowly. They touched with exquisite, thoughtful care. They’d found an excuse for the last time they’d touched, though they’d had to dredge hard to find one. They could probably manufacture one this time, too, she decided. But she knew there was only one excuse that mattered—the searching, blind hope in their kisses.

  She thought again that she loved the way he kissed. Slowly, deeply, consistently, with that unique breath he took in between. She didn’t realize she was still crying until he caught a tear with his tongue, then dove back to her mouth again.

  And that undid her.

  He thought again that he loved the way she melted and went soft. That for all her prickly independence, her body gave and clung. He didn’t realize he was shaking until he couldn’t quite find the hem of her sweater. He hadn’t meant to find it anyway. But then he did, and his palm moved up the smooth, hot skin of her back.

  He leaned into her. She relented. Gave. Eased back on the hay, and he found himself on top of her. Again.

  “Dinah...” she whispered, with one last, licking flame of common sense. Maybe that last, licking flame of common sense was just looking for a way out. Before it was too late.

  It was already too late. This wasn’t a sudden bursting through a barrier to find what was on the other side. They both knew what they were doing, where they were headed. His answer proved it.

  “Dinah hates the barn.”

  “But...”

  “Never comes in here,” he continued, against her mouth this time, his words getting muffled. “If she can help it.”

  “We can’t take the chance.”

  “We’ve got to.”

  How many days had they spent building toward this, homing in on this moment, like heat-seeking missiles with only one place to go? She thought that it had started when he had first kissed her behind the sofa, and knew that that other physical contact had nothing to do with this at all. It was the little things, the necessary things, that had brought them here. It was the friendship that had bloomed under all the sexual tension. She had never really had a friend before. She needed one. She needed him.