Saving Susannah

by Beverly Bird

  “He did talk to you.”

  “Nope. Not a word.”

  “Then how do you know?”

  He leaned forward suddenly and caught her chin in his hand. “Because,” he said slowly, “I see myself in your eyes.”

  Kim paled.

  “I was there, Kimmie. Been there, done that, as they say. This can work two ways. You can try to run, as I did. But I’m here to tell you that there’s nowhere to go. And you’ll risk losing the best thing you’ve ever found if you keep tearing off, trying to get away from it. Or...you can just stay put. I’m not saying you shouldn’t take your time. Katya and I did. We just came to terms first. We both knew what we wanted the end results to be.

  “I’m just saying that you ought to give some thought to taking that time with Joe,” he continued, then he stood abruptly. “Tell you what, you two have given me a couple of my finest hours.”

  Kim scowled at him. “Who? Me and Joe?”

  “No. You and Adam. That was right up there with the speech I gave him a year ago or so.”

  Kim closed her eyes again, her head swimming. “It’s not that easy, Jake.”

  “Sure it is.”

  “No. If I stay there at the farm, if we...keep up as we have been, there won’t be any way out again. Don’t you see? It would be like leading him on.” It would be like leading her own heart on. “It would make it too difficult to break away later.”

  Jake thought about that a moment. “If nothing else, let’s consider practicalities. What choice do you have? You can’t sleep in the waiting room here until you get a job and save enough to rent an apartment.”

  She panicked again. “I can’t go back there, Jake! He wants to marry me.”

  He grabbed her hand and hauled her to her feet. “Yeah, well, the rest of us Wallaces went down kicking and screaming. Why should you be any different?”

  “This isn’t a joke.”

  “Life’s a joke, Kimmie. At least there’s a good bit of humor in it, if you choose to see it. Now, are you coming home or not? I hate to break this to you, sweetheart, but you need a shower and a bed. You look like hell. Put these decisions on hold and get a grip first before you deal with them.”

  Kim nodded. She was exhausted, she admitted. She’d do it for one night, she told herself. She’d go back there for one night. She could get her stuff out herself. She would not be a coward.

  “I need to kiss Susannah good-night,” she murmured.

  “Then go do it. I already saw her before I tracked you down dozing in your Danish.” He picked the pastry up and tossed it in the trash with his empty coffee cup. “I’ll wait in the car.”

  He was a good ten feet on his way before he stopped and turned around. “And just for the record, it doesn’t hurt when you land. At least not much.”

  Then he was gone again, swinging through the doors at the end of the corridor, his black hair too long, his stride too arrogant, his departing grin the devil’s own. And in that precise moment, she remembered. She remembered that grin.

  Kim pressed her hands to her cheeks. She remembered Jake dragging her down the hall so fast she thought her arm would come out of its socket. She remembered being airborne, literally airborne, as he picked her up and hurled her at Adam. And Adam had caught her, then his big hand had clamped down on the crown of her head, shoving her unceremoniously under the covers. Jake had jumped in beside them and both boys had drawn their knees up so an extra small lump under the covers wouldn’t be noticed.

  And that time Edward hadn’t found her. That time, at least that one time, Edward had left again. And Jake had lifted the covers to peer in at her under there. Grinning. Grinning just the way he had now.

  “You’re safe, darlin’,” he’d said.

  Kim got as far as Susannah’s room before she put her back to the wall and slid down it. She hugged her up-drawn knees and rested her cheek upon them. But she didn’t cry this time. Jake was right. Hitting bottom didn’t hurt that much after all.

  Especially when she wasn’t alone there. Especially when she was with company she’d had before.

  Chapter 21

  Joe threw himself into his work. Or he tried to. Unfortunately, there was precious little to do, since Nathaniel was home again.

  It was a long day. By supper, it dawned on him that Kimberley probably wasn’t going to come back. Period. She would quietly and surreptitiously retrieve her belongings. There would be no last, awkward scene, no painful goodbyes, no words of appreciation he couldn’t bear to hear. No, that wouldn’t be her style. She would disappear from his life as she had come into it—without ceremony or fanfare or advance notice.

  By nightfall, he was so tired his eyes felt grainy. He realized he had spent almost as much time at the hospital as she had lately, and he’d kept his herds going besides. Yet he knew he wasn’t going to be able to sleep. When the house quieted—and it took a while with so many people under the roof again—he looked at the sofa for a long time, then he turned away from it and went outside.

  This time he did not stop in the backyard. He crossed the creek. Instead of turning in the direction of the tree line and the boulder he had shared with Kimberley on that day he had talked her into staying, he went the other way. His feet kept moving steadily, his hands thrust deeply into his pockets.

  The headstones at the far fence line of his property were all white, of identical size and shape. They were set out in precise, neat lines. Aside from the names and the dates, the brief words of prayer and the tributes etched upon each one were pretty much the same. That, too, was the Amish way.

  Sarah’s family had shared this section of land with the Stoltzfuses and the Bylers for generations. And the generations stretched back to the Amish arrival in America. Joe had not been here since Sarah had been laid to rest.

  Continuity, he thought, stepping past the small graves of the children he and Sarah had lost before birth. Continuity had always soothed him, like the steady and predictable turn of the seasons, everything happening the same way it always had. He had found comfort, too, in much of the ordnung, in the given rules of behavior that lent structure and predictability to his life.

  What had he done to deserve this upheaval? But he knew. Of course he knew. He had believed himself above it.

  He stopped at Sarah’s headstone and eased down to sit on the large, gnarled root of a nearby elm. Moonlight slanted across her name.

  “I suppose you’ve been watching all this,” he said finally.

  There was no response. It didn’t deter him.

  “And you let me blunder through on my own,” he continued. “I’d forgotten how to do that, Sarah. You were always there to set me straight. Oh, you did it quietly. Somewhere along the line I convinced myself that you didn’t do it at all. That everything about us was my way. But you had your say, didn’t you? Like with that appalled little look you would give me with your eyes. Or that barely there shake of your head.” He broke off, smiling slightly, then his expression turned pained. “Or sometimes your eyes were red, and I knew you had been crying.

  “Mostly I just plowed right on through anyway, didn’t I? Not all the time, but much of it. And when I did that, you always stayed beside me, even when you didn’t approve. Like when I decided the old gemeide had to look for the missing children, that I couldn’t live with myself otherwise. You were terrified by what that would mean to us, to our family, but you went along with me on it just the same.”

  He put his head down, scrubbed his face with his hands. “I did take it for granted, Sarah. That much is true. And I guess that’s what’s been bothering me most of all. That’s what I was always thinking whenever I looked at Hannah. I wanted, you knew it was dangerous, but you went along. It was so much more than sex. It was your sense of giving.

  “Maybe that was why I was drawn to Kimberley at first. Because she wouldn’t let me re-create my sins. She wouldn’t just give and give and give and let me keep taking. But now that she’s not giving, I’m angry at her for that. Now t
hat she’s not doing as you would have done, since she’s not throwing all her own needs and desires aside to follow my wishes, I feel betrayed. And angry.” Yes, he thought, he was angry.

  He tossed his hat aside. “I’m trying to make this black-andwhite, aren’t I? Just as I tried to make your death a black-andwhite issue. All my fault. All my doing. But there were just so many gray areas. There always are. Ah, but I’m a hardheaded German. I want to see things as all one way or another.

  “I told Nathaniel that Kimberley was a completely different sort of gift. I spouted words without listening to myself, Sarah. Without hearing myself. Then I turned right around and made demands that she couldn’t possibly meet.” He made a strangled sound. “I’m going to have to do the unconscionable, Sarah. I’m going to have to walk away from this gemeide and all I’ve vowed to them. I see no other way to make this right. I can’t be hardheaded and stand on principle as though it’s absolute. Because nothing is absolute. If nothing else, I’ve learned that much.”

  He fell quiet for a long time. His heart was beating fast now.

  “Does that betray you?” he asked finally. “I don’t think so. Because you can’t be here. And knowing you, you wouldn’t want me to keep blundering through alone. You’d want a mama for your babies. You’d rather see someone else do it than have them muddle through life with just me. You’d trust my decision, even if it pained you.”

  “There’s always middle ground.”

  Kimberley’s voice came out of nowhere. For one horrible, near paralyzing moment, he actually thought Sarah had spoken back to him. But Sarah’s voice had never been husky, with an edge of steel.

  Joe jerked upright, leaping off the tree root, and turned fast and hard. Somehow, in the time he had been here, the moon had moved, sliding farther along in the sky. The beam of light that had been slanted across Sarah’s headstone was now illuminating Kimberley’s face. Then she stepped toward him, beneath the tree, and she was caught in shadows again.

  “Doesn’t it strike you as a little... off, to be talking to your wife about me?” she murmured.

  How long had she been standing there? he wondered. How long had she been listening? She had come home. No, he corrected, she had come back. There was a difference. Her home was in California, in a world that was alien to him. One he was going to have to bend enough to learn about, if she’d have him.

  “There are those who might say you shouldn’t have eavesdropped,” he replied hoarsely.

  “Well, you were right. I’m no saint,” she answered. “Not like your Sarah. That’s quelling, too, Joe. It’s really scary. Because she gave everything, and I have a hell of a time giving anything. But I do know one thing. I can’t let you do all the giving. I can’t let you do this, Joe. Because unless I badly miss my guess, you wouldn’t be able to live with yourself if you broke the vows you’ve made to these people. You’d end up hating me for asking it of you. Because you’re not that kind of a man. You can’t back away from a promise, Joe. That would turn you inside out. It would make you someone other than the man I’ve...needed.”

  He couldn’t deny that, so he chose another avenue. “I would never have wanted you if you were like Sarah.”

  She would have thought that horribly cruel if she had not heard what he had just said to Sarah’s ghost. She just nodded.

  She was trembling, Kim realized. Partly it was the cold, the unrelenting cold of this place now that it was nearly winter. But mostly it was because of the things she had yet to say.

  She was terrified. But there was, quite simply, no way to retreat now. She’d realized that on the long, silent drive back with Jake. Everything had been torn down, just as Susannah’s system had been, whether she liked it or not. If some new life wasn’t infused, she would die.

  “You were right, you know,” she continued. “We’ve come a long way together these past weeks. Middle ground,” she said again, musingly. “God knocked one leg out from under me when Susannah was diagnosed—I sort of had to incline to one side. And there you were, inching into that middle ground, too, for reasons of your own. I guess we sort of held each other up.”

  “Yeah,” he said finally, hoarsely.

  “So if either one of us moves now, the other one is going to fall flat.”

  “It’s occurred to me,” he said in his best reasonable tone.

  “I was afraid to stay in your house any longer than I absolutely had to because I was afraid of all this...all this comfort and family and...and you. That it would all close around me and I wouldn’t be able to get out again. All. along, I’ve told myself that I could—would—go again. But by the same token, when I had every right and reason to go, when I lost my job, I found reasons to stay.” She took a deep breath. “I’ve done a little soul-searching of my own, Joe. And what I’ve realized is that once Susannah’s transplant is completed, I’m left with only one logical reason to stay here. Because I want to. And that scares the devil out of me. That was what I couldn’t admit back in the hospital. To you or to myself.”

  “We’d be crazy if we weren’t afraid,” he said roughly. “I’m afraid to leave this gemeide, my faith. But I’d do it.”

  “I know you would.” And that was true. “No, Joe. No. That’s not the answer. We both have to lean. As you said, that’s what’s brought us this far.”

  “What are you saying?”

  She took a deep, shaky breath. “I’ll try.”

  He was afraid to breathe.

  “Maybe it won’t work. We’d have to be open to that eventuality, too. I mean, I can’t stand here and promise you that I’ll start wearing plain dresses and actually put that chicken stuff in my mouth. But I’ll...I’ll marry you. If we can do a civil ceremony like Adam and Mariah did. If you can live with that.” If it was asking a lot, she thought, then it took all the courage in the world for her. “I can’t live without you, Joe. I just need a little more time to get used to your world.”

  “My people would consider it living in sin.”

  She couldn’t read his face. She couldn’t tell from his tone if he was serious or not. What in the name of God was she going to do if he said no?

  He came toward her, and took her hand. “I love you, Kimberley. I can’t live without you. And if that means we have to squeeze a few conflicting customs together, so be it.”

  It was that easy for him, she thought.

  That shaking feeling started inside her again. And when he made the offer, she knew she no longer needed it. “I love you, too. I don’t need time to know that. Let me try.”

  And the amazing thing was, the words came out like a prayer, with no trouble at all.

  Epilogue

  Susannah came home from the hospital on the first day of March. There were twelve inches of snow on the ground, and more was falling hard.

  The engraftment had taken. Susannah was in complete remission. So far, Kim thought, so good. She knew, intellectually, that it would be another five years before they would know if she’d need another transfusion, or if she was one of those who would be blessed with a lifetime of good health. But there was hope.

  Suze’s eyes glowed with it these days. Kim’s heart hurt with it. Because even if she did need another transfusion, there was nothing prohibiting another engraftment later, another swipe at the sky for another handful of stars. Rebekkah matched with five antigens. And the Wallace clan showed no sign of slowing down on the procreation front, Kim thought. Where there were children, kin, family, there was hope.

  She glanced over her shoulder at her daughter as she worked in Joe’s kitchen. Susannah was sitting at the table, playing a card game with most of Joe’s kids, and Jake and Katya’s. Nathaniel was home again for the weekend. The house was a zoo. Everyone had come together for Susannah’s homecoming. Only Adam and Mariah, Bo and Rebekkah were missing, and they would be around shortly for supper, after the baby woke up from her nap.

  The silly grin Kim had been wearing all morning grew wider. Then she turned back to the tub on the counter in
front of her, and she gave a small shudder.

  “Ugh.”

  “Another one?” Joe asked, coming to lean against the counter beside her, his arms crossed over his chest.

  “That leg just kicked.” She aimed her knife at one of the birds. He leaned to look at it more closely.

  “It was your imagination.”

  “Tell me that when it’s up and running out the door again.”

  He laughed and took the knife from her hand. “I’ll finish.”

  “But I—”

  “I know. You already have feathers stuck all over your skin. That’s what I’m counting on.”

  Her heart kicked. Her grin widened even further. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” He leaned close to her ear. “Meet me in the barn in ten minutes. We can pick them off each other. This house is too crazy for any privacy.”

  “There’s an offer I can’t refuse.” Besides, she thought, the barn was their place. She’d developed an odd sort of... fondness for it.

  All the same, she stopped in the bathroom and washed up before she went across the road. She wondered if anyone thought it odd that Joe so steadfastly refused to put those bales of hay up in the loft. And she laughed.

  He was as good as his word. Not more than five minutes later, the door creaked open and he stepped inside.

  There was never any time to waste. Even as they came together, Joe elbowed open the door of the last stall and pulled her inside. No one had ever asked why he had suddenly taken to storing bales in there, either, or why there was now a quilt and a lantern sitting on a new shelf built on the wall.

  Before the door swung fully closed behind them, Kim’s coat hit the sawdust on the floor. Before she’d pushed his suspenders away and dragged his shirt free of his pants, he had her sweater over her head. But always he kissed the same, as though they had all the time until eternity, slowly, relentlessly, covering her mouth, easing away. Everything inside her was going warm and liquid again.

  “No feathers,” he complained when he got down to skin, his mouth sliding down, down, between her breasts.