A Rose by the Door

by Deborah Bedford

  “Well, yes. I can say that.”

  A long silence passed. Both of them waited. Gemma waited for the disembodied voice to ask, “Is there a number or a name, anything, some way he can get hold of you?” But she didn’t. She didn’t want to. It was obvious. “I really don’t think he’ll—”

  “If that message means nothing to him, it doesn’t matter. It’s okay.”

  The voice grew softer, more diffident. And bouncy. Gemma could tell she was bouncing the baby to keep it soothed. “It’s just that Jacob’s changed so much.” A pause, as the voice searched forwords. “Remembering hurts him. He doesn’t much like to dredge up the past.”

  Paisley Franklin, known by her bear and by her mother and by Mrs. Bartling as Paisley Rose, had decided she’d be better off not saying another word to anybody she knew.

  Sometimes, when she talked out loud, she forgot and broke The Rule.

  She tried hard not to break it, but it got harder and harder, the more she got to know people she liked. The more she got to know people she loved.

  Paisley had broken the rule on the morning when Nathan went away. “I love you, Nathan!” she’d said, squeezing him tight, tight around his legs.

  “We’ll see you when we get home tonight, Paisley Rose.” He’d planted a kiss on the top of her head. “I might even take you fishing.”

  Nathan hadn’t come back for supper. He hadn’t come back when it was time for bed. The next morning when she’d awakened with her blanket, her mother had told her he wasn’t coming back at all.

  Paisley had also broken the rule with Mrs. Bartling. Mrs. Bartling had been in her bathroom, dressed in a yellow pantsuit that made her look sunny as a lemon. “I’m going to work today, Paisley Rose,” she’d said, meeting her eyes in the mirror. “It’s a big day, I guess.”

  “I love you, Mrs. Bartling,” Paisley had said, hugging her tight, tight, liking the cushiony way her belly felt beneath Paisley’s head and thinking she smelled like lemons, too.

  That night, she’d come in from playing at Addy’s house and heard Mrs. Bartling saying, “You have your car now. I want you to pack it up. I want you to go.”

  Paisley couldn’t guess who she might be in danger of breaking the rule with next. She thought of Madeleine, who had invited her over to play Barbies. She thought of Mabel Perkins, who worked her mouth like a sourpuss and didn’t seem much in danger of playing the game at all. She thought of her mother, and that scared Paisley most of all. What if she accidentally said it to Mama? What if she broke the rule then?

  There would be nobody left for her.

  If not for Mama, there would be nobody left now.

  Paisley decided it would be best, safer by far, not to break the rule, not to talk to anybody at all. Whenever she visited the museum with Mama in the afternoons, she played outside while Mama worked and talked to the people who came to see history and have tours. It was amazing, the things you could see when you weren’t kept so busy talking. Outside, there were bubbles scooting across the surface of the water in the bucket, flat on the bottom and tall on the top so they looked like buttons. There were mouse holes where the grass had been nibbled short—not shaggy like the rest, but gray and velvety. There were green garden snakes laying in loose tangles on the ground and when you tried to catch one, it got away fast, in the shape of an S, even though it had no legs.

  If not for being quiet, Paisley might never have found the old upturned boat back behind the willows. She loved it there. It was like a house that she never had to leave. Every day, she’d carried some new thing out there. A rusty can to make a bowl for pretend supper. A gathering of leaves for a pretend campfire. A log stump chiseled into an L on one corner that made a nice seat for her bear.

  The boat was set up on bricks so Paisley could just get beneath it and hide. Enough daylight came through the cracks and knotholes so she could see. Here, she talked aloud to her teddy bear about things. Here, she sang the songs God liked when she could remember the words from vacation Bible school.

  She remembered when Pastor Sissel had told her, “The Father delights in your singing. No one can praise Him in exactly the same way that you can.”

  Here, beneath the boat, she prayed. Here, in her secret new house, she listened.

  When it was time to go, she heard her mama calling. She climbed out fast because she didn’t want anybody grown up to find her secret place.

  Paisley would always go out when they called her.

  And then she would be silent for another day.

  No matter how lonely Bea was, it felt beautiful and right to be reading scripture again.

  She held the Sneed family Bible between both hands and took pleasure from the primeval smell of it, from the oniony, brittle feel of the pages when she turned them.

  A word in 1 Thessalonians caught her eye. She read one verse, then another.

  May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it.

  Chills ran the length of Bea’s spine. It seemed almost as if God was speaking to her. For weeks she had been running from this, hiding in her pain, closing her ears, fighting not to listen.

  Not even thinking what she was doing, she flipped back a few chapters. There it was. The same thing. The same word, this time, in 2 Timothy.

  If we are faithless, he will remain faithful, for he cannot disown himself.

  Over and over again, the words jumped out at her. From all over the Bible, the same message, the same promise, the same glorious refrain.

  God is faithful . . . A faithful God keeps covenant and mercy with those who love him . . . By faith Abraham was enabled to become a father because he considered him faithful who had made the promise . . .

  Bea remembered a sermon George Sissel had given on Joshua once. In it, Pastor George had said, “Every single promise God made to His people has been ful filled.”

  It had been weeks since Bea had gone to her knees. Months since she had lifted up her heart in grace and yearning to a heavenly Father who waited for her in delight as she came. “Oh, Jesus,” she whispered to the ceiling in her family room. “Those things in the Bible. Please, I don’t want to believe in fate anymore and think that’s faith. I want to believe in you, in your faithfulness.”

  She waited. And listened. And heard nothing.

  “Lord?” she asked the ceiling, the brown spots where she needed to paint, the light fixture as old as the hills. “If you’ve been listening to my prayers, isn’t there some way that I can know?”

  Still nothing. Nothing.

  If you are a faithful God, isn’t there some way that you can tell me?

  She lifted her face. That’s where it all began. A small niggling in her breast, a tiny spark of faith that swelled into a quiet, gentle fire. Expectancy. For the first time in months, she expected something.

  “Lord?”

  You didn’t want me to give you only chances, did you? You wanted me to give you my whole heart.

  “Lord? All this time, have you been hearing me?”

  Outside on a fence post, a meadowlark suddenly burst into song, its bold, happy phrases filling the room. Across the way, an afternoon storm cloud was building, rumbling, its mellow thunder echoing like the low notes of a piano across the pasture. Each sound Bea heard seemed to outdo the one before it. A radio in a passing car. Children’s voices laughing, flutelike, as they played hide-and-seek down the street. Maple leaves hissing in the breeze. The cadence of a ticking clock.

  All the earth seemed filled with sound and song and rhythm.

  Does He who implanted the ear not hear? Does He who formed the eye not see? Does He who teaches man lack knowledge?

  Something caught hold in Bea’s heart that had not been there a moment before. His answer. A knowledge that, until that moment of expansiveness, Bea could not have understood.

  Her Father didn’t have to struggle t
o hear anything. He had been the one who, of course, had created the very act of hearing. He had been the one who, to His own delight, created ears and sound.

  And Nathan had his own choice whether to listen or not to listen.

  From the depths of her spirit, Bea accepted God’s powerful, loving answer. From the depths of her spirit, she accepted the familiar, rekindled Presence that she felt beside her, holding her, lifting her above her sorrow.

  Show me, Lord. Show me how I can let Gemma into my life. Show me how I can make her stay.

  As soon as she asked the question, Bea knew exactly what she should do. She reached across the coffee table, picked up the fine-point permanent marker laying there. With great care, she turned to the frontispiece in the Sneed Family Bible. “Gemma Franklin Bartling,” she wrote in solid, careful letters across one entire line. “Married to Nathan Roger Bartling February 2001.” Beside that, she wrote, “Paisley Franklin, child.”

  I don’t know their birthdays. I didn’t ask. How silly.

  Well, that would have to come later. Bea found another empty line, an appropriate spot just below Nathan’s name. “Jacob Bartling,” she wrote, just as carefully, just as neatly. “Adopted son of Ray and Beatrice Bartling. Whereabouts unknown.”

  She ran her hand over the words. As if she could touch those she loved, all of them, by tracing the curves of their names. In the distance, through all the other sounds, she thought she could hear Alva Torrington from somewhere, calling out her name, rattling on a door. “Bea! Hurry.”

  “Hey? Alva T. That you? What are you doing here?”

  Alva still wore her Cramalot Inn apron as she banged on Bea’s front door. “They sent me to come find you,” she announced, her voice terse, her constant smile gone. Her New Yorker was chugging out puffs of smoke in the driveway. “We’ve closed the restaurant. Everybody in town’s going to the museum to help.”

  “To help with what?”

  “Gemma went to finish up her work at the museum and now Paisley’s missing. It’s been hours,” Alva said. “Gemma wanted me to get you. If she’s hidden away somewhere, or if she’s hurt, all those other people might scare her. Gemma thinks you stand the best chance to find her. Better than any of the rest.”

  In late afternoon, when everyone started to search for Paisley, the mercury in the thermometer outside J’s Cedar Vu Hardware topped 89 degrees. When night fell, the mercury dipped to 46 degrees and the searchers brought out their flashlights and refused to go home. Alva Torrington and Charlene Grover worked as a team and combed through the pasture across the street. Orvin Kornruff brought his checker-playing buddies and sent them out in installments along the irrigation ditch out back. “Gemma?” Jay asked in front of them all. “She isn’t talking. If she was trapped somewhere and somebody called to her, would she answer?”

  “She would answer Mrs. Bartling,” Gemma said, her voice gone flat and numb with shock.

  Deputy Jay Triplett himself did not pull out his clipboard and take the missing child report. Another deputy brought out the papers. Bea stood behind Gemma, holding her up by the shoulders, trying not to succumb to the awful déjà vu of Nathan, listening while Gemma gave her dazed answers.

  No, Paisley didn’t say she was leaving. Paisley didn’t say anything.

  No, Gemma didn’t know any place she could have gone.

  “What was your daughter wearing the last time you saw her, Miss Franklin?”

  Bea watched Gemma struggle to recount what clothes Paisley had worn that morning. As any mother would. As Bea remembered herself doing. “No. No hat. She didn’t have on a hat. A white T-shirt, maybe. Sandals. And purple capri pants.”

  “I’ve been through this,” Bea said. “I ought to know what to do.”

  “Keep calling,” Gemma urged her, as they sat with their backs against the outside wall of the museum, shivering from the cool night. “If she doesn’t answer anybody else, she’ll answer you.”

  Bea called for hours. She didn’t stop, even after her voice grew hoarse.

  “What if she’s dead, Mrs. Bartling?” Gemma asked. “What if somebody awful has her? What if she’s hurt? Or . . . or worse?”

  “You have to trust,” Bea told her. “You just have to trust.”

  “I don’t want to trust,” Gemma said. “I see where trusting has gotten you.”

  Bea took Gemma’s arm, held her elbow tight to make her listen. “No. Don’t measure anything by what I’ve done. I’ve been so wrong. God has heard me. He’s been trustworthy all the time. It’s us who have to think about what we’re doing. Building up, not tearing down.”

  Bea pulled her sweater tighter around her shoulders and went off on her own again, backtracking behind the sandstone building, around the floodlights set to illuminate the rear of the building, lifting up a plywood scrap, searching for clues.

  She heard footsteps coming from a copse of willows. “Oh, Care Goodsell,” Bea said, the tears finally coming to her eyes. “Did you hear what happened? Paisley’s gone. Did you come to search?”

  “Nope,” he said, laughing and scrubbing his sweater sleeve across the bangs of his spiky hair. “I came to find.”

  “What?” Bea asked.

  “You seek and I find,” he said, his eyes merry. ” ‘Seek, and ye shall find.’ Get it?” He pointed to the upturned hull of an old rowboat that, all this time, had been hidden in the brambles. “Listen carefully,” he told her and, when Bea did, she heard. For, of all the sounds she’d noticed these past hours, of all the sounds the Father had shared so she could learn about His ears, this was by far the most beautiful sound of them all.

  The sound of a child singing—a soft song, a praise song, coming from beneath the boat.

  Oh, Lord. Thank you. Thank you. Care Goodsell has found her. You knew it all along, didn’t you? Paisley’s there, under the boat hull.

  “Paisley? Can you hear me? I’m out here.”

  I am not calling you to always know the answers, Bea. I am calling you to love. Even as I am loving and longing for you.

  “I can hear you,” a tiny, muffled voice answered. “The boat fell down. I couldn’t get out.”

  People heard and ran from every direction. Ablebodied men surrounded the hull, tilting it sideways. Bea looked for Mr. Goodsell, but he had disappeared in all the commotion.

  “Here we go.”

  “Steady now.”

  “Watch out.”

  When Paisley toppled out, it was Mrs. Bartling who grabbed her first to bill and coo. The woman clung to the child and the child clung to the woman. And the woman vowed to her heavenly Father she would never let this one go again.

  “I never told you, did I?” she asked, nuzzling Paisley, their tears mixing. “I love you back.” Bea couldn’t stop saying it, over and over again. “I love you back. I love you back.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The car with Wyoming license plates drove in and parked in front of the Garden County Museum a few minutes before closing time. “Excuse me?” the young man called out when he couldn’t find anyone at the desk. “Is there anybody here?”

  “Oh, of course there’s somebody here.” A woman with a nametag that read “Mabel P., Museum Director” appeared from a corner where she must have been hanging guitars. She had a hammer in one hand and a twelve-string Gibson in the other. “There’s always somebody here.”

  “Well, good.” He poked his hands in the pockets of his belted London Fog and fiddled with his keys.

  “Admittance is free,” Mabel told him. “But you might want to wait until tomorrow if you plan to spend much time. We close in—” She inclined her head toward the wall clock hanging beside the desk. “—seven minutes. You wouldn’t want to get locked in after closing time. We’ve had that happen.”

  “No, that wouldn’t be good.” He jostled his coins in his pockets again. He hesitated a moment. “I’m not wanting a tour, anyway. I came looking for directions.”

  “Oh. Directions. I can do that. There’s maps of Garden County
on the wall. Flyers on the table. This area has many historical attractions. Anything in particular you’re looking for?”

  “I’m looking for a house.”

  “A house?”

  “I am.” For a moment his deep voice faltered, as if he felt foolish not knowing what so say. “Used to be able to drive right to it. But it’s been a long time. Can’t seem to find my way.”

  Mabel leaned the Gibson against the wall. “Which house would you be looking for?”

  “Bea Bartling’s house. The lady who grows roses. She must still be there.”

  “There’s a leaflet right there. To your left. The yellow one.”

  “I see it.” He picked up the brochure between one large thumb and one large forefinger. “Don’t Miss Ash Hollow’s Pioneer Rosebush.” He tamped it on the edge of her desk. “Thank you.”

  “House is over on Pattison,” Mabel told him. “There’s a map on the back.”

  The man stood over six feet tall, with a lick of dark hair that kept falling across his brow, with eyes bluer than morning sun on Lake Mac. He looked vaguely familiar to Mabel, but she couldn’t figure out why.

  “Say, you’re not—?”

  He turned back eagerly, as if he expected her to say his name. She didn’t.

  “No. Never mind.”

  He had his hand on the door handle when Mabel said, “Bea ought to be charging admittance over there. She’d be a rich woman by now.”

  The man turned toward Mabel one last time. “She been getting lots of visitors?”

  “Well, yes. She has. You heard about her son dying, I suppose.”

  He nodded, with something unreadable in his eyes. “I heard.”

  Mabel rummaged in her desk drawer and found her own set of keys. “No matter what happens at that house, those roses are always blooming. Got to lock up now. Hope you don’t mind.”

  Bea peered through the peephole, trying to see who was knocking on her door.

  Surely Gemma and Jay wouldn’t be back from the movie so soon. According to the paper, this one lasted a long time, over two hours—a great bottom numb-er, Jay had joked when he’d come to suggest hanging out and going to a show.