Jenna grimaced. “Goodness, girl, don’t you hurt your own ears?”
Another scream.
Guess not, she thought.
She leaned over the railing, put her hands to each side of the little darling, and whooshed her up out of the crib, to Kyla’s screeching delight.
“Getting you out of bed at seven-thirty p.m. had better not be a bad idea, Miss Franklin. You’d better sleep for Mom-Mom when she gets home.
“Mom-Mom! Mom-Mom!”
“She’ll be home soon. But until then,” Jenna said with a widening grin, “you, little lady … are all miiiine!”
Kyla giggled uncontrollably as Jenna—‘Jee-Jee’—twirled her around once and dashed out of the bedroom.
ELIZABETH FRANKLIN, AGAIN, blew loose strands of hair from the middle of her face. Both hands were full, so shifting the lengths over her right eye was going to have to do for the moment. She walked over to table nine and placed the orders of grilled chicken and a double cheeseburger and fries in front of her customers.
“Be careful. Both of the plates are hot. Can I get you two anything else?”
“This looks good,” said the cute guy as he glanced toward his cute girlfriend. Or fiancé. Or whatever.
“Yeah, it looks good. Thank you.”
“I’ll check back in a bit to make sure your orders were prepared the way you like them.”
Elizabeth turned away, moving across the black-and-white checked linoleum floor of the 1950s-style diner and back into the kitchen area. She glanced at her watch. Fifteen more minutes. Guess I won’t be getting that tip.
Fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes before she could return home to her little one … back to a place where she could decompress, enjoy a little bit of family life, and mentally prepare to repeat the whole experience again the next day.
TUESDAY, JULY 29
Chapter 2
B
rent woke with a start and sat bolt upright. His sudden movement alerted Tara, beside him. She, too, sat up.
“What is it?” Wide-eyed, she looked from him to scan the bedroom. “Did you hear something?”
Quickly, Brent mentally placed himself back in his own bed. It was still dark outside. The clock read 4:58 a.m. It had all been a dream. Again. He began to relax, his lungs and heart slowing to normal.
He turned to face his wife. Seeing the alarm in her eyes, he reached out and placed his hand over hers and gave it a hopefully comforting squeeze.
“Just a dream. Just a bad dream. It’s okay.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.” He took in a deep breath and let it out through puffed-out cheeks. “Sorry.”
Tara pushed herself back against the headboard, turning slightly to face Brent. “A bad dream? How bad?”
Brent paused for a moment before answering. No reason for this to become an actual conversation. It was only a dream. “Seriously, it’s okay. Whatever it was that I was dreaming about has already faded away.”
That wasn’t the complete truth, of course. He remembered most, if not all, of it. The nightly repetition of the same dream made sure of that.
Tara visibly relaxed. “Are you going to be able to get back to sleep? You don’t have to get up for another hour.”
Brent already knew that falling back to sleep was out of the question. Waking abruptly was as good as a shot or two of espresso. Once he was up, he was up.
“Nahh. I guess I’m going to be operating on a little less juice today, but it’ll be all right.” He stretched and let out a noisy yawn.
“Well, with your spare hour, I could rustle up a nice breakfast for the two of us.”
“A weekday breakfast? That’s a novel idea. It even bears repeating. Daily.”
Tara shook her head, smiled, and scratched her head with both hands. “How’s my hair?”
Brent looked and slowly tipped his head from side to side before saying, “We’ve got bacon, right?”
Tara let out a rather loud laugh, followed by a slight snort. “Right,” she said, reaching across her chest with her left arm to give Brent a playful punch in the shoulder.
Across the hall a baby began to cry.
Tara closed her eyes and grimaced.
“And there goes Elizabeth’s alarm clock,” said Brent. “I’m sure she’s appreciating you right now.” He rested his hand gently on Tara’s shoulder and drew her close, planting a kiss on her forehead.
Tara sighed tenderly. “Guess I’ll be making breakfast for three and a half this morning.”
“Shh! It’s possible that Elizabeth doesn’t even know we’re awake,” said Brent with a conspiratorial whisper.
“Great! Thanks, Mom!” It was Jenna, loudly interjecting from the room next door, which she now shared with their youngest, Amy.
“And that proves what I’ve been saying for years: You’re not the quietest of people.”
Tara giggled. “Breakfast is getting bigger by the second.”
“Well, at least Jamie sleeps like a rock.”
JAMIE YAWNED AND grabbed another piece of bacon while also making an attempt to rub the sleep out of his left eye.
Breakfast went from two people to seven in a matter of about sixty seconds. After Kyla began crying, it had only been a matter of time—a very brief matter of time—before everyone was up. Tara knew, though, that most of them would head back to bed in short order. One of the greatest benefits of summer was not having to wake up to usher kids off to school. Aside from Brent, they all took advantage of that.
Maybe even I can get some more sleep, she mused.
Brent pushed back from the table. “As much as I’d like to spend more time with all of you, I’ve got a city to protect.”
“A village,” said Jenna with a smirk.
Brent stood and presented her with a wry grin. “I stand corrected. A village.”
“Go protect those cows, Dad,” said fifteen-year-old Jamie through a mouthful of buttered toast.
“You know what? I’m not sure I want to have 5:30 breakfast with you ragamuffins again.”
“How about six o’clock breakfast?” Jamie shot back, as his dad turned from the table, still in his sleep pants and long-sleeved T-shirt.
“Maybe. Maybe six o’clock breakfast. Less time for your oh-so-funny jabs.”
Tara smiled.
BRENT WALKED UP the stairs of his suburban, middle-class Millsville home. Normalcy appeared to be the order of the day again. For that he was glad, because he knew what non-normal looked and felt like.
A little over three years before he started dealing with the recurring nightmares, life-endangering chaos swept through the Lawton household, instilling a fear that took more than a little while to shake. Thankfully, they had all survived.
That was good. Obviously.
But it had been much longer—thirty-three years, in fact—since he’d last endured repeating nightmares.
And that made this obviously bad.
He tried, once again, to push the dreams to the back of his mind, holding out on the hope that he’d wake up one morning to realize that it’d been days since he’d last thought about them. So far, after a month, the hope had not become reality.
Reaching the top of the second-floor landing, he veered right and walked into his bedroom. Closing the door behind him, he stripped down and walked into the master bathroom to take a shower. The hot water felt good, allowing him to get lost for a few minutes and relax.
Relaxed and invigorated and with his towel wrapped around his waist, Brent stepped out of the walk-in shower and approached his Village of Pittston Police Department uniform. The four stars on each collar of the dark blue shirt still seemed a bit ostentatious and served as a reminder of his whirlwind life over the previous three and a half years. He’d gone from being a sergeant at the Millsville Police Department, to being fired, to being hired as the chief of police in Pittston. Definitely not something he’d mapped out for himself.<
br />
Fully dressed, Brent went back downstairs. It was time, once again, to not hit the streets. His position as boss of the department left him riding a desk far more often than driving a patrol car.
Oh, sure, he’d periodically head out and drive the streets of the village for a while, but that was really the responsibility of his younger officers.
He felt, at times, as though he were walking along the fringes of discontentment, as he was very cognizant that he was no longer the one writing the tickets, calming down the heated situations, or catching the bad guys.
Be that as it may, he was still a cop, and he figured that was the reason discontentment would probably never fully take hold.
“Be careful and come back to me,” said Tara as she kissed him goodbye at the door. She’d been saying that same sentence for years. He always loved hearing it—the emotional reinforcement of being her man.
“I love you,” he said in response. “See you this afternoon.”
“Bye, Dad!” yelled both Jenna and Elizabeth in unison.
Brent chuckled. Elizabeth might not be one of his own, but that girl would certainly leave a hole if, and when, she was to go off on her own.
“Bye, pretty ladies!”
Jamie’s masculine, teenage voice chimed in, “What? No goodbye for Amy and me?”
“Bye, pretty ladies!”
“Hey, now!”
Chapter 3
W
hat a dreary day.
Elizabeth stood in her room looking out of the second-story window into the front yard. It was still raining. ‘Raining’ was probably too generous a word to use; it was really something between a drizzle and a mist, topped with a healthy dose of melancholy. According to Tara, it would stay pretty much the same throughout the remainder of the day.
Melancholic dreariness. Fitting.
Her fatigue, coupled with the necessity of going back to a brain-numbing, physically demanding job, fortified a low-grade depression deep within.
You can handle it. Not the first time you’ve survived a day like this.
Certainly, it was true, but the thought that she had more days—many more days—of the same did nothing to help her outlook.
Kyla was finally down for a nap, and Elizabeth had to finish getting laundry done so that she would have a clean uniform for work.
She headed out of their bedroom and began walking down the stairs.
Though she didn’t enjoy every aspect of her life, she at least had a place to come back to each day that was mentally relaxing.
No. Not relaxing, really. Comforting. And peaceful.
The Lawtons had given her a place in which she could finally feel at home. And that meant a lot, especially when she thought back to where she had previously lived with her real mom and dad.
Elizabeth could only think of her parents’ place as the house in which she had slept. She called it “the museum,” that beautiful, pristine place that family and friends could visit but in which no one could ever really feel comfortable.
Unlike “the museum,” the Lawton home had love in it. It was a place in which everyone could spread out and decompress after work and school. To Elizabeth, it was surreal to see people live their lives with warmth toward one another. Well, most of the time. There were those periodic fights between Jamie and Jenna. But even those, she decided, were somehow wonderful experiences. The two of them would be required by either their mom or dad to stop the spat and then apologize to each other afterward.
Is it weird that I want a brother to fight with?
Elizabeth made it down to the laundry room. It was at the rear of the basement, partitioned by a doorway from the finished guest room-slash television room-slash library.
I really should have asked if I could have had the basement as my bedroom, she thought to herself again. But she knew that it was smarter to have Kyla sleeping on the same floor as everyone else, should she ever have to work late or spend time out and about doing … doing something … with … with someone. With whom? Elizabeth sighed, resigning herself to the fact that she didn’t really have any true friends. At least, not yet.
There was another upcoming year of school, though—her senior year—and that would allow for another attempt. Just three weeks away, she thought. She would be entering her second year at Millsville High School where she’d been attending since beginning life anew with the Lawtons.
Still being sixteen years old and entering her senior year was certainly no help in the making-friends department. She wanted to curse her parents for making her skip the sixth grade. Gifted shmifted. More like they had a lot of pull with the school superintendent and needed me to look gifted. She rolled her eyes.
At least there was one big bright spot in her social life: she and Jenna were developing a special bond.
Jenna, of course, could be considered a friend, but what Elizabeth really wanted was to be able to view her as a sister, even if, like her parents, she was a little overly religious. Was it really asking too much to have both a sister and a few good friends?
Disappointment struck at Elizabeth’s heart. Would everything in my life have been different if I’d had a real sister or brother? But, as quickly as the question arose, the possibility was again cast aside.
Even she hadn’t been planned by her parents. She was the big “oops!” that had cramped her mom’s and dad’s lifestyle. There had never been a real hope of a sibling.
Growing up as an only child did not have any benefits. Not one. And she had tried on multiple occasions to come up with some.
The contrast between what she missed out on with her parents at the museum and what she had now, intertwined with a real family, was highlighted by watching the pestering and nagging and tug-o-war that existed between the three Lawton siblings. And, yes, of course, it was maddening at times, but….
Oh, how she would have loved a life in which she’d had to periodically walk away in a huff from a brother or sister—or both—only to later sit side-by-side with them watching a movie or even helping one of them with a special project for school.
She bent down and grabbed the last handful of colors and tossed them into the washing machine.
It was thoughts like these—thoughts about what it would have been like to have a loving family—that caused resentment to fester within Elizabeth. She had been emotionally abused—perpetually—by her parents, probably without either one of them ever realizing it. And for her, it had been normal, everyday life. It took seeing the Lawtons interact on a daily basis to see just how starved she had been for love, attention, and siblings.
If it hadn’t been for her parents’ computer, life would have had little in the way of mystery and excitement and summertime “interactions.” Not exactly the relationships she dreamed of, but at least they offered some fun and excitement.
Elizabeth caught herself staring into the basin of the washer. She shook her head, added the detergent and fabric softener, closed the lid, and started the machine. With another deep sigh, she made her way back up the stairs, through the dining room, into the living room, and then glumly trudged up the second set of stairs, back toward her bedroom.
At the top of the staircase, she turned right and was just about to walk into her room when she overheard her name. It was Jenna.
Elizabeth stopped. The door to Tara’s and Brent’s bedroom across the hall was only partly closed. She could hear Tara and Jenna talking, although it was obvious that they were speaking more softly than normal to keep what they were saying between themselves.
Figuring she had a right to know what was being discussed, Elizabeth carefully crept to the other side of the hall, remaining hidden by the half-closed door.
“So, why didn’t you ever tell me about this?” Jenna asked.
“Frankly, I didn’t know if it was appropriate. It almost seems like an intrusion into Elizabeth’s life, and I don’t want to violate her trust.”
“Then
why would you tell me now?”
Tell her what? Elizabeth wanted to know.
“To reinforce your faith. The more that I think back to your dad’s story, the more I realize that it is further proof of God’s interest in us as individuals—that he really does care about the details of our lives.”
“I already know that.”
“I know you do. But you’re about to head off into your own adventure. You’re moving out of state in a few weeks to start college, and you need to more than just know that God is watching out for you. You need to be utterly convinced.”
For too long there was a pause. And? Come on. What’s this about?
Elizabeth knew Jenna and Tara well enough to know that nothing malicious was being said about her, but just the fact that they were speaking secretively behind her back made her feel uneasy.
Jenna finally spoke again. “So, Kyla… You really think her name is tied to an experience that Dad had like … twenty-five years ago?”
“I think that’s a strong possibility. Don’t you?”
“I don’t know. I think it’s a bit of a stretch.”
“Well, you can ponder that while you go to the store and pick up the groceries we need for dinner tonight.”
Elizabeth’s heart skipped a beat as she practically leapt across the hall to her room. She’d barely made it out of sight when she heard Jenna step into the hallway.
“And don’t take your merry old time,” said Tara.
“I won’t, merry old-timer!” responded Jenna, humor in her voice.
“I’m not old!”
“Whatever you say, Kyla’s grandma.”
Elizabeth heard Tara laugh and Jenna start down the stairs.
Kyla’s name? What’s that got to do with anything?
Chapter 4
T
here were times when Brent wondered why he’d done it.
This was one of those times.
Certainly, nothing had been forced upon him. There had been no obligation … not even an expectation. That meant that the decision had resulted from something else.
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