“A suspicion understandably reinforced by how I lost it that day in Redding,” he said ruefully.
“And I owe Joe an apology too. I even thought he deliberately tried to run over and kill me with the van, to get rid of me and protect you.”
Jace shook his head. “And you had all this closed up inside you, carrying it all alone.”
“Until I let myself lean on the Lord.”
“I’m glad about that, so very glad. I always thought you would eventually. I could feel it every time you tried to claim disbelief and lack of faith.”
“But this changes everything, doesn’t it?” she asked.
“Such as?”
“Us.”
“It doesn’t change that I love you!”
“You can’t know you love me! You don’t know anything about me as Sara Garrison.”
“I didn’t fall in love with Kat or Katy Cavanaugh. I fell in love with the woman behind the name, the woman I almost lost today. You.”
“I’m not a New York model. I don’t own the ranch. I—”
“Does it matter to you that you’re not a New York model? That you don’t own the ranch?” he challenged.
“No!”
“Then why should it matter to me?”
She floundered, uncertain why it should matter but certain it must.
“Do you love me?” he demanded.
“Oh, yes!”
“Then the rest of it is all just minor details to fill in the blanks. Some of which you might fill in for me right now.” He changed positions, pulling her into his arms so her back rested against his chest, as if he were settling down to give them all the time they needed.
“I hardly know where to start.”
“How about the beginning, with ‘I was born in. . .’?” He ended on an upnote and nuzzled her cheek, encouraging her to fill in the blank.
“I was born in Texas,” she began slowly. “To wonderful Christian parents. My father was in the military, and my mother always loved doing anything with plants, working in a flower shop or greenhouse or tree nursery. We moved around a lot, of course, with Dad in the military, so I never had any real home town or longtime friends, but maybe that just brought us closer as a family. Then, when I was in high school and Dad was stationed in Korea, they adopted a little Korean girl who’d lost her parents. Her name was Kimsi, but we always called her Cricket because when she got excited she made this sweet, funny little chirpy noise.” Sara smiled reminiscently, her throat closing up with bittersweet memory of the adopted sister she’d loved so dearly.
“Cricket!” Jace exclaimed, understanding dawning as he remembered her odd reaction to the sound of crickets chirping in the evening air.
“She had some emotional problems at first, but we all loved her so much and by the time we came back to the States and she’d learned to trust us, she became the sweetest, most wonderful little girl. Then I started college.”
“And studied computers?” Jace guessed.
She shook her head. “No, I planned to be a teacher, although I also took some computer classes. But in my sophomore year, my parents were killed in a boat accident on the Mississippi River.”
“Oh, Ka—Sara, I’m so sorry!”
“Maybe that was why Katy’s loss of her parents seemed so much like a real part of me,” Sara said softly. “Even now I almost feel as if they were a beloved aunt and uncle I’ve lost.”
Jace held her close, his jaw pressed hard against her cheek in silent comfort.”
“Cricket was only seven when it happened. It was a terrible blow for both of us, but we shared a wonderful faith in the Lord and had him to lean on. Then another blow hit when the authorities tried to take Cricket away and put her in a foster home. My parents had named me to take care of her if anything happened to them, but the authorities fought it because I wasn’t twenty-one yet, too young in their eyes. As if strangers could care for her better than I could! But I vowed they weren’t going to separate us. I found a woman lawyer to fight them, which she did by getting herself named guardian for both of us. Then, when I turned twenty-one, she arranged legal custody of Cricket for me.”
“She sounds like a wonderful woman,” Jace said thoughtfully. “But why wasn’t she looking for you while you thought you were Kat? Wasn’t she concerned when you were missing?”
“Because a month after she finished our case, she was killed in a carjacking out in her office parking lot.” Sara hesitated, remembering the shock of that, and finally added slowly, “Which, even though my faith didn’t fail then, was maybe when I first began to question God’s love and caring.”
“What about Cricket and college?”
“I kept going. It wasn’t easy managing time and money so I could take care of Cricket and attend classes too. In fact, we lived a kind of leap-from-one-crisis-to-the-next kind of life. But it was a wonderful time anyway. We had each other and the Lord.” Sara brushed away tears, remembering the sweet closeness they’d shared. “And then Cricket got sick.”
Jace didn’t say anything, but she could feel his sudden dismay, as if he realized something even worse was coming.
“It didn’t seem too serious at first. Headaches and tiredness. The doctor thought it was the tail end of a flu that wouldn’t go away. Then, like some monster creeping up from inside her, she started having trouble with her eyesight, then her hearing and speech. Finally, through an MRI and biopsy, they diagnosed it as. . .” Sara closed her eyes as her mind dragged up the letters one by one until they spelled the strange and terrifying word. “Rhabdomyosarcoma. It’s a type of cancer, and the tumor was so close to vital nerves in her head that they couldn’t do surgery, and the other treatments, radiation and chemotherapy, were horrendous. I quit college than, of course, to take care of her, and we moved to Minnesota to be near a clinic and specialist.”
“But they couldn’t help her?” Jace asked softly.
“They tried. Tried very hard. But she suffered so much, from treatments as well as the disease. Oh, Jace, how she suffered! I couldn’t stand it. I kept praying to God to keep her from suffering so much, to help her somehow, but he didn’t seem to be listening. By then the money I’d inherited from my folks was running out, so I took in computer work I could do at home and still take care of her. Then, like some miracle, she got a little better! Tests showed the tumor had shrunk. I cheered. I praised God! I thought she was on her way to healing. And then they discovered she wasn’t better at all, that she had bone cancer and needed a bone-marrow transplant. And I wasn’t a match, of course, so I couldn’t donate to her. Then there was more pain, and all I could do was watch her suffer, and wonder why God didn’t care.”
“Oh, honey.” She could feel his pain as he absorbed hers.
“She died while we were still trying to find a matching donor. All her pain, all that suffering, all in vain.” Sara shook her head helplessly. “And I just collapsed and went wild at the same time. I hated God, not just for taking her, but for making her suffer so much first. I couldn’t understand how he could heap so much on one innocent little girl. Taking her real parents and then her adopted parents too, then snatching even this woman who had helped us. As if he were out to get anyone important to either of us! Stealing Cricket’s eyesight and hearing, putting her through so much suffering for one so young and helpless. I can still hear her crying in the night.”
Jace rocked her gently as she buried her face in her hands and let the tears fall. The tears didn’t end then, but she spoke through them in broken words.
“And after she was gone, all I wanted was to get away, away from everything. So I sold my computer and everything else I couldn’t stuff in the car and just started driving. I didn’t know where I was going and didn’t care. Mostly I just wanted to outrun God, I think. Abandon and reject him the way he’d abandoned and rejected Cricket when she needed him most.
“I got to Seattle, and the car broke down. I remember thinking bitterly, ‘Thanks, God, yo
u’re all heart, aren’t you?’ All my life I’d believed in a loving, caring God, and now I believed that, if he existed at all, he was cruel and uncaring. The repair bill was more than the car was worth, so I just walked off and left it and everything in it. Then I happened to overhear some people in a store talking about taking a camping trip by bicycle down the Oregon coast that summer. I thought, why not? I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t overhear people talking about a slow freighter to the Orient, or I might have wound up in some strange foreign place rather than here,” she added with an effort to lighten her grim story.
“No, God intended you for here, for me.” Jace’s voice held no trace of doubt. “And he did indeed work in mysterious ways to get you here, didn’t he?”
“I took a bus down to Portland, bought some camping equipment and a bicycle, rode over to the coast and started down Highway 101. It’s a popular trip with bicyclists, and there are campgrounds all along the coast. This was earlier in the year than most people do it by bicycle, but the weather was good, and I met a few other bicyclists along the way. The coast scenery was wild and spectacular, but I just resented God for that too. Then, somewhere along the southern coast, I took an old side road up into the hills thinking I’d camp up there somewhere that night.”
“All by yourself, not in a campground?”
She smiled wryly. “I was tired of friendly, helpful people concerned about a woman traveling alone. Anyway, it was a steep climb, and I rounded a curve and saw a bridge. Then the sun hit my eyes and blinded me, and the bike swerved into gravel beside the bridge. I remember both me and the bike flying through the air and landing in brush, and then I was stumbling, falling, hitting something. Then it was like today, being tossed and whirled, as if the whole world had become a maelstrom of water. After that my memory is still gone, but I think I must have washed down the creek to the beach, then sloshed in the surf until someone found me.”
Jace nodded slowly. “Your bicycle and identification are probably still hidden in brush somewhere alongside an old road in Oregon.”
“And then I woke up in the Benton Beach Hospital and became Kat Cavanaugh.”
“And I fell in love with you.” Jace reached up and erased the trail of teardrops across her cheek with a fingertip. “Is it too soon to talk about marriage, Ka—Sara?”
“Maybe it’s too soon until you learn to call me by my real name,” she teased through the tears.
“I love you, Sara Garrison,” he said fiercely. “I love you, and I want to marry you.”
“But there’s still something I have to do.” The thing she hadn’t been able to bring herself to do before her memory fled into darkness.
Chapter Twenty-Three
They stood at the foot of the grave, the September sunlight golden in this rural Midwestern cemetery. Around them the other gravestones were mostly older, weathered, yet lovingly cared for. The chrysanthemums they had placed on the two adjoining graves glowed orange and rust and gold against the dusty green of grass.
It was accomplished now, this thing she had fled from doing yet couldn’t escape, this thing that had haunted her even in the dark emptiness of lost memory. Sadness and gladness that Cricket was beyond suffering now, safe in the arms of the Lord, mingled in her mind and heart.
Jace’s arm held her shoulders with fierce tenderness as they studied the words engraved on the newly erected rose-granite stone.
KIMSI GARRISON
Our Beloved Cricket
“Do you wonder why I didn’t do it before?” Sara asked. “Why I left the grave without a headstone when she was first buried here?”
Jace silently pressed his cheek against her temple.
“It was because it was such a final gesture, a good-bye I couldn’t make. It was, as if, once the stone with her name was erected, it would be an admission that she was gone forever. And so I rejected the God who had taken her and ran away instead of accepting the eternal truth that those we love are never truly gone forever, that for believers there will someday be a happy reunion. Now I’m just grateful I had her as long as I did.”
Sara knelt and placed the third bouquet of chrysanthemums in the container in front of the gravestone. “Goodbye, Cricket,” she said softly. “We’ll meet again.”
At the gate in the stone fence surrounding the old cemetery, she paused and looked back. Sara had never known the grandparents who were buried here, nor had Cricket, but there was a family unity in the three graves placed side by side, a peaceful serenity there beneath the trees with leaves just beginning to show a blaze of fall color. Sara’s own parents were buried in a military cemetery, and so this was where she had chosen for Cricket. Now it was finished, and she felt the peace of completion that had so long been missing.
***
They flew back to Redding and picked up Jace’s pickup at the airport, talking little but taking comfort in each other’s nearness. The crisp air of coming fall made the lingering warmth of summer doubly sweet as they drove through the mountains, but Sara felt a returning twinge of sadness when they passed the driveway to the log house she had once thought of as home. The strips of yellow plastic across the driveway that marked the ranch as a crime scene were gone now, and the house looked lonely, brooding, and abandoned, Mrs. L.’s garden and rose bushes dry and forlorn.
So sad, Sara thought with a pang, all that had happened there. So strange how love could have gone so wrong in the tangled relationships between man and woman, mother and son.
But just across the road, at Damascus, a different mood prevailed. Noisy shouts echoed from a football game in progress, and a chain saw buzzed beyond the woodpile. Joe’s welcoming wave came from under the van, where he was busy with the unending process of keeping the old vehicle running. The cats, Maggie and Tillie, who had made the move to the school with relative tranquility, lazed like furry doorstops beside the dormitory door. And a corporate donation of twenty cases of bean sprouts crowded the kitchen steps.
Jace laughed. “I hope you like Chinese food. I have a feeling we may be eating a lot of it.”
He lifted her suitcase from the back of the pickup, and she led the way upstairs to her room in the staff wing of the dormitory where she had lived since leaving the ranch. At the doorway she turned, and Jace draped his arms around her.
“Welcome home,” he said. He smiled and kissed her lightly.
Home, Sara thought with a feeling of wonder followed by a sweet rush of satisfaction and relief and happiness. Yes, home. “Thank you for going with me,” she whispered.
“That’s what a husband-to-be is for, to be there when the woman he loves needs him.” He smiled again. “A husband-to-be who is eager to change that to just plain husband whenever you’re ready.”
One part of Sara recklessly said Yes! Let’s do it now, right now, before another day goes by! Jace had suggested they be married before they flew to the Midwest to put the headstone on Cricket’s grave. But now, as then, another part of Sara held back. Not for lack of love. Oh, no! She didn’t doubt the depth of her love for him or his for her. She felt that love whether she was in his arms or miles away, whether, as now, their eyes were only inches apart or their gazes met across a dining room crowded with boys, whether they were worshipping together in the chapel or slinging overripe zucchini and laughter at each other in the garden.
It was just that she still needed time to put her interrupted life back together, to mend the strange rip in the continuity of her existence, to look to the future instead of the past. “Soon,” she whispered.
“I’m ready whenever you are. Just remember, I love you, Sara.”
She tilted her head back to look into his loving eyes. “At least you get my name right these days,” she teased lightly. “You don’t slip and call me Katy anymore.”
“I love you whether you’re Katy or Sara or Judy Jones from Juneau. All I want to do with your name is make it end in Foster.”
***
Sara thought about those wor
ds as she stood at her window that night and looked across the road at the dark silhouette of the log house. Its ownership was in limbo at the moment, but Jace planned to make an offer on it whenever the legal details were sorted out. Sara had accepted Jace’s invitation to live and work at Damascus as soon as she realized she wasn’t Kat Cavanaugh and didn’t belong there at the ranch. Kat’s shallow grave in the woods had been found a few days after Evan’s body was pulled from the river, and Mrs. L.’s future, now that she had suffered a nervous breakdown, was up in the air. Joe faithfully went to visit her once a week.
***
Sara threw herself into activities of the school and her job, straightening and organizing records and files that Jace admitted, with gross understatement, were a bit disorganized., She checked with the university she’d attended and found what it would take to get her degree and become a teacher here at the school. She wrote Barry and explained everything that had happened, but she never heard from him and could only wonder if he mourned the real Kat or simply dismissed her as being of no more use to him.
Slowly the part of her that had almost become Katy receded, and she was fully Sara once more.
And one day in early November, as she and Jace picked the last of the late apples in the school’s little orchard, he wrapped his arms around her from behind so they could share crisp bites from the same apple. “Ready for a wedding?” he asked softly.
Sara tilted her head at him and smiled. Yes, she was ready.
***
And so it was, on the day after Thanksgiving, that Sara Garrison, in long white gown, walked down the aisle of the chapel on the arm of the woman who had cared for her in Oregon, a delighted Dr. Fischer. Standing at the altar waiting for her was Jace, expression solemn in the flickering candlelight but eyes joyously alight with love. They joined hands as school chaplain Mac repeated the timeless words that made them one before God.
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