A Rose Revealed (8 page)

I looked at Allie with her blonde hair and straight-toothed smile and knew she had deliberately not told me about the circle. It took me a long time to accept that God also knew about the circle, yet He not only allowed me to be late, He allowed me to sit next to Allie and ask her my question. Obviously He had other things besides cheerleading for me, and I gradually came to terms with that fact. Still every game as I sat in the stands and watched Allie jump and tumble, I fought my resentment. Now here she was right behind me, all smiles.

The other image that flashed through my mind was of Ben the night I broke our engagement. I had come to realize that even though he was a Christian, he wasn’t the Christian for me. Something I couldn’t even define wasn’t right.

“I’m sorry, Ben,” I said that night when he came to my mother’s house to visit me. It was my senior year in nursing school and I was home for the weekend. “You’re a great guy. It’s not your fault. It’s mine. I don’t love you as I should if I’m to be your wife. I just have to be fair to you and release you. You’ll find someone who will love you as you deserve being loved.” And I handed him my engagement ring.

I’d worked long and hard to come up with lines that sounded as kind as I could possibly make them. Always Miss Nice Person, that’s me, even though I had begun to suspect he was not being faithful to me. But since I couldn’t prove it, I didn’t want to argue about it. I just wanted to break our engagement and be free of what had become his cloying and increasingly annoying presence.

He chose to be nasty. He shouted. He ranted. He turned scarlet. Finally, in a great rush of anger, he ran out in the rain, across my mother’s lawn, and threw what had been my beautiful diamond ring across the street into a field.

“Ben, what did you do!” I yelled in horror, staring at the plowed field. “You just threw away a diamond ring!”

“If you won’t wear it, Rose, then no one should wear it!”

He stormed to his car and roared off. I wasn’t even in the house before I heard the screech of tires and the thud and crash that turned out to be Jake’s accident.

As these thoughts raced through my mind in a second or two, I stared at Allie and Ben. I became aware of Jake, sensing my consternation, looking on with great interest. Gritting my teeth, I smiled sweetly and made the introductions. Jake shook hands with Ben with great aplomb and smiled charmingly at Allie. But then he had no history with them.

“Guess what?” Allie asked me while Jake turned to order our popcorn.

I spread my hands, at a loss as to what to guess.

Allie grabbed Ben’s hand and looked at me with a smug smile. I noticed that her teeth were still beautifully straight. “Ben and I are engaged!”

I blinked. “How wonderful.” I think I managed to sound somewhat pleased. In fact I was pleased. They deserved each other.

“Just look!” She stuck her left hand under my nose. I couldn’t imagine how I had previously missed the sparkling stone on her third finger. The solitaire sat on an S-shaped shank with a tiny baguette on each side of the central stone.

“Very beautiful,” I said as I stared first at it and then at Ben, who was suddenly busy studying the candy in the display case.

A giant tub of popcorn was shoved into my hands.

“Come on, Tiger,” Jake said. “We need to get our seats.” He wheeled off and I had no choice but to follow.

As I walked away, gnashing my teeth and screaming inside, I heard Allie say, “Tiger? Oh, please!” I’d never known anyone who could drip condescension like she could. The fact that I’d been thinking the very same thing only made me angrier.

I stalked after Jake. I grabbed a handful of popcorn and shoved it into my mouth. Yes! Phony butter. Maybe the evening could be redeemed.

Just outside the auditorium where our film was showing, Jake stopped. He looked at my clenched jaw and stormy expression.

“I seem to be asking this of you a lot, but are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I ground out.

He raised his eyebrow. “I can tell.”

“Did you see that ring?” I demanded.

“Not really. I’m not into engagement rings.” Jake studied me. “Why does the ring bother you?”

“I used to be engaged to him.”

He nodded. “Do you still love him or something?”

“Ben?” I stared, aghast. “Are you kidding? It was one of the greatest escapes in recorded history that I got away from him before it was too late.”

“Then are you upset because you resent Allie so much? She got your man and all that, even though you no longer wanted him?”

I sputtered at the idea. “Hardly. They deserve each other.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“The ring!” I held out my left hand and pointed to the third finger with my popcorn tub. “It was my ring! I picked it out! He bought it for me and now he gave it to her!”

“It was your ring?”

“My ring!”

“And you want it back?”

“Never!”

He shook his head and shrugged his massive shoulders. “Then what?”

“He threw it away!”

Jake looked at me, confused. “He threw it away?”

I nodded. “He was so mad when I broke up with him that he raced to the bottom of my mother’s yard and tossed the ring as far as he could, right into the field across the street!”

Jake picked up a handful of popcorn. “He actually threw away a ring worth all that money?” He stuffed the popcorn in his mouth. “No wonder you broke up with him. He’s too dumb to be on the loose.”

I stilled for a moment. Dumb? I’d always thought egotistical, but dumb might be better.

“But he never threw it away, did he?” Jake was right with me, as usual. “What a grandstander!” Jake grabbed another handful of popcorn. A huge grin spread over his face as the absurdity of it all hit him.

“Don’t you dare laugh!” I was livid at Ben, my jaw so tightly clenched I might have had tetanus. “This is no laughing matter! Why, he probably didn’t even care that I broke up with him! He probably never really loved me after all!” I was breathing fire. “I’d like to strangle him!”

“You’re just mad because he put one over on you,” Jake said.

“And that’s not the worst of it!” I spun around in a circle in my frustration, several kernels spilling from my tub onto the rug. Jake pointed to them and I picked them up without being totally aware of what I was doing. My mind was going in agitated spirals, and I stood staring at the popcorn in my palm.

“Trash receptacle.” Jake nodded in its direction.

“Right.” I walked across the hall and dumped the corn. I was still frowning when I came back. “Mom and I spent hours over in that field looking for that ring! Hours!”

Jake stared at me for a moment. Then he began to laugh. “Oh, Rosie, I can just see you out there, down on your hands and knees, sifting through the dirt and grass, hoping against hope that you could find the thing, thinking of all the stuff you could buy when you traded it in.” And he began to laugh harder.

He was much too close to the truth for comfort. “Wait until my mother hears about this. She’ll have a fit over all those lost hours.”

For some reason this statement made Jake laugh even harder. That was because he’d never met my mother.

I stared at him through slitted eyes until the absurdity of the whole thing finally washed over me. Ben’s great show of pique that was only that, a show. And all those hours searching for a ring that was never there! I started to laugh too, and soon we were wheezing, gasping for breath. I had to use the wall to hold myself up.

Into this scene of great merriment walked Allie and Ben. Ben took one look at the two of us and spun Allie around on her heels, rushing her into the first auditorium they came to, the one showing a bland kiddie flick that had been creamed by the critics as less than stellar.

“But Ben, this wasn’t what I wanted to see,” Allie cried as the door swung shut behind them.

We found our movie to be vastly entertaining. In fact we laughed so readily that the people around us began looking at us askance. I didn’t care. I kept imagining Allie looking at the wrong movie, getting more agitated with Ben by the moment, and Ben, sitting there worried about seeing Jake and me again. After all, what if I told Allie what I knew about her ring? I was willing to bet anything that she had no idea of its previous history.

I started to giggle again, only to feel Jake’s elbow in my side. I looked at the screen and saw I was giggling at a death scene. That made me laugh harder. Soon he joined me, and the people in front of us actually moved.

The upshot was that I went to bed feeling much better than I had the night before. That’s why the nightmare took me so by surprise.

I sat bolt upright in bed, my heart pounding. My dream wrapped dark tentacles of terror about me, gripping me as tightly as imprisoning chains. I was sweating, trembling, almost hyperventilating. It seemed impossible that I was staring into ordinary darkness in an ordinary bedroom, so vivid had been the flashing red lights and the crackling static. And the bodies! They lay in the road, floated in the water, and sat in burning cars.

They all looked at me and chorused, “You! You! You!”

I slashed at the tears on my cheeks and reached for my bedside lamp. Immediately, in the glare of the light, the phantoms retreated. I stared with relief at my coat hanging on a peg in the wall and reveled in the sheer normality of the sight.

But the feelings of horror clung, sticky cobwebs of emotion that refused to release me.

I pushed back the covers and climbed shivering from bed. I padded into the bathroom. I’d discovered long ago that movement or a different location banished the emotions that clung long after the visions had ceased.

I drank two glasses of water. I wet the cloth and wiped it across my face. I brushed my teeth.

Still the clammy terror remained.

A cup of tea, I thought. That’s what I need. Chamomile to help me relax and sleep again.

I started out of the bathroom only to realize I wasn’t in my place. I was at Zooks’.

If I lived here, I thought, one of the first things I’d do would be to get me a microwave to keep up here for just such emergencies.

I padded into my darkened living room and stared out the window at the quiet countryside silvered by a three-quarter moon. Everything looked so peaceful, so tranquil, so at odds with what I felt.

Oh, dear Lord, calm me down. I feel like I’m coming apart here
.

I took my shivering body back to the bedroom and tugged a set of sweats from my duffel bag. I pulled them on over my nightshirt. I grabbed my sweater and pulled it on over the sweatshirt. Then I stuck my arms into my bathrobe and tied it about me. I felt like the little brother in
The Christmas Story
, the one who couldn’t move because of so many layers of winter clothes. I could barely bend enough to tie my sneakers. It was sheer habit that caused me to attach my beeper to my bathrobe belt.

When I no longer shook with cold but merely shivered, I grabbed my emergency flashlight and made my way downstairs. Maybe there was enough heat left in the wood stove for me to heat a cup of water. I didn’t think Mary would mind if I rummaged until I found her wonderful spearmint tea. To be honest, though, I didn’t care whether she minded or not. My nerves were jangled enough to make me less than the ideal houseguest.

Moving quietly I put some water in the teakettle and set it on the still warm stove. It might not boil anymore, but it would at least get warm. I began opening and closing cupboards as quietly as I could, shining my flashlight into all the nooks and crannies. I found the tea in the third place I looked. Not too bad, I thought with misplaced pride.

I was getting a mug from the cabinet when I heard the whoosh of Jake’s wheels.

“Who’s here? What’s going on?” he asked. He didn’t sound too happy.

“It’s me,” I whispered, shining my light at my face. I probably looked like a Halloween ghoul.

“Rose.” His voice was decidedly testy.

“Don’t go getting all grumpy.” I put my mug on the counter. “I’m not stealing the family jewels. I’m making a cup of tea. You want one?”

“Why not?” He wheeled over to the table and lit the Coleman lantern that sat on it. The sudden bright light made me blink.

“That’s too bright,” I said, shielding my eyes. “Midnight escapades call for soft light.” Also soft light might disguise how strange I must look with my combination of clothes and my uncombed hair and my nighttime face cream.

Jake grunted and turned to an end table. He lifted the globe and lit a kerosene lamp. As soon as it took hold, I turned the Coleman off.

“Much better,” I said.

Jake had on a T-shirt and sweat pants. He had a blanket across his knees and another wrapped around his shoulders.

“How did you know I was here?” I said. “I tried to be so quiet.”

“It wasn’t your noise. It was the flashlight flickering. I wasn’t asleep yet, and I kept seeing streaks of light. I don’t close the door to the house at night in case I need to yell for help.”

“You should get one of those baby intercoms,” I said.

“We have one. Father just forgets to turn it on some nights. He’s convinced that the sound goes both ways.”

I smothered a giggle and handed him a mug of tea. We sat at the table with hands wrapped around the warm mugs. The tea hadn’t steeped too well because the water wouldn’t boil, but warm and flavored were really my only requirements at the moment.

“Do you always have tea in the middle of the night?” Jake asked.

I shook my head. “Bad dream.”

“I’m not surprised,” he said.

“I am.” I stirred my sugar slowly. “I felt very lighthearted when I went to bed. Laughing about Ben was such a wonderful feeling. I expected to sleep like a baby. The nightmare was unexpected.”

“The bomb?” Jake looked at me, his face shadowed by his angle to the lamp. He looked stern and haughty, but his voice was gentle.

“Partly.” I stared into my tea, my mind re-creating what little I could actually recall of the dream. “It was a mishmash of the bomb and Dad and Rhoda and you. There were flashing lights and static and shouts. I’d forgotten about the shouts.”

“Shouts?”