Hidden Mercies (7 page)

“You may have as much as you want,” she encouraged. “You do not have to hold back.”

While Maddy served Jesse, Claire went upstairs to her bedroom. She had not slept for a very long time. Not only had she helped Kathleen have her baby, she had sat up all night with Amanda Hershberger, who turned out to be having false contractions.

She changed out of her good birthing dress and into an old choring dress. She had chosen the birthing dress material, designed and sewn it with much thought. It was a lighter blue than she would have normally worn—an Amish compromise for a white nurse’s uniform. She had also taken the liberty of modifying her church’s prescribed dress pattern slightly by setting in loose, elbow-length sleeves instead of full-length, so her sleeves did not get in the way when she needed to catch a baby. Her apron was white, and she always took an extra one along with her when she attended a birth. She had made three of these outfits, because she never knew how many times she might get called out in a week, and she did not want to get caught without a clean birthing dress and apron.

The washing of clothes was more complicated for her and her girls than for the
Englisch
. She could not simply toss a dress into a washer and then a dryer and have it come out ready to wear with no thought to whether it was raining or the sun was shining. She had to plan ahead.

Her bed beckoned. There was nothing she wanted more right now than to fall into it and sleep for a long, long time, but she could not. She had chores. Always so many chores. With Abraham gone and Levi having both farms on his shoulders
now, she tried to help him as much as possible. It was a heavy load along with the midwifery and the ever-present work that went with raising a family.

She looked at the bed again. Oh, it was enticing! The soft pillow, the snowy sheets, the lovely, worn wedding-ring quilt passed down from Abraham’s grandmother. It would feel so good to lie down and close her eyes for a few blessed minutes.

Perhaps if she could catch a short nap, she would have the energy to push through the rest of the evening.

No. She shook it off. The time to sleep would come tonight. Not a minute of daylight hours could be wasted. Approximately two hundred people would be having church at her house in the late summer, and with all she had to do, she needed every spare minute to get ready for it. Walls had to be washed. Drawers turned out and sorted. The kitchen could use a new coat of paint, as could the girls’ upstairs bedroom. The garden needed to be weeded, the yard raked, the barn cleaned . . . the list was endless. She wanted to plant several more flower beds, enough to make an impressive display. For the past two years, since Abraham’s death, her church had not expected her to host, and with everything else she had to do, she had relaxed a little too much about keeping up her house.

She would wait until nightfall to rest—and hope that no one else went into labor tonight!

T
om’s fever did not abate for several hours that night. He tossed and turned on the bed in Levi and Grace’s downstairs guest room until he barely knew when he was awake and when he was asleep. Scenes from his past found their way into his dreams, becoming nightmares so realistic, it was as though he were reliving each one in detail.

The worst one of all involved his final day in Afghanistan.
“A towering confection of culinary perfection,” Vicki Kenworth texted him. “Deep, rich chocolate with enough coffee-flavored caramel frosting to make it decadent.”

Vicki had been a pastry chef before coming to work for USAID. If she said his birthday cake was perfection, it was. In an often brutal and disheartening environment, Vicki was a bright ray of decency and kindness.

He pulled up to the gate of Green Village in Kabul and was passed through on foot by the Nepalese guards. The name of the compound was a joke. Like the rest of Afghanistan, there was little that was “green” about Green Village. The best that could be said about it was that it was well guarded.

As Tom strode toward Vicki’s office, he saw George, an old Marine buddy who had been hired to help train the Afghan army. George sat in the shade of an office building, his chair tilted back against the cooler side of the wall.

Vicki stepped out of the office building where she worked and gave him a big smile. “Happy birthday, Tom. The coffee is ready. You two go on in. I’m heading to the bakery for the cake. George has been eager to help you celebrate.”

“I’m touched, George,” Tom joked.

“We’re talking birthday cake, buddy,” George said. “I’d celebrate Groundhog Day for a slice of whatever it is that Vicki’s concocted.”

“Hey, guys, check out my party clothes.” Vicki turned around in a circle so they could get the full impact of her outfit. “I dressed up for the occasion.”

She wore garish orange slacks and a bright pink blouse. Oversize sparkly earrings peeked out from behind her shoulder-length blond hair. A multicolored scarf was draped around her neck. It was a deliberately silly outfit, but it was nice to rest his eyes on a woman wearing something other than desert camouflage and olive green.

“Y’all go on into my office,” she said in that sweet, Southern Tennessee accent of hers. “I’ll be right back.”

They found that she printed out a banner saying HAPPY BIRTHDAY TOM and attached it to the wall of her office. Somewhere, she’d managed to dig up three sad-looking balloons, which hung from the ceiling.

“That boyfriend of hers back home is a lucky man,” George observed.

“I hope she gets to go home soon,” Tom said. “That girl does not belong here.”

They’d barely walked inside her office when there was a deafening explosion. The ground shook beneath their feet, the walls of the office building trembled, and he heard screams.

•   •   •

He awoke with a start. His teeth were chattering and he was chilled to the bone. Where was he? Whose bed was he lying in? This was not Green Village.

A pregnant woman materialized and tried to give him a pill. He wouldn’t take it from her. She disappeared and then came in again, wiped his arm with something cold, and gave him an injection. He tried to fight it, but he was so weak. A man held him still so she could do this thing, and it shamed him that he was too helpless to fight.

“You go on to bed,” the man said to the woman. “I will call if you are needed.”

“The meds should take hold in a few minutes,” she said. “If this fever doesn’t break soon, I’ll want to get him to the hospital where I can start an IV.”

“You rest.” There was kindness in the man’s voice. “I will watch over him.”

The man had his brother’s face. That was strange. Matthew was dead. He knew this for a fact, because he had been the one who killed him.

The shot began to take effect, and he started to sink into a spiraling oblivion, until the nightmare started up again. He thrashed around, trying to regain consciousness. Then, when he could no longer fight and began to slip back into that dark place, the movie that had been playing started back up again—like a movie projector over which he had no control.

•   •   •

He had spent enough time in the Middle East to know that an explosion that big could only mean one thing—a VBIED—a vehicle borne improvised explosive device, better known to the world and the media as a car bomb.

Glass shattered all around them. George dropped his
Field & Stream
on the floor as they rushed to the window. A black cloud rose from the front gate—the very gate through which Tom had walked minutes before.

The compound had been compromised. Sirens wailed. Noncombatants were heading to safety.

“Move it, man!” George shoved Tom out the door. “Let’s get inside a bunker. You aren’t gonna do any good with that little peashooter sidearm you’re carrying, and neither am I.”

The compound had erupted with more explosions. AK-47s were rat-a-tatting all around them. Tom could hear grenades and suicide bombers detonating. George was right—he needed to get himself to the bunker. He was a pilot, not a ground pounder. Those Nepalese guards were in charge of protecting the compound and they were a lot better trained at hand-to-hand combat than he.

The problem was, where was Vicki? The girl was a civilian. She was not combat trained. Even worse, the bakery where she had gone was near the front of the compound—next door to the main explosion.

“We have to find Vicki!” Tom yelled.

“Right. Let me lead,” George responded. “I have more ground combat experience.”

Ducking low, they headed directly toward the bakery. Tom kept scanning the personnel scurrying past him—hoping he’d see her.

“Here!” A German policeman tossed both of them AK-47s from an armload he was handing out.

They passed several bunkers where office workers, technicians, and experts in everything from carpentry to proper waste management were sheltering. Even though none of these people was military, all the bunkers had guns pointing outward, ready to be the last line of defense if the guarded perimeter did not hold.

As they passed each one, Tom shouted for Vicki, hoping she’d made it to safety. Each bunker led them closer and closer to the intense fighting at the front gate.

They reached the bakery. Its sides were riddled with bullet holes.

He made a run for it, dove headfirst through the bakery door, and hugged the floor. George slammed the door behind them for the little protection it afforded.

He saw a stainless steel work table topped with a chocolate cake that had been blown to bits. Vicki was lying, motionless, in her festive orange slacks and pink blouse on a floor littered with cake. He checked for a pulse. It was weak, but it was there.

Tom did not know how long the fighting continued. He remembered only pieces of what happened later.

He had a memory of running with her in his arms, carrying her to the safety of the nearest bunker. He saw a Taliban fighter step around a wall. He was wearing a suicide vest and the stupid grin from the drugs they had to take in order to have the courage to go through with their grisly task. George, still leading, was slightly ahead of him.

Later, he had a vague recollection of two German medics working over him. He tried to crawl to Vicki’s body, but the medics held him down. One punched a shot of something into his arm. Slowly, his will to fight faded.

When he awoke, he was being flown to the States. George, they told him, was wounded but stable. Vicki had not survived.

All because of his birthday cake.

The damage to his body was great. The damage to his soul was greater. The black hole in his heart grew until he did not know if he could bear it. He cursed the Taliban for being so brutal, God for allowing this terrible thing to happen, and himself for allowing that sweet girl to bake a birthday cake in the midst of a war zone. For three days, the hospital staff quietly placed him on suicide watch.

•   •   •

“How is he?” the pregnant woman asked. “Did he sleep?”

“Yes, but it was restless,” the man said. “I would not have wanted to be inside his mind tonight. I do not think it would be a good place to be.”

“There are probably wounds within him that we cannot see, Levi.”

“I think his fever may have broken,” the man said. “He began to sweat a few minutes ago.”

“Open, please.” She stuck a thermometer in his mouth.

“Yes, it has begun to go down,” she said a few moments later. “When he fully awakens, if he’s strong enough, it would be a good idea for him to take a shower while I change those sweaty sheets. Will you help him, Levi?”

“For a man who saved my wife’s life,” the man said, “I would do much.”

Levi had to help prop him up while the shower washed the dried sweat from his body. The clean sheets felt fresh against his skin. He was as weak as a kitten, but he thought the worst might be over. How grateful he was for the kindness of his nephew and his wife, as well as Elizabeth, who would come in from time to time and put a hand on his forehead, a gesture he remembered his mother doing when he was a small child.

His sleep, when it came this time, was healing. For once, there were no nightmares. The movie forever reeling through his subconscious had finally shut off. For now.

•   •   •

As Claire sorted laundry in the dim early-morning light, she was deeply troubled in her soul. The man who had passed out in her front room yesterday was not a man easily forgotten.

She’d seen the haunted look of near-desperation in his eyes when he’d fully awakened, and yet he had tried his best to refuse help. Had Levi and Grace not insisted, he would have
tried to drive himself to the hotel in his feverish state. Lord only knows what might have happened to him.

The long scars along his left jawline and beneath his eye spoke of some serious reconstructive surgery. The scarring on his hands had been extensive—as though he’d thrown up his hands to protect his face.

He had lived in such an alien world to her, a world entirely different from the one in which she lived, and yet the man had not seemed foreign to her at all. There had been a strange, visceral feeling of recognition that she could not explain.

This could not be. Her circle of
Englisch
acquaintances was very small. Grace and Elizabeth at the farm next door. A few tourists who dropped by to purchase something from Amy’s little store. The
Englisch
driver, Annette, whom she hired from time to time to drive her to clients homes too far away to be reached by buggy. A few salesclerks at the
Englisch
stores where she shopped. Nowhere had she ever met anyone remotely like this Tom Miller.

She had never experienced this kind of familiarity before, but she sorted through the
Englisch
people she had known, trying to figure out why Tom seemed known to her, and she got so lost in her head that she tossed a pair of Jesse’s denims onto a pile of whites and had to grab them back out. This would never do. She had too many responsibilities to allow herself to be so distracted as to nearly ruin an entire load of clothes.