Home Another Way (13 page)

Maggie had prepared a huge breakfast—pancakes and home fries, bacon, venison sausage, cheesy egg strata and fruit salad—and it waited on the table when Jack and I arrived, reheated and beckoning. We sat down and Jack prayed. I peeked around the table at the Watsons, noting that Beth and Maggie both scrunched their eyes tight and Jack kept his face turned upward.

I glutted myself on the delicious food while Jack recounted my morning, with Beth and Maggie providing worried gasps and the occasional “Oh, no” at the appropriate times. Maggie looked drawn and yellow. She chatted as usual, but pushed her pancakes around in the syrup without eating them, and more than once glanced at the clock—the one made from a cast-iron griddle—on the counter. Beth, however, still sparkled from the night before. She wore jeans, a blue Nordic-pattern sweater, and a white turtleneck tucked under her new pearls. Plush penguin slippers covered her feet—a gift from her mother, she said.

“Speaking of gifts,” Maggie said, stirring her coffee gently, “maybe we should give Sarah hers now.”

“Yes, we should,” Beth said, grabbing my arm and pulling me onto the living room couch. “Here, open mine first.”

From under the tree she pulled a cellophane bag filled with red shredded paper and plastic candy-cane confetti.

“I don’t have anything for you,” I said, feeling foolish. It wasn’t that I didn’t think of it, but what could I possibly get at the variety store? Oven mitts? Dish soap?

“Just open it,” Beth said.

Digging through the fill, I found a cassette tape.

“It’s our greatest hits,” she said. “Well, hit, anyway.”

I looked at the tape. Beth had tucked a small watercolor of a ship inside the front cover; it sailed on a calm, early-morning ocean, pink sunshine coloring the waves. “Did you paint this?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“It’s good,” I said, and I meant it.

“I tell her that all the time,” Maggie said, “But she doesn’t listen to me ’cause I’m just her mother. Mine next. It’s that one, Beth, with the gold bow.”

Usually, I tore off wrapping paper in wild, ragged chunks. But I couldn’t do that to Maggie’s gift, with its perfect corners and ribbon tendrils, and the little glass ornaments tied to the top. I slipped my finger along the seam, pulling the tape up without damaging the paper, and took a lovely sage-colored sweater from the box. Hand-knitted in the softest yarn I’d ever felt, it had wide, romantic wrists and a slanted hemline, and fastened at the neck with a carved mother-of-pearl button.

“This is beautiful, Maggie.”

“Do you like it? I thought the color would go perfectly with your hair.”

My throat prickled with impending tears. I coughed and held the sweater close against my face, as if gauging the softness against my cheek or, odder yet, smelling it. The threat passed, and I folded the sweater more neatly than anything I’d ever folded in my life.

“One more,” Jack said, placing a thin, book-shaped package wound in wrinkled green paper on my lap. “Wrapping is not one of my talents.”

I pressed the gift to my ear. “It’s a Bible.”

“Come on,” Jack said. “I’m not that predictable.”

“Yes, you are,” said Beth, giggling and ducking her head to avoid the needlepoint pillow her brother tossed at her.

I dug my fingers through the layers of blue painter’s tape. It was, in fact, a Bible, with a pebbly brown leather cover and my name embossed in the lower right corner.
Sarah
Isabel Graham.

He knew my middle name.

“Don’t feel like you have to read it or anything,” Jack said, stuffing stray wrapping paper into a trash bag. “It makes a really good coaster. Or a doorstop. Or a—”

“Projectile?” offered Beth. She and her mother laughed.

“Oh, come on. I was eight years old,” said Jack, but he, too, chuckled.

“Sarah, you have to hear this story,” Maggie said. “One November when the boys were eight, my husband, John, and I took them camping in the mountains. Well, John had gone out early to hunt, very early, like four in the morning. And not too long after that, me and the boys heard this sound outside the tent, this growling and rustling. There were a couple of coyotes out there, scrounging around in the trash that someone forgot to tie up in a tree.”

“That was Timothy. Not me,” Jack said.

“Before I could find a pot and spoon to bang and try to scare the coyotes off, Jack was out of the tent, Bible in hand, shouting things like, ‘Get thee behind me, ye hounds of hell,’ ” Maggie said. “Those coyotes stood there, looking at Jack like he was crazy as a loon, I’m not kidding. So he threw his Bible at them. When they didn’t leave, he threw Timothy’s Bible at them. Finally, I think they just got tired of some kid screaming and tossing books at them, and they walked off into the woods.”

“It could be worse. I could still be thumping coyotes with Bibles. Or people, for that matter,” Jack said.

“Well, there was that one time you threw your Bible at me when I was a baby,” Beth said.

“I accidentally dropped it on you. And there wasn’t any permanent damage. I don’t think, anyway,” he teased, hitting her with another pillow.

“See. Still throwing,” Beth said. “You should’ve played for the Yankees.”

“All right, I’ve had enough of this torment. Let’s change the subject.” He turned to me. “Sarah, do you have anything nice to say about me?”

“Nope,” I said, adding to the laughter. “But I was wondering who Timothy is.”

My question sucked the merriment from the room. Maggie’s eyes flickered toward Jack, and he leaned toward her, saying quietly, “The subject never came up.”

Maggie picked up a photo from the end table and handed it to me, the same one from Jack’s office of the young boy with the fish, hair battling the wind. “Timothy was Jack’s twin brother. He died when he was twelve.”

I stared at the Christmas tree, a plump, long-needled kind, with tinsel and metallic garlands twirled around it, and several strands of colored lights flashing at uneven intervals. A motley assortment of ornaments, handmade mostly, but with an occasional glass ball nestled here and there, brightened the velvety-green branches. “I’m sorry. I mean—”

“You didn’t know,” Jack said.

The front doorbell jingled, and someone called, “Maggie?”

“In here, Adele.”

The yellow-fingered woman rushed in, hair and clothes stale with cigarette smoke. I sneezed.

“The roads are thawed, Maggie. We can get those boxes delivered now,” Adele said.

“Wonderful,” Maggie said. She struggled up from her seat. Jack reached his arm out to her, but she brushed him away. “Sarah, don’t mean to be rude and all, but each year some of the ladies at church put together boxes of baked goods and little gifts for some of the families ’round here who can’t afford much of anything. Usually we get them all delivered before breakfast, but with the storm and all—well, they’re still sitting in my bedroom.”

“I should probably go anyway,” I said.

“No, stay,” Jack said. “Who wants to be alone on Christmas? And I’m not allowed to help with the baskets.

It’s a girl thing.”

Beth gave me a warm hug as she left the room. Maggie’s embrace seemed quicker, cooler somehow. She said, “We won’t be long,” her eyes on Jack, her words pointed there, too.

Jack and I sat for several minutes, listening to Bing Crosby and to the women tramping in and out as they loaded their vehicles. He nursed a glass of eggnog, homemade by Maggie, of course.

“Your mom’s upset with me,” I said after the ladies drove away.

“No. You’re fine. That last look was for me.”

“About?”

“Don’t worry. Nothing important.”

My toes cold, I tucked my feet between the couch cushions, resting my chin on my knees. The fire smoldered; Jack added a couple more logs, and sat beside me.

“So, what happened? To your brother, I mean.”

“He drowned. The river was high from all the spring rain and thaw, and moving fast. We shouldn’t have been playing near it, we both knew better, but . . . Anyway, Timothy fell in and was swept away. I ran along the bank, following him, and slipped in, too. I was pulled out by a couple of loggers. Timothy was found stuck in some branches about a mile past where I was rescued.

“We were so different. Mom called Tim spirited, but that was probably being nice.” He smiled wryly. “It didn’t matter. He was my best friend. We were inseparable. I was always trying to talk him out of something.”

“It must have been hard.”

“The hardest part was the whispers, the side comments. No one actually came out and said it, but there was a general attitude of ‘Thank God it wasn’t Jack.’ I’ve been carrying that with me for the last twenty years. The expectation that I was spared for something . . . I don’t know . . . something bigger. Some divine purpose. I just can’t—”

He stopped, took a breath. “I don’t know why I just told you that. Anyway, my folks never thought that way. Mom was crushed. I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose a child. You just don’t get over that. If she hadn’t gotten pregnant with Beth, I honestly don’t think she would have made it.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Believe you me, I did the math. She got pregnant about three weeks before Tim died. It was just too early to know. It really was an act of God’s grace—she’d had seven miscarriages between us and Beth.”

“Grace?”

“Yeah. A gift. A miracle, really.”

I shook my head. “I don’t follow your logic. Your brother dies, and you see having another baby to replace him as a gift?”

“I wouldn’t put it quite like that.”

“My grandmother would’ve seen some sort of punishment in all this.”

“I would have to respectfully disagree with your grandmother. And I’d tell her to read John, chapter nine, verses one through three.”

“My grandmother’s dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not.”

Jack didn’t respond, so I said, “She wasn’t like you. She was . . .”

I stretched my legs, knees popping. Thinking about my grandmother, even now, five years after her death, made me feel as if I were six years old again, sobbing because she refused to hug me. Crossing the room to the window, I watched the melting ice drip off the inn’s rusted gutters, and pushed my hand against the glass. A ghostly haze formed around my fingers. I pressed a little harder, wondering how much weight was needed to break through. The pain of glass shards in my palm would be a relief from any memory of my childhood.

“She called me her burden,” I said to the street outside. “She said I was her constant reminder that she raised her daughter to be a whore.”

Jack came up behind me; he stood close, not touching but close enough that I felt the air warm between us. I thought briefly about sinking back into him, like two spoons in a drawer, but knew if my body touched his, I would shatter.

“Sarah.” He took my shoulders and spun me to face him. I looked at his feet, in gray socks with green stitching over the toes. Putting his thumb under my chin, he nudged, saying, “Look at me.”

“I can’t,” I said, stiffening the muscles in my neck. And I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.

The phone rang. And rang, its persistent cry shrill and pleading. Jack sighed and answered it. “Jonah Inn . . . Calm down, Editha . . . Did you call Bill Hendrickson? . . . I know . . . it’s Christmas for me, too . . . No, no, don’t do that. I’ll be there in ten minutes.” He covered his face with his hands, pulling his cheeks down until I could see the reds of his lower eyelids, looking like one of those baggy-skinned dogs. “I have to go rescue someone from her overflowing toilet.”

“You’re a plumber now?”

“You would be surprised at the extent of my knowledge and skill,” he said, tugging a knit hat over his curls. “Sit. Enjoy the fire. Mom and Beth should be back soon.”

“I’m going to get out of here.”

Jack glanced at me, at the tree, out the window. He chewed a flap of loose skin from his bottom lip and shook his head quickly, as if trying to shake a stubborn thought from it, the kind that pursued, and the faster a person ran from it, the more determined it became.

I had them all the time.

“I’ll stop by the cabin in a couple of hours,” he said.

“No.”

“Sarah—”

“Don’t.”

“Okay,” he said with a deflated nod. “Okay.”

We left together. He opened my truck door, closing it softly, silently, behind me. I turned left out of the driveway; he turned right. I watched him in my mirror until he shrunk to nothing.

Already the daylight was creeping away, the last strands of sunlight tangled high in the treetops. I loved and hated the short winter days for the same reason—longer nights. More time to sleep, to escape. Or play. But also more time to relive the past, if sleep refused to come, and there was no one to play with.

I only wanted to sack out now, and changed to my pajamas as soon as I got back to the cabin. I crawled into the sleeping bag, saw the Bible on the coffee table where I dropped it, with my other gifts. What did Jack say to look up? I flipped though the pages. Matthew. Mark. Luke. John. My grandmother had made me memorize all the books of both testaments. There it was, John 9:1–3: “
As he went along,
he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi,
who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’