In Search of Eden (16 page)

Aunt Bobbie shook her head. “Your mama didn't tell me, honey. She just said she'd made arrangements with somebody she trusted.”

“That had to be a short list,” Miranda said.

Aunt Bobbie nodded, then stood up. “I'm so sorry to leave you like this, but I have to go to work.”

Miranda walked her to the door and hugged her, reassuring her she'd done the right thing. She watched her walk to the car, stop, and look back once. When she had driven away, Miranda went back to the stairs, sat down, and stared at that picture for a long time. Then she made up her mind.

She took out her cell phone and called the airline. It took her a half hour, but she canceled her ticket, leaving a credit with the airline. She had no idea where Abingdon was and had no map handy. She had her laptop but had canceled her Internet service, so she would just have to buy a map and drive. She would have to borrow or rent a car. And besides, she had no idea how or if she could find a nameless child even if she found the town.

She thought of a thousand reasons why she should just put that picture in the bottom of her suitcase and continue on with her plans, but she knew they were just thoughts, and she had no intention of acting on them. There were some times that you reasoned things out and decided what to do. Then there were other times when your brain just realized what your heart had already decided.

chapter
15

A
pril in Abingdon was really quite lovely, even from this vantage point, Ruth Williams decided as she knelt in the dirt of last year's garden and turned the damp, red-clay soil. She wore a straw hat and overalls and knew she could have easily been mistaken for a scarecrow except for the extra padding she wore. She attacked the weeds with an old kitchen knife, but her mind was not on her garden.

She was not by temperament a worrier. Born in 1939, she had managed to live through the aftermath of the Great Depression, five wars, and widowhood. Even her childhood, happy though it was, had not been without trouble. In fact, she well remembered planting gardens just like this one, and not for the enjoyment of it. Their produce had fed the family. Before the Second World War came, her parents had lived on a large farm and grown acres of tobacco. After Dad joined up, Mama had tried to run the farm by herself but eventually lost it to the bank. Without a whisper of self-pity she had moved the family to a series of run-down rental houses in Richmond, where she found work in the can factory. Dad had died in the Pacific three years later. Ruth had no memories of him, but she well remembered
how often they had moved, and she did not ever remember hearing her mother complain.

In fact, Ruth couldn't think of much to complain about, at least not from a child's perspective. She uprooted a dandelion and smiled as she remembered her childhood. Their home had been a cheerful place. Mama had never been one to sit down and cry when there was something that could be done, and Ruth supposed she was like her in that respect. Which was why she was weeding the garden today instead of sitting inside worrying, even though her family was in disarray and there was nothing she could do to fix it. She wished there were. She wished desperately this was the kind of situation that determination and energy could remedy. Those words reminded her again of her mother. After saving money for years, Mama had finally been able to buy their own place. She could still see the determined expression on her mother's face as she had stood in the doorway and surveyed the dingy little house.

“Well, the first thing to be done is to clean it up,”
Mama had said in her matter-of-fact way, and she'd set all of them to sweeping and scrubbing and washing, which had put the doldrums right out of them. Ruth tried to recall how many washtubs of brown water she had slung out that back door the first day or so in that house. Twenty perhaps. Thirty. It had taken time and patience, but within a year Mama had painted the walls a clean white, sewn her own curtains on her treadle sewing machine for the now spotless windows, made rag rugs for the kitchen floor, and planted a rosebush by the front porch. They had made do with what they had, and it had been plenty.

Mama had given them separate garden plots because agreeing about what to plant and where to plant it would have been impossible. Dorothy was still bossy, Ruth thought, expertly dislodging a hogweed with a flick of her knife blade. And Shirley was just as bad. She chuckled briefly, thinking what they would say about her. She and her sisters had put their younger brother, Walter, to work collecting manure, which they used for fertilizer.
It had been one decision they had all agreed on. She grinned, thinking of his outrage.

She tried to remember if there had been darkness over their spirits in those days. If there had been, she couldn't remember it. And if her mother had worried, she had hidden it well from her children. Ruth herself had been worried at one time. When she was twelve, Minnie Harper had told her the Koreans were going to fly right over Richmond and drop bombs on them just like the Japanese had done to Pearl Harbor. She remembered confiding those fears to her sister Dorothy who, being the ninny tattle-tale she was at that time, had passed them directly on to Mother. To tell the truth, she had been a little bit relieved to have her secret fears brought out into the light.

“Not likely to happen, Ruth,”
Mama had said the next day, bringing the matter up as she stirred a pot of beans for their supper and waited for the golden cornbread to turn brown on top.
“There's enough real trouble in the world without inventing more. Where's the quilt square you were sewing? Get your scissors out. That seam is crooked.”
And that had been that.

Even growing up without a father hadn't crushed their spirits. Ruth could see the difference now between that and this circumstance of theirs. They still knew that God was on His throne. Good was good and evil was evil, and if Dad had died doing his part to stand against Hitler and Mussolini and Hirohito, then they would be proud he had spent his life well. Now it seemed the lines weren't so clearly drawn. Things had gotten confusing.

She remembered her mother, could see every line of her face as clearly as if she stood before her now. She remembered supper-time with the table covered with steaming food, the bounty of the jewel-toned mason jars gleaming proudly from the kitchen shelves, and for a moment she wished sharply she could be back in her mother's kitchen again. Oh, how she longed to lay her head on her mother's shoulder and feel her strong hand patting and smoothing her hair. She closed her eyes and could see the red-and-white gingham curtains and the checkered tablecloth.
She could feel the warmth of the woodstove and hear the hiss of the kettle. But there was no mother for her now. She
was
the mother.

She sighed and felt the burden settle on her back again. She had seen the world go from party lines to cell phones, from streetcars to moon landings. She had buried her own husband. Yes, she supposed she had seen her share of changes and dealt with her share of adversity. But this? This was tearing her very heart out.

She wiped her eyes furiously with the back of her hand, the only clean part she could find, then leaned back against her heels and dug in the pocket of her overalls for a rumpled, smudged index card. It was her prayer list, warped with her tears and frayed from being carried in her purse or pocket these past four months. Not that she needed it. She set it before her more to remind herself of the promises she'd scrawled along the bottom than the names upon it. The people who had occupied most of her thoughts and her prayers still stood on center stage, herself a sometimes anxious, sometimes faith-filled audience. There would be David lying broken in his bed with sweet Sarah beside him, Eden buzzing around the edges like a frenzied little bee, and Joseph, dear Joseph, marching back and forth, turning, marching again, peering sternly out over the wings, alert for danger. She felt a familiar downward pull of grief and loss but quickly snapped the cable with the shears of faith. She had gone back and forth between those two states so often and so quickly during the past year that she felt herself to be on a kind of emotional spin cycle. She read the words she had inscribed on the card.
For I am persuaded beyond doubt that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor things impending and threatening nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

She believed it. She did. She sighed, tucked the card away, and dug back into the dirt with determination.

She finished the row and stood up and surveyed things. There were four rows of corn, two each of peas, green beans and pole
beans, parsnips, turnips, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, lots of cucumbers, some to eat and some to pickle, a row of watermelons, a row of pumpkins for fall, and a small plastic-covered greenhouse for the tomatoes. She turned and surveyed the flower gardens. They were a little messy, but she loved them anyway. They were in the style of an English cottage garden, with plants growing very close together like beautiful women with shoulders brushing and their children jostling at their feet.

The moss between the flagstones was coming along nicely, and the path twisted and curled past the little nooks she had created, each separated by vines creeping up a section of fence or a weeping tree. There were huge lilacs ready to bloom and dangling wisteria, azaleas, and laurels that had already flamed and gone out. That's the way it was with all living things, she realized. You had to seize their beauty while it was there. It didn't last forever.

Joseph had helped her fashion a raised bed surrounded by a wall made of river rock. The pink and white and purple foxgloves stood sprightly among a sea of purple and white phlox. Peeping impatiens and green swords of hosta nestled beneath the huge trees—oaks and maples planted by her husband's grandmother. This had been his home, and she liked to think of him growing up here. It gave her happiness and reminded her of their life together. She gazed off for a moment, then remembered that she could be grateful for many things now. She had her sons and her granddaughter. Her bed-and-breakfast had been busy, and that was a saving grace. It always made her feel better to be doing something. Anything.

Which made it even harder with David's injury. There was nothing she could do. Not for him. Not for Sarah. Even helping Eden had turned out to be more of an exercise in ingenuity than direct intervention.

Her granddaughter had wanted to go stay in Minneapolis to be with David and Sarah for these last months, but that idea had been vetoed.
“You could help best by taking Eden,”
Sarah had told her, and she had been willing, of course. Still, it was hard to know
her son was suffering miles away. But she couldn't leave Joseph to cope with her granddaughter alone, although he did admirably. She just wished she could fix them all. She sniffed and wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her shirt.

Well, at least they would all be here soon. Sarah said they would be coming to stay here with her for a while. It had seemed good in the ideal, but now that the real was upon her she wondered if she would be able to see her son so broken and not give in to despair. She would just deal with it. She had to. That was all there was to it. One good thing had come of the whole horrible situation. Her sons would be in the same place at the same time, and perhaps there would be the possibility of reconciliation.

She picked up her knife and stretched out her sore muscles. She was getting old. Too old for this kind of thing, she supposed, though she could not envision herself sitting on the porch. She checked her watch again. She wasn't sure about the system Joseph had devised for keeping track of Eden, but at least there had been no more disappearing acts since they'd started it. She shook her head, feeling weak just remembering how panicked she'd been the first time Eden had simply not come home after school. She'd called Joseph, and he'd had the entire police force out looking for her. She'd been discovered calmly sitting in the rectory of St. James, playing hearts with Pastor Hector the first time, and the second time she'd been in the public library, hunkered over an encyclopedia, making cryptic notes. Ruth sighed, suddenly tired.

Even as a little child Eden had liked to run off without telling anyone where she was going. A frightening and dangerous pastime. The adults in her world had passed the point of amusement with the habit and moved on to aggravation, but it didn't seem to matter in the least to Eden. She would simply disappear, and the hunt would be on. Her parents would call, cajole, and finally threaten, but to no avail. She would be gone somewhere on one of her mysterious errands and would come back when and if she wanted to, and always with a faintly satisfied air. Even as a toddler, she would sling an old Easter basket over her arm and visit the
downhill neighbor without permission. She couldn't be held down. One could only hope to keep her safe.

It always seemed slightly irrational to Ruth that David and Sarah punished Eden for running off by making her stay alone. Somehow Ruth had the idea that Eden's wanderlust was a message of some kind, if only they could understand it.
Ask her what she's looking for,
she wanted to plead, but they only gave her a “time out”—the fashionable discipline these days. It seemed to make much better sense to put Eden in the midst of things—have her bake cookies with her mother or help her father clean the garage, to involve her in the life of the home so she wouldn't feel the need to go looking for companionship elsewhere. But David and Sarah felt they knew best, so off to her room she would go, apparently unconcerned but with that busy look in her eye, as if she were already making plans for her next escapade.

Ruth dusted off her hands, picked up her phone, and punched a number on the speed dial. After one ring Joseph answered. “Lieutenant Williams.”