Reflection (47 page)

“Rachel is not the issue here.”

She leaned against the wall. “I don't want to talk about this anymore,” she said.

Typical Katy, he thought. Any real meat in a conversation, anything remotely difficult, and she tuned out.

“What's happening with the Hostetter project?” she asked.

“The vote was last night.” He had watched the board sign, seal, and deliver permission to the Hostetters to destroy the land. “They start work Friday.”

She let out an exasperated sigh. “Everything's falling apart.” She turned to the window and toyed with the lock for a moment before looking over at him again. “Can we do something together tomorrow?” she asked. “The three of us? Take Jace to Hershey Park, maybe?”

“Yes,” he said. He wanted to do that, to give tomorrow to his family.

“Good.” She tried to smile, then added, almost shyly, “I'm really tired, Michael. Where do you want me to sleep?”

He couldn't sleep with her, not when he'd been so recently with Rachel. Could he ever—would he ever
want
to—sleep with Katy again?

“You stay here.” He got out of the bed, reaching for his robe. “I'll sleep in the guest room.”

The bed in the guest room was not made up, but he didn't care. He lay down on the spread and covered himself with a blanket. It didn't matter where he tried to sleep tonight. Between the confusion in his mind and the turmoil in his heart, he knew he would not be able to sleep at all.

RACHEL AWAKENED WITH A
sense of doom she couldn't place. She stared at the ceiling, trying to determine the reason for the gray shroud hanging over her. Then suddenly, she had it: It was Friday, ground-breaking day for the Hostetter Project. By the end of the day, acres of trees would be felled, the earth around them would be torn and raw, and the vision of Reflection so many held dear would be gone forever. Soon the Amish and Mennonites would be sharing their cemetery with tract houses. A few hundred more cars would snake their way between the buggies and spook the horses. Glossy, glassy office buildings would block the reflection of Michael's church in the pond, and the forest that had been her playground as a child would be flattened and transformed into one hundred houses and four hundred people.

She got out of bed, wincing when her foot hit the floor. Her hip ached where she'd gotten a few of the shots for her trip. Her arm was even stiffer. She dressed quickly, then left a note for Gram.
Running errands
, she wrote. She was certain where she was going but not yet sure what she would do once she got there. She had an idea, though—a bizarre idea that she feared was the product of a hazy, not-quite-awake mind.

It was nearly eight o'clock by the time she reached the center of town, and she could see that a crowd had already formed in the street in front of the pond. Yellow plastic tape had been stretched along the sidewalk, separating the crowd from the Hostetter property. The bulldozers and trucks and backhoes were planted on the grass, lined up next to a slender dirt road someone had cut through the lawn, from street to forest, over the past couple of days. The blunt noses of the vehicles were pointed at the trees, ready to charge.

Rachel pulled her car to the side of the road across the street from the crowd. She could see Celine Humphrey and Becky Frank among the throng. She spotted Lily, sipping from a mug, and Marge eating what looked like a doughnut. Sixty or seventy people, she guessed, and more were arriving by the minute, talking among themselves, pointing toward the woods.

Michaels car cut through the crowd and turned into the narrow driveway next to the Mennonite church on the opposite side of the pond. In another minute he walked out front, joining the other bystanders. Rachel wished she could talk to him. Katy was back, that much she knew. He'd called her to let her know and to tell her he'd planned to spend yesterday with her and Jason. That was good, she'd told herself. He needed to experience fully what he had come so close to giving up.

She lost him in the thickening crowd, and she couldn't see Lily anymore, either. Or Becky. How long should she wait? Her pulse thrummed in her hands where they rested in her lap.

It was eight-thirty when one of the workmen got into a bulldozer and turned the engine over, and that's when Rachel drew in a deep breath and got out of her car. She made her way resolutely through the crowd, aware of the flurry of whispers that followed her progress. Without a moment's hesitation, she stepped over the yellow tape and walked toward the dirt road.

“Hey, lady!” one of the men called out to her. “Ma'am! You can't go there.”

She feigned deafness, only turning around in the road once she'd reached the bulldozer, which looked very large, very menacing, this close up. She glanced at the crush of people in the street. They had fallen utterly silent, and Rachel felt the color in her cheeks. She was making a spectacle of herself.

The crowd began to chatter again, and there was excitement in the sound. She folded her arms across her chest as one of the workmen approached her.

“You've got to move, lady,” he said. “We're ready to start work here.”

“Then you'll have to roll over me to start it,” she said.

“Oh, come on, lady.” He scowled. “We don't have time for the heroics. They're gonna cart you away, you know that? Either jail or the asylum. Come on now, let's go.” He reached out to take hold of her arm.

“Don't touch me.” She jerked away from him, giving him a look that had lawsuit written all over it, and he backed away.

“Hey! Huber!” A male voice hollered from behind the yellow ribbon. She spotted a man in a gray suit standing at the edge of the crowd, making a megaphone with his hands. She didn't recognize him. “You're an outsider, Huber,” he called. “What the hell right do you have to interfere with what's going on here?”

A few people in the crowd cheered him, but others—by far the majority—booed and hissed.

“We're calling the police,” one of the workmen shouted to her. The guy in the bulldozer had turned the engine off and was lighting a cigarette.

She saw movement in the center of the crowd, and in a moment Michael stepped over the yellow tape. Was he coming to talk her out of this? When he reached her, he merely winked at her, took her hand, and stood a short distance away from her. With their arms outstretched, their two-man blockade effectively bisected the road.

“Oh, shit,” said the workman. “Look, you two, we're just here to do our job. I don't know what your problem is with the situation here, but we're getting paid to knock down these trees, and that's what we're going to do. It's legal. It's our right. So get the hell out of our way.”

One of the other workmen added, “The cops have been called.”

Michael leaned over to speak quietly to her. “What do you want to bet this will be the slowest police response in history? They all love this place as much as we do.”

Rachel smiled at him. She hoped he was right.

Michael nodded toward the crowd. “Check it out,” he said.

Rachel looked toward the gathering to see Lily stepping over the yellow tape. Lily set her mug down on the sidewalk and marched along the dirt road until she reached them. She was grinning as she took Michael's hand, leaning forward to talk to Rachel.

“Cool idea, Rache!” she said.

Then someone tore the tape. In an instant, at least half the crowd moved en masse down the hill, and Rachel couldn't help laughing. Each person linked up with them on Michael and Lily's side, as if Rachel's hand might burn them. She stepped farther and farther to her left, until she was right up against one of the backhoes. It was Sarah Holland, the clerk from the bookstore whose face had been scarred in Rachel's classroom, who finally took her hand and gave her a smile.

“Let's make it a triple line,” one of the men said, and people regrouped until a boisterous clot of humanity blocked entrance to the forest, and for the moment anyway, Reflection was safe.

HELEN TURNED ON THE
television to check the weather, a habit she'd gotten into ever since the storm that had changed her life. She realized quickly that some major news story had broken, and she struggled to make sense of the images on the screen. There were dozens of people and a couple of bulldozers. She spotted the Mennonite church and the forest behind it. A protest at Spring Willow Pond, a reporter said. The blockade had been started by Rachel Huber. Once Helen recovered from her shock, she watched the rest of the broadcast with tears in her eyes.

By afternoon, a Harrisburg station had picked up the story. The newscaster spoke about Rachel's past in Reflection. He showed horrible old pictures of the demolished wing of the Spring Willow Elementary School. He showed old high school photos of Rachel and Michael, and Luke. He talked about the nonresistance of a Mennonite, how potentially devastating the Hostetter development had to be for it to move a Mennonite minister to action.

The police had been called hours earlier, a second reporter said from the scene, and were only now beginning to make arrests. It didn't matter. The workmen had already given up for the day. Too late to start, they said.

Helen smiled. Tomorrow was Saturday. Reflection would have a two-day reprieve.

She sat on the sofa, her eyes on the television, her mind on Peter. She gnawed her lip as she watched her granddaughter being led away from the pond by a police officer. Rachel and Michael had taken the risk, Helen thought. They'd put the past aside for the sake of the future. She could do at least as much.

At two o'clock she walked into( the library. She lifted the phone to her ear and dialed the information number for New York City.

“I'd like the number for a Speicer,” she said, sitting down. “Karl Speicer.”

HELEN BREWED A POT
of peppermint tea and drank it slowly, cup after cup, trying to calm her nerves. Hans had said he would rent a car at the Harrisburg airport and arrive at her house sometime between two and three. It was nearly three now.

She'd had to leave a message on an answering machine for him the day before. His voice had surprised her with its strength, had brought tears to her eyes with its familiarity. It was different, yes—forty-three years had made a difference. But even though the speaker didn't identify himself, she had known whose voice she was hearing.

She had first apologized for calling, telling him she wouldn't do it if it were not absolutely necessary. She told him only that he needed to come to Reflection, that it was urgent. She had something for him from Peter. “Please, Hans,” she begged, “you must come.” She hung up, kicking herself for sounding so desperate. What if Winona was the one to pick up the messages from the answering machine?

Hans called back late last night, so late that she feared the phone would awaken Rachel—or that he might not call at all. He didn't sound at all distressed by her call, but rather pleased. Still, she felt edgy talking to him and didn't allow him to draw her into conversation once she had his perplexed commitment to come.

She'd gotten Rachel out of the house, asking her to stay away, to spend the night elsewhere. “I want to get used to being alone while you're still close enough to call,” she'd told her.

Rachel had looked surprised for a minute before responding. Then she smiled, shaking her head. “You're still trying to push Michael and me together, aren't you?” she'd asked.

Helen had shrugged noncommittally. It didn't matter what Rachel thought. She just didn't want her granddaughter around while Hans was here, not until she knew how this situation was going to turn out.

At ten after three she heard a car on the gravel driveway. The muscles in her legs shook as she stood up. She felt as if something were expanding inside her chest and that it was going to explode soon and spill out of her. She walked out onto the porch. It was cool outside, the weather almost autumn-like, and she hugged herself as she watched Hans get out of the white rental car.

He was half the pianist from the Kennedy Center and half the man from her memory. She had forgotten how tall he was. He was slimmer than she remembered, and he was wearing glasses. She walked down the porch steps, and he shut the car door and smiled, walking toward her, holding out his arms. She sank into his embrace as if she were falling and felt the strength in his body. Leaning wordlessly against him, she was finally able to whisper only one thing.

“I was struck by lightning,” she said, and then she began to cry.

She helped him settle into the room that Chris had used. In the past, he had always stayed in Rachel's room with its wonderland of books, but he seemed quite content with the smaller space, and he stared out the window toward the thick greenery of the woods for several minutes before beginning to unpack.

She sat on the bed and watched him with a longing she had never expected to feel again. “Thank you for coming,” she said, over and over, and he replied that he had stayed away far too long.

Once his clothes were hung up and put away, she offered him an early dinner.

“Do you still take walks?” he asked.

“Yes, though not with quite the energy I used to have.”

“Can we go for one before dinner? Is the tree house still there?”

“In part.” She smiled.

They set out on the walk. She told him about her injuries and about Rachel coming to help her. He told her that Winona was in a nursing home.

“Alzheimer's,” he said. “She doesn't know who I am anymore, but I guess we were lucky that she didn't develop it until five or six years ago. So many people get it when they're young.”

“You had a long marriage together.” Helen didn't want to think about how he had filled all those years they had been apart.

They came to the tree house. Hans looked up at the splintered wooden platform and smiled. “We were young,” he said. “How did we ever get up there?”