The Heart's Voice (10 page)

“A regular sheet will do just fine,” she told him, and then had to let him placate CJ while she folded and tucked the thing into place.

CJ went back into the crib and refused to get out until they both pretended to leave the room. Grinning at each other in the hall, they let him howl for a moment before swooping in to scoop him out of the bed once more and carry him off downstairs to the kitchen, where Jem was discovered helping herself to another glass of milk, her second since lunch. Her skill at this endeavor was clearly demonstrated by puddles of milk on the counter, table and the floor in front of the refrigerator. She had not, however, broken any glasses or turned over any chairs in the process. Becca coaxed her into entertaining her brother with a set of plastic measuring cups and other extraneous utensils while dinner was being prepared.

Dan kept a well-stocked larder, and the freezer tucked into a corner of the utility room proved to contain enough meat to feed them for months to come. The chest-type freezer seemed to have held its seal well and adequately preserved its contents, so it was just a matter of determining what could be prepared most quickly. They decided on hamburgers, though the package in Dan’s pantry contained only three buns and he declared himself hun
gry enough to eat a whole cow. In the end he ate one burger with bun and all the fixings, another with white bread and a third patty all on its lonesome, not to mention canned pork and beans and fruit cocktail.

Afterward they loaded the dirty dishes into the automatic washer—such luxury!—and adjourned to the living room for a little television, very little, as it turned out. Jem was asleep before she fully stretched out on the rug in front of the set, and Becca herself was fading fast. Even CJ, who had napped much of the day away, seemed worn out. When Dan shut off the set and stooped to gather up Jem, Becca was only too glad to let him carry the child up the stairs.

What followed was unique in Becca’s experience. Whenever Cody had been home, it had been his habit to take a few moments for himself while Becca prepared Jem and got her into bed. Later, often after Jemmy was already asleep, he would slip into the room and kiss her good-night. He even stood sometimes and watched her slumbering peacefully, a smile of fatherly pride on his face, but it had never occurred to him, apparently, to actually get her ready and tuck her in, and in all honesty it hadn’t occurred to Becca to let him, perhaps because Jem was a girl and because her own father had never taken a hand with his children except in discipline. John Odem provided fine help with the children as a general rule, but even when they were
around at bedtime, he was usually the first one to bed. Whatever the reason, she didn’t expect Dan to help out with bedtime chores, even though they would be sleeping in his house.

It came as a shock when, after producing pj’s and other necessary items from the mound of shopping bags in the foyer, he wrestled CJ into a dry diaper and shirt while she changed Jemmy. Then while she got the baby down, a more time-consuming task than normal, he calmly toted Jemmy into the bathroom and held her up to the sink so she could brush her teeth, which involved much more giggling and spitting than it should have. When Becca was finally able to slip away from CJ, she found Dan sitting on the side of a twin-size maple bed reading a book to Jemmy in such a soft voice that it was almost a whisper. Jem looked up and lifted a finger to her lips, as if to say that it would be rude to ask him to speak louder. Feeling a pang at her heart, Becca stood in the doorway, arms folded, back against the casing, and waited until he was finished. As she tucked Becca beneath the covers, she noticed a small, roughly triangular pink plastic box standing on the shelf above the bed. It was the only feminine thing in the room.

Out in the hallway Dan handed her a corresponding piece that he’d clipped to the back of his belt. “Monitor,” he explained. “In case she gets scared.” He shrugged. “First time sleeping alone, strange place.”

Becca stared at the gizmo in her hand, watching a tiny light flash green as Jemmy coughed in the other room. He’d thought of everything. In the old house she’d heard through the wall every time one of her babies had so much as rolled over in the night, but this place was different—not just larger but more solid. She nodded, a lump in her throat, but when she looked up to thank him, he produced a second receiver, a blue one.

“CJ,” he said succinctly.

She stared at him for a long moment and saw the weariness and concern around his eyes. He needed a shave, but the shadows on his jaws and chin just made the blue of his eyes look brighter and more vivid. She ached to feel his arms around her once more, but too much had happened for that now. She was too dependent on him suddenly, too much of a burden. She had dared to dream of finding love with him, of an equal and mutually beneficial relationship. For a while she had imagined that she could be his ears, his bridge to the hearing world, but this long, traumatic day had shown her he didn’t really need a thing that she could provide. Just the opposite, in fact. He surely didn’t need the trouble she’d brought to his doorstep.

If God had any purpose at all in bringing her into his life, it was to show him how little assistance he really needed. No, she rather feared that the need was all on her end. That, it seemed, was the story of her life, and she was purely tired of it, tired to
the bone. In more ways than one. It must have shown.

“Better grab some gear,” he said suddenly, moving toward his bedroom. “Shift stuff around tomorrow.”

“No need for that,” she told him, but his back was to her, so he couldn’t know. She stood in the doorway of his room, head bowed as he packed up.

Large and spacious, the room was simply furnished with a ridiculously large bed, a single side table and a dresser and chest of drawers that matched each other but nothing else. He pulled things from both and tossed them into a small black kit bag, working quickly, then moved into the well-appointed bath to pick up his personal toiletries. She hated putting him out of his room, but it was only temporary. Tomorrow, she decided wearily, she would figure out what to do. He moved toward her, zipping the bag as he crossed the room.

“I’m sorry about this,” she said, catching his eye, “but it won’t be for long.”

He smiled, stopping in front of her. “It’s okay,” he said, and then he reached around her, the bag swinging lightly against her back as he hugged her briefly. “Sleep well.”

He was at the top of the stairs before she even thought to return his polite good-night, and then he was gone. She stood in the silent house, pink and blue monitors in her hands, and felt the weight of broken dreams around her.

D
an spent Saturday morning salvaging as many of his tools as he could from the wreck of his pickup truck. The toolbox had flown open at some point, but a number of the larger items were still inside. His levels were broken, the blade of a circular saw had been bent beyond redemption, but he had the tools necessary to help John Odem get a tarp over his back porch where the roof had been blown away. Clouds were building in the west when John dropped him back at the house, and he’d barely started on the late lunch Becca had prepared for him when the insurance adjuster arrived, having driven over from Lawton. Becca showed the fellow in, introduced him as Alan Hampton and insisted on fixing him a sandwich, which he accepted with a happy smile and words that Dan didn’t quite catch.

“Can’t very well eat in front of you,” she said, sitting down across the table from Dan.

Hampton was a youngish fellow, affable and self-assured but nondescript physically. After making short work of the sandwich, he took out a long form and an ink pen and began asking questions about the storm, which either Becca or Dan answered. It went fairly smoothly. She was so good at helping him understand all that was being said that Dan doubted the young man even realized he was talking to a deaf person. Hampton would be writing and speaking at the same time, so Dan would totally miss what he was saying. Then Becca would ask something like, “Can you remember your Social Security number off the top of your head?” or “The mailing address here would be the same as the physical address, wouldn’t it?”

Dan would concur or make some relevant correction, and they’d move on to the next question. One time she looked at him and said very deliberately, “You never did tell me the exact date you bought that truck or who you bought it from, either.”

Dan had to grin at that one. “Don’t suppose I did.” He recited the date and place in Oklahoma City where he’d purchased the now wrecked truck, and the insurance adjuster wrote it all down.

When Hampton asked why Dan happened to be out that night, Becca supplied the answer. “It was a mission of mercy, pure and simple.”

Grateful that she hadn’t made more of it than that, Dan added simply, “Sirens can’t be heard out there.”

Hampton nodded his understanding and asked, “Anyone hurt?”

“No,” Becca told him, looking at Dan. “Everyone’s just fine.”

“Can’t mind a wrecked truck too much, then, can we?” he said, and Becca and Dan both agreed that they could not.

The form was filled out pretty quickly after that. Hampton thanked them both and left to go check out the damage, promising to return later with a settlement check. Dan offered to show him the way, but he felt confident that he could find the site on his own, so Dan let it be. He didn’t really care whether or not the fellow knew that he was deaf, but he was coming to the conclusion that he and Becca worked well together. In fact, they seemed to fit pretty much like glove and hand.

“That went fine,” he said to her as soon as they were alone.

“Should’ve,” she answered, getting up to clear the table. “Though why they have to ask some of that stuff is beyond me.”

He nodded in agreement, then softly said, “You didn’t have to run interference for me.”

He knew he’d gotten it wrong or that she’d taken it wrong when she stiffened. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

“No, no,” he protested, but she kept going.

“I didn’t even think. I mean, it was sort of automatic.”

“It’s okay,” he said quickly.

“No, really, you manage just fine on your own.”

“You don’t understand,” he tried to say, but Jemmy skipped into the room then, announcing that CJ was awake from his nap.

“The monitor?” Dan asked, glancing around the room.

“I forgot it,” Becca admitted with a grimace before going to rescue CJ from his crib.

Dan tamped down his impatience. Not only had he gotten the tone all wrong, his timing obviously left much to be desired. Pushing out a long breath, he looked to Jemmy and swirled a finger at the littered table. “Want to help?”

“I’ll get it,” she said, whirling away. Puzzled, he rose and brought his hands to his hips, his gaze skittering around the room. A red light was flashing on the alarm panel. Someone was at the front door. He stepped out into the hall just in time to see Jemmy swerve almost into the wall as she ran toward the foyer. Following, he came upon her talking to two women, one elderly, the other a mere teenager with dark, short hair caught up in all manner of clips and barrettes.

“They come to see you,” Jem announced, looking up into his face. He looked at the two women.

“Are you Mr. Holden?” the girl asked. He nodded, and she went on. “Gram needs your help. The
roof’s plumb off the bathroom, and there’s a leak coming out from under the house. John Odem down to Kinder’s said you was the one to call on account of she hasn’t got insurance, only he said we wasn’t to telephone, you being deaf and all.”

Dan blinked, increasingly aware of the old woman’s hands as she wrung them. Worry emanated from her squat, stooped form.

“It’s gonna rain again,” she said, and something in her face told him who she was.

“Mrs. Schumacher?”

She nodded dumbly. He looked to the girl. “Are you Evelyn’s daughter?”

“Yeah. I’m Jessica.” He knew that Evelyn and her husband had died in a car crash when he was a junior in high school. Mr. Schumacher had been gone many years even then, dead of heart failure, it was said. These two were alone in the world. Dan sighed inwardly. He couldn’t refuse to help.

“Got a car?”

“Yeah, out front.”

“Room for my tools?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Anything to cover the roof?”

“John Odem gave us a tarp.”

He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Go get my toolbox and some rope.” First he took Jemmy by the shoulder, looking down into her face. “Tell your mom where I’ve gone, okay?” Jem nodded. He went to get what tools he could carry.

It was wet, dirty work. He got the tarp in place just minutes after the rain began to pour, so the Schumacher women could use their bathroom, but the interior walls would have to be replaced, and the old house sagged alarmingly at one corner, where water seeped out of a broken pipe. Already drenched to the skin, he found an opening in the crawl space and slithered under the house on his belly. The break was all the way on the other side of the house, naturally, so it took some time to reach it, and about half the way was through mud. The water leak had apparently driven out some sort of critter, an opossum or skunk judging by the “nest” that Dan came across. Unfortunately the same could not be said for the spiders, but he knocked the webs out of his way and kept going.

He found the leak in a joint of pipe. That would be easy enough to fix. The bigger problem was the section of broken foundation beam that had caused the pipe to stress. The creosote-coated twelve-inch-square beam had broken off above ground level, leaving a jagged chunk of wood poking up and two others on the ground beside it. The beam had probably already been rotted, so the force of the storm had made the house sway enough to splinter it. If he could get that corner of the house up, the leak would stop pretty much of its own accord.

After crawling back the way he’d come, he had to hose himself off in the yard, even with rain fall
ing, before he could go to the house and discuss the situation with Mrs. Schumacher. She told him that she had an upright piano sitting in that corner, so Dan took off his boots, dried himself with a towel as much as possible and crept through the crowded, untidy house to shift the furniture and move that piano. Once that Herculean job was accomplished, he borrowed the jack from the trunk of their car, found a few pieces of lumber sturdy enough to serve his purpose and set about temporarily leveling the house. In order to do so, he had to remove some of the siding around the foundation and make himself a special lever with which to work the jack. Even then it took all his body weight to coax the jack into lifting that corner of the house.

The good news was that he didn’t have to crawl the full length of the house to check the leaky pipe again. All he had to do was lie in the mud under the newly exposed corner of the house and convince the flashlight to work in the rain. After drying the joint with some rags supplied by Mrs. Schumacher, he smeared it with plumber’s putty and wrapped the area in duct tape. Weary and filthy, he once more knocked on the Schumacher door and told Jessica that he was ready to be taken home. This being without transportation was getting old fast. He promised to return as soon as the weather cleared to fix the roof, replace the broken foundation beam and put back the siding.

Mrs. Schumacher wept and tried to offer him
money, but he put her off, saying the job wasn’t finished yet, and that he’d have to check the price of certain supplies. Upon seeing the blood drain from her face, he assured her that the job probably wouldn’t cost more than a couple hundred dollars to complete and that she could pay it out a little at a time. He would not, of course, charge her for more than the supplies, and perhaps not even all of those if the cost seemed too much for her, but she didn’t have to know that.

By the time he slogged up the steps to his own front door, he was craving a hot shower and a cold drink. He removed his boots on the porch, then stood dripping in the front foyer for a few moments, wondering how best to keep from creating a huge mess. Finally he decided to ask Becca for a towel. He peeked into the living room and saw that it was empty. So far as he could tell, no light was on in the kitchen. Everyone must be upstairs. He’d have to call out to her. At least he didn’t have to worry about waking the baby. Oddly, he had to think how to go about shouting. It felt so strange, sucking in his breath, putting back his head and forcing the word up out of his throat.

“Bec-ca!”

For a moment he could only wonder if he’d made himself heard, but then she was there at the top of the stairs. She said something, but he couldn’t quite make it out at that distance and figured he could let it go for a minute.

“Towel, please.”

She turned and disappeared into the upstairs hall. Just seconds later she was on her way down to him, a pair of folded towels stacked on her arms. “You look like a drowned rat,” she said, handing over the first one.

“Feel like one, too,” he admitted. Smiling sheepishly, he mopped his face and moved to his chest.

She gave him an arch look, then draped a towel over his head and began rubbing briskly at his hair. Laughing, he let her tend to him. It felt good—unfamiliar but good. Finally she whipped off the towel and stood with it tossed over one arm, her hands at her waist.

“So what were you doing? Jem said two women came for you.”

He nodded. “Mrs. Schumacher and her granddaughter.” He briefly explained while toweling his pants legs. When he straightened again, he found Becca shaking her head.

“You can’t help playing the hero, can you?”

“Huh? Just a temporary fix.”

Becca folded her arms. “Who’s going to do the real work?”

“Me. Can’t afford to hire anyone.”

Becca flapped her arms, and the towel with it. “There. You see. Abby told me you were going to do their work, too.”

He shrugged. “So?”

“So you can’t fix the whole world, Dan. Much as you might like to, you just can’t fix the whole world.” With that she dropped the towel, whirled and stomped quickly up the stairs.

Dan stood there, his mouth agape, as swamped now by confusion as he had been by mud and rain earlier. He couldn’t imagine what was going on with Becca. She was a Christian woman, as generous as she could be. Surely she didn’t expect less from him. It must be the stress of her situation. She hadn’t wanted to go to work today and leave the children, but it seemed to Dan that they were handling their new circumstances better than she was in some ways. He’d just have to be patient with her, he supposed.

With that in mind, he draped the towel he was using around his neck, then moved forward and picked up the other one from the floor before beginning to climb the stairs. He went straight to his bedroom and across it to the bath, but the instant he stepped through the open bathroom door, he realized that Becca was already in the room. Quickly he ducked his head.

“Oops. Sorry.” Before he could even back out the door, however, she had hold of him, her fingers curled around his forearm. He looked up uncertainly.

“It’s for you, silly.”

Frowning, he glanced around the room and saw the water running in the shower. “Oh. Thanks.”

“By the time you gather up some clean clothes, it ought to be hot.”

“Right. Great.”

She shooed at him impatiently. “Go on. Get your things. When you’re done, I’ll wash what you’re wearing.”

Backing out into the bedroom, he said, “I can.” He didn’t want to put her to any trouble.

She rolled her eyes, following him. “Fine.”

He turned toward the dresser, and when he turned back again, she was gone, having pulled the bedroom door closed behind her. She was in a strange mood. Dan scratched an ear, realized that he was itching all over and headed for the shower.

Becca stood at the kitchen sink, her back to the door, and gulped down tears. A maudlin feeling of helplessness enveloped her. She brushed impatiently at her damp cheeks and told herself that she was being an idiot. Of course Dan would go to help the Schumachers, just as he’d help Abby and John Odem and anyone else who needed it. Even her. She knew that she must not make the mistake of thinking that made her special. Dan was a talented, generous, caring man. Why that should make her cry, she didn’t know.

She had plenty to cry about, of course. The storm had taken her home, the one place she could call her own, and she just didn’t know what she was going to do. She didn’t even have as much insur
ance on her house as Dan had on his truck. She’d never be able to rebuild with what she had coming, at least according to what her agent had told Abby, who’d notified the company of Becca’s claim, since Dan didn’t have a telephone. She wouldn’t know for certain until the adjuster came, and she didn’t know when that might be. Maybe God would work a miracle in the meantime. For now, everyone was okay.