The Hope of Refuge (4 page)

Ephraim picked up the lantern. “Now, let’s go.”

His brother’s shoulders drooped as they left the barn. Without another word Simeon headed for the edge of the road to cross it. Ephraim went toward the back pasture.

“Ephraim?”

He paused. “Well, come on. We can’t find the mama dog going that way. I just came from there.”

Simeon wiped his eyes with the back of his hands.

Ephraim pulled the handkerchief out of his pocket. “I brought cake. If we get anywhere near her, I’ll bet she’ll get a whiff of this and come running.”

The noise and busyness of the Port Authority Bus Terminal raked a feeling of déjà vu over Cara. She’d been in the building plenty of times before, but this time she sensed… something odd.

With her diary clutched in one arm and her other hand holding her daughter’s hand, she walked past shops, restaurants, and ticket counters. The strange feeling grew stronger as she stepped on the escalator and began the descent to the subway level.

Suddenly it was her father holding her hand, not Lori. Memories unrolled inside her. A set of escalators taking her and her dad deeper into the belly of the city A brown paper bag, the top of it scrunched like a rope inside her hand. They kept going and going—hundreds, maybe thousands, of people all around her not caring one bit that her mom had died last week. Her father went into a café and set her on a chair.
“Dry your tears, Cara. You’ll be fine. I promise.”

He pulled the map out of his jacket pocket, the one he had drawn for her the night before and had gotten her to help him color. He spread it out on the table.
“See, this is right where you are, New York City’s bus station. A woman is coming for you. Her name is Emma Riehl. The bus will take you and her southwest. You’ll probably change buses in Harrisburg and keep heading west for another hour or so. Right here.”
His huge finger tapped the paper.

She must have said something odd because he gaped at her, and then he ordered a drink. He drank until his words slurred, then he walked her to a bench and demanded she stay put, promising Emma was coming.

And he left.

The terror of watching him walk away faded as the hours passed. Afraid Emma might show up and leave without her if she didn’t stay put, she left the spot where her father had set her only long enough to go to the bathroom when she absolutely had to.

Later she fell asleep, and a man in a uniform woke her. He had a woman beside him, and she hoped it was Emma. But it wasn’t, and they took her to a place where rows of metal bunk beds were half-filled with mean kids who’d never had anybody show up for them either.

Feeling Lori tug at her hand, she looked down into her innocent brown eyes.

“Are we looking for Kendal, Mom?”

She shook her head. Her days of meeting up with her friend were over. Kendal’s complete abandonment earlier today had been along time in coming. They’d been close once, starting when they’d shared the same foster-care home for a while, but over the last few years, Kendal had stolen from, lied to, and argued with her a lot. Since they were all each other had in the way of family, Cara had refused to give up. But—

Lori pointed to a picture. “Are we going somewhere on a bus?”

“Yes.”

“What about Kendal?”

“It’s just the two of us this time.”

“But…”

“Shh.” Cara gently placed one arm around Lori’s shoulders as they continued walking. Memories of Kendal mocked her, and she felt like an idiot for trying to keep them together as long as she had. She’d always figured life with Kendal was as much like family as she’d ever have. One doesn’t get to pick their family or choose who rescues them. But Kendal had done just that. At nineteen years old she’d opened the grubby door to her tiny, shabby apartment and dared to give a fifteen-year-old runaway food and shelter. The gesture had filled Cara with hope. Without her, she had little chance of making it on her own and no chance of escaping Mike’s grip. But it’d been easier back then to ignore Kendal’s weaknesses—men and drugs. It’d always seemed that she and Kendal were like a lot of siblings in a real family—extreme opposites.

Her attention shifted to the diary resting on her arm. Maybe the faded words her mother had written to her more than twenty years ago had kept her from seeking men or drugs to help numb the ache inside her—maybe not. But she’d read the beautiful entries ten thousand times over the years and couldn’t separate herself from the woman her mother hoped she’d become.

A middle-school teacher once said that Cara’s mother’s diary sparked her love of dissecting books for understanding. It probably had, and she was a good student, but then life changed, and books and schooling faded in comparison to survival knowledge. That’s where Kendal came in.

As one thought strung to another, Cara realized somewhere inside her, beyond her fear and jumbled thoughts, it hurt for Kendal to give up the way she had. No last-minute message of encouragement for either her or Lori. No whisper of wanting to meet up once Cara worked free of Mike again. Just a final good-bye. And
after
she’d packed and hailed a taxi.

The numbness gave way to grief, and in some odd way that Cara couldn’t understand, it seemed right to be inside this place—the building where her father had abandoned her.

“Mom,” Lori elongated the word, half whining and half demanding, “I want to know where we’re going.”

Cara thought for a moment. They needed to get out of the city, but their traveling funds were limited. “Jersey, I think. We’re fine and safe, so no worrying, okay?” The words didn’t leave her mouth easily.

She had no real answers. But she knew one thing—any life she could give Lori would be immeasurably better than foster care, where she’d have to live with strangers who were paid to pretend they cared.

It seemed unfair that Cara had spent all her life trying to be good, always aiming to live in a way her dead mother would be proud of, just to fall victim to Mike’s power to find her time and again. Maybe that’s what had made her and Lori an easy target for him.

Regardless of whatever she needed to do—lie, cheat, or steal—no one was separating her from her daughter.

Needing a few moments to think, she moved to an empty table outside Au Bon Pain. She opened her diary and thumbed through it, looking for signs of a life she wasn’t sure ever existed. The frayed leather binding and bulging pages were hints to how much she loved this book. She didn’t write everyday stuff in it. This book was used mostly for sharing things between mom and daughter—first her and her mother and now her and Lori. It made her sick to think of Mike reading her mother’s thoughts and hopes for her, the special things they’d done, and Cara’s most treasured memories with Lori.

Standing in front of him less than an hour ago, she’d envisioned rows of tall corn, heard a boy’s laughter, and remembered feeling welcomed by an old woman in a black apron and white head covering. But her treasured journal revealed none of it. Why?

Lori pulled a baggie of stale cookies from her backpack—the kind that had ingredients dogs shouldn’t eat, but they were tasty enough and were always able to remove the worst of the hunger. With Mike probably watching and waiting outside her apartment—maybe inside it—she and Lori would leave New York with the clothes they were wearing, whatever that schoolbag held, and the diary.

Cara flipped page after page, skimming the entries written by her mother. She’d had this book since she was younger than Lori. With one exception every available spot had been written on. Each line had two rows of writing squeezed in. The margins were filled with tiny words and drawings. Even the insides of the book’s covers were written on. There were places where she’d taped and stapled clean paper onto existing pages before filling them with words too. Only one spot, about three inches high and four inches long, remained blank.

Her mothers instructions written above that space told her never to write in that spot but to remember. A sadness she’d grown to hate moved into her chest as she read her mother’s words.

Don’t write inside the area I’ve marked. When the time is right, my beloved one, I’ll fill in the blank
.

Beloved one
. The phrase twisted her insides as it’d done for what seemed like forever. Had her mother ever loved her like it sounded?

Obviously her mother couldn’t fulfill her plan, and Cara had no recollection of what she might have been talking about. According to the date on the entry, her mother wrote those words when Cara was five. She raised her head and skimmed her index finger over the spot.

Demanding the emotional nonsense to cease, she buried her head in her hands, trying to gain control of her feelings.

Lori smacked her palm on the blank spot of the diary. “What’s that?”

Cara brushed off the specks of cookie that’d fallen from her daughter’s hand onto the page. “An empty place my mother said not to write in.”

“Why?”

Cara shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Can I sign my name there?”

She hesitated for a moment before sliding the book toward Lori. “Sure, why not?”

Lori dug into her book bag and came up with a pencil. She began trying to write in cursive. At seven, Lori’s marks were more swirls than real letters. Cara eyed the few leftover cookies, but she refused to eat one. Money was limited, and Lori might need those before Cara found another job.

The good thing about waitressing was it came with immediate money. She’d have to wait for her paycheck, but she’d make tips the very day she started. Time and again the need for immediate food money after they moved kept her waitressing—that and the fact that being a tenth-grade dropout didn’t qualify her for much. But she was capable of more. She knew that. Her school years had proved it. Got great grades, skipped the third grade, and always landed at the top of her classes. But she’d probably never get a chance to prove she wasn’t who others thought—a poor quitter with no potential.

“Mom, look!”

Cara glanced while closing the baggie of cookies. Her daughter had given up on cursive and made a thick, double-edged L. Then she’d filled the middle part with light sketching. “Very pretty, Lori.”

“No, Mom, look.”

She moved the book closer, seeing that letters had shown up under the shading.

“Oh, that’s from words written on the opposite page.” She slid the book to Lori.

The time is long past, my beloved…
Like a whisper, her mother’s voice floated into her mind from nowhere.

“Wait, Lori. Stop writing.” Cara pulled the book in front of her. Through the light gray coloring of pencil, she saw part of a word. “Let me see your pencil for a minute.”

“No.” Lori jerked the book away from her. “It’s my spot. You said so.”

Cara resisted the desire to overreact. “Okay. You’re right. I gave it to you.” She placed the cookies into the backpack and zipped it up. “If you look at the date on that entry, you can see that I was a couple of years younger than you are now when your grandma wrote that.” She pointed to the words her mother had written above the blank space. “Maybe it’s nothing. Or maybe your grandma hid a secret in the diary. But… if you’d rather write your name…”

Lori pulled the book closer, inspecting the blank space. “You think she wanted to tell me something?”

“No, kiddo. How could she? She didn’t know you. But we should still figure out what she wrote.”

Lori’s brows furrowed. “Let’s do it together.”

Cara nodded. “Good idea. We need to run the pencil over the whole area very, very lightly or we might scratch out the message rather than make it visible.”

Lori passed her the pencil. “I already went first. It’s your turn.”

Relieved, Cara took the pencil and began lightly rubbing the lead over the page. Words that had been there since before her mother died suddenly appeared on the page. It looked like an address. The street numbers were hidden under the heavy-handedness of her daughter’s artwork, but the road, town, and state were clear.

Mast Road, Dry Lake, Pennsylvania

“What’s it say, Mom?”

Hope trickled in, and tears stung her eyes. Lori had no one but her, a single mom who’d been an orphan. She had no support system. She wanted… no, she ached to give Lori some sort of life connections, a relative or friend of Cara’s mother, something that spoke of the things life was supposed to be made of—worthy relationships. Maybe this was the answer. It had to be better than Jersey. “It says where we’re going.”

“Where’s that?”

Cara closed the book. “As close to Dry Lake, Pennsylvania, as a bus route goes.” She put the backpack over one shoulder and held her hand out for Lori. “You discovered a secret I didn’t know was there. Come on. We’ve got bus tickets to buy.”

In a blur of confusion and fears, Cara bought tickets to Shippensburg, Pennsylvania. The man at the ticket counter said they were heading for the heart of Amish country. When she shrugged, he told her they were easy to spot—wore clothing that looked like something from the eighteen hundreds and traveled by horse and buggy.

With the tickets in hand, they boarded one bus, rode for hours, had a long delay at another station, and then boarded another bus. Now it was night again. Between purchasing bus tickets and food, she had little money left. The uncertainty scared her, and it stole all sense of victory for getting free of Mike and discovering the long-held secret in her diary.