Sam ignores my last comment, glancing at Jean once again.
“I’ll call Shane and let him know you’re coming,” she tells him. I wait for Sam to tell her to leap off a cliff, he can do it himself.
Instead, he nods tersely and says, “Thanks.”
Now I know he’s lost too much blood.
Chapter 30
Sam
Shane waits outside as we pull up, like a concerned uncle. I glance at Niahm as she carefully maneuvers the truck into the driveway. She wouldn’t even let me drive. I’d be amused if I weren’t so worried about how we’re going to explain my suddenly healed arm to her. It had taken my knife and some pain to reopen the wound in Niahm’s bathroom before she took a look at it. I wanted to make sure it would stay for her inspection, but had cut too deep as she declared it necessary for stitches.
We walk into the house, Niahm watching me with worry etched across her forehead. I put my “good” arm around her and give her a reassuring squeeze. In the kitchen, I sit in the chair, and she sits directly next to me.
“Niahm,” Shane says, professionally unwrapping his suturing kits to Niahm’s widened eyes. “Would you do me a favor?”
“Sure,” she answers immediately.
“In the hallway closet there is a small bin. Can you get that for me?”
“Okay,” she answers readily, and I wince at the deception required to pull this off. She gives my shoulder a squeeze as she passes me then does as asked.
Without speech necessary, as soon as she is gone, I quickly pull my shirt off, and Shane uses a sterile scalpel on the now light pink line to recreate the wound. I grit my teeth against the pain, and he grunts in apology. His slice is much neater than mine, and not quite as deep. By the time she returns, the scalpel has disappeared into one of the pockets of his suture kit, and he’s examining my arm.
“Thanks, sweetie.” I raise my brows at his overly uncle-ish endearment, which he ignores. “Can you fill it with warm water from the sink? And put some of this soap in it.” He hands her the bottle of sterile soap. She fills it, hands it to him, and returns to sit next to me.
“You’re bleeding again,” she notes, looking slightly pale.
“His shirt was a little stuck,” Shane says. “Reopened it a little.” He dips a sterile piece of gauze into the water, and cleans the wound quickly. He has to work quickly—otherwise he will soon be suturing nothing but my healed arm. She watches him, and I decide I need to pull her attention away from scrutinizing what I know will soon be happening.
“So, what’s wrong with calling him Hercules?” I ask. Her eyes turn to me.
“It’s a silly name for such an unusual, magnificent horse.”
“You named the Irish Hercules?” Shane questions.
“Niahm did,” I say.
“No, I didn’t,” she refutes. “I was just calling him that as sort of a nickname since he doesn’t have one yet.”
“Hercules was a magnificent man,” I say, wincing as Shane stabs the needle into my arm. Niahm’s eyes fly to my arm, and I regret reacting. “What else should I call him?” I ask, pulling her attention back to me. “Trigger? Mr. Ed?”
She grimaces. “Why on earth would you call a horse Mr. Ed?” Shane stabs extra hard for my blunder and I’m hard pressed to keep from wincing again. I sometimes forget that though a few decades mean little to me, Niahm has only been alive for a few years. Of course she would have no idea who Mr. Ed is.
“He was a talking horse on TV in the ’60’s,” I say.
“You kind of like old movies and stuff, huh?” she says, and Shane coughs over his choked back laugh.
“I didn’t say I liked it, I was just telling you who Mr. Ed is.”
“Well, I doubt your horse is going to talk, so, no, I don’t think you should call him that either.” She starts to lean around me, to watch what Shane is doing. In desperation, I lean forward and plant a quick kiss on her lips. Her face reddens as she glances quickly at Shane, who is suddenly intent on his work. She looks back at me, then away, and I’m sorry for the action.
“Sorry,” I whisper, “I couldn’t help myself.” She looks at me and I grin, reaching up to lightly caress her jaw. Her eyes widen a little, reminding me that she is not used to such overt displays of affection. But it’s done the trick, diverting her attention from Shane suturing my wound.
“Done,” Shane pronounces, pressing a gauze pad over his handiwork, and as Niahm had done, wrapping a longer piece of gauze around my arm. Niahm looks over, disappointed that he’s already covered it.
“How many stitches?” she questions.
“Oh, uh... six.” I roll my eyes at Shane’s poor attempt at lying.
“Huh,” Niahm answers. “Where did you learn to do that?”
“I used to work as a paramedic,” Shane says, a story he’s told many times. It’s the truth; that is one of the jobs he has done. He can’t tell her that he’s also been through medical school—once in the 1700’s in Europe, and again in the early 1900’s in America.
“Why don’t you anymore?”
He glances at her, and gives her his prepared answer. “A really bad accident, where I was unable to save a family. It shook me up so much I couldn’t work effectively after that. So I decided to do something different.”
“Oh.” Niahm’s small voice is laced with sorrow.
“Now that there’s no danger of me bleeding to death,” I say before she can question him further, “can I drive you home?”
She looks to Shane. “Do you think he should be driving?”
“He didn’t lose much blood.” She glances at the small pile of bloody bandages, and Shane smiles. “I know it seems like a lot, but it really isn’t much. His reactions are all normal, his eyes are fine, his coloring is good... ”
Niahm looks at me skeptically at that last. Granted, it would be a little hard to tell if I had lost any color with my naturally pale skin, the result of being a redhead.
“See, I’m fine,” I say. “You, however, look a little pale.”
She shakes her head. “No, I’m good. Let’s go, then.”
We walk out to the truck, and when we climb in, I’m pleased to notice that Niahm sits a little more to the center of the bench seat. I reach out and take her hand in mine, giving her a little tug. She smiles and scoots closer, and I close my mind to hers.
We pull around the backside of the barn, and see that the Irish is no longer in the paddock. We go into the barn and find him back in his stall, rubbed down, all the equipment stowed in the tack room. We both lift our brows and look at one another, well aware of who did this.
Niahm steps up to the half-door and shakes a finger at him.
“Bad, bad horse, to hurt Sam like that,” she admonishes in a tone that sounds more like she’s praising him. I walk over to the stall, and the stallion comes over to me—a first. Niahm slips an apple into my hand, which I then give the horse. He blows out a light whinny, as if in apology.
“See, I knew he was sorry,” she says, as if I’d been angry with him. How could I? He was only doing what was natural and instinctive to him.
“Is that right?” I say to the horse. “Are you sorry you threw me, Hercules?”
Niahm grunts, but the Irish tosses his head up once.
“Maybe I should name him Mr. Ed,” I say to her with a laugh. He backs away a couple of steps, and I laugh. “Maybe not.”
Niahm elbows me lightly in the arm, then horror crosses her face.
“Oh, I’m so sorry!”
I look at my arm, and remember this is my “wounded” arm—which is now completely healed beneath Shane’s faux sutures and bandage.
“It doesn’t hurt, Niahm.” That much is true. She still looks worried. “I promise... it doesn’t hurt.”
“You don’t have to be brave,” she says.
“I’m not. It genuinely doesn’t hurt.”
“I’m sorry, Sam, for not holding on to him tight enough. I let him go and he threw you.”
I shake my head at her
skewed thoughts.
“You had no choice, Niahm. If you’d tried to hold on, you could have been seriously injured.” I don’t tell her that I threw myself as much as the horse threw me—I knew if I removed my weight, he would calm somewhat and stop his pawing which would be devastating to a mortal caught beneath. “I couldn’t stand that, if you’d been hurt.”
“Do you think I like you being hurt?” she questions.
I put my “injured” arm around her and pull her close.
“I’m not hurt. See?”
She’s a little off balance at being so close, so I take advantage and kiss her. She melts against me, arms tight around my middle, returning the kiss with enthusiasm. Her innocence moves me. In the back of my mind, I wonder how I’m going to explain the lack of a healing wound and subsequent scar—bad enough to require stitches—to her.
Chapter 31
Niahm
Snow falls for the first time today. I love the first snow of the season. This year, it feels wrong. I can’t run outside and play in the falling flakes with Bob. I can’t call Stacy to go for a ride on the ATV’s along the snowy paths. I can’t take Sheila out for a run in the chill.
Because I can’t call my parents and tell them about it.
A sob catches in my chest, and I swallow it. I can feel Jean behind me, typing furiously on her laptop, look up at me. Her stare is like a weight on my back.
I can go out and get the tarp secured over the chicken run. I can make sure the heaters are working in the coop and stalls. I can use the relative privacy of the barn to fall apart.
When I’ve finished crying, and completed the chores I set for myself, I return to the house. Jean is no longer in the kitchen, her laptop gone with her. I consider starting dinner, but I don’t really feel up to it. I climb the stairs... and see the light on in my parents’ bedroom. Fury flows through me as I hurry down the hall.
I shove the door open, and see Jean sitting on the floor, surrounded by papers, crying silently. I’m checked in my anger at the genuine grief creasing her face. Before I can retreat, she looks up and sees me. She lifts a few of the papers toward me.
“What... ” I have to stop and clear my throat. “What are you doing in here?”
She takes a breath, controlling her emotions. Finally, she’s able to speak.
“I think you should see these, Niahm.”
With trepidation, I force my feet to move. When I reach her, I take the paper she hands me. The sight of my mom’s handwriting drives me to my knees.
“What is this?” I gasp.
“She suspected I was still alive.”
Her words turn my attention back to the papers.
Dear Mom (wherever you are),
I wish you would come home. Dad tries, but he just doesn’t know how to answer my questions—the ones I ask, anyway. Some of them, I refuse to ask him. He’s my father. I need you, Mom. I don’t know why you left—was it me? Did I do something wrong? I promise to be good, to do anything you ask if you’ll just come home.
I love you,
Beth
I look up at Jean, angry once again on behalf of my own mom as a young girl, desperately wishing for her mother. Her words could almost be mine.
“How could you leave your own daughter like that? How could you... stay away?”
“I haven’t seen these before today.”
“What? I thought you told me she’d written to you.”
“She did,” she confirms. “But not these letters—different ones. She was writing for all intents and purposes to a complete stranger. However, I suspected, from some of the things she’d written, that she thought it might be me she was writing to.”
“Where did you find these, then?”
She smiles apologetically. “I broke into her files on her computer. She made reference to them, said she’d hidden them in the floor in her closet.”
I glance past her and see where she’s lifted the carpeting and a square of wood from the floor of their closet. And suddenly, a memory assaults me.
I’m a little girl. I walked into my mom’s room, and saw her sitting in her closet.
“What are you doing, mommy?”
She turned guiltily, and I could see the hole in the floor.
“Mommy, there’s a hole in your closet. Is the floor broked?”
“Broken,” she corrected automatically, backing out and closing the closet door. “No, sweetness, it’s not broken. Let’s go make some cookies, hmm?”
Later, I snuck into her closet to see the hole, but it was gone. The carpet was in place and there was no evidence of it having ever been there.
I rise to my knees, push past Jean and look down into the hole. It’s empty. The smells in the closet overpower my senses—my parent’s scents. Why haven’t I thought to come in here before, to smell them? I breathe deeply, hungrily, controlling my emotions before I back out.
“Everything is here,” she says, indicating the mess around her. I sink back down, suddenly exhausted.
“Fine. Tell me,” I say belligerently.
“The letters she left in the tree—they were more like journal entries in the beginning. I didn’t plan to write back, but I looked forward to those letters, to know what was happening in her life. It wasn’t safe for me to be there, I was always in disguise. Sometimes months would pass between visits, and I would find several letters.”
She leans back against the closet door, pulling some of the papers against her chest.
“Then one day, I wrote back. A simple note, telling her I had found her notes and was intrigued by them. I gave her no indication it was me.”
“Then what makes you think she believed you were alive?” I demand. “I mean, that one letter could have been written right after you left, while she was still in shock from your... death.”
Jean shakes her head, as if the answer should be obvious.
“That was only the first.” She points to a semi-neat stack of papers to her left. “Those are all similar letters. Only, as time passed, she became more and more angry at me.”
I picked up the stack, flipped through them, overwhelmed at the pages of her handwriting. About halfway through, they became typed pages, and then printed pages. They weren’t her handwriting, but in my hands I held my mom’s words.
“You can read them all, if you’d like,” she says. “But I think this is the one you should read now. This is the last one she wrote.”
I take the paper she hands me, shaking at the thought that I hold the last thing my mom had created. I glance down at the date, and see that it’s the day they left. I recall now her going back into the house after we had everything loaded in the car, claiming she had one last thing she needed to take care of. Was this it?
Dear Mom (wherever you are),
I glance up, shuffle through a few of the other papers, and see that she started them all the same.
You wouldn’t believe how mad Niahm is at us right now. She’s so angry that we are leaving her once again. I wish I could tell her, could explain to her this insatiable need to travel the world, hoping that just once I might run into you. Whether in the Sahara Desert, or the jungles of Africa, I don’t care. I’m not even sure how I’d react if I did—would I hug you, joyous to see you again? Or would I punch you square in the nose, tell you how rotten you are for leaving me? Leaving me... just as I leave Niahm. The difference is I will always come home to her.
I take a deep breath at the words, pain lancing through my whole being at the realization that she wouldn’t always come home to me. Not anymore.
I have one last letter to leave in the tree. I think it’s you I’ve been writing to all these years. Even if it’s not, I’ve always pretended that it’s so. It keeps me sane. Keeps that hatred I harbor for your actions at bay, the thought that you are still there for me. Why did you go? After this, I will no longer leave the letters. Even if it is you, it’s far past time for me to move on.
I suppose this shall be our last excursion. Jonas and I h
ave lived more adventure than most people do in their lifetimes. But it’s time to be home, to do this for Niahm, rather than the constant searching that I do for me. I haven’t spoken to Jonas about this yet. He doesn’t know the reason behind my insistence on our travels. He loves me—he would do anything for me. I have used that to my own selfish ends. This will be the last time I indulge myself.
So, if you find the letter I will leave, I will hope that you honor my request to the best of your ability, to take care of Niahm. My Niahm has always had a sort of sixth sense about things, and she is worried about our leaving. I can feel her intense concern. That’s the reason for the content of the letter, and the reason for, God willing, my safe return to Goshen to live the rest of my days in peace.
Beth
I clutch the letter, breathing heavily. She knew? I had no idea she could feel my concern. If she knew, if she believed it, why did she go? She couldn’t give up this one last trip? It was only one, how much of a difference could that have made?
“Niahm?”
I look up at my name, see the worried look on Jean’s face. I know I’m on the verge of losing it, but manage to pull my emotions back down to a manageable level, regaining control.
“Do you have it?” I ask.
She hands me another letter, this time in an envelope. Of course she would know what I was asking for, having read this herself. I just hold it, unable to take my eyes from the last thing my mom touched, at least that I have access to.
“I’ll leave you alone,” Jean says. “If you need me—” she breaks off, and changes course. “If you need anything, I’ll be in the kitchen.”
She leaves me there, among a side of my mom’s life that feels like an opened secret—or maybe more like her own Pandora’s Box left behind to destroy any sense of peace I might have.