A Love Like Ours (15 page)

“Your mother will be right back.” The voice had come from the living room. “She went to go get more scrapbooking supplies.”

Jake set the sacks in the kitchen, then followed Lyndie into a living room that ended in a bank of windows overlooking more trees.

“Hey, Grandpa.”

“Hello.” Lyndie’s grandpa sat in one of two recliners that directly faced the TV. He tilted his head up to look at them, his attention immediately focusing on Jake.

“I’d like you to meet Jake Porter. Jake, this is Harold James, my grandfather.”

“Nice to meet you, sir.”

“You’re the horse trainer?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Mike and I follow your racehorses—in other words, your Thoroughbreds. They’ve done very well.” Harold wore a yellow golf shirt and high-waisted pants. He had a head full of pale gray hair and a stare so intense his eyes squinted. “You’ve got a pretty good scar over there.” He tapped a bony finger against his own cheek.

“Grandpa,” Lyndie scolded.

“I think,” Harold said to Lyndie, “he’s noticed his scar.”

Jake could still remember the despair in his gut the first time they’d let him see himself after the initial surgery to stitch together
his cheek. He’d looked into the mirror and tried to make himself believe that the man with the angry, jagged scar was him.

“Jake served with the Marines in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Lyndie said.

“You were a Marine, eh?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So was I. Korea. Once a Marine . . .” He waited for Jake to complete the saying, his brows lifted.

“Always a Marine,” Jake finished.

“Good man.” Harold faced the TV as an episode of
The Big Break
returned from commercial. Jake and Lyndie moved off.

“Iwo Jima!” Harold barked.

Lyndie paused. “What was that, Grandpa?”

“Iwo Jima. The Marines. Do you know what I mean?”

She shot Jake a pleading look.

“Yes.” Jake raised his voice so Harold could hear. “The Marines were at Iwo Jima.”

“Iwo Jima?” she asked under her breath.

“World War Two battle against the Japanese.”

“He’s always asking me if I know what he means. I almost never do.”

They both washed their hands with soap that smelled like a pine tree before continuing down the home’s central hallway to a yellow-painted bedroom.

“Hi, Eve,” Lyndie said.

“Good to see you, sweetie.” A heavyset African-American woman rose from the pink chair next to the bed. “I’ll take my break and give ya’ll some privacy.”

“Thanks. Jake, this is Eve, Mollie’s day nurse.”

He nodded at the woman. In response, she smiled at him as she passed from the room.

Lyndie went to the small figure lying in the bed. “How’s your day been, Mols? You look good.” She sat on the edge of the mattress and smoothed back a section of Mollie’s hair.

Jake hesitated two steps inside the room, feeling like he didn’t
belong. He was only good with horses. He wasn’t good with people who spoke back, much less those who couldn’t.

Lyndie pulled gently on the sleeve of his brown sweater until she’d brought him to stand beside where she sat. She kept a light hold on his wrist; it held him prisoner more surely than iron could have. Her touch made him aware of just how long he’d been alone. It made him feel the weight of just how much he wanted her.

“I brought someone with me today,” she told Mollie. “This is Jake Porter.”

Thank God Mollie was blind and couldn’t see him the way that Harold had. His face would have terrified her.

The woman on the bed wore a green T-shirt that said
Home Is Where the Heart Is
. Her thin arms folded across her chest. A blanket covered the rest of her. Mollie looked a lot like Lyndie and at the same time completely unlike her. She had wavy, dark blond hair pulled back into a short ponytail and facial features similar to Lyndie’s. But Mollie’s body contained none of the purpose and vitality that was so much a part of Lyndie. Her face was slack, her mouth half-open. Her wide and staring gaze aimed downward and to the side.

“We knew Jake a long time ago”—Lyndie gave his wrist a squeeze—“when we were kids. He’s a trainer, which means he teaches horses to be great runners.” Her words fell off, and he knew she wanted him to say something.

“Hi, Mollie.”

Lyndie gave him a glance full of gratitude, as if he hadn’t just fallen ridiculously short. Honestly, he couldn’t handle her thankfulness when he was so rotten at this. He was a fake. A man afraid of a person who was as gentle as any person could be.

He didn’t want to stay. This small, airless room left him nowhere to hide.

Lyndie released him and started telling Mollie about their day and the horses he had in training. Jake strode to the room’s window, staring hard at the bird that took to the air at his approach.

He’d seen vicious things during war. Bloated bodies in the street.
Innocent civilians shot. Children killed. His own men torn apart and dying. Why, then, did it trouble him to see Mollie? She was harmless—

Except she wasn’t.

She was the opposite of harmless because she made him feel. She put him in touch with his own sorrow. And his sorrow was a scary thing, black and deep.

Lyndie’s voice stilled. Then, “Do you want to take a seat, Jake?”

She indicated a wooden chair next to a dresser topped with a TV. He lowered into the chair, propping an elbow against the dresser’s side and bending the fingers of that arm into his hair.

“When I come over I usually read to Mollie out of her devotional.” Two books waited on the low shelves next to the bed. One had a castle on the front. Lyndie picked up the other. “Would that be okay with you?”

He nodded.

She read a few verses from the Bible, then some application about finding peace in this difficult world. He watched her with burning eyes, watched her as if his breath would stop if he didn’t.

“You’ve shut God out,”
Lyndie had said to him last night,
“but I think He wanted to
show you that He hasn’t shut you out.”
The stories his parents had told him about God when he’d been a kid seemed like naïve fairy tales to him now. A God who could listen to everyone’s prayers at once? Who lived in a place in the sky called heaven behind pearly gates? Angels? A baby born out of a virgin? Really? A God who cared about and protected those who trusted Him?

If so, where had that God been back when Jake had trusted Him? When Jake’s men had been killed? Where had He been when soldiers and civilians were dying in Iraq and Afghanistan? Why would He have given Mollie the body she’d been given?

It wasn’t that Jake had shut God out like Lyndie thought. That implied that he’d shut out someone he believed in. It was more that he didn’t believe in God anymore. Foolishly optimistic or
weak or imaginative people clung to the idea of God so they’d have something to hope in.

The sounds of doors closing and voices drifted to him from the front of the house. Moments later, Lyndie’s mom, Karen, hurried into the room wearing a brightly colored sweatsuit and pink glasses. She spotted him at once, a grin filling her face. “Jake!”

No sooner had he risen to his feet than she wrapped her arms around him.

He stood inside her embrace, stiff with shock over the fact that she was hugging him. She’d seemed tall to him when he was a kid, but she was so short that she hardly reached his shoulder. When she stepped back, she kept a hold of his upper arms. “It’s good to see you again.”

“Thank you.”

She finally released him and went to give forehead kisses to each of her daughters.

“Now that you’re here,” Lyndie said to Karen, “I’m going to go unpack groceries and put in more time with Grandpa.”

“Sure.”

Lyndie met his gaze before abandoning him to her mother and sister.

He returned to his seat, and Karen pulled the pink chair a few feet closer to him. She settled into it and took one of Mollie’s hands in hers. “It’s been a long time, Jake. Too long. You were a child the last time I saw you.”

Looking at her now, he could remember things he’d forgotten. The other parents in Holley had insisted on being called
ma’am
or
sir
, but she’d asked all the kids to call her Karen. She’d fixed him tuna fish sandwiches with the crusts cut off, sliced into triangles. Her prettiness had made him shy.

“I’m glad for the chance to tell you, Jake, how much we appreciate you giving Lyndie a job. She loves exercising your horses, as you probably know.”

He dipped his chin.

“She’s been telling me about Silver Leaf. Mike and I are planning
to drive out to Lone Star for his first race. Do you think he has a chance of success?”

“I make it a habit not to predict what my horses will do. Whenever I think I know, they do the opposite.”

“That’s how life is, isn’t it? Full of surprises good and bad.” She played with Mollie’s fingers.

“Do you mind me asking what that machine does?” Jake pointed to a black electronic box with two red number readings on its front. It rested on the shelves that also held the books, paper towels, and some medical supplies.

“Not a bit. That’s an oximeter. It measures Mollie’s oxygen and her pulse.”

“If there’s a problem, it alerts you?”

“It does. Though, between Eve, Lyndie, Mike, and me, we usually know if Mollie’s having issues before the machine does. We’re pretty in tune with her after all these years.”

Birdsong and the sound of Mollie’s soft breathing filled the space. He watched Mollie, saw her open and close her mouth slightly.

“She’s very peaceful unless she’s in pain,” Karen said.

Mollie, in pain. Just the thought caused Jake’s heart to take on weight, like a hundred-pound rock gathering mass. In what kind of screwed-up world should a person who’d done nothing wrong be forced to suffer pain? “I can’t remember if anyone ever told me what caused Mollie’s cerebral palsy. Was there a cause?” As he transferred his concentration from Mollie to Karen, he realized he’d probably just offended Karen with his question.

“I like it when people ask me about Mollie. Every single time they do, God gives me a ministry opportunity through her.” Looking completely un-offended, she bent to unlace her tennis shoes.

A ministry opportunity? He’d just had to listen to a devotional reading. He had no interest in being the focus of Karen’s ministry opportunity. The flight instinct he’d been battling ever since he’d entered Mollie’s room intensified.

He forced himself to remain in his chair. It could be that he’d
made too much of a habit of avoiding people and situations and reminders that upset him. He’d stay for a few more minutes so that he could find out what had happened to Mollie. Lyndie’s life had been wound together with Mollie’s for as long as he could remember. What affected Mollie affected Lyndie and every other member of the James family.

Karen folded her knees to the side and tucked her feet onto the pink chair. “When I was expecting Mollie, we were living at our old house in Holley. Do you remember it?”

“Yes.”

“Lyndie was three at the time, and the biggest worry I had in life was what color I was going to paint the nursery.” She shook her head, as if she hardly knew her old self. “And then I went into labor. There were complications. They couldn’t get Mollie free of the birth canal, so my obstetrician used forceps. In doing so, he ended up fracturing Mollie’s skull in three places.”

The muscles along Jake’s jawline flexed and hardened.

Karen threaded her fingers through Mollie’s. “We went into the hospital thinking we’d be coming home with a healthy little newborn, and instead our whole lives were turned upside-down in a day.”

He understood. His own life had been changed forever in one fast twist of time. “Would she have been completely healthy if the doctor hadn’t fractured her skull?”

“The medical tests showed that she would have had some issues. But nothing nearly as severe as this.”

“I see.”

“The first few years after Mollie’s birth were miserable for me. I was furious at God. We sued the obstetrician, so I had to deal with a trial on top of everything else. I struggled with depression.” Uncensored honesty shone from her brown eyes, eyes that reminded him of Lyndie. “Mollie was in the hospital six to eight times every year. She needed major surgeries, a body cast. Our financial situation almost dragged us under. Mike and I nearly divorced. Our reality wasn’t what I’d wanted”—emotion began
to clog her voice—“for Lyndie or me or Mike or Mollie.” Tears glittered on her eyelashes.

Why had he asked her about this? “I—”

“Don’t worry, it’s just in my nature to be sentimental.” She gave a quiet chuckle and dashed a finger under her eyes. “I really am glad for the chance to talk to you about this.”

He struggled to imagine how hard life had been for Karen and Mike, but his brain reeled even more at the thought of Lyndie. She’d been very young back then, and caught in the middle of a storm.

“Things were awful,” Karen said. “And then your mom, your sweet mom, whom you know I love dearly?”

“Yes.”

“She made me go to Bible study with her. For weeks I hated it. It didn’t matter. She came every Thursday morning and drove me to that Bible study. The study ended with a worship concert in Dallas that your mom and I went to together. As soon as the music started that night, I began to cry. I cried all the way through it.”

He didn’t understand the joy in her expression. “That was a good thing?”

“For me, yes. Those tears marked the beginning of my renewed trust in God. My whole life was no longer consumed with what might have been.”

That hit dangerously close to where he lived.
What might have been
.

“Instead,” she continued, “I began working through my anger and grief. I moved forward with what was. We went on the wait list for this wonderful thing called the Medically Dependent Children’s Program. For the five years until that came through, I was Mollie’s main nurse. She and I slept together every night. Didn’t we, Mols?” She smiled at Mollie. “Do you remember?”

Mollie arched her face toward her mother’s voice.

“Once MDCP came to the rescue,” Karen told him, “I started taking classes for a degree in counseling. It was like therapy for me, to work with people.” Karen lifted Mollie’s hand and kissed
it. “God is good.” She looked right into his eyes. “‘His love endures forever.’ Second Chronicles 7:3. Do you know that one?”