Hearts Unfold (18 page)

With a laugh
that brought a dimple to one cheek, she nodded.
 
“I really do need a shower.”

“And I guess I'd
better see if Martha Jean’s has some shoes that will fit you.”
 
The only ladies’ clothing shop in town, the
boutique was run by the very enterprising Miss Martha Jean Clark.
 
“What size do you need?”

“Eight, but I'm
sure I'll find mine when the snow melts.”
 
She couldn't imagine Jack picking out shoes for her.

“Well, you sure
can't wear those things to church tomorrow night.”
 
He pointed to her feet, still clad in Stani's
ruined boots.

“Oh, dear.
 
I never thought of that.
 
I don't have anything with me that I could
wear to church.
 
I only brought jeans and
sweaters, and most of those are dirty now.
 
I'll have to stay home, but thanks for inviting me.”

“I wasn't
inviting.
 
Your father would never allow
you to miss a Christmas Eve service.
 
If
he sent you up here, he surely expected you to go to church.
 
I'll just have Martha Jean get something
together for you.
 
What size dress?”

She knew when
she'd been overruled.
 
“Martha Jean will
know, and you'd better tell her 'from the skin out'.”

Jack
grinned.
 
“Got it.
 
Now let me see if I can find a pipe wrench.”

Emily slept
that night on a pallet of clean linens.
 
She had repeated dreams of snow, falling and blowing, and finally
gleaming in the sunlight.
 
But there was
no fear in her dreams.
 
She woke sometime
during the night to stare at the moonlight streaming through the window.
 
The angel on the mantel glowed in the soft
light, and she thought sleepily that it was smiling down at her.
 
She had always believed in miracles, and now
she believed she had lived through one.
 
She looked forward to being in church late on Christmas Eve, to singing
hymns about angels and shepherds, and to giving thanks for prayers answered and
a miraculous homecoming.

Chapter Twelve

That night the
two of them waited at the hospital in Manhattan for Stani's arrival.
 
They said little to each other, blessedly
occupied filling out various forms and arranging for the private suite Stani
would stay in while he recovered.
 
When
the ambulance arrived at well past midnight and the stretcher was rolled in,
they rushed to meet him, concerned smiles glued to their faces.
 
Not until that first sight of him, only his
face visible beneath the bandages, his motionless body completely swathed in
layers of white blankets, did they grasp the gravity of the situation.
 
His face was pale and bruised.
 
His eyelids, almost translucent, never
fluttered.
 
There was no indication that
he knew they were there.
 
Milo was
reluctant to touch him, but Jana sought under the blankets and found his hand.

Once Stani had
been taken into a treatment room, where the doctors and nurses began to work
over him, stripping away the blankets and hanging the IV fluid bag and the sack
of dark red blood above him, they were allowed to come to his side for few
minutes.
 
He seemed so small, Jana
thought, as if he had been deflated.
 
His
breathing seemed normal, but other than the rise and fall of his chest, he was
absolutely still.
 
A doctor talked to
Milo, explaining that Stani was heavily sedated, but not in a coma.
 
Although his head injury was serious, it did
not appear life-threatening.
 
As soon as
the surgical team was assembled, they would operate to repair his shoulder.

Escorted back
to the corridor by a sympathetic young nurse, they discovered the Virginia
State Trooper, who had accompanied the ambulance, waiting for them.
 
In his hands were Stani’s blood-stained
overcoat and a bag containing some of Stani's clothes and his wallet.
 
He talked with them briefly about the
accident, and Jana asked how Stani had been found.

Though the
details were still sketchy, he explained, it seemed that Stani must have walked
a good distance from the car.
 
Yesterday
at around one in the afternoon, six hours after the car had been discovered, he
was spotted by a local resident.
 
He had
been taken into a farmhouse and there he had spent the next eighteen
hours.
 
The power had been knocked out by
the storm, and there was no telephone in the house.
 
Earlier today, the county sheriff, a personal
friend of this resident, had come by to check on things and discovered Stani
there.
 
The ER physician had credited
Stani's condition at the time he finally reached the hospital to the quick
thinking of the woman who had found him.

“A woman?”
 
Milo pictured a strong country woman, with
weathered face and rough hands, carrying Stani in out of the storm.

“I can get her
name for you if you'd like to get in touch with her.”

“Please.
 
That's an amazing story.”
 
Milo's voice trailed off as the doors opened
and Stani was wheeled past them, now prepared for surgery.
 
The officer looked after him, shaking his
head.

“It’s really a
miracle that he walked away.
 
The officer
at the scene said he must have been thrown from the car before it hit the
tree.
 
The other two died on impact.
 
There was nothing to indicate that a third
person was ever in the car, or there would have been a search party.
 
The whole thing defies reason, when you think
about it.”

“Who were the
other two people in the car?
 
We don't
even know where he had been that night.”
 
Jana struggled to understand as much as possible of what had
happened.
 
She would need to explain
these things to Stani when he woke up.

Consulting his
notepad, the officer read off the names of the victims.
 
The driver had been Mark Stevenson of Albany,
New York.
 
The other passenger was a
woman named Elizabeth Mason, from Manhattan.

Milo recognized
the man's name immediately.
 
The already
notorious son of a powerful political family, his death would be headline
news.
 
But what possible connection could
Stani have had to him?
 
Whatever the
circumstances, he would need to act quickly to shield Stani from the kind of
publicity this was certain to generate.

Betsy was
dead.
 
Jana's first thought was to wonder
if Stani had been in love with her.
 
If
so, how would he react to the news of her death?
 
She began to prepare herself for what lay
ahead.
 
The next weeks, perhaps even
months, would require all of her energy.
 
Stani would need her, not only to nurse him back to health but also to
help him accept the inevitable changes in his life.

They followed
Stani through the swinging doors and into the surgical unit of the
hospital.
 
A nurse directed them to a
sitting room where they could wait; or if they would prefer to go home, she would
see that they were called when the surgery was over.
 
It would most likely be several hours,
wouldn't they like to go home and get some rest?
 
They would wait, Milo said.
 
The streets were treacherous.
 
Better not to risk going out now.

They sat side by
side, each beginning to absorb the reality of this night.
 
Glancing at Milo, Jana recognized the look of
grim determination in his tired face.
 
She placed her hand over his, without saying a word, letting him know
that she understood how difficult this was for him.
 
To have to sit and wait, when his mind was
already running to all he would need to do to safeguard Stani's career until he
was healed.
 
They had been together for
so long, they easily read each other's thoughts.
 
She knew Milo was blaming himself, fearing
that the boy he had invested his life's work in might never be the same, even
when the doctors had done their best for him.
 
She would need to be strong for Milo as much as for Stani.
 
As if in response to her promised support,
Milo patted her hand gently, continuing to stare at the blank wall
opposite.
 
She knew that in fact he was
staring at the vision in his mind, planning, calculating, reasoning his way
around the fear.

She had known
him all her life, it seemed.
 
She had
been twelve years old, barely adjusted to her new life in the strange little
world that was Oxford, when her father had brought home a student, a Hungarian
like themselves, he had said by way of introduction to the tall, gaunt boy who
still wore the wariness of a refugee in his dark eyes.
 
She had come to England in a move sanctioned
by her father’s position at the university, while Milo had arrived by a very
different road, as he and his parents had slipped out of Eastern Europe just
ahead of the rumbling that threatened the security of even the most prosperous
Jewish households.
 
For over a year, they
had journeyed quietly, finally reaching out to Jana’s father, an old
acquaintance from that other world, now forever closed to them.

Twelve years
old, and a tiny girl at that, she knew Milo Scheider saw her as a mere child,
yet he was none the less admiring of one who had already committed her life to
music.
 
But Jana had instantly fallen in
love with his intense dedication, his aspirations to make a mark in this new
world, and of course his dark good looks.
 
Already elegant in dress and manner, with much of the old world
reflected in his impeccable English, he was her girlish fantasy, quickly becoming
her womanly ambition.
 
If the truth be
known, had he not come for her once she was old enough to be interesting, she
knew she would have found her way to him.

Milo had
dedicated himself to acquiring an education, to building a new life and to
providing for his parents and making them proud of his efforts.
 
He had shown little interest in the daughter
of his mentor until years later, by which time Jana had absorbed all there was
to know about him and expanded her commitment to include joining him in whatever
endeavor he chose.
 
Always, what Milo
wanted had come first, ahead of any ambition of her own.
 
Ironically, it had been her talent as a
pianist that had eventually provided him with his direction.

The life they
built did not allow for the addition of children, which suited both of them; but
then Stani had come along to force them into at least the semblance of a
family.
 
Stani had focused the two of
them on one goal, had in fact brought warmth to the businesslike rhythm of
their marriage.
 
Just as in those early
years, when they had carefully molded a space around the gifted little boy,
reshaping their routine and always considering the next move with an eye to his
future, tonight they sat together in the stark, sterile waiting room, both
afraid to anticipate the next turn.

Looking again
at Milo’s profile, Jana tried to swallow the tears that threatened.
 
She rarely cried.
 
Why the sight of his finely sculpted
features, etched now with lines of weariness and worry, should cause this
overpowering sadness, she wasn’t sure.
 
Most likely, it was the knowledge that behind the tightly held
composure, Milo’s heart was weighed down with as much fear as her own.
 
What would they do if Stani’s career, or God
forbid his life, were over?
 
He might not
have been the child of their bodies, but he had been the child of their mutual
effort.
 
His sweet willingness to become
whatever they required, his undemanding adoration, expressed in childish
gestures and the unwavering effort to please, had been their reward.
 
Without Stani, who would they be?
 
How would they identify themselves without
Stani’s career to move their lives forward into comfortable old age?
 
It was those questions—born of fear as Stani
passed through those doors to an uncertain future, fear she would never voice
to Milo—that brought tears to her eyes.
 
It was that same fear that made her certain she would do whatever she
could to see that they never learned the answers.

Three hours,
Milo thought, then the recovery room, the nurse had said.
 
He could have accomplished a great deal in
three hours.
 
But it was the middle of
the night now.
 
There was no one to call,
in an effort to learn what had happened in the past two days of Stani's life.
 
They were so much together, the three of
them, traveling, touring, rehearsing, performing.
 
Even at home, they were in constant
discussion over new music, tour schedules, arguing amiably over the merits of
this conductor or that orchestra.
 
It was
unusual for them to be separated for more than a day or two.
 
Milo had been tired lately, lacking his
normal energy.
 
He was after all getting
older.
 
He and Jana had talked for years
of taking a vacation, just the two of them.
 
They had decided at the last minute to take four days and go to Aspen.
 
Stani had not objected to going to Washington
on his own.
 
He had made other overnight
trips, to perform in Boston and Philadelphia.
 
They should go, he said, have some fun.
 
He would be fine.
 
What had happened?
 
How had he ended up lost, wandering in the
woods, miles from Washington?
 
How had he
come to be in a car with Mark Stevenson?
 
If in fact he was the son of that state senator, what was he doing
traveling with Stani and the girl, Betsy?