Home Another Way (14 page)
“ ‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned,’ said Jesus, ‘but
this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his
life.’ ”
I tossed the book back on the table. Jack was right. It would make a good coaster.
Jack sat in his truck outside Luke’s cabin, engine off. Icy gusts pierced the cab, and inside his gloves he curled his fingers into his palms to keep his hands warm. He’d been there twenty minutes, staring at a dull light flickering in the front windows. From the television, he thought, but he didn’t know if Sarah was watching it. She had told Beth once she slept with it on, for company. He didn’t want to wake her.
She’d told him not to come, anyway.
Every time he saw Sarah, her wall sprung another crack. She worked to patch them as soon as they came, with the mortar of a sharp word, or a turn-and-retreat. Still, he knew she wouldn’t be able to hide behind that weakening barricade forever. He prayed it would crumble here, in Jonah, where someone stood waiting to catch her. Only God knew how many bones would break if no one padded her fall.
Jack swallowed a trickle of disappointment. He had wanted Sarah to invite him over. He more than enjoyed talking with her. She didn’t know he had wet his pants on the first day of kindergarten, or that he forgot his only line—“It’s a long way to Canaan. Can’t we stop and rest?”—in his third-grade Sunday school play. She didn’t know that, when he turned eleven, he went out into the wilderness of his backyard for a forty-day fast, only to have his father drag him back into the house after a week, when an autumn downpour threatened to wash Jack’s pup tent down the mountain, and he was so weak from hunger he couldn’t walk more than a couple of yards on his wobbly knees. With Sarah, he didn’t have to act the part of Jack Watson, best thing to come out of Jonah since, well, since never. He could be the someone no one knew him to be.
And he was attracted to her.
Jack closed his eyes, sighing, and banged the back of his head into the unpadded headrest, once, twice.
Idiot, idiot,
the thuds echoed. When the feelings began, he didn’t know. But in the past week, since he watched her on the stage next to Beth, her violin transforming his sister from pauper to princess, he found himself thinking of her too often. Not just her music. Her. How her hair blazed in the light. How her fingernails always looked short and frayed, from her chewing them, no doubt, though he’d never seen her do it. The way she hid her smile beneath the back of her hand when she laughed. The thoughts were fleeting—he refused to let them dawdle, instead going to his knees or running out on some errand. But he was a minister, not a eunuch. And he was lonely.
Lord forgive him, he was lonely.
Allison’s face darted behind his closed eyelids, surprising him. Jack hadn’t thought of her in months, more than a year, maybe. His stomach bucked as if he swallowed pounds of deviled eggs. The weight of guilt. He pushed it away. He’d been forgiven of that. And it wasn’t something he’d repeat. Not with Sarah. Not ever.
The old pickup started loudly, rattling from the leaky exhaust he’d yet to have repaired, unable to justify spending three hundred dollars on a twenty-five-year-old junker. He kept his lights off so they wouldn’t shine into the cabin windows. He’d rather not have Sarah know he’d been there, peering, waiting. What would she think of him then?
I stopped by Doc’s office to meet him New Year’s Eve day. Two people sat in the waiting room—a woman with her ankle wrapped in a beige compression bandage, and a man with glasses at least an inch thick, paper clips dangling from where the screws should be, holding on the arms.
I hadn’t seen Patty since the pageant. I decided if she said something about my performance, I’d give a thin, courteous compliment on hers. If not, she’d get nothing.
“You’re late,” she said, cutting photos of floral arrangements from a bridal magazine.
“I’m always late,” I said. “Doc back there?”
“Where else would he be?”
I found Doc in the only exam room, folding dingy cotton hospital gowns and stacking them in a metal cabinet. I hopped up on the table, white paper wrinkling beneath me, legs dangling off the side.
He sighed. “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” he said. “I’ll have to rip that paper off after you leave. It’s wasteful.”
“You don’t pay me enough to care,” I said.
“This coming from someone who said she’d work for Doc handed me a spray bottle, and then threw a rag at me. nothing.” Every week I sat in the same place, and every week he told me not to.
We had a peculiar understanding, Doc and I. We tiptoed around the old wounds both of us so obviously had, but neither wanted to share—nor did we want them to close. We pecked at each other’s half-healed scabs with sarcasm and contrivances, until they started to bleed again, and we hurt just enough to remember why we didn’t belong in polite society.
I so wanted to know what Doc hid from up in these mountains. Whatever it was, it had to be delicious.
“All your old folks are fine,” I said. “At least, I think they are. Rabbit still won’t let me in.”
“I saw them a couple days ago. Ben’s foot is healing. But slowly. I expect it will be two, three months before he can be up on it again, unrestricted. Anything else to report?”
“No. But I was wondering, how much is Robert really aware of? I mean, does he recognize people by sight, or voices? Or sounds?”
“I honestly don’t know. It’s nearly impossible to diagnose how much of his response is simply reflexive and how much is deliberate. Why do you ask?”
“No reason. But I think Memory believes he understands every word she says.”
“Memory’s not a fool. She’s just doing what she needs to do to get through each day. You should understand that.” Doc shook his head a little, a smirk lighting one corner of his mouth.“Make yourself useful.”
Another weekly ritual. I slid off the table, tore off the paper I’d been sitting on, and coated the vinyl with the disinfecting mist. “I thought I saw you at the pageant the other night,” I said, “trying to sneak out before the lights came up.”
“That was me.”
“What’d you think?”
He looked at me then, not like a man who’d known me for only a couple of months but as if he were someone who’d watched me grow through the years—someone who’d been there for that first missing tooth, or who waved me off to the prom. I almost expected him to pull out his wallet and show me photos of myself at all those milestones. Instead, he turned away and began filling a glass apothecary jar with more cotton balls. “You play well.”
“That’s it?”
He moved to the next jar, dumping in a box of tongue depressors. “You’re better than your father. Is that what you were looking for?”
It wasn’t.
I crunched up the discarded paper, tossed it toward the trash can. He hadn’t mentioned Luke to me, not since that first time we met. “How do you know?”
“I heard him once.”
“When? Why? I thought—I mean, I was under the impression you had nothing to do with Luke.”
“We weren’t friends. We hardly said half a dozen words to each other over the years. I—” Doc stopped, took his glasses off and rubbed one eye with the fat, fleshy part of his hand, just beneath his thumb. “I didn’t know him.”
I wanted to ask more, to be nosy, but he said, “Go home, Sarah. I have patients.”
I’d never made popcorn without a microwave. I’d watched Beth do it several times, fluffy kernels bursting out from under the aluminum lid like an Orville Redenbacher commercial. Grab a pot, pour in some oil, add the popping corn, wiggle the handle around over the heat so nothing would burn. Done. How difficult could it be?
Twenty minutes later, I held the pot over the trash pail, scraping greasy, blackened kernels off the bottom with a knife. Beth could make more when she arrived. She and I planned to watch movies until midnight, then go outside, banging pots and hooting like banshees in the new year. A tradition, she insisted, and fun, too.
I’d humor her.
I did have brownie mix in the cabinet. I dumped the mix in a bowl, sneezing as the chocolate dust puffed into the air and up my nose. I added three eggs for more cakelike brownies—the way I liked them—and spooned the batter into my only pan.
The front door swung open, and Beth bounded in, shaking snow from her hair. “Sarah.”
“You’re early,” I called, leaving the pan on the stovetop. “Don’t laugh. I’m baking.”
She flung her arms around my rib cage and squeezed the breath from me. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“You’re welcome, I think.” I pried her off. “Did you leave your car running?”
“It’s Dominic,” she said, with a smile that was coy and shy and radiant all at once. “He told me. Oh, Sarah, do you mind if I—That is, could we reschedule?”
“I don’t think the new year will wait. But I’ve said before, hot dates take precedence. He’s not taking you to the diner, is he?”
“No.” She giggled. “He said it’s special, but he won’t tell me what.”
“A surprise. Sounds romantic.”
Beth pulled her head down into her shoulders, tortoise-like, and covered her face with her hands, fingers splayed, giggling some more. “I know. Sarah, I can’t believe what you did.”
“It’s no big deal. I just talked to him. I didn’t even exhaust my entire vocabulary.”
“No, it’s not that.” She shoved her hair behind her ears.
“Then, what?”
“Never mind. It’s nothing.”
“Beth, what?”
She looked at me then, her blue eyes on mine, her face divided nearly down the middle. And I realized how long it had been since I’d noticed her scars. I’d seen them, but they were no longer something freakish and grotesque; they were Beth.
“What you did for me,” Beth said. “It was . . . I mean, I knew you had a heart, Sarah. I just never thought I’d see it.”
I felt my forehead scrunch at that thumbprint-sized place between my eyebrows, folding and unfolding quickly, almost instantaneously. Then a ripple of understanding, another. I don’t know what look passed over my face, but Beth stammered, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . .”
“It’s okay.” My lips kinked into what I hoped looked like a smile. It wasn’t okay. It wasn’t. “You go on your date. But I want to hear all about it tomorrow.”
“I’ll come by early.”
“Not too early. Go on. Dominic will run out of gas if you stay here gabbing too much longer.”
And she went. And I stood in the middle of the room, ordering myself to take deep, slow breaths.
I’d been called heartless before. Sometimes with blatant disgust, by those I had—in their own estimation—handled too carelessly. And other times with admiration for my deft ability to remain unmoved, untouched. Either way, I’d always taken the observation as a compliment.
But Beth . . . she said it in such a plain, compassionate way, like a mother explaining to her crying toddler that the butterfly had died because his chubby, clumsy hands closed too tightly around it. As if I didn’t know better but still should learn to be more cautious.
I knew better. I just didn’t care.
I wouldn’t think of Beth anymore. I crammed a movie into the VCR, and when it ended I remembered I never baked the brownies. After shutting them in the oven, I squirted detergent into the popcorn pot and scrubbed the last burnt remnants from the bottom. Moving with determination, I dried the pot, added more oil, heated it, and emptied the bag of kernels into it. The oil sizzled, and as the corn started popping, I held the pot just above the burner, swirling it around and around until the
ping, ding
and
pop
ended. I drenched the popcorn with two sticks of melted butter and a handful of salt, carried the pot and several sodas into the living room, and started another video.
Sometime during the movie, a bitter, fudgey smell plugged my nostrils. I jumped up, ran into the kitchen, and yanked down the oven door and reached in for the pan, wearing a mitt on only one hand. My naked fingers touched the metal and I swore, twisted on the faucet. Cold water washed over my hand as the hot oven air—I’d left the door open, brownies tottering on the edge of the wire shelf—toasted my legs.
I couldn’t do anything right.
No, I could do one thing right.
I stumbled to the closet, tore open the door, and jammed the violin against my chin. My jumbled mind didn’t know what to play. But my hands did, and in a few moments, despite the blisters growing on my left fingertips, the familiar strains of Giuseppe Tartini’s Sonata in G Minor—
La Sonata
del Diavolo—
infected the silence.
I had planned to perform this piece at my Juilliard graduation jury. But not the popular Romantic-era Fritz Kreisler arrangement, with a piano accompaniment that oozed Viennese charm and warmth. After hearing Andrew Manze’s blazing solo rendition, I, too, wanted to play it alone on an authentic Baroque instrument. Just eighteen minutes of me, the violin, and Tartini’s devilish trill.
According to musical folklore, the devil came to Tartini in a dream, and in the dream the devil played a sonata on the composer’s own violin. Tartini, awed by such ambrosial strains, forced himself to wake and tried to replicate the music he’d heard while sleeping. The result was
The Devil’s
Sonata,
though Tartini insisted it was far inferior to the music in his dream. If he could have found another way to support himself, he would have smashed his violin and given up music forever after hearing the virtuoso from Hades, a mastery he could not touch.