Larissa removed the tray Gracie had left the day before and replaced it with a new one. “Cain?”
He didn’t answer, just stared blindly out the window as the clouds darkened, and drizzle turned to fat drops of rain pelting down on the earth.
“Cain, please talk to me. You need to talk to someone. Everyone’s worried about you.”
“Why? They never cared before.”
“That’s not true,” she whispered, but she was the one lying. “I have always cared about what happened to you and so have Adam and Gracie and Anna and Mother and Father. You’re one of us, and we love you.”
“Nobody loves me. She did, but now she doesn’t know who I am. I never existed to her.”
“Oh, Cain.” Larissa leaned down and placed a soft kiss on his forehead.
“I’d like to be alone.”
She sighed and quietly left the room.
Later that night it was Anna who visited. She held the baby out for him to see and Cain, unconvincingly, tried to appear interested. His nephew had been born, and he hadn’t been invited to visit. The child was already two weeks old and was only now being presented to his namesake.
Annalise grew uncomfortable the longer he ignored her chatter. Little Cain started to cry, and the only thing Cain said was, “You should have named him Adam.”
He thought he heard Anna sniffle as she left the room, but he wasn’t sure.
The following day no one came to bring him food or try and coax him out of bed. On the sixth day, when his hunger pains became too much to bear, he left his room, stomped across the soggy ground to the barn, fed, and returned to bed.
He lost track of time. What did time matter anyway? He had an eternity ahead of him with nothing to look forward to. His facial hair grew in, and he didn’t see why he should shave. He needed to bathe and was becoming ill from being trapped in this stuffy room, but he had nothing to get up for.
He often wondered about Dane. He couldn’t bring himself to contemplate Cybil and what had become of her. Such a waste. He often thought of Destiny and wondered what she was doing.
One morning he woke up and suddenly got out of bed. He bathed and dressed, but left his facial hair as it was. He was tired of looking like someone he would never measure up to. He wanted to look like Cain, not Adam.
Cain walked past Annalise and Gracie who were sitting in the kitchen. All talking stopped when he walked through, but he kept moving. He readied a horse and carriage and quickly was on his way. As he drew closer to where he needed to be, the rain gave way to warmer spring air, laced with the scent of fresh blooms. He reached the town an hour later and pulled his buggy over in an empty lot. He tied off his horse and searched for what he was looking for.
He finally saw it in the window of a small privately owned antique store called Mark Peanuts. He pushed through the door, and a small bell chimed as the door closed behind him.
“M’help you?”
“The television you have in the front window, does it work?”
“Should,” the clerk said, making a disgusting sucking noise with his tongue through the space of his front teeth.
“Do you have electricity I could use to test it out?”
The man grumbled and pointed to a plug in the wall. He then placed a rickety old chair in front of the plug. “You can move it, but you break it, you buy it. Don’t see what one of you Godly types want a TV for anyway, but have at it.”
Cain lifted the small television set and carried it to the wall. He plugged it in and moved the dials around. The glass screen snapped on, and the hairs of his arm rose from the static electricity.
“Ain’t gonna get a clear channel without one of those cable boxes the cable companies rent. Don’t think they’re compatible with an old set like that. They do that so we gots to keep spending money on new things, but I guess you fellows don’t gotta worry ’bout stuff like that.” The man laughed as if he’d said something amusing. Cain ignored him.
A channel came in, and Cain backed up. He fumbled with the wires.
“You lookin’ for some’in p’ticular?”
“
Channel Six
.”
The man grunted. He had an odor about him that Cain didn’t particularly care for. “That should come in fine.”
When Cain found the channel, he sat back and waited. “What time does the news come on?”
“Lunchtime. You got’s about ten minutes.”
Cain sighed and waited. “You on the run or some’in? Checking to see if you wanted?” The man chuckled at his wit again.
“Take a nap.”
His eyes closed, and he drooped slowly to the side of the counter, landing on the dusty floor with a thud. The bell above the door chimed and without taking his eyes off the television, Cain said, “Shop’s closed. Come back in an hour.”
“I don’t think so,
bredder
.”
Cain jerked around and saw Adam standing by the counter. His brother leaned over and took notice of the clerk snoring softly with his mouth open. Rather than explain, he asked, “What are you doing here, Adam?”
“I came to ask you the same question.”
“It’s none of your business. I’m not harming anyone. Go away.”
Rather than leave, Adam leaned his hip against the counter and made himself comfortable. The news program started with a serious man sitting at a desk listing various topics of the hour, and then an upbeat song played as images flashed over the small gray screen with people smiling gaily doing an odd selection of random activities.
When the music stopped, the man at the desk was there again. He reported on crime in the Middle East, an airplane crash, a line of convenience store robberies, and the upcoming traffic report. The longer he droned on, the more impatient Cain grew.
There was a string of advertisements, and then the man was back. Finally he said her name. Cain held his breath and felt Adam scrutinizing him.
“Thanks, Mike. I’m here at the new local skate park where kids are enjoying this beautiful spring weather.” Young English children zoomed up and down hills in the background. “This is Cameron,” she said, gesturing to a young boy by her side with curly hair. “He’s twelve and lives about twenty minutes from here. What do you think of the new skate park, Cameron?” She held her microphone out to the kid.
The boy smiled. “I think it’s awesome.”
“Did your parents bring you here today for the opening?”
“Yeah. My mom. She’s over there. Hi, Mom!”
Destiny took the microphone back and smiled. “As you can see, Mike, the new skate park is off to a great start. A donation was made for the park by town native and skate legend, Chris Farrel, who we interviewed last fall when the ground broke on this project.” Grinning down at the boy, she said, “Looks like Chris Farrel may not be the last skate champion this town produces! Back to you, Mike.”
The screen switched back to the man at the desk, and Adam leaned forward and switched off the set. “Can we go now?”
Cain stared at the blank screen a minute longer. “Did she look happy to you? I thought she looked kind of sad. Do you think she’s been eating right? Something didn’t seem right about her.”
“Cain.” Adam sighed. “What do you want me to tell you? She looked like an English news reporter doing her job.”
Cain shook his head. “But what if something’s wrong? What if she needs help or has run into some sort of trouble?”
Adam pinched the bridge of his nose. “How long do you plan to go on like this? You let her go. There’s nothing else you can do. Do you plan on continuing to torture yourself over a woman you cannot have?”
“If you couldn’t have Anna, how long would it take you to forget about her?”
“That’s different.”
“Why, because she’s your mate?” Cain’s brow creased. “Well, she’s my mate, too. Maybe I changed my mind. Maybe I want her back now. How do you feel about that?”
Rather than allow himself to be baited, Adam only shook his head sadly. “What are you doing, Cain? This isn’t about Anna.”
Cain let out a deep breath and hung his head. “That’s the problem, Adam. Since Anna, it will never be about anyone else. She was my one chance at destiny, and you have her. I have nothing. All I have is a bleak eternity to spend by myself.”
“I’m sorry, Cain. I wish I knew how to make this better for you, but I don’t. All I can tell you is that while you may not have a mate out there, you do have a family here. We do not take pleasure in seeing you like this. Come back to the farm, clean yourself up, and start moving on.”
“I don’t want to move on.”
Adam sagged, defeated. He nodded and turned toward the door. Cain sat in the rickety chair staring at the silent television until the clerk stirred.
He took the long way home in no rush to get back to his purposeless life.
* * * *
In the late spring his mother and father returned from their trip. Cain had never recalled seeing his father so full of life. His mother looked radiant. Her belly swelled with the promise of Cain’s soon-to-be little brother, and he hoped very hard his mother faced no complications with this one.
That July Larissa and the bishop welcomed their new daughter into the world. Her name was Mariah Abilene King. She had a thatch of black hair just like both her parents and the diamond eyes of her mother.
It seemed for the first time in over a year, the farm started returning to its regular order. Everyone was busy harvesting both the land and their families while the world outside the farm chugged on by.
His baby brother was born on a hot August afternoon. His mother was silent through the entire delivery, just promising that if God gave her a healthy babe she would never complain of how he got there. His name was Jadon, which meant “thankful.”
Cain spent a great amount of time in the safe house visiting Cybil. She never seemed to recognize him as anything more than an enemy, but he came, every day, all the same. He would often read to her and tell her stories. She never spoke and showed no recollection of Dane in any way even though he visited her just as often.
It made Cain sad to see her in such a state. He refused to consider her to be like the others. While the band of brothers was making some headway in the woods, destroying many of the ill-bred transitions, they had yet to capture Isaiah. They were, however, able to police the woods and work at keeping the English hikers and campers safe. According to the council, it wouldn’t be long before they had him.
On Cybil’s twelfth birthday he brought her a small cake. He slid it through the bars of her cell, and she slapped it away. Dane had left the safe house distraught that day.
Dane had the incredible gift to see people’s thoughts. He couldn’t hear them, but he could glean impressions from open minds, mostly from children. He said, other than Gracie, he rarely could see into adult minds. He had confessed to Cain that fall that what he saw in Cybil’s mind frightened him.
Cain knew the boy regretted insisting that Cain save her, but there was nothing to be done for it now. Cain had sentenced her to an eternity of hell, and he would do his best to keep her safe from those who thought to destroy her and from the danger of herself.
Time moved on, and the council made no decision regarding Cybil’s fate. Even the unfeeling bishop took pity on Dane and himself. There was such a sense of responsibility for Cybil between the two of them, it somehow united them, each one of them a broken man, trying to be whole.
His thoughts of Destiny lessened, but never faded. He had learned how to push them away while others were around and saved them for his time alone at night. The harvest would be an outstanding one this year. It rained every night, the moment Cain shut away the rest of the world and allowed his memories of her to run free, crushing his heart.
There was an epidemic of babies in his small circle. That winter holiday Annalise announced that she would again be bringing a child into this world. Gracie immediately announced it would be a boy, and Annalise had pouted because she wanted to be surprised.
Mariah proved to be quite an incredible child. With Eleazar as her father and Larissa as her mother, he wasn’t surprised. When she was only just starting to sit up, she showed a talent for pulling items in the room closer to her if she wanted them. Frequently, a rattle would go skittering across the floor only to get grabbed up by her chubby, pink fingers. Larissa was exhausted from intervening when she tried to take away something that wasn’t safe for her. With a talent like that, the child would likely never crawl, but Cain lacked the energy to tease his sister about such things. What was the point?
Dane’s eighteenth birthday was a sad event. They had tried to make it as special as possible. Jonas had invited him to take a room in their family home, much to Gracie’s disapproval, but the boy declined, saying he would continue on staying with Nana Faith and Ezekiel. Everyone had made Dane a special gift, but knew all he wanted was to be able to share this day with a member of his own family.
At the end of the night, Gracie had marched up to Dane and, as if it were a chore, pressed a soft peck to his lips. The boy’s stunned face was comical, but what was even more amusing was when he swung Gracie back into his arms and kissed her thoroughly on the mouth. He released her, and she stormed out of the house in a foul temper.