Free Falling (6 page)

“We were lucky,” David said. “They took mostly the useless stuff,” he said.

“Our cell phones?” Sarah said. “Our television, the iPad?”

“But  they left the Gor-Tex jackets,” David pointed out. “And the axe and the knives.”

 “I hope they choke on the food.”

“They were probably hungry if that’s any consolation.”

“The food they took was food stolen out of your son’s mouth.”

“Maybe they have a son to feed, too.”

“Okay, fine, David. Whatever. It’s not a good thing, though, you know? We’re not safe here.”

“They waited ‘til we left...”

“And what about when they or people like them get really desperate and don’t wait for us to leave first? This...this crisis is not going to bring out the best in people, David.” She finished her wine and looked out across the pasture. There was no moon and the fields were black.

“They didn’t find the wine,” David said with a smile. He pulled her close to him and kissed her. “We’ll sort it out. We’ll find a work-around.”

Sarah sighed. The pleasure of the day was long gone.

The next morning, David was up early hammering on the house’s exterior. Sarah assumed it had something to do with better fortifying them. But as she had nothing to add in the way of advice along those lines, she turned her attention to the kitchen and the task of making bread. Dierdre had given her a small yeast starter and while sour dough bread had been her least favorite kind back in the States, she was looking forward to eating it from now on if she could actually produce a loaf.

John had been playing outside. He came in the front door. “Mom, Dad says the goats have to live with the horses from now on. Is there anything to eat? I’m starving.”

“You just ate breakfast.” Sarah felt a kernel of anxiety in the pit of her stomach. It was so easy to take care of him back home. She could just pop a toaster streudel in the oven and pour a glass of milk from the fridge. Now, the simple matter of providing him with healthy snacks—or even making sure he didn’t go hungry—was an exhausting and often impossible proposition.

“I’m hungry. I’m helping Dad and it makes me hungry.”

“I’m making bread,” Sarah said as she picked up the jar of starter and peered at it.

“When will that be ready?”

“Not for awhile,” she admitted. “Here.” She pulled out one of the jars of jam they had gotten from Dierdre. “Have a spoonful of this.”

“Without bread?”

 “If you wait a minute, I’ll make you a fried egg,” she said.

That seemed to satisfy him so she set about lighting the gas stove and putting two of the precious eggs in an iron skillet.

John watched her. “You’re doing it without butter?” he said.

“I didn’t know you knew so much about cooking. I’m going to watch it carefully. Don’t worry, it’ll be fine.” She was not at all sure about that but she didn’t have any choice. They had no butter.

David came into the kitchen and dropped a heavy hammer onto the dining table.

“How’s that trap coming, son?”

Sarah frowned. “Trap?”

“Oh, yeah,” John said. “I made a rabbit trap.”

“To catch as in for eating?” Sarah tried to keep the note of incredulity out of her voice.

“Well, not for pets, eh, sport?” David tossled his son’s hair. “Lunch?” he said, hopefully to Sarah.

“You just had breakfast,” Sarah said with exasperation.

“Of a sort,” he said. “Two spoons of jam and tea without sugar or milk. Pretty crappy breakfast.”

Sarah added two more eggs to the skillet and felt her own stomach growl. Feeling like she was throwing gemstones down a well, she added a third for herself. “We only have seven eggs left,” she said. “We need to be really mindful of our rations.”

“I’m going back to Dierdre’s tomorrow,” David said. “I’ll trade my services for another dozen eggs.”

“And maybe some milk, Dad?” John took his plate of eggs and sat down at the kitchen table. “I hate drinking tea without milk.”

“He needs milk, David,” Sarah said, the panic still with her. “He’s a growing boy.”

“I’ll bring back milk and eggs,” he promised. “Don’t worry.”

The lunch was eaten quickly. David and John returned to finding ways to safeguard the house and barn and Sarah turned her attention back to the stove and bread-making. Although never much of a baker she had, in one of her more industrious moods, typed in a recipe for bread on her phone. But the battery had long since gone dead and, besides, the robbers had taken all their phones last night. Sighing, she tried to remember the ingredient amounts. Baking is a science, she knew. You could wing it to a certain extent when you cooked, but baking needed exactness. She pulled open drawers in the kitchen, looking for a bread recipe.

She glanced at the starter on the counter and knew she couldn’t waste it by experimenting. She thought of the disappointment on John’s face if she had to tell him tonight that there was no bread.
By God, she was going to make him bread today! Was it so much to ask that she give her child a slice of damn bread?

Sarah crossed the living room and began pulling books off the shelves. Mostly they were paperbacks left by previous vacationers. She stacked them carefully—in case they ended up being the only things they had to read for the next few months—and even opened the pages to see if, by some miracle, a recipe index card had been used as a bookmark. Before she’d abandoned books entirely and gone strictly to e-readers, she’d kept favorite recipes on index cards which she laminated and used for bookmarks. She paused for a moment remembering that. She did used to do that. What an odd, endearing habit, lost now in her love affair with her Kindle.

On the very bottom shelf of the bookcase, she found it. And when she did, she literally whooped with delight. Not just a recipe, but a cookbook. And not just any cookbook but
Joy of Cooking
—a cookbook from her very own kitchen library, and one she knew as well as a beloved novel. Finding it felt like the first real stroke of luck since the crisis. Like a turning point, somehow.

An hour later, with the dough rising under a thin, worn dishtowel she had found in another kitchen drawer, Sarah walked outside into the sunshine. She felt like she had accomplished something no less significant than whatever David had been doing to shore up their physical defenses. As the mother, she felt she’d done her job to tend her nest  and protect her hatchling. She was surprised by a stack of wood outside the kitchen door. John had collected and stacked the wood without being told. She scanned the vacant courtyard between the barn and the house.
Maybe
, she thought,
just maybe there’s some little good to all this mess
.

David came out of the barn, wiping his hands on his jeans.

That’s not good
, Sarah thought sourly.
We don’t have an automatic washing machine any more. Unless you count me.

“Hey,” he said, walking toward her and smiling. “I think I’ve done as much as can be done to secure the place. They’ll have to take crowbars to get in next time.”

“Great,” she said. “Horses okay?”

He looked over his shoulder toward the pasture.

“I turned them out,” he said. “They were getting really skitterish in the paddock.”

Just the thought of the horses “skitterish” made Sarah’s stomach clench.

“Do you know for a fact that the pasture is fenced?” she asked.

He looked at her in surprise. “I thought all pastures were fenced.”

“Maybe we’d better do a perimeter check, to be sure,” she said. “Where’s John?”

“I thought he was in the house.”

Sarah literally vibrated with the anxiety that pulsed through her at his words. For a moment, she felt like she might hyperventilate. Instead, she found herself turning toward the pasture at a run.

“Grab the halters,” she said. “And catch up with me.”

They walked and called for forty minutes before Sarah turned back. They found all three horses but not John. She led Dan and the pony. David led the big bay he called “Rocky.” Both Rocky and the pony had nameplates on their stalls but unlike Dan’s theirs were in Gaelic. After a day of struggling to pronounce their names, David and John rechristened the two “Rocky” and “Star.”

There was no fence.

“This isn’t Mandarin,” she said to David, referring to the neighborhood in Jacksonville where they lived. “You can’t just let him go do his own thing. He’s only ten years old.”

“I thought he was with you,” David said. “I’m sorry...”

“We were broken into last night! What if those people are still around? What if they have him?”

“Look, I know—”

“No, you don’t know! You
don’t
know, David!”

 It took every ounce of emotional strength she had not to physically or verbally launch into David. Some part of her knew he wasn’t to blame for John being missing. She had never felt so powerless, so ineffectual, in her whole life,
especially
now when the stakes were so high. She was so upset she didn’t even think about the fact that she was leading a horse on either side of her. Her focus was on getting her boy back. She turned to walk back to the house, praying that John was there.
 

 “You keep looking for him out here,” she said. “I’m going to see if he’s back at the cottage.”

 “We’ll find him, Sarah,” David called after her, the panic and fear in his voice belying his words. “I’m sure he’s just exploring.”

Sarah didn’t bother replying. She was angry and afraid, a combination of which she had felt pretty much nonstop since the crisis had happened. She felt as if her whole world were hanging on by a thread, with nothing certain, nothing secure.

It was early afternoon but already it seemed as if the sun had disappeared. The light was grey, and dark clouds scudded across the sky.
What if he gets caught out here and it storms?
One of the horses shied at something in the grass and Sarah dropped the lead rope. She quickly snatched it back and tried to calm him, convinced it was her own anxiety that had caused him to panic in the first place.

Damn horses
, she thought.
They can read your mind
. She took a deep breath and tried to steady her nerves, for their sakes if not her own. She estimated that she was about fifteen minutes from the cottage. If David found John in the pasture and they rode double on Rocky, they could actually beat her back to the house. The thought comforted her and she walked on, pushing thoughts of crumpled little boy forms and wild dogs from her mind.

Cresting the last hill, she saw their cottage below. The courtyard was empty but something caught her eye in the pasture behind the house. A small herd of fluffy white sheep were moving steadily toward the cottage. Sarah looked closer and could see John’s red shirt in front of the flock. He was leading the sheep by a rope.

Tears of relief came to her eyes.
He was safe and sound
.

He waved and she started down the hill to meet him.

 “Where’s Rocky?” he asked when they met up.

“Dad’s got him. He’s up in the far pasture looking for you.”

“How come?”

Sarah shifted both lead ropes to one hand and hugged him tightly.

“John,” she whispered into his hair. “You scared us to death. We didn’t know where you were. Did you tell anyone you were leaving?”

John moved out of her hug. “Mom, stop. You’re pinching me. I didn’t realize I
was
leaving,” he said, “until I got the idea about the sheep.”

“You must never ever do that again,” Sarah said, gently shaking his shoulder with her free hand.

“Sorry, Mom,” he said.

 “Okay,” she said. She steadied herself with a long breath. The fear and anxiety of the last hour would take awhile to abate. “So, what’s with the sheep?”

“They’re ours.” He twisted around to show her the tag in the ewe’s ear that he was leading. “See? It matches the brand at Cairn Cottage. You know? The one in the barn on the stalls?”

 “Sheep,” she said. “That’s nice.”

“Mom,” he said with exasperation. “We can make wool from their fur, you know? We’ve got sheep, now.”

“Well, let’s get them into the paddock,” she said. “Why were they wandering about out there anyway? Do they live out there?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I just thought we should get all the stuff that’s ours in one spot, you know?”

 “Good logic,” she said. “Next time
tell
someone you’re leaving, though. We were worried sick.”

“Yeah, okay,” he said, leading the way down the hill to the paddock. Sarah let the flock go ahead and followed with the two horses.

Later that night, after a dinner of perfectly baked bread and scrambled eggs, Sarah sat on the couch with the cookbook on her knees reading about how to make butter from goat’s milk. David and John played cards by the fireplace.

“You know, we can eat the sheep, too,” David said.

 “These sheep are not for eating,” John said, firmly. “They’re for the fur.”

“The wool,” Sarah said.

“Yeah, for sweaters and blankets and stuff. Mom knows how to knit.”

All of a sudden the room reverberated with the sound of a shrill scream. David and John were on their feet in an instant.