When Sparrows Fall (23 page)

Jubilant with the success of his mission, he pulled the van out of the tiny parking lot. The vehicle was stuffed with kids and books. Lord willing, none of the books were godless trash, but it was hard enough to keep track of five kids without inspecting each selection.

He glanced at Timothy, riding shotgun. At the last minute he’d nearly stayed home, but he’d been unable to resist the lure of free reading materials.

“What did you find?” Jack asked.

“Science. History. Mostly history.”

“You want to be more specific?”

“World War II. Stuff like that.” Timothy conveniently neglected to mention the psychology and anatomy books between his feet.

Ah, the joys of adolescent curiosity. Jack could guess which chapters Timothy would read first, far from his mother’s supervision.

“I noticed you weren’t in the children’s section,” Jack said.

“The good history books are in the adult area. You have a problem with that?”

“Absolutely not. I don’t believe in the strict policing of reading choices, nor do I approve of censorship, for the most part. I believe in digging for the truth. If you earn it, you own it.”

Timothy nodded.

Encouraged, Jack went on. “My dad was a history buff, and I have dozens of history books that belonged to him. I’d be happy to share them, if you’re interested.”

Timothy shrugged.

“Uncle Jack,” Martha called. “I love going to the library, but it would’ve been more fun if we were in your pretty car.”

Jack looked in the rearview mirror. Hugging a brightly colored book, she sat in the middle seat with the archangels and smiled out the window at the passing sights.

“Y’all wouldn’t fit in my car, sweetie. It only holds four people, and the ones in the backseat had better not be very big.”

“Oh. But sometime I want a ride in your—” She shrieked. “Look! A palm reader’s sign. I
hate
palm readers.”

Jack laughed as he cruised through the intersection on the yellow light. She’d seen the red Don’t Walk hand.

“That’s not a palm reader’s sign, Martha. It’s connected to the traffic light, and it warns people on the sidewalk when the light’s about to turn red.”

“Oh. Good, ’cause palm reading is bad. That’s divination, and it’s wicked.”

How could a four-year-old know a word like “divination” but remain ignorant of basic sidewalk safety?

Down the street, she cried out again. “A blimp! I love blimps.”

A gray, blimp-shaped balloon flew high above a car dealership. Behind the tether, a jet carved out a white trail against the sky. The tether and the jet trail appeared to be on the same trajectory, but the jet kept going, soaring free. The balloon’s line jerked and arched and pulled back, attached to the earth. A fake, it was going nowhere.

On the outskirts of town, Jack looked in the mirror. Michael and Gabriel had already dug into
Kidnapped
and
The Borrowers
, respectively. Martha had opened one of the Berenstain Bears stories and was tracing the words with her forefinger.

The kids were reading, unfettered by ridiculous rules. That was the first step toward cutting the tether and setting the family free.

“Gabe, how’s your book so far?”

Gabriel nodded furiously without looking up and turned a page.

“I loved the Borrowers series,” Jack said. “I remember reading in the closet with a flashlight and wondering if there were borrowers in the walls.”

Martha looked up. “What are borrowers?”

“Smart little people, a few inches tall. They hide in old houses and borrow things from big folks like us.”

She gasped. “In
our
house? Where?”

“I’m afraid it’s only a story,” Jack said. “Make-believe.”

“Oh.” The disappointment in her voice was pitiful.

“But we can pretend …”

“Yes! I love to pretend.”

“I’ll read it to you when Gabriel’s finished with it,” he offered.

“Okay! Uncle Jack, I’m so happy because you came to stay with us.”

“And I’m happy to be staying with you,” he said over a ridiculous lump in his throat.

Martha clutched her book to her heart and let out a sigh of bliss. Behind her, with the backseat all to herself, Rebekah swayed with the motion of the van, engrossed in a paperback copy of
Jane Eyre
. Jack hoped Miranda wouldn’t fuss over the fact that Mr. Rochester had fully intended to enter into a bigamous marriage. It would be difficult reading for a ten-year-old, but if Gabriel could comprehend that horrible chapter about earthworms, surely Rebekah could enjoy Charlotte Brontë.

Jack hadn’t forgotten the youngest child either. Among other titles, Jack had grabbed
The Book of Jonah
by Peter Spier, partly for the shared name and partly for the cover art, a fantastically scary fish sure to thrill Jonah when he woke from his nap.

If Miranda wanted to throw a fit, she could throw a fit. She could even confiscate their finds, but the kids had spent the afternoon glorying in the
treasures of a public library without their mama looking over their shoulders, and they wouldn’t forget it.

“Almost home,” Jack said. “And we’ll watch it hit the fan.”

“Watch what?” Timothy asked. “Oh. That.” His mouth curled into a mischievous grin, and for one little moment, they were allies.

sixteen

J
ack ran up Miranda’s steps with the pharmacy bag in his hand and stopped on the threshold to savor the change wrought by yesterday’s trip to the library. Overnight, the noisy household had become a place of quiet, book-induced rapture.

Finished with the day’s schoolwork, the kids had returned to their pleasure reading. Timothy had taken his haul upstairs the night before, but the rest were headquartered in the living room.

Jonah lay on his back with his feet propped up on the coffee table, humming like a contented little bumblebee with the Spier book a few inches from his face. The archangels were sprawled on the rag rug. Rebekah and Martha, absorbed in Brontë and Seuss respectively, snuggled together on one end of the couch, while their mother took the other end.

Only Miranda wasn’t reading. She stared into space, oblivious to Jack’s return. For the last twenty-four hours or so, she’d been gloomy, her eyes haunted with something he couldn’t name.

What had happened in the last twenty-four hours? Not much. He’d
pledged, in writing, that he wouldn’t report her to anybody, and he’d led the library excursion. As far as he knew, that was it.

“I’m back,” he said.

She jumped, touching her fingertips to the hollow of her throat. “Oh! I didn’t hear you come in.”

Closing the door behind him, he lifted the plastic bag higher. “I have something for you.”

“If it’s another pain prescription, I don’t need it.”

“It’s not.” He squeezed in between her and Martha, who ignored him in favor of Seuss, and pulled the photo envelope from the bag. “Your camera was beyond help, but we saved the film.”

“Oh, Jack, thank you!”

Warmed by her enthusiasm, he hurried to extract the pictures from the envelope. “Tell me if I’m going too fast.”

The first few photographs were outdoor group shots of the kids, so well posed that they appeared to be candid. In the best of them, Jonah lounged in one of the Adirondack chairs with his siblings gathered around him, all of them glancing toward the camera as if it had just happened to catch their attention.

“A great shot of a great family,” Jack said.

“They’re pretty wonderful, aren’t they?” Miranda said wistfully. “Such beautiful girls, such handsome boys.”

“Stop talking, Mama,” Martha said, turning a page. “You make it so I can’t think.”

“Yeah, don’t talk about us,” Michael said. “It’s embarrassing.”

Jack wadded up the photo receipt and bounced it off of Michael’s head. “Listen up, young ’uns. Your mother and I plan to go on talking. And embarrassing you. If you don’t like it, you’d better leave, because it’ll only get worse.”

The archangels exchanged irritated glances and got to their feet. Martha huffed and slid off the couch. Rebekah followed, still reading. The two boys and two girls took to the stairs with their books. Only Jonah stayed, still humming.

“Worked like a charm,” Jack said.

Liking the cozy setup, he didn’t scoot over to the space the girls had vacated. Miranda didn’t move either. Their knees knocked against each other, their shoulders touched. She sighed, and her shoulder moved up and down against his.

“Okay, ’fess up. Ever since I took the kids to the library, you’ve been wallowing in gloom. Are you afraid I didn’t vet their choices adequately?”

“No. If you think they’re good books, I’ll trust your judgment.”

“You trust me?”

She didn’t answer right away. “Yes,” she said, finally. “I do.”

“Good. Then you can tell me why you’re moping.”

“I’m not moping.”

“Let’s call it worrying, then. Are you paranoid about trouble with the authorities?”

She was watching Jonah with a faint frown. “Because we homeschool? It’s not paranoia. Even when we’re completely legal, they keep a close eye on us just because we buck the system.”

“And this has troubled you for quite some time?”

“Yes.”

“Ah. Then you still haven’t explained the recent increase in moping. What’s that about?”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” she said, a little too briskly.

Jack bit back another question. He’d segue into flattery instead.

He moved on to the next photo. “Your kids all have the same chin. Even in the girls, it’s sort of pugnacious. It shows up in pictures more than it does in real life.”

“The Hanford chin.”

He ignored that. “They have your eyes. Very pretty eyes.”

She ignored that.

“You seem to know your way around a camera,” he said. “I like the way you used tree branches like a window frame in this one.”

“I’m always looking for frames.” Her voice came alive, and this time her animation was genuine. “I like any kind of window. An actual window or something in nature. I love to watch the vignettes in the frame change as I move.”

“You must like off-center shots too or you wouldn’t take so many of them.”

“I do. They wake up the eye in ways a centered, symmetrical shot can’t.” She looked up.

Squashed close together as they were, he had to twist his head down at an odd angle to see her. But it was worth it. She gave him a shy smile that very nearly demanded a kiss.

Trying to talk himself out of that idea, suddenly he couldn’t remember exactly what he’d been trying to worm out of her. “I don’t like too much symmetry either,” he said, afraid he’d be babbling like an idiot in no time. “I like random, irregular things. Appaloosas. Crooked tree limbs. Stories that don’t have neat endings, that leave doors open, that make me think about possibilities.”

“You’re funny. Next picture, please.”

He complied, feeling like a fool but glad that he’d made her smile. “This is a good shot of Timothy.”

“Yes, it is.”

Timothy hadn’t smiled, but he’d met the eye of the camera squarely, as he looked at people when he spoke to them. Jack was still working on that. He was in his thirties before he’d learned he made a habit of looking
at
eyes instead of looking into them. A subtle distinction, but it made a difference.

He continued flipping photos. A pine with a twisted trunk. A hawk in the sky. A shaft of sun turning a cobweb to a string-art creation of light. Then, five shots of a vivid mountain sunset, the sun lower in the sky with each click of the shutter.

The outdoor photos captured the mountains in the grip of winter. No green but the pines. Some were taken on sunny days, others on overcast days. Most of them had a morning look, somehow.

“You’re a very good photographer, Miranda.”

“Thank you.”

The next-to-last photo was a vista of the Blue Ridge, shrouded in fog. It might have been taken from the cliffs. The final shot was a blurry image of straw-colored weeds.

He held those two side by side. The faraway mountains in one; the weeds in the other. “Do you remember taking that last shot of the mountains?”

“Yes, I do, and I remember getting dizzy.”

“Then you fell.”

“And that was the end of poor Jezebel.”

“You’re the funny one, Miranda. You’re more interested in the camera’s fate than in your own. That fall could have killed you, you know.”

“But it didn’t. So that’s that.”

“Thank God. But why were you out walking so early in the morning?”

She kept her head down, hiding her expression, but he could tell from her voice that she’d stopped smiling. “I was praying.”

“And you were praying about—?”

“You are incredibly nosy.” She squeezed his hand so swiftly that he might have imagined it. “But you have a good heart.”

“Sometimes.”

With her battered fingers, she picked up the last picture and studied it in silence. Not that there was much to see, as far as Jack could tell. Weeds, out of focus and blurred with movement.

“Jack?”

“Yes ma’am?”

She’d tilted her head again to look up at him. The connection was downright scary.

“Why didn’t you tell me Mason came by while I was in the hospital?” she asked.

Jack looked away. He shrugged, the movement making his shoulder bump
hers. “I saw no need to tell you. Is that what’s been bothering you? Something about Mason?”

She dropped the photo on the top of the stack in his hand and edged away from him, making him feel that she’d built an invisible box around herself, shutting him out.

“I see no need to tell you,” she said, and that told him more than she’d probably intended.