When Sparrows Fall (6 page)

He turned to Timothy. “Gabe’s quite a handful.”

“His name is Gabriel.”

Nicknames were against their religion too? Jack kept his mouth shut, but he couldn’t help thinking of the changes he would make if the kids were his. Lord willing, they never would be. But he was responsible for their welfare. He had to know where each one slept, at least. If the house ever caught fire.…

He climbed the creaky, steep stairway. It was narrow, with a wobbly handrail. God only knew the condition of the electrical system and the furnace, if there was one, and he’d seen no sign of smoke alarms or carbon monoxide detectors.

He gained the second floor, half the size of the main floor and dimly lit by night lights. One of the bedrooms held two sets of bunk beds. In plaid pajamas, Michael and Gabriel huddled in the top bunks and argued softly with each other. Jonah was sound asleep in the bottom bunk on the left. Crowded close to the safety rail, he clutched a quilt to his chin. He was sucking his thumb, his mouth moving around it like fish lips.

“Good night, gentlemen,” Jack said quietly.

“G’night,” the archangels echoed in unison. They resumed their subdued argument without missing a beat.

The other bedroom held two twin-size four-posters, two dressers, and two school desks, all painted in pastel colors that glowed ghostly in the half light. Martha was sacked out, hugging the Seuss book he’d found in the grocery store down the street from Slades Creek’s little hospital. It was the closest thing to a bookstore that he’d found.

She smiled in her sleep.

Jack grinned, rocking back and forth on his heels. Martha was already a book addict like her worldly uncle. A taste of
Green Eggs and Ham
would be good medicine for a literalist.

In his brief conversation with Miranda’s attorney, Alexander Whitlow, Jack had learned that a guardian was required to abide by the parents’ religious convictions for the children but had some freedom to make choices about their education. He hadn’t asked Whitlow if a ban on Seuss would be called a religious conviction or an educational decision. It was a moot point anyway; Miranda’s authority hadn’t been transferred. Jack was simply Martha’s uncle who happened to pick up a book to entertain her while her mom recovered.

Whitlow had not revealed why Miranda had changed her will, nor who the previous guardian or guardians had been, if any. He’d cited client confidentiality.

As Jack reached the bottom of the stairs, Rebekah emerged from the downstairs bedroom, carrying a wicker laundry basket heaped with bedding.

She smiled timidly. “I put fresh sheets on the bed for you.” Her eyebrows wobbled up and down. “Uncle Jack,” she finished, her cheeks turning pink.

Her bashful use of the honorific—new to her, but sadly nostalgic to him—moved him. He hadn’t been an official uncle since his divorce cut him off, not only from Ava, but also from her sister’s kids, and it still hurt.

“Thanks, Rebekah. I can sleep on the couch though. You didn’t have to—”

“Oh, no. Take the bed,” she said, sounding like a grown hostess. “That’s what Mother would say.” She hurried away, shifting the laundry basket to her skinny hip.

No doubt Miranda wouldn’t want him anywhere near her bed, but he checked out the room. The high four-poster was spread with an intricately pieced quilt in shades of blue and green. A stiff, symmetrical swag of dried flowers hung on the wall, flanked by three little needlepoint pictures on each side. The frames were lined up with an inch separating each one from its neighbor. Miranda seemed fond of regularity and order, or maybe that was Carl’s influence.

Everywhere were family photos, some posed and some candid. Many of them were artsy black-and-whites with a photo-journalistic flair out of sync with the stiffness he saw elsewhere.

Rebekah may have been right about having no relatives, because Jack saw no photos of anyone but Carl, Miranda, and the children, and there weren’t many of Miranda. She must have been the official family photographer, behind the camera more often than in front of it.

Now her vintage Nikon was trash.

Now a man she didn’t know had taken charge of her children.

That explained the panic he’d seen in her eyes when she fought through the pain medication and connected with reality. Maybe she’d begun to question her crazy decision.

She might question it even more once she woke in her right mind, or in whatever passed for a right mind in her strange world. A world where children didn’t use computers or read fiction. Where they didn’t even know Dr. Seuss.

Tomorrow, Jack would enroll six young students in Normal American Life 101. He couldn’t stay long, but while he did, at least he could say he was homeschooling them.

four

M
iranda struggled out of a groggy sleep and recalled a man standing beside her bed. “It’s all right,” the stranger had said. “I’ll take care of the kids.”

No, not quite a stranger. Jack. Unless she’d dreamed him.

What was he doing in her bedroom?

She fingered the bedding. It was wrong. A fuzzy blanket instead of her soft quilt and smooth sheets. And her hand hurt.

Everything
hurt.

She fought to open her eyes. Her head drummed with a dull ache that was pierced by daggers when she made the slightest movement. She turned anyway and saw closed blinds on an unfamiliar wall. Everything kept spinning and thumping.

She closed her eyes. The throbbing continued. Desperate to know where she was, she turned slowly in the other direction before she opened her eyes again.

A pale blue curtain hung from the ceiling. A room divider.

A hospital room. That antiseptic smell. That quiet bustling.

Past hours came back in bits and pieces. Intense pain encasing her chest, her shoulder. Ice packs, bandages, IV lines.

A move from one room to another. A nurse who hummed and a roommate who snored.

A doctor who pried her eyelids open and mumbled at her.

Something rustled. The room divider swayed. A thin woman in a green shirt loomed over the bed, out of focus, and fiddled with the IV bag.

“You awake, hon?”

“I … I think so.”

The nurse smiled. “Maybe not, then. Do you remember what happened?”

Miranda lay still, trying to sort memory from nightmare, and nightmare from dream. “I fell?”

“You sure did. You’ve had a concussion, not to mention a collapsed lung and some broken ribs and a separated shoulder. Pretty impressive road rash too. Did you know that?”

“Not … exactly. Did I have a visitor?”

“I don’t know, hon. I’m working nights.”

“Yeah, you had a visitor.” A woman spoke from the other side of the divider. “A man. Dark hair. Good-lookin’.”

Jack? She hadn’t dreamed him. He had the children, then?

He would think she deserved to lose them. A good mother wouldn’t have left her children alone in the house. Not even for a prayer walk. But what had she been praying about?

She moved her head too quickly and cried out. The room spiraled, pressing in on her.

The nurse hovered near. “You have a button to push for your meds, whenever you need more.” Warm fingers took Miranda’s hand and guided it toward the side of the bed, then curled it around something cold and hard. “Like this, see? There, now. You’ll feel better soon.” The nurse lowered Miranda’s hand to the bed.

Lying motionless, she tried to think. Everything was fuzzy. And growing fuzzier. Now her bed was a boat, tilting and circling in a giant whirlpool. Nearly going under.

She was thankful for the numbness creeping up on her. But she mustn’t rely on
pharmakeia
. It was a false peace. It wasn’t peace at all.

Too late. The whirlpool spun faster, sucked her in, and spat her up in Abigail’s living room. Nicole was there, her dark eyes shining. She held a folded red sweater to her chest.

That’s Abigail’s sweater!
Miranda snatched it and ran.

You Jezebel
, Carl scolded.
Now you’re a thief too
.

You’re dead
, she told him.
Be quiet. I don’t have to obey you anymore
.

He faded away. She was drowning in the black hole again, trying to catch her babies in the cuddle-quilt as they fell from the sky. One … two … three.…

They fell from heaven, dodged earth, and raced through a lower sky toward hell. Something choked her scream into a weak bleat that traveled no further than her prayers.

Jack stumbled into the kitchen, rubbing his face awake. “O, I have passed a miserable night, so full of fearful dreams, of ugly sights, that, as I am a Christian faithful man …”

It was annoying, sometimes, the way his mind spouted Shakespeare at random moments.

Something about sliding between Miranda’s flowery sheets hadn’t set right with him, and he’d hardly slept. He’d kept imagining how his life might have changed if her fall had killed her.

One thing was certain. If anything ever happened to her now, he couldn’t put the children in foster care. Martha? Jonah? Unthinkable.

He couldn’t raise six orphans either.

Jack looked out the window at a dormant vegetable garden and an arbor
hung with brown, bare grapevines. Farther away, fog softened the outline of a wooden swing hanging from an oak that still bore last year’s caramel brown leaves. Three smaller oaks stood deeper in the fog. One broken limb hung straight down like a body at the end of a rope.

It was only Tuesday. Too early in the week for morbid thoughts. He turned away from the window.

Thankful that the local Kroger stocked everything necessary for the perfect cup of coffee, Jack poured beans just past the four-cup line in his brand-new grinder and hit the switch. An explosive racket shattered the quiet. Quickly, he lifted his finger from the switch.

No sounds of life came from upstairs. Thank God. He didn’t need half a dozen rug rats underfoot when he was hardly awake. But he couldn’t wake up without coffee.

He toyed with the desperate idea of pulverizing the beans with the marble mortar and pestle on the windowsill, then recognized the insanity of that notion. Grimacing at the noise, he hit the switch again. Nobody stirred, but he’d better start grinding the beans the night before.

While the coffee brewed in his new, no-frills coffee maker, he took a closer look at Miranda’s domain. The kitchen held a king-size fridge and a modern electric range. Sunshine, filtered through fog, sneaked into the room over plain white curtains that covered only the bottom half of the window.

The walls were warm, knot-holed planks, and her decorating taste ran toward cheerful yellows and greens. The door of the fridge held twelve pieces of artwork and penmanship practice, lined up in two neat columns that nearly reached the floor. Everything looked clean, orderly, and reasonably prosperous, but something was missing. He couldn’t put his finger on it.

Maybe it was the very orderliness of the room that bothered him. He preferred the irregular, off kilter, haphazard stuff of life. He liked, as Hopkins put it, all things counter, original, spare, strange.

Jack examined an ugly pink and purple ceramic plaque that hung above the stove. Clumsily painted pansies nearly eclipsed the florid lettering:

A wife who’s always neat and sweet

Makes her husband’s life a treat.

Jack rolled his eyes and turned his back on the monstrosity.

Soon he was at the table, drinking black coffee from a brown mug. With his eyes closed, he could almost fool himself into believing he was in his own kitchen—

“What’s a half person?”

Startled, he looked down at a sleepy face framed by messy pigtails. Martha wore a flannel nightgown, and she’d draped a small quilt around her shoulders like a faded red and blue shawl.

“Mornin’, Miss Martha.”

“Good morning,” she said in her precise way. She placed her elbows on the table and propped her chin in her hands. “How can there be a half person?”

He smiled at the glimpse into a four-year-old mind. “Like a half-brother?”

She nodded.

“I’m a whole person, but I’m only a half brother to your dad because we had the same father but not the same mother. Do you understand that?”

She scrutinized him as she mulled the concept. “No.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m ten times older than you are, and there are a lot of things I still don’t understand.”

She pointed to the cereal he’d unloaded on the counter the day before. “What’s in that blue box?”

“Frosted Flakes. Do you like Frosted Flakes?”

“What’s that?”

He nearly choked on his coffee. “It’s a kind of cereal. What do you usually have for breakfast?”

“Toast or hot oatmeal. Or hot buckwheat when Mama’s fasting because she doesn’t like it so then she isn’t tempted.”

“Fasting? Why does she fast?”

“Because she wants to hear God.” Martha’s tone implied that he was a big dummy for needing to ask. “That kind there, is it any good?”

“What a pessimist. Of course it’s good.” He searched for a bowl, finding the right cupboard on his third try, and fixed her a serving of Frosted Flakes.