A Rose Revealed (3 page)

I saw Sophie’s smiling face, full of excitement over her foray into the real world.

I saw Ammon’s kind face as he helped his mother with the seatbelt.

Then the image jumped, and I saw my mother’s ravaged face, my father’s terrified face, Rhoda’s dead face. The ache in my chest expanded until I could barely breathe.

Oh, God, help me! I don’t want Rhoda to be dead! I don’t want Sophie to be dead! Or Ammon! Please! Oh, God! Please!

A sharp rap on the driver’s side window made me jump, and a small scream erupted like a little verbal geyser. I spun and saw a dark figure looming in the night, the shape blurry through the condensation formed on the window by my weeping and harsh, heavy breathing.

I was too emotionally drained to feel fear though I wondered resentfully just who was insensitive enough to bother me while I felt like this.

“Roll down the window,” a man requested, his voice made hollow by the glass between us.

I was so depleted with my personal agony that I couldn’t respond. All I could do was stare. Tears still streamed down my face, and the relentless pounding in my head continued unabated, but I didn’t seem to be shaking any more, a fact that gave me a strange, foolish pride.

“Open the window!” the voice said, this time an order, courteous but implacable.

He spoke with such quiet authority that I struggled to obey with hands so uncoordinated that I could barely push the little button on the door panel. After long moments I managed to lower the window a couple of inches.

“What?” I asked in a thready whisper. I began to yearn desperately for a tissue, for several tissues, for a box of tissues as tears dripped off my chin onto my chest. I grabbed the edge of my cardigan and wiped ineffectually across my face.

The man leaned over and peered at me. He wore a broad-brimmed black hat but no beard. “What are you doing here?” he asked, not unkindly.

Now there was a foolish question, I thought.

“Crying,” I said and sniffed. I lowered my head to my hands that again rested on the steering wheel. It was too great an effort to hold myself upright. “Crying.”

Suddenly a flashlight was shining on me, or rather on the top of my head and what little of my face wasn’t blocked by my arms.

“Rose?” The man’s voice was hesitant, disbelieving.

I nodded without lifting my head.

“Is that you, Rose?”

Now I recognized the voice of Elam Zook. I was parked in his driveway, or rather that of his father, John. Elam and John, staunch and upright Amishmen, worked the family farm together.

I leaned wearily back against the headrest and looked toward the partially opened window, blinking in the glare. “Hi, Elam.” I barely made a sound in spite of the great effort the words took.

“Rose!” he said in horror.

Well, now I knew what I looked like.

“
Iss die
Rose?” another male voice asked, and John Zook peered in the window at me. “
Ach
, look at her!” He was highly distressed.

“Hi, John,” I managed. “I’m—” I swallowed against the constriction in my throat. “I’m just borrowing your driveway for a few minutes. I won’t be long.” I tried to sound as if it was an everyday occurrence that I drove into driveways, parked with my motor running and my lights on, and sobbed my heart out.

“Rose.” A third voice was both stern and concerned.

I looked as John moved aside and Jake rolled up to the window in his wheelchair, his trusty German shepherd, Hawk, at his side. I smiled, or at least I tried to. I always smiled at Jake, prickly, handsome, marvelous Jake.

He looked at me, skewered in the stark light his brother held to my face, and muttered something harsh under his breath. “Lower this window,” he ordered.

I didn’t move.

“Rose,” he growled. “Lower the window all the way.”

I nodded but still didn’t move.

Jake made a disgruntled noise and grabbed the door handle. He pulled. Nothing happened. “Unlock the door, Rose. Now.”

What a good idea, I thought, but what came out in a weak, quavering voice was, “Stop yelling at me.”

“Rose.” His voice was full of exasperation and warning.

“Right,” I said, looking at the door. It seemed miles away, but I wanted to make Jake happy. I always wanted to make Jake happy. I studied the buttons, trying to decide which one was the door lock. With great resolve, I reached and pushed. The window slid all the way down.

I sighed and smiled weakly. “Sorry,” was all I could manage as two big tears slid down my cheeks.

Jake looked at me and shook his head. I couldn’t tell if it was in pity or exasperation. He reached inside the car, pushed the right button to release the lock, and pulled my door open. He maneuvered around it and wheeled his chair right to the edge of my seat.

“Rose.” He studied me for a long minute.

“Hi,” I whispered, rolling my head toward him and trying to smile. Without warning my voice broke off in a great sob. I felt myself begin to shake again.

“I’m s-sorry. I’m s-sorry!” And I shook harder. “You’re so brave and I’m—”

“Rosie!” The distress in his voice washed over me like a soothing balm, but I couldn’t stop the tremors or the tears.

He reached across me to where my hands lay limply in my lap. He grasped them, held them between his palms, and rubbed until they felt warm for the first time in hours. Then he grabbed my wrists and pulled.

“What?” I mumbled as I automatically pulled back.

“Come here,” he said as he continued to tug.

I hadn’t the strength to fight him. I let him draw me out of the car and into his lap.

“Jake! I can’t sit on you! I’ll hurt you!” I tried to pull away.

“A little thing like you?” he said. “Never.” He put a hand on my waist and held me in place. Hawk put his head on my knee.

“But your legs!”

“They can’t feel you, Rose. Don’t worry.”

So I sat stiffly on his knees with my tear-ravaged face, my wild woman hair, and a bad case of the hiccups I’d gotten from all the crying. Elam continued to shine the flashlight on me. I put my hands to my face to block both the light and Jake’s view of me. I wasn’t surprised to feel tears slide between my fingers. At the rate I was weeping, I’d be suffering from dehydration momentarily.

Jake pulled my hands from my face and held them again in his strong ones.

“Tell me, Rose. Tell me what’s wrong.”

“Oh, Jake,” I said miserably. “It was awf…I s-saw…” I couldn’t articulate a complete sentence. I took a deep breath. “Sophie and Ammon. And the lights! The static!”

He put a hand under my chin and turned me to face him. He looked at me like what I had said made sense.

“If it’s got you this upset, it must have been rough,” he said, reaching out to push my hair off my face. For the first time he noticed the abrasion on my forehead.

“Rosie!” He ran a finger softly over my skin, being careful not to touch the injury itself. “What happened? Did you fall? Or have an accident?”

“No,” I answered the last question. It was too difficult and too confusing to remember everything he asked. I was too tired. “I didn’t have an accident.”

The flashlight beam moved off of me, and Elam, John, and Hawk began a careful tour of my car, looking for dings and collapsed fenders.

“I didn’t,” I protested weakly.

“I don’t see anything,” Elam said when they completed their circuit.

John nodded agreement. “The car’s fine.”

“I told you,” I said, irritated that they hadn’t taken my word.

“Then what, Rose?” Jake’s voice was so gentle. If I weren’t already crying, I’d have burst into tears at his concern.

My feelings for this man were so complicated, yet so fierce. I’d known him for two years, ever since the night he was nearly killed outside my mother’s home in Honey Brook, the night his motorcycle skidded on wet leaves and landed on his back, leaving him a paraplegic. I had sat with him in the street in the pouring rain that night while we waited for the medevac helicopter to arrive to transport him to the hospital. I’d felt his failing vital signs and watched the emergency techs shake their heads. I’d thought he died. I’d even planted a little cross by the site of his accident as a memorial.

It was a year before I learned he was alive. I met Kristie Matthews, who boarded here at the farm, and she told me he had survived. I took down my little cross, but almost another year passed before I actually met the man. When his mother took a terrible fall on the cellar stairs during the summer, I’d been on the emergency crew that took Mary to the hospital. Then I’d been the home health nurse assigned to her care when she returned to the farm.

Often on my visits to Mary, I talked with Jake, lingering after I should have left for my next case. I enjoyed our conversations and apparently so did he. He made it a point to be around when I had a visit scheduled. We talked about everything from his parents’ strict faith to why I liked being a nurse to how his life had changed in the past two years.

After my official visits to Mary ended, I stopped by unannounced two more times, ostensibly to check on her but really to talk with Jake. He’d been home one time and we’d talked for an hour. He was absent the next time, and I was appalled at the disappointment I felt at missing him. I knew I couldn’t stop again unless he specifically invited me. Otherwise I was setting myself up for heartbreak.

Jake called me after that second visit, saying Mary told him I’d dropped by. His voice on the phone made my mouth go dry and my palms sweat. Since then he called at infrequent intervals, always surprising me, always getting the same physical reaction, not that he knew. We talked every time for an hour or two. But he never mentioned meeting or my coming to the farm or his coming to my place. Just friends talking.

Only it always felt like more. Or maybe, more accurately,
almost
more.

One thing I’d never told Jake was that Rose, the home health nurse, was the same woman as Rose who sat in the street with him. He didn’t want to meet the latter, a matter of pride as far as I could discern. Rose in the street had seen him at his worst, his most vulnerable. As a man who liked to be in control, he found it bad enough to be confined to a wheelchair. To be reminded of the night his world had collapsed was more than he could handle.

So I’d never told him that I was Rose from the street. In all our conversations about life and death and God and salvation, I’d never told him. Someday I would, when the circumstances were right. It certainly wasn’t my intent to be less than truthful with him. After all, I was a woman who prided herself in being honest. Soon, I always told myself. Soon.

Now as I sat in his lap, I was thinking only about the comfort he was to me. If I couldn’t cope with the memories that plagued me, he would handle them for me. He would take my pain and transfer it to his strong shoulders, barely bending under the load that was driving me into the ground. Against all reason I knew Jake could fix my troubles. I didn’t understand how he could do something that monumental. I just knew he could.

If he wanted to.

The problem was that he’d never shown in the slightest fashion that he wanted to do anything as personal as cope on my behalf. He never showed he wanted to be anything more than my casual friend, just like Elam and the rest of the Zooks. It was in my dreams that he was interested in being God’s man for me, not in real life. In real life he wasn’t even interested in being God’s man, let alone God’s man for me.

“What happened?” he repeated softly, studying the edema on my forehead in the renewed blaze of the flashlight.

“I fell,” I said. “When the second explosion came, I fell and hit my head on the step.”

“The second explosion?”

I nodded. “The first one just knocked me down. It didn’t hurt me, really it didn’t, but it didn’t do the impatiens any good.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, just like he understood what I was talking about. “And that’s why you’re crying? It hurts? Did you see the doctor about it?”

The man has to stop with these multiple questions, I thought as I reached up and felt the knot gingerly. I shook my head ever so slightly. As pain shot through my temples, I winced, stilled, and forced myself to say, “No.”

“No, what? No, it doesn’t hurt? No, you didn’t see a doctor? No, you’re not crying because you hit your head?“

“No,” I said. “I mean yes, it hurts, and no, I didn’t see a doctor. An EMT treated me. Can’t you see the disinfectant he painted me with?”

“I thought maybe you treated yourself.”

“I’d never paint myself orange.”

“And that’s why you’re crying?” There was a slight smile in his voice. “You don’t want to be orange?”

I tried to frown at him, but my orange forehead wouldn’t pucker well. “That’s not why I’m crying and you know it.”

“So why?” he prompted when I fell silent. His voice was a shade less patient. “Because you fell?”

“No.” I shut my eyes against the glare of the flashlight still shining in my face. I knew I was frustrating him with my inability to get the story out. I took a deep breath. I could tell this. I could. But for some reason, I couldn’t.

“You’re crying because of the second explosion?”

“No.”

“Because of the first explosion.”

“No.”

“Were you on an emergency call?”

“No.”

There was a short silence. I could almost feel Jake looking at Elam and John for help. And I could swear I heard both of them shrug.

“Come on, Rose,” Jake said, a faint edge to his voice. “Help me out here.”

“The light,” I said.

“You’re crying because of the light?”

“No,” I whispered. “Make them turn it off.”

Immediately the light slid away from my face though it didn’t go out.

“I’m sorry, Rose,” Elam said. “I should have thought.”

“It’s okay.” I looked at Jake beseechingly.

“Father, Elam,” Jake said without taking his eyes from me. “Why don’t you two go inside?”

That’s the way it often was between Jake and me. We understood each other on some wordless level. In the long conversations we had after I treated Mary, we often disagreed, but we also often finished each other’s sentences. Tonight somehow he knew I wanted to talk to him alone.