Every Last Cuckoo (30 page)

“Go on, Roger,” she whispered. “I'll take care of him.”

He moved to the top of the stairs and started down silently, taking a last look at Andrew and Sarah before gathering himself and descending swiftly, soundless as a cat for all his size. Sarah waited a beat or two and followed. By the time she reached the bottom, Roger had turned into the foyer and its shadows. By the time she got there herself, he had slipped through the door and down the porch stairs, into the moonless night. She sent a prayer after him.
Let him do what's right.

Adrenaline ebbed in a dizzying rush. Weak in the knees, her heart pounding and skipping, Sarah found Andrew heavy as stone for the few steps to the great room. No one even heard her coming. Josie, Sandy, and Jordan were cheering the arrival of the plane that would carry the stranded old women to safety. Their heroism was out in the open, their fears of death now small beside it.

The young women were astounded, therefore, when Sarah staggered up to Josie, plunked the still sleeping Andrew into her lap, and fell to the floor. She knew she was about to fall, but she lost all sensation before she hit. Her arm knocked the coffee table as she went down. Tea soared in a sparkling river through the air.

S
ARAH'S THREE CHILDREN SAT
at her bedside. She could hear them talking in low voices but couldn't see them. She couldn't open her eyes. “Where,” she croaked, and went under again.

M
ORDECHAI CAME, AND
S
ARAH
could finally see. “Andrew.” She whispered.

“Andrew is fine, Sarah. So is everyone else.” He held her hand. “You are a hero.”

“No,” she said.

“Yes,” he insisted.

“No, just one . . . old . . . one.”

“Exactly the right one.”

A
T LAST
S
ARAH LEARNED
how things had unwound. The others knew only the version that Sarah and Roger had agreed on, because he had told it to the police exactly as Sarah had laid it out in Andrew's room.

Mordechai, however, sensed that there was more to the story. Sitting beside Sarah's bed with David and Charlotte, he grinned at her and said, “I think you held a peace conference, Sarah.”

She rolled her eyes. “Tell me everything.” So they did.

Roger couldn't remember how he had finally discovered Josie's whereabouts. Someone he knew had told someone he knew. All of Vermont was a village.

The night he'd meant to kidnap Andrew—rather, as he told it, the night he had needed so badly to see his son—Roger had entered the house well acquainted with its layout. He'd circled the perimeter night after night to get the floor plan down, always waiting until the dogs had taken their final constitutional in the dark. This time he left the dogs a late feast of raw meat laced with sleeping pills. Then he waited, knowing just who was home and who was out, knowing that Josie and the others were in the great room with the television on. He came in through the mudroom and the kitchen and moved silently down the hallway, hugging the shadowed wall opposite the great room. It was easy, then, to glide up the stairs to Andrew's room.

After Sarah's collapse, Jordan screamed for Mordechai, and Sandy called 911. Andrew woke and cried, and Josie strode up and down the room, jouncing him and fearing for Sarah. No one had any idea what had just happened upstairs. They knew only that Sarah had blacked out.

The EMTs spent an hour stabilizing her before taking her to the hospital in Barre, and in that time the police arrived, to the astonishment of the others. Roger was in custody and had told his story. The police wanted to question Sarah but had to settle for calming everyone down and piecing things together with them.

As Sarah would learn days later, the police had not believed Roger's version of the night's events, not with his history of violence and flight. They confided their doubts to Mordechai, who shared them and eventually laid them before Sarah. Knowing she could trust him, she finally told him everything and found relief in the true tale. But she would not tell the police.

Now Mordechai said, “When I found out what Roger had done, that he had put you in danger—I wanted to kill him, Sarah. I was suddenly an Israeli soldier again.”

Sarah smiled. “Well, Mordechai, you're only human. You really need to get used to that.”

Pushing herself higher in bed, she marveled that Roger really had turned himself in. She had said nothing to the police about the gun, which she would retrieve from the mattress, and somehow dispose of, the minute she got home. She meant for no one except Mordechai to know how dire the situation had been. Even Sarah didn't know for sure. Maybe Roger would never have used that gun at all; maybe he only meant to hold Josie and the others at bay while he took Andrew away.

Charlotte gestured at banks of flowers in Sarah's hospital room. “Rose and Josie sent at least half of these. Rose is nearly hysterical with relief.” She rolled her eyes, adding, “Rose is nearly hysterical all the time, isn't she.”

“Those are from Jordan,” Mordechai said, pointing to a pot of lilies. “She took up a collection at school, so, really, they're from all of her friends, too. Angelo and his parents sent those roses, over there. Two dozen roses!”

“Yellow,” smiled Sarah, gazing at the huge bouquet. “Beautiful.” She fell back against her pillows, weak with relief and exhaustion. “Everyone's okay,” she breathed.

Mordechai asked, “Don't you want to know about you?”

“What about me? I fainted, right?”

David explained, “It was a little more than that, Mom. Your heart started fibrillating. You were fighting for breath. Mordechai did CPR until the EMTs got there, but you scared the bejeezus out of everybody. You need to stay here for a day or two of tests.”

Sarah shot a grateful look at Mordechai but dismissed David's concern. “It wasn't an actual heart attack, then, was it.”

“No,” he grinned. “It wasn't. You're a tough cookie, Mom.”

“So, what else?”

Tyler had slept through everything in the room off the kitchen, which Roger had stealthily passed. Tyler asked about Sarah all the time.

Sarah closed her eyes. “Sandy?”

David shook his head. “Bob doesn't have long. She's having a hard time but trying not to show it. She's torn between grief over Bob and delight that you're safe. She's comforting Tyler, taking care of the house, putting the garden to bed. She planted about a thousand daffodils down by the cabin and the pond. Good thing the ground's not frozen yet.”

A field of yellow dazzled through Sarah's mind. Suddenly, though relieved and happy, she could take no more news or company. She pushed the button to lower the head of her bed. “Sorry,” she said. “Need sleep.” Charlotte stood at the end of the bed. David kissed Sarah, and Mordechai touched her cheek. Then they left, promising to return in the morning.

T
WO DAYS LATER
, Sarah packed her belongings and waited for Mordechai to pick her up and take her home. She
was warned to avoid stress, and even to stay away from her trails and garden for a while.

She puzzled over Mordechai's remark about a peace conference. That's not how either Roger or Sarah was telling the story, and yet it was true. Sarah was old and weak but not dead. She had kept the seam of life intact. It might have turned out differently, but it had not.

Mordechai arrived just as Sarah was zipping her small suitcase and wondering who had packed it on the night she'd been brought in. She turned to him happily, then saw his face.

He took Sarah's hand. “Bob died last night. Sandy got the call around eleven.”

Sarah clutched Mordechai's hand, tears in her eyes. They had known this was coming. Bob had grown weaker every day. He had stopped speaking to Sandy when she visited, turning his face away. Sandy was no longer hurt by this. She didn't support his unspoken decision to die, but she understood it, finally. He was who he was, and he clung to that.

A
WEEK LATER
, Thanksgiving came and went. Angelo joined his parents for the day, and Josie and Andrew celebrated with Rose, but everyone else gathered at Charlotte's. Sarah, Charlotte, Tom, Lottie, Luke, Jordan, Mordechai, Sandy, and Tyler sat around the table. Peter, Vivi, and Jonathan joined them. They were all a little subdued, still shaken by Bob's death and Sarah's collapse, but thankful for blessings beyond measure.

Then it was nearly Christmas. Another holiday loomed without Charles. Sarah missed him, as she always did, but not more, because more was not possible. Twice he had come smiling and proud to her hospital bed, in dream or some other realm, but
he had said nothing. Since then, Sarah talked to him often, his presence surrounding her like air.

Life would not hold still, even in Sarah's old age. It was never just one thing, whole and comprehensible. It was a tapestry, yet so fluid its strands might as well be water. The picture was never the same twice, any more than Sarah's view of the mountains or meadow was the same two days in a row. No joys were pure; they all partook of sorrow. No sorrows lacked joy.

Some of this Sarah learned from Sandy in the days after Bob's death. Sandy had taken the news in full, mourning it while accepting it and being glad that he was out of pain. None of it seemed more than she could handle, though she wept often, allowing Tyler to see her weep. “We need to cry,” she told him, “so your Daddy will know how much we love him. But we can't cry forever, or he will be terribly sad.”

Tyler cried a great deal at first, nearly bursting with grief. He was too young to understand the monumental events in his life. He and Sandy had moved back into their room upstairs, at Josie's insistence, and Sandy let him sleep with her every night, instead of on the narrow daybed. She let him cry and pound the bed in anguish, she let him ask her the same questions ceaselessly. Their conversations became storylike, almost liturgical.

“Why did we have to have a fire?”

“I don't know, honey. Bad things happen.”

“Why are bad things so big?”

“Maybe all our bad things just came one after another.”

“Is Daddy in heaven?”

“Maybe. I don't know what the place is called, but he's safe there.”

The questions came steadily for a week, and then Tyler
stopped asking. He went back to Angelo, and Angelo's brand of story. He started feeding the cats again. He spent time with Mordechai and watched videos with Lottie and Jordan, who had an appetite for animated films as great as Tyler's own. It seemed he still pondered his father's death at moments when his eyes would fix on midair, and he would sit motionless until something else captured his attention. But he had already lived without Bob for five months and had settled into Sarah's large, busy household like a cuckoo in a nest of warblers.

Most of those who lived at Sarah's were cuckoos. Sarah and Lottie were the only birds native to the nest, and they were outnumbered seven to two, though soon the numbers would change. Sandy and Josie were going to look for jobs and a house to share. With Bob's life insurance and Rose's help, they would probably move soon. Sarah's house would echo with their absence, even with all three teenagers still there. But it would fill up again.

Molly was convalescing from knee surgery. She would stay with a nephew over Christmas and then move into Sarah's old office. She didn't need nursing. She just needed people around until she healed well enough to cook for herself and drive again. Her only condition for moving in was that she pay Sarah generously. When Sarah protested, Molly confided that she was “rich as a coot,” though she was mum about the source of her wealth. For all Sarah knew, the old renegade grew marijuana for profit. Molly was certainly sold on its medicinal virtues, and Sarah could perfectly well see her branching out from her sales of legal tinctures and oils. She would never sell to kids, but there could be quite a market among seniors.

Other people needed temporary shelter, too. Adelaide had
asked whether a young gay couple from New York could stay with Sarah while they went house hunting in Montpelier. Another friend, who worked for the state, had called to find out whether Sarah might briefly accommodate a retired couple who had to evacuate while the housing authority removed the lead-based paint in their house. If Sarah agreed, the state would surely call on her again.

Not every boarder would become family. Sarah had been lucky with her first batch. Others might be demanding or rude, but that kind would come and go quickly. Sarah needn't live with people she didn't like, but she did need to offer a stopover. It was the least she could do. It was what her parents had done, and what Charles had done in a different way, each time he took barter for medical services. Now it was Sarah's turn, and someday, she hoped, it would be her children's turn, and then her grandchildren's.

C
HRISTMAS SAW THE
house overflowing. Stephie and Jake came three days before the holiday. Paul and William showed up next, with sleeping bags that Mordechai invited them to spread on the couches in the cabin. David, Tess, and Hannah drove up with Charlie, born two weeks early but thriving. He was a peaceful baby, a good sleeper, born to breastfeed. David's family, made whole and coherent by wee Charlie, took over Charles's old office, where they set up a cot for Hannah and a portable crib for the baby. Tess and David had married at Thanksgiving at Tess's parents' house with no officiating clergy. The two recited their vows directly to each other, using traditional Quaker language. Then they sat down to dinner with twenty-seven of Tess's relatives. David had both invited and
excused his own family. Sarah had been advised against traveling in any case. Christmas would be their celebration.

Jordan was staying through all of Christmas, too. She had established contact with her brother and sister, whom she met faithfully at least once a week. She had bought gifts for them and also for Lorraine, who was distant but seemed no longer hostile.