In Search of Eden (22 page)

He wasn't in the mood to answer questions, so he just unloaded the bike, then held up a hand in good-bye. He looked in the rearview mirror and saw his mother holding Eden's hand in an iron grip.

He didn't go back to the office, though. Not yet. Instead, he drove slowly back the way he'd come and parked the car in the same spot he had a few moments before. He followed the tracks again, only this time he went past the blackberry thicket to the edge of the woods. Here he could clearly see two sets of prints heading in and two out. Until right here. Then there was another set going back in alone. Whoever Mr. or Miss Hiking Boot was, he or she had walked this far back with Eden, then turned back. Those solitary tracks were wider spaced with deep heel marks and scrapes by the toe as the foot left the ground. He'd been running away, back into the woods.

Joseph followed the tracks for about a quarter of a mile. They turned at the edge of the woods, and he was in another field. The land belonged to Amos Schwartz, he thought, but he didn't think Amos, a simple Amish farmer, would have been renting out camping spots. He saw tire tracks of a truck and trailer, drag marks and crushed grass from where camp had been broken down. But he didn't need to be a tracker to know someone had been here. There was a circle where the grass had been scraped away and a fire laid. Dirt had been thrown over it, but the logs were still smoking.

He drove the long way around to Amos's place and saw Amos himself plowing his far pasture with a mule. Joseph waved and walked to meet him.

“Hello, Lieutenant Williams.” Amos took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt. Like most Amishmen, he wore a beard but no mustache. “What brings you here?”

“Your land up there?” Joseph asked, gesturing toward the hilltop.

Amos nodded in the affirmative.

“Anyone camping?”

“Not to my knowledge,” Amos answered. “Is there trouble?”

“I don't know,” Joseph said. “Somebody's been there, but they're gone now.”

Amos tilted his head, considering. “Maybe Travelers,” he said, speaking aloud Joseph's own thoughts.

“Maybe,” Joseph answered. He thanked Amos and walked back to his car. The whole matter was strange and came too close on the heels of the Traveler scam for his comfort. The woman he had ticketed came to his mind. The name on the registration had been Cooper. It was Irish, wasn't it? True, he was more familiar with the standard Traveler surnames, but not all of them were Sherlocks and Gormans. Plus, the driver's license had a different name and was new, showing no wear at all, just as you might expect if she'd pulled it out of a box of different possible identities. She hadn't looked like a con woman, but then again, that was the point, wasn't it? If they looked like criminals, no one would trust them. Besides, he had heard some of the Travelers were recruiting their women to run their scams. He ran it all over in his mind and drove back into town, keeping an eye out for the silver Cadillac.

chapter
22

S
arah watched her husband struggle with the simple act of moving from his bed to his power wheelchair and asked herself the question that had been on her mind and she knew was on David's mind, as well, whether he spoke it or not.
Will he walk again?

The spinal cord had not been severed. David had sensation— translation, pain—in his legs, but the muscle and nerve damage had been severe. Now that it was less probable that David would die, the question of whether he would walk again was the dragon curled in the center of the room, fixing her with its beady stare, threatening to finish off fragile hope with a flick of its tail.

Everything felt overwhelming, the future a scarred patchwork of fears and anxieties. First she had feared he would die. Now she feared everything else.

She was afraid about money. The insurance companies were haggling, and there was no income. She, who had never even paid the bills, had taken out a home equity loan on the house and used it to make the payments, but that plate wouldn't keep spinning forever.

She was afraid about Eden. She felt guilt every time she spoke
to her daughter. In fact, in these weeks of aloneness—for she was alone even with David—she had relived each one of the mistakes she had made with her daughter. She worried that Eden was irreparably scarred by them. She began to believe there was a reason she had not been entrusted with a child.

She was afraid for the future. She could barely manage her life as it was now, getting up in the small apartment the hospital had rented to her, making herself toast and coffee, then walking over to be at David's room by seven when the doctors made their rounds. Then another day of treatments and therapies would begin, and the agonizingly slow recovery continued. It had been four months almost to the day since David had his accident. They had warned her to expect six to nine months of hospitalization.

Watching him struggle made her afraid. And that was, perhaps, the deepest fear of all. From the time she'd first met him, it had felt as if he was the missing half of her heart. She was whole with him. It seemed so wrong that he should be helpless. He was the helper of the helpless, was he not? He was the one who made sense of life, who kept her sane. Without that help she was just as broken as he was. The doctors and nurses had begun strongly encouraging her to take over some of David's care. She tried, but she hated touching his wounds, and he seemed to hate it, as well.

She pretended to look out the window, watching sidelong as David struggled to make the eighteen-inch journey along the transfer board from the bed to the chair. His knuckles were white as he gripped the triangular trapeze bar and swung himself over. He dropped the bar and had to stop midway in an uncomfortable position. His face grimaced in pain, and Sarah moved to help him, earning a frown and a dismissive gesture from the physical therapy aide.

“Come on. You can do it.” The aide stood with hands at his side while David sweated and strained.

Sarah felt a flush of shame as she turned and left the room.

One of the nurses had spoken sharply to her yesterday. “This is his battle,” the woman had said to her, taking her aside out in
the hall. “You can't do it for him, but he needs your support. His future depends on becoming independent. He needs your encouragement. Your pity isn't going to help him.” Sarah had blinked back tears and nodded meekly.

She looked out the double-glazed windows to the hospital grounds. It was an unseasonably warm day, and although the grass was still winter brown, there were people outside without coats and jackets. Someone was delivering flowers. A woman shepherded three children into a van. She watched, amazed that the lives of people below could go on so normally in the shadow of this place of tears and wounds.

She thought of Eden, as she did many times each day, and felt the usual piercing guilt. After David's accident, she had felt as if they'd all been treading water in a rough sea, the wreckage of the boats all around them. She'd seen Eden hanging on to a piece of drifting wood and David with his head underwater. She had chosen her husband and stowed her daughter in what she hoped was a safe place. Perhaps she had made a mistake, since she didn't seem to be doing either of them much good.

She thought of her mother-in-law. Oh, how she wished Ruth were here. There was something about the older woman's sound common sense that Sarah longed for. Leaning her head on that willing shoulder and resting for a moment would be pure bliss. In fact, they had discussed Ruth's coming here to stay and having Eden come with her, but Sarah knew how Eden was, and now Ruth was finding out, too. The thought of Eden running unsupervised through Minneapolis gave Sarah a shudder. Better for her to be in Abingdon, where it was safe. Where Joseph would keep her safe as he had promised. She thought of Joseph briefly and still felt the guilt of that betrayal. He was a good man, but he had expected her to be more than she was. He had been unwilling to see her in her weakness. And when she had shown it, he had not been able to forgive it.

Sarah called Eden every day and talked briefly to her and then put David on the telephone. Eden seemed a little flat, a little
angry, and answered questions with monosyllables, rarely volunteering any information. Ruth always assured her that Eden was fine and seemed happy most of the time. She would have to leave it at that. Sarah took a few deep breaths and walked back into David's room. He had successfully completed his transfer and was sitting in his power chair, his untouched lunch tray on the table before him. She forced a smile and approached him.

“You made it,” she said cheerily, and he turned an equally false face to her. His smile didn't quite reach his eyes.

“I'm getting there. I'll be racing around in no time.”

She smiled back, then they lapsed into silence.

“When did Warren say to expect him?” David asked.

“He said his plane would get in around two, and he would come straight from the airport.”

David nodded and Sarah could see the tension on his face. Although David's agent had assured him the visit was purely friendly, she knew David felt the pressure of his unfinished manuscript. There was only one chapter left, but now, who could even think about stringing words together when the body was so broken? Besides, she thought of the message of the book: God could heal a wounded heart. It was a book he needed to read right now rather than write.

But then there was the small matter of the advance, already spent, the due date long past, the publication date fast approaching. There had been no pressure from the publisher. Just a gentle question. Will you write again? Or should we remove the book from the schedule? She didn't know what he had answered and hadn't the heart to ask.

“Do you want your computer?” she asked, her voice hesitant.

“No, I don't want it,” he said, his tone almost distracted. “Not today.”

It was then that the thought came. It was pointed and aimed right at her heart. She thought of another question, different from the one that normally tormented her. And she knew that this one had to do with the fate of her husband's heart rather than his legs.
She knew it was the one she ought to be asking. Not will he walk. Instead, she wondered if he would ever laugh again. It had been that laugh that had drawn her to him. It was so full of life and joy, so full of his heart thrown out upon the world. He hadn't laughed in months. But even this she could not control.

chapter
23

D
ispirited, Eden picked up her backpack and slung it over her shoulder. She usually threw her books into her bag, hurried out the door as soon as the bell rang, and was waiting on the bus while most of the other kids were still hanging around. But today she couldn't think of a single reason to hurry. Or yesterday. Or the day before. She wouldn't be getting off at the police department and finding her bike chained to the rack, waiting for her. Her two-way radio wasn't stashed in the bottom of her book bag. Uncle Joseph had taken both of them away. She was on restriction.

“Behavior has consequences, Eden,”
Grandma had said, patting her on the back, but something about her voice made Eden think Grandma felt just as bad as she did.

“You play, you pay”
was all Uncle Joseph said, but he didn't look happy either when he told her she was restricted.
“You're on house arrest until Friday,”
he said.

So there was no reason to hurry home today. She would just shuffle down to the bus and get off on Main Street, where Grandma would be waiting for her. They would walk home together, and Grandma would have to stop at Aunt Vi's, who
really wasn't her aunt but acted like one, and the two old ladies would have coffee and cookies, and Eden would have milk and cookies because Grandma thought she was too young to drink coffee. And who knew what was happening without her to keep tabs on things? Why, just anybody might be sneaking into town, and Floyd at the bus station wouldn't know who to watch out for, and now she didn't have Elna to keep her posted about things going on in the Hasty Taste because she'd gone to her daughter's in Bristol to have her surgery. Pastor Hector had been having to run the food bank all by himself, and her notebook was totally empty, and she didn't even feel like writing any more detective stories. It just wasn't fair.

And she totally knew that if she had just told the truth about Grady Adair, she probably wouldn't be in trouble. But something about the panicky look in his eyes when he'd seen Uncle Joseph drive up and asked if he was a policeman had made her shut her mouth tight, and even though they'd asked her about it again,
“Where did you go? Who did you go with?”
she had just said,
“Nowhere”
and
“Nobody,”
and they had said,
“Fine, go to your room.”
So that's where she'd been.
Forever.
Staring at the walls and at all the dumb old toys that she didn't want to play with anymore. With nothing to do but homework. She wasn't even allowed to go to the library to use the Internet, so who knew how much e-mail she was missing?

At least at Aunt Vi's she was allowed to watch the television, only she always had it on a stupid kid's show when Eden came in. Eden waited until she and Grandma were busy talking, and then she changed it to
Guiding Light.
It was pretty interesting, actually. Yesterday a girl named Tammy brought this guy named Jonathan to this guy named Coop's party. But Coop turns out to be really mad about it—the party. Anyway, this lady named Ava likes him and is kissing him, but this woman named Lizzie butts in. Then Lizzie pushes Ava into an elevator and locks her inside, but later on in the party Ava escapes and pushes Lizzie's face into the birthday cake. That's when Grandma came in and turned it
off. Eden decided to watch again today and find out what happened after that.