Reflection (2 page)

Helen stared at the woman, then held out her hand. “Give me her number. I'm going to call her and tell her not to come.”

“She
wants
to come, Mrs. Huber. She was very sincere. Actually, she sounded enthusiastic, as if she'd been waiting for someone to suggest a way for her to spend the summer. When I told her you'd still be here for a few days, that we need to track down the cause of your vertigo and all, she said she would drive out instead of fly. She sounds like the adventurous type.”

“But she has a little boy to take care of,” Helen argued.

The social worker smiled. “That little boy is twenty years old and in college,” she said.

Helen was speechless. Her great-grandson was already in college?

The social worker patted her hand. “I know it must be hard for someone who's been so independent to accept help, but—”

“That's not it,” Helen interrupted her. “Just give me the number.”.

The woman reluctantly handed over a small piece of paper and, with a few words of advice on letting Rachel come, left the room.

Helen spent the evening trying to read, but it was hard to concentrate on her book with that scrap of paper resting on her bed table. Should she call Rachel, tell her it would be a mistake for her to come back to Reflection? But oh, how she wanted to see her granddaughter! What kind of person had Rachel grown up to be?

She picked up the piece of paper, studied it for a moment, then crumpled it in her hand. It might be selfish of her, but she would let her granddaughter come. She would let her think she needed her help. It would probably be a while before Rachel realized it was the other way around.

RACHEL SAT UP IN
the strange bed, eyes wide, heart knocking against her ribs. The footsteps were still there, that rapid-fire click, click, click of someone in a hurry, but they were fading into the distance outside her motel-room door.

She lay down again on the damp sheets. She was in West Virginia, she remembered. Somewhere near Charleston. She'd arrived late the night before and barely noticed the nondescript motel room before falling into bed. For three days she'd lost herself in audio books played on the car's tape player. For three days she'd kept herself from wondering whether she was making the right decision in going to Reflection. She had avoided thinking about her reasons for leaving that little town, but she knew those thoughts were scratching to be let in. The hurried footsteps had brought them back to her far too easily.

It had happened on a Monday, that much she could remember. She knew she'd spoken to the police afterward only because her parents told her she had. She'd had to whisper, her father said, because she'd screamed for so long and so hard after it happened that she had no voice left. The police couldn't understand some of her breathless answers, and they made her write them down on small sheets of paper.

She remembered those pieces of paper. They were square, pink. Odd how her mind chose to save one memory and discard another. For the most part, the memories didn't disturb her. She knew that they should, though. She had known that for a long time.

A town this small can't lose ten of its children in one fell swoop and go on unchanged
.

Who had said those words? Over the past two decades they had played in her mind, coming to her at weird moments. She might be leaning over a desk helping one of her students with math, or folding the laundry, or making love to Phil. She didn't know if the voice belonged to a man or a woman. Perhaps it had been one of the policemen or someone else whose path had crossed hers during those few terrible days. Or perhaps, her therapist had suggested, it was her own voice she was hearing.

She remembered the rapid clicking of her shoes on Spring Willow Elementary School's polished hall flooring as she raced toward her classroom. Sometimes even now, if she were rushing somewhere and heard that staccato rapping of her shoes, panic rose in her throat and she would have to slow down, change her pace, make the sound go away. When it was someone else's footsteps, though, she had no choice but to wait them out.

She didn't recall making the decision to go to her cousin Gail's in San Antonio after it happened. She knew from what her parents had told her that she herself had made the decision once Gail offered to take her in, but she had no idea what pros and cons she had weighed. Her mind had been numb, full of holes and blurry, dreamlike images that made no sense and carried no emotional weight. Was it fear that had driven her away from Reflection? She couldn't say. She had simply followed the advice of others blindly. It was all she'd had the strength to do.

Gail, who was seven years her senior, had insisted she be in therapy. Rachel couldn't remember the therapist's name or what she looked like, but she did remember some of the things the woman had said. For the first few sessions Rachel did nothing but cry. That was good, the therapist said. Let it all out. Rachel was ashamed to tell her that her tears were not for the children or even for her husband, Luke. Her tears were over Michael, the man she loved and would never be able to have.

“Ah,” said the therapist. “You're transferring your pain over Luke and the children to a smaller loss in order to make it more tolerable.” But the therapist was wrong.

Rachel didn't intentionally evade the therapist's many attempts to get her to talk about the children. She simply couldn't remember them. The students were a blur to her, and she knew she had to keep them that way. She couldn't bring herself to take too close a look at them, to remember details like a smile, or blue eyes, or scattered freckles across an upturned nose.

She wondered whether the therapist had been disgusted by her unwillingness to examine what had happened, or if she had understood then what Rachel was only coming to understand now, twenty-one years after the fact. She had tucked her memories of the children and Luke into a neat little box in her mind, to be opened only when she was ready to deal with what she might find inside.

And she was ready now, or she would have to be. The call from the social worker had shocked her at first. Go back to Reflection to take care of an old woman who was essentially a stranger to her? But the timing of the call was serendipitous. Phil was gone. Chris was home for the summer but thoroughly involved with his friends. She'd taken time off, intending to get herself back in shape, physically and emotionally, after this difficult year. She could do that as easily in Reflection as she could in San Antonio. And so she'd said, “Sure, I'll come,” responding with the same detached calm that always accompanied her thoughts of her hometown. It was as if she'd been expecting that phone call, waiting for someone to tell her it was time to go home.

She'd looked forward to the drive. It had been a while since she'd traveled on her own, and she found herself altering her route, intentionally getting lost, exploring places not on her itinerary. She'd brought her bicycle with her, and she took it off the bike rack a few times to ride through an intriguing town or speed along a path by the side of a river. She liked having time to think. Yesterday she'd come up with a way she could give something back to her hometown. She would contact the schools to see if she might be able to tutor students who needed extra help, on a strictly voluntary basis. The thought pleased her enormously, easing something inside her that had long needed easing.

It was quiet outside her motel room, and she got out of bed. This would be her last day on the road. She took a shower and dressed, then bought a newspaper in the motel's sundry shop before walking across the street to a restaurant. She ordered cereal and bananas, spreading the paper out on the table while she ate. She grimaced at the picture on the front page. Rwanda, again. The devastation in the refugee camps. Adults with empty eyes. Sick, starving children.

She had lived in Rwanda once, teaching in the Peace Corps in the early seventies. Even then the country had been in turmoil. She stared at the blank faces of the children. They could be the sons and daughters of children she had taught back then.

The cereal suddenly felt like rocks in her stomach, and she put away the front section of the paper in favor of the comics.

IT WAS ONE O'CLOCK
when she pulled her car off the road at the crest of Winter Hill, and for the first time she felt certain she'd made the right decision in coming. She was not the superstitious type, but when she'd reached the Pennsylvania border a few hours earlier, the classical station she was listening to played Peter Huber's
Patchwork
. It was her favorite of her grandfather's compositions, and it felt almost as if he were talking to her, winking at her the way he used to do when she was small, saying, “Welcome to your home state, Rachel.”

Everyone knew the story behind that particular piece of music. The idea had come to Grandpa one day when he was walking on Winter Hill and saw the patchwork of green-and-gold farmland spread out in front of him, as she was seeing it now, with the scrubbed little village of Reflection mirrored in the glassy waters of the pond.

Rachel doubted this view had been much different then. The barns and silos and farmhouses had been repaired and painted or in some cases replaced. But the three sky-touching churches had stood near the pond for a hundred years. The gray flagstone, the largest of the three, was the Lutheran church she had attended as a child. Across the street stood the Mennonite church, its white clapboard image perfectly re-created in the pond's mirror. She couldn't recall the denomination of the third church, the diminutive brick chapel, but from this distance at least it was as charming as the others. Reflection had been an old and crumbling little town even when Rachel was small, but from up here it was lovely, the sight of it comforting.

She'd been right to come. This would be a good summer. A healing summer.

In the distance, several miles west of town, the boxy shape of Spader Hospital rose out of the trees. Rachel looked at her watch. She had an hour before she was supposed to pick up her grandmother. She got back into her car and drove slowly down the hill toward the town where she'd grown up.

Passing a farmyard, she noticed that the laundry line stretching between the house and barn was hung with blue shirts and black pants. An Amish family had lived in that house for as long as she could remember. Still no electrical cables or telephone wires in sight. What had she expected? The Amish had endured in this area for two centuries, their way of life virtually unchanged. Had she thought they would succumb to modern times in the two decades she'd been gone?

She began her tour on Water Street, the blue-collar neighborhood in the southern part of town. The street seemed narrower than Rachel remembered it, almost claustrophobic, yet she felt buoyed by the sight of it. The houses hugged the curb, and the steps of their wooden porches sagged, but for the most part they were well kept and freshly painted. Flowers and shrubs grew in every tiny exposed patch of earth between the buildings and the street. Many of the houses were duplexes. But there was one lone triplex, she knew, a few blocks closer to the center of town.

She almost missed it. Someone had painted it robin's-egg blue, and she found she couldn't quite remember what color it had been when it was her home. Something neutral—beige or white or gray. The blue was outrageous, but she liked it. She parked her car across the street and studied the building. The two doors on the left were close together; the third was set apart. Fitting. She'd never thought of that before. The first door had belonged to her family, the second to Luke's. Her parents had moved into the building within days of Luke's parents, and pregnant Inge Huber and pregnant Charlotte Pierce had become fast friends. When their children were born—a girl to Inge, a boy to Charlotte—their mothers kidded that they would marry one day. Rachel and Luke's future was set at their birth.

What a beautiful boy he'd been. Dark-haired, blue-eyed. Rachel couldn't remember a moment in her childhood that Luke had not been a part of, that she had not felt his nearness. They would bounce out their front doors and be pulled together as if they were magnetized. Even at ten, eleven, twelve, when most boys were avoiding girls as if they would suck the life from them if given the chance, Luke and Rachel had been inseparable.

Rachel hugged herself, grimacing against the nostalgia. After graduating from college, she and Luke had followed their mothers' plans and married. And Michael Stoltz had been their best man.

The Stoltz family had moved into the third apartment of the triplex when Luke and Rachel were seven years old. Michael had just gotten his first pair of glasses, and that about summed him up. He was a slender, gawky child, shorter than most of his classmates, annoyingly bright and adored by his teachers but not well accepted by his peers. Perhaps it was because Luke and Rachel lived so close to him that they saw something in him the other children missed. He was a valuable friend, and by the time Rachel was eight or nine years old, she and Luke could no longer imagine going off together without inviting Michael to come along. Still, although they were a threesome throughout elementary school, in high school no one ever doubted that the bond between Luke and Rachel was based on more than friendship. She and Luke would fix Michael up with a date from time to time, but nothing ever worked out for long. He was not bad-looking, but he was still skinny, and that combined with his bookishness made him invisible to the eyes of adolescent girls.

Where was Michael now? When she'd left Reflection, he'd still been in Rwanda with plans to teach in Philadelphia once he was out of the Peace Corps. And he was married to Katy Esterhaus, the one girl from their high school who could match him for brains.

With a shake of her head, Rachel turned the key in the ignition and started slowly up Water Street toward the center of town. She didn't dare think too long about Michael.