Sonoma Rose: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel (30 page)

“It’s equally likely that it’s John’s baby,” she countered, lowering her voice and glancing toward the front room where Ana was reading Maria a story. All morning Maria had rested listlessly on the sofa, weak and exhausted after a difficult bout of illness that had begun before dawn. “What would you have me do? Tell my husband that the child I’m carrying may be yours, but just in case it’s his, he shouldn’t throw me out of the house?”

“If he threw you out of the house, you’d be better off.”

“Not without my children, I wouldn’t be.” He didn’t seem to grasp that leaving John meant abandoning her children. She
had committed adultery. In the eyes of God, the law, and the community, she was an unfit mother. She knew how a judge and jury would see matters. John would be cast as a wronged husband, a devoted father even to the offspring of his wife’s premarital adultery, a landowner and a good provider. If Rosa left John, no judge would grant her custody of the children, not if John fought for them, and he would, if only to spite her. What would become of them without their mother? What tales would John invent to explain why she did not come home, why she had not taken them with her? How long would it take before he taught them to despise her? And what of Ana and Maria, chronically ill and in the care of a man who had given up searching for a cure? What of sweet baby Pedro, if he too became sick someday?

Lars pushed back his chair and stood, shaking his head slowly in disbelief. “I can’t go along with this. I just can’t.”

“Please, Lars,” Rosa implored, tears of anguish and remorse welling up and spilling over before she could hold them back. “The child may be John’s, in which case none of this—nothing that we’re arguing about right now—none of it will matter.”

“It all matters, Rosa.”

Wordlessly she shook her head. Nothing she said would make him understand. Lars had known John longer, but Rosa knew him better. Staying with John and concealing her tryst with Lars was the only way to keep her children. It was the only way.

Lars paced the width of the kitchen. “You’re thinking only of how to get through the next few months and not of what might happen years down the road. Let’s say the baby is mine and you don’t tell him. What do you think will happen when John figures it out on his own?”

“He never has to know,” said Rosa. “He’ll never know unless we tell him.”

Lars halted and regarded her, his face drawn in compassion and frustration. “Rosa, he’ll know. Forgive me, but if the baby turns out like Marta, if this child doesn’t get sick, he’ll know.”

Her heart plummeted as the truth of his words sank in. Suddenly she heard the familiar rumble of John’s truck coming up the gravel drive. With a gasp, she snatched up the coffee cups and dropped them into the sink, where lukewarm dishwater and soapsuds concealed them. By the time John opened the front door, Rosa and Lars were in the front room with Ana and Maria, and Rosa was handing Lars his mail bundle and offering her best regards to his family.

John watched them from the doorway for a moment, his hand on the doorknob, the gray U.S. Mail bag slung over his shoulder. Then he came inside, but he left the door open, and he strode past them to set the heavy bag on the floor beside his desk with a dull thud.

Rosa was too upset to speak.

“Hello, John,” Lars greeted him easily.

“I heard you were back in town.” John glanced at the bundle in Lars’s arms. “You came too early. If you’d come a couple of hours later, you’d have this week’s mail in your bundle as well. I don’t have time to sort it now, so you’ll have to wait until tomorrow at the earliest.”

“I don’t mind making another trip.” Lars put on his hat, nodded to Rosa, and headed toward the door.

John’s gaze shifted to Rosa, and she quickly fought to compose herself, hiding her distress beneath a placid mask. “You know,” John mused, addressing Lars but keeping his eyes on Rosa, “this is the first time I’ve seen you pick up the mail since
you came back. Now that I think about it, I can’t recall the last time I’ve seen anyone from your place around here, and yet your family’s bundle is picked up once a week like clockwork.”

Lars halted at the door and turned around, his face expressionless.

“Most people pick up their bundle on Tuesday afternoon or Wednesday morning,” John continued, his voice thoughtful with a thread of anger running through it. “They know I fetch the mail from the train station on Mondays and sort it on Tuesday mornings. But you—” John’s steely gaze shifted to Lars. “You knew my schedule too, didn’t you? And you planned accordingly.”

Lars fixed him with the same easy, self-assured grin that used to charm Rosa into forgetting all his faults. “Well, John, if I’d known how much you missed me, I would have come on Tuesday afternoons.”

“John, please,” Rosa murmured, mindful of Ana watching silent and wide-eyed from the sofa, the book forgotten on her lap, her sleeping sister’s little hand curled in hers.

John’s eyes narrowed as he looked from Lars to Rosa and back. “I think you’ve upset my wife.”

“I’m fine,” said Rosa, but her voice shook. “Lars was just leaving.”

As Lars put his hand on the doorknob, John barked, “Don’t come back. Send your brother or one of the ranch hands for the mail from now on, but don’t you come back around here. Don’t you ever set foot on my land when you know I’m away and my wife is home alone.”

“She’s in no danger from me,” Lars said, his grin disappearing like the sun slipping behind a thundercloud. “It’s you she’s afraid of.”

John clenched his fists and took a step toward him. “Come near her again and you’ll be sorry.”

“Hit her again and
you’ll
be sorry.”

“John, Lars,” Rosa broke in. “Please stop it. Not in front of the children. Lars, please just go.”

“I will,” he said, glaring at John. “I’ll go away and I’ll stay away, Rosa, if that’s what you want. Is that what you want?”

“Yes,” she cried. “Yes, that’s what I want. Please go away and don’t come back. Please. It’s for the best.”

Lars took a step backward as if her words had struck him in the chest. For a moment he looked as if he might argue, but just then Ana gasped and he looked her way as if he had forgotten she was there. He offered her a rueful smile and a shrug that managed to make the whole scene appear harmless and comical, a misunderstanding between grown-ups, easily settled and forgotten. He left without another word, without a parting glance at Rosa.

“Let’s hope that’s the last we see of him,” John said as they heard the car start up and drive away.

Lars did as she asked. Others from the Jorgensen ranch came each week to pick up the family’s mail, and although at first Rosa hoped someone would pass along a message from Lars, no one ever did.

The months went by. Ana, usually the most reasonable of the children, began refusing the wholesome diet of white bread and milk the doctor had recommended and stubbornly insisted upon eating rice, beans, and corn tortillas or nothing at all. Rosa found a certain logic in her finicky habits; if she were going to be sick anyway, why shouldn’t she eat her favorite foods? John, who hated waste and required the children to clean their plates at mealtimes, objected whenever he caught Rosa indulging a picky
eater. “You’re only going to spoil her,” he warned when he found Rosa putting beans in to soak for the fifth night in a row.

“I’m going to make pot roast, potatoes, and bread for the rest of the family, so it shouldn’t bother you that Ana wants something different,” Rosa pointed out. “I don’t mind the extra effort, nothing will go to waste, and she’ll clean her plate, so what’s the harm?”

“Children need to be obedient and eat what’s set in front of them,” John argued. “She’s going to grow up to think she’s always going to get her own way.”

“As long as she grows up,” Rosa replied quietly, putting the lid on the pot of beans.

Privately Rosa worried about the consequences of disregarding the doctor’s orders, but as the summer passed, Ana’s symptoms lessened, and it seemed to Rosa that her limbs fleshed out a bit and her bloated abdomen receded somewhat. Perplexingly, Maria followed the doctor’s prescribed diet to the letter but grew progressively weaker. Rosa was tempted to put her on Ana’s adopted diet too, but she was reluctant to ignore the most up-to-date medical advice she had been given. She wished one of the many doctors she had written to had replied with something else to try, but she suspected none of them wanted to overrule a local physician who had actually examined the children.

In late September Lupita was born, and when Rosa held her for the first time, she thought she imagined a striking resemblance to Marta, but she quashed the faint stirrings of anxiety their similarities evoked. She saw more of herself in their dark eyes and hair and skin than either John or Lars. No one would doubt Lupita was John’s child—no one but Lars and Rosa herself. But she could not help brooding over the inescapable flaw in her plan Lars had detected: If, as the years passed, Lupita remained
as vigorous and healthy as her eldest sister, John would realize that Rosa had betrayed him.

He had forgiven her once before because he loved her and wanted her for his wife. He would not forgive her a second time, and Rosa could not blame him.

She buried her guilty secret deep in her heart and resolved to forget that Lars had ever returned to the Arboles Valley. For her family’s sake, it had to be as if he were still hundreds of miles away.

A year passed. Lupita took her first steps. Ana started school, and never before had Rosa seen a child more eager to learn. She devoured books and spent hours scribbling stories of her own on scrap paper while most of her classmates were still mastering the alphabet. Rosa exhausted every likely contact in the last of her city business directories, but came no closer to a remedy for the children since John forbade her to hazard a trip beyond the Arboles Valley. John, mercurial as ever, was kind to her one week and indifferent the next, but even the worst of his indifference was preferable to his rage. In all that time Rosa saw Lars only once, from a distance, when he rode by on horseback one summer afternoon while she played on the mesa with the children. She didn’t know if he even saw them, and if he did, whether he recognized them.

Winter came, with long stretches of clear, cool, sunny weather occasionally interrupted by billowing gray clouds and chilly rains. On such a gloomy day in February, an unexpected visitor knocked on the adobe door—her brother, Carlos, haggard and grim. She had not seen him since their mother’s funeral and knew immediately that he would not have sought her out at home if their father were still living.

He had died the night before of a heart attack, Carlos told
her, glancing around the adobe uncomfortably as if worried that even this necessary errand was a betrayal of his father’s wishes that he disown his sister. The funeral mass would be in two days, and if Rosa and her family attended, Carlos wanted them to sit in the front pew beside him. Rosa thanked him and told him they would come, and after he left, she wondered if his small gesture were the overture to their eventual reconciliation. Carlos had not embraced her, he had declined her offer of coffee, and he had remained standing throughout his brief visit, but she decided to interpret his invitation to sit in the family pew as the extending of an olive branch. Time would tell.

Her father’s funeral was less upsetting and grueling than her mother’s had been, since Isabel had died so unexpectedly and under such suspicious circumstances. And yet it was sadder in its way, for with her father’s passing, Rosa was forced to abandon her long-held hopes that he might someday forgive her. As she mourned for her father, she silently lamented the years he had wasted in estrangement and the potential for love and joy he had needlessly squandered in refusing to acknowledge his grandchildren. She felt sorry for her children that they would never know their grandfather, but she felt sorrier still for him.

Five weeks after the funeral, Rosa gave birth to a son. Moved by compassion and sorrow, inspired by fond memories of much happier days long ago, she named her newborn Miguel after his late grandfather. It was a tribute to the memory of the Papá she had known as a child, the man who had loved and cherished her.

Less than six months after Miguel was born, Maria died.

All summer long Maria had grown weaker and weaker until she had spent most of her waking hours lying prostrate on the sofa, clutching her stuffed bunny. After her precious girl was
gone, Rosa descended into a black pit of despair deeper and more impenetrable than any she had fallen into before. It was all she could do to force herself out of bed every morning to fix breakfast for her family and change Miguel’s diapers and see Marta and Ana off to school. She washed the dishes and did the laundry mechanically, as if her spirit had fled and some unseen, relentless puppeteer mercilessly pulled the strings that kept her in motion. Soon thereafter, Pedro—her happy, chubby, mischievous Pedro—showed his first symptoms of the terrible affliction that had taken his brother and sisters.

Rosa was convinced that if she had to bury another child, she would go mad. She would go mad and go to the mesa as her mother had done and hurl herself from the rim of the Salto Canyon until she struck the unyielding earth and quiet oblivion absorbed all her pain.

But as the dark thoughts flew about her like blackbirds in the rye fields, she would remind herself that her mother had
not
taken her own life, she had fallen, and Isabel would not approve of the despairing turn her daughter’s thoughts had taken. Rosa would remember that the five living children God had thus far let her keep still needed her, and would need her for many years yet. So she persevered. Prayer was an insufficient balm for her shattered heart, but her children—Marta, Ana, Pedro, Lupita, and little Miguel—they offered her their pure, innocent love, and the sight of their sweet faces and the music of their voices gave her reason enough to keep living.

Thus when Pedro passed away one afternoon shortly before his fifth birthday, Rosa chose not to follow quickly after. She made the funeral arrangements and buried another son and tried to comfort his frightened and unhappy surviving siblings.