The Doctor's Undoing (21 page)

“Judges, Ruth, First and Second Samuel,” she said, feeling Gitch's fingers relax against her hand. Daniel stroked Gitch's shoulder, and she heard the girl's breathing lengthen out from the pained gasps she had made earlier. “First and Second Kings, First and Second Chronicles.” She nodded to Daniel to continue.

“Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job, I love you.”

Ida blinked and looked up, startled by the declaration at the end of Daniel's list. His hand slipped over Gitch to take hers, making a perfect circle of caring hands—hers to Gitch to Daniel and back to her. Of course he loved her. She loved him. It ought to be shocking, but it wasn't at all. She'd been fighting the truth that she loved him for days, maybe weeks now. Why wasn't now the perfect time to admit it?

“I love you.” She smiled as she whispered, feeling as if her skin could not contain the swells of care and hope surging inside. Surely, she would break open in sparkling happy colors any second, turning the pristine white hospital into a riotous rainbow. “Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon...” She stopped the list, and instead quoted from that last book, “I found him whom my soul loveth.”

Daniel squeezed her hand—once for yes. Gitch's slow, even breaths signaled the girl had lapsed back into sleep, and Ida gave a prayer of thanks. Daniel was right—what obstacle of small-minded judgment could overcome the power of the love in this room at the moment? She and Daniel were capable of so much more together than they were apart.

They sat in two chairs next to Gitch's bed for the next pair of hours, holding hands, holding vigil over Gitch's sleeping form, stringing tougher the bonds that would hold them through the struggle to come. Ida felt as if the hours were holy, healing to all three of them in particular ways. As they talked and sat and prayed, Daniel shed some of his guilt over the bathing pools. He still insisted they be closed, but he came to understand Gitch's fall for the accident it was. Ida's sting over Amelia's judgment softened, and while she never would agree with the tactic, she saw it for what it was: a mother who thought she was protecting her son. Gitch received pain medicine, and while she repeatedly reached out for Ida's or Daniel's hand, she managed a fitful rest.

By seven o'clock, Daniel rose. “I'm going to go back to the Home for a short bit. I'll return with some dinner for you. I want the children to know Gitch will be okay, and I want a few words with Mrs. Smiley.” His tone brooked no argument, nor did Ida wish to give him one.

“Of course. I'll be praying for you, Daniel.”

He took her hand and kissed it. “Thank you.”

He leaned over and left a light kiss on the part of Gitch's brow that was exposed. His sigh was sweet and piercing. “She loves you,” Ida said softly. “We both do.”

She watched Daniel fix that truth strongly against his heart in the moments before he walked from the room. The Daniel Parker who returned to the Home tonight would be a different man from the one who left the institution this afternoon. Ida looked after the door where Daniel had departed and prayed.
You've begun such a good work in him, Lord, now stay with him—and us—until it is completed.

She hadn't even realized she had nodded off until Daniel's hand on her shoulder gently prodded her awake what seemed only moments later. The clock on the ward wall and the full dark outside told her that more than an hour had passed. Gitch was still sound asleep, even though Ida noticed ugly bruises had begun to darken at her surgery sites and her bandages had begun to stain. The crisis of injury was for the most part over, giving way now to the long, steep road of healing.

Daniel's eyes looked raw and tired, his face lined with weary creases. He held two bags. “Supper,” he said, lifting one, “and knitting,” he added, and Ida wondered why she hadn't even been awake enough to recognize her own knitting bag. His thoughtfulness stole her heart all over again, making her sniff back a teary smile. “If I didn't already love you...”

He managed a grin. “Had I only known...”

It was the closest to a joke she'd seen from him in days. He really was a changed man. She waited for him to sit down, but he remained standing. It took her only a moment to work out why.

“You're going to see her, aren't you?”

“Yes.”

“Wouldn't it be better to wait until morning?”

His voice was iced with determination when he said, “No.”

“You'll come back here?”

“I think I'll need to.” She heard the
I'll need you
in his voice, and was glad for the hundredth time she was not on a train to Washington.

“I'll be here.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

A
melia Parker swept into her front parlor. “Daniel, whatever are you doing here at so late an hour?”

Daniel saw no point in pleasantries. “You arranged for Ida Landway to leave.”

She sat down carefully in her accustomed chair, barely even flinching at his direct statement. He'd almost forgotten how very good she was at this brand of civilized warfare. “I suggested she ought to be removed, yes.”

“That's not what I said. You arranged for her to go. Even before you spoke to me, you had Bennet suggest the post to John Gallows.”

She opened her mouth to deny it, but he held up a hand. “Save the denials, Mother. I saw Bennet's letter. And I saw the date on the letter. Tell me, did the post actually exist, or did you have to call in extra favors to have one made up?”

Her eyes burned at him. “Mind your tongue, Daniel Parker,” she snapped. “I am still your mother.”

“Oh, I have held my tongue for years, Mother. Out of respect for all you do for the Home and for who you are, I have let you play queen and be your grand self. I have listened to your lectures and your endless opinions. I have swallowed my fill of arguments for the good of the Home and for Father's sake—even for the sake of his memory. But I am done.”

Mother's fingers wrapped their way around the ends of her chair arms. “How dare you! Don't tell me you're going to let that no-good army nurse sway your—”

Daniel stormed over to her. “Do you know where I have been today?”

“Of course I don't know where you've been.” She said it as if she had no interest in keeping tabs on his whereabouts—a ridiculous argument given the nature of their current conflict. There were times Mother knew about Home events even before he did.

“I've been at Roper watching an eight-year-old girl get her broken jaw pinned shut. I've been washing her blood off my shirt and hoping she wouldn't bear the scars of her accident the rest of her life. I've been sitting at that girl's bedside with a woman who loves that girl and all the children not as
a cause
, but as children. She cares for them in marvelous, creative ways that change their lives, Mother. That ‘no-good army nurse' is the best thing to happen to the Home since Father founded it, and not only won't you see it, you've tried to send her away.”

“Because she is after you!”

Did Mother really see love only in terms of acquisition? Could a woman who had done so much in the name of charity be that blind to the selfless nature of real love? “She was ready to get on a train to Washington not because she wanted to go or because she was afraid of you—although I'm sure you tried your best to intimidate her—but because she couldn't bear to see the children hurt by what you'd do in retaliation if she stayed. Now, tell me, Mother, who is the villain here?”

“She's twisted your mind, has her hooks already into you. The Parker Home exists on the reputation of our family, a reputation you are about to sully for...for a backwoods hussy. This is exactly what I feared would happen if I let this infatuation go any longer,” she hissed, rising out of the chair. The graceful exterior had peeled away, leaving a woman Daniel cringed to see. His anger boiled just barely under his control. If he ever learned that she'd called Ida “hussy” to her face, Daniel was sure he couldn't be held responsible for what he'd do.

Dear, sweet Ida. Her only crime was to care. With all her heart, with exactly who she was. And the children had—as children do—responded to her authenticity with deep affection and emotional growth. Not ever, for as long as she lived, would she even be capable of the cold cruelty he saw in his mother now. Daniel pictured Mother threatening Ida with the vicious eyes he saw before him, and his gut seared. People often said he had his mother's eyes, but at this moment he wished that nothing was further from the truth. He found himself glad his father had not lived to see such ugliness.

The more Mother glared at him—her eyes silently shouting “See? See what she's done?”—the more Daniel's rage hardened and settled into an icy, immovable determination. It was almost sad—she could not see that the strength of her protest merely doubled his resolve. She went on talking, but Daniel didn't hear the words. In her desperate attempt to manipulate him, she'd removed the last hold of any sense of duty or loyalty she'd had over him. Some oddly detached part of him wondered why it had taken this long.

Daniel let her stalk angrily around the room, waiting until he could speak with absolute calm. In a moment of surprise, he realized that his stance—feet slightly apart, shoulders square, hands clasped behind his back—was that of his father's. He'd aged a decade since this morning, but the years settled on him with confidence rather than with weariness. He spoke slowly, very clearly and without raising his voice. “I am of my own mind on this. Ida stays.”

Mother wheeled on him, hands flying in the air. “Is she ‘Ida' to you now? Oh, if only Jane Smiley had come to me earlier.” She was half panicked mother, half cordial predator as she grappled with the realization that her usual tactics would not work here. She moved toward him and put a hand on his lapel. It was all he could do not to flinch from the contact. “This can still be fixed, Daniel. You would not be the first man to have his head turned by a pretty conniver. The position for her in Washington is genuine and...”

He took his mother's hand by the wrist and removed it from his chest. Her eyes showed a mixture of hurt, anger and confusion. “Ida stays,” he repeated, giving the words more force this time. “It is Jane Smiley who will be leaving. I'll not have staff going behind my back, especially to collude with you.”

“You can't run the Home without Jane Smiley.”

“She'll be missed.” Mother was right that Mrs. Smiley's removal would be a huge loss, but one he was ready to bear. “But I assure you we will get by. We always do.”

“If you persist in this nonsense, I'll withdraw from the board and take patrons with me. I'll not be associated with such scandalous behavior.”

Daniel had been waiting for that. He'd known it was in the offing since the moment he chose to come here. Perhaps he'd been waiting months—years, even—for whatever offense would eventually drive Mother off. It should be terrifying, but Daniel found the only emotion he felt was a hollow, weary relief.

“And we will suffer your loss as well—but we will survive it.” Somewhere, from a place he was sure could have come only from God's supernatural mercy, Daniel heard himself say, “End this, Mother. Ida is not your enemy. We are all we have, you and I. This is not what Father would have wanted.”

“Don't you dare bring your father into this. It's enough I had to ship away one of
his
pretty little underlings and sit there smiling about it. I will not stand for it in my son.”

His father? Someone from the Home? “You're lying.”

“Am I? How do you think I was able to accomplish this so quickly? I've done it before, Daniel. I know how. I wasn't talking about Shepler before. I was talking about your father and one of the teachers. I'd hoped to spare you this, but since you now seem to take after him in every regard...”

“Stop that!”

“Stop what? Aren't we telling the truth now? Isn't that what you want?”

Daniel felt the air turn to dust in his lungs. The sterling reputation of Harold Parker, the man whose character Daniel strove every day to emulate? A man who did so much good in the world that Daniel woke up every morning feeling the weight of his name press down on his conscience?

“No, it wasn't pleasant, but this is what married women must do to protect our families. Your father came to thank me for what I was able to do, and in time I was able to forgive him for what he'd done.”

Even as she said the words Daniel could see she had not ever forgiven him. How easily a cold marriage could hide in a civil society. It made him yearn for Ida's warmth all the more.

“I'm going to marry her, Mother, if she'll have me.” He hadn't even settled on the idea until this very instant, but it made perfect, immediate sense the moment the words hit the air. Daniel wished he could have turned and proposed to Ida right then; the urge was that profound and irrefutable.

“If she'll have you?” Mother nearly spat the words out. “You are Daniel Parker! You cannot marry some wild mountain woman like that.”

“I can indeed. And I shall, if she says yes, which I expect she will. I'll be happy, Mother. Does that mean anything at all to you?”

She looked at him as though he were a lost cause. One of her projects now beyond hope. Whatever the expression was, it wasn't anything he would classify as the kind of look a mother ought to give a son. There seemed to be no love in it at all, just a pale wash of long-suffering disappointment. “You are just like your father.”

“I hope in many ways that's true.” In all the good ways, that is. For what man is without fault? And who could even know where the truth stood in whatever Mother told him tonight, or ever, now? He could only aspire to the character he knew and follow where God led.

And God led him to Ida.

As he looked at his mother, he felt the final snap of their long-strained relationship, the burst of a man coming into his own true identity out from behind a shadow he hadn't even realized was there.

It was done.

It had been a tortuously long day, but Daniel felt weightless, scrubbed clean of an obligation that no longer made sense. He hoped that someday he might find a way to repair the relationship to the point of civility, but he was grateful the obligation to Amelia Parker was forever severed. Too many children depended on Daniel Parker for it to stand as it was.

It was time to go home.

* * *

Her life was in tangles. Ida was used to causing trouble, but not to making enemies. The thought of Jane Smiley and Amelia Parker—two women she had actually thought were coming to like her—plotting her removal was hard to bear. She felt her own heart was as beaten and bruised as Gitch's jaw. Then again, that same heart was so full of love and wonder over Daniel, it was hard to believe the day had gone so far in opposite directions. Such happiness in the midst of such sadness—how was it life could come up with such a clash all at once?

In the darkened ward, listening to Gitch's breathing, Ida groped for stillness and balance one stitch at a time. The ward had a dozen or so children in it, and it struck her how wounds came in visible and invisible forms. The boys and girls at the Home came from lost, missing, broken or embittered families. What was to become of Daniel's family tonight? Could God somehow save the relationship between Daniel and Amelia Parker? Or was Daniel about to become a different kind of orphan?

I can't see Your plan
, Ida prayed as she sat knitting in the dim light, her eyes not even seeing the stitches, her fingers working the yarn by sheer touch, as she'd seen the Catholic nuns at the army hospital worry at their rosaries.
Will the Home survive? Can Daniel and I have a life together? Have I truly helped or just made a terrible mess of things?

She couldn't know. She couldn't move the obstacles surrounding her. She could only be who she was, where she was. She could tend to Gitch, she could love Daniel, and perhaps knit an ounce of peace and stillness into the growing darkness.

All the rest would have to be God's territory.