A Morning Like This (34 page)

“What’s wrong?” Mike had come from nowhere. He must have been hiding in the bushes behind her. “Don’t you like what I wrote?”
His hand clamped around her elbow like a vice.

“S-sure,” she said, hating herself because she stammered. “Sure I do. I’m just not in the mood—”

“You’re going away, aren’t you? I
knew
you were going somewhere. I saw the truck at the gas station a few hours ago.”

“I’m just—”

“Just what? Leaving town?” His lip curled against his teeth. “I know you aren’t going to Elaine’s.”

“No, I’m not going to Elaine’s. I haven’t even talked to her.”

“She thinks you’re wrong. I’ve got your sister on my side.”

“What are you doing, Mike?” She wrenched her arm free. “Writing me poetry? Sending me flowers? Bringing me a wild
pheasant?
”

“You can’t do this to us. I’m letting you know how I feel. That’s what I’m doing.”

“Mike, we can’t ever have an argument of equals. You start out ahead every time because I know what you’re going to do at
the end. In the end, you always hit me.”

She tried to climb up into the truck but he held her down by the arm. “How do you know what I do at the end? You’re running
away. You aren’t even staying until the end.”

“If you’d stop to count, you’d realize how many endings I’ve stayed around for.” She tried to step up again, struggling against
his grip. Mike’s fingers tightened against her biceps. Her arm had gotten past the point of throbbing. She didn’t feel the
pain anymore.

“I have to go, Mike. It was a bad poem,” she said. “It wasn’t even any good.”

She felt him go stiff beside her. She wrenched around and found him staring at her the way he always did when she knew she
was in trouble. The wind had changed, and Sophie felt danger.

“Oh, Sophie Darling,” he said, shaking his head and chiding. “Sophie… Sophie… Sophie.”

“I’m leaving because I never can catch my breath with you. You keep me off guard.” She kept on talking and talking, pressing
it beyond her better judgment, beyond the point of caring. “I never know which one of you is coming in the door next.”

“Well, why don’t we try it and see?” This time, instead of yanking her down from the truck, he began to shove her up inside.
“Get in,” he ordered. “You’re the one who wanted to drive away so badly. Just get in.”

“Not with you.” She felt herself being bodily lifted. “Not—”

But it was too late. He forced her across and climbed in beside her. The trashcan fell over. All her belongings toppled out
onto the floor.

“Where’s the keys?”

She bit her lip and shook her head, tears streaming down her face. “I don’t want to.”

“Sophie, give me the keys.” He grabbed her and tried to wrench them out of her hand. She dug into him with her fingernails.

At that moment the front door to the shelter slammed open. Abby ran toward them across the yard, her cell phone in hand. “Sophie!”
Mike saw her coming and banged the truck door shut.

“Mike, c’mon.” Sophie pleaded with him. “Don’t make this worse than it is.”

“You can’t abandon me, Soph. I won’t let you.”

Abby grabbed the door handle on the passenger’s side and groped to open it. Like a mallet, Mike slapped the lock button down.
“Let me have the keys.”

It was a brave thing for Sophie to do. She hadn’t denied her husband anything but herself in a long time. She’d been too smart.
“No.”

Crack
. Mike slapped her hard with one huge, wide-open hand. Her head snapped against the window behind her.

Enormous pain, and things went black for a minute. She struggled upright again. Sophie curled the back of her hand against
her mouth.

She circled the sides of her mouth with her tongue, probing for damage, feeling the raw cuts her own teeth had made in her
gums. She tasted blood. With the flat of her other hand, she touched her eye. She’d probably have another black one.

Mike cursed in frustration. “Why do you make me do this?”

“Sophie,” Abby called through the window, her voice a mixed tone of command and strength. “Open the door. Climb out.”

“Leave us alone,” Mike said.

“Come on, Sophie. You don’t have to be here. Come with me.”

Mike throttled Sophie’s wrist and yanked her hair.

She cried out in pain. Through a dim fog of shock, she saw Abby moving around the truck’s front fender, racing for Mike’s
door. He let Sophie go long enough to swivel in his seat and lock his door.

Sophie felt with blind hands, sorting through the belongings that had fallen to the floor. What was down here? Everything
she’d brought with her, the day she’d run away. She tried to remember, and couldn’t.

From the shadow beside her feet, she seized a canister and remembered her hair spray. With more courage than she’d ever summoned
before, Sophie brandished the silver canister against him. E
IGHTEEN
-H
OUR
P
ROTECTION AND
H
OLD
, the label read.

Mike pivoted toward her. Before he had a chance to yank the can away, Sophie sprayed the toxic aerosol fumes straight into
his eyes.

He bellowed, clawing at his face.

Sophie launched herself past Mike’s shoulder and unlocked the door.

Abby jerked open the door and jammed her cell phone against the back of Mike’s neck. “Put your hands on the wheel,” she growled.
“Both of them. Let her go.”

“What’s back there?” he asked, panicking at the feel of something cold and blunt on his skin.

“Let her go,” Abby said without missing a beat, “or I’ll hurt you.”

“All right. All right.” How easily he gave in. Mike folded his hands over the steering wheel and laid his head atop his knuckles,
as the two City of Jackson police cars rounded the corner, their blue-and-red lights swinging arcs against windowpanes and
tree limbs. The sound of their sirens crescendoed, then abruptly cut, decrescendoing again to silence.

For a long time, Abby would remember the snapshot views of these next moments, these next hours.

Sophie staggering down from the truck, her face bruised and swollen, her upper lip dripping blood. Mike leaning his forehead
against the truck beside the gas cap, his eyes downcast, his bangs sticking stiffly up from the coating of hairspray, wrists
cuffed behind his hipbones, his jean legs straddled wide. The officers consulting among themselves as they loaded him up,
congratulating one another on a completed mission.

Their last view as the police had driven off while she and Sophie waited hipbone to hipbone on the plank steps, their arms
encircling their shins and their chins on their knees, had been a view of Mike’s face through the squad car’s rear window.
There he sat secured behind some sort of a metal cage, his eyes wide and following Sophie as he passed, devoid of any emotion.

“He’s going to have to wear one of those outfits,” Sophie said after the cars and that haunting last view had gone. “One of
those bright yellow ones that will make him look like a yield sign.”

Abby waited a while, unwilling to leave Sophie alone, before she went into the shelter kitchen to get some ice. She dropped
the cubes into a Ziploc baggie and folded it inside a washcloth. “Here.” She handed it to Sophie. “This’ll help with the swelling.”

For a long time after Mike had gone, they heard only the sounds of siskins chittering in the pines above their heads and the
click of ice in its little bag and the pounding of bass notes in the one car that went past. As Sophie stared out into the
street where she’d run with Mike’s roses, she began to quiver.

Abby touched her. “What’s up? You okay?”

Sophie nodded and clamped her knees tighter together.

“I’ll get you some water. You’re shaking. Maybe that will help.”

“No, don’t leave.” Sophie laid a hand on top of hers. “Stay with me. Everything’s fine. I just get scared sometimes, feeling
this much
relief
.”

Abby reached for the cloth in Sophie’s hand, refolded it around the ice. “You don’t have to leave tonight. If you’re too shook
up after what he’s done, you can wait until tomorrow.”

Sophie gingerly reapplied the cold pack. “I’m doing it tonight. If I don’t take the next step while I’m feeling this courageous,
I might not take it at all.”

Abby stared at an ant as it scurried past a crack on the sidewalk, and said nothing.

A second ant scurried along the cement, a third, a fourth, before Sophie spoke again. “Will you…Well, you know how you’ve
been telling me about God’s love and what it’s done for Braden and Sam? How you said, ‘God’s love never fails’?”

Abby nodded.

“Well, what about me and Mike, Abby? How can you say God’s love never failed for us? When I’ve waited so long for him to stop
hitting me? And now, I’m leaving?”

Oh, Lord. I can’t answer that.
When Abby reached to enfold Sophie inside her arms, Sophie bent against her like someone starving. The top of her head pressed
against Abby’s chest as Abby spread her hand wide across the dip of her spine. They rocked to and fro, to and fro.

“Maybe God’s perfect will would be to have two people seeking Him together. But when there’s one who doesn’t…”

Abby struggled to find her own answers as she stopped the hug and took over the icepack to dab it against her friend’s damaged
face.

“All I know is this.” She shrugged. “When you’re the one who allows God to love the other person through you, you haven’t
any regrets when you look back. I think you can trust that with God. When you let Him work through you, you are changed for
the good even if the other person isn’t.”

You were never wrong to trust Me, Abby. Even when you couldn’t trust in people, you were right to trust in My love.

Oh, Father. If I understood Your ways, I would tell her. If I understood everything You wanted from me, maybe I could tell
Sophie, too
.

“Oh, Soph. I don’t know. I don’t know.” They hugged, rocked again. “Right now, I’m just learning to let people see my own
heart.”

S
usan had agreed to remain in the valley for one week to allow Samantha time to get to know her new family. After that, she
would travel home to Oregon, to the care of her oncologist. For three days, the Treasures had kept David’s daughter before
her mother arrived. For six days more, Susan had stayed at the Elk Country Inn while Sam camped on the Treasures’ floor in
Braden’s sleeping bag. A length of days that had changed everything in some respects and, in some respects, had changed nothing
at all.

Many friends and church members had heard Braden’s speech. They were quick to offer Abby a hug whenever they saw her. “This
must be hard,” they’d say. “But seeing Samantha and Braden the way they are, it’s got to be worth it. And you and David still
together
.”

“I just want to be real,” Abby repeated every time. “I just want to stop pretending.”

On Tuesday morning, Abby’s mother phoned. “You need to know that Frank has heart arrhythmia,” she said. “They did tests at
the hospital and they’re giving him medicine. He’s going to be fine, but it really shook him up.”

“Mom, I’m sorry.”

“When you get the chance, would you send him a card or something? You know how he likes to get mail. He’s blue. And he’s always
seen you as a daughter.”

“I know that, Mom. I’ll do something.”

On Tuesday night, Samantha put ice cubes in Braden’s baseball cleats, and Braden put ice cubes in Samantha’s sleeping bag.

On Wednesday morning, they packed Braden up for the team trip to Newcastle and the Little League Wyoming Shoot-Out Baseball
Tournament. Samantha stood with them in the Kmart parking lot at six a.m., teary-eyed because she didn’t know when she’d next
see her brother again, waving off the caravans of SUVs and cars, shoe polish words emblazoned across rear windows:

“Go Jackson All-Stars!”

“Baseball Rocks!”

“Win the Shoot-Out!”

Braden peered through the back window, through all those white words written on the Hubner’s Landcruiser, waving, too.

On Wednesday night, two nights before Samantha and Susan would leave, Abby dreamed of Sophie. “What would you take if you
had to leave your house and didn’t have any time to plan?” Sophie kept asking over and over again until Abby wanted to shove
her away. What would you take? What would you take? What would you take?

In the dream, Abby searched from room to room. She gathered her most precious possessions, piling one thing on top of another,
until everything toppled out of her arms. Everything was too heavy, too large, too cumbersome to carry. Everyplace she tried
to go, a dangerous presence preceded her.

She couldn’t open the front door. Her feet wouldn’t budge. Not until the door flung wide of its own accord and she stepped
out into the moonlight did she realize what it was she’d managed to save.

The two most precious things in her possession.

Braden’s Little League baseball trophy. And the comforter from their king-sized bed.

Abby’s eyes popped open, her heart pounding, her pajamas rumpled high around her, wet with sweat. She lay flat, wide-eyed,
clutching the comforter to her neck. Night, as black as velvet, draped around her, in a room that felt vacant and strange.
The only thing she could see, three tiny pools of light—the same phosphorescent green as a firefly—from the digital clock.
Three-forty a.m.