An Elm Creek Quilts Sampler (100 page)

Then something happened to shake Grace from her complacency.

One night she woke to the acrid stench of burning. Her heart pounding, she scrambled from bed to find the living room in flames.

“Gabriel,” she screamed at the motionless lump on the sofa. Choking on smoke, she stumbled to his side and shook him, screaming his name over and over until she managed to rouse him. She helped him stagger outside and let him fall uncomprehending on the front lawn. Her heart racing with fear, she turned back inside, only to find that the fire had spread. The hallway to the room where Justine lay sleeping was impassable.

Frantic, Grace ran outside and raced around the backyard to Justine’s window. Her eyes burned and streamed tears; her ears were full of the menacing roar of the fire as it consumed her home. She struggled to open the window, but it wouldn’t budge. She searched around blindly until she stumbled upon a lawn chair. Without a thought, she lifted it over her head and smashed it through the glass.

She didn’t remember climbing past the broken shards and hauling Justine to safety, only sitting on the front lawn with her daughter in her arms and a neighbor’s blanket over her shoulders. She stared at the house unblinking as the firefighters struggled to extinguish the blaze. Justine sobbed and buried her face in Grace’s shoulder.

When the house was nothing more than a smoldering ruin, a paramedic came to inspect Grace’s injuries. Still dazed, at first Grace refused to let go of Justine, but eventually was persuaded to allow a neighbor to take her. She stared at the embers of her life as the paramedic examined her. “We’ll have to take her to the hospital to remove the glass,” she overheard him say. Only then did she feel the sharp stinging in her hands and legs and feel the wet slickness of her own blood on her skin.

Helen, one of her elder sisters, took them in. A few days later, Grace learned that the blaze had started when Gabriel fell asleep holding a lit cigarette. He dropped it and set fire to the drapes. In a way, they had been fortunate. If the cigarette had fallen on the sofa, the investigators said, the foam cushions would have burned much more rapidly than the drapes, almost certainly killing Gabriel and possibly the rest of the family. They were lucky.

“Lucky,” Gabriel mumbled, and left Helen’s house for a drink.

Under Helen’s watchful eye, Grace could no longer maintain the facade of a happy family. She crumbled and tearfully confessed the pain of the past few years. Helen listened without judgment until Grace was spent. Then she said, “If he had killed your baby last night, that would have been his fault. If he kills her tomorrow, it will be yours.”

When Gabriel returned, drunk and stumbling, the house was closed to him. Helen went outside only long enough to tell him to find another place to spend the night. She handed him a letter Grace had written, a painful message of love and resolve in which she told him he could come home to his wife and daughter when he was sober, and not a day before.

Gabriel tried to change her mind, but with Helen to support her, Grace held fast. She had forgotten what it was like to wake up in the morning not dreading the day, how peaceful it was to be able to walk from the hallway to the kitchen without averting her gaze to avoid seeing her husband passed out in the living room. When Justine asked for her daddy, Grace told her he was away but he would be coming home to them soon. She thought she was telling the truth.

The Thursday before Halloween, Robby picked two of the best pumpkins from his grandmother’s garden, one for him to carve and one for Megan. When they reached home, Robby’s description of his carving strategy abruptly broke off. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing to the front porch.

Megan glimpsed a brown box by the door as she as she pulled into the garage. “Looks like someone sent us a package.”

Robby was out of the car and racing around to the front door almost before she turned off the engine. Carrying the pumpkins, she entered the house through the garage, unlocking the front door for Robby on her way. He met her in the kitchen with the parcel in his hands. “It’s for me,” he exclaimed, showing her his name printed in block letters with a black marker above their address. “Look. It’s from Oregon. It’s from Dad.”

“That’s great,” Megan said, hiding her astonishment. Robby set the box on the table and tore into it, tossing packing materials aside. Then, suddenly, he froze, and his smile faded.

“What’s wrong?” Megan asked. She peered into the box to find ginger-bread and sugar cookies cut into the shapes of ghosts, pumpkins, and black cats, beautifully decorated with frosting. They were carefully packaged and unbroken, and seemed to be arranged several layers deep.

“Dad didn’t make these,” Robby said flatly. “
She
sent them.”

“You don’t know that. Maybe Dad bought them in a bakery.” Megan indicated an orange envelope. “There’s a card. See what it says.”

Reluctantly, Robby opened the envelope and read the card, which he promptly threw back into the box. “They’re from her,” he said again, sliding down from his chair.

“Robby …” she began, but he left the kitchen with his mouth set in a sullen line. In another moment she heard the door to his room slam shut. Her heart sinking, Megan picked up the card. It had a picture of a haunted house on the front and a simple rhyming poem inside. The signature, in Gina’s handwriting, said, “With love from Dad and Gina.”

Megan sank into the chair Robby had vacated, the card in her hand, wondering what to do. If only Keith had taken the thirty seconds required to sign the card himself. It would have been far better for Gina to send nothing than to go to such trouble to send a present Keith obviously had nothing to do with. Sighing, she returned the card to its envelope, placed it on top of the cookies, and discarded the scattered wrapping. Then she took a gingerbread ghost down the hall and knocked on the door to Robby’s room.

When he didn’t respond, she said, “May I come in?”

“I’m busy.” His voice was muffled through the door, but she could hear the tears in it.

“Oh. Okay.” Megan thought for a moment. “Well, I’m going to start supper. It might be a while. Do you want a cookie to tide you over?”

“I’m not allowed to eat sweets before meals.”

“Just this once we can make an exception.”

“I don’t want any stupid cookies.”

“Do you mind if I have one?”

A pause. “I don’t care.”

“Okay, then.” Megan took a bite of the ghost’s head. “Mmm. This is delicious.”

“You can have them.”

“I can’t eat them all myself. I’ll get sick.” She took another bite. “Maybe you’ll want some after supper.”

“I don’t want anything
she
makes.”

Megan waited for him to say something more, but when he didn’t, she decided to leave him alone. “I’ll be in the kitchen,” she said, hoping he would join her there to talk. She waited, but he didn’t leave his room until she called him for supper, and then he took his seat and ate without a word. His eyes were red-rimmed, and as soon as he had finished eating, he returned to his room without clearing his dishes, a chore that had become such a habit that he sometimes automatically rose to clear his place at restaurants.

After straightening the kitchen, Megan tried again. She knocked on his door and asked if he wanted to carve pumpkins. “No,” he said through the door.

“But you planned your design and everything.”

“I don’t feel like it.”

Megan covered the kitchen table with newspapers in case he changed his mind, but he only left his room once, to go to the bathroom and brush his teeth, and then it was his bedtime.

The next morning, Megan taped the box of cookies shut and placed it by his backpack and the bag holding his Batman costume. When he saw the box, he gave her an odd look. “Why is this here?”

“I thought you could share the cookies with your class.”

“They won’t want them.”

“Not want cookies? You’re kidding, right?” Megan made sure his jacket was zipped, then put on her own coat and opened the door to the garage. “Come on, let’s go. We’ll be late.” Sullen, Robby picked up the bag and backpack, leaving the cookie box for her to carry.

As they drove to school, Megan reminded Robby that she was leaving work early so she could pick him up right after the class parties ended. “If there are any cookies left, bring them,” she said. “We can take them to Vinnie’s.”

Robby perked up at the reminder of the party, enough so that he submitted willingly to a hug and kiss. “I’ll see you later,” she called as he shut the door. He waved good-bye with the tips of his fingers, his left arm wrapped around the box of cookies.

Throughout the day, Megan found herself thinking about Robby and wondering how his day was going. She doubted she would be able to persuade him to send Gina and Keith a thank-you note for the cookies. Most likely she would end up sending an acknowledgment herself. She wondered if this would be the way of things for the rest of their lives, Keith and Robby communicating by proxy through her and Gina.

Robby’s school ended classes for the day after lunch, when the students gathered in the gymnasium for a Halloween parade. When Robby was in kindergarten, Megan had joined the other adoring parents with camcorders in the bleachers, searching the long line of costumed children for her son, and grinning with delight when she spotted him marching proudly with his friends. Afterward, the students held parties in their separate classrooms. Megan pictured Robby distributing the cookies Gina had so lovingly made, and hoped the other students wouldn’t reject them as they had most of Robby’s other offers of friendship.

The school parking lot was reserved for faculty and staff, so Megan parked on a side street a few blocks away and walked to school, self-conscious in her costume. Because of the trouble with the cookies, she had postponed the decision until that morning, when she put together an empire-waist dress, elbow-length gloves, and other period accessories and decided she was Elizabeth Bennett. Throughout the day, however, she began to have an uncomfortable suspicion that not even fans of
Pride and Prejudice
would be able to identify her, even with her hair up. Only then, when it had been far too late to change her mind, did it occur to her that whatever she wore would make a lasting impression on Adam.

She still wasn’t sure what impression she wanted to make. As nice as Adam had seemed, Megan had mixed feelings about Vinnie’s matchmaking. She had grown accustomed to being alone, and in many ways, although she wasn’t as happy as the happily married people she knew, she was much more content than those tangled in fractious relationships. The thought of enduring all the heartache of falling in love and breaking up and starting over with someone else in a unrelenting cycle of searching and hoping made her weary. She didn’t think she should put herself—or Robby—through that again.

Robby was waiting for her on the playground, as they had arranged. Other children played nearby, but he sat alone on a swing in his Batman costume, scuffling his feet in the gravel. Megan spotted his backpack and the bag with his school clothes on the ground not far away.

He looked up when Megan called his name, smiled, and got off the swing. “Where’s the box?” Megan asked him. “Are all the cookies gone?” At that, Robby’s face fell, and he turned his back on her to pick up his back-pack. “What is it? What happened?” She pictured him shyly offering the other children the cookies, and some bully shoving them back in his face. “Didn’t the other kids want the cookies?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“They got broken.”

“Got broken?” Megan echoed. “How?”

Robby shrugged.

“You must know how.”

Robby said nothing, his eyes downcast. “They broke on my way to school.”

“But I let you off right in front of the building.”

“I dropped the box.”

Megan watched him, waiting for more. Gina had padded those cookies with so much plastic wrap and paper that Robby could have dropped the box off the roof of the school and the cookies might have survived unscathed. “What did you do with the box?”

“Threw it away.”

“Show me.”

“But they’re only crumbs now.”

“Show me.”

Reluctantly, Robby led her toward a garbage can on the edge of the playground. He stopped a few feet away and pointed. With her thumb and first finger, Megan gingerly moved aside wadded-up brown paper lunch bags, school assignments on lined paper, and crumbled candy wrappers until she uncovered the box. She stooped down, placed it on the ground, and lifted the lid. Inside it was just as Robby had said: Each cookie had been pulverized into crumbs until their original shapes were completely obliterated. Some of the crumbs had been compressed into piles, and in these she found the impression of the sole of a shoe.

She took a deep breath and rose, returning the box to the garbage can. “Who did this?”

Robby shrugged.

“One of the other kids?” She recalled the name of the sixth-grade terror who had stolen his lunchbox the previous month. “Was it Kenny?”

He shook his head.

Megan was quiet for a moment. “Did you do it?”