Immortal Mine (22 page)

“Done,” Shane pronounces, pressing a gauze
pad over his handiwork, and as Niahm had done, wrapping a longer
piece of gauze around my arm. Niahm looks over, disappointed that
he’s already covered it.

“How many stitches?” she questions.

“Oh, uh... six.” I roll my eyes at Shane’s
poor attempt at lying.

“Huh,” Niahm answers. “Where did you learn
to do that?”

“I used to work as a paramedic,” Shane says,
a story he’s told many times. It’s the truth; that is one of the
jobs he has done. He can’t tell her that he’s also been through
medical school—once in the 1700’s in Europe, and again in the early
1900’s in America.

“Why don’t you anymore?”

He glances at her, and gives her his
prepared answer. “A really bad accident, where I was unable to save
a family. It shook me up so much I couldn’t work effectively after
that. So I decided to do something different.”

“Oh.” Niahm’s small voice is laced with
sorrow.

“Now that there’s no danger of me bleeding
to death,” I say before she can question him further, “can I drive
you home?”

She looks to Shane. “Do you think he should
be driving?”

“He didn’t lose much blood.” She glances at
the small pile of bloody bandages, and Shane smiles. “I know it
seems like a lot, but it really isn’t much. His reactions are all
normal, his eyes are fine, his coloring is good... ”

Niahm looks at me skeptically at that last.
Granted, it would be a little hard to tell if I had lost any color
with my naturally pale skin, the result of being a redhead.

“See, I’m fine,” I say. “You, however, look
a little pale.”

She shakes her head. “No, I’m good. Let’s
go, then.”

We walk out to the truck, and when we climb
in, I’m pleased to notice that Niahm sits a little more to the
center of the bench seat. I reach out and take her hand in mine,
giving her a little tug. She smiles and scoots closer, and I close
my mind to hers.

We pull around the backside of the barn, and
see that the Irish is no longer in the paddock. We go into the barn
and find him back in his stall, rubbed down, all the equipment
stowed in the tack room. We both lift our brows and look at one
another, well aware of who did this.

Niahm steps up to the half-door and shakes a
finger at him.

“Bad, bad horse, to hurt Sam like that,” she
admonishes in a tone that sounds more like she’s praising him. I
walk over to the stall, and the stallion comes over to me—a first.
Niahm slips an apple into my hand, which I then give the horse. He
blows out a light whinny, as if in apology.

“See, I knew he was sorry,” she says, as if
I’d been angry with him. How could I? He was only doing what was
natural and instinctive to him.

“Is that right?” I say to the horse. “Are
you sorry you threw me, Hercules?”

Niahm grunts, but the Irish tosses his head
up once.

“Maybe I
should
name him Mr. Ed,” I
say to her with a laugh. He backs away a couple of steps, and I
laugh. “Maybe not.”

Niahm elbows me lightly in the arm, then
horror crosses her face.

“Oh, I’m so sorry!”

I look at my arm, and remember this is my
“wounded” arm—which is now completely healed beneath Shane’s faux
sutures and bandage.

“It doesn’t hurt, Niahm.” That much is true.
She still looks worried. “I promise... it doesn’t hurt.”

“You don’t have to be brave,” she says.

“I’m not. It
genuinely
doesn’t
hurt.”

“I’m sorry, Sam, for not holding on to him
tight enough. I let him go and he threw you.”

I shake my head at her skewed thoughts.

“You had no choice, Niahm. If you’d tried to
hold on, you could have been seriously injured.” I don’t tell her
that I threw myself as much as the horse threw me—I knew if I
removed my weight, he would calm somewhat and stop his pawing which
would be devastating to a mortal caught beneath. “I couldn’t stand
that, if you’d been hurt.”

“Do you think I like you being hurt?” she
questions.

I put my “injured” arm around her and pull
her close.

“I’m not hurt. See?”

She’s a little off balance at being so
close, so I take advantage and kiss her. She melts against me, arms
tight around my middle, returning the kiss with enthusiasm. Her
innocence moves me. In the back of my mind, I wonder how I’m going
to explain the lack of a healing wound and subsequent scar—bad
enough to require stitches—to her.

Snow falls for the first time today. I love
the first snow of the season. This year, it feels wrong. I can’t
run outside and play in the falling flakes with Bob. I can’t call
Stacy to go for a ride on the ATV’s along the snowy paths. I can’t
take Sheila out for a run in the chill.

Because I can’t call my parents and tell
them about it.

A sob catches in my chest,
and I swallow it. I can
feel
Jean behind me, typing furiously on her laptop,
look up at me. Her stare is like a weight on my back.

I
can
go out and get the tarp secured
over the chicken run. I
can
make sure the heaters are working in the coop and
stalls. I can use the relative privacy of the barn to fall
apart.

When I’ve finished crying, and completed the
chores I set for myself, I return to the house. Jean is no longer
in the kitchen, her laptop gone with her. I consider starting
dinner, but I don’t really feel up to it. I climb the stairs... and
see the light on in my parents’ bedroom. Fury flows through me as I
hurry down the hall.

I shove the door open, and see Jean sitting
on the floor, surrounded by papers, crying silently. I’m checked in
my anger at the genuine grief creasing her face. Before I can
retreat, she looks up and sees me. She lifts a few of the papers
toward me.

“What... ” I have to stop and clear my
throat. “What are you doing in here?”

She takes a breath, controlling her
emotions. Finally, she’s able to speak.

“I think you should see these, Niahm.”

With trepidation, I force my feet to move.
When I reach her, I take the paper she hands me. The sight of my
mom’s handwriting drives me to my knees.

“What is this?” I gasp.

“She suspected I was still alive.”

Her words turn my attention back to the
papers.

Dear Mom (wherever you are),

I wish you would come
home. Dad tries, but he just doesn’t know how to answer my
questions—the ones I ask, anyway. Some of them, I refuse to ask
him. He’s my
father
. I need you, Mom. I don’t know why you left—was it me? Did I
do something wrong? I promise to be good, to do anything you ask if
you’ll just come home.

I love you,

Beth

I look up at Jean, angry once again on
behalf of my own mom as a young girl, desperately wishing for her
mother. Her words could almost be mine.

“How could you leave your own daughter like
that? How could you... stay away?”

“I haven’t seen these before today.”

“What? I thought you told me she’d written
to you.”

“She did,” she confirms. “But not these
letters—different ones. She was writing for all intents and
purposes to a complete stranger. However, I suspected, from some of
the things she’d written, that she thought it might be me she was
writing to.”

“Where did you find these, then?”

She smiles apologetically. “I broke into her
files on her computer. She made reference to them, said she’d
hidden them in the floor in her closet.”

I glance past her and see where she’s lifted
the carpeting and a square of wood from the floor of their closet.
And suddenly, a memory assaults me.

I’m a little girl. I walked into my mom’s
room, and saw her sitting in her closet.

“
What are you doing, mommy?”

She turned guiltily, and I could see the
hole in the floor.

“
Mommy, there’s a hole in your closet. Is
the floor broked?”

“
Broken,” she corrected automatically,
backing out and closing the closet door. “No, sweetness, it’s not
broken. Let’s go make some cookies, hmm?”

Later, I snuck into her closet to see the
hole, but it was gone. The carpet was in place and there was no
evidence of it having ever been there.

I rise to my knees, push past Jean and look
down into the hole. It’s empty. The smells in the closet overpower
my senses—my parent’s scents. Why haven’t I thought to come in here
before, to smell them? I breathe deeply, hungrily, controlling my
emotions before I back out.

“Everything is here,” she says, indicating
the mess around her. I sink back down, suddenly exhausted.

“Fine. Tell me,” I say belligerently.

“The letters she left in the tree—they were
more like journal entries in the beginning. I didn’t plan to write
back, but I looked forward to those letters, to know what was
happening in her life. It wasn’t safe for me to be there, I was
always in disguise. Sometimes months would pass between visits, and
I would find several letters.”

She leans back against the closet door,
pulling some of the papers against her chest.

“Then one day, I wrote back. A simple note,
telling her I had found her notes and was intrigued by them. I gave
her no indication it was me.”

“Then what makes you think she believed you
were alive?” I demand. “I mean, that one letter could have been
written right after you left, while she was still in shock from
your... death.”

Jean shakes her head, as if the answer
should be obvious.

“That was only the first.” She points to a
semi-neat stack of papers to her left. “Those are all similar
letters. Only, as time passed, she became more and more angry at
me.”

I picked up the stack, flipped through them,
overwhelmed at the pages of her handwriting. About halfway through,
they became typed pages, and then printed pages. They weren’t her
handwriting, but in my hands I held my mom’s words.

“You can read them all, if you’d like,” she
says. “But I think this is the one you should read now. This is the
last one she wrote.”

I take the paper she hands me, shaking at
the thought that I hold the last thing my mom had created. I glance
down at the date, and see that it’s the day they left. I recall now
her going back into the house after we had everything loaded in the
car, claiming she had one last thing she needed to take care of.
Was this it?

Dear Mom (wherever you are),

I glance up, shuffle through a few of the
other papers, and see that she started them all the same.

You wouldn’t believe how mad Niahm is at us
right now. She’s so angry that we are leaving her once again. I
wish I could tell her, could explain to her this insatiable need to
travel the world, hoping that just once I might run into you.
Whether in the Sahara Desert, or the jungles of Africa, I don’t
care. I’m not even sure how I’d react if I did—would I hug you,
joyous to see you again? Or would I punch you square in the nose,
tell you how rotten you are for leaving me? Leaving me... just as I
leave Niahm. The difference is I will always come home to her.

I take a deep breath at
the words, pain lancing through my whole being at the realization
that she
wouldn’t
always come home to me. Not anymore.

I have one last letter to leave in the tree.
I think it’s you I’ve been writing to all these years. Even if it’s
not, I’ve always pretended that it’s so. It keeps me sane. Keeps
that hatred I harbor for your actions at bay, the thought that you
are still there for me. Why did you go? After this, I will no
longer leave the letters. Even if it is you, it’s far past time for
me to move on.

I suppose this shall be our last excursion.
Jonas and I have lived more adventure than most people do in their
lifetimes. But it’s time to be home, to do this for Niahm, rather
than the constant searching that I do for me. I haven’t spoken to
Jonas about this yet. He doesn’t know the reason behind my
insistence on our travels. He loves me—he would do anything for me.
I have used that to my own selfish ends. This will be the last time
I indulge myself.

So, if you find the letter I will leave, I
will hope that you honor my request to the best of your ability, to
take care of Niahm. My Niahm has always had a sort of sixth sense
about things, and she is worried about our leaving. I can feel her
intense concern. That’s the reason for the content of the letter,
and the reason for, God willing, my safe return to Goshen to live
the rest of my days in peace.

Beth

I clutch the letter,
breathing heavily. She knew? I had no idea she could feel my
concern. If she knew, if she believed it,
why
did she go? She couldn’t give up
this one last trip? It was only one, how much of a difference could
that have made?