Rebecca's Rose (28 page)

“Rebecca, you have to believe how sorry I am about the accident. That memory tortures me every day of my life. I relive it over and over, wishing like crazy that I could change the past. Please forgive me.”

“Forgive you? Dottie Mae is dead.
Dead
. And you and your friends drove off and let her die because you didn’t want to get caught.”

“That’s not true—”

“You will answer to God.”

Levi hung his head. “You told me once that you always take people at face value. That you see what I really am inside. Can’t you see that now?”

“How can I ever love you? You are a liar and a drunk. And a—and a murderer.”

Rebecca immediately chastised herself for that part about loving him. Where had that come from? Of course she didn’t love him. She never had. The thought of loving such a person repulsed her.

Her words struck him dumb. They stared at each other for a thirty-second eternity.

“Please, Rebecca,” he said.

She turned to go back into the house. “I have chores.”

“I can’t change it, Rebecca,” he said in one last-ditch effort to sway her. “I wish it had been me in that buggy instead of Dottie Mae.”

“So do I.”

Her words found their mark. Levi caught his breath and stumbled a few steps backward. His chest heaved up and down as the tears rolled down his cheeks. “I’m sorry, Rebecca,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

“So you’ve said. Now go away.”

He backed slowly down the steps, never taking his eyes from her face. And then he was gone. Rebecca stood motionless on the porch, staring in the direction Levi had gone, listening as the rumbling echo of his Toyota slowly faded to nothing.

She didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath. She took air into her lungs in spasms, as if she had just spent hours weeping bitterly for what might have been. Closing her eyes, she bit her lower lip. Hard.
Block out every other pain, no matter how intense. Don’t scream in frustration or guilt or heartbreak.

Don’t cry.

Never, ever cry.

Why would she ever waste tears on Levi Cooper? Dottie Mae would scold her harshly.

Did our friendship mean nothing?
she would say.
Spend your tears on me, not on one of my killers. No matter that he has stolen your heart. Do not love him.

I don’t. I won’t love him. He is dead to me now.

With her good hand, Rebecca scooped up the quilt and the bouquet of roses from the bench. They probably cost Levi upwards of sixty dollars. He shouldn’t have bothered. She thudded her foot a couple of times against the front door, and Danny immediately opened for her.

“Where’s Levi?” he said.

Rebecca pushed past her eager brother, marched to the kitchen, and shoved the roses into the garbage bin.

“He’s gone,” she said. “Gone for good.”

Levi stumbled to his car, slammed the door, and tore out of Rebecca’s driveway. He drove in whatever direction the road took him until his vision blurred and he couldn’t seem to find his way.

He was going to lose it.

After pulling into an ancient gas station spotted with rust, he parked his car and rested his head on the steering wheel to stop the world from going in circles.

Her name was Dorothy. Levi hadn’t even made the connection.

Oh, please, dear heavenly Father. Anything but this. Could You hate me any more than You do? I can’t bear this punishment.

He felt as if he were plunging from a jagged cliff into a river of stones that tumbled and crushed and pulverized him into dust. He longed for a stiff wind to blow him into oblivion.

“I wish it had been me in that buggy instead of Dottie Mae.”

“So do I.”

Crying out in pain, he put his car into Drive and squealed the tires in an effort to get away. He had to find a drink. He had to have a drink.

The gravel crackled under Levi’s tires as he pulled up along the side of the road. He parked far enough from the shoulder that there was no risk of a passing motorist hitting his car in the dark. The cold night air felt good after sitting in his stifling car. Clutching the neck of his unopened bottle, he staggered to the rocky bank of the half-frozen river where he and his dad used to spend lazy afternoons, fishing.

For a moment, Levi forgot his self-loathing. Anger at his dad welled up inside him. If it hadn’t been for Dad, Levi wouldn’t have been so reckless, wouldn’t have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. If Dad were still around, none of this would have happened.

But rage at his dad couldn’t hold Levi for long. He knew precisely where to lay the blame. Oh, how he hated himself for what he had done! The despair engulfed him. Now Rebecca hated him too. There were no words of comfort that would sway her. She despised the very sight of him. How could he bear her contempt?

He had lost her.

He raised his bottle of whiskey in the moonlight. This was the only thing that ever gave him comfort. It dulled the pain enough to let him function, let him forget for a few hours what he was. He eagerly peeled the wrapping off the lid. In his carelessness, he pulled the wrong way, and the sharp foil sliced through his finger. Good. A new pain to dull the old one. He tried to twist off the lid, but it wouldn’t budge. No matter. He’d never met a liquor bottle he couldn’t open.

Doubling his efforts, he grasped the bottle tightly, but his hand slipped around the lid as if it were greased.

Growling, he took a deep breath and contemplated bashing the thing with a rock, when a glint of light on the river caught his eye. A cloudless night in Wisconsin in December was rare, and the moon glowed unhindered in the sky, bathing the frosty water in a sparkling glow. Momentarily captivated by the brilliance, he gazed out over the water, and Rebecca’s bright eyes seemed to appear in the reflection. He heard her voice.

“Jesus will carry it for you if you give it to Him.”

“It’s my burden, Rebecca, not His.”

“Everything is His burden.”

He wished he could believe it. He wanted to believe it with all his heart. But how could God ever love, ever forgive him? He tapped a knuckle between his eyebrows in an attempt to drum Rebecca’s voice out of his head.

“Can a woman forget her sucking child? …yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands.”

Levi didn’t know how that Scripture found its way into his brain, but he heard it again and again. Focusing his eyes across the river, he pictured Jesus standing on the other side with His arms outstretched.

“I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands.”

What did that mean?

In a flash of insight, Levi knew exactly what it meant. The Lord had paid a high price for sinners like him. Anyone could see the price if they looked at His hands.

Rebecca’s voice rang inside his head like a bell.

“There are no lost causes.”

Just look at the hands.

He felt as if he were standing on the railroad tracks as a train came full speed and bowled him over. The weight of his life, his mistakes, hit him and threw him into an imaginary brick wall. Unable to support himself, he groped his way to the nearest tree and wrapped his arm around it.

Bowing his head and letting the grief overcome him, he wept, spilling out tears with every emotion he had buried deep.

That poor girl. Her death threw countless lives tossing and rolling in its wake: her family, her friends, his old friend Derek who was with him in the car that night, his family, Rebecca, his own…. Tonight, more than ever, the weight of consequences crushed him. How could Jesus ever lift it? It was too heavy.

“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

He moaned in exhaustion, his strength spent.

Levi looked down through tear-filled eyes. He still had the bottle. Again he tried to unscrew the lid. This time it opened with ease. He tipped the bottle upside down and poured out every drop. The whiskey sloshed and splashed on the rocks.

It was time to let God, not the liquor, take control of his life.

The sharp rocks of the riverbank cut into his skin as he fell to his knees.

“Dear God,” he said, tears still streaking down his face, “I think I’m ready for a rest.”

Early the next morning, Rebecca stepped out on the front porch to attempt to sweep with one hand. She looked down.

A single red rose lay on the welcome mat at her feet.

Her heart drummed a wild cadence as she looked down her driveway and across the pasture. Not a sign of him. The disappointment almost overwhelmed her.

She picked up the rose, closed her eyes, and stroked her cheek with the soft petals. She stopped herself before she put the flower to her nose. How could she ever think about accepting a gift from him?

She crushed the rose until it fell apart in her hand then cast the petals onto the snowdrift in front of her porch.

Her hand smelled like rose milk the rest of the day.

Levi crunched through the snow in heavy boots with two full pails of milk. His breath hung on the air as he paused between the barn and the house to savor the quiet stillness of dusk on Christmas evening. It had started snowing early in the morning as the houseful of guests stirred from sleep. Flakes heavy enough to catch on his tongue still drifted to the ground as he stood gazing at the frosted windows of the house. A white Christmas—like the ones he remembered from his childhood.

On a day like this, Dat would hitch Beauty to the sleigh and they would glide around the snowy lanes to the pond for some ice-skating. Levi’s cheeks would grow numb and bright red before Mom made him bundle up in the sleigh and Dat drove them to Mammi’s house for Christmas dinner.

Levi and his mom had moved into the dawdi house almost a week ago. Relatives by the buggy-ful came to their apartment to help them move out, while a houseful of more relatives greeted them at their new place to help them settle in. The dawdi house was attached to the main house. It had two bedrooms and a nice, big living area with a complete kitchen.

Today, Mammi’s house was nicely crammed from cellar to attic with out-of-town visitors—Mom’s sisters Barbara and Eva and their husbands, plus Uncle Jonas with his family, and, ach, too many cousins to count.

Surely they made up half the population of Amish people in Wisconsin.

That morning after breakfast, the uncles and cousins went sledding on the big hill beyond Mammi and Dawdi’s pasture. Levi took several of the little cousins for rides down the hill. Cousin Rachel, who was four, would go only if Levi sat behind her, held on tight, and dragged his feet in the snow the whole way down.

Rachel reminded Levi of Rebecca. Rebecca would hate sledding.

Thinking of Rebecca always left Levi panting for air. He closed his eyes and waited for the raw pain to subside. Thoughts of her swirled in his brain constantly, rendering him unable to sleep or eat or carry on a coherent conversation.

The look in her eyes last week on the ski hill was riveted to his memory. Her rejection was a pocketknife right to the gut.

She wishes I had died instead of Dottie Mae.

The cruelty of her declaration struck Levi as if Rebecca were standing right there and saying those words to him again. His legs shook. He placed his milk pails on the ground and knelt in the ankle-deep snow. The wet cold crept up his legs and into his heart.

He wished the tears didn’t come so easily. He bowed his head and whispered a prayer. “Lord, please help me get through this. And please let Rebecca heal. She deserves to be happy.”

He knelt there motionless with tears streaming down his face, trying to lift his vision to heaven, until his knees throbbed and his teeth chattered with cold. He swiped away the tears, stumbled to his feet, and picked up his pails, determined that his troubles wouldn’t ruin his first Amish Christmas in fifteen years.

The first for many years to come, Lord willing.

Because in spite of it all, Levi knew he wanted to be baptized. That night at the river, faced with the reality of losing Rebecca, his heart changed and he found another, better motivation. A permanent Rockof-Ages reason to give his life to God.

Levi poured the milk into the large metal container sitting outside the back door and then went inside, leaving his boots on the rug in the mudroom.

Mammi, Aunt Barbara, Levi’s sister, Beth, and five older cousins bustled around the kitchen preparing a Christmas feast. Beth had come from school to spend Christmas with them, and even though she was in her Englisch clothes, she seemed to fit in perfectly with her Amish relatives. She chopped carrots while chatting merrily to Mammi about her time at the university.

Mom sat in the corner with her eyes shining and her hands clasped below her chin. While the family included her in what they could, certain formalities of shunning would still be observed for another few weeks. She didn’t seem to mind being excluded from the food preparation.

When she caught sight of Levi, she leaped from her stool and came to him.

“Oh, Levi, isn’t this wonderful-gute? Mammi made
stollen
and pecan pie. And you should see the size of the turkey in the cookstove.”

She squeezed his hand and smiled so big that Levi could see the little girl she used to be. At times like this, his heartache evaporated. Levi had never seen his mother so radiant.

Mammi, with a dot of flour on her cheek, pulled a plate of pickles and olives from the fridge. “It’s high time to wash up, Levi. Dinner will be ready in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

Levi helped
Onkel
Titus and the cousins move the big furniture out of the front room and set up two columns of long tables and benches. The older girl cousins spread silky tablecloths over the tables and arranged tall candles and pine greenery down the centers.

Mammi pulled out the good china, and the tables soon looked like something Levi would have seen in
Better Homes and Gardens
magazine.