Reflection (7 page)

The box was full of leather-bound appointment books that must have belonged to her father. They looked thoroughly unfamiliar. Three cryptic journals, filled with dates and places written in strange handwriting, were tucked into the side of the box, along with two framed photographs of her grandparents. Helen and Peter Huber, looking handsome, the way she remembered them from her childhood. Digging further, she found a slightly blurry, unframed photograph of a young woman, fully clothed in a dress, shoes, and hat, jumping from a rock into swirling water. Rachel studied the picture closely. Was it Gram? She couldn't tell, but the image brought a smile to her lips.

She pulled out a few loose pieces of paper and saw that they were sheets of music, handwritten. It suddenly dawned on her that she was not sorting through one of her parents' boxes. She turned the box this way and that, looking for her father's name to no avail. Carefully, she piled the appointment books and journals and photographs back into the carton, leaving out the picture of the leaping woman. She stopped to take one last look at the sheets of music. Even though she could make little sense of them, they fascinated her. The scribbled manuscripts were undoubtedly early versions of her grandfather's compositions.

She folded down the flaps on the top of the carton and slid it across the floor to the south wall before turning to tackle the boxes marked with her father's name.

The first two boxes held carefully wrapped Hummel figurines, her mother's treasures. Rachel had nearly forgotten how every spare inch of shelf or table space in their house had been covered by knick-knacks. The third box held a tarnished silver tea service.

Had her parents saved anything of hers? Any memorabilia? She had left everything behind when she'd fled from Reflection, taking only some clothes. It had never occurred to her to take any other possessions. Least of all, memories of her husband.

Her parents had left town shortly after she had, settling in another part of Lancaster County. They'd come out to San Antonio three times, once for her wedding to Phil and twice to visit. They'd died together in an automobile accident a number of years ago. Rachel hadn't learned about their deaths until two weeks after the funeral, when someone managed to unearth her address from her parents' files. Only then did she realize that her mother and father had continued to feel the need to keep her whereabouts a secret.

The fourth box was filled with her things, and she shivered as she pulled out the objects, one by one. High school yearbooks. A few ancient Beatles albums. Two shoe boxes marked “Rachel” on the top in her mother's handwriting. Inside were pictures Rachel had taken over the years. Plenty of her dog, Laredo, and plenty of Luke and Michael when they were kids. She pressed her hand to her mouth. So long since she'd seen an image of either of those boys. She glanced through the pictures quickly, intentionally refusing to study them.

Beneath the second shoe box was her small white wedding album, wrapped in clear plastic. Rachel and Luke. Their names were embossed in large gold letters on the front of the book, and beneath it in smaller type, June 9, 1972. She rested her hand on the album, hesitating a moment before opening it.

When she finally lifted the cover she was immediately plunged into that long-ago day, truly one of the happiest of her life. She looked at the pictures of her glowing face, of Luke in his uniform, his smile warm and full of love. No hint in their faces of what was to come. That day had been her last taste of innocence. How she'd trusted the world back then. How easily she'd made the decision to spend the time Luke would be in Vietnam in the Peace Corps. She'd had to fight to go. She had not been married when she'd applied, and the Peace Corps didn't like to take just one member of a married couple. But they had invested enough in her training by then that she could persuade them to let her go. It had been the luck of the draw that she and Michael had ended up in the same village together. Katari needed two teachers, male and female and French-speaking, and she and Michael requested—and were fortunate enough to receive—the same assignment.

People had chastised her for not staying home while Luke was serving in a dangerous war. She should be available to meet him if he could get leave, they'd said. But she'd never been the type to sit home. Growing up with two boys as her best friends had made her adventurous and independent. She'd been excited about going to Africa, and besides, it would make the time go faster.

In a few of the wedding pictures she thought she could detect a hint of sadness in her face, evidence of the long separation she and Luke were about to endure. There was such love in Luke's eyes, and in hers. Love and certainty. There had never been any doubt, in her mind or his or in the minds of people who knew them, that this marriage was right. Yes, they were young, but they were meant to be together.

She was stunned by Luke's resemblance to Chris. Luke had been twenty-one in these pictures; Chris was now twenty. So close in age, so obviously cut from the same exquisite cloth. After she'd left home, Rachel had possessed only one picture of her first husband, a wallet—sized snapshot of him in his uniform. Now, to suddenly see Luke from all these different angles—the easy, handsome smile, the expressive blue eyes—was overwhelming. She stared at his face, holding the pictures into the light, searching for a sign that the dark side lurked inside him even then. But she saw nothing of the kind. Whatever had turned Luke into a dangerous man had come from outside.

Michael, their best man, was grinning in every picture, delighted by the happiness of his two closest friends. Sometime during college, Michael had completely shed his gawkiness. He was still slender, but there was beauty in the structure of his face, and he'd grown into one of those men who looked better with glasses than without. Katy Esterhaus had been his date, but she was in only one picture. She was staring into space, blond and squinty-eyed behind her own thick glasses. Rachel had always thought an undiscovered prettiness lurked behind that studious demeanor. She wondered what Katy looked like now.

Two months after the wedding, Luke was in Vietnam and Rachel and Michael flew together to Zaire, then Rwanda, where they spent the next year working side by side in an impoverished, muddy village, teaching and learning and growing. She'd had some anger at Luke during that year for not attempting to become a conscientious objector, as Michael had done. She'd tried to understand Luke's feelings of patriotism. He'd clung to them despite the fact that by 1972 many people doubted the legitimacy of the war. His letters were few and slow in coming, though full of love for her and caring for Michael.

Gradually, though, the tenor of those letters began to change. Three months after his arrival in Vietnam, he wrote of killing someone, and she knew he'd been crying as he'd written those words. But a few months later his letters offered no sense of sorrow or remorse—no feeling at all—when he described the bloody details of the war he was fighting. She felt him hardening with each letter she received. She'd read them to Michael, usually after they'd had dinner together in her small cinderblock house, which had more space and light than his.

“'Yesterday we managed to ambush this group,'” she read from one particular letter.” ‘It was a challenge, but we got them. Some kids were in the way and got hurt. It was too bad, but one of those things that couldn't be helped.'”

She raised her eyes to Michael's after reading the letter, and he said quietly, “What's happening to him?” She shook her head slowly, without speaking, afraid of the answer to that question. Luke was becoming a stranger to her.

She was changing, too. Something happened when you existed side by side with another person for a year, in hellish conditions, doing the sort of work that made you cheer together over the smallest successes, that made you cry in pain together over life's injustices. Neither she nor Michael had ever experienced an existence in which death and suffering and unfathomable poverty were an accepted—and expected—part of daily life. Something happened when that person you'd known forever was suddenly your one link to your past, to your real life, to your sanity. When that person was so fine a human being, so life-embracing. When you watched him make children learn who had not been learning, or help a man dig a grave for his youngest son, or drive the frantic mother of a malaria-stricken baby fifty miles to the nearest hospital. Something happened. And one day she looked over at Michael and felt a slow, subtle twist of pain in her chest, and she knew she'd crossed a line between loving him as a friend and loving him as something more.

And then, of course, the fear began. Fear that those feelings would grow inside her until she could no longer control them. Fear she would never be able to stop thinking about him when she lay in her bed at night. As bad as the fear was, though, the guilt was worse.

They'd been working together for five or six months when she realized that Michael felt it too. It was during her second bout with malaria. Michael stayed with her through the night, bathing her with the coolest water he could find to bring the fever down. In the morning he made her strong tea she could barely touch, and he sat on the edge of her bed, stroking her face and arms and neck with a damp cloth. It was Sunday; neither of them were expected to teach that day, and so they talked. Oh, they always talked, but this time was different.

“I was watching you with Mbasa yesterday,” he said, referring to the mother of a three-year-old boy who had disappeared sometime during the night. Mbasa had been hysterical when Rachel found her down by the stream. “You sat with her all day,” Michael said, “and you were so comforting to her. You knew just what to say. I was…in awe.”

He turned his face away from her then, and she knew. He didn't want her to see the raw emotion there, but she heard in his voice the same tenderness she felt for him. A tenderness pure in and of itself but touched with longing.

“Michael,” she said, reaching her hand up to his cheek. “Do you love me?”

“Of course I do. I've loved you and Luke since I was a kid—” He stopped himself. “That's not what you mean, is it?”

She shook her head.

“Yes, I love you, and it scares the shit out of me.”

She wept then, too weak to hold in the feelings that had been churning inside her during the past few months. She told him how much she loved him, how paper-thin her memory of Luke had become. Luke wrote her letters of death and killing and violence and anger, while Michael seemed the embodiment of serenity and compassion.

“Listen to me.” Michael wrapped his hand around her wrist. “What you and I are feeling is wrong, Rachel. I'm not saying we're bad for feeling it. I think it's normal after what we've been through together, but we can't give in to it. Luke is going through something terrible, something so bad that you and I cannot even imagine it. We know he's a good guy, right? He has a good heart. We have to remember that. Remember when he found those kittens behind the high school and practically cried when the vet said they had distemper and had to be put down?”

Rachel furrowed her brow, the memory vague through her fever.

“We're in this bizarre situation,” Michael continued. “Luke's a million miles away, and his letters sound like someone else wrote them, and so it's almost like he doesn't exist anymore. And then you and I are working together every day, in this kind of…emotional setting, and we're horny as hell, right?”

She smiled and nodded.

“The whole mess is a recipe for disaster, and we're going to have to fight it.”

She was relieved. At least she would no longer be alone in the battle.

From that day forward, they didn't touch. Where they had been easy with their hugs and casual pecks on the cheek, they now behaved as though they were separated by an invisible wall.

In March, Luke was among the last soldiers to leave Vietnam, and Rachel received permission to fly to San Francisco to spend a week with him before his transfer to Fort Myer in Virginia. The week with her husband did nothing to ease her fears. She had no sooner greeted him in the airport than a teenage boy with long hair and holes in his jeans walked up to Luke and spit on the front of his uniform. Within seconds Luke had flattened his assailant to the floor. Rachel stepped out of the way, alarmed by the hatred in her husband's eyes and by his focused and furious attack on the terrified boy.

Luke didn't leave his anger at the airport. He covered it up with silence, but she could see it clouding his eyes when he looked at her. One night he told her he no longer had any respect for Michael, or for anyone who would shirk his responsibility to his country. She was trying to formulate a reply when he fell silent again, and he remained that way for the rest of their week together. Luke's body was with her in San Francisco, but his mind was still back in Vietnam, and Rachel returned to Katari and Michael with guilty relief.

She decided to leave Rwanda and the Peace Corps after only a year, partly because she seemed to have no resistance to malaria and partly because Luke's time in the military would be up in August and she felt honor-bound to be with him. Although he was now in Virginia, his letters still seemed full of anger and an odd, unsettling paranoia.

She was due to leave in July, while Michael stayed behind to begin his second year in the Peace Corps. Katy Esterhaus was coming to Katari to visit him the following week, and Rachel was glad she would not be leaving him entirely alone. She planned to go back to Reflection, where she would find an apartment and interview for the teaching positions she'd applied for through the mail. Then on August second she would pick Luke up at the airport in Philadelphia. They would have a month to get to know each other once more before she had to start teaching and Luke began his search for a civilian job.

She couldn't eat or sleep as the day of her departure neared. Although she and Michael had not acted on their feelings, she still felt weighed down by guilt. What if being with Luke again didn't undo her yearning for Michael? She tried to forget the week she'd spent with the angry stranger in San Francisco. She had made a commitment to her husband, and she was determined to honor it. She had loved him her entire life. Maybe the distance she'd been feeling from him had been nothing more than self-protection. In case he'd been killed, she'd shielded herself from loving him too much. Surely when they were together again in Reflection she would once again feel her deep love for him.