Immortal Mine (15 page)

“Are you okay?” I ask, instinctively taking
her hand, immediately wishing I could take the words back when she
glances at me. In that glance I can see a maelstrom of emotion
barely held in check. In her hand I can feel the pain, rejection,
abandonment that drags at her.

“Niahm,” Beth entreats, one hand snaking out
toward her daughter, then pulling back when Niahm jerks away.
“Honey, we were going to tell you tonight…” she trails off in
Niahm’s silence.

“When?” Niahm finally grinds out,
quietly.

“Sweetie, we—”

“When!” she demands, pushing back from the
table, standing, pulling her hand from mine.

“Next week,” Beth admits, quietly.

Niahm takes a breath, as if to control her
emotion.

“Baby, why don’t you come with us?” Jonas
cajoles. “You haven’t been to Russ—”

“No.” Niahm’s refusal is immediate, firm.
She turns tortured eyes to me. “If you’ll excuse me,” she says,
sounding proper and stiff, controlled in a way I’ve never heard her
speak before. With her words, she turns and walks out the back
door.

I stand, intending to follow her, suddenly
wondering if it’s my place to do so. After all, this is between her
and her parents.

“Oh, dear,” Beth says, covering her mouth
with a hand.

“She’ll be fine,” Jonas assures her. “She
always is.”

I look at them both, wondering why one of
them hasn’t already rushed from the room to comfort her.

“Should I?” I mutter, indicating the door
she left from.

Jonas glances at me, as if just remembering
I’m present. “Well, you can try, I suppose. It’s usually better to
just let her be.”

I don’t answer, just leave, hoping I can
find her. She’s in the stable, using a pitchfork to brutalize the
hay. If I didn’t feel so bad for her, I might be amused by the
activity.

“Niahm?” I ask, and she glances up at me. I
don’t need to take her hand to see what she’s feeling; it’s written
all over her face. She flings herself at me, wrapping her arms
tightly around my middle as her tears come. I hold her, wishing
that in all my years on the earth, I had somehow learned the proper
words to say at this moment, to ease her hurt.



“Are you sure you want me to come
along?”

Niahm rolls her eyes at me. I’ve asked her
the same question several times, and I guess she’s tired of
answering. I shrug and return to the house to haul another bag out
to the truck.

It’s a two-hour drive to the airport, one
that Niahm doesn’t usually make with her parents when they leave.
She told me they typically drive and leave their car parked while
they’re gone.

“I feel this weird sense of…I don’t know,
foreboding, I guess,” she explained. “I just have this overwhelming
thought that I need to take them this time.”

Because Niahm seems so firm in her
conviction that something bad will happen if she doesn’t do this, I
don’t argue with her. Instead, I’d volunteered to ride with
her—later wondering if she needed the time alone with them. She’s
still angry, still hurt, but managing to hide it beneath a falsely
cheery exterior. She wants me along, particularly, I suspect, since
Stacy isn’t available to make the trip.

The two hour trip to the airport is made
with even more falsely cheerful conversation in the car, from both
Niahm and her parents.

“How’s school, sweetie?”

“Really good. I’m getting an A in
biology.”

“That’s fantastic.”

“A miracle, really.”

I’m on edge just listening to the inane,
senseless chatter. But it seems to be what they all need, so I
don’t say much—and definitely don’t question Jonas about his
travels, not matter how much I’d like to tell them some places to
visit while in Russia. I can feel Niahm’s worry, as palpable as her
hand in mine, though I don’t intrude on her mind. I’m tempted to,
but I resist. She’s told me her worry is unclear, nothing more than
a feeling. I’ve decided it’s just the stress of having them gone
once again.

At the airport curb, Niahm clings to
them.

“Sweetie,” Beth laughs. “We’ll be back
before you know it.”

Niahm shakes her head against her father’s
chest, eyes scrunched closed.

“Darling, we’ll bring you back one of those
amazing Russian dolls, the ones that stack inside one another.”
Jonas seems taken aback by Niahm’s display.

“I don’t want a doll.” Niahm’s voice is
flat. “I just want you to be home.”

“We will, Niahm—as soon as we possibly can.”
Niahm just shakes her head again and turns away from them, climbing
back into the car.

The two hour trip back to Goshen is made
with me driving, Niahm crying, pitifully silent as she gazes out
the window, refusing to talk about their leaving.



“Hey, Shane, you think we could slow down
work on the stables?” I call, glancing out the window at the nearly
finished structure.

Shane, having silently come into the room
behind me, throws an arm about my neck, pulling tightly. I drop,
throwing an elbow into his solar plexus as I do so, immediately
grabbing his arm and flipping him over my head. I continue my
descent over his prone form, driving my elbow toward his windpipe,
stopping just short of actually hurting him.

“Very nice,” he compliments, his breath
wheezing. I hold out a hand, pulling him to his feet as I stand,
grinning. It’s only been the past couple of years that I’ve been
able to defeat Shane, a source of great pride for me, and chagrin
for him.

“You’re an old man,” I grin at him, “You
sure you should keep trying to take me?”

Shane’s fist shoots out, and I feel my
shoulder dislocate.

“Uh,” I grunt painfully, no longer
grinning.

“Not so old, now, huh?” He smiles, grabbing
my arm and pulling my shoulder back into place.

“Why don’t we go out and visit that barn?” I
challenge, rolling my sore shoulder, not wanting to destroy the
kitchen.

“You mean the one you want me to stop
working on so that you have a reason to go visit the object of your
affection?”

“The very one,” I say, grinning with what I
hope is malice.

At the same time, we hear it—hooves
galloping toward the house, and very quickly, at that. We turn and
move at the same time. Without speaking we are plotting our defense
if needed. As we step out the front door, I see Niahm’s
unmistakable blonde hair flying out behind her as she pushes Sheila
toward our house. Shane relaxes, but my tension ratchets up in
response to her body language.

Something is wrong.

I run out to meet her, Niahm throwing a leg
over and sliding off the mare’s bare back before she has even
stopped. I catch her in my arms as she falls forward, horror and
grief in every line of her body.

“What, Niahm? What is it?”

She opens her mouth to speak, but can’t
force the words past her intense dread. I snake my hand down to
hers, and I see it.

Officer Hill
walking up to her
door, followed by two strangers, a man and a woman. I see the logo
on their lapels; recognize that they are from the airline. I hear
Officer Hill tell her, feel Niahm’s panic as her brain tries to
process his words, hear the representatives offering their
condolences.

“
No
,” I cry, releasing her hand and
pulling her into my crushing embrace as she collapses, unable to
withstand the burden any longer, knowing that now her parents will
never again return home to her. In the back of my mind, underneath
the overpowering concern for Niahm, I recall her intense worry over
their trip, her need to drive them to the airport one last
time.

Numb.

I lay on the couch, aware of Stacy and Sam’s
voices from the kitchen. They talk in lowered voices, but they
needn’t bother. I can’t make sense of words anymore. Bob pushes his
nuzzle under my dangling hand, a plaintive whine escaping him. It’s
a sound my own throat longs to release.

There’s a knock at the door, I can hear
that, divine the meaning of the sound. I try to muster the will to
care who is standing on the other side, but the effort is too
great, so I give up. Stacy passes me, her hand reaching out to
squeeze my arm. She opens the door; voices that drone from her
direction mean nothing to me.

Time passes. People stream in and out. They
all come to me, touch me, say words to me in voices that grate on
my nerves. I know them—have known them my whole life, but I don’t
care to pull their names from memory to acknowledge them. Finally,
I pull a blanket over my head, hiding from them, hiding from the
pain that keeps trying to surface. It works; they stop bothering
me.

Sometime later, when the silence becomes
oppressing, I pull the blanket back and see Stacy sleeping at the
end of the couch, my feet resting in her lap. I didn’t even feel
her sit down, let alone pull my feet into her lap. A light snore
from near my head pulls my attention there, where Sam sits in the
chair with his head leaned back, also sleeping.

I study him. His cheek bones are angular, as
if carved. Once, in India, I spent an entire afternoon sitting on a
mat in the street, watching an old man carving a piece of wood with
a small knife. When he was finished, he showed me the face he’d
created, and I had been impressed by the symmetry and perfection of
the cheek bones. I see the same perfection in Sam’s face. With his
eyes closed, I can see how long and thick his copper lashes really
are, fanning across the high point of those perfect cheeks. His jaw
is strong, masculine, freckled with stubble. His amazing hair
glints in the dim light pouring in from the street.

I don’t really know him all that well and
yet it somehow feels right that he is here, in my life. In the
short time he has been, it almost feels
essential
that he’s
in my life. As if he can feel the weight of my appraisal, he opens
his eyes. He watches me in return for a few moments then slowly
leans forward. He reaches out and touches my forehead lightly,
fingers barely skimming the surface, and I feel a shudder start
deep within my abdomen. I try to force it back, push it down to
where I’ve managed to keep it tucked away. Then Sam moves closer
and brings his other hand up, cupping my face, eyes full of
sympathy and understanding.

A sudden recollection of his own family
pushes to the front of my mind, how similar his circumstances—

I gasp, urgently trying to shove the thought
away, but it comes anyway. Sam’s parents are… his parents are
also…

Sam is kneeling next to me now, tears
shining in his eyes as I stare at him desperately.

“I can’t, Sam, I can’t…” The shudder pushes
its way up my spine, into my arms, down my legs. Shaking
uncontrollably, I’m helpless as Sam pushes me into sitting
position, sliding next to me. I’m aware of Stacy’s now-awake warmth
pressing from my other side, cocooned in the safety of two pairs of
arms, safe to let the sound out, the one that’s been trying to
escape.

With the sound comes the grief that I’ve
held at bay since that first day, when I could only think to go to
Sam. Bob, at my knee, matches my grief with his own howling.

I’m relieved that Niahm finally let herself
cry over the loss of her parents last night. She hasn’t cried since
she first came to my place three days prior, wrapped in a silent,
impenetrable wall. This morning she actually let Stacy pull her up
off the couch, and get her into the shower. After she had fallen
back asleep last night, sleeping peacefully for the first time
since this had begun, Stacy informed me today was the day we needed
to force her to make some decisions.

Niahm is escorted from her bedroom, hair
damp, face clean, dressed in a black t-shirt and gray sweatpants,
pulling a matching gray jacket on. She looks tired, grief etching
deep grooves on her forehead and at the corners of her mouth. My
heart thuds with dread. I’d give anything to not have to add to her
distress.