The Baker's Wife (34 page)

“It's
your
fault that he can't get out!” Salty tears ran over her scratches. The cat's blood had made a smear across her shirt. “Only pathetic monsters shoot trapped animals!”

“I almost shot
you
!”

“You couldn't shoot me any more than you could shoot Miralee. You just want us all to think you don't care.”

Disbelief made Jack guffaw. “Don't make me prove it.”

Leslie buried her nose behind the cat's rigid neck but kept her glare on Jack as she walked back into the kitchen.

Jack rubbed his temples, the gun still in hand.

“Mean, mean man,” Leslie cooed. She snuffled, and her voice faded into the storeroom. “Poor kitty, he shot you in the foot!”

Jack fired two rounds into the espresso machine.

Then he reloaded.

CHAPTER 32

How far are you willing to go?

The voice came to Audrey again, male this time, while Julie slept on her cot, murmuring and kicking weakly at her blankets. Audrey stood next to the woodstove, trying to stay warm, trying to figure out what the question meant and how the answer would help Julie, help her husband and son.

At first she had thought God was talking to her about physical distance.
If I asked you, Audrey Bofinger, would you drive through a
barrier and down a precarious fourteen-mile road to find a woman who
needs you, while your husband and son suffer without you? How far
away from them would you go?

She had gone that distance, though, and the question still hounded her. Maybe if Diane and Miri couldn't raise anyone on the radio, they could carry Julie out. It would be dangerous and guarantee nothing, of course. Not even if they could get back to Geoff's truck.

Julie clutched the wool draped over her breast and, somewhere deep in a feverish dream, she began to whimper. She twisted away from the cause of her tears, her hips and shoulders rolling in opposite directions. The blanket shifted and Julie's thin cotton Henley shirt opened at her throat, and Audrey saw a blotchy rash there, one that had troubled her own neck in the days after the accident. A pendant on a silver chain seemed to be the irritant, a crude silver circle surrounding a rough yellowed rock—the necklace that Cora Jean had draped over her family photograph where she could see it at all times in her dying days.

The necklace that had separated the twin sisters.

Julie looked more like Cora Jean in that moment than she looked like herself, and Audrey was moved to compassion by her fondness for the dear old woman. Without thinking, Audrey dropped to her knees beside the cot and took Julie's burning hands in her own.

Julie's fever splashed across Audrey's fingers like a flaming oil lamp, spilled. Audrey snatched her hands away. The agony vanished. Julie's tender cries stopped, then after a perplexing pause, resumed with more intensity.

Audrey felt alarmed. She had been here before, helping to bear Cora Jean's heartache in such an intimate, personal way that it was nothing short of embarrassing for her, perhaps for both parties. Julie was no sister, no beloved friend, but a virtual stranger—and not only that, but one who had turned down Audrey's offer of help before. Audrey didn't have any desire to relieve her by sharing the pain; she had enough of her own to deal with at the present moment.

What do you want me to do?
Audrey shrieked inside her own head.

Dare to own it!

Own
what
? Whatever it was, she did not dare.

A draft entered the room with Miralee and Diane, who stomped their shoes free of snow before stepping in.

“Did you get the medicine?” Audrey whispered.

“I need to walk back,” said Diane.

Miralee was rubbing her hands together over the stove, looking at her mother, her brow rippled.

“Did the radio work?”

Diane nodded once in an unconvincing way. She was staring at Julie's neck.

“So someone's coming?” Audrey demanded. “When? Who did you talk to? Are Geoff and Ed all right? Why do you have to walk back if they're on their way?”

Instead of answering, Diane reached over and touched the exposed pendant.

“Your mother had that necklace before she died,” Audrey said to Diane, hoping to offer something good in the fact that the jewelry had made it back home one way or the other. “She kept it in her bedroom, over a family portrait.”

“So Juliet gave it back for me. She did what I couldn't do.”

And then Cora Jean, with her biological daughters in prison and in the ground, instructed Harlan to give the family heirloom to Julie. It would have been cruel for Audrey to say these thoughts.

“Is she going to die?” Diane asked.

Miralee clapped a hand over her own mouth.

“No,” Audrey said. “She's not going to die with all of us helping her.”

“What should I do?” Miralee asked.

Audrey didn't know. She didn't close the gap between herself and the bed. “I was thinking we could carry her out. Get her to the truck and the medicine, then go back.”

“That could take hours,” Diane said. “And the skies are clear now. Don't you think Wilson will send a helicopter even if he doesn't hear from us?”

“And it's so cold,” Miralee whispered.

Geoff and Ed didn't have hours, and Audrey preferred to be doing something, fixing problems.

“We could carry her on the cot,” Audrey said. She bent over and gripped the corner of the metal frame and gave it a gentle tug to pull it away from the wall. The feet scraped the wood floor as the bed shifted, accompanied by the sound of ripping canvas.

“That won't hold together,” Diane said. “It's too old.”

Audrey straightened, forced to agree.

Miralee crouched between the stove and the bed and began to rub her mother's feet. Diane used the chair for support as she lowered herself to the floor, sat sideways on her hip, and reached up to stroke Julie's stringy hair.

“I'm worried that she has an infection from her surgery,” Audrey said.

“Is she hurt any other way?” Miralee asked.

“Not any obvious physical way.”

“But she lost so much blood—wouldn't that take its toll?”

“That blood was your mom's, but it wasn't from an injury.”

“Then where did it come from?” Diane asked.

Audrey walked to the desk and picked up the bill from Hemato Labs. “Your mother donated her own blood before her surgery. It was probably something her doctor recommended she do in case something went wrong and she needed a transfusion. The safest blood to get is your own.”

“She didn't do that,” Miralee said.

“This bill says she did.”

“But I know she didn't, because she and Dad had a huge fight about it. The insurance company wouldn't approve it—they said it was unnecessary because the risks for her procedure were so low. Mom was the one who wanted it, and her doctor agreed to prescribe it for peace of mind. But Dad wouldn't scrape the money together, and Mom went off like a firework, said all this stuff about how he cared more about protecting the city of Cornucopia than about protecting her and all that. She eventually let him have his way.”

“Apparently not.” She handed the paperwork to Miralee.

“That fight was a biggie—The Biggie. I moved out within the week.”

“One more loss. How much can a person take?”

“What do you mean?”

“Cora Jean died in the spring. You had an abortion—”

“How's that a loss to her?”

Miralee's tone was defensive. She was so young.

“If you're fortunate to become a grandmother someday, you'll know. It was my grandbaby too, remember. But besides that, it was
your
loss, and a mother bears her children's losses.”

Diane was weeping silently. Audrey began her list again, feeling the connections tighten among the women in this one-room cabin.

“She lost her mother figure, her grandbaby, and you, Miri— her daughter. She lost an important part of her body, she lost her job”—Miralee's eyes widened—“and somewhere along the way, she lost her husband's affection.”

“If it ever existed,” Miri said doubtfully. “She should have told someone.”

“If someone's bleeding from the heart, is it her job to ask for help or our job to notice?”

“She lost hope.” Diane sniffled.

“A truly hopeless person might pour her own blood out over a motor scooter and wait for someone to smash it up. That would make a dramatic statement.”

Miralee had laid her cheek against the folds of her mother's blanket.

“But why you?” Diane wondered aloud. “What could she have against you?”

“Not me, but Jack. I think she wrote that message on his computer.”

“What message?” asked Miralee.

“Some crimes never see justice.”

“He's always saying that.”

“His colleagues would respond to the scene, tell him the sad story. He'd try to investigate, come up with nothing. But Jack thinks . . .”

There was no need to finish. Everyone understood what Jack thought, and what Jack would do.

“The park where Mom and Dad married is right across the street from your bakery,” Miralee said. “I'll bet it never occurred to her that you and Ed would be the ones to cross the intersection first.”

Audrey turned slowly to face the trail map hanging on the wall over the desk. “Ed and I hike up here a lot. You know why I love this place? Because it's a land of such huge disappointments, but unsurpassed beauty too. Did you know that the Native Americans who used to live here abandoned this valley? No one knows why, but something bad happened here, something made the place taboo. Then there were the silver-mining failures—you know all about that, Diane—the lost fortunes, the avalanches. Walt Disney even planned to build a massive ski resort here before the land was annexed into the national park. Yes, it's true. He couldn't get it off the ground. All that effort, all that failure—and look at it. We're standing in one of the most beautiful places in the world. It's hard work to get here, but when you arrive, you're met by a peace that reminds me of relief, like the happy exhaustion of a hard day's work. Nothing easy about this place, just hope that has staying power.”

These thoughts that had inspired Audrey repeatedly in the past fell flat today. A log in the stove broke in two and thumped the drumlike floor.

“I don't think that's been my mom's experience here so far,” Miralee said.

How far are you willing to go?

“I was thinking,” Diane said, “about when Jesus went to Gethsemane before he was crucified, and he asked his friends to stay awake with him.”

Diane's unexpected observation began to provide glimpses of an answer to the question plaguing Audrey. She quoted, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.”

“Why did he need his friends?” Diane asked. “He was the Son of God.”

“I . . . don't know. I only wondered why the disciples couldn't stay awake with him. Why they were so tired.”

“I think they were scared,” Diane said.

“Fear keeps me awake,” Miralee said.

“Fear keeps me away,” said Diane. “They wouldn't even go with him while he prayed.”

These women had spent their lives running away from pain. Audrey's mind opened up to new meanings.
How far are you willing
to go? Do you dare to own it? What are you afraid of?

“I'm afraid of never being forgiven,” Diane said. She looked at Audrey. “What are you afraid of?”

The question stunned her.

“She's afraid of losing her family, of course,” Miralee said.

But Audrey saw the bigger answer without having to think.

“I'm afraid of hurting so bad that I start to lose my faith,” she confessed, staring at the woman who ached precisely that much, and who would not survive it alone.

She closed the gap between herself and the cot, took Julie's hands, and laid her body over the top of Julie's in a protective embrace.

CHAPTER 33

In the back of Audrey's mind, distant and rhythmic explosions pulsed along her blood vessels. They were like lightning behind thunderclouds, illuminating for split seconds at a time the personal scenes of Julie's life that had brought her to this lonely mountain place. And they were like flashbulbs on an old camera, calling attention to the fact that there was a witness to the scenes now, a record of the journey shared with someone else.

The comfort of being allowed to hold Julie's wounded hands with her own scabbed and blistered palms came as a surprise to Audrey.

Julie's pain was as terrible as she had feared but also completely tolerable, divided as it was by four instead of only by one or two. Miralee and Diane held their own at Julie's head and feet, maybe or maybe not having a similar experience. Their presence and their touch were enough. Audrey marveled at God's mercy, delivered by the diverse comforts of diverse women, each doing what she was able to do. No more, no less. The effects were exhausting and energizing at the same time.