Showers in Season (26 page)

Barry’s secretary was not in her cubicle, but the door to his office was open. With a lump of emotion in her throat, Tory went to the doorway, knocked softly, then leaned inside. Barry wasn’t at his desk.

She couldn’t decide if she was disappointed or relieved. Part of her wanted to turn and run back to the elevator and pretend she had never taken this vulnerable step. The other part of her wanted him to know she had tried.

She stepped into his office and scanned his desk for a notepad. His desk was too clean, and she didn’t see one. She glanced back through the door toward his secretary’s desk. Surely, she had one. She went to his secretary’s cubicle and found a notepad lying there with a pen next to it. She sat down in the older woman’s chair, wondering if she was out sick today. Quickly, she jotted a note to Barry, telling him she had been there, that she’d wanted to share something with him, but that she would just see him at home.

That was when she heard the voices in the cubicle next door.

“We were at church the other night and the kids told everybody that she was pregnant.”

Her hand froze on the notepad, and she sat up, listening. She had no doubt that it was Barry’s voice she heard.

Then she heard a woman’s voice. “It was unreasonable to tell the kids. But how could she be reasonable, with all those hormones raging through her?”

Tory stood frozen, unable to move to the right or to the left, unable to flee or confront.

“I think you need to give her an ultimatum,” the woman said. “Just tell her how it’s got to be.”

“Ultimatums don’t work on her,” Barry said. “She’s made up her mind and she’s not going to change it.”

“Well, maybe you just don’t need to make it easy for her.”

“I’ve already been sleeping in the basement,” he said. “I don’t know what more I can do other than leave.”

“Well, leave then,” she said. “Maybe that’s the best thing. You don’t have to get saddled with this, Barry. Especially if it’s not your choice. I don’t know why women think they’re the only ones allowed to have choices. You know, that word applies to you men, too.”

Tory was dumbfounded, unable to believe that her husband was sharing such an intimate secret with someone she didn’t even know—a woman, no less—when he didn’t even want to discuss the baby with their children. She had never felt such rage. Blood rushed through her head like waves crashing against the shore. She thought for a moment that she might faint, but the thought of doing it here…now…was more than she could bear. No, she wouldn’t faint, she told herself. And she wouldn’t run and pretend she hadn’t heard.

Slowly, she went around the cubicle and stepped into the doorway. The woman looked up at her.

Barry turned around. “Tory!”

“Surprised you, didn’t I?” she asked through stiff lips. “I came by to tell you that I felt the baby move. I thought it might
make a difference, but I didn’t know the two of you had already settled our baby’s future.”

It was only then that she turned and fled to the elevator. She was on her way down before Barry could even react.

Tory flew home, sobbing all the way. Her tires skidded to a halt in her driveway, and she got out and bolted into the house. She headed for the closet where they kept their suitcases, jerked one off of a shelf, and ran into the bedroom.

She heard the door close at the other end of the house, and Barry yelled, “Tory! Tory! Where are you?”

She threw the suitcase on the bed and unzipped it so hard that she feared she might tear it.

Barry was at the door in an instant. “Tory, I don’t know what you think you heard but—”

“What I
think
I heard?” She went to Barry’s drawer and pulled it out, almost dropping it on the floor. With both arms she picked up a pile of his clothes and thrust them into the suitcase. “I
think
I heard you telling some of our most private secrets to a woman I don’t even know! I
think
I heard you telling her what our sleeping arrangements are! I
think
I heard her advising you to give me an ultimatum about our baby’s life!”

She went back to the dresser and slid another drawer open, took another armload of clothes to the suitcase, and dropped them in.

“What are you doing?” he demanded.

“I’m packing your suitcase! I don’t want you here.”

She pulled out another drawer, but he stopped her. “Tory, I know you’re hurt. Maybe I shouldn’t have been talking to anybody about us, but—”

She jerked away from him. “Who is she, Barry? Who is this woman who’s making judgments about my baby?”

“Her name is Linda Holland. She works in marketing. We’ve gotten to be friends. It’s no big deal.”

“It’s a big deal to me!” she shouted. She went to the closet and grabbed some things, threw them on the bed.

“Stop it! I’m not going anywhere.”

“Oh, yes, you are,” she said. “So help me, you’re out of here.”

“And what is that going to solve?” he asked.

“I can have peace during my pregnancy!” she sobbed. “I won’t have to walk around trying to pretend I have a marriage when I don’t. I won’t have to know that my husband is sharing my most intimate secrets with some other woman. You won’t
know
my intimate secrets,” she said. “You won’t know when the baby moves, or when my water breaks, or when I go into labor. And neither will she. Those choices she was telling you about? You’ve made yours, Barry.
I
thought our only problem was that our daughter has Down’s Syndrome. But there’s a lot more than that going on here.”

“You’re wrong about that,” Barry said. “I am not having an affair with her.”

“I don’t know what you’re having with her,” she said, “but whatever it is, I feel betrayed and violated.”

She zipped up the suitcase and slid it across the bed, unable to pick it up. “Here. Take it. Go.”

He refused to touch it. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Oh, yes, you are. Either you’re going or the kids and I are going, and since I’m pregnant and those two children need a place to sleep, I suggest you let us stay here.”

His eyes began to redden. “Tory, I don’t have anyplace to go.”

“Go to your mother’s,” she said. “Tell her what you’re doing. See how she likes it.”

“I’m not going to my mother’s.” He jerked the suitcase off the bed. “I’ll check into the Holiday Inn until you cool down.”

“You do that. And go on back to the office and tell Linda that your wife’s hormones ran amuck today. Tell her you didn’t have to give me that ultimatum after all. I gave
you
one.”

She left the bedroom and bolted up the hall.

Barry followed her with the suitcase. “What are you going to tell the kids?”

“Maybe nothing,” she said. “Isn’t that the way you like it? Or maybe I’ll tell them that their father won’t talk to their mother but he’ll talk to some woman who thinks she’s got all the answers.”

She slammed herself into the bathroom and locked it behind her. She wanted to break something, wanted to smash her fist through the glass.

Instead, she threw up.

She heard Barry outside the door, and she wondered why he hadn’t taken the suitcase and gone. She sat on the floor, weeping into the circle of her arms, listening for him to leave. Finally, she heard his footsteps move, heard him walking through the kitchen, heard the door close.

As she realized her husband was gone, the baby fluttered again. She set her hand over her stomach and leaned back against the wall, wondering what she was going to do now.

The hospital in León was filthy and unsanitary, nothing like the clinic where Harry and the medical missionaries practiced medicine. Though the American clinic was poorly equipped for serious surgeries, it was sanitary.

Now, as Sylvia walked through the halls and heard people moaning in the rooms, babies crying and nurses shouting, she wondered what was going to become of the baby. Would she have to leave her here with her mother, or would a relative take her home? Would little Carly miss her?

With dreadful reluctance, Sylvia followed Harry to the room at the end of the hall and watched him knock on the door. She held back, not wanting to reach the door, not wanting to walk through it and hand that baby over. She started to cry again and pressed her forehead against the child’s. The baby looked up at her and touched the tears with one extended finger.

“You’re not going to forget me, are you, Carly?” she asked. Those big black eyes just searched her wet face.

“Sylvia, honey.” Harry prompted her to come on, get this over with. Sylvia stepped into the doorway, feeling as if that threshold would take her to something terrible and out of her control.

A young, pretty woman lay on the bed, one side of her face bruised and scarred. A row of poorly done stitches zipped across her cheekbone. Sylvia saw Carly in the woman’s mouth, in the shape of her nose, in her eyes as she sat up and beheld the child in Sylvia’s arms.

She let out a cry. “
Mi bebe!
”

It was only then that the baby, surprised by the voice of her mother, turned and saw the woman lying on the bed. She started to cry as if the sight had frightened her, and Sylvia bounced her and tried to calm her down.

But then the baby reached. With both arms extended, she leaned away from Sylvia, toward her mother. Sylvia had no choice but to surrender the child, and the woman closed her bruised, bandaged arms around the baby and began to sob with joy.

Sylvia smiled through her tears. This young, injured woman loved her child the way Sylvia had loved her own babies.

Harry stepped up behind her and put his arms around her. “Are you okay?”

She nodded, unable to speak.

When the woman had calmed down, she told Sylvia in a burst of Spanish how the hurricane had leveled their house. A wall had fallen on her. She’d had a head injury, and by the time her consciousness returned, no one knew where her baby was. Grieving over her dead husband, she had almost decided her child was dead, too. No one had any word on where she was. Everyone who had walked through the door had heard her grief-stricken pleas, and along with her hope, she had almost given up her will to live.

The woman took Sylvia’s hand and squeezed it hard. “
Gracias
,” she wept. “You are an angel of God.”

Sylvia barely understood the Spanish, and she moved questioning eyes to Harry. “Did she call me an angel of God?”

“Yes, she did.”

Sylvia turned back to the woman, frowned, and shook her head. “No, not me.”

“
Angel
,” the woman repeated in Spanish. “He sent you to protect my Selena.” The child had relaxed on her mother’s breast. She was home. “God loved us enough to send you.”

The words stunned Sylvia. She had believed the child was a gift from God—a reward, perhaps, for coming here on faith. She had counted Carly as part of her work.

Maybe she hadn’t been wrong. Maybe she had been sent to care for the lost child of a desperate mother. Instead of Carly being Sylvia’s provision, maybe it was the other way around. Maybe it wasn’t over yet.

“What will you do with the child tonight?” Sylvia asked, her Spanish halting and broken.

“I don’t know,” the woman said.

Sylvia thought of offering to keep the baby one more night, but she knew she couldn’t wrench her away now. But the woman was in no shape to even sit up.

Sylvia bucked up the strength that she would need to get through this and turned to her husband. “Harry, I need to stay here overnight.”

“Stay here? Why?” he asked.

“Because she needs help tending to Carly…I mean, Selena. I can’t separate them tonight, so I’ll stay. Tomorrow, I’ll take her home and keep her until her mother gets out of the hospital.”

Just then an older woman bolted through the door. She took one look at the baby and let out a yell. She threw herself over the bed rail, kissing the baby and the mother and weeping as she chattered in Spanish.

Sylvia knew the woman was the baby’s grandmother, or some other close relative who loved her.

Harry pulled Sylvia from the room. “I can’t go yet!” she said. “Harry, I didn’t say good-bye!”

“We need to go,” he said, “before it gets harder. She’s in good hands, Sylvia. Her mother’s, her grandmother’s…and
God’s. You have to trust that.” He held her as she wept out her heart. Finally, she allowed Harry to walk her down the corridor.

He took her home in silence, walked her into the house, then held her on the couch as she wept against his shirt.

While Leah and Rachel helped Joseph memorize his multiplication tables, Brenda took Mark and Daniel outside to do an experiment to show them what color flame different compounds would produce. She had gotten compounds from an advanced chemistry set with strict instructions on what not to do.

Mark had given her little trouble today, since the science project interested him. She had found that he needed almost constant stimulation, but if she could get him interested in what they were doing, he forgot to be a smart aleck.

They had only gotten as far as Noah in the Old Testament, and John the Baptist in the New, but on their test this morning, Mark had named Shem, Ham, and Japheth. She considered that a divine victory.

The experiment captured his imagination, so when she asked Mark to memorize the results of burning each compound, he seemed anxious to comply. When they had finished, she took the supplies to David’s workshop and set them on a shelf.
“David, the kids are all working on assignments. Would you keep an eye on them while I run over to check on Tory?”

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll just take a break.”

Brenda had seen Tory screeching into the driveway earlier, and a few minutes later, Barry had driven up. She hoped things had gone well at Barry’s office, but from the looks of things, they hadn’t.

Barry had slammed out of the house and screeched out of Cedar Circle, and when Tory drove by to pick up the kids sometime later, her eyes had looked red and swollen. Brenda crossed the lot between their homes and knocked on Tory’s door. When she didn’t answer, Brenda tried the knob. It was unlocked, so she opened it and stepped inside.

“Tory?” After a few seconds, she heard a voice responding from the back. She headed for the bedrooms. She saw the children napping as she passed their rooms, and was careful not to wake them. Quietly, she started back to Tory’s room.

But Tory was on her way out. Her eyes were red, and she had a Kleenex pressed under her nose. She looked as if she had been crying all morning.

“Tory, honey, what’s wrong?”

Tory led her into the living room so the kids wouldn’t wake up. “I did what you said,” she told her, dropping onto the couch. “I went up there to let him feel the baby move, only he was sitting in this cubicle with a woman.”

“What?”

“He was telling her how he’s been sleeping in the basement, how our marriage is falling apart, that he can’t reason with me, that I’m too hormonal.”

“He was saying all that to a woman?”

“Yes, and she told him he should give me an ultimatum, that he had choices, too.” She tried to find a dry place on the tissue and dabbed at her eyes.

“Oh, honey. What did you do?”

“I let them know I was there,” Tory said, lifting her chin. “You know me. I can’t keep my mouth shut. Maybe I should
have just gone on home and confronted him tonight, but I didn’t.”

“Did the two of you get to talk?”

“Oh, yeah. He came home and I packed his suitcase so he could leave again.”

“You didn’t.”

She wiped her face and breathed in a sob. “I did. I packed all of his clothes in that suitcase, threw it at him, and he’s gone. He’s checked in at the Holiday Inn.”

“He’ll be back.”

“No, he won’t,” she said through tight lips. “I won’t let him in. I’m thinking about having the locks changed.”

“Tory, that would be ridiculous.” She touched Tory’s shoulder, helpless to know what to do for her. “Did you tell him about the baby moving?”

“Yeah, somewhere in all the screaming and yelling I did. Not that he cares. This baby has had an execution verdict from Day One.”

Brenda closed her eyes.

“Can you believe this?” Tory asked. “He’s sharing our marriage problems with another woman. She knows more about what he’s thinking than I do!”

“What did he say about her?”

“He swore that it was nothing. But it is, Brenda. I know it is. That’s what all this is about. It’s not just about the baby. I should have known.” She blew her nose. “All this time, I’ve thought this was about Down’s Syndrome. But it may really be about an affair.”

“Maybe not. Maybe it really is nothing.”

“It’s something, all right. I don’t know how much more I can take.”

Brenda pulled her into a hug, and she felt Tory relaxing in despair against her shirt. She wished she knew what to say, but no special words of wisdom came to her mind.

Suddenly, the front door flew open. “Mama!” Leah cried. “There’s a fire! Mark and Daniel!”

Brenda let Tory go and dashed outside. Smoke filled the air, and she saw flames dancing from the picnic table next to her house.

Mark and Daniel stood off to the side as David tried to drown it with the hose. She heard a siren coming from around the corner and realized someone had called the fire department.

She ran to Joseph, standing on the side of the yard. “Honey, you have to get out of this smoke.” She turned around and saw that Tory was behind her. “Tory, will you take him into your house? Leah and Rachel, too?”

“Sure,” Tory said, wiping her nose again. “Come on, guys. I’ll see if I have any Popsicles.”

Brenda watched her children leave, then looked across the fire to the older two boys. Daniel was crying. He knew he was in trouble. Mark, however, just held his chin up defiantly, as if he dared anyone to confront him.

As the firemen talked to David and doused the flames, Brenda approached the boys. “What happened?” she demanded.

“I told him not to do it,” Daniel cried. “We were working on our assignments and I told him just to do what you said. But he had to try that experiment again, and he went into Dad’s workshop while Dad was in the house, and he got the compounds back out. This time he didn’t get it right and it caught fire.”

Her eyes flashed as she grabbed Mark’s hands and looked them over. “You could have been burned.”

“But I wasn’t,” he said.

“Mark, do you understand how dangerous this could have been?”

“We were outside,” he said. “It’s just a stupid picnic table.”

“You could have burned my house down!”

“Well, it’s not like I meant to do it.”

For the first time in her life, Brenda thought she had the capacity to hurt a child. “Can you just say you’re sorry?”

“For what? All I did was a stupid experiment. I’m trying to learn like you keep telling me.”

“I told you to do your assignment.” Her voice was rising. “Why couldn’t you just follow orders?”

“Why can’t you just calm down?” he asked. “You sound like my mom.”

She felt her scalp tingling as the fury built up inside her. “Mark, you deliberately disobeyed me…
again.
”

The firemen were busy dousing the grass in case any live sparks remained. David came up behind her and put his arm around Brenda’s shoulders. “No harm done,” he said. “This time. I can rebuild the picnic table.”

“See?” Mark told Daniel. “No harm done.”

“No thanks to you,” David said. “How about a little more remorse and a little less attitude?”

“Attitude? The experiment was her idea. She showed us how to do it.”

David shot Brenda a look that said no amount of money was worth this.

“Mark, you’re really testing my patience.” Brenda’s hands trembled.

“What?” he asked. “Now everybody’s mad at me. I was just trying to do my work.”

“You were
not
trying to do your work!” Brenda bellowed. “You were doing exactly what I told you not to do, and it could have hurt or killed somebody.”

“But since it didn’t, can we just move on? The picnic table was old, anyway. You needed a new one.”

Brenda grabbed Mark’s arm and glared into his face. “I’ve tried to work with you, Mark. I’ve tried to help you. But I can’t stand this anymore. I don’t know what to do for you.”

He jerked away from her. “Then just let me go home.”

“No, I’m not going to let you go home, because your mother’s not there, and you might burn
her
house down.”

“So what do I have to do?”

“You have to go into the living room and sit there by yourself until your mother gets home.”

“The
living
room? There’s nothing in there, not even a TV.”

“You don’t
need
anything to do. You just need to sit there and think.”

“Think about what?”

“About what you did wrong today. What you need to apologize for.”

“I haven’t done anything wrong,” he insisted.

“Just go into the living room,” she demanded. “Now!”

Finally, Mark obeyed and started into the house.

Brenda turned back to Daniel. “Go get your brother and sisters from Miss Tory’s,” she said. “I want everybody back to the school books, now.”

Daniel wiped his face and looked up at her. “I’m sorry, Mama. I should have stopped him.”

“Next time, tell me or your father
before
he blows something up.” She saw the deep contrition on her son’s face, and pulled him into a hug. “Oh, honey, I’m so glad you’re all right. And I’m sorry you had to see me lose my cool. I thought I was above that.”

She tried to hold back her tears, but failed. Daniel hugged her back, then headed to Tory’s house to get his siblings. She wanted to go with him, to tell Tory how sorry she was that their talk had been interrupted. Tory needed her, but she couldn’t leave Mark in there alone. There was no telling what he might do.

“You okay?” David asked.

“No,” she said, “I’m not okay.”

He turned her around to face him. “Mark’s getting to you, isn’t he?”

Her face was getting hot with emotion. “He’s driving me crazy, David. I don’t know if I can take this.”

“Maybe you just need to have another talk with Cathy.”

“David, if I don’t keep teaching him, what are we going to do? We need this money.”

“Maybe I can get a job at night. We’ll work something out.”

“No. I can do this. I know I can. I’ve just got to figure out how to get through to him. I thought I was making progress. He seemed so interested today, and he did really well on his test this morning. But this…”

“You know, you don’t have to finish school today,” he said. “You could just take the rest of the day off.”

“No,” she said. “It’s like getting back on a horse after falling off. I’ve got to keep going or I’ll give it all up entirely.”

That afternoon, when Mark went home from school, he told his mother that Brenda made him sit in the living room alone all afternoon with nothing to do.

“All right, Mark,” Cathy said. “Give it to me straight, because you know I’ll find out from Brenda. What did you do?”

“I had an accident doing a science experiment. It caught fire and almost killed me. The fire department came and everything.”

Cathy’s mouth fell open, and she looked out the front window and saw the charred picnic table and the black spot on the Dodds’ lawn. “A fire?” she asked, turning back to him. “Mark, were you hurt?”

“Of course I was hurt,” he said. “It knocked me off my bench. But she was over at Tory’s house, so there was nobody but Daniel there to help me.”

“Wait.” The story wasn’t adding up. Brenda had left Mark alone while he did a potentially dangerous science experiment? “Just…I’m going to talk to Brenda, okay? I’m going to get to the bottom of this.”

“Fine,” he said. “You’ll see. I’m supposed to psychically know chemistry and get the experiment right.”

“So she really left you
alone
to do it? Just you and Daniel?”

“That’s right. While she hung out with Tory.”

This time when Cathy stormed over to demand an explanation, she found Brenda more agitated than she was.

“Hold it!” Brenda said at the door. “If you came to lambaste me about keeping him in the living room all afternoon, you’d better get the real story first.”

Cathy had never seen Brenda angry. She responded with maternal defensiveness. “He said you were at Tory’s while he
was doing a dangerous experiment. He said he almost got blown up!”

“Of
course
he said that!” Brenda almost shouted. “Cathy, either you trust me or you don’t.”

“Well,
were
you at Tory’s?”

“Yes! Because I saw her screech home and run in crying, and then Barry screeched home, and left with a suitcase. They’ve separated, and I was trying to comfort her.”

“Separated?” Cathy asked. “Oh, my gosh.”

“And
since
Mark is thirteen years old I thought he could be trusted without adult supervision for fifteen minutes!”

“Well, yeah, but not with dangerous chemical compounds.”

“He didn’t
have
dangerous compounds, Cathy. They were on a shelf in David’s workshop. But Mark can’t be trusted on the same
block
with dangerous compounds!”

“Now, wait a minute,” Cathy said. “He’s never blown up anything before. It was an accident!”

Brenda closed her front door behind her and came out onto her porch. She dropped onto her swing. She looked as if she was close to bursting into tears. “They call me Homier-than-thou, you know.”

Cathy crossed her arms, still fuming. “Who does?”

“The other homeschooling moms. They call me that behind my back, because I’m usually so organized and structured. ‘Don’t compare yourself to Brenda Dodd because nobody can have that tight a schedule.’ They’re all more flexible and relaxed, which works for them. But they don’t understand that I
have
to be structured to keep five kids progressing. But look at me today! I want to pull my hair out.”

Cathy suddenly felt sorry for her. The anger drained out of her. She sighed and sank into a rocker. “Mark did this to you, didn’t he? He ruined your disposition and your way of life.”

Brenda breathed a laugh. “Let’s not go that far. I’m just having a bad day. But he almost burned my house down, Cathy,” Brenda said. “He destroyed the picnic table. Did he tell you the fire department was here?”

“Yes. But if it wasn’t a science experiment…”

“He had an unauthorized run-in with a Bunsen burner, after we had done the experiment and put everything away. Thankfully, no one was hurt. My blood pressure may never be the same…” She rubbed her eyes. “I had put the compounds in David’s workshop. Mark went in there and got them while David was in the house. He knew better.”