The Road Home (34 page)

Jenny waited until the fluttering and squeaking bats were gone. Her ankle was beginning to throb again, and her left side ached where she had landed when she fell off the cliff. The cave was cold, but it was dry. She was lying on a sandy floor. The dim light from the first rays of the sun filtered through the low entrance and lit the cave enough for Jenny to see around her. She could see that the cave was narrow in the front where the roof came down to the entrance but that it widened out the farther back it went.

The floor was smooth sand except where a few rocks stuck out. Back into the cave a little farther, someone had dug a pit, and she could see that a few pieces of burned wood and ashes from an old fire were still in it. Jenny slowly got to her feet and looked around. She could feel her heart beating in her ankle. There were ledges on the wall, almost like shelves, and the stub ends of candles were stuck on them. Someone had obviously used this place, probably kids.

As she was looking around, she heard a noise from outside. She
shrank back against the wall of the cave and cautiously peered out the entrance to see Jorge walking along the trail, following her tracks.

The sun was barely up, but there was enough light for her tracks to be easily seen. Jorge continued walking right past the brush in front of the cave. Jenny's ruse had worked! He continued on up the trail until he was out of sight.

Jenny sank back down on the floor of the cave, her heart pounding. She waited in fear for him to come back. After a few minutes she thought about hiding from him farther back in the cave. She looked along the shelf where the candle stubs were to see if someone had left any matches. There! A small circular metal tube with a screw-on lid was lying beside one of the larger candles. She picked it up and unscrewed the lid. Inside were about ten perfectly dry wooden matches. There were four candles on the shelf. Three of them were burned almost all the way down, but the fourth stub was fairly large. She gathered all of them up and limped to the back of the cave.

There was an opening in the back wall that she could just barely see. She waited in the silence to make sure Jorge wasn't coming back, and then she struck a match on a striker inside the lid of the tube. The match flared up, and she lit the candle and held it aloft as she began to walk down the narrow passage until she came to a blank wall. As she stood looking for any other way out she noticed that the candle flame was fluttering. A breeze.

She raised the candle higher. About five feet up the wall was a narrow opening. It appeared big enough to crawl through, but she couldn't figure out how to get up. Then she noticed a pattern of holes in the wall of the cave leading up to the opening, almost as though someone had cut them for a ladder. She took one of the small candle stubs out of her pocket, lit it, and set it on a rocky projection next to the holes.

Jenny blew out her big candle and started climbing. The first step was easy because she could use her right foot. But when she put her
weight on her injured left ankle, the pain almost made her fall off the wall. She gritted her teeth and pulled her weight up using the handholds. Slowly she climbed up the wall until she came to the opening. She put her knee up and used her hands to lever herself up and into the hole in the wall. It was cramped inside, but there was just enough space to turn around in. She leaned partway out and grabbed the smaller candle off the wall where she had put it. It blew out, and then she was in darkness. Jenny rolled over on her back and tried to get the matches out of her pocket. Her ankle was throbbing, and she wanted to give in to the urge to just break down and cry.

The narrow passage she was lying in sloped downhill, and there were loose rocks underneath her back. As she struggled to get the tube of matches out of her pocket, she felt herself begin to slide. She struggled to stop, but when she tried to push her left ankle against the wall, a jolt of pain shot through it and she took her weight off. Desperately she clawed at the walls, trying to get a grip. She slid a few more feet and then, with an agonizing jolt, she jerked to a stop. She tried to move her legs, but the injured one was stuck somehow. She was trapped in the dark.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-N
INE

A Light in the Darkness

J
ENNY LAY QUIETLY
,
THINKING OF
what to do, but there was nothing but to stay here for now, stuck somewhere in the dark pit of a cave. Her mind played back a memory buried deep in her youth of another time when she was trapped. It was in a car, and she was very small. She had been cold, looking out of a car window as the wind howled like raging demons and the snow blew fiercely.

Outside the car window was ice, but there was a hole and water splashing. Then a man's face rose up out of the water. Jenny thought the face would see her, but the eyes were raised to heaven and the lips were moving soundlessly. It was a man with stringy hair, and he was struggling to get out of the water, but the edge of the hole kept breaking. And then he looked straight at her and reached for her—but suddenly he disappeared under the water. The wind howled and the snow slowly covered the window bit by bit until she couldn't see the hole anymore.

The roar of the wind had grown louder, and Jenny felt the cold encase her body…and then something wonderful happened. She heard a sound like a scraping at the window. She looked up and saw
something moving outside, brushing and cleaning the snow away from the glass. The movement continued, and suddenly the little girl was looking up into the most beautiful face she had ever seen. The eyes stared back at her, and the mouth opened in surprise. It was her mama! She was kneeling in the snow, looking at Jenny through the window.

Jenny cried out, “Mama, Mama, I'm here! Mama, come find me!”

Jenny could see her mama struggling with the door of the car, but she couldn't open it. Her mama got up and went around to the other side of the car. The door slowly opened, but then everything got mixed up. Her mama was in the car with her, and they were huddled together, and then her mama was gone but she was covered by something like feathers—and then her mama was back and she was wrapping Jenny in something wonderfully warm and soft, and Jenny could see there was a flower, a rose. And then her mama was carrying her through the howling wind, and Jenny was safe and warm in the quilt.

The memory faded, and Jenny returned to reality as a stab of pain shot through her, almost causing her pass to out.

I'm in a cave, and I slid down. I may have fallen a long way. I was dreaming about the car again. I was back in the car by the pond, and I was freezing to death, and my mama found me and wrapped me in a warm quilt
.

Jenny thought about the quilt. Her mama had called it the Rose of Sharon. It had been Jenna's quilt, but her mama used it to save her when she was lost in the big storm, and then it was her quilt. She remembered the last time she had seen it a few years earlier. She came home and couldn't find her mama, and she looked all through the house. Then she peeked in her mama's sewing room. Jerusha was sitting in her rocking chair, holding the quilt close to her, tears glistening down her cheek.

“Mama?” she asked.

“Come in,
dochter
,” Jerusha said, and she did. She stood at her mother's side and looked down at the quilt.

“That's my quilt,” she said. “The one you wrapped me in to save my life.”

“Yes, Jenny, this is your quilt,” Jerusha said. “It's a strange and wonderful story, how it came to be yours.”

Jenny sat down at her mother's feet and laid her head on Jerusha's lap. “Tell me again, Mama,” she said.

Jerusha laid her hand gently on her daughter's head and began to stroke her hair as she spoke.

“I made this quilt for our Jenna when I was running away from God and from my faith. This quilt was my way out. But then God led me to you, and I had to make a choice—hold on to my pride and keep the quilt unspoiled, or use it to save you. I made the right choice.”

You had to make a choice to save me, and the way you saved me was to ruin the quilt
.

“And how did you get me?” Jenny had asked.

“No one knew where you came from or who your parents were,” Jerusha said. “By the time the police went to Jepson's Pond to pull out the car, it was already spring. In the bottom of the pond they found the body of a man. He had been there too long for them to take any fingerprints. When they checked on the car, they found that it was stolen in New York City. He may have been your father, but no one knows.”

He may have been my father, but he hurt me, and he did something bad to my first mama
.

Jerusha kept telling the story. “Well, since you were all alone, we applied to take you into foster care while the authorities looked for any relatives. That was a fruitless search, so we adopted you, and that's how you became our daughter. And a wonderful daughter you have been.”

“Mama, did you ever regret having me instead of Jenna?” Jenny asked as she looked up into her mother's face.

“Jenna was a wonderful child. She already had a special relationship with the Lord when she died. It was an easy and pleasant task to raise her.”

Jenny wondered what her mama had meant about Jenna already having a special relationship with the Lord. As she lay in the darkness of the cave, she tried to remember the rest of the conversation.

“You were a stronger child than Jenna, more determined and self-willed. God knew that you needed your papa and me to raise you, to bring order to your life, and to give you the opportunity to have a relationship with Him,” Jerusha said.

Jenny wondered how being stronger made her different from Jenna. Wouldn't that make her better? And then Jenny remembered a scripture verse she had been taught as a child.
Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ's sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong
.

Jenny lay in the dark, pondering what that meant. It didn't make sense to her. She had always been able to solve her problems by exerting her own will. She took pride in her ability to work her way through any difficulty and solve the problem with her mind and her knowledge. Jenny closed her eyes and thought about her childhood. It had been difficult, but somehow she had always found a way to get through the hard times. Or had she? She thought about what her mama had said to her that day as she told her the story of the quilt.

“Who knows what would have happened to you or me or your papa if God had not put us together? We all needed each other.”

Jenny considered those words. Her mama said that God had put them together and that their lives might have been different if He had not made them a family. As she lay alone in the cave, she began to see things in a new way. All her life she had believed that people made their own way through life—they used whatever talents they had to face each day and somehow make it through. But now she was beginning to see that behind her life, a hand had been guiding and directing her.
What if the bad man hadn't crashed the car? What if her mama hadn't been out in the storm? What if her mama hadn't made the quilt for Jenna, and what if she hadn't had it with her to wrap Jenny in and save her? The quilt! There was something about the quilt that she needed to understand.

Her mama had told her that she had come upon the beautiful silk she used for the red rose by accident. But was it really an accident? All the pieces that made up the quilt were somehow like her life, stitched together in a perfect pattern, yet done so skillfully that even when she looked closely, Jenny had never seen how it was fitted together. It was just a quilt, wasn't it? But as she thought about it, she remembered how difficult it was for her to even stitch, much less make a beautiful quilt the way her mama did.