Over the Waters Page 8

  Beth had promised to give them to her church's annual rummage sale. Valerie had shed a few tears that day. But if anything, it proved to her that she and Will had made the right decision.

  She would make a good mom. She still believed that. Still dared to hope that it wasn't too late. But she couldn't live her life waiting for something that might never happen. It was time to move on.

  She closed the Bible in her lap and stretched her arms overhead. There was no use dwelling on what she couldn't have.

  The sun had grown warm, and below her she heard the children assembling for breakfast. Sighing, she scooped up the unused notebook, struggled to her feet, and went down to join them.

  A trio of girls waited at the bottom of the stairs, dressed for the day in their crisp blue school uniforms. They stood in a knot waving shyly as she descended. She was beginning to learn some of the children's names. The taller two were sisters--Marie and Monique. She thought the other girl was called Daphney. She had grown to love the children's lively chatter. The Creole language had a distinctive cadence to it that made their playground banter sound like music. Fortunately, Pastor and Madame Phil insisted that the girls study English, so most of them understood enough that Valerie had been able to communicate with them. She was trying to learn Creole, but was not very successful at it so far.

  Monique whispered something to her sister, and the two older girls giggled and pushed Daphney toward Valerie.

  Her large eyes gleamed. "You sit with us at table?" She blurted out the words, then clapped her hand over her mouth as the older girls corrected her.

  "At breakfast," they said.

  Daphney fell into another fit of giggles.

  Their laughter was contagious and Valerie joined in. "You want me to have breakfast with you?"

  The girls turned serious and nodded in unison, looking like a collection of those wobbly-headed dolls Will had once displayed on his dashboard for a lark. "Sure. But we'd better hurry. It smells like breakfast is ready."

  The sisters each grabbed one of Valerie's hands, and they dragged her across the courtyard as Daphney led the way to the dining room.

  Madame Phil was supervising the serving line. "Good morning, Miss Valerie. Did you sleep well?"

  "Very well, thank you. And you?"

  Madame Phil batted the question away as though it were a pesky fly. "As good as I ever do. I'm learning to make use of the wakeful hours. The Lord and I had a lovely conversation last night."

  "Well, I'm sorry you had trouble sleeping, but I'm glad it wasn't wasted time."

  Madame Phil smiled her sweet smile, and glanced down at the girls, who had turned Valerie's hands loose in favor of their breakfast plates. "Looks like you made some new friends."

  Valerie formed a saucer of her hand and pantomimed sipping from a cup. "We're having coffee together this morning."

  The girls tittered at her joke, and Madame Phil clicked her tongue in mock disapproval. "You'll have all the children wanting morning coffee breaks, Miss Valerie! Then who will do the chores?"

  "Oh, dear! I guess we'll have to stick to milk, girls. Sound okay?"

  Madame Phil translated and the girls giggled some more. Valerie followed them as they carried their plates to one of the tables. She slid onto the long bench and the girls scuttled, shoving each other for a spot beside her. Daphney lost, and turned to the wall, pouting.

  "Wait a minute..." Valerie scooted past Marie, and lifted the little girl and sat her down between the sisters. She moved her plate to the other side of the table and sat across from them. "There! Now I can look at all of your pretty faces while we eat!"

  That seemed to satisfy the girls and they chattered amongst themselves through the rest of the meal.

  After the children went off to school, the day was spent working in the kitchen, helping Pastor Phil paint some of the dorm rooms, and rocking babies to sleep at naptime.

  With three little girls snoring softly in the cribs beside her, and a baby boy they guessed to be about eight months old sleeping in her arms, Valerie basked in a peaceful contentment she'd rarely experienced. The little boy, whom they'd christened Nino, had been left at the gates of the orphanage on Thanksgiving Day. A passerby had discovered him outside the walls and rung the bell while they were eating their holiday dinner.

  "He created quite a stir, let me tell you," Madame Phil had told her, a faraway note in her voice.

  "But doesn't it break your heart?" Valerie asked.

  "It breaks my heart and God's as well, but don't you see? That's why we're here. Before the foundations of the world were laid, God knew that child would need a place like Hope House."

  As Valerie rocked back and forth, stroking the perfectly rounded head of damp curls, listening to the older children playing outside the windows, she had to push away thoughts of leaving these children behind when it was time to go back. Just ten short days from now. What would happen to this little boy?

  Pastor Phil had told her that only a very small percentage of the children were ever adopted. Most of the children left the home when they graduated from the orphanage's secondary school. A few stayed on to help with the younger children, or teach in the school, but for many of them, life after the orphanage was one of poverty and heartache.

  How did Pastor and Madame Phil stand it? Her heart was raw, and she'd only known the children for a few days. How could the elderly couple call each little one by name, watch them develop and learn, and then see them go out into a world that was rarely kind or prosperous?

  Little Nino was fast asleep and Valerie rose carefully from the chair and transferred him to a waiting crib. He stirred and she put a hand on him, waiting for his breathing to become even again. Something about a tiny baby had always touched her deeply. She lingered over the crib, delighting in the feel of his chest rising and falling beneath her hand.

  Oh, Father. I can't help it. I want babies!

  A distinctive squeal of brakes penetrated the silence as Pastor Phil's Volkswagen rolled through the gate, delivering the older girls from the school they attended outside the gates. Soon, a parade of girls marched into the dorm. Valerie checked on the other napping infants and stepped into the dayroom in the center of the dorm. Two toddlers had fallen asleep on a rug at the edge of the room, the pieces of a half-finished puzzle strewn beside them.

  The teenage girls went to their respective rooms to change clothes before they did their chores. Valerie picked up the puzzle and straightened the room while she waited for Jaelle and Nadage to take over babysitting duties.

  The older girls came back into the room smiling broadly. Jaelle asked something in Creole, but Valerie had to shrug that she didn't understand. Jaelle pressed her palms together and leaned her head on the pillow they made. Valerie made out the word pitit. Baby.

  "Oh, yes," she smiled. "All the babies are sleeping."

  "You are good, no?" Jaelle said in halting English. "The babies, they like you."

  She smiled. "I like them, too."

  She did have a way with kids, and the children here had taken to her immediately. Each afternoon when chores were finished, they would spend an hour playing games on the playground or under the vine-covered veranda if the sun was too hot. They always managed to coax Valerie away from what she was doing to join them. It was her favorite time of the day.

  As if on cue, a group of the nine- and ten-year-old girls appeared in the doorway. "Valerie! You come? We fix you hair."

  The girls were fascinated with her thick blond mane of hair, and fought for turns to braid and re-braid it. She'd always loved having someone mess with her hair.

  "I'm coming," she said. "Let me get my brush." She went back to tell Jaelle and Nadage she was leaving, then let the little girls lead her to her room for her hairbrush and comb before they went out to the veranda.

  She plopped down in the shade on the warm concrete floor, and three of them went to work on her. With a tender touch, Monique sectioned her hair into three hanks and assigned one to each o
f the other girls who started the intricate process of twisting it into tight braids. She let them fill her head with bright ribbons and the tiny, colorful beads and barrettes they were so fond of.

  Beside them, another group of girls had gathered small stones to play osle, a game that reminded Valerie of jacks. With the gentle tug of the brushing and plaiting, the babble of girlish conversation and the rhythmic clapping games and songs, Valerie was almost lulled to sleep.

  She was startled out of her near-trance by a burst of laughter. She opened her eyes to see half a dozen little faces giggling. She reached up to feel the silly "do" they'd invented at her expense. If Will could see her now, he'd be laughing harder than all of them put together.

  She pushed the thought away. Will was no longer a part of her life. She had to quit thinking of him as though he would be there when she got back.

  She held out her arms and immediately there were two little girls holding each hand, yanking her to her feet.

  "Let's go find a mirror so I can see what terrible thing you did to me," she teased. "A mirror?" She held an imaginary mirror in front of her face.

  A petite girl called Mariana apparently understood her pantomime and repeated the word in Creole. "Glas...Miwa!"

  "Yes! Mirror," she cheered.

  They all squealed and scrambled to their feet, taking Valerie's hands and pulling her along in their wake.

  Laughing, she followed them to the dormitory, relishing the feel of the new mop of bead-laced braids slapping at her neck and face as she ran.

  Chapter Eleven

  Brizjanti, Haiti, January 15

  "Was this Joshua's room when he was here?" Max stopped on the dusty pathway and cocked his head in the direction of the guest room where he'd slept the last four nights. He somehow knew the answer to his question before Samantha Courtney's nod confirmed it.

  "I guess I should have told you." She paused. "It's really the only guest space we have. I hope that's okay--"

  "No, no, it's fine."

  He followed Samantha as she showed him around the grounds of the orphanage. It was the first chance he'd really had for a tour of the place--and a good talk with the young woman who seemed to have known Joshua better than he ever had.

  His first days in Brizjanti had been spent setting up a temporary clinic and giving each of the children in the home a cursory physical examination. The facilities--if you could call them that--were appalling. Cracks in the uneven walls let in a menagerie of insects and rodents, and the filth that permeated the very air made it impossible to disinfect anything. The gates couldn't keep out the acrid smoke from a garbage heap smoldering in the ditch beyond. The stench seeped in through every window. Max had a fleeting glimpse of his days as a young resident serving an Indian reservation in Arizona. Only this made that tumbledown clinic look state-of-the-art.

  He'd forgotten how influential those brief and horrid months in the desert had been. Janie and Josh had remained in Chicago, and after three miserable months, Max had fled the west and returned to civilization. On the long bus ride to Phoenix to catch a flight home, he'd sworn to himself that he would never work or live in such dire circumstances again. It was one of the few promises he'd kept in his life.

  Or had he? Could he really make that claim when his only son, the heir to the small kingdom Maximilian Jordan had established, had died here in the heart of the world's most impoverished country?

  "What makes you so sure Joshua was happy here?" The words tumbled out before he realized he'd spoken them aloud.

  "Oh, Dr. Jordan..." The girl's expression took on that dreamy quality it always did when she spoke of Joshua. "I wish you could have seen him here. You wouldn't have had to ask me that. Josh loved his work, loved the children. As Madame Duval told you last night, he was the best thing that ever happened to this place. Aside from the lives he literally saved, he just added such joy and fun to life. The kids adored him. Kids all over the village knew him because he helped at the other two orphanages here."

  She stopped abruptly at the edge of a sparse lawn where some children were kicking a soccer ball around. She bowed her head briefly before looking back up at him. "I have something I need to tell you. A confession, I guess you'd have to call it."

  "Oh?"

  She led him to the cement slab where the older girls did the laundry. They each took a corner and sat. The sun was warm on his back.

  She hesitated, then started with a sigh. "The first night in the hospital, Josh asked me to get a paper and pencil...He wanted me to write a letter to you. I--I put him off. I hated the way he was talking...as though he knew he was going to die. I told him he could tell you all those things in person. But he insisted. I did write down the things he told me...later. I think I got everything. But I should have gotten it word for word...in his own words."

  Max wondered why she was telling him this now. Were the things Joshua told her so terrible that it had taken her four days to get up the nerve to repeat them?

  "I'm so sorry, Dr. Jordan. I should have listened to him. Josh's last thoughts were of you. He felt responsible that you two didn't have...the best relationship and he wanted you to know that he loved you." A faraway look came to her eyes, as though she were remembering that last conversation with Josh. "He wanted you to know that he was sorry."

  Regret washed over Max. He felt jealous that this girl, this stranger, had been the one to hear his son's last words. Yet, he was touched--and a little surprised--that Josh's last thoughts had been for him. Something about Samantha Courtney made him feel uncharacteristically open, and eager to talk about Joshua.

  "I think...I think you knew Joshua differently than I did. Tell me about my son."

  She nodded. "Josh said that once. That you two didn't exactly see eye to eye, that you never really understood each other. He wanted you to know that he was sorry for that. He never told me what happened between you, really, but he regretted the way he acted. He said he wasn't very Christlike in his responses to you."

  "That was pretty important to him, huh? Being...a Christian?"

  "It was the most important thing in Josh's life." Her eyes met his and she held his gaze until he turned away, unsettled by her honesty.

  "I think," she said, "that sometimes, when people first find faith, they're so excited and happy that they just want to share it--especially with the people they love most. But like Josh said, they sometimes end up trying to shove it down people's throats instead."

  Max gave a humorless laugh. "Yes, he did that all right."

  "I hope you won't hold it against him. He wanted a chance to make it right. To explain it better. No," she said. A faraway look came to her eyes. "He just wanted to let you see it...in the way he lived his life."

  A lump rose in Max's throat and he bowed his head. When he finally had a rein on his emotions, he looked at her, "Are you a Christian?" Again, he somehow knew the answer before the question was even out.

  "Yes. I am."

  "So you understood him?"

  She laughed softly. "As well as a man and a woman ever understand each other."

  Max smiled. He liked this girl. He wondered if Joshua had had feelings for her, as she'd so obviously had for him.

  "I understood his passion for the things of God," Samantha said. Then, eyes downcast, she told him, "After Josh died, I wrote down the things he wanted to tell you. I know it's not the same as having it in his very own words. I'm sorry. But I saved the paper for you. And...I'll answer any questions you have. It's the least I can do."

  "Thank you," he said. "I'd like to have it. And I do have questions. I'm just not sure I'm ready to ask them yet."

  "How long are you staying?"

  "I don't know yet. I cleared my schedule until the end of the month." He shaded his eyes and gazed off toward the front gates. "To be honest, I'm not sure why I came. I guess I just needed to feel a connection to him. To see what was so all-fired special about this place that he gave up...everything for it."

  She grinned. "I'd gues
s by your tone of voice you haven't quite figured that out yet."

  "No. I haven't." He glanced at his watch. "What time were we supposed to go to the market?"

  She gave a little gasp. "What time is it?"

  "Almost ten."

  She jumped up. "Oh! Madame Duval is going to kill me. We'd better run." She sounded like a ditzy teenager, and it jolted Max to remember how young she really was.

  And yet she had wisdom beyond her years, and an obvious contentment and purpose in life that Max Jordan hadn't unearthed in forty-seven years of searching.

  Max stepped down from the tap-tap and thrust two crisp five-gourde bills into the driver's hand, hoping it was enough. The driver seemed satisfied. One by one, he offered a hand down to Madame Duval, Samantha and two young Haitian women who cooked at the orphanage. The truck pulled away, leaving them on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince in a cloud of dust and exhaust fumes.

  He looked to the west where a "housing development" sprawled across a slope of land. It looked like something a gang of ten-year-old boys might erect at the city dump on a Saturday afternoon, sheets of tin and cardboard jutting everywhere at odd angles.

  In the market, vendors crowded the street, hawking their wares, and shoppers bargained in a hundred rich nuances of the Creole language.

  Madame Duval distributed shopping lists along with plastic pails and sturdy shopping bags for their purchases. She instructed everyone to meet back here in an hour. "Enjoy yourselves, but be careful," the older woman warned.

  Max had been able to log onto the Internet on his laptop computer for a few minutes each morning. The news sites carried accounts of sporadic uprisings in Port-au-Prince. The natives didn't seem overly concerned. But then, they'd lived with constant unrest for two hundred years.

  "This way," Samantha yelled above the clamor of the streets. "Stay with me."

  Swinging a large plastic bucket on her arm, she led the way to a crossroads where an elderly woman had laid out a variety of anemic fruits and vegetables on a tatty blanket.