Butterfly Garden

by Annette Blair

  Adam was surprised at that admission, and yet ... what was wrong with him? “Go,” he shouted. “Just go.”

  The look Sara threw him before she went out the door cut him to the bone. He knew she was angry at his gruff; he just wished he knew why that bothered him.

  The house was silent after she left. Too silent. Everybody felt it. His mother bid him goodnight with a look of understanding—which he hated—before she shepherded the girls upstairs and he was left alone.

  He went right to bed, early as it was, and lay there. Alone. It took him a while to realize that what he felt was not anger, but disappointment. He had expected, but dreaded, having Sara in the bed beside him, and now he was alone. He should be glad. Except that she was with The English. Again.

  During the night, he tossed in a bed that seemed suddenly too big and drifted in and out of sleep. When he heard the kitchen clock chime two, he sat up and saw that Sara was still missing.

  He put on his trousers and went up to see if she was in either of the girls’ beds, hoping, yet dreading the thought of finding her there. For if she chose a different bed from his, the die would be cast and there would be no budging, for either of them. He did not want her in his bed, true, but he did not want her anywhere else either ... except home, damn it!

  Adam sat in the kitchen rocker and lay his head back. Where had they said they were going? North, yes, but what was the name of that farm?

  The clock chimed; Adam’s head fell forward and he sat up straight. Four o’clock. All night. They had been gone all night. His wife had not spent the night with him, but with the fancy English doctor.

  Jakeman; that was the name, and he knew that farm.

  Adam hitched his horses to his buggy and set out after his wife. Enough was enough.

  A frosty snow-cap blanketed the earth, the sun still far from rising, as Adam rounded the bend. The farm he sought lay in the valley, its windows lit even at this hour. That, Adam thought, was a good sign.

  He left the horses standing, climbed the steps, opened the door and stepped onto the porch. At the same time, the kitchen door creaked open, pulled by the draft from the porch door.

  All was silent in a dark kitchen that smelled of baked bread and pickled beets, except for the sound of a man’s snores. The man with the big teeth, the husband, slept and snorted sitting in a kitchen chair, his head in his arms on the table. The English snored too, but it was the position in which he slept, and with whom, that chilled Adam’s blood.

  It looked as if Sara had fallen asleep sitting on the daybed, though now she slept leaning way over sideways. The doctor’s head was in Sara’s lap, her hand in his hair.

  The English looked relaxed, comfortable—who wouldn’t be?—too bloody damned comfortable. His Yankee tie was loose, his sleeves rolled up, his arms bare. Sara’s kapp had fallen off and her hair, unpinned on one side, hung in a flow of soft curls that rested in the doctor’s lap.

  Adam must have made a sound that only Sara heard. She opened her eyes, disoriented and sleep-soft. Something in Adam stirred, something both emotional and physical at one and the same time, and it started him trembling.

  When Sara saw him, she looked confused for a minute, and when she recognized him, there was no life in her awareness. But her gaze softened when it rested on the doctor, and the warmth in her regard struck Adam sharply. She stroked the man’s cheek with a finger, whispered his name, smiled ... and turned Adam to stone. She knew exactly how to awaken the man.

  As if that were not enough, The English moaned and rubbed his face against Sara’s lap. His feelings were surely as far from Adam’s as heaven was from hell, yet he slept on.

  Adam heard the roar that came from his throat and was surprised even as he lunged.

  Both men woke with a vengeance and shot to their feet, teetering between grogginess and vigilance.

  The husband cursed and made for the stairs.

  The English made to protect Sara by stepping in front of her, his expression changing from outrage to red-faced comprehension.

  The whole thing was a farce, but Adam’s laugh became another roar as he lifted the doctor off his feet and away from the object of his need.

  Adam knew in that blink of time that he needed to touch Sara, to claim her, despite disguising urgency with outrage. This new wife of his had not slept beside her husband, but beside another, likely not for the first time, judging by their mutual ease in the situation.

  Adam grasped Sara’s arms. Touching her was pain, it was succor. “You will never—”

  “Doctor Jordan,” the husband shouted. “It’s started again and it’s—” The man’s voice quivered and died.

  Sara and The English ran.

  Adam was alone again, abandoned in his foolishness. Hating the feeling, he took the stairs, determined to reassert his ire and claim his wife, but what he saw inside that bedroom stopped him cold.

  Sara and the doctor worked furiously, but as perfectly together as gears in a thresher, to help Abby—no it was another woman this time. This time a different husband cowered, tears streaming down his face.

  Adam left, and fast, determined to outrun the fiend at his heels. Though he refused to acknowledge its presence, he knew with gut-slicing instinct that it followed too closely behind for him to slow, even for a minute.

  Hours later, Adam heard Sara’s buggy in the drive. Sitting on a hay bale in a dark corner of the barn, he removed his hands from his face and watched the woman who shattered but renewed his spirit make straight for him. Her eyes were wild, and challenge thrummed in her every step. Strong, unbreakable Sara, marching to meet him as a foe, while he, her foolish opponent, longed only for her return.

  “She lives,” Sara said, as she stopped, framed by the wide, open barn door behind her, her black cape billowing in the snapping wind. Sunshine blurred the edges of her form, giving her the look of an avenging angel. Dangerous. Beautiful.

  “Mary and her new daughters live,” Sara repeated, her voice rising with each word. “Because Jordan was there, Adam, and maybe because I was there too. You will not intrude on a birthing again, do you hear me? Never again.” She stepped closer then, becoming no more than a woman, breathtaking in her righteousness. “Birthings are my private world, mine, yes, and the doctor’s too, if need be, for however many days and nights necessary and in whatever place.” She stood so close, now, Adam needed to look up to see her. “A place where you do not belong.”

  There were many such places, Adam thought, and one of them was beside this woman—at any time.

  She walked away. He let her go.

  The following night, Adam’s wife slept silently beside him for the first time ever. He reveled in each breath she took and in each of her movements that rocked him.

  They had not spoken the entire day.

  With his mother, Sara shared every detail, sometimes whispering, sometimes crying, getting hugged and hugging back. And with his girls, she had laughed, even sung. But with him, she was more stone than sand, more foe than friend, more stranger than wife.

  As was best.

  * * * * *

  If she had to go one more day not speaking to Adam, Sara thought she would scream and scare everyone. Despite her anger, she had so wanted to share the joy of that birthing with Adam. She wanted to tell him that she’d slept beside Jordan of necessity. She had almost wept that the first night she was to share Adam’s bed, she had spent the night away from him, instead.

  She and Jordan had needed rest to go on, so they’d be alert and ready when labor began again. No other room in the Jakeman house had a bed, yet every Amish kitchen had a daybed. It was used daily, for elderly parents, children with the sniffles, even for mothers who needed to rest as much as they needed to watch the roast on the fire or their children at play. Midwives, doctors, always used the daybed during long nights of illness or birth. That night had been no different.

  Sleeping beside Jordan, Sara had felt relaxed, safe.

  Sleeping beside Adam, she felt, if not
quite safe, then freshly alive and teetering on the brink of ... something ... like a bud, swollen and ready to burst into bloom, frustrated, for only he could nurture her to flower. But in the days since that birthing, he had not nurtured, but seemed to forget her presence entirely.

  Wilting, she was, and parched for Adam’s look, his touch. If she were not so miserable, she might laugh at such foolishness.

  That night, the third that they had gone to sleep without speaking, on far opposite sides of the bed, Sara was awakened from her own fitful sleep by Adam’s thrashing. Trying to calm him, Sara was forced to grapple with him, until finally she held him down with the weight of her body, a hand to his brow.

  Less at his brow did she feel real heat, than along her leg near his slow-healing thigh. Even through his nightshirt, she felt the fire of infection. She looked back at his face in moonlight to see he’d awakened, fever visible in his eyes. He looked surprised to see her.

  “You’ve got a fever,” she said cupping his cheek, then his forehead with her palm. “You’ve let that leg fester without letting me tend it, haven’t you?”

  Adam grunted, trying to shift her off him she thought, but he only managed to dislodge her enough so that one of her legs fell between his.

  She recognized the reaction in him instantly, warmed to it, despite herself, and willed herself to move, but before she could make her lethargic body respond, Adam’s hands were at her waist.

  Whatever his intent, it changed. She felt it in his touch, in the altered beat of his heart. His hands slid upward to rest beneath her arms, his palms skimming the sides of her breasts, their pressure increasing. At the same time, Sara felt the heaviness of him, there, where she became more liquid as he became more erect.

  Boldly, she fitted herself intimately against him, bringing a gasp, as much of appreciation as denial, from somewhere deep in her husband’s throat.

  Bent on seduction, she raised the hem of his nightshirt. But as she skimmed his thigh, she encountered the source of his fever and emitted a gasp of her own, for her hand came away wet and sticky with blood.

  She scrambled aside to examine that thigh, and no mistaking what she saw. Following the direction of her look, Adam seemed as surprised by the sight.

  Cursing, he pushed her away. “Blast it, Sara, can’t a man get some rest. Took me long enough to get to sleep, now you have to go waking me up.”

  “Blast it, yourself,” she snapped. “You’ve torn the wound open again and it’s been getting worse for God knows how long.” Efficient as the healer she was determined to become, Sara rose, lit a lamp and carried it around to his side of the bed. Even now, the sight of that angry wound was a shock. “Why didn’t you tell me, dummkopf. Keep this up and we’ll be having Jordan over to take the leg.”

  He looked at her sharply, to see if she was serious.

  “I am not fooling, Adam. This is bad. If you go on like this, you will lose it for sure.”

  Adam sighed and lay back while Sara tended him. “Just what he needed, to have her soft hands all over him. Well, it was what he needed, just not like this. “I am sorry,” he finally said. “It started the other day when I went chasing after Emma.”

  Sara sighed. “I should have realized, I suppose, that would cause damage, but so much happened that night, then I went off on that delivery with Jordan. Later when you came running after me, I was so, so—”

  Adam growled, agitated all over again thinking about it. “Damn it, Sara, I was worried sick when I saw you had not been home all night.”

  “You never said you were worried.” Sara was thoughtful as she washed the wound. “You acted as though Jordan and I were ... carrying on or—”

  “Which is what I found!” Adam shouted, memory and pain combining to make him cross.

  “What you were looking for, you mean. Do you honestly think that a wife who ... who ... wants ... a man other than her husband, would carry on while— Adam, honestly, you can be so dumb; David Jakeman was right there.”

  Adam felt dumb. Sara had her faults—many of them—but he supposed she had a point. “I guess it’s because you and The English have been friends for a long time.” He shrugged. “I guess I don’t understand such a friendship.”

  Sara touched his cheek with the back of her fingers. “I’d like for us to be friends, too.”

  “Well that’s just plain foolish,” he snapped. “And dumb too. You can’t be my friend; you’re my wife. Talk about a typical Sara-notion.”

  “Well, here is another Sara-notion,” Sara said, bending to touch her lips to her surprised husband’s. “There is not a man I’d rather befriend, no, nor one I’d rather kiss, or sleep beside, either, than you, Adam Zuckerman, husband or no.” She gazed into his eyes for a long moment wishing he would pull her down and make her his in every way, but he sat as if turned to stone.

  “While you think about that,” she said, “I’ll get some medicine to clean the wound and a healing tea for you to drink.”

  Sara mixed valerian and golden seal in the peppermint tea she gave him to drink. And before she finished binding his thigh, he stopped answering her questions, because the herbs had done their work and he had fallen sound asleep.

  It was near dawn, and almost time for milking, when she finished and made to lower the hem of his nightshirt, but to her surprise, she began to raise it, instead.

  She hesitated for no more than a minute, shocked at her own boldness, but that did not stop her from wanting to look her fill.

  Chapter 10

  All those weeks after his fall, Sara had tended her husband wondering exactly what a man looked like … there. Oh she knew, strictly speaking, because Jordan had taught her everything a midwife should know. He’d even showed her pictures in his medical books that gave her the knowledge of how a man and woman created a child together. She knew that when a man hardened, he wanted to mate with a woman.

  But her curiosity, now, was more specific, more personal. She could admit to herself, in the privacy of her own bedroom, she supposed, that she’d wanted to know about Adam, almost from the first, though she’d dared not even consider looking back then.

  Now he was her husband, and a woman should know about her husband. Ever since the upper room, she had wanted to see him in the bright light of day, and though dawn was naught but a distant glow on the horizon, the room was lit well enough by the lamp.

  Gazing at Adam—at as fine a set of man parts as she might have imagined—Sara covered her fast-beating heart, afraid he would catch her, wishing he would, so he might know how much she wanted to be his.

  He was beautiful, as large and sturdy, strong and pleasing a man, here, as everywhere else. Their Maker had done some fine creating with Adam, she thought, not for the first time. Everything fit together so well, so neatly. In repose, he appeared imposing, aroused he must look grand as a stallion. When she stroked the sleeping length of him, Sara was surprised at its soft silkiness, even folded against itself as it was.

  She cupped his testicles feeling them contract at her touch, and stroked his length again, watching mesmerized as those folds seemed to disappear and he grew before her eyes.

  Warmth stirred within her. She stroked him again, feeling wicked, sinful, though she knew that touching was not wrong between a wife and her husband. Could it be wrong, however, in the event the husband did not know? Because the wife surely felt as if she were stealing ... something.

  “Sara,” her husband whispered on a ragged breath, warming her with his fevered gaze, and she wondered if he could hear the quickening beat of her heart. Even as she pulled her hand away, his denial reached her and he stopped her withdrawal.

  “Do it again,” he begged raggedly.

  She did, and watched the way his eyes closed, almost in ecstasy. Then he opened them again and tightened her fingers around his length, watching her face, guiding her hand with his own.

  “Sara,” he whispered again, but his hand fell away, and he slept.

  Prickles raced up Sara’s spine,
her legs, everywhere. She stopped but did not let him go. This was the closest she felt to Adam, the most intimacy they had shared. She loved the power; she feared it. She could lose something of herself in this way, if she allowed it—and oh Lord, she wanted to allow it. She wanted to be consumed.

  Inside her hand, Adam shrank, softened, Sara was disappointed to realize. With a heady rush of affection, she bent to kiss him just there, but her own shock stopped her. Good, Lord, she thought, as she lowered his nightshirt and covered him. What had she been about to do?

  Red-faced, Sara dressed, and by the time she was on her way upstairs to speak to Adam’s mother, she had thrust the embarrassing episode from her mind and turned her thoughts to the tasks of running a farm. She knew that rest alone would allow Adam to heal, and with Lena to dress and feed the girls, Sara would be free to do the milking in Adam’s place.

  Sara had barely begun when Emma came tentatively into the barn, silent and wary, and sat beside her to milk the next cow in line.

  Barn sounds—milk splashing and echoing in hollow wooden buckets, lowing cows, and clucking, scurrying chickens—lulled Sara, as did the presence of the silent woman beside her.

  “Do you remember Adam?” Sara asked. “From when you were small, before you went away?”

  Emma turned her forehead against the cow’s side, her cheek still against it, and regarded Sara with a world of happiness in her eyes. She nodded.

  “You love him?”

  Again the joyful look.

  “Then why are you afraid of him?”

  Indignation, confusion, flitted across Emma’s features. She shook her head, denying the question and asking for an explanation at the same time.

  “Then you are not afraid of him?”

  Emma sighed and seemed pleased Sara understood.

  “I am glad,” Sara said. “Because he could use a sister, I think.” Sara moved to the cow on the other side of her sister-in-law then, causing the girl to pivot in the opposite direction. “Emma….” Sara began.