Evidently fearing for his institution’s floor—and perhaps rightly so—Daniel walked over to Robby and his green dribbles with a long-suffering look on his face. For a moment, Ida held her breath, praying Daniel would not scold the child for his carelessness. Even Robby looked as though he feared the worst. The old Daniel most certainly would have scolded, but she had sensed a fundamental change in the doctor lately.
“Robby,” Daniel began, bending down to the boy’s height, “let’s fix this together, shall we?”
The relief in Robby’s face matched the swelling in Ida’s heart. Daniel had always cared deeply about the children, but a distinct tenderness had sprung up between Dr. Parker and his charges recently. She hated to see him injured, yes, but she couldn’t ignore the fact that his wounds had given the children a chance to show how much they cared about him, and it had loosened the stiff bindings he kept around his heart. Even the way he looked at her had changed.
And oh, what an unsettling change that had been.
Ida stood back, watching Daniel interact with Robby while she pretended to be stirring some paint. He looked so different now. He couldn’t wear his glasses easily with the injured eye, so he went without more often than he normally did. His hair, usually neat, had been so continually mussed by bandages that it now stuck up in odd directions. The effect shaved years off his serious features, making him look a bit of the ruffian. The artist in her longed to capture this moment and sketch it a dozen different ways. Daniel looked different, stood differently, spoke differently. Was it wrong that she found the differences so appealing?
Her heart turned over inside her chest, humming with the knowledge that she was losing her heart to the doctor. That was a riskier proposition than all the boys and all the dripping paintbrushes combined. This could be wonderful or awful, Ida cried out to God in the silence of her flip-flopping heart. Father, what are You up to here?
Daniel was crouched on the floor beside Robby—something she’d never seen him do before—taking the rags Robby offered one by one to sop up the trail of green spots. “Look at that,” Daniel said. “All gone, as if they were never there.” Daniel pointed over the baseboard. “You’re doing fine work, Robby. Let’s go finish all the way down to the corner, you and I together.”
Ida felt her throat tighten. “Sure, Doc!” Robby said. Doc? It was hardly a term Daniel had allowed before. She watched to see how he would respond.
Daniel tilted his head to one side, his good eye narrowing above a furrowed eyebrow. “Doc, hmm?”
Robby stilled. “Well, I don’t know your real name, Dr. Parker.”
A small smile began at one corner of Daniel’s mouth. “Dr. Parker is my real name.”
“I mean the other one. You know, like I’m Robby.”
“Oh.” Daniel folded up the last rag. “I see. Well, in that case, my real name is Daniel.” She could see the gears in Daniel’s head spinning, trying to figure out how to explain social protocol to an eight-year-old. “Only...”
“But Mr. Grimshaw told us we aren’t s’posed to call grown-ups by their real name. I mostly just wanted to know. Only ‘Doc’ is kind of fun, isn’t it?”
Ida swallowed a laugh. Daniel was no more a “Doc” than she was “Lady Ida.” She sat back on her heels, entertained to watch how Daniel would navigate this social mire.
“It’s not my favorite,” Daniel said kindly. “Let’s find something else. We can think while we paint.”
Robby, who had never objected to “Dr. Parker” before as near as Ida could tell—nor had any of the other children, for that matter—looked pointedly dissatisfied. He wanted to call Daniel by something friendlier than Dr. Parker. Many of the girls had begun to refer to her as Nurse Ida, so that’s where he must have gotten the idea. Good Southern civility dictated the use of sir or ma’am outside of family—but this was a family. It was the only family Robby had ever known. It was part of why Isabelle’s idea of the Aunties was such a powerful one.
They kept on painting, but Robby was coming as close to a pout as any eight-year-old boy would allow. Ida longed to step in and distract him, but something told her to let Daniel sort this one out on his own.
To Ida’s surprise, it was Robby who made the next move. “What about ‘Dr. Dan’?”
Ida winced. She’d known dozens of Dans or Dannys in her day, and Daniel Parker struck her as neither. Again, she held back—her bedside manner told her this was a pivotal moment for this particular patient. Daniel’s face was kind, but didn’t hide his dislike for the nickname. Ida clutched the tin of paint she was holding, waiting for something even if she didn’t know what.
Daniel held up his paintbrush. “How about Dr. Daniel?”
Robby looked up from his painting, squinting as he tried the thought on for size. “It fits.” He proclaimed his approval with a wave of his paintbrush—one that sent a spattering of green onto Daniel’s chin.
Ida sucked in a breath. To her delight, Daniel began to laugh. Robby raced over to the bucket of rags and grabbed one off the top, mortified.
“Thank you, Robby. And don’t worry—I’ll clean up just like the floor.”
“I’m...sorry...Dr. Parker.” Robby clearly thought his carelessness was going to earn him a stint at the laundry basins.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Daniel,” Daniel corrected, chuckling as he wiped the paint from his chin. He made a face at Robby. “Does the green go with my black eye?”
Ida let her breath out as Robby began to giggle. “Not at all,” the boy replied. “And your eye is really more of a purple, if you ask me.”
“Well, good then. I’ll match the windows. They’re a sort of purple, I suppose.”
The two went back to painting, but Ida could barely move. She’d always suspected Daniel could be less rigid, less cautious, but she hadn’t expected to see this tender, endearing side of him. She wanted to run for her sketchbook, to capture the curve of Daniel’s smile and the gleam in his dark eyes, but she didn’t want to move for fear of breaking the wonder of the moment. Thank You, Lord, for that. What a gift.
She’d known her prayer was silent, but Daniel looked up as if he’d heard her gratitude. He held her gaze over Robby’s head, the hint of a smile on his lips and just the faintest smudge of green still on his cheek. He’d recognized the step he’d just taken as much as she did, and the astonishment of it showed on his face. He was, at that moment, the handsomest man Ida had ever known.
She pressed her hand to her chest and gave him a smile of her own, eyes stinging with the threat of tears. All the while, boys busily painted baseboards, oblivious to the huge shift two hearts in the room had taken.
It was a wonder what a little color could do to the world.
Chapter Eighteen
Something had been wrong with Daniel the rest of the week. He’d been glowing the day of the painting, but much of the stiffness had returned to his demeanor. Ida felt she was watching all the new joy she’d seen in Daniel evaporate in front of her eyes. She’d been so fond of the “new” Daniel, so overjoyed to see the new connections he seemed to have with the children. This slip back toward the “old” Daniel now seemed twice as regrettable. It was as if his new openness had made something worse—only she couldn’t understand why.
With no classes on Sunday, it was usually the easiest day to talk to Daniel. She’d tried to seek him out all day—worried that, at the very least, his eye had taken a turn for the worse—but he seemed to be avoiding her. Now it was nearly nightfall, and the day seemed to be stretched tight as a drum between them. Was she imagining the change in the way he looked at her? Before today, when they could catch each other’s eye over a task or across the room, she would feel a burst of warmth between them. Today, despite the oppressive heat, Ida could almost shiver at the change she saw in his glance.
Confused and tired by the time night fell, Ida deci
ded to take the direct course. As soon as the children were settled for the evening, she went looking for him. He didn’t answer a knock to his parlor door, nor was he in the library or any of his usual places. Finally, after searching every other place she could think of, Ida found him sitting on one of the bathhouse benches. He looked deep in thought, staring at the patches of moonlight reflecting on the water as if he were gazing out to sea.
“It’s pretty,” she offered, not knowing what else to say. It was pretty, in an unusual way. Boxy as the bathhouse was, it took on the quality of a reflecting pool in the breezeless darkness, and it was certainly one of the coolest places on the compound.
Daniel didn’t look up. “I do some of my best thinking here, strange as that sounds.”
Ida chose a bench next to his rather than sit on the same one beside him as she might have done earlier in the week. He seemed to need space. “Everybody needs a thinking spot, I suppose.”
“Where is yours?” When he looked up at her, the only word she could think of to describe his expression was lost.
Tucking her hands under her knees, she replied, “I haven’t picked one out for here yet. Back at Camp Jackson, there was a particular bench up on the hillside. You could look at the whole camp and even some of the countryside. I always thought the wide view helped me keep things in perspective. Getting up above my problems, you know?”
Daniel shrugged. “We’ve got no high spot here.”
“I’ll find a spot. Or, I suppose I should say, I’m sure the spot will find me.”
He looked at her for a long moment before saying softly, “You have such faith that things will work out. It seems so much easier for you.”
Ida wanted to laugh—if he only knew how much she worried about things lately—but it seemed wrong to make light of his comment. “God’s been kind to me.”
Daniel didn’t reply to that, only stood up and walked to the far corner of the pool. The structure wasn’t especially large, but she felt the distance between them sharply and wondered if he’d moved away from her intentionally. He seemed to be drawing back into himself, retreating, and she wasn’t going to let that happen. She stood up herself and walked to the side of the pool where he stood.
“Daniel, what’s wrong? What’s happened?”
“Nothing.”
“That is so far from true, I could be a mile away and know something’s happened. You seemed to change so much while we were painting, but yet you’ve been quiet and sour the rest of the week. Don’t try to deny it. I’m a stubborn lot, if you haven’t yet figured that out.”
Daniel leaned back against one of the columns that framed the structure. “You’re wonderful.”
Well, that wasn’t what she was expecting. The way he said it, Ida couldn’t shake the notion that her “wonderfulness”—whatever he meant by it—was a problem. “Thank you—I think. Whatever do you mean?”
“You’ve changed this place. You’ve brought things I didn’t even know were missing. Things aren’t running nearly as smoothly as before, and for some insane reason I’m glad for the disorder. It’s better. The children are better.” He let his head fall back against the column, his shoulders sagging a bit. “I’m better.”
The two words pressed against her heart. “It’s what nurses do. We make things better.”
Daniel smiled a bit and shook his head. “You are a fine nurse, Ida, but all of it is so much more than ointment and bandages.”
Ida’s heart stilled. So he had felt the strength of the connection between them. It was silly to think he hadn’t—it was so strong Ida often wondered if the whole Home felt it. The night, already quiet, seemed to hush to a stillness that was nearly church-like. Somewhere off behind her, Ida could hear the sounds of the Home settling down for the night, and it struck her how much those sounds had become a part of her life. In a way she never expected, she fit in, felt at home, felt as if she had purpose and belonged here. Daniel was such a huge part of that—did he know? “I’m very happy here. In a way I never expected to be.” Ida dared a step toward him. “What is it, Daniel?”
“It’s you.” He put his hand to his forehead, squinting and looking up as if he’d find the right words in the rafters. “I...it’s all...I don’t know if...”
His look was such a combination of confusion and pain and wonder that whatever piece of her heart Ida had been holding back slipped right through her fingers. It was here, between them, and powerful. “I know,” she said, brave enough to finish the thought he could not. “Me, too.”
Her directness seemed to startle him out of the cloud he’d been carrying around him. “Ida.” He was trying so hard not to feel it, to fight what was growing between them. She wasn’t quite sure how, but his resistance seemed to dissolve hers. This was real and precious, no matter how puzzling. This was worth the risk.
He stood motionless up against the column, looking at her with fear and wonder in his eyes. She walked toward him, confidence coming with every step. Once there were only inches between them, he shook his head and nearly whispered, “It’s not sensible.” His tone was so transparent and yet so intimate that even she knew he didn’t believe that to be a true obstacle.
“I don’t think it’s supposed to make sense. If it helps, I’m scared, too. You’re right that there’s a load of reasons why this isn’t sensible.” She looked up into the spectacular intensity of his dark eyes. “Right now they don’t seem so important.”
Daniel’s hand left his side and turned palm up, open and asking for hers. He was reaching for her. The gesture was physically small, but Ida knew how enormous it truly was to Daniel. She slipped her hand into his, feeling something deep and vital settle into place between them. She tightened her grip around his hand, and when he returned the grasp, she knew they’d stepped over the imaginary line they both had been drawing for days if not weeks. A fragile joy spread around her heart, as still and quiet as the night around them.
“You are so...extraordinary. In so many ways I never expected.” His free hand went to her cheek. “You’re an absolute gift, Ida.”
Ida had been called a great many things. Unusual. Spirited. Spunky. Odd. Some had called her special or unusual, and she tried to be happy for her unique character the way Mama had taught her. Her strong nature had been an asset sometimes at Camp Jackson, but just as often it got her into trouble. Right here, right now, Daniel’s eyes told her that those very qualities were what touched him most, what made her special. To be a gift to someone like that? To each of these children and this exceptional man? Ida felt as if the “gift” was from Daniel and the Home to her, not the other way around.
Color and shape were how Ida saw the world, not words. Words weren’t her language—and at this moment they failed her. Except she knew she would remember the particular shade of Daniel’s eyes right now, reflecting the pearly glow of the moonlight off the pool, every day forever. She would always know the shape of his brow and the arc of his smile when he laughed—and oh, what a joy it was to release his laughter. Having no words, nor wanting any if they weren’t absolutely perfect, Ida touched the place where his wound began down by his cheekbone, and stood on tiptoe to plant a feather-light kiss there.
His hand gripped hers and she heard Daniel suck in his breath. “Ida.” He said her name with such a close, cherishing tone that Ida felt her heart break wide open. She kept her face close to his, her eyes still closed, afraid to move for fear of shattering the fragile moment.
Ida felt Daniel’s one hand leave her grasp, and she opened her eyes when both his hands cupped her face. When he stared down at her, eyes wide and suddenly fiery, Ida could barely breathe. She would follow those eyes anywhere, would pay any cost to stay in the brilliance of their gaze. The moment hung between them for what felt like forever, awash in discovery and defiance. And then Daniel dipped his head and kissed her. Gently at first, like the gentleman he was,
and then more like the warrior he had become in her eyes, battling against all the elements set out to drag these precious children down. He was so strong. Ida felt that the power of his focus and drive could buoy her against any foe. With his kiss humming through her body, bursting brilliant light into corners of her spirit she hadn’t realized had gone dark, Ida felt as if together they could accomplish anything.
She belonged with him, and he with her. It was an irrefutable fact, an unopposable force no matter what sensibility said. Decorum might frown on her station beside his, tongues might wag at a well-born doctor taking up with a nobody nurse, but none of that mattered. God brought her to the Home to complete Daniel, while Daniel and the Home completed her. It was a harmony only God could orchestrate, a harmony she felt in Daniel’s touch and the exquisite brush of his lips against hers. Bliss wasn’t too strong of a word for the burst of light and color Ida felt pulsing through her.
“I ran out of ways to fight it,” he said, pulling her fully into his arms so that her head rested against his chest. The moon and quiet seemed to fold around them, holding time still and the world at bay while they discovered each other’s heart.
“Hearts are powerful things,” she said with a sigh, marveling at how perfect it felt to be in his arms. There could be no argument against such perfection, she thought, certainly not any that mattered. She looked up at him, feeling ready to defy anyone who thought this wasn’t exactly how God had it planned. “Do you really think anyone will disapprove so much?”
“Yes,” he said, the word almost a sigh. He pulled her closer still, as if to protect her from the objections he saw coming. “But right now I can’t bring myself to care.” The statement was so unlike the Dr. Parker she had first met at the Home gates that she smiled. He must have felt her smile, for he looked down at her. “You’ve brought out the radical in me, Ida.”
“I’m too happy to regret it,” she admitted. “I feel like I’m ready to burst.” She reached her hands around his neck and kissed him again, wanting to show him how happy his affections made her.
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