Then Sings My Soul

by Amy Sorrells

  Noises weren’t the only thing that vexed him. He saw things too, darting shadows he mistook for Catherine that ended up being the dappled penumbrae of light against walls and doorframes. On the night of the funeral, he’d awakened to pitch-blackness and the sound of a toilet flushing.

  “Catherine?” he’d cried out.

  When Nel ran into the room, the shadowy outline of her frame was so much like Catherine’s, he’d reached for her. Only when Nel backed away from his hand—something Catherine would never have done—had the mirage faded. He’d been glad the darkness hid his embarrassment and hoped it had veiled his confusion too.

  He heard Nel shut off the water in the kitchen and pick up the phone receiver. Soon someone greeted her on the other end of the line.

  “I have some things to finish up here,” Nel explained. “Decisions to make … I understand, yes, by November tenth. Yes, but I can’t get back until the fifth at the earliest …”

  One of her jewelry buyers, Jakob figured, as Nel bantered away. He knew she had work to do back in Santa Fe, but he suspected from the way she fussed over him, she didn’t want to leave him. He didn’t want to be a burden.

  “Maybe …,” Nel rambled on. “I might be able to have someone send some of my stuff out here. There’s also the possibility of having Matthew and a couple of other artists I know finish the jobs for the Frontiers catalog … Right … Yes, I know … Sure … I’ll make some calls and get back to you as soon as I can … Sure. Thanks, Sandra.”

  She set the phone in the receiver harder than she needed to, Jakob thought. If he kept his eyes closed, maybe she’d think he was asleep.

  “Dad?”

  Jakob opened one eye.

  “Dad, we need to talk.”

  He closed it again.

  Nel sighed. “I know you’re exhausted. But there are decisions we need to make, and I’ve only got a short amount of time before I have to head back.”

  Jakob opened both eyes. “Decisions?” He coughed the word out.

  Nel stood at the picture window, her back toward him, and stared out at the lake.

  “The house needs repairs. Updates.” She turned to face him. “You can’t take all these stairs on your own. And as for meals, Mattie’s great, but we can’t expect—”

  “I’m fine. I’ll be fine. I made you breakfast, didn’t I? I can cook what I need to. Get back to your work. They need you out there.”

  “Work can wait, for a little while anyway. And I don’t know … I was thinking maybe I could work out here until we get you some help. Sam or Matthew can send some of my things, and you have most of the tools here already that I’d need.”

  “I don’t want help.” He’d been enough of a burden on Catherine. He didn’t want to be a burden on his daughter too.

  He couldn’t help notice her exasperation with him as she ran both hands through the length of her hair and pushed the dreadlocks off her forehead. She came to where he sat and knelt on the floor in front of him, taking his hands in hers. “Look, Dad. Neither one of us is any good at this asking-for-help business. But we’re stuck. And we’ve gotta figure out where to go from here.”

  “I have friends. Mattie. Billy. Others who check on me. People from the church.”

  “That’s not enough. The repairs … they’re necessary. You’ll need a contractor and someone to supervise the work. And someone to check on you every day. There are home health services; Lori mentioned she might know about some good ones.”

  “You go home. Take care of your jewelry and Sam. I’ll be fine. I’ll figure it out.” He hadn’t meant to be harsh.

  “Fine,” she said as she stomped toward the stairs. “You figure it out, then. Figure it all out yourself.”

  Jakob cringed when the door to Nel’s bedroom slammed, reminding him of the times she slammed it growing up. He didn’t blame her for being upset. He was upset too. Without Catherine, he was a mess. Everything was a mess.

  He fell asleep in his recliner by the fire, as he often did, which had frustrated Catherine to no end. When he awoke, it was morning. He knew this not because of daylight—there was no daylight yet. He knew it from the songs of the birds. They cut through the memory of the argument he and Nel had the night before, and his mind began to turn with the advancing realization that Nel was right. Still, he didn’t want her help. More than that, he didn’t want to be a burden. Hadn’t he been burden enough to Catherine? Incontinence plagued him more and more often. The tremors in his hands caused him to drop and break more dishes than he could wash, so that Catherine had long been doing the dishes and most other chores herself. He could barely keep his lapidary equipment dusted, let alone use it to cut even a simple cabochon. And then there were the nightmares that Nel didn’t know about yet. He hoped she wouldn’t find out.

  On the other hand, Nel could use his lapidary equipment. It was older than she was used to, but she could use it. He’d seen her designs, gorgeous tumbled stones, fine metalwork. And he’d love to watch how she worked. He’d brush off his equipment and straighten his workroom a bit for her this morning and offer it to her, at least until he could convince her it was okay for her to leave.

  He pulled his cane out from where he’d tucked it into the seat cushion beside him, leaned against it with one hand, and pushed up from the chair with the other. His bladder was so full, he wasn’t sure he could hold it. His thighs and tailbone burned from the effort of the long shuffle to the bathroom. He hoped he could make it in time, the stinging pressure of urine threatening to escape.

  As he tried to shuffle faster, he heard a loud snap, and a black curtain of pain overwhelmed him as he thudded to the floor, the warmth of urine flooding over his groin.

  CHAPTER 12

  “He’s suffered a pretty bad break in that right hip,” the orthopedic surgeon explained. A tall, burly fellow with kind eyes, Dr. Weiss had found Nel sitting in a corner of the lounge outside the recovery room at Battle Creek Memorial Hospital. The surgery to repair the hip had lasted nearly three hours. “His bones are brittle. Normally I wouldn’t have done surgery at all on someone his age, but as vibrant as you indicated he was before, it’s worth a shot.”

  “My mom said he’s been needing to have that hip replaced.”

  “She was right.”

  “When can I see him?”

  “Let the nurses get him settled. I’m going to keep him in the progressive care unit for a day or two for closer monitoring before I send him to the ward. After that, he’ll start rehabilitation here at the hospital. And depending on how that goes—”

  “He won’t want to live in a nursing home.”

  Dr. Weiss sat back and exhaled. “You need to prepare yourself for that. And him. Recovery from a surgery like this takes a lot out of a sixty- or seventy-year-old. Given his age … well … folks that old don’t have much reserve to pull from. There could be confusion, too, acute delusions and, or, a worsening of his dementia.”

  “Dementia?”

  “You weren’t aware of his dementia?”

  “I suppose I wasn’t. I mean, I’ve been living in New Mexico for twenty years. I talk to him on the phone pretty regularly and visit during holidays, but I hadn’t noticed … Mom never said he had an official diagnosis.” Nel thought about how Catherine had refused her offer to organize a fiftieth wedding anniversary party for them. She’d said they preferred a quiet celebration, just the two of them. But now Nel wondered—had Mom been protecting her from Jakob’s decline?

  Dr. Weiss opened Jakob’s chart and flipped through several pages. “Looks like he’s been seeing a doctor over at the Center for Aging here since last fall. They’ve got a great program. But honestly, it wouldn’t be unusual for you not to have noticed. The short-term memory goes first. A lot of times these patients can carry on a conversation and remember things from decades ago with great detail.”

  Nel tried to recall pattern
s or anything off about their phone conversations over the past several months. He’d told a lot of the same stories over and over, but otherwise he seemed to be the same dad as always.

  “So what should I expect?” Nel didn’t know if she could deal with losing both her parents within a couple of weeks of each other.

  “Expect to take things day by day.” He stood, tucking Jakob’s chart under his arm, and put a hand on Nel’s shoulder. “Some of these folks surprise us.”

  If the first few days of Jakob’s hospitalization were any indication of how things would go, Nel was terrified. When she saw him for the first time in the progressive care unit, he had no idea who she was. The nurses had placed giant, mitten-like restraints on his hands and tied down his arms.

  “He’s yanked his IV out three times already. The restraints are there to protect him more than anything,” one of the nurses explained.

  One morning, Nel was visiting when a physical therapist carrying a walker came into the room for the first time. “It’s time for you to get up, Mr. Stewart.”

  Jakob’s eyes widened. “And just who do you think you are?”

  “My name’s Tom, and I’m here to get you moving. Can’t stay in bed, or else you’ll get too weak, your bowels will stop up, you’ll get pneumonia—”

  “Where’s Peter?” Jakob asked him.

  “We don’t have a therapist named Peter. I’m Tom.”

  “But where is Peter? I need to talk to him about all this,” Jakob insisted, fidgeting with the blankets tangled around his waist from his restlessness.

  “Dad, it’s okay. Tom just wants to help you get up.”

  The troubled lines on Jakob’s forehead softened when he turned toward Nel. “Why, Catherine, you look beautiful today. Tell this man to quit bothering me, will you?”

  Any hesitation she’d had about correcting him in the past vanished with her frustration with the whole situation. “Dad. It’s me. Nel.”

  “Nel?” He looked at her quizzically. “Oh, Nel! Yes, of course! I’m sorry.” He shook his head and turned back to Tom. “What are we doing here? What do you want?”

  Tom explained again that he was there to help Jakob get up from bed, but despite Tom’s patient coaxing and help from Nel, Jakob barely had the wits or the strength to stand at the side of the bed. He nearly fell as they tried to ease him back down, his feet flying up in the air and knocking the walker over as he plopped precariously onto the mattress.

  “We’ll try again this afternoon,” Tom said, breathless.

  That afternoon and the seventy-two hours that followed were a disaster. The nurses gave Jakob pain medicine to help him get up, but the medicine only made him more confused. Even when Nel was there visiting—which was most of the time, since she hadn’t wanted to leave him alone—the staff insisted on tying him up. He’d become delirious, fighting the staff when they tried to move him, slugging poor Tom in the gut at one point.

  “Don’t let them take my fingers! Don’t let them take my fingers!” Jakob cried over and over one evening as two nurses struggled to put the mitten restraints on his hands.

  Nel backed out of the room as she watched them tie the restraints onto the bedframe. She was beside herself with emotion and exhausted from all the time she’d been there. She couldn’t remember the last time she had taken a shower. When the nurses came back into the hallway, she told them she was going home. “Please call me if he gets worse.”

  “We will,” they assured her. “Get some rest. That’ll make you feel better.”

  She doubted that but went home anyway, grateful to find that someone had dropped off another casserole—something Italian, which was a nice change from tuna and chicken. A hot shower had never felt as good as the one she had after she ate. And the nurses were right about getting some rest. She slept for sixteen hours that night, and if the phone had rung, she hadn’t heard it.

  In the morning, she padded to the kitchen and made herself some scrambled eggs, adding a bit of water to fluff them up. Then she called the hospital.

  “He did okay last night. Less combative—we didn’t have to put him in the mitt restraints. But he keeps talking about a man coming to take his baby.” The nurse chuckled.

  Nel didn’t get what was funny.

  “Never know what these patients are going to come up with when they’re confused. Said something about a missing gem too. As though he were reliving that old movie—what was it? … Romancing the Stone with Michael Douglas, right? I wish I could go live with them in their make-believe worlds sometimes.”

  Nel set the phone down and heard the sound of a nail gun coming from the direction of Mattie’s house. She stepped out onto the back deck and saw David up on the ladder, working his way around to the back eaves of the house. He must’ve been there early, judging by all the old wood torn off and strewn around the yard below him. He reached around to his belt for a new strip of nails, and Nel jumped back so he wouldn’t see her in her saggy old pajama pants and matted hair. Maybe she’d say hello to him, but she at least wanted to have a bra on and her teeth brushed.

  Inside, she sat at the round oak dining table and halfheartedly sifted through a growing stack of mail Mattie’d been bringing in for them. Most of it was junk mail and catalogs addressed to her mom, social security checks she’d deposit on the way back to the hospital, and utility bills. Underneath was the envelope from immigration she’d found the day of the funeral. She opened it again and looked more closely at the ship manifest for clues as to what her mom had been searching for. The information fascinated Nel as she read through the list: Stanislaw Zolinsky, a laborer from Russia, Hebrew. Maryanne Bujeloska, a laborer from Lithuania. Gossel Kalmonowik, a tailor, and his wife, Judes, and children, Abraham and Sarah, listed as Russian and Hebrew. Rudolph Lipelk, a locksmith from Russia, Hebrew. Adam Greschenko, a twenty-one-year-old Russian egg packer.

  Nel stopped when she came to a line that read “Peter Maevski, 14,” and below it, “Jakob Maevski, 5. Place of residence: Chudniv, Russia. Race or people group: Hebrew.”

  She studied the photograph of the two boys. They looked sad, but maybe it was because they weren’t smiling. Everyone in old photos had sad, stoic expressions whether it was a wedding day or a funeral. She’d never seen any childhood pictures of her father, so she couldn’t say if the boys resembled anyone for certain. And the last name didn’t make sense, unless … unless they’d been adopted. And if they were brothers who had come from Russia, what kind of life would they have come from? What happened to their mother and father? Why hadn’t they come with the boys to America? She didn’t know much about that period in Russian history, except that large numbers had emigrated from Eastern Europe in the early 1900s. And the only thing she knew about what life was like there was from Fiddler on the Roof, one of her favorite musicals. She and her mom had seen it more than once in Chicago, but her dad never wanted to come. He said he didn’t like plays. He was glad his girls enjoyed shows, but the theater was not for him.

  And why had her mom grown interested in researching this after so many years of marriage?

  EARLY 1904

  Eastern Ukraine, Russian Empire

  CHAPTER 13

  Jakob jammed himself against the wall of the barn and pressed his hands over his ears, but nothing could dampen the sound of Peter screaming. He kept his eyes squeezed shut except to open them momentarily to see if the girl was still there, sitting across from him, her eyes wide open, her face pale, and her expression as vacant as it had been from the first moment they saw her.

  He wished Peter had never found the place, but they’d been desperate for shelter. Galya could barely lift his legs to plod through the snowdrifts, and the blizzard itself was so blinding, for all they knew they could’ve been traveling in circles, or worse, back toward Chudniv. So when they’d seen the large barn, which had appeared vacant at first, they didn’t worry about what or who was ins
ide. They were only glad to have a place to stay.

  At first inspection, they thought they were alone. The main barn was high and open, and empty stalls lined each side wall. They shook the snow off themselves and brushed off Galya before Peter began a more thorough inspection of the building. At the back of the barn, a corridor led to a smaller, low-ceilinged building. There, the stalls were lined with fresh straw—too fresh. In the far corner, a potbellied stove glowed from a waning fire. Next to it were baskets of beets, potatoes, and jerky.

  “Hello?” Peter called. “Anyone here?”

  Peter hadn’t needed to call out and ask. Jakob had already found the girl, who appeared about as old as their middle sister, Tova. She cowered under a table near the stove and reminded Jakob of the feral cats, timid and wide-eyed with fear, that hid under their front porch at home. She wore only a vyshyvanka,1 sized for a large woman, which fell to her knees. The garment must’ve been white at some point but was now yellowed with age and dirt. Jakob and the girl stared at each other, silent, until Peter noticed them.

  Peter got down on his haunches and smiled at the girl. “Come on out now. It’s all right. We won’t hurt you.”

  She only continued to stare past him at nothing, until she glanced toward the one window in the room for a moment before staring back at nothing again.

  “What is it? Someone here with you?”

  Peter’s answer came only too soon, as a man burst through the door, cursing and coughing until he nearly ran into them.

  “What’s this?” the man said, brushing the snow off his coat and tossing a rabbit carcass onto the pile of straw nearby before taking a gulp from a filthy, tarnished flask. “If I’d known we’d have company, I’d have tried to catch another. Then again, the trap’s only big enough to catch one.”