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  After the Leaves Fall

  Copyright © 2007 by Nicole Baart. All rights reserved.

  Cover photograph of baby chick copyright © by Jose Manuel Gelpi Diaz/iStockphoto. All rights reserved.

  Cover photograph of leaves copyright © by Kati Molin/iStockphoto. All rights reserved.

  Designed by Jessie McGrath

  Edited by Lorie Popp

  Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or publisher.

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Baart, Nicole.

  After the leaves fall / Nicole Baart.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4143-1622-2 (pbk.)

  ISBN-10: 1-4143-1622-4 (pbk.)

  I. Title.

  PS3602.A22A69 2007

  813’.6—dc22 2007011431

  * * *

  Printed in the United States of America

  13 12 11 10 09 08 07

  7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Part 1

  Waiting

  Janice

  Signs

  Good Girl

  Consumed

  Decrescendo

  Lessons

  Reconnect

  Mosaic

  Part 2

  Departure

  Entry Level

  Time and Again

  Initiation

  Cipher

  Assessment

  Homecoming

  Great Expectation

  Free Fall

  Aftermath

  Nineteen

  Exile

  Part 3

  Lighthouse

  Nativity

  Last Threads

  Seeking

  Discussion Questions

  About the Author

  Humility

  Many heartfelt thanks …

  To Todd Diakow, my writing partner, encourager, friend, and first-draft editor. This book would not be without you.

  To both of my lovely grandmothers. Your courage, beauty, and strength is on every page of this book.

  To Toni Tweten, for inviting me in. You are truly my esteemed friend.

  To Arlana Huyser, for calling me from a bus on some back road in Nebraska halfway through reading the first manuscript. You renewed my energy.

  To Jamin and Kate VerVelde, for being more than just good friends. I couldn’t ask for better cheerleaders.

  To Bruce and Sue Osterink, for being the hands and feet of Christ better than anyone I’ve ever met.

  To my parents, for never once laughing at the countless poems, short stories, and sorry attempts at literature that I proudly brought home from kindergarten on.

  And to my family: To Aaron, for your patience and loving support. To Isaac, for your three-year-old wisdom and never-ending supply of puppy kisses. To Judah, for keeping this all in perspective. Knowing you waited for me half a world away realigned my every priority.

  God has blessed my life far more than I could ever claim to deserve. The debt of gratitude I owe my Master defies explanation.

  Waiting

  WAITING IS A COMPLICATED LONGING.

  I lost my father when I was fifteen, and I’ve been waiting ever since.

  He was buried on a rainy day in October, and I remember the sound of the raindrops on the lid of the sleek black casket and how it seemed like music to me. The pastor was doing his best to make sorrowful an occasion that seemed anything but—the leaves on the trees above us were burnt amber, the consoling sky around us was velvety gray, and the rain was singing softly. I didn’t feel sad. I felt expectant.

  My father had been in pain. There was so much pain. It had seeped out of his limbs and crept hauntingly into my blood and bones. My grandmother and I carried pain from his bed every time we walked away from a failed attempt at getting him to eat. We steeled ourselves against the ache that slowly invaded when we sat by his side and held his cool hand, his fingers dry and fragile in ours as if this small part of him were already gone. Even walking the few steps past the living room, where he lay entombed in an impossibly narrow hospital bed, to the dining room, which was the only way into the kitchen, was a staggering experience. I’d pause imperceptibly in the hallway, gather myself, and walk with purpose and more than adequate speed until I was wrapped in the warmth of the kitchen, where the oven was baking something that he would never eat.

  Sometimes he cried, but the tears just gathered in the corners of his eyes and pooled there like so much dark water lost among the black-brown of his gaze. I wasn’t always sure if he was even aware of his crying, but those tears called out of their own accord, and the reverberation would echo through the house until it drowned out all else. I felt I would go deaf from it. Stop. Oh, please, God, make it stop.

  When it stopped it was as if the world was filled with air again. I breathed again. Great gasping lungfuls of air that left me dizzy and panting. And weeping. The night after Dad died, Grandma found me in the grove behind the old chicken coop, gulping that glorious, rich air and sobbing without making the tiniest sound. She knelt beside me in her housecoat, letting the damp grass soak her arthritic knees, and pounded me on the back until all that good air took and my tears could be heard as well as seen. I’m dying too, I thought when I heard the keen that could only be coming from my own mouth. What but death could possibly feel like this?

  But I wasn’t even close to dying. Fresh air was new life that filled my veins. Grief was so quickly and yet so incompletely replaced by something that felt like relief that I careened from guilt to repose and never became fully settled with anything I felt.

  After he was gone, I would find myself in the darkness of the living room in the middle of the night, standing where his bed had filled the space in front of the picture window. The October sky would be cold and clear, and from the farmhouse window the stars would shimmer like something otherworldly. Thank You, God, for taking him. I would breathe the half prayer over and over, and for those minutes in the newly quiet house, I would feel something close to peace. Then the very next morning the lack of his presence across the table would choke me until my tongue was thick and threatening in my mouth, and I promised God my soul if only I could have one more day with Dad.

  It was in this new living that waiting became so complicated.

  I began to exist in a tension between wanting and not wanting—waiting for something I couldn’t even pin down in my most naked and honest moments. Waiting for a balance where I neither ached nor forgot, regretted nor accepted. Waiting for my heart to be light again yet fearing the implications of that same lightness. I suppose I waited for peace—an end to my own personal warfare.

  The imbalance struck me for the first time immediately after I threw a fistful of sodden dirt on the box in the ground that contained his body. I was torn between laughter and tears. Feeling that something big and incomprehensible had just happened, Grandma and I stood hand in hand until the graveyard was empty and the rain had all but ceased to fall. Her lips moved faintly, and I knew she was whispering prayers for me. I couldn’t join her—I had forgotten ho
w; the ability to pray had slipped out of my soul like the dirt had tumbled from my fingers. I wasn’t angry at God or anything—that would have been far too clichéd. He just seemed irrelevant.

  When Grandma spoke, it was unexpected. “You know what my favorite time of year is?”

  I blinked for the first time in minutes and looked up at her. “Huh?”

  She continued without looking down at me. “I love it best when the leaves fall.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Lots of people like autumn because the leaves turn such pretty colors.” Grandma smiled at this as if she had a secret, something sweet and unforeseen that she was going to share with me. I watched the familiar, wrinkled profile soften. “I like it when all those leaves fall because it’s such a small thing that means so very much.” Pulling her hand out of mine, she turned to me and tilted my face toward her own. “Do you know what I mean?”

  I didn’t.

  She searched my face. “There’s this subtle sadness—winter is coming, and it’s going to be hard and cold. And there’s a feeling of good-bye. But there’s also …” She searched for the right word. “Suspense? Maybe hope? Because it’s not over; everything is just waiting for spring. Do you know what I mean?”

  Grandma sounded expectant, and I smiled at her because I loved her better than anyone else in the world now that Dad was gone. “I think so,” I said quietly.

  “You can see more clearly when it’s all stripped bare. You can see that everything gets to be new.” Grandma smiled at me with every hope for our future shining in her eyes. “That’s the good part.”

  A gust of wind from the southwest shot through the trees and showered us with cold water and soggy leaves that were anything but hopeful.

  I’ve been waiting a long time for the good part.

  Janice

  MY MOTHER LEFT when I was nine. It wasn’t as traumatic as it probably should have been because I had considered her gone well before she actually packed her bags and vacated our house on Pearson Drive.

  She didn’t pay much attention to us, to Dad and me, and I guess we didn’t take the time to notice her much either. It had always been that way. She was my mother—the woman who had carried me inside her and nursed me from her own body and given me the slant of my hazel-green eyes—but she didn’t do a lot of mothering. I called her Janice from kindergarten on.

  Janice was the receptionist and secretary in a dentist’s office. She worked eight to five Monday through Friday and every other Saturday morning, and while she was gone, I went to Grandma’s house. Grandma was far more of a mother to me than Janice ever was.

  I don’t remember Janice cheerfully asking me about my day while she checked a casserole in the oven or making supper at all, for that matter. I can’t recall a single bedtime story. She wasn’t one for hugs. We never giggled over a secret joke. Dad did those things, and Janice was the woman on the periphery, watching reruns of Bewitched on Nick at Nite and laughing on the telephone with her friend from high school who didn’t have a husband or a daughter and who had moved to Chicago after graduation to be a waitress in some restaurant where she was supposed to be rude to the customers. Janice thought this was hilarious. I thought that if Ellen at the China Blue Café was rude to me, I wouldn’t let her tug my braid when she gave me my fortune cookie.

  Once I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and through the kitchen window caught a glimpse of Janice standing on the front porch. She was holding something mysterious and glowing and was studying it carefully with her shoulders hunched and her head at an attractive tilt. The dim light played with the honey-colored highlights in her hair, and the easy angle of her jawbone slanting away from me was so pretty and relaxed that my breath caught in my throat. It filled me with a warm, hopeful feeling, like I was witnessing something beautiful and secret and profound. I didn’t know what the object she held was, but something so lovely and orange and unexpected could only belong to someone who was similarly lovely and mysterious.

  I adored her for a week—my remote, ordinary mother was not who I thought she was—until I caught her in the act a second time and watched her raise her glowing hand to her mouth, pause, and then slowly blow a transparent, silvery white cloud into the air. She wasn’t mysterious. She was a smoker.

  I hated smoking. It smelled gross. It made me cough. I couldn’t possibly have a mother who smoked. And on the sly, too!

  Janice always said I had a mouth on me, and although I didn’t exactly know what that meant when I was younger, I felt a certain rush when I saw her smoking that prompted me to use my mouth to the best of my ability. I’d confront her—that would get us somewhere. Even if she raged at me and grounded me for a month, she would have to see the reason in my argument and eventually come around.

  I found her stash of cigarettes. It wasn’t hard. She always wore Dad’s red and navy blue checkered corduroy jacket if she had to go outside after dark. It was a far cry from the faux furlined, hip-length coat she wore everywhere else, but I suppose she figured no one could see her in the dark. Sure enough, when I checked the pockets of that ratty old jacket, I found a mostly full pack of Marlboro Lights in the left side and a neon yellow lighter in the right. I had hoped to burn the cigarettes—she’d never be able to rescue them after that—but I didn’t know how to work the lighter, and I wasn’t allowed to touch the matches in the junk drawer in the kitchen.

  So I had to improvise. Since I didn’t want her to be able to find the cigarettes and finish smoking them, I decided destruction was the only possible method of elimination. Taking the kitchen scissors—a risk well worth it, I thought, even though, like the matches, I wasn’t supposed to use them without supervision—I painstakingly cut cigarette after cigarette into tiny shreds. I tried not to make a mess—I cut above the garbage can—but the little flakes of tobacco inside each stick exploded in a muted poof every time I made a cut. The lightest breath of air carried the debris away from the garbage can and all over me and the floor where it stuck with determination. I gave up trying to brush it away and continued methodically cutting, not budging an inch when I heard the garage door open and Janice’s rusty Caprice pull inside and choke to a stop.

  “Excuse me?” She raised an eyebrow at me as she trudged into the kitchen and deposited two brown grocery bags on the counter with a distinct thump. “What are you doing, Julia?”

  “Cigarettes cause cancer, Janice. And they make your teeth brown and your breath smell bad. You shouldn’t smoke them.” I looked her in the eye and beheaded another little stick. Snip.

  For a moment, she looked at me uncomprehendingly. Then she laughed. A short, sarcastic grunt that told me she didn’t think this was very funny. “That’s ridiculous,” she said, wrenching the scissors from my hands with more force than was necessary. “You’re not allowed to use these, you know.” She waggled the blue-handled scissors under my nose.

  “I’m sorry I used the scissors, but it was the only way to get you to stop smoking,” I explained, still confident that this conversation would go the way I wanted it to, even though she had already turned her back to me as she put a gallon of skim milk in the refrigerator.

  “How do you know I smoke, Julia?” Janice shut the refrigerator door with her hip and, without looking at me, began to dig groceries out of the bags on the counter.

  “I saw you one night.”

  “Spying is a nasty habit,” she said, making her voice sound creepy on the word nasty.

  I rolled my eyes. “I wasn’t spying. I saw you on accident. You should have tried to hide it better if you didn’t want me to know.”

  “Now I have to sneak around my own house?” She slammed a box of Alpha-Bits on the cupboard shelf, and I knew I was getting to her.

  “If you’re doing something you shouldn’t be doing.”

  “Whoa, Julia.” Janice turned to me full-on for the first time since she entered the kitchen. Leveling her finger at my face, she spoke carefully. “Don’t you tell me what I
should and should not be doing, little girl.”

  I stared back. “Does Dad know you smoke?”

  “Unless he’s stupid, I can’t see how he missed it.”

  She knew that comment would hurt me, and for a moment I was derailed from my original intent. “Don’t say that about my dad!”

  Janice sighed. “I didn’t call him stupid. I said if he didn’t know—”

  “I know what you said. I’m mad about what you meant.” I still had three cigarettes in my left hand, and with a flourish I cracked them in half in my palm and, rubbing my hands together, discarded the pulpy contents in the garbage can with a distinct gleam in my eye.

  Janice was watching me from five feet away with her hand still on a jar of spaghetti sauce as it rested in the pantry.

  In the time it takes to inhale, my mind flipped the scenario, and I imagined she was about to take out the sauce and hand it to me, ask me to empty it in the little pot while she got water boiling for the pasta. I was in a different kitchen, with a different mother, one who didn’t smoke on the back porch when everyone else was asleep. We played the parts we were supposed to play.

  Then her eyes got hard and the image vanished. She banged the pantry door shut and covered the floor in two strides. For a second I thought she was going to hit me, but she swept right past me as if I didn’t exist. From the depths of one of the grocery bags she produced another pack of cigarettes, identical to the one lying in the garbage can in front of me. “Lucky for you, I have more.” She breezed out of the kitchen, leaving the groceries half put away and me standing in my mess by the sink.