A Rose Revealed by Gayle Roper Page B

such a great heart.
    Becky slipped off the bed and laid Trevor in his nest in his basket on the floor. She began covering him with blankets. “I brought Samuel to my lady too. I wanted him to know Jesus like me.” She stopped and blushed as she glanced at me. “He needed to understand why I wouldn’t get into bed with him anymore.”
    She stood, suddenly concerned lest I misunderstand. “Samuel is not bad,” she said. “He isn’t, even though he’s meidung . He’s practical. That’s what he always tells me. That’s why he got the truck. Because it’s practical, Becky . That’s what he says.”
    “Becky, if you love him, I’m sure he’s a fine man. You wouldn’t love him otherwise.”
    Her smile was so bright that my breath caught. I realized that she rarely had the luxury of talking about Samuel. That was part of shunning.
    “So has Samuel trusted Jesus too?” I asked.
    “I don’t know,” she said, tears gathering in her eyes. “I haven’t seen him in so many months or been able to talk to him. He doesn’t know about Trevor, that he was born, that he’s sick. My heart breaks that he doesn’t know.”
    My heart broke a bit too. “Have you never tried to call him at the phone shanty?”
    “I tried when I first came, but they saw me. My grandfather said I would have to leave if I tried again. I was seven months pregnant. Where would I go?”
    What would I have done, I wondered, under an ultimatum like that? Honored my dictatorial grandfather or followed my heart? It was a hard question to answer because I viewed the whole question from what I considered a normal perspective, while Becky had been immersed in another way of thinking her whole life. Certainly she was rebelling and planning to break free, but that was with Samuel by her side. Here, alone, knowing no one?
    “I did try again,” she confided, glancing at the door as if afraid of being overheard. “But no one answered the first two times I tried. Then I got a message saying the phone was disconnected. Samuel had moved, I guess. I don’t know. I didn’t worry too much at first. I would only be here until the baby was born and then I would go home. Somehow I would go home.”
    We looked at Trevor.
    “And now you can’t leave,” I said.
    “I can’t risk the travel, the cold. And I can’t leave his doctors.”
    I reached out and hugged this young woman who was enduring such pain on so many levels. She clung to me like a limpet to a rock. I wondered when the last time was that she had been hugged.
    “It’ll be all right, Becky,” I said. “It’ll be all right.”
    Why, I wondered even as I spoke, do we say such inane things, such impossible-to-be-true things?
    “It is all right,” she said softly as she loosened her death grip though she did not let go completely. “I have my baby. I have you. I will have Samuel. And I have Herr Gott .”
    What a combination of deep wisdom and pure naiveté.
    Footsteps sounded on the stairs, and Becky jumped away from me. She turned her back to the door, but not before I saw the tears wetting her cheeks.
    One of Annie’s female visitors stopped in the doorway, looking around the small room with a frown.
    “Yes?” I said.
    “The coroner is here. The other man asked could I get you.”
    “Thank you,” I said in my best professional voice and moved to the door. “You keep that baby covered and warm, Becky. I’m depending on you to take good care of him, just like you’ve been doing. Drafts would be very bad for him. And you need to make another doctor’s appointment as soon as possible. I don’t like his coloring.”
    Without turning, she nodded and bent over the baby’s basket. “I will,” she promised, playing my nurse–patient game with me for the benefit of the woman. “I will.”
    I got back to Zooks’ at four in the morning and was halfway up the stairs to my rooms when a deep voice stopped me.
    “Are you okay?”
    I turned and looked at Jake as he stared up the steps at