Angel of Mercy by Lurlene McDaniel Page B

felt such pity for Kia that tears welled in her eyes. “Doesn’t she ever come out from under the cot?”
    Jodene shook her head. “Hardly ever. She runs outside to go to the bathroom. She eats when I put food beside the cot. She won’t sleep on top of the cot, either. She sleeps under it, like a frightened animal. We tried to put her into one of the family units, but she ran away and came straight back here. Maybe because it was the place she last saw her mother alive.”
    Jodene chewed on her lip reflectively. “We’ll never know what really happened to Kia and her family, but whatever happened totally traumatized her. And in all the time she’s been here, she’s never spoken a word. I know she understand us. Sometimes she sits and rocks and wails, so we know she can make sound, but she never speaks. Not one single word since her mother died. The only other person she has in the world is her baby sister. I would give
anything
if we could reunite them.”
    Once dinner was over, Ian and Heather went for a walk on the grounds, where the fronds of banana trees rustled, lending a kind of music to the night. Under the star-studded sky, the full moon floated above them like a ghost ship, adrift on an inky sea, and lit the landscape with a pale light.
    “Thanks for inviting me tonight,” she told Ian. “Except for hearing about Kia, the evening was perfect.”
    “Yes, lass. It’s a sad story. And there are so many sad stories. But the girl’s with good people. Jodene and Paul will help her however they can. You know, I believe one by one a difference is made.”
    Heather held out her hand as if to catch the moonbeams. “If I could,” she said, “I’d bring Kia these moonbeams. Maybe they would make her smile glow.”
    “Just the way yours glows,” Ian said, looking at her and making her heart skip.
    “It’s only the moonlight.”
    “No, lass. It’s
your
glow. It begins down deep in your heart and bubbles up till it spills out your eyes.”
    “If you want me to melt at your feet, keep it up.”
    He laughed, the sound rich and deep. “You make my days brighter, Heather. You make this place a better place for your being here. Sometimes, when I’m sitting with a patient I know will not live through the night, I think of you. I hold on to the patient, but my mind is all around you. It helps me let go of what I cannot change.”
    “It’s the same for me, Ian.” Her words came out breathlessly. She found it difficult to give voice to the things she’d held silently in her heart for so long. “I can’t picture my life without you in it.”
    “Careful. . . . I will not let you take back these words.”
    “I don’t want to take them back. I can’t help the way I feel.”
    “Feelings grow stronger in the moonlight. It’s strange but true.”
    “I feel the same way in the clear light of day. I—I want to be with you.”
    He toyed with her hoop earring, saying nothing for such a long time that she was afraid she’d said far too much. She knew she was younger than he. She knew that he had plans and dreams that had never included her. But she also knew how she felt. She loved him. Although he’d never kissed her, never romanced her, never so much as hinted that she was anything more to him than a pretty girl on a mission trip, he had taken root inside her heart in such a way that she wasn’t sure she could ever uproot him.
    “This trip will end,” he said finally. “You’ll go back to your home; I’ll return to mine. I have years to go before I finish my schooling. And you have college, too. You told me so. You’ll want to go on with your life when you get home.”
    Her other life didn’t seem important now. Here in the moonlight, under the stars of Africa, she wasn’t sure she had another life. But
he
did. Was he telling her he had no room in it for her? “It’s hard to think about that now,” she said with a nervous laugh. “Must be moon madness.”
    “Yes,” he whispered. “That’s