Susan Kiernan-Lewis - Free Falling

“I’m going back to Dierdre’s tomorrow,” David said. “I’ll trade my services for another dozen eggs.”

“And maybe some milk, Dad?” John took his plate of eggs and sat down at the kitchen table. “I hate drinking tea without milk.”

“He needs milk, David,” Sarah said, the panic still with her. “He’s a growing boy.”

“I’ll bring back milk and eggs,” he promised. “Don’t worry.”

The lunch was eaten quickly. David and John returned to finding ways to safeguard the house and barn and Sarah turned her attention back to the stove and bread-making. Although never much of a baker she had, in one of her more industrious moods, typed in a recipe for bread on her phone. But the battery had long since gone dead and, besides, the robbers had taken all their phones last night. Sighing, she tried to remember the ingredient amounts. Baking is a science, she knew. You could wing it to a certain extent when you cooked, but baking needed exactness. She pulled open drawers in the kitchen, looking for a bread recipe.

She glanced at the starter on the counter and knew she couldn’t waste it by experimenting. She thought of the disappointment on John’s face if she had to tell him tonight that there was no bread. By God, she was going to make him bread today! Was it so much to ask that she give her child a slice of damn bread?

Sarah crossed the living room and began pulling books off the shelves. Mostly they were paperbacks left by previous vacationers. She stacked them carefully—in case they ended up being the only things they had to read for the next few months—and even opened the pages to see if, by some miracle, a recipe index card had been used as a bookmark. Before she’d abandoned books entirely and gone strictly to e-readers, she’d kept favorite recipes on index cards which she laminated and used for bookmarks. She paused for a moment remembering that. She did used to do that. What an odd, endearing habit, lost now in her love affair with her Kindle.

On the very bottom shelf of the bookcase, she found it. And when she did, she literally whooped with delight. Not just a recipe, but a cookbook. And not just any cookbook but Joy of Cooking —a cookbook from her very own kitchen library, and one she knew as well as a beloved novel. Finding it felt like the first real stroke of luck since the crisis. Like a turning point, somehow.

An hour later, with the dough rising under a thin, worn dishtowel she had found in another kitchen drawer, Sarah walked outside into the sunshine. She felt like she had accomplished something no less significant than whatever David had been doing to shore up their physical defenses. As the mother, she felt she’d done her job to tend her nest and protect her hatchling. She was surprised by a stack of wood outside the kitchen door. John had collected and stacked the wood without being told. She scanned the vacant courtyard between the barn and the house. Maybe , she thought, just maybe there’s some little good to all this mess .

David came out of the barn, wiping his hands on his jeans.

That’s not good , Sarah thought sourly. We don’t have an automatic washing machine any more. Unless you count me.

“Hey,” he said, walking toward her and smiling. “I think I’ve done as much as can be done to secure the place. They’ll have to take crowbars to get in next time.”

“Great,” she said. “Horses okay?”

He looked over his shoulder toward the pasture.

“I turned them out,” he said. “They were getting really skitterish in the paddock.”

Just the thought of the horses “skitterish” made Sarah’s stomach clench.

“Do you know for a fact that the pasture is fenced?” she asked.

He looked at her in surprise. “I thought all pastures were fenced.”

“Maybe we’d better do a perimeter check, to be sure,” she said. “Where’s John?”

“I thought he was in the house.”

Sarah literally vibrated with the anxiety that pulsed through her at his words. For a moment, she felt like she might hyperventilate. Instead, she found herself turning toward the pasture at a run.

“Grab the halters,” she said. “And catch up with me.”

They walked and called for forty minutes before Sarah turned back. They found all three horses but not John. She led Dan and the pony. David led the big bay he called “Rocky.” Both Rocky and the pony had nameplates on their stalls but unlike Dan’s theirs were in Gaelic. After a day of struggling to pronounce their names, David and John rechristened the two “Rocky” and “Star.”

There was no fence.

“This isn’t Mandarin,” she said to David, referring to the neighborhood in Jacksonville where they lived. “You can’t just let him go do his own thing. He’s only ten years old.”

“I thought he was with you,” David said. “I’m sorry…”

“We were broken into last night! What if those people are still around? What if they have him?”

“Look, I know—”

“No, you don’t know! You don’t know, David!”

It took every ounce of emotional strength she had not to physically or verbally launch into David. Some part of her knew he wasn’t to blame for John being missing. She had never felt so powerless, so ineffectual, in her whole life, especially now when the stakes were so high. She was so upset she didn’t even think about the fact that she was leading a horse on either side of her. Her focus was on getting her boy back. She turned to walk back to the house, praying that John was there.

“You keep looking for him out here,” she said. “I’m going to see if he’s back at the cottage.”

“We’ll find him, Sarah,” David called after her, the panic and fear in his voice belying his words. “I’m sure he’s just exploring.”

Sarah didn’t bother replying. She was angry and afraid, a combination of which she had felt pretty much nonstop since the crisis had happened. She felt as if her whole world were hanging on by a thread, with nothing certain, nothing secure.

It was early afternoon but already it seemed as if the sun had disappeared. The light was grey, and dark clouds scudded across the sky. What if he gets caught out here and it storms? One of the horses shied at something in the grass and Sarah dropped the lead rope. She quickly snatched it back and tried to calm him, convinced it was her own anxiety that had caused him to panic in the first place.

Damn horses , she thought. They can read your mind . She took a deep breath and tried to steady her nerves, for their sakes if not her own. She estimated that she was about fifteen minutes from the cottage. If David found John in the pasture and they rode double on Rocky, they could actually beat her back to the house. The thought comforted her and she walked on, pushing thoughts of crumpled little boy forms and wild dogs from her mind.

Cresting the last hill, she saw their cottage below. The courtyard was empty but something caught her eye in the pasture behind the house. A small herd of fluffy white sheep were moving steadily toward the cottage. Sarah looked closer and could see John’s red shirt in front of the flock. He was leading the sheep by a rope.

Tears of relief came to her eyes. He was safe and sound .

He waved and she started down the hill to meet him.

“Where’s Rocky?” he asked when they met up.

“Dad’s got him. He’s up in the far pasture looking for you.”

“How come?”

Sarah shifted both lead ropes to one hand and hugged him tightly.

“John,” she whispered into his hair. “You scared us to death. We didn’t know where you were. Did you tell anyone you were leaving?”

John moved out of her hug. “Mom, stop. You’re pinching me. I didn’t realize I was leaving,” he said, “until I got the idea about the sheep.”