Sonoma Rose: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel by Jannifer Chiaverini Page B

call your mother and brother and let them know you’re fine,” Rosa said.
    “I should do no such thing. No one can know where we are until I’m sure you and the children are safe, and I’m a long way from sure.”
    “Not even your own family?”
    “They can’t let slip what they don’t know.”
    Rosa supposed he made a fair point, and he would be seeing them again soon enough. A day or two of worry wouldn’t matter in the long run.
    The children stirred in bed, roused by their hushed conversation and the smell of donuts. Only Miguel seemed startled to see Lars there, and he reached for Rosa and buried his face in the collar of her nightgown when she picked him up. “Hungry?” she asked the girls, and passed the box of donuts. Delighted, they each took one, thrilled with the novelty of the treat and of eating in bed. Even Miguel overcame his shyness and took a few bites, but he refused to go to Lars when he offered to watch the children while Rosa bathed and dressed. Miguel climbed into bed beside Marta instead, and after Rosa warned the children not to bounce around with full tummies and make themselves sick, she took her things into the small washroom and drew a bath.
    She avoided looking at herself in the mirror while she undressed, but as the chill of the tile floor crept into her bare toes, amorbid curiosity eventually compelled her to examine herself unflinchingly. She was a horror, she concluded, studying the mottled pattern of bruises and cuts on her face, shoulders, and side. It was a wonder the children didn’t recoil from her.
    She never should have let them become accustomed to seeing her in such a state.
    She eased herself into the tub, sinking into the blissfully warm water. A bar of hard amber soap sat in a ceramic dish on a tile shelf above the faucet, so Rosa scrubbed herself clean of blood and dirt, treating her injuries as gingerly as she could. Stomach growling, she finished her bath, drained the tub, and refilled it as she dried off and dressed. Just as she was about to summon the girls, Ana knocked on the door and burst in without waiting for a response. Blinking back tears, Rosa stroked her head while Ana voided her bowels in an explosion of diarrhea. She was so thin that Rosa could count her vertebrae through her nightgown like pearls on a necklace. Frustrated and frightened, Ana sobbed all the while, and although Rosa soothed her and told her everything would be all right, she didn’t know whether she spoke the truth.
    A knock sounded on the door. “Mamá,” called Marta. “Miguel has to go and he has to go
now
.”
    Hastily Rosa yanked open the door and, with Marta’s help, managed to get Miguel’s trousers off and set him on the toilet just in time. “He didn’t throw up,” Marta told her. “Not yet anyway.”
    Rosa nodded, but that didn’t offer her much hope. She had nursed Miguel longer than any of her children, eighteen months, certain that he would be her last baby and longing to extend that precious time. For his first year, Miguel had thrived. He had smiled and crawled and talked and walked exactly when he should have, exactly like any other healthy child. But a fewmonths before his second birthday, he had begun to steadily decline. She weighed and measured all her children vigilantly, and the numbers recorded in her notebook broke her heart: Miguel had lost weight since she had weaned him, and he had not grown in height at all in eight months. Once, he had run and played and found his way into all manner of mischief, but now all he wanted was for Rosa to hold him. And Rosa did, willingly, because she had already lost four children, four children she would never hold again, four children she would love and remember every day for the rest of her life.
    She bathed Ana first and then Miguel, and as she carried him back to the bed to dry him off and dress him, she found Lars pacing by the window, stricken. “I shouldn’t have brought sweets,” he said. “I should have