A Daughter's Truth

by Laura Bradford

  “Yah.”

  Clenching his hands into fists, he strode over to the window. “They were wrong! Wrong about my feelings for Ruby, and wrong to keep you from me!”

  She looked from the window, to her hands, and back again, her throat constricted by so many emotions she didn’t know where to start. “So, it is not true? You did care about her . . . and me?”

  “Emma, you . . .” He closed the gap between them with several long steps and then dropped into a squat beside her chair. “My feelings for your mother were like nothing I’d ever felt before—or since. And the word care isn’t even in the same universe in terms of my feelings for her. I loved her, Emma. With everything I was and everything I wanted to be. And when she told me about you—that you were coming? I wanted nothing more than to give you a good life, a good home, a loving family.”

  She considered his words and the emotion with which he said them against everything she knew thus far—which wasn’t much. It all sounded good but . . . “If you loved my real mamm the way you say you did . . . and you wanted me the way you say you did . . . then why weren’t you there when I was born? Why didn’t you know I lived?”

  The cloud was back. Only this time, instead of ushering in an outward rage, she sensed a storm brewing behind his eyes. She decided she was right when his hand left hers to wipe at a lone tear. “I want to answer that, Emma, I really do. And I will. But right now, I want to sit with this, with”—he swept his damp fingers toward her face—“you, with all of this. You’re . . . alive. You’re my-my daughter.”

  Her lips trembled their way into a smile as she, too, wiped at her own tears. “Yah.”

  “You look so much like her, Emma. Even now, when you’re crying. It’s like my life has rewound back some twenty-two years and she’s actually here, sitting in the office I told her we’d have one day . . . Only it’s not her. It’s you. . . . And you have my eyes and”—he leaned forward, his brows knitted—“my mother’s chin.”

  Emma flew her hand to her chin and fingered it gently. “Your mother’s chin?”

  “Yup. My mom—your grandmother—has that same chin. One of her best features, in fact.”

  She knew she shouldn’t be surprised to hear of a grandmother. It made sense, actually. But she’d been so thrown by the truth surrounding her birth, she hadn’t let her thoughts move beyond Ruby and . . .

  “I-I don’t know what to call you,” Emma whispered. “You are my real dat, but you are not Amish.”

  He returned his hand to hers and held it close. “We don’t have to figure all of that out right now. We have tomorrow, and every day after to decide all of that.”

  Tomorrow . . .

  A glance at the window and the waning daylight brought her to her feet. “I-I have to go. It is getting late and my scooter cannot be seen on the road when it is dark.”

  “Whoa. Whoa.” He straightened to a stand. “Slow down. I’ll drive you home if that’s where you want to go. But if you don’t, I can bring you back to my place or to my mom’s if that would make you feel more comfortable. And I—”

  Palming his mouth, he stepped back, his eyes wide. “My mom is going to freak when she sees you.”

  “No . . . I have to go back to the farm.” Again, Emma looked at the window. “I-I told my sister Sarah that I would be back. I have already left her too long. Now she will have to give answers she should not have to give.”

  “But—”

  “Please. I-I must go.” Emma turned toward the door but stopped before she’d gone more than a step. Glancing over her shoulder, she soaked up the sense of belonging she found in his face and the unfamiliar flash of confidence it gave her in return. “I could come back tomorrow, if that’s okay?”

  “If that’s okay?” He grabbed his keys off the top of his desk and fairly ran back to her side. “Trust me, Emma, there is nothing in this entire world that would make me happier than that.”

  * * *

  He pulled her scooter from the back of his black shiny truck and set it on the ground next to her feet, the happiness he’d worn on the way out to the farmhouse now concealed by a wariness in everything from the way he moved, to the way he looked from Emma to the driveway and back again. “Are you sure I can’t take you all the way up to the house?”

  “Yah.”

  “Because there is a lot I want to say to them—to both of them.”

  “Yah. But not today. Today, it is for me to say.” She followed his gaze past the maple tree to the corner of the barn she could see from where he parked. There was no visible sign of her brothers, but she knew they were near, likely inside, finishing up with the animals before dinner. “Jakob, Sarah, Jonathan, Annie, and Esther do not know the things I have learned since my birthday. I do not want them to find out this way.”

  “Those are Wayne and Rebeccah’s children?”

  Wayne and Rebeccah’s children . . .

  It sounded so odd to hear them described that way. Without her own name in the mix. And, for a split second, the sudden tightness in her throat almost led to her correcting him. But she couldn’t. Wayne and Rebeccah were not her parents. And Jakob, Sarah, Jonathan, Annie, and Esther were not her siblings.

  Closing her eyes against a flurry of memories that had her holding a newborn Esther, teaching Annie to make a pie, hugging Jonathan after he scraped his knee when he was not more than four, helping Sarah with her quilts, and playing with Jakob by the pond, she willed herself not to cry.

  Everything she’d ever known to be true was now different.

  She was different.

  “Emma?”

  “Yah.” She parted her lashes to reveal the barn once again. “They are Wayne and Rebeccah’s children.”

  “Jakob is the oldest?”

  “No, I . . .” She stopped, inhaled, and wrapped her hands around the handles of Sarah’s scooter in preparation for the ride up to the house. “Yah. Jakob is the oldest. Esther is the youngest. She is five.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Jakob?” At Brad’s nod, Emma swallowed. “He is twenty-one.”

  Cupping his mouth with his hand, Brad rocked back on his heels. “I wonder how many times, when I’d sit down here on the road, hoping to talk to Rebeccah those next few years, that the child I’d seen her holding had actually been you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I was younger than you are now. I hadn’t been around babies, so I had no idea how big they should or shouldn’t be at different ages. Wayne never let me get closer than where I’m parked right now, so when I’d see a little one in Rebeccah’s arms on occasion, I assumed it was hers.”

  She could hear his growing anger, even felt some of her own beginning to press at the bout of sadness, but the sound of Jakob securing the latch on the chicken coop meant it all had to stop. For the moment.

  “I really should go.” Emma walked the scooter away from the truck but waited to actually step on. “Dinner will be ready for the table and I must help Sarah and Annie.”

  Brad shut the truck’s rear gate with an echoing thump. “I will see you again, right? Tomorrow? Around lunchtime?”

  A week ago, she would never have made plans during the height of the workday, certainly not without seeking permission from Mamm or Dat first. But it wasn’t a week ago, it was now. “Yah. If you are not too busy.”

  His laugh punctured the evening air. “To get a second chance like I’m getting right now? No, I will never be too busy for you. In fact, if you’re good with lunchtime, I’ll get what I need to get done in the morning, and then I can turn it over to Sue Ellen in the office and to my foreman out in the field for the rest of the day.”

  She met his clear blue eyes and felt the answering shiver that moved its way up her spine. For the first time, she knew what her own eyes looked like in the light of early evening, and how they must look when she, too, was both excited and nervous all at the same time. “I do not need to take your whole afternoon.”

  “Yes, you do. You need to take ma
ny, many of my afternoons.” The thin graveled road popped beneath his work boots as he drew closer. “Emma, we have twenty-two years of time together to make up for. And I have twenty-two years of your life to catch up on. I don’t intend to rush that.”

  “Should I come to the same place tomorrow?”

  “Yes, or you could call me and I’ll come get you.”

  She pulled a face. “I am Amish. I don’t have a phone.”

  “That’s right . . .” He led her focus down the street toward the next closest farm. “What about the phone that used to be in that little wooden shack between this place and Weaver’s? Did they pull that out or something?”

  “No, it is still there. But it is for business and emergencies.” She studied him for a moment, a dozen questions suddenly filling her thoughts. “Did Ruby use that phone to call you?”

  His nod was slow, distant. “Sometimes, yeah.” Then, shaking off the memory, he turned back to Emma. “I could just be out here waiting at a certain time, if that’s easier.”

  “No, I’ll come to you.”

  “That’s a long way to go on a scooter, Emma. Especially at this time of year. Besides, I’d feel better knowing you’re safe.”

  “It is not too long, and I have scootered to town many times,” she protested.

  “Emma, they have to find out at some point. One way or the other.”

  He was right. They did. But dealing with anger, as she was where Mamm and Dat were concerned, was somehow easier than the hurt that would come from sharing the truth with her siblings.

  “You didn’t create this situation, Emma. Remember that. Rebeccah and Wayne did. With their lies.” Reaching into his pocket, he extracted the locket she’d shoved at him in his office and unhooked the clasp. “When I left this for you, I never thought I’d actually be able to put it around your neck.”

  Confusion pushed her chin back. “You didn’t leave it for me. You left it on Ruby’s . . .”

  And then she knew.

  The gifts she’d been stashing away in the hollow of the oak tree by Miller’s Pond since her seventh birthday had, in fact, been for her all along. Left by a man who’d clearly believed she’d been buried in her mother’s arms.

  “I-I’m sorry you didn’t know,” she whispered.

  “So am I, Emma.” He set the locket on his palm and opened it to the picture inside, the answering pain in his eyes unmistakable. “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think of her. And there’s not a day that’s gone by that I didn’t think about you, mourn you, imagine you—all of it. Sometimes, clients bring their kids to a meeting. And while they’re talking about stuff like closet size and window seats, I’m looking at their kids, trying to figure out how old they are and what you might have looked like at that age. Funny thing is, no matter what age they were, the face I always saw in my mind was a variation of Ruby’s.”

  Emma sucked in a breath. “Did you know I was a girl?”

  Glancing up from the locket, he met and held her gaze. “I did. That was the one thing Wayne told me when he came out of the house that day.”

  “What day?”

  “The day you were born. I stood right there”—he pointed to the part of the driveway that met the road—“and waited to hear how Ruby was. How you were. And after a few hours, Wayne came out and told me the two of you were gone.” He looked again at the locket, his voice thick, raspy. “I remember feeling as if someone punched me in the gut. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t think. But when Wayne started to walk away, I managed to pull it together enough to ask him what you were.”

  At a loss for what to say, Emma took the locket and chain from his hand and gazed down at the face so like her own. “I-I really do look like her, don’t I?”

  “Spitting image, minus your blue eyes and blond hair. But even being blue, your eyes are the same shape.”

  “I wish I could have known her,” she managed past the lump she couldn’t seem to dislodge no matter how hard she swallowed or how many times she tried to clear her throat. “How she spoke, the kinds of things she liked to do, the things that made her smile, and if she was excited to have me.”

  “She was very excited to have you. We both were.”

  “Then . . .” Emma stopped, blinked at the tears beginning to dapple her lashes, and tried to steady her breath enough to continue. But just as she was beginning to doubt she could, her hand and the locket disappeared inside his.

  “There is so much I want to tell you, Emma. Things I want you to know, to experience, to believe with your whole heart. And you will, because I’m going to tell you and show you everything.” His blue eyes, a mirror image of her own, were waiting when she looked up. “Starting tomorrow.”

  Chapter 7

  She leaned the scooter against the tree and quickly smoothed her hands down the front and sides of her dress. Jakob’s voice from somewhere in the vicinity of the barn let her know supper hadn’t started. Yet.

  Still, the position of the sun in the western sky told her it wasn’t far off.

  Inhaling the cold winter air, Emma made her way onto the porch and over to the front door, her ears perked for anything that might indicate Mamm’s or Dat’s exact location. If she were to guess, Dat was in the barn finishing up a few final tasks with Jakob and Jonathan, and Mamm was preparing the dinner plates while Sarah, Annie, and Esther waited to set them on the table.

  The thing she couldn’t quite guess was what Mamm’s reaction would be when Emma strolled into the house after an unexplained absence of nearly six hours. Would she be angry? Would she be upset? Would she be silent?

  Shrugging off the imagined answers she wasn’t sure she even cared about, Emma let the screen door bang closed at her back and made her way toward the beckoning smells of homemade bread and chicken stew.

  “I’m here,” she called, wiggling out of her coat.

  A sharp intake of air pulled her gaze from her coat’s hook to the table in time to see Sarah finish with the napkins and practically run to Emma’s side. “Emma! Where have you been? I did not want to tell Mamm that you had gone, but when you were not here to help with lunch or to bake the bread for tonight, Mamm asked me if you’d left. I could not pretend I did not know.”

  “I know. I wouldn’t expect you to lie, Sarah.” Emma motioned toward the counter and the stew bowls that stood stacked and waiting to be filled. “Where is she?”

  “Who? Mamm?”

  It was on the tip of her tongue to correct Sarah by inserting Rebeccah in place of Mamm, but she settled, instead, for a simple nod. Now was not the time or place.

  Sarah swept her hand toward the stairs. “She has not been down since Dat and Jakob went back out to the barn after lunch.”

  “But that was hours ago,” Emma protested. “It is Monday! There was bread to be made and—”

  “I made the bread. And I sent Annie next door to the Weavers’ with a loaf as Mamm always does.”

  “That is good, but it is not like her to be upstairs for so long.”

  “I do not think she is feeling well,” Sarah said.

  Emma stared at her sister. “Have you checked to see if that is so?”

  “Yah.”

  “And?” Emma prodded.

  “She said she was not sick and that I was to come down here and make the bread. But she did not look well.”

  Emma cocked her ear for any sound of life coming from the second floor, but there was nothing. “Is everything ready for dinner?” Emma glanced out the window at the gathering dusk and then back at Sarah, waiting.

  “Yah.”

  “Then as soon as Dat and the boys come inside, start filling the bowls.”

  “What are you going to do?” Sarah asked.

  “I will go upstairs and check on her.” Slowly, Emma made her way up the same staircase she’d climbed since she was old enough to walk, each step delivering up a crystal-clear memory from a life that had been lived around a lie. There were the races with Jakob that had always ended with him reaching t
he top step first.... There were the creaky steps she’d tried to avoid while sneaking downstairs in the hope she might catch a glimpse of whatever new animal had come into the world.... And there was the anticipation that had accompanied her up the steps to her parents’ room every time a new sibling had been born....

  Only they hadn’t been siblings.

  They’d been cousins.

  And Rebeccah and Wayne hadn’t been her mamm and dat.

  Ruby had been. And Brad was.

  At the top step, Emma turned left, clenching and unclenching her hands at her sides. She knew she should be concerned about the woman at the end of the hall—a woman she’d called Mamm her whole life. But she wasn’t. What she was, was angry, and it was an anger that was only growing stronger, if the unfamiliar heat in her face was any indication.

  She’d seen anger before. She’d stood next to it each of her first seven birthdays. And even though she’d been small and hadn’t understood its underlying origin, she’d felt its power.

  Now, that anger was hers.

  It was raw and it was intense and she had no desire to push it away for anyone, least of all the woman responsible for its presence in the first place. Still, a lifetime of habit had her knocking on the partially open door rather than pushing her way inside.

  “Sarah and Annie have everything ready,” Emma said through the opening. “They will put the stew into the bowls when Dat and the boys are ready.”

  She turned back to the stairs, only to stop at the sound of her name. Part of her wanted to ignore it, to simply go down to the kitchen and wait for dinner to begin. Another part wanted to ignore it and bypass the kitchen altogether in favor of shutting herself away in her own room, away from everyone and everything connected to the first twenty-two years of her life. And still, another part wanted to heed the invitation into the room if for no other reason than to share the details of her day—a day that had started with questions she never should have had, and ended with answers that changed everything. Including her feelings for the woman on the other side of the door.

  The pull of the latter won.

  Pushing her way into the room, Emma felt the immediate hitch to her breath as her gaze fell on the lone figure in the room—a figure who, with the exception of Emma’s birthday, had always seemed so strong. Yet there, standing beside the window with stooped shoulders and red-rimmed eyes, strong was not the word she’d pick for Rebeccah Lapp.