A Plain & Fancy Christmas

by Cynthia Keller

  An odd thought struck her. Why hadn’t the Lawrence mother recognized that the baby wasn’t her own? Violet searched her memory for the sequence of events. That first day, the mother would have been woozy from anesthesia from her C-section, so it was easy to imagine that she might not have imprinted the baby’s face clearly in her mind. After that, she now recalled, there had been some complications with the mother. Loss of blood, infection—she wasn’t sure, but the mother had barely seen the baby over the past two days. The two babies were quite similar—the same size, delicate features, little hair to speak of—so a change could easily have gone unnoticed by a woman still on medication and in pain.

  Which left the Amish parents, Leah and Isaac King, according to the birth certificate Violet had just copied. She remembered that there had been some concerns about the delivery that brought the couple to the hospital instead of having a home birth, which she knew the Amish preferred. Based on the hospital’s schedule, the babies would have been brought around to the mothers earlier this afternoon, so that mother had seen and probably held this baby today. Yet, apparently, no one said a word about anything being amiss.

  Violet recalled the mother had come in very early yesterday morning, already having contractions, and endured at least twenty-four hours of labor. An exhausted mother holds her newborn, takes a loving look, counts fingers and toes, then relinquishes it to a waiting nurse and falls asleep. Violet had no problem understanding how the woman might not have noticed any difference between that baby she’d seen for a few moments and the one she saw today.

  The magnitude of the mistake was too much for Violet to contemplate any further. She went about the business of her shift, and left the nursery when her husband came in to sign discharge papers for the King baby. She wasn’t there to witness the Amish couple take home Rachel Lawrence, believing her to be their child. Later, without indicating anything was wrong, Violet updated the nurse who came to relieve her at midnight and went home.

  Paul was asleep in their bed when she arrived. She smelled alcohol on his breath, but shook him, calling his name until he awoke, his legs thrashing as he was yanked from dark oblivion.

  “What is it? What?” His words were slurred.

  “Paul, get up! It’s important. Listen to me—the babies you discharged today …”

  “Babies?” His voice faded as he closed his eyes again. “Always dis …”

  “Do you know what you did?”

  He struggled to open his eyes, staring at her uncomprehendingly.

  “Get out of bed,” she commanded.

  Violet made a pot of coffee as he roused himself and came into the kitchen. She didn’t say anything until they were seated at the table, cups of hot coffee in front of them, her husband more alert.

  “What’s the emergency?” Paul asked, taking a gulp of coffee. “I’m listening.”

  Violet paused, wondering how to begin. “In the morning, you sent home a family from New York named Lawrence with their baby, Rachel.”

  “Okay,” Paul nodded, “makes sense. I don’t remember their name, but okay. Why is that a problem?”

  “Because the baby they took home wasn’t their baby. They took Rachel King, the Amish baby that was delivered near midnight yesterday.”

  The color drained from his face. “No, no. That can’t be.”

  “This afternoon,” she continued, “you sent the New York baby, Rachel Lawrence, home with the other set of parents, an Amish family from here named King. You mixed up the babies and sent them off with the wrong families.”

  Her husband shook his head in frantic disbelief. “Oh, no, that’s impossible. I would never … I would have double-checked … I always do.”

  Violet said nothing.

  He leaned his head against one hand, going over what he could remember of the two discharges. “I followed procedures, checked the mother’s ID, the baby’s …” He paused. “Didn’t I check them both?” he muttered. “I know I did for the baby in the morning.”

  “The babies were both named Rachel. Do you remember that?”

  He continued to think, then raised his eyes, which were filled with fear. “That must have been it, the first names. I must have glanced at the first name and not really taken in the last name. And I was rushing, I remember now. But, still …”

  Neither one of them spoke for a few moments.

  “Violet, what am I going to do? We have to make this right.” His words came pouring out. “I have to call the hospital.” He got up from the table.

  “Paul, stop. Listen to me for a minute. Please.”

  “What? Yes, you’re right, it’s too late. It’ll have to wait until the morning.” He sat down again.

  She reached over to take his hand in hers. “You understand this will be the last straw at the hospital. And the end of your practicing medicine.”

  He stared at her.

  “I just want to make sure you understand,” she said as gently as she could.

  “But if we make it right, and everybody is okay with it …”

  She shook her head. “Come on, Paul. Be realistic.”

  He nodded, biting his lip, thinking. Finally, he gave her a sad smile. “I don’t think I could stand that, Violet, you know?”

  “Yes. I do know.”

  “So where does that leave us?”

  She paused, steeling herself to say it all aloud. “There are only two choices that I can think of. You can tell the hospital and sort it out, which means you will be finished as a doctor. Actually, we’d probably have to move away from here altogether. I can’t see either of us staying with everyone knowing.”

  “And the other choice?” he whispered.

  Her eyes filled with pain. “We say nothing. We let the mistake stand, and hope no one ever figures it out. The families don’t know they have the wrong babies, and they’ll just raise them as their own.”

  “We couldn’t. No. We couldn’t do that.”

  They sat there, the kitchen clock’s ticking suddenly unbearably loud.

  Paul was first to break the silence. He spoke slowly. “If I had a second chance, I can tell you one thing. I would never, never touch another drop of alcohol for the rest of my life.”

  She closed her eyes. The decision had been made.

  The two of them never discussed it again. He kept his vow not to drink, from that moment until twenty-six years later when he died. She never stopped thinking about those two babies. Every Sunday, she went to church to pray that the mistake had been part of a larger plan. It had saved her husband, of that she was sure. Maybe it required something so awful to do it, but she wanted to believe saving him was in the service of something bigger. He went on to save the lives of so many children over the years. Perhaps that was the reason he was spared from his self-destructive ways.

  Even after Paul died, Violet didn’t tell a soul what happened in the hospital all those years ago. Now, though, she was dying, and when she died, the truth would go with her. It was time to tell those babies—grown women now—what had happened.

  Seated at her husband’s desk, squinting in the dim light, she picked up a pen and reached for one of the pieces of stationery. Her fingers were stiff with age, so she wrote slowly.

  Dear Rachel,

  You wouldn’t recognize my name, but I was a nurse at the hospital where you were born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania …

  Chapter 4

  Rachel hoisted herself up onto the buggy’s front seat and took hold of the reins. Katie jumped in beside her.

  They had just dropped off a large container of Leah King’s vegetable soup, plus two loaves of bread and enough roasted chicken and potatoes for tonight’s supper for the Burkholder family. Sue Burkholder was sick and the family had their farm and eight children to manage, so neighbors were taking turns bringing food and helping with chores.

  “That soup has gotten me past many a cold since I was a girl,” Rachel said.

  “I’m going to ask Grandma to show me how she makes it,” Katie resol
ved. “Or maybe you could?”

  “I could, but somehow it won’t come out the same way. That’s Grandma’s special soup, and no one can do it the way she does.”

  Katie frowned. “I don’t think Grandma would like to hear you say that, like she’s special or something.”

  Rachel knew her mother was as keenly sensitive as ever to the dangers of thinking of oneself as special. She glanced over at Katie with a smile. “You’re absolutely right. She wouldn’t like that. But I think she’d like it if you asked her how to make the soup.”

  They drove in companionable silence. The morning held the promise of a picture-perfect May day. Wispy clouds crossed the sky as the sun bathed the countryside in bright light. The paved road cut a neat path through the vista of green fields, dotted with houses and farms.

  Rachel pulled gently on one of the reins, and Driver turned onto the long dirt road heading toward their barn. She and her daughter disembarked from the carriage and tied the horse to a post. It was Saturday, the day of the week devoted primarily to housecleaning, and Rachel and Katie had taken a short break to deliver the food. Now they would return to scouring the bathrooms and kitchen, and dusting in every room. Then they would help prepare dinner and clean up after the meal before taking on the afternoon’s work.

  Inside the house, Leah King was wiping down the kitchen cabinets. The kitchen was set within a much larger area that served as dining and family room. Ten chairs ringed a wooden table that could be expanded to seat up to thirty people when necessary. Beyond that, two wooden sofas, multiple armchairs, and a rocking chair gleamed beneath blue cushions. An oak display case contained enough fine china to serve a large crowd. This was the hub of the house where most activities took place, as evidenced by the shelves containing board games and books. A table off to one side held the remnants of a half-finished art project started by Rachel’s niece and nephews, the children of Rachel’s younger sister, Sarah.

  At the moment, those three children were seated at the big table, snacking on home-baked zucchini bread. Sarah was the sibling to whom Rachel felt closest. She loved her youngest sister, Laura, and both her brothers; in fact, she had a special closeness to the baby in the family, Daniel. Rachel and Sarah had been nearly inseparable growing up, and still continued to share everything and confide in each other.

  Eleven-year-old Katie, seeing her young cousins, ran over to greet them. The littlest, Christine, was just over a year old, wearing an unadorned powder blue dress, sitting in a high chair and busily making a mess of her snack.

  “Funny baby,” Katie said, giving the little girl a quick hug. She began to play with her, clapping her hands.

  “Katie, you know where the cleaning supplies are,” Leah chided.

  Nothing more needed to be said. Katie instantly turned and left the room to start work on the upstairs bathroom.

  “I’ll go with Katie now,” Rachel said to her mother.

  Leah gave a short nod.

  Upstairs in the bathroom, Rachel and Katie resumed their ongoing game, one they had been playing together since they moved into the house after Jacob’s death and had wound up sharing this particular Saturday chore. All the hardware in the room, from the faucets to the doorknobs, were characters who maintained a running dialogue, commenting on events that had occurred during the week or whatever else might be on their minds. Katie had designated different voices, typically high for smaller items like the draw pulls, deep for larger ones like the showerhead. Initially, the game had been an outlet for her to express some of her sorrow over the loss of her father, with the running water from the sink and shower representing an outpouring of tears and grief. Over time the game had evolved; sometimes the conversations touched on difficult subjects, sometimes they were simply silly. Katie, Rachel had realized many years before, was a child with many questions, just as Rachel herself had been. These questions weren’t necessarily welcomed by her grandparents, so she did her best to handle them herself, out of earshot of those who might fear the girl was probing when she should have been obeying without question. A troublemaker just like her mother, was what Rachel imagined her own mother must think. She chose to look at it as being spirited. In fact, she couldn’t help feeling a bit of pride at that, which she knew was terribly wrong. One of her most important jobs as a parent was to teach her child to be obedient. She certainly tried, but she wasn’t sure she was succeeding. Katie was always polite and did as she was told, but her questions and some of the discussions they had made Rachel wonder.

  Just another way in which I’m unworthy, she thought, her feelings of guilt surging, as always, to do battle with her rebellious impulse.

  Katie was almost done with fourth grade. Like the other Amish children in their church district, she attended a one-room schoolhouse that consisted of a single teacher overseeing grades one through eight. School would be over for the year soon; the children finished in May so they could help their parents during the farms’ busiest times.

  They worked quickly to finish the upstairs bathroom, then headed downstairs to work on the other one. After dinner, when the dishes had been washed and put away, and Rachel had finished mopping the main room’s floor, she went to see about dusting in the bedrooms.

  At the end of the day Rachel tucked Katie into bed and kissed her good night. Entering her own bedroom, she set down the lantern on a small table next to her narrow bed. She was surprised to see a letter on the bed. She rarely got mail, so, curious, she immediately went over to look at it. The address was faint, as if someone had had a difficult time pressing down with the pen. Strange, she noted; it was addressed to her using her maiden name, Rachel King. Anyone she knew was well aware that her married name was Yoder. Yet she saw from the postmark that it came from Lancaster. Sitting down, she used her thumb to pry open the envelope, then pulled out several pink and white pages, paper-clipped together. She unfolded the pink stationery and smoothed down the pages before starting to read.

  Dear Rachel,

  You wouldn’t recognize my name, but I was a nurse in the hospital where you were born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania …

  She read the entire letter, then examined the attachments, a copy of her birth certificate and a birth certificate for a Rachel Lawrence, born two days earlier than she had been.

  Rachel took a deep breath, then read the entire letter again. She tried to picture the situation, a nurse covering up for her husband after he had committed an unthinkable act. Rachel felt a pang of sorrow for both of them, having to live with both their mistake and their terrible choice. A choice made out of fear, but one they both knew was wrong, selfish, sinful.

  I don’t want to know this, she realized. I don’t want this to be happening.

  She tossed the letter down on her bed, then began busying herself with preparations for going to sleep. She kept staring at the pink pages out of the corner of her eye, powerless to stop the flood of questions. Was she really supposed to be this Rachel Lawrence, a girl from New York? She said the name aloud, quietly, tentatively. Was it her real name?

  A terrifying thought was forming in her mind. If she was this Rachel Lawrence, born to another family, then her being here was a mistake, and she shouldn’t have lived this life. Was she even Amish? Yes, she’d been baptized, but it was all based on a false notion of who she was. Her mother and father, all the Kings, and their enormous extended family weren’t her real family. Everything about her life was wrong, not what it was meant to be. Tears stung her eyes.

  Maybe none of this was true. Surely it was a mistake. Or a lie.

  Yet it occurred to her that, for all the questions it raised, the letter had also answered so many others. This was why she was always the child who caused problems, the one who questioned and refused to obey. This explained why she could never overcome her doubts about their faith and way of life. All the trouble and worry she had caused her parents over the years, especially her mother—they hadn’t deserved it because she wasn’t the one who was supposed to be their child. Of cour
se, she wasn’t Amish. She was never meant to be. It was all a cruel mistake. Even Jacob had paid a price; she wasn’t truly the girl he thought he had married.

  The next thought struck her with the ferocity of a blow. Katie. What was her daughter? Who was she? This wasn’t just about Rachel anymore. If she were revealed to be someone else’s daughter, what would that make Katie? Should she be here either? Maybe the two of them would be sent away.

  She grabbed the papers from her bed and shoved them back into the envelope. Hurriedly, she went to her dark wooden dresser, and yanked open the bottom drawer, stuffing the envelope beneath the neatly folded pairs of black tights there. No one had to know about this. It could just be as if nothing had happened.

  Her heart was pounding. She picked up the lantern and slipped into the hall to look in on Katie. Her daughter was asleep, snoring faintly. Rachel looked lovingly at the peaceful expression on her child’s face, the soft, smooth skin and unlined brow. Losing her father had been the worst thing that had happened to Katie. Rachel couldn’t imagine what it would do to her child to find out that her mother wasn’t who she thought she was. That their entire life was based on a lie—or a mistake. The girl’s world would be shattered by such a thing. If her mother’s very self was a lie, there would be nothing that could be counted on to be true after that.

  Katie must never find out. Far from achieving the goal of protecting her in life, by telling her daughter about this Rachel would destroy her.