Piece by Piece

by Laura Bradford

  Her answering laugh held no humor.

  Emily’s cheeks reddened along with her neck. “I mean, of course you know. You’re living it every single day. But we feel it, too.”

  She could feel her throat tightening, her eyes beginning to burn, but still, she stood there, unable to move, unable to even really breathe.

  “Stay outside with us for a little while, Dani, please. It’ll be good for you—for all of us.” Emily’s eyes led her own to the boys on the other side of the street, and then across her own yard to Roberta’s and the girls quietly holding their Barbie dolls. “I could put on a movie for the kids so they’re not out here where you have to see them. Or-or I could ask Roberta and Suze to keep an eye on Bobby and his friend for me for a little while so I can go inside with you for a cup of coffee or whatever. That way we could talk in private or I could just shut up and listen. I just want to do whatever you want, Dani. Whatever you need.”

  Whatever she wanted.

  Whatever she needed.

  She looked beyond Emily to Roberta and Suze, noted the way they toed the ground, picked pretend lint off their clothes, and turned toward imaginary sounds in the distance lest Dani think they were watching her every move, her every facial expression . . .

  Twenty paces to their right, and still clutching their dolls with uncertainty, the pair of eight-year-olds who had been Maggie’s closest neighborhood friends looked as if they were afraid to move, afraid to speak, afraid to keep playing . . .

  And Bobby? Spencer’s best friend? He slowly tugged the army-green bandana off his head and sat down in the middle of the grass much to his teammate’s chagrin . . .

  Emily’s gentle hand on her arm brought her back to the conversation she didn’t really want to be having. Not now. Not there. If at all. “Please, Dani. Let me do something to help.”

  Again, she looked from Roberta and Suze, to the girls, to Bobby and his friend, and, finally, back to Emily. “Actually, there is something you could help with if that’s okay.”

  “Anything! Just name it!”

  “Can you look after things for me for a while?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Bring in the mail? Water the flowers? Make sure everything is okay from time to time?”

  “Of course,” Emily said again. “And if you’re not downstairs when I bring in the mail, should I leave it on your desk in the kitchen or bring it all the way up to you?”

  “Just put it on my desk and I’ll deal with it when I get home.”

  Emily drew back. “When you get home? Does-does that mean you’re going somewhere?”

  “It does.”

  “But . . . when? And to where?”

  “First thing in the morning.” Dani stepped around the mailbox and headed up the walkway, glancing back at Emily as she reached the base of the porch steps. “I’m going to Pennsylvania. To stay with a friend.”

  Chapter 6

  She tried to concentrate on the traffic, the scenery whizzing by, even the periodic instructions from the built-in GPS, but like the house, there were reminders of her family and the accident everywhere she turned. In fact, two different times before she’d even reached the end of the driveway she’d wrestled with going back inside, but she’d pressed on, her fear of going rivaled only by the pain of staying.

  Tightening her fingers around the leather-wrapped steering wheel of Jeff’s sedan, she saw little of the passing countryside to her left and right. Instead, she visited and revisited the moment she’d wheeled her suitcase into the garage and seen the empty spot where her minivan should have been. It had felt oddly normal at first, as if it were any other Saturday morning and Jeff would soon be pulling in with the kids, their mouths already messy from the donuts they were supposed to wait to eat until they were back home. But it wasn’t any other Saturday morning and it never would be again . . .

  She glanced in the rearview mirror at the back seat, her thoughts immediately wandering to the same view in her minivan—Spencer’s booster seat behind the passenger seat, Ava’s car seat strapped into the middle, and the spot behind her own seat where Maggie proudly sat like a big person. On the floor in front of Maggie was the car toy bag, and its plethora of books, dolls, and cars capable of staving off boredom.

  Was Ava holding the little stuffed pink dog when it happened?

  Or was she playing with the mermaid doll?

  Shaking her head, she grabbed the water bottle she’d placed in the center console and forced herself to take a sip.

  Was Maggie looking out the window? Did she see the car hurtling across the median in their direction? Did she understand what she was seeing enough to feel fear?

  She tried to take another sip, but her hand was shaking so bad she simply returned it to the holder and willed herself to focus on the license plate in front of her—Connecticut. When the car moved into the exit lane, she looked over just long enough to take in the child sleeping in the back seat, his head resting against the windowsill, his mouth open.

  Was Spencer dozing off like that? Had his head been pressed against the window, too, or was it resting on the edge of Ava’s car seat? Did he wake up when he heard the crash?

  The sound of a horn to her immediate left pulled her back into the present in time to see a car whiz around her, the driver’s shaking fist and passenger’s evil stare down serving as a reminder of where she was, and where she wasn’t.

  Had the driver who killed her family been distracted? Had he been talking on the phone? Texting? Dozing? Reading? Thinking about something other than the road in front of him?

  A second horn, this time to her right, had her glancing over in time to see a woman, about her age, eyeing her warily from the driver’s seat of a dark green minivan. Seated behind the woman and peering through the side window at Dani was a little boy, drinking from a sippy cup with one hand while making a stuffed dog jump up and down on his leg with the other.

  If she had to take a guess, the little boy was probably a little younger than Ava, although not by much. Either way, he looked like a happy kid, someone Ava would have gravitated toward if they’d crossed paths at the park or while sitting on the bleachers at an older sibling’s game.

  She tried to see if there were any other kids in the car, but when she started to drift out of her lane in the process, the minivan sped up, the child’s mother clearly trying to put as much distance between herself and Dani as possible.

  Would Jeff and Mom and the kids still be alive if he’d sped up instead of swerving? Would—

  “In two miles, take the exit for Route 322 toward Blue Ball.”

  Startled, she looked at the dashboard screen and peeked at the estimated time of arrival on the bottom corner of the display: 1:25 p.m. Twelve minutes away.

  For the first time since her spur-of-the-moment decision to take Lydia up on the offer of an escape, she found herself beginning to squirm. After all, their contact with each other had been strictly pen and paper since they’d met as children twenty-seven years earlier. And while those earliest letters had been exchanged once a month into their respective teen years, they’d petered out to an annual Christmas letter with an occasional just because thrown in over the summer.

  What did Dani really know about the Lydia Yoder of today besides the fact that she was now Lydia Schlabach and had been for close to fourteen years?

  “Not much,” she whispered. “Not enough to be showing up on her doorstep like—”

  “Take a left onto Route 322 and proceed for eight miles.”

  Like a dutiful child, she turned left, her gaze taking in the gas station on the corner, the grocery store on her left, and the fast-food restaurant in her rearview mirror. Soon, the standard commercial trappings gave way to large tracts of land on which cows grazed, farmhouses were nestled, shirts and dresses blew and snapped on clotheslines, and grain silos broke the seamless line between earth and sky.

  She took in the dark green shades in the second-floor windows and tried to remember what it was
about that detail she’d learned while visiting the area as a child. Letting up on the gas pedal, she rounded a slight bend in the road and sucked in her breath at the sight of the gunmetal-gray buggy and its chestnut-colored mare traveling toward her on the opposite side of the road. A quick glance to her left as it passed revealed an elderly couple seated on the driver’s bench, the end of the man’s beard reaching the mid-point of his chest.

  Being there, surrounded by farmland and horse-drawn buggies, it was, as she remembered from her youth, like stepping into a story whose characters lived in another century—a life that was so different from her own, yet alluring for the same reason. But perhaps what struck her most was how her own heartbeat seemed to slow, how her fingers loosened on the steering wheel, how the music she’d been playing as a mind-numbing distraction the whole time suddenly seemed so jarring, so unnecessary.

  Maybe some of that was nothing more than the miles she’d put between herself and a house that no longer felt like home. But that wasn’t all of it. There was something about the wide-open fields and the slower, simpler pace that had resonated with her all those years earlier in a way she’d never truly understood or ever quite forgotten. She just knew it had and, apparently, still did.

  “Take the next right onto Weaverland Road.”

  She glanced at the screen, noted the remaining half mile left in her drive, and slowed still more as the street name she’d been writing on envelopes for years revealed itself on a faded sign tucked back from the main road. Still, she pulled onto the shoulder, double- and triple-checked the open address book on the passenger seat, and then turned onto the sparsely graveled road bookended by grazing cows to her left and rows of what looked to be barley to her right.

  “Your destination—404 Weaverland Road, Blue Ball—is. 5 miles away.”

  Beyond the cows, in a wide field, she could make out a team of horses pulling some sort of farming equipment. Atop the back of the machine, an Amish man stood, overseeing the horses. A young boy walked ahead of the team, occasionally stopping to pick something up. Inching forward, Dani slid her gaze right, to the white farmhouse she could see on the other side of the road. There, a woman clad in a prayer kapp and aproned dress was sweeping the front porch while a younger girl pulled laundry from a clothesline and set it into a basket at her feet.

  Here, as had been the case with her first buggy sighting of the trip so far, she reveled in the quiet calm of the air—a quiet calm she breathed in and held before letting it go in a much-needed sigh.

  “You have arrived at your destination. Arrived.”

  Abandoning her view of the woman and her daughter, Dani looked to the left again, the slight bend in the road making the cows and tractor she’d seen just moments earlier visible only through the rearview mirror. Now the view from the driver’s side window was one of sheep munching on grass, a wood and wire fence that ran alongside a dirt lane, and a black mailbox bearing the name Schlabach.

  Like clockwork, the rapid breathing was back, this time accompanied by a sudden clamminess in her hands that necessitated a quick wipe of each down the sides of her jeans. “Relax,” she murmured. “Lydia asked you to come.”

  She knew it was true, yet sitting there, staring across the road at Lydia’s driveway, she couldn’t help but feel as if she’d made a huge mistake. Yes, she and Lydia had struck up a friendship decades earlier, but they’d been kids. And while they’d kept in touch throughout the years, their lives couldn’t be any more different. Connections no longer came down to whether someone liked to play dolls or run and jump the way you did. For adults, commonalities were more about jobs and hobbies and where you lived. She had none of that with Lydia any longer. They were strangers, really. Strangers who just happened to have each other’s name in their address books.

  A soft whir from somewhere close by broke through her woolgathering and pulled her attention back to the rearview mirror in time to see an Amish boy, in a straw hat, coming toward her on what looked like a half bicycle, half scooter. Before she could process anything else, he was beside her, his curious blue eyes meeting hers through the partially open window.

  “Are you stuck?” he asked, pointing at the front of her car.

  An odd sensation of familiarity kept her gaze firmly rooted on the young boy she guessed to be a year or so older than Maggie. “I . . . um . . . no. Not really. Just trying to decide what to do.”

  “You looking for a birdhouse?”

  “A birdhouse?” she echoed.

  “Yah. I help Dat build them and Mamm paints them.” The boy pulled his right hand from the handlebar of his scooter bike and pointed toward a wooden stand about ten yards away. “If you see one you want, just take it and put the money in the yellow-painted box. There’s a hole at the top where you can push it in. Dat will get it out later, before dinner.”

  Using her hand as a shield against the early afternoon sun, she studied the stand and the hand-painted sign in front of it: Birdhouses for Sale. Even from her vantage point, she could see the craftsmanship present in the little wooden houses. Some were the more standard square birdhouse with a hole in the center. Others appeared to be mounted to poles and ran the gamut from miniature Victorian homes with turrets to the more garden-variety apartment building. “You made those?”

  The boy nodded. “Yah. Dat and me did.”

  “Wow. You’re very talented.”

  Instead of the broad smile she would have expected her praise to bring, the boy’s gaze dropped to the road, where it remained for several beats. Then, “I must go. Mamm asked me to bring some bread to my grossmudder after school and then hurry home to help Dat and my uncle in the barn. Soon, Molly will have her baby. Maybe today.”

  “Is Molly your sister?” she asked.

  A smile pushed his cheeks practically into his eyes. “My sister is Nettie. She is only three. Molly is Dat’s cow.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” She met his smile with a more sheepish one of her own and then dropped her focus to the boy’s mode of transportation. “I imagine you’ll get home pretty fast on that.”

  “I am home.” Nudging his chin across his shoulder, he tucked his thumb beneath one of the suspenders that sat atop his pale blue shirt. “And faster than I did it yesterday, I think.”

  She recovered the brief gape of her mouth and, instead, looked back at the boy. “You live there?” she asked, nudging her own chin at the mailbox.

  “Yah.”

  Lydia’s son . . .

  Again, she took in the boy, her earlier assessment as to his age now bringing with it a name she’d been seeing in Lydia’s holiday letters since before Maggie was born.

  “So you must be Luke,” she said. “The oldest.”

  The boy’s eyes widened. “Yah. I am Luke. How do you know my name?”

  “Because I’ve been friends with your mom since we were almost as old as you are.”

  “I am almost ten.”

  “And your mother and I were eight when we met and became friends.”

  Luke took a half step closer toward the car, then recovered it with a quizzical look. “But you are English.”

  “You’re right; I am.”

  “I do not remember seeing you before.”

  “That’s because you haven’t. Your mom and I are more pen pal friends; we’ve stayed friends through the letters we write one another.”

  Luke righted his scooter bike beside him but refrained from actually stepping onto the riding shelf. “Sometimes Mamm reads us the letters she gets in the mailbox. My favorite are the ones from Mamm’s sister. She lives in Ohio.” He looked from Dani to the bike and back again. “They had a very bad storm in the fall and lost all their corn! When Mamm read that part after dinner, Dat said it sounded like a hailstorm! He said such a storm took Grossdawdy’s corn one year when Dat was my age. He said he still remembers waking up and looking out his window to see the broken stalks scattered across the field.”

  She looked past him again, this time taking in the fields she could just ma
ke out beyond the sheep. “Is that what is growing there?” she asked, pointing. “Corn?”

  “No, that is wheat. We will plant corn soon.” He stepped onto his scooter bike, but again, he did not move. “Where are you from? Maybe Mamm has read us some of your letters, too.”

  “I live in New York.”

  “New York,” he repeated quietly as if trying to place the name in relation to a memory he couldn’t quite capture. “What is your name? Maybe I will remember that.”

  “My name is Dani—Danielle, actually. But your mom and I really only exchange letters once a year, around the holidays mostly. Though, now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t remember getting one from her this year.”

  “Do your letters make her smile?” he asked, his own expression growing serious.

  Caught off guard by both the question and the boy’s diminished smile, she considered her words more carefully than she might have otherwise. “I-I hope so. I know her letters always make me smile.”

  And it was true. Seeing the standard white envelope with its Pennsylvania postmark nestled amid the stack of bills and solicitations each December was always a quiet thrill. It didn’t matter what she was doing when she saw Lydia’s letter, because the moment she did, all else stopped for the time it took to read each and every word from the Dear Danielle at the top of the page all the way to the Your friend, Lydia at the bottom.

  “Perhaps you are like the rainbow Grossmudder speaks of.”

  “Rainbow?”

  “Yah. Grossmudder says a friend is like a rainbow that comes after a storm.”

  She tried to make sense of what the boy was saying, but she came up empty. “I don’t understand . . . Has something happened?”

  “You must come. Inside.” Luke motioned for Dani to follow him toward the driveway. “You can park your car next to the barn, and I will tell Mamm you are here.”

  “Perhaps it will be better if I come back another time, on another day. When things are not so busy.”