Loving Mariah

by Beverly Bird

  “Can’t we go?” He stood and glared down at her when she remained seated. “Look, if it’s all the same to you, I’d really like to do something about getting my kid back so I can get the hell out of Dodge. Are you coming or not?”

  He thought he saw her flinch, and he knew he was being rude. But panic was carrying him now. And her expression went smooth again almost immediately, anyway.

  “Just let me get my coat and shawl,” she said.

  Just a little while longer, she thought Would it hurt to enjoy his company just a little while longer? Besides, he really wasn’t ready to help her yet. Wasn’t the situation with Bo still unresolved?

  She stood and hurried from the kitchen. Adam watched her go, and wondered suddenly where she kept her clothing, her personal things...where she slept.

  He went back into the living room and realized he was getting a headache. He looked around pensively. As pretty and feminine as it was in its simplicity, there really wasn’t anything personal about the space. There were no pictures of family or friends. No books beside the chair that might tell him what she liked to read—this woman who had craved knowledge enough to sacrifice her world for it.

  When she came back, she seemed slightly out of breath. He looked at her and wondered if he was crazy or if her eyes looked even more sad than usual. As if she, too, had finally come to the conclusion that their friendship had reached a brick wall, and it was going to have to stop evolving right here, right now.

  “Mariah, you don’t have to do this. You don’t have to go with me.”

  “Of course I do. How else will we let Joe know what’s happening?”

  “I could approach him.”

  “You don’t even know what he looks like.”

  He took a deep breath and raked a hand through his hair. “So we’ll drive by and you can point him out to me. I’ll take it from there.”

  “This is better. I might be shunned; but at least he knows me. He knows my family. You’re...”

  “Anner Satt Leit, ” he finished for her, his mood lifting a little, absurdly pleased that he had remembered the phrase.

  Mariah let out her breath. “Yes.”

  He didn’t fight her. He knew he should and couldn’t find the will or the energy.

  They went out to his car. This time she stopped him on Ronks Road, heading south, before they turned onto Star Road toward the school and the Essler farm.

  “Park here, Adam. I think that’s best.”

  He pulled over, scowling. “Why?”

  “In this Gemeide, it would be considered in poor taste to bring an automobile to Gemeesunndaag, to Church Sunday.”

  He thought about it. “Okay.” He didn’t want to offend anyone. He didn’t want to make enemies right off the bat. He wanted to get his kid back, as simply and kindly and easily as possible.

  They got out of the car and started up the road on foot. Mariah still seemed too quiet, too pensive. He, on the other hand, felt better, stronger, more charged with every step he took. He was finally doing something.

  They reached the Essler farm just as the side door of the house shot open. He was boggled by the sheer number of buggies crammed into the front paddocks—easily a hundred of them. What seemed like an equal amount of children spilled outside. laughing, chasing each other like they did when they were released from school for the year. Then again, three hours was a long service, he thought, and he remembered that Mariah had mentioned they all did their milking and chores first. This would be their first taste of freedom since dawn.

  A handful of men emerged from the house after the children. Like Katya’s husband, they were all bearded. Like everyone else he had met here, they all wore black. But like men the world over, they moved off to the side of a barn by themselves, congregating for their own masculine talk and pleasures, patting pockets, looking for their pipes.

  “Guess nobody told them that that’s bad for their health,” Adam muttered as one of them began puffing. He and Mariah had stopped at the foot of the drive.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Mariah murmured, her eyes searching the burgeoning crowd. “Cancer, too, is God’s will. I doubt most of them know or care what cholesterol is, either.”

  Adam snorted in disbelief.

  “There’s little Matthew,” she said suddenly. “He’ll do. Wait here, Adam.”

  He’d intended to. He stuck his hands into his pockets for warmth and watched as she hurried up the drive. The children had scattered, the girls going off in one direction, the boys in another, except for one group of teenagers. They stayed together but kept a good distance from each other, and Adam found himself wondering which of the boys had shone flashlights on the windows of which girls’ homes the night before.

  Rumspringa, he thought. All fine and dandy, as long as you were going to marry the lady. It made his gut tighten.

  Then it happened. As Mariah passed the teenagers, they looked at her quickly, clearly shocked. Adam saw their surprise turn to discomfiture, then to disapproval before they quickly retreated from her path, almost stumbling into each other in their haste.

  She had to pass the little girls, as well, to get to the boys who were playing tag in the field behind the barn. The girls started to call out to her, then they quickly looked at their fathers as though unsure if they were allowed to speak to her here or not. And no matter if they accepted her now, Adam knew they were all going to grow into women who disdained her.

  The men at the barn all seemed to notice her at the same time. They turned their backs on her as one. Their faces were angry, full of censure, even disgust.

  A heavy silence had fallen. Even the horses in a distant pasture seemed to have stopped chewing to watch the scene unfold. Adam saw Mariah miss a step and her face colored in shame. His pulse roared.

  Not for me, don’t do this for me. He was torn suddenly between guilt and fury at these holier-than-thou people, who acted as if they had never, not once, made a mistake.

  A woman came out of the house in response to the unnatural quiet. “What’s going—” Then she saw Mariah and stopped in her tracks, as well. She turned quickly and went back inside.

  Adam took a step without meaning to. Damn them. Damn them all. Why had Mariah done this to herself? She had to have known what she was walking into—hell, on some level so had he. But seeing it, watching it, was harder than he had known it would be.

  He called out to her reflexively, his voice loud and raw. Gazes flicked to him, then, furtively and briefly, to her again. Mariah didn’t answer, just kept hurrying toward the boys.

  He waited, feeling sick, his head pounding now. He prayed to a God he had never really gotten in touch with. Come on, come on, let her get it done and come back to me. As though I deserve her.

  He saw her tuck her note into a youngster’s hand. He wondered if anyone else noticed. Probably not. They were all looking deliberately away. She knelt and talked to the boy quickly, then she got to her feet again and hurried back toward the drive.

  Past the men. Past the teenagers. She kept her head high now, and her face had gone from red to pale. She did not look at any one of them.

  He caught an arm around her shoulders when she reached him, pushing her down the drive to the street again. She was trembling hard, as she had on the night she had cried, and it tore his heart out.

  “I shouldn’t have let you do this.” For me.

  “You didn’t let me,” she gasped.

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “No. Please, just...hurry, Adam. Just...let’s get out of here.”

  They reached the street and turned. “How dare they?” he growled.

  “Some of them didn’t want to, but they had to.”

  That tipped him off. She wasn’t trembling, wasn’t on the verge of breaking, because her community had shunned her. Or at least, it wasn’t only because of that.

  “Your family was there,” he said hoarsely. “God, were some of those people your family?”

  “Adam, please. Don’t use His name
in vain.”

  She didn’t answer his question, and that was answer enough. She moved a little closer to him, as though for strength and comfort, and that was when he realized that his arm was still around her shoulder. He held her as they walked, as though he could somehow shield her from everything back there on that farm with his own body. As though to keep those censuring eyes from watching her furtively, now that her back was turned. He knew without looking that they would all be staring now. Contemplating her shame, her defiance, wondering if she would break soon. Probably wondering who he was.

  Suddenly her arm snaked around his waist. And as she had the other night, she grabbed a handful of his jacket and just...held on. And if that was all he could give her, then he would give her that much.

  “I didn’t think it would be that bad,” he admitted as they. reached the school. She finally let go of him to unlock the door. He released her, as well. The wind felt colder for it.

  She laughed a little too harshly. “I always think I’m strong enough to handle anything. Another sin of pride. Anyway, it’s over now.”

  “Will Sugar Joe come?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll wait and see.”

  “He damned well better,” he snapped.

  Mariah looked at him, surprised.

  “Was he one of those men outside?” he demanded.

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then he saw what you went through to get that note to his kid. And if he doesn’t have the heart to find out what you need him for, then I’ll be damned if I’m going to give him another five minutes with my Bo.”

  Mariah sighed tremulously and went to put some wood into the stove. The little schoolhouse was gripped with a chill.

  His words still lingered in the air when the door behind them opened. Mariah came to her feet, looking around quickly, and relief flooded her face.

  “Sugar Joe! Oh, thank you.”

  At first glance, Adam thought Joe Lapp was as unobtrusive as the rest of the men. He wore the same black hat. He sported the same black clothing and the same beard. But the beard was shorter than those Adam had noticed earlier, and the man’s eyes were deep and dark and thoughtful.

  Sugar Joe’s gaze moved to Mariah, and Adam thought he saw regret there. Then they came around to him and they were measuring, assessing, hardly the eyes of an ignorant, uneducated man.

  “So,” Sugar Joe said finally. “I guess you’d be Noah’s father.”

  Chapter 9

  Adam tensed, and a spurt of irrational indignation hit him. “Bo,” he corrected. “His name is Bo Wallace.”

  Sugar Joe only nodded. His face was one of jaded calm. Adam realized that that would have been a contradiction in terms anywhere but here, in this quiet, simple land. There were gentle lines at the corners of his eyes, and the skin that showed above his beard was tanned, even in January, and weathered from working in the elements. But his eyes remained steady, knowing and peaceful.

  He took off his broad-brimmed hat and placed it on a desk, then he looked quickly at Mariah and picked it up again. “Sorry. Do you mind?”

  She seemed shaken that he had even acknowledged her, much less with respect. “No. Of course not. Please, make yourself comfortable.” She bent back to the hearth to stoke the fire. Adam thought she was shivering, but from the cold or from nerves, he couldn’t be sure.

  Joe finally put the hat down again. He leaned a hip against the desk. “So you’ve come for your boy.”

  “I have papers. Custody papers.” Adam patted his pockets, then he realized that he hadn’t been carrying them on him. Not this trip, this time when he had finally hit pay dirt and needed them most of all.

  That realization made him scowl.

  Sugar Joe waved a hand. “We have no use for that sort of thing. I’ve always imagined that was one of the reasons he was dropped off here. Besides, there’s not a doubt in my mind that you are who you say you are. He looks like you.”

  Adam’s heart swelled so suddenly, so completely, it caught him off guard. His eyes hurt and he had to look away. He heard Mariah’s voice as though from a great distance, although she had finished with the fire and had come to join them.

  “How did you know?” she asked.

  Joe gave a laugh. “The deacons might consider me a Berks County heathen, but I’m not a stupid heathen. I’ve always expected this would happen sooner or later. I’ve kept warning Sarah. Matt and Noah said an outsider, a man, has been watching them play hockey. Then you turned up in the Essler drive.”

  Adam found himself liking the man. He extended his hand. “Adam Wallace.”

  Sugar Joe shook. “Joe Lapp. I’d appreciate it if you could ignore the nickname. It’s been the bane of my existence for a while now.”

  Adam almost grinned, then he sobered again. “His mother?” he asked hoarsely. There was so much he needed to ask, to know. “Where is Jannel? Mariah thought she just...just gave him to you and...and took off again?”

  “She turned up on our porch four years ago,” Joe said slowly. “She said that she’d read about our people, our culture. She knew we might be generous enough to take care of her child for a while without asking questions.”

  Everything inside Adam began roaring again, as it had when the people at the Essler farm had shunned Mariah. He realized that it was the same sort of rage. If these people had only notified the authorities, he would have found Bo a long time ago.

  But that, of course, was what Jannel had obviously counted on. Why? And where the hell was she?

  “Why take him with her at all if she was just going to drop him off somewhere?” he demanded aloud.

  “Maybe she didn’t intend to, not at the start,” Joe said levelly. “She said she’d come back for him, but she never did.”

  “She was blond?” Adam croaked, needing to be sure.

  “Yes. Quite attractive, as I remember. She wasn’t a woman you’d forget easily.”

  Mariah felt something odd and uncomfortable settle inside her.

  “That’s Jannel,” Adam said bluntly. “That’s her.”

  “Sometime later, perhaps as long as two years, a man came looking for her. He asked if we had seen her. He came right into services. It was a Church Sunday. The deacons said she had been here once but she had gone again. They asked the man to leave. He never questioned us about the boy, and of course we didn’t volunteer anything, although Noah was sitting right there at the time. My Sarah took him outside, out the back, until the man had gone.”

  It was the hottest lead Adam had ever gotten, other than the milk-carton call that had led him here to the settlement. He told himself he didn’t care where Jannel was. He’d located Bo. That was all that was important.

  But he needed to know how it had all happened, where he’d been.

  “What time of year was this?” he demanded. “When was it that Bo came here?”

  Joe thought about it a moment. “We were busy with the first of the harvests. That would have made it early fall.”

  So she hadn’t wandered first, Adam thought. She’d read about these people and had come to them directly, entrusting them with her—his—son.

  “Who was the man who followed her?” Adam asked, and felt himself scowl as he realized how stupid the question was.

  “He never gave us a name,” Sugar Joe replied.

  “I mean, what did he look like? Do you remember that?”

  “None among us liked his eyes.”

  It wasn’t much of a description. It wasn’t a description at all. But it was something. A drug dealer? Adam rubbed his forehead and tried to think like Jake. “Could you draw a picture of him?”

  “Why?”

  Adam stared at him.

  “Are you looking to find her, as well?” Joe went on. “Do you want her back or would you just like to see her punished for what she’s done to you? I take it she took him against your will.”

  Adam let his breath out. “I don’t particularly want her back,” he admitted. It was enough of an understat
ement that even Joe smiled.

  “Well, if I were a good Old Order Amishman, I’d tell you that you must take her back. But I’m an incorrigible Berks man at heart. So my advice to you, my friend, would be to forget it. It was painful. Let it pass. Rejoice in being reunited with your child.” He picked his hat up again. “I’ll go get him.”

  “No.”

  Adam’s abrupt response startled all of them. He heard Mariah suck in her breath.

  He looked at her quickly and thought her eyes were shining. With what? Tears? Relief? Pride in him? He had to look away.

  “Not yet,” he said hoarsely. “I’ve got time.”

  Joe waited.

  “I don’t want to hurt him,” Adam explained. Inadequately, he thought. “I don’t want to hurt your wife, your family.”

  “Thank you,” Joe said simply.

  “He’d be...he’s part of you now.” Then his voice tightened. “There’s a lot about this place that I don’t approve of. There’s a certain lack of forgiveness about you folks that I find hard to swallow. But it’s Bo’s world. It’s what he’s lived for more than half his life. I’m aware of that. I won’t pass judgment. For now. And I won’t wrench him out of it so fast that it would cause him pain.”

  Joe nodded. “I don’t think he remembers much of that other world he lived in. Going back there will be something of a jolt if you do it too abruptly.”

  Adam flinched at the truth of that. It felt as if something cold and sharp had gone into his chest. “I’ve considered that.”

  “At first, in the beginning, he asked for you—for his parents—quite often. There was nothing we could tell him. We didn’t know, of course. And he was just a baby, really. I’m not sure how much he would have understood even if we had had answers.”

  “He was three,” Adam said hoarsely.

  “Yes, that was about what we guessed. Your wife never said. She didn’t tell us his name or his birthday. That’s why I’ve always believed that she didn’t mean for him to stay here so long. And she was nervous, frightened, very much in a hurry. When she didn’t come back, we made up a birthday for him and we gave him a name of our own. We had to call him something.”