by Senft, Adina
“It’s difficult to get away,” Amelia said lamely. Her teeth were not exactly number one on her list of things to worry about. As long as they kept chewing, she was satisfied. “I floss, though, as you told me last time, and I make the boys do it, too.”
“That’s good. Here we are. Just make yourself comfortable, and Dr. Sweeney will be back in a shake.”
When the young man with the lip rings—now wearing a white dentist’s coat—opened the connecting door and called her name a few minutes later, she stared at him in confusion. “I was expecting Dr. Sweeney.”
“That’s me.” He smiled at her as if they were old friends and led her to the exam room. “Sorry, I should have introduced myself in the waiting room. I also should have realized that my first patient was Amish. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so familiar.”
Amelia shook her head while he maneuvered the chair so that she was lying nearly prone. Her bob, braided at the nape of her neck, forced her head too far forward, so she wriggled until it fit into a crease in the headrest a little better. “You were not too familiar. You were kind.”
He adjusted a light on a plastic band on his head and turned on another light to shine in her mouth. “Open wide. I fall up steps all the time. My mom tells me it’s because I have so much data in my head that sensory information doesn’t have any room to get in.”
“’At’s not ’y problem,” she said around the pick. “’Ine is MS.”
He stopped probing. “MS? Yeah? Were you diagnosed recently? It doesn’t say anything about that in your chart.”
“Six or eight weeks ago,” she said. “First it was my hands, then my arms. Now, this morning, my leg decided to go out on me.”
“Tingling, numbness, even pain in the extremities? Burning?”
She nodded. Goodness. He was a dentist. How did he know about things outside the mouth?
“And you’ve had a positive diagnosis of MS, with MRIs and everything.”
Hesitating now, she nodded again. “The doctor looked at the pictures, and he said he was nearly positive he saw lesions. Those combined with my symptoms made him sure.”
“So the pictures didn’t show lesions absolutely?”
“Not absolutely, but— Why are you asking me these questions?”
“Open.”
She did, obediently. He probed around for a minute, his pick gentle on her gums, before he spoke again. “Amelia—can I call you that?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You’ve got an awful lot of metal in here.”
“Uh-huh.” The results of a good twenty years’ worth of trips to see Dr. Brucker. “’At’s why I’m here. Lost one.”
“Okay, you can close. Yeah, I see that. Nothing a crown won’t fix, and it will be much cheaper than an extraction. But what I’m concerned about is the number of fillings. See, there’s been a lot of research lately on the subject, and we’re finding out that people can have the symptoms you’re describing and not have MS, or even fibromyalgia, at all.”
Amelia went absolutely still, as motionless as a deer sensing something unfamiliar in the woods.
Dr. Sweeney didn’t seem to notice. “These fillings you have here? They’re old. We’re encouraging people to have them taken out and replaced by a composite—you know, that white stuff that matches your teeth. Because one of the ingredients they use in the amalgam is mercury, and sometimes the heavy metals build up so much in a person’s body that they start affecting the nervous system. So that would give you shooting pains, numbness, lack of responsiveness in the limbs, that kind of thing. Are you following me?”
She couldn’t have taken her gaze from his face if the end of the world had happened then and there.
Or maybe it had, and he was the only one holding out a lifeline.
“Not MS?” she whispered.
“You’d have to get it checked out with blood tests and stuff, but it’s worth it, don’t you think? It’s another road to try.”
“What would I have to do? If it’s true?”
“Well, first we’d replace all these bad boys so they quit leaching mercury into your system. That’s a bunch of hours in the chair. Either you get crowns and fillings or we pull them all and give you false teeth. Your choice.” Amelia shuddered. “Yeah, I’d go with the crowns myself. Then you go see a doc who puts you through detox—chelation, they call it. Diet, pills, supplements. Then, hopefully, things return to normal and you go on your way rejoicing.”
“No wheelchair,” she whispered.
“No wheelchair. If it turns out to be this and not MS for real.”
Please, God. Let it be this. Is that why You didn’t want me to go rushing off to Mexico? So I would stay long enough to go to the dentist and learn this?
Mercury poisoning. Of all the things she might have dreamed in her wildest imaginings, this was the absolute last she would have expected.
Dr. Sweeney muttered something about not needing surgical prep and left the room. Amelia lay there while the horizons of her world rolled back and the sun of hope burst over the rim, dazzling her with its brightness. If she had not been lying flat out with a tray full of instruments suspended over her chest, she would have fallen to her knees, praising God.
Who could imagine praising Him for being poisoned?
But compared to all the things she had feared, being poisoned was a blessing. It was curable. There was hope.
She could hardly wait to get out of here and have a blood test. How fast could Daisy cover the distance between this office and Dr. Stewart’s?
Even when Dr. Sweeney brought out his big needle and drill and began to work on her tooth, she hardly felt it. Because try as she might not to let hope blossom in case it was cruelly crushed, she couldn’t stop her mind from winging its way over fields and hills, imagining how she would tell her family and Carrie and Emma that she would not have to leave but that God had provided a way of escape and she might be cured.
And if it wanted to wing a little farther, say, in the direction of Lebanon…No. She reined in her unruly, impossible thoughts and focused on Dr. Sweeney’s hands instead.
If all this turned out to be true, she was going to write the dentist’s mother a thank-you letter.
The next day Amelia left the shop in David’s and Melvin’s hands and got to the bus stop just in time for the Number 46 bus that would take her out along Edgeware Road. At home half the laundry still waited for her, but she was going to close the washroom door and not think about it. Nothing was going to keep her from the quilting frolic with Emma and Carrie there today.
The boys had stayed overnight at Lavinia’s and would come back to her at dinnertime, so she soaked in the strange sensation of being alone in the house while she made coffee and set the meat pies she’d put together last night in the oven to bake for lunch. When she went to the side window to look out across Moses Yoder’s field for the fourth time, she saw a tall figure swathed in black making its way toward the house. A few minutes later, coming from the other direction, Carrie walked down the lane.
Amelia flung open the door, and the cat scooted in. “Hello, Liewi. What have you done with your buggy?”
Carrie removed her black bonnet and untied the knitted scarf under it, finally revealing her golden head and its slightly flattened Kapp. “I caught a ride with Erica and Joshua Yoder. Melvin is going to come and pick me up later. I hope you don’t mind company for the whole afternoon.”
“As if I could mind.” Amelia hugged her tightly. Goodness, but Carrie was thin under her clothes. “Are you eating properly?”
“Ja, Mammi.” Carrie made a face at her. “Better now that Melvin has steady work, thanks to you.”
“Lucky for you my sister sent over a bag of jelly doughnuts. You’re going to eat one right now, as soon as I pour the coffee.”
“What’s got you all in a buzz today? And where did that cat come from?” Out on the back porch, they heard feet stamping off snow, and then the kitchen door opened, preventing Amelia’s reply.
“Let me take your coat.”
Emma divested herself of all her wrappings, one by one, handing them to Amelia to make a big pile in her arms. “Mamm gave me new gums for Christmas, and am I ever grateful. They’re higher than my old ones, so my feet are actually dry even after walking the field. Hullo, who are you?” She bent to pet the little cat as it wound around her ankles.
“That’s Elam’s cat,” Amelia called from the closet, where she was hanging up their coats. “He calls it Smokey because it’s gray.”
“I didn’t think you liked animals around the house,” Carrie said. “You don’t even like my chickens on the porch.”
“Chickens belong in the barnyard—except at your house, where they’re members of the family and have their own chairs at dinner.” A woman’s maternal instincts cropped out in the strangest places—in the summer you were as likely to find a chicken in Carrie’s lap as you were a cat in any other household. “And the only reason we never had pets is that Enoch was allergic to them. But Elam befriended this one. I didn’t have the heart to refuse him—he asks for so little.”
Carrie had poured the coffee and set out the jelly doughnuts. “Aren’t these supposed to come out later?” Emma wanted to know. “I smell something in the oven.”
“We’re going to live dangerously and eat our dessert before our dinner.” Amelia grinned at her.
“Since when do you live dangerously?” Emma gave her the once-over from Kapp to shoes, the way the old ladies used to when the three of them were Rumspringing and testing the limits of hem heights and hairdos. “Something’s different. What are you up to?”
“Oh, about five foot seven.” Emma rolled her eyes, and Amelia felt a laugh bubble up in her throat. “I have such good news—at least I hope it will be good—that I hardly know what to think or do or say.”
“You’d better say something quick, or I’m going to shake you,” Carrie told her. “Did Eli Fischer write again?”
“No. This has nothing to do with him.”
Carrie looked a little disappointed.
“At least not…No. Nothing to do with men of any description. Well, one man, maybe.”
“Amelia…” Emma’s tone sounded a warning. “If you have good news, please tell us, because heaven knows you need some, and we want to share it.”
Unable to keep it in any longer, Amelia plunged into the story of her visit to the dentist, watching their expressions go from concern to horror to astonishment to joy. With a shriek, Carrie threw her arms around her, and Emma hugged them both at once. How long had it been since they’d celebrated something in such a childlike, uninhibited way? Carrie’s engagement? The morning Amelia found out she was pregnant with Matthew? It felt like fresh, cold water in the desert after many miles of trudging under the hot sun, battling the mirages of the devil.
“So I went rattling over to the doctor’s office after Dr. Sweeney did my crown and replaced two other fillings on that side, and I told her all about it,” Amelia finished over her shoulder as she took the pies out of the oven. “She did a whole bunch of blood tests and promised that she’d get the results to me as fast as she could, even if she had to drive them out here herself.”
“That would be the best kind of house call,” Carrie said, her eyes glowing. “Oh, I hope it’s true. I mean—I’m not glad that you have this poison in your blood, but that it’s not MS.”
“I’d welcome it,” Amelia told them bluntly. “Anything is better than losing a limb at a time until I’m as useless as a tree after the ax is finished with it.”
“You would never be useless, even if your arms and legs didn’t work,” Emma said. “Your spirit would have been an encouragement to everyone in the house.”
“Maybe on the outside. But on the inside I would be in a screaming rage the whole time. So what good would the outside appearance be? The Lord would know, and eventually everyone else would, too.”
“You never accepted your diagnosis, did you?” Carrie asked softly, obediently biting into a jelly doughnut between forkfuls of meat pie thick with mushrooms and onions and hot, buttered, mashed squash. “Did you plan to go to Mexico after all, despite what the men would say—and what Bishop Daniel would do?”
Amelia hesitated. They knew her too well. “I thought the Lord had shown me clearly that I should abandon Mexico and resign myself to the treatment that had been good enough for Lila Esch.” They might as well know this, too. “That night Daniel spoke to me was the longest of my life—longer even than the first one I spent without Enoch, which I thought I would never survive. And long as it was, I never did come to the place of peace.”
Carrie reached over and covered her hand. “I know you would have been willing to submit.”
“It’s one thing to know man’s will, but it’s terrible to have no clear picture of God’s will. That is a very unhappy place to be. For every sign saying yes, there was another saying no.” She glanced into the sitting room at the couch, where there was no evidence that Aaron had ever been there, much less spent the night. He’d been one of the signs saying no. “Now I wonder if all of it was meant to stall me just long enough to get to the dentist, where I could find out the real reason all this was happening to me. If this is what’s happening. We don’t know yet, and we won’t until those results come back.”
“They’ll say you don’t have MS,” Emma told her firmly. “God would not have gone to so much trouble just to leave you in the same place. You’ll see. It will all turn out well.”
Amelia began to stack their plates. “It’s in God’s hands. Let’s think about something else and make the time go faster. Where are we on our quilt?”
While she made short work of the cleanup, Carrie and Emma spread their squares on point on the sitting-room floor. When they had them all laid out, the three of them stood in the dining-room archway and gazed at the pattern. Emma took their hands and squeezed. “It really does look like a sunrise over green fields, doesn’t it?”
The colors shifted and changed from cool to warm, moving through the shades of the rainbow and the flowers of summer.
“I’ve gone without hope ever since I saw that first doctor,” Amelia said softly, “and here it was all the time, dawning over the fields we were making. I insisted on seeing just the fabric, not the meaning we were putting into it.”
“That’ll teach you.” Carrie bumped her with one shoulder. “Never give up hope.”
“That goes for more than quilts,” Emma said quietly. “Amelia, I have to ask. …If your diagnosis turns out to be different, why did you say it would still have nothing to do with Eli Fischer?”
Amelia kept her gaze on the field of triangles and squares. “Because it doesn’t. I made my choice, and now I can’t unmake it.”
“Who says?” Carrie asked. “If your circumstances change, there’s no reason your answer couldn’t, too.”
“I’m not going to chase him.” The edges of the pieces were beginning to look a little blurry.
“I wouldn’t say it was chasing a man to tell him you no longer have a life-threatening disease,” Emma said. “Eli is a good man. He would rejoice with you.”
“I know he would. But he’d also think I was hinting that he should maybe come around again, and I can’t do that.” Amelia took a breath and let it out slowly. “I’ve learned my lesson. I’m too independent and too proud—too inclined to think like some of those tourist kids do, that it’s all about me.”
“I think that in Eli’s mind it is all about you.” Carrie grinned, but neither Amelia nor Emma smiled back. Instead Emma’s brows drew together a little.
“You would not even write to him as a friend, to tell him your good news?” she asked. “You would let him hear it through Martin and Anna King?”
Amelia shrugged. “I can’t control what people write about in their letters. Anyway, if it turns out that it isn’t MS, then I’ll still have a long row to hoe. I’ll have dental work, chelation—whatever that involves—and who knows how long for recovery.
I need to concentrate on getting well for the boys’ sake. I can’t think of anything else right now.”
Emma didn’t press her further but shot Carrie a glance that Amelia couldn’t read. It was just too bad if the girls didn’t like her answer. And if Emma was so eager for romance and courtship, she should try being a tiny bit more forward and see if she couldn’t start her own.
Amelia ignored the little pang in the most secret part of her heart, protesting at every word. She’d meant it. She had learned her lesson. Galloping off to share her news in Lebanon was something the old Amelia might have considered. This Amelia knew better. When you took things into your own hands, it only led to trouble and gossip and the possibility of being separated from God’s people. She couldn’t go through that again.
“Shall we get to work?” Emma moved from between them and opened the sewing cabinet, changing the subject once and for all. “The rows will go together fast on the diagonal, even if I couldn’t bring my machine today.”
“I’ll sew the seams if you two will pin and match them,” Amelia said. “It’s all I can do to get the pins in my Kapp and apron these days. I even had to wear one of my snap dresses to church last week because I couldn’t get my fingers to work well enough to pin the front of my good dress.”
Carrie and Emma each took a pincushion full of straight pins and knelt at opposite corners of the piecework. “Folks who are looking at the front of your dress hard enough to see whether it’s snapped or pinned should be ashamed of themselves,” Emma said. “No one will judge you for that.”
“Maybe a month from now you’ll be able to,” Carrie said with as much of a smile as she could manage given the pins between her lips.
Maybe. Please, liewe Gott, let that be so.
Carrie brought her the first corner, and she bent her attention to her sewing. The afternoon measured itself out in squares and rows, and the sun had just dipped below the dark tracery of the hawthorn trees that lined the road when Amelia clipped the last thread and pushed back her chair. She shook out the pieced top, and the girls laid it on the floor once more.