The Tempted Soul

by Adina Senft

  “That’s the anesthetic,” the nurse said. “It will pass and you’ll feel normal soon.” She glanced at her stomach. “You’ll be sore, though. We’ve got you on a drip for the pain. You’ll be wanting to see your babies, but—”

  “Nei.” Lydia clutched Carrie’s fingers. Her hands would be bruised in the morning…if it wasn’t morning already. Carrie had no idea what time or even what day it was.

  “I’m sorry, honey.” The nurse squeezed her other hand. “Your little boy didn’t make it. We did our best, but—on behalf of Whinburg Township General, please let me offer my condolences—I’m so sorry—we’ll bring him in so you can—”

  “Don’t want them.”

  The nurse didn’t seem to understand. And Carrie just plain couldn’t understand. Even that Englisch nurse had mourned the little boy…and his own mother didn’t care…Carrie swallowed and looked away. How could she?

  “Your little girl will be up here in a jiffy, as soon as the nurses get her washed and measured and all that good stuff.”

  “Nei!”

  The nurse released her hand and met Carrie’s eyes. “It’s the anesthetic. You should hear some of the things that come out of women’s mouths in this room. Their husbands would be shocked.”

  “I don’t think it’s the anesthetic.” Carrie captured Lydia’s hands and clasped them between her own. “It’s all right, Schatzi. The nurses will take care of the Bobbel. Everything will be all right.”

  “Don’t bring them. You do it.”

  Them? Had she not heard the poor nurse’s attempt to break the news to her? “All right. I’ll look after them. You just rest, dear. Rest and get well.”

  The nurse went to the door. “Maybe it’s better it hasn’t sunk in. She needs to get stronger. You’ll stay with her?”

  And be the one to tell her again—and be understood this time? Ach, God’s will could be hard. Carrie nodded. Lydia’s fingers were relaxing, and the fretful creases between her brows smoothed out.

  The other girl, the one in the green pajamas, came in. “Remember me? I’m Sylvia, the maternity ward nurse. How’s she feeling?”

  “Not very sensible,” Carrie told her. “I’m glad you’re giving her something for the pain, though.”

  “Is Lydia married?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “What about the father? Is he in the picture?”

  “No one knows who he is.”

  “Ah. You’ll be her designate, then?”

  “Her what?”

  “She designated you as a second caretaker for the children.” Sylvia held out a form and a pen. “If you can sign here? You’ll get a baby bracelet so you can come and go in the NICU just like the mother would.”

  “Oh. That’s gut.” If “designate” was as close as she’d ever get to motherhood, she’d take it gladly and sign whatever they wanted.

  “It’s all right,” the girl said to her in rapid Deitch. “She’ll warm up to the baby when she gets to hold her. Sometimes it takes a little while for the bond of love to form—and loving the little girl will help her through the loss of the little boy.”

  Carrie’s face went slack with surprise. This woman had grown up Amish.

  But she’d left. And now she was nurse to a girl who was determined to leave as well. Truly God’s ways were mysterious.

  “I hope so,” she answered in English. Somehow it didn’t seem right to speak their mother tongue with someone who had chosen to live outside.

  Somehow nothing seemed right. A tiny life had been extinguished despite the efforts of five—six—eight people to save him.

  Would anything be right ever again?

  Why, Lord? Why did You take him, so small and so innocent?

  But the gut Gott in his infinite wisdom did not answer.

  * * *

  Carrie fingered the bracelet that the nurse had told her would give her as many privileges as a mother. It looked like a string of little candies, with a tag that said “ZOOK” and a lot of incomprehensible numbers and letters.

  “Don’t worry, it isn’t jewelry.” The ex-Amish nurse, whose full name was Sylvia Hostetler, leaned over the counter at the nurse’s station to smile. “Think of it as an ID card you don’t have to carry in your purse.”

  Carrie slipped it on her wrist. “Can I see the baby now?”

  “Right this way.”

  Since Whinburg Township Hospital was small and rural, the nursery wasn’t large. At the moment, it only held the baby that had been born earlier that day, and the warmer holding Lydia’s little girl.

  Her beautiful, healthy, alive little girl, whose hair had dried into a blond fluff tinged with red.

  “She’s so small,” Carrie breathed.

  “Not really—I’ve seen them a lot smaller. She’s four pounds six ounces and in pretty good shape, considering the way she arrived.”

  “Can I hold her?”

  “You can feed her if you want. Lydia’s milk won’t come in for a couple of days, so we use a formula until it does.”

  Carrie looked up in surprise. “She’s going to nurse her?”

  “So far, she says no, but I’m hoping you can persuade her. It would be better for the baby.” The woman hesitated. “Any idea what she wants to call her? I mean, we can’t exactly put ‘Baby Zook’ on the birth certificate, and neither Denise nor I can get a reply out of her.”

  This should be a string of joyful moments—holding a baby, deciding on a name, nursing for the first time. But Lydia lay in her bed like a fallen gravestone, refusing to have anything to do with her children. An hour ago, Carrie would have said that nothing could be as heartbreaking as the little bundle they had tried to lay in Lydia’s arms. Eventually she herself had taken it and said a prayer over it. Had kissed the cold little forehead and allowed the nurse to take it away.

  But this tiny girl was still alive, and didn’t deserve to be refused a name. Carrie gazed down at her. Her eyes were scrunched up as though she couldn’t bring herself to look at her own prospects, and her little hands opened and closed as though looking for something to hold on to.

  “Lydia’s mother’s name was Rachel,” she finally said. “I will ask her if we might call her that.”

  Sylvia nodded. “She looks like a Rachel. The Rachel in the Bible was fair of face, wasn’t she? And this little one surely is. We’ll wrap her up and you can sit there in the mommy’s chair with her. I’ll get the bottle for you.”

  Carrie had held any number of newborns—her own younger brother, her sisters’ children—but she had never experienced a moment as sweet as this. She sank into the upholstered chair and took little Rachel in her arms—so small, so vulnerable—and cuddled her to her chest.

  Warm. Alive. Moving. What an unspeakable gift, after such a night.

  The Bible is right—joy cometh in the morning.

  If only she could feed her from her own body. But the bottle would have to do. Once she got the hang of it, Rachel sucked as though she meant business, her cheeks working in and out, her eyes still scrunched shut. When she turned her head away from the nipple, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world for Carrie to lay her on her shoulder and rub the brief length of her spine until she heard a wet burp.

  “Oops. You’ll want this.” Sylvia handed her a piece of flannel to wipe her shoulder with. “You’re a natural. How many do you have?”

  “None,” Carrie whispered. None but this one. For this moment, this morning.

  The woman’s eyes widened, but to her credit, she said not a word. “When she falls asleep, let me know and I’ll put her back in the warmer. Then maybe you and I and Lydia can fill out some paperwork, okay?”

  They were the happiest forty-five minutes Carrie could remember in many months. Somewhere in the back of her mind, a little voice warned her not to get too attached, not to open the floodgates of love that were already leaking and bowing outward under the pressure of it.

  But for those all-too-brief minutes, she could pretend this child was
hers—and no one could deny her.

  Chapter 24

  When she and the nurse took the paperwork for the birth certificate in to Lydia, Carrie prepared herself for a fight. Maybe it was the pain medicine, or maybe it was simply lack of interest, but when Carrie suggested she name her after her mother, Lydia merely nodded and rolled her head to look out the window.

  “And the father’s name?” Sylvia persisted.

  Silence. Then, “I’m not going to say.” All the exhaustion and despair of the night hung in her voice. “I don’t want to—” Her throat closed. “It doesn’t matter.”

  An hour of questions by Sylvia, her supervisor, and even another doctor produced no results. Carrie had never seen anyone so exhausted and yet so stubborn. Abe Zook might not have been the girl’s father, but in some cases nurture obviously was a lot stronger than nature.

  Sylvia bought Carrie some yogurt and oatmeal in a plastic cup down in the cafeteria, since her purse was at home where she’d left it and she had not one cent on her. When she’d eaten it, Carrie fell asleep in the mommy’s chair after Rachel’s second feeding.

  When she woke, Melvin was perched on the edge of a plastic chair next to her.

  She stared at him, wondering where she was, and what he was doing there.

  “Liebschdi, do you not know me?” His face paled, as if he were worried she had been admitted as a patient for some illness no one had told him of.

  She held out a hand, and his was so warm, so strong, that she nearly wept with relief. “How could I not know my own Mann? How did you find me? What time is it? What day is it?”

  “It’s two o’clock on Tuesday afternoon, and the news met Brian and me when we got off the train. Boyd brought me straight here when he picked us up. And Sadie and Aram Grohl offer you their thanks for seeing to Sarah. They’ve collected their horse and the buggy, and she has gone home with them already. The whole family will be back for a visit tonight if you are still here.”

  Carrie took a breath. “Sarah. They shouldn’t thank me—oh Melvin, I never gave her a single thought until now. The poor girl had a broken arm, and I left her down there in Emergency all alone.”

  “I don’t think she’ll hold it against you. Not when the two of you seem to have saved Lydia’s life—and that of her Bobbel.”

  “There were twins.” Her lips trembled. “No one could save the little boy. God took him before he was even out of the womb.”

  “Ah.” He looked down as the news settled on his shoulders. “And the other? She is well?”

  “I’ve been holding her and feeding her. She is so beautiful, and sucks so strongly. We’ve called her Rachel.”

  “We?”

  “Lydia. And me. She—she doesn’t want her, Melvin. She didn’t want either of them. Even in the worst of her labor, she kept saying so, as though the labor should stop and the babies just go away.”

  “Don’t cry, Carrie.” His face twisted in pain. “I can’t bear it.”

  “Someone has to cry for the little boy—for poor Rachel, beautiful and well favored—” She slid to the floor and buried her face in his lap, sobbing with the pain of loss and injustice. He pulled her onto his knee and held her, and when she finally lifted her head, hunting in her sleeve for a tissue, she saw that a tear had found its way down his cheek, too.

  “I was so frightened, Liebschdi, at first,” he whispered. “They were talking so fast and I thought it was you who had gone over in the buggy. I think my heart actually stopped at the thought that anything might have happened to you—that because my work had taken me away from home, God was punishing me.”

  She put a finger on his lips, her breath hitching. “God was too busy bringing blessing into the world. I just wish Lydia could see it.”

  “And where is this little blessing?”

  “Kumm mit.” She slid off his lap and tugged him in the direction of the nursery. “I have a mother’s privileges here.” She waggled the bracelet and then wiped her nose with the last dry bit of the tissue. “And I decree that you may see her.”

  He hovered over the baby in her plastic bed just the way she had spent any number of hours doing this morning. And when Rachel woke, the nurse put her into Melvin’s big woodworker’s hands. “Don’t worry. She’s fragile, but she won’t break.”

  “It is difficult to believe.” He looked around for a place to lay his black wide-brimmed hat, and cautiously adjusted the baby against his chest.

  “Sylvia, this is my husband,” Carrie told her. “Melvin, Sylvia Hostetler has been a huge help to me.”

  He nodded at her. “Thank you for looking after my wife.”

  “You two were made to be parents,” Sylvia said.

  Melvin stiffened. “That blessing is in God’s hands.”

  Sylvia glanced at the door, in the direction of the room in which Lydia was recovering. “If that girl doesn’t come around soon, I hope God has a plan for Rachel. Do you know she actually told the floor nurse she was planning to leave town as soon as she could walk? Without the baby?”

  Sooner or later they were going to believe Lydia meant what she said. “After going through an operation like that, getting to the toilet would be a major accomplishment,” Carrie said mildly. “She’s not going anywhere for a while.”

  When Sylvia came back with the bottle, Carrie settled into the chair feeling as though she had been doing this half her life. Melvin watched her so intently she might have blushed if ninety-nine percent of her attention hadn’t been focused on Rachel—on her breathing, on whether she was warm enough, on the strength of her appetite.

  “One thing I will say, you’re more of a mother to her than her own mother is,” Sylvia said softly. “There are things in this world I will never understand.” She left quietly as though she didn’t want to disturb them, the only sound the squeak of her crepe soles on the linoleum.

  Melvin’s gaze rested on little Rachel. “She is a good eater.”

  “I hope so. She needs to be five pounds before they’ll let her leave. We have a couple of ounces left to go, don’t we, Schatzi?”

  “And will Lydia be ready to leave at the same time?”

  “They wouldn’t let them go separately.” She looked up. “I would like to drive her home, Melvin. She’ll need someone to help her organize things.”

  “And someone to help her face her father?” Carrie was silent, but Melvin read the truth in her face. “Has he come to visit?”

  She shook her head.

  “And she’s determined to send the baby away for adoption?”

  “She hasn’t mentioned that, exactly. All she’ll say is that she doesn’t want her.” Carrie lowered her voice, as if Rachel might hear the ugly truth and be hurt by it.

  “We should adopt the little one, Carrie.”

  The blood seemed to come to a stop in her veins, then lurch into motion again at a gallop. “But I thought—you told me—what about the father and his bad—”

  He winced, as though his own words pained him. “In those moments when I thought it was you who was hurt, God pulled the cover off a multitude of my sins. And chief among them was arrogance. Selfishness. And lack of love and compassion.” His voice broke on the last syllable. “He made me see what kind of man I am. And I wondered how you could live with such a man.”

  “Because I love him, faults and all,” she said softly. “The way he loves me, with all my shortcomings.”

  “If Lydia will agree, I want to be a father to this little one. I don’t know what we will have to do to make that happen, but if you can go and talk to a doctor about making babies in plastic dishes, then I can go and talk to someone about adopting one.”

  “Ach, Melvin.” Tears welled over her lashes and dripped down her cheek. “You’ve made me so happy. We’ll make Lydia see that this is the right thing to do.”

  “Seeing you a mother is the right thing.” And he slid off his chair to kneel on the floor, and gently took the two of them into his arms.

  * * *

  It
would have been in Carrie’s transparent nature to rush down the hall and fling her plans over Lydia in her hospital bed like a crazy quilt. But Melvin held her back.

  “Let her see what a good mother you are to the Bobbel,” he said. “Show her that you would be a better choice than any Englisch woman. She may even bring it up herself.”

  So Carrie bit her tongue as Rachel gained weight, as Lydia’s stitches made her itchy and cranky, as they filled out paperwork and finally secured her release.

  A nurse’s aide pushed Lydia through the main doors in a wheelchair, as Carrie followed with Rachel securely wrapped up against the April breeze. She had bought one of the Englisch car seats with a little bolster that ran around the inside of it, and Melvin had rigged a simple strap on the floor of the buggy to attach it to. Rachel was as snug as a chick in a nest—which didn’t prevent Carrie glancing over her shoulder twenty times during the trip over to the Zook farm, just to make sure.

  As they made the turn onto Camas Creek Road, Carrie glanced at her silent companion. “The women will have put the baby things in your room,” she said. “Mary Lapp sent a message by Melvin last night that she’d finished collecting everything—layette, changing table, bassinet—and she and my sister Susan set it all up yesterday.”

  Lydia chewed her upper lip and said nothing.

  “If you’re worried about your father,” Carrie said gently, “Mary said he was fine about all the things coming in.”

  “He’s not likely to argue with the bishop’s wife. He’s all about the letter of the law.”

  “He may have been disappointed in you, and maybe even angry, but once he sees Rachel, he will change his tune. You’ll see.”

  Though Lydia hadn’t changed anything since the night of the accident except her dress. She hadn’t looked over her shoulder once, either. Rachel could be a pumpkin going to the farmer’s market for all the interest she showed in her.

  It was on the tip of Carrie’s tongue to say, Please let me adopt this little girl I already love so much, when they turned down the Zook lane. It was a conversation that would take much longer than the hundred yards of time they had, so Carrie choked it back.