by Beverly Bird
“Bobby! Oh, of course I remember him, God rest his soul.”
The dusk went abruptly to black, or maybe it was only her own vision. “He’s dead, too?”
“A hunting accident, not long after you left him. Never even got the chance to marry, poor boy.”
Kim sat down hard on the top step. It explained a lot. It explained too much. Such as why he had never come looking for her. “His parents?” she inquired.
“Well, now, they were old even then, weren’t they? I believe his ma’s still alive, in a nursing home somewhere. She’s senile. But his daddy’s gone, and of course Bobby never had any brothers or sisters.”
She couldn’t ask a frail old woman in a nursing home for bone marrow, Kim thought helplessly. But she would. Of course she would. That woman was Susannah’s paternal grandmother. But she would try Jake and Adam first. It was the only thing that made sense. Presumably, they were still young and healthy.
In a religious community in Pennsylvania. She laughed shrilly.
She’d had seven strong possibilities when she’d left L.A.—Bobby, his parents and the four members of her own family. She’d even hoped that maybe Bobby had eventually had other kids, as well. Now she was down to only two feasible possibilities—her brothers—and they were thousands of miles away.
Three, she corrected herself. She was down to three potential donors. Mrs. Madigan had said that Adam had a son—Susannah’s cousin. A little genetically removed, perhaps, but kin all the same.
She would find them. Her only other choice was to stay and wait for Jake to come back to Texas. Given the little money she had left, that wasn’t an option. She couldn’t afford to hang around in a motel for several weeks, and she couldn’t bring herself to seek shelter in this battered old house, with all its painful memories.
She got to her feet again, her head pounding. “I guess I’m going to Pennsylvania.”
“Divinity,” Mrs. Madigan said.
“Pardon me?”
“Divinity. That’s the name of the village where they are. The girl on the phone said so.”
Divinity, Kim thought disbelievingly. As though there were a true and loving God somewhere who would save her daughter. She was reasonably sure He would dwell in a place called “Divinity.” The problem was, she had stopped asking Him for help a long time ago. If she lived to be ninety, she would always remember praying, praying...before succumbing to yet another of her father’s blows.
Kim left Mrs. Madigan standing at the fence and started back toward the street. To the best of her calculations, without actually digging into her wallet to be sure, she had roughly two hundred dollars left. She had maybe three hundred dollars’ unused credit on her one and only credit card. She had gotten to L.A. all those years ago on a lot less, she reasoned.
Susannah woke up this time when Kim tried to slide soundlessly behind the wheel.
“Mom?” she asked groggily. “Where did you go?”
“To find out everyone’s gone,” Kim answered tensely.
“What?”
“My brothers are in Pennsylvania. My parents have passed away. So has your father, baby. I’m sorry.”
Susannah said nothing. Kim hoped she wouldn’t feel much in the way of grief, for any of them. Up until a week ago, she had never even known she had grandparents. As for Bobby, Kim had told her daughter long ago that her relationship with him just hadn’t worked out. That much was true, and Susannah had seemed to accept it.
“I didn’t know we were looking for him, too,” Susannah said in a small voice.
“Suze, I’m looking for anybody at all who can help us.”
“So what do we do now?”
“Now we’ve got a long drive ahead of us, I guess.” She started the car. It coughed, sputtered, then the engine caught. “Assuming our transportation holds out.”
“We’re going to drive there? To Pennsylvania? Now?”
“You got it.”
“Cool.”
Kim looked at her and wished desperately that she could bottle some of Susannah’s optimism. At the moment, she had none of her own whatsoever.
Chapter 2
Joe Lapp closed the barn door behind him and stared across the road in the direction of his home. Lanterns glowed in every window as dusk settled over the farm. At least five women were in there right now, he thought, tending to his children, cooking their supper, cleaning some corner that had already been exorcised of the dust bunnies that had gathered since Sarah had died.
Sarah had died. It came again immediately—that kickpunch in his chest that made it impossible for him to breathe for a long moment. Then the pain splintered and shattered and left him feeling almost normal again, or at least numb.
Joe generally tried not to think about his wife. Sarah had been gone since the verdant peak of summer, four months now, or it would be on Friday. He could almost escape her ghost during the day. His dairy farm demanded backbreaking toil, especially the way the Amish worked, without benefit of electricity or tractors. During the days, Joe sweated and strained, and he was almost okay. Then evening would come. He would go back to the house—Sarah’s house—and there would be the women, her sisters and well-intentioned neighbors, hovering over him and the children Sarah had left behind. They would not allow him to forget. By their mere presence, they reminded him of how horribly wrong things had gone. Still, Joe needed them. He simply wasn’t capable of taking care of his children and running the farm besides.
His eldest son, Nathaniel, would be nineteen next month, old enough that he contained his own pain and dealt with it on his own terms. But Dinah was trapped between adolescence and maturity, he thought. Barely fourteen, she had just finished with school last June. Joe knew that half of her wanted to sob like a baby, and let all the women comfort and take care of her, as well. But the other half was determined to oversee the house in her mother’s stead, no matter that these were the years she should be running around, mildly abusing her freedom before she was baptized and married and settled down.
Grace and Matthew were still young enough to...well, to bounce back from tragedy, Joe thought. They had crumbled beneath the weight of their mother’s loss for a month or so, then they had straightened up, dried their tears and gotten on with their lives. Gracie was eleven, and Matt had just turned nine.
Then there was Hannah.
Joe squeezed his eyes shut and leaned back against the barn with a groan. Hannah had lived. He wrestled every day with the unconscionable, heinous need to blame the baby for her mother’s death. Guilt, Joe thought, was a very unruly animal. It was quite untrainable. There was no predicting the directions in which it was likely to lash out.
His guilt wanted to make him snarl at Hannah. He thanked God that he was a reasonable man. That he understood his reaction. That he was able to recognize and control it somewhat. But rational or not, it would not be overruled entirely.
He and Sarah had known since she had nearly died giving birth to Matt that she dared not have more children. In fact, they had guessed that it would not be easy for them to have a large family long before that, when five whole years had passed between the births of Nathaniel and Dinah. Sarah had suffered innumerable miscarriages in between. They had guessed early on that their own family would be forever small by Amish standards, where most kitchen tables seated families of nine or ten or even more. Birth control was against the ordnung, the rules of their Amish faith.
Nonetheless, Sarah and Joe had broken that rule in good conscience. The doctor in Lancaster who had saved her life after Matthew’s birth had given her some birth control pills, and Sarah had taken them religiously. They already had four children who needed their mother. Joe could not fathom a God who would want Sarah to leave them. He had lived every day of their nineteen years together depending upon Sarah’s warm presence at his side. He could not believe that God meant him to go on alone, without her.
He’d been wrong.
Or had he? Joe gave a bitter laugh. God gave choices. He had alw
ays believed that, though it didn’t completely mesh with what his Amish bishop taught. The bishop—Sarah’s own father—spoke of God’s will, of bending oneself to it. But Joe didn’t believe that God ordained events in a man’s life. He just built forks in the road. Going left or right was a man’s own choice.
Joe had had choices. He could have left his beloved wife alone, to absolutely ensure that she did not conceive again. He could have refrained from touching her. Everything in their marriage had been about him, he’d come to realize. What he wanted. What he needed. And Sarah, sweet, loving, docile Sarah, had gone along with that without a murmur of complaint.
Then the pills had failed. Sarah had refused to go so far as to abort the pregnancy. It was one thing to buck her religion enough to swallow those little tablets in the morning, but getting rid of her child, even to save her own life, was simply beyond her.
Seven months into her pregnancy, Sarah’s placenta had ripped free from her uterine wall, just as it had done when she had been pregnant with Matt. But Matt had been full term and she had been in labor when it had happened. The settlement midwife had already called in a doctor when the profuse bleeding had started. He’d had an automobile, and they had managed to get Sarah to the hospital in Lancaster quickly enough to save her life and Matthew’s, as well.
This time Sarah had been alone in the kitchen while Joe was in the fields. This time she had lain down on their kitchen floor, and had nearly bled to death before anyone could help her. Joe had found her that way when he had come in to wash up before dinner, and there had only been time to say goodbye. She had died on the way to the hospital.
Somehow, incredibly, the technicians in the ambulance had saved Hannah. Born two months prematurely, she had barely survived after being robbed of oxygen, and she had come home from the hospital only two months ago. And that was when all the women from the settlement had really started coming to his home, to help him care for her. They were painful, physical, nearly overwhelming reminders of Joe’s loss and all the shattering changes in his life. Joe couldn’t live with their presence, and he couldn’t live without their help.
“Pa? You okay?”
Joe opened his eyes from his own harsh thoughts. Nathaniel was watching him. His son had just come in from the fields. He was wearing a worried frown. Joe knew that this particular frown had little to do with his mother’s death, and everything to do with his father’s mental and emotional well-being.
Joe pushed away from the barn wall. “Sure.”
“We ought to be getting in for supper,” Nathaniel said, as though speaking to a child who might be inclined to throw a tantrum. “Don’t you think?”
“Are you looking forward to it?” Joe countered honestly. Suppers had become a time of overly bright chatter, what with all the women around lately.
Nathaniel winced. “I never knew so much talkin’, Pa. And lately Dinah just falls right in with it, babbling with the rest of them. You notice that?”
“She’s trying to be one of them,” Joe said. “Grown up.” Nathaniel nodded sadly.
“This can’t go on,” Joe said suddenly.
Nathaniel looked at him, surprised. “What are you going to do? How are you going to stop it?”
“I’m going to send them all home. Well, most of them.” He’d need one to stay, he allowed reluctantly. Dinah needed help. The baby and the house were too much for one young girl, nor was it right that she should have to give up everything else to handle them. “And you’re going back to Berks County to get on with your life,” Joe decided.
Nathaniel immediately began shaking his head. He had been all but packed for the move, when Sarah had died. Now he had postponed his departure indefinitely. Joe knew it was time for new pain, fresh loss. He was going to have to force his son to leave. Otherwise, Nathaniel would never go.
“You’re not happy here,” Joe said. This Lancaster County gemeide, their church district, was Old Order Amish. It was a smidgen more liberal than most Old Order sects, but it was Old Order just the same. The people adhered to the strictest rules. No telephones, no electricity. The men wore long beards, longer hair—except Joe, who had obstinately bucked that rule from the start. His dark beard and his hair were short and trimmed, a tiny tribute to his own New Order, Berks County upbringing.
But those were not the things that grated on his elder son. Nathaniel strained most against the confines of the Amish staunch nonresistance to trouble. Nathaniel disapproved of the meidung, the horrible punishment that made a person “disappear” when he or she committed some sin against the ordnung. Then the remainder of the congregation could no longer “see” that person. The sinner was shunned, shut out, ignored. It had happened to too many of their close friends in recent years for Nathaniel’s comfort. Sarah and Joe had decided that Nathaniel should go to Joe’s family’s New Order settlement to receive his baptism. But then Sarah had died.
“I’ve sent word to my father,” Joe continued. “He’ll be expecting you.”
“But—” Nathaniel began.
“I’ll have the same amount of work to do without you now as I would have had before your mother died. You were going to go away then anyway. The farm chores are not a factor, Nathaniel.”
“I—”
“There really is no excuse any longer—except, perhaps, that you fear for my sanity.”
Nathaniel flushed.
“I will survive,” Joe said, though sometimes he doubted it. “It’s time.”
“I’ll think about it,” Nathaniel hedged, sounding as though he just wanted to change the subject.
“You must go.”
“We’ll talk later.”
They would have to, Joe realized, finally looking across the road at the house again. A small, very loud, dark blue car had just parked in front of his walkway. Owning automobiles was against the ordnung, too.
“What is this?” Joe wondered aloud. They both moved away from the barn, through the front paddock, to lean against the fence nearest the road and watch. Joe hooked one muddy boot on the lower rung. He reached a hand up to pull down the brim of his black, broad-brimmed hat. The hat came in handy, Joe had realized of late. Properly positioned, no one could see his eyes. No one would know if they were reddened by loss. And no one could tell if he was watching, like the woman who was just now getting out of the small blue car.
She definitely wasn’t Amish.
“She’s a beauty,” Joe said, without realizing he’d spoken. He became aware of it when Nathaniel whipped his head around to look at him.
“Guess so,” Nathaniel agreed finally, as though reserving judgment on the startling fact that his father could actually consider a woman attractive.
“I’ve got to say I like the jeans those women wear,” Joe continued.
“Uh...yeah,” Nathaniel said slowly, nodding.
This woman’s were quite possibly painted on. Joe had not had much occasion in his thirty-nine years to observe women walking around in painted-on jeans. Not even in Berks, in the New Order gemeide he had been born to, did women wear anything but plain dresses and aprons. But while the Lancaster settlements prohibited education past the eighth grade and insisted that their children be taught in their own one-room schoolhouses, the Berks people sent their kids to public schools. College was prohibited, but going to high school was just fine.
Joe had seen his share of jeans back then, on those days that he’d gone off to school. That had been back in the seventies. He fondly remembered hip-huggers. He’d considered it a sad day when they had gone out of style, even if he had since graduated, married and moved to Lancaster with little if any excuse to go into the city to see such bounty again.
“Now what do you reckon she’s doing?” Nathaniel asked as the woman paused and looked up at their house.
She was hugging herself, Joe saw, and the jeans hugged her, conforming tightly to her bottom and what seemed to him miles of legs. They were tucked into boots that were more fashionable than serviceable. She wore a short, nav
y blue jacket that warmed her only as far down as her waist.
The settlement—especially the villages, Divinity included—saw its share of tourists. The anner Satt Leit people who comprised mainstream America were fascinated with the Amish culture. They came to gawk, to marvel at their horse-drawn carriages and their simple dress. The “Plain People”—that was what they called the Amish. But the tourists visited mostly in the summer. This was November.
If this was a tourist, then she was probably lost, Joe figured. But she had to know by now that she would not find a telephone here to borrow. There were no phone lines, no electrical wires, anywhere in evidence.
“Reckon I ought to go point her in the right direction,” he said, pushing away from the fence, still watching the woman. “If she knocks on the door and encounters all those women talking at once, she’ll never make out a word they’re saying.”
“Yeah,” Nathaniel agreed. “And truth to tell, I’d kind of like to see those jeans up close.”
“I wouldn’t be averse to it.” It was a deliberate statement to make Nathaniel believe he was fine, healing, getting over the loss of Sarah. It worked. His son gave him that sharp look again, then he grinned slightly.
They climbed over the fence and started across the road. Then they stopped cold again. The front door opened. A tall man with nearly black hair passed across the screened-in porch. He stopped on the steps there, and he stared at the woman, as well. The man was Jacob Wallace.
The settlement’s infusion of Wallaces had begun ten months previously, when Adam had come looking for his son, Bo. Bo had been dropped on Joe Lapp’s doorstep nearly five years ago, and Joe and Sarah had raised the boy as their own. They had not notified the authorities. The woman who had left the boy had said she’d be back for him. She never came, and calling the authorities was against the ordnung. It was considered God’s will that the boy had been left with them.