Saving Susannah

by Beverly Bird

He was wrong, she thought. This time he was wrong. Because this almost perfect, almost heinous idea to save Susannah involved hearts, his and hers. It involved four people, including Susannah and the yet-to-be baby, an Irish-German half sibling who could save her. And if conceiving one child to save the life of another trembled on the brink of being morally unconscionable, what could be said about doing it without giving that child the best life possible, with two parents and all the love a family could hold?

  Families didn’t guarantee love, she reminded herself frantically. She realized she felt vaguely nauseous, and pulled away from him. She dragged on her jeans, her sweater. She couldn’t find her coat. What had he done with her coat? The hell with it, she decided. “I need...to go,” she mumbled. “I need to think.” She took a single jerky step toward the door. And it opened just as she reached for it.

  “Pa?”

  Kim jumped back, startled. Joe was right behind her. She bumped into his chest and his strong hands found her waist to steady her. He always steadied her, she realized. And somehow, in that moment, she knew that if she asked him to help her conceive to save Susannah, he would do that, too.

  But now, right now, he had a few problems of his own.

  “Nathaniel?” he said in disbelief. “What are you doing here?”

  Kim couldn’t see the boy’s eyes. The sun behind him was glaring, far too bright—she could only make out his silhouette. He looked like some kind of avenging angel.

  “I don’t guess that’s the question, is it?” Nathaniel answered, looking at his father’s bare chest. “What are you doing?” His voice cracked as he turned away again. “Never mind. I guess I’m old enough to figure it out.”

  He slammed the door closed again as he left, pitching them back into darkness. Joe reached up very slowly to pull a long blade of hay out of Kimberley’s tangled hair.

  Chapter 18

  Kim sat at the kitchen table with her head in her hands. She felt overwhelmed, incapable of even sorting through things to decide what she should worry about first. How had this gotten so complicated, so out of control?

  Women all over America had casual sex all the time. She’d tried it once, once—Mark and Bobby didn’t count because she’d been engaged to both in some fashion. And everything had crashed in around her ears. The next thing she knew, words like conceive and marry were ringing in her head. while her daughter’s life was hanging in the balance. While Joe’s son was staring at them as if they were the spawn of Satan himself.

  Kim groaned.

  Then again, she’d brought this upon herself, she decided. Of all the men in the world she might have gotten intimate with, she had had the really poor sense to choose a devout Amish man with strong beliefs and morals.

  The only sane place left in the world was in his arms.

  It seemed safest to say that that was why she always went there so readily. She wasn’t capable at the moment of wondering why she found sanity there, though a mocking, inner voice kept asking her.

  “Kim?”

  Her head snapped up. Dinah had come into the kitchen, a reasonably quiet Hannah cuddled against her shoulder.

  “Is something wrong?” the girl asked.

  “No.” Everything. He wants me to stay. He makes me feel things. I need him. I’m scared.

  “Nathaniel’s home.”

  “Yes,” Kim muttered. “I know.”

  “There’s that wedding at the Eitners’ on Thursday. He caught a ride down with some folks who’ll be going.”

  Well, she thought, that explained the last little unplanned development—Nathaniel’s accusing silhouette in the barn door.

  Kim pushed shakily to her feet. She had to make supper. No, she thought, lunch, glancing at her watch. It was only one o’clock. Then she corrected herself. Not lunch, dinner. Joe called it “dinner.” They didn’t even use the same name for their meals. She felt dizzy.

  “Where are you going?” Dinah asked, startled, when she swerved for the door.

  “Out.”

  That was all she needed, she decided. To get away, by herself, for just a few moments. To get her legs beneath her again. To be alone so she could feel like herself again. Susannah was well cared for at Mariah’s school, and she’d be there for a little while yet. So Kim would drive down to the phone booth and call the hospital.

  She grabbed her keys off the kitchen counter and fled. She’d driven aimlessly all the way into Lancaster and back again on a tank of gas bought with Joe’s money before she accepted that she couldn’t outrun the truth.

  This wasn’t just about making babies and saving Susannah. Somehow or other, she’d fallen in love with him.

  Joe caught up with his son in the dairy barn. Nathaniel was throwing hay out like a madman. The pitchfork flashed in the thin light that came down from a vent in the ceiling.

  “We need to talk,” Joe said quietly.

  “No. None of my business.” Hay flew even more wildly, then Nathaniel went on anyway. “Guess this explains why you were so all fired in a hurry to get me off the farm.”

  That hurt. “This has nothing to do with you.”

  “The hell it doesn’t.”

  “Nathaniel.”

  “Well, it doesn’t. And don’t stand there chastising me for swearing when you were just...you were just...”

  He couldn’t say it, Joe realized.

  Nathaniel veered for another tack. “You didn’t want anyone around here who might be old enough to figure out what you were up to,” he accused.

  Joe took a shaky breath. “I sent you away because it was best for you,” he replied evenly. “I sent you away for your own happiness.”

  “You sent me away because you’re-running around like a bull in a field full of fertile cows!” Nathaniel shouted, throwing the fork aside.

  Joe’s blood drained. All the old guilt came clawing up, savage little talons digging and gouging. And then he understood something. And there was peace.

  “Nathaniel—”

  “I see what I see, Pa!”

  “You don’t see what you think you see.”

  “She had hay in her hair and you didn’t have a shirt on!”

  “That’s true enough.”

  The quiet admission took some of the wind out of Nathaniel’s sails.

  “But as for the whole field of cows,” Joe continued, “that’s where you’ve made your mistake. That’s simply wrong.” Joe broke off, thinking. “If that were true,” he added carefully, “this would have happened long before it did.”

  The anger was completely gone from his tone now. There was only bone-deep relief. And wonder. And exhaustion. Because guilt was a powerful foe to do battle with, and he had been doing battle with it for what felt like a lifetime.

  “Aunt Frida has been sending moon eyes my way since the harvest,” he went on. She was Sarah’s youngest sister, widowed herself some two years now. He’d never felt a stirring in her direction. “Elizabeth Byler was coming around every Friday evening before Kimberley arrived,” he continued. And until this very moment, it had never even occurred to him why. “And Elisheva Miller. Gretchen Fisher.” So many. Now he realized, only now did it strike him, how very many women had flocked to his home, to the door of an eligible, newly available man, just as soon as propriety allowed it. He had not wanted a one of them. He breathed, really breathed, for the first time in months, an invisible pressure lifting off his chest.

  “So you saved it for one who wore tight jeans,” Nathaniel said angrily.

  Joe cocked a brow. “You liked them, too,” he noted. “Have I raised such a pious, judgmental fool? What’s happened to you, Nathaniel? You’re more critical now than before you went to Berks.”

  That stopped his son cold.

  “What I was doing in that other barn was nothing more than what young men do the whole settlement over,” Joe said, “when they find the woman...” they want to marry. He trailed off, his heart chugging hard, then he pushed on. “I might be older, Nathaniel, but I’m not dead, and I
have the same rights.”

  Nathaniel’s face became mottled.

  “Your mother is gone,” Joe continued. “I can’t bring her back. I would give up everything else if I could.” And he thought he might, for his children.

  Nathaniel picked up the pitchfork again. “Do you love her?” he asked as he began to work again frantically.

  Funny, Joe thought, how he could think it so easily, yet saying it made his throat swell hard and painfully. In that moment, he understood Kimberley’s fear, all her careful defenses. “Yes,” he finally managed to answer.

  Nathaniel stopped again to stare at him. “Inside of a couple of weeks?”

  “A month, give or take,” Joe corrected. “And, well, I have that propensity.”

  “What do you mean?” Nathaniel demanded.

  “I fell in love with Sarah after five minutes. All things considered, I’m taking this one slow.”

  Nathaniel continued to stare at him.

  “I’ve always been a man who knows what he wants, Nathaniel,” he said. “And in most cases, I go after it and manage to get it. I wanted your mother from the moment I saw her. I determined to have her five minutes later when I introduced myself to her and she spoke my name. And our time together was good, special, a gift the likes of which I never expect to receive again. But in Kimberley, God has given me something entirely different. Perhaps I have the right to happiness twice, to two different kinds, though I can’t imagine why I should be so lucky, so blessed.”

  Nathaniel raked a hand through his hair. He struggled with the words, fought to push them out, and they didn’t end up being a question. “You’re going to marry her.”

  And there it was again, that leap of his heart, his breath scrambling for escape. “Maybe.”

  “That’s not good enough,” Nathaniel charged. “It’s one thing if you’re going to marry somebody. That’s rumspringa. If you’re not—”

  “I’m an adult, Nathaniel,” Joe said. “If I choose to sin, then I will pay the consequences. Or I’ll fix it. Grant me the right to make my own choices and pay my own dues.”

  It occurred to both of them then that there were those who would say he certainly didn’t have to explain this to his son, or seek Nathaniel’s approval.

  Nathaniel looked away. “Some folks came down for the Eitner wedding. I caught a ride with them,” he explained, not quite absently.

  Joe nodded, waiting.

  “Are you two going?”

  “We’ve been invited, though I’m not sure Kimberley will get within nine feet of a roast casserole.”

  Nathaniel looked at him. “She’s not like us, Pa.”

  “No,” he admitted.

  “So how are you going to fix that? What are you going to do?”

  Joe reached to open the barn door again. “This settlement has topped greater reluctance than hers.”

  But he wasn’t sure about that, he realized with an unsettled feeling. The truth was that he just wasn’t sure.

  When she came back to the settlement, Kim didn’t go inside the quaint wooden phone booth right away. She sat with her back against it, her legs drawn up, her heels digging into the dead garden.

  What am I going to do?

  But she knew. For starters, she was going to ask Dr. Coyle about the idea that had flown into her head this afternoon. Just to know. If it was impossible, then she could stop tormenting herself over it.

  She got up and went into the booth. She still had six of Adam’s quarters left, and some money of Joe’s, as well. Through some miracle, the quarters hadn’t fallen out of her pocket when Joe had been tossing her clothing all over the barn.

  Don’t think about that.

  Eventually she would have to think about it, she knew. About the things that had been said and the look in his eyes and what she felt. But not yet. Not now. She dropped the quarters into the phone and punched out the number for Children’s Hospital. She’d do the easiest thing first.

  “Dr. Reginald Coyle,” she told the hotel operator. “Pediatric Oncology.”

  A moment later, the man came on the line.

  “It’s Kimberley...Mancuso.” Her head spun. So much had happened lately. So much had come undone. The name she had made her own all those years ago now felt alien and clumsy on her tongue. “I know I’m calling a little early,” she continued, “but—”

  “No,” Dr. Coyle interrupted. “It’s fine.”

  She heard it in his voice. She gave a little cry and backed into the wall behind her, desperately needing a place to sit down. There was none. “You finished,” she said, strangled. “They finished the samples.”

  “Yes.”

  “And there’s nothing.”

  “I’m sorry. No.”

  She made a howling sound of despair that she wasn’t even aware of holding in her throat.

  “We’ll keep working with the donor lists, of course.”

  “There’s nothing there!” she cried. “What are the odds of there being anything there?”

  “Ten percent, as I’ve told you.”

  “I won’t give my baby a one in ten chance of surviving!”

  He didn’t respond to that. They both knew there was nothing else he could say, nothing more she could do.

  All in all, she realized, it made what she was about to ask a lot easier. She gulped air. “Can you take marrow from an infant, from a... a newborn?”

  “Marrow? No.”

  She swore violently and punched a hand against the wall hard enough to splinter a plank. She didn’t feel the pain as shards of wood pierced her palm. That was that, then.

  “Putting an infant under general anesthesia,” he continued, “for any other reason than saving its own life is something no reputable doctor in the country would consider. However, if we’re talking about a newborn, then the same stem cells found in marrow are rife in the umbilical cord and placenta, as well. I...uh, wasn’t aware that you were pregnant.”

  A moment before, her heart had felt as though it had stopped. Now it pumped once, heavily, with a boom that echoed in her chest. It picked up momentum and exploded. “I’m not pregnant,” she whispered.

  “Ah. Then it’s a moot point.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. I’ll...call you back,” she croaked. She hung up and moved blindly for the car.

  Joe was in the kitchen when she got back. He was helping Dinah put together sandwiches with some egg salad that Kim had apparently made earlier, though she couldn’t remember having done it. Dinah was holding Hannah with her one free arm.

  Joe looked over his shoulder at her and felt everything sluice out of him. Her face was bone white. Her eyes were immense, deep, an almost black shade of purple. They were dilated, he realized. She was in shock.

  “What happened?” He dropped the knife with a clatter. It hit the edge of the counter and spun onto the floor. “What’s wrong?”

  Her eyes were fast on the sandwiches. “I forgot to make lunch. Uh, dinner,” she said inanely. Her teeth began chattering. “Sorry.”

  He touched her. Just her arms, holding each one as though it would keep her from shattering. “It doesn’t matter.”

  She finally tore her eyes off the food and looked at him with a weak smile. “Of course it does. I’m falling down on the job.” She pulled away from him, dragged a chair out from the table and sat unsteadily. “It’s been...quite a day.”

  He didn’t answer that. He hunkered down beside her chair, and he knew. “You called the hospital.”

  She nodded vaguely.

  “They’ve finished the samples?”

  She nodded again.

  His heart was booming. “No matches?”

  “No. Not a one.” She looked around blankly. “Where is she? Where’s Suze? Did she come home from school?”

  “Not yet,” Dinah said, inching closer.

  Kim looked up at her and realized the girl’s eyes were shining.

  “I’m...so sorry,” Dinah said. “I wouldn’t have wanted...anything like this...to happen
to her, to either of you. I... really like her.”

  Joe stood again and drew the girl close, baby and all. Dinah turned her face into his chest and sobbed.

  Bridges, Kim thought. There was some healing between these two, as well. Something constricted in her chest. Joe’s eyes hadn’t left her own.

  “Well, as you said earlier, there are other ways,” he said.

  Her head swam and tears burned her eyes because it was an offer, a promise, a hand reaching out to her through impossible darkness. Of course, she thought, that hand would be his. And she knew he would say nothing more about it. He would simply put it out there—another impossible gift—and let her decide.

  She was still staring at him, unable to think of a response, when the back door burst open.

  “Watch it!” Joe shouted, a little more angrily than usual, looking toward the hall. “You’re going to knock it right off its hinges, and I’m not the one who’s going to be fixing it this time!”

  But it wasn’t Matt or Bo, the usual culprits when the door banged and clattered. Adam came into the kitchen. He opened his mouth, closed it, then tried again. One word came out, an odd bleating.

  “Help.”

  Kim was on her feet in an instant. And if her own very horrible problems were forgotten for a moment, completely forgotten with one look at her brother’s terrified face, then she didn’t even realize it. She caught his arm and tried to guide him to a chair.

  Adam shook off her grip. “Can’t sit down,” he said.

  “What’s wrong?” she demanded.

  “Got to find the sisters.”

  “What sisters?” Joe asked. “Sarah’s sisters? Why?”

  “She’s having the baby. Mariah’s having the baby. She wants to do it at home, and I don’t know what to do.”

  Chapter 19

  That was when it hit Kim. German and Irish. German and Irish. The words bounced and clamored in her head. Mariah was German. Adam was Irish. This wasn’t left to her and Joe after all.

  She felt her breath leave her on a gasp. It was as though her blood were draining. Adam didn’t share any HLA matches with Susannah. It was just another long shot. But his unborn child would be German and Irish, just as Susannah herself was.