by Sarah Price
“Celery?”
Anna nodded her head shyly. “Ja,” she admitted. “I asked Mamm to plant the garden with lots of celery.”
That could only mean one thing, Amanda realized: a wedding next fall.
“Did he ask you?”
The direct nature of the question caused Anna to gasp, her forehead crinkling in a frown. “Of course not!”
“Then how do you know?”
Anna shook her head and dismissed her sister with a wave of her hand. “Oh, Amanda, you don’t understand. You haven’t courted yet.”
It was true. Despite Benjamin’s attempts to court Amanda, she had been quite standoffish with him. In recent weeks, she hadn’t even attended any of the singings at all. Her friends often stopped by the farm, wondering if she was unwell. Amanda just replied that she was busy and tired and didn’t feel like attending that week. Secretly, she was thankful that singings only happened every other weekend after church service. It gave her more space to avoid the questions.
“He won’t ask until later in the fall. But we’ve talked about the future, and he hinted that I should talk to Mamm,” Anna said, her cheeks rosy with excitement and her eyes glowing. “You are happy for me, ja?”
“You haven’t been courting for that long,” Amanda observed drily.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Anna snapped, the glow disappearing from her eyes.
Another shrug. “You never know what can happen, I reckon.” She closed her eyes when her sister stormed out of the room, roughly shutting the door as she left. Truth was that she didn’t want her sister to get married and move away. Truth was that she wished she, too, could find happiness. Truth was . . .
“I don’t think I care very much for interviews,” Amanda said reflectively as they sat at a window table at Bryant Park for dinner.
“Why’s that, Princesa?”
She thought for a moment before she responded. “It’s an unnatural dialogue, isn’t it? The back and the forth. It’s not like how we talk to each other. It’s a forced conversation, and that makes me uncomfortable.” She picked at her salad. “No, I don’t like them at all.”
He chuckled. “That’s a shame because you handled the interviews very well.”
They had left the television studio and visited two radio stations for interviews as well as a thirty-minute meeting with an entertainment show. It had been a long day with people constantly around. Carlos kept everything organized, and Alejandro said that the day was flawless. But Amanda had felt that it was chaotic and out of control. No matter where Alejandro went, there were crowds of people. If they weren’t surrounded by his fans, they were most certainly surrounded by his inner circle of people who handled the logistics of his life.
“Do you think so, then?”
The sincerity of her question startled him. Setting his fork down, he wiped his mouth with his napkin. “Amanda,” he said. Aman-tha. She still enjoyed hearing him say her name. “At some point, you will need to realize that the media adores you. You were spectacular today. And the way you handled Barbara . . .” He shook his head and smiled. “She’s one of the toughest interviewers, but she just doesn’t make it seem that way, no?”
“If you say so.”
“The social media went crazy after your interview,” he confided in her. “So it’s not me saying so. The numbers don’t lie.” He seemed pleased with that, so she was reluctant to ask him what he meant. “And furthermore,” he added, “you are deliciosa, mi amor. When you blushed today . . .” He let the sentence trail off. “Ay, mi madre,” he sighed happily. “I knew exactly what you were thinking.”
“Alejandro!” She glanced around, hoping that no one could overhear his words.
He raised his eyebrows and growled playfully at her, his eyelids drooping just enough that she could barely see his blue eyes. “I want to see you blush tomorrow when you think back on what happens later tonight.”
Horrified at his insinuation, she wished she could be angry or offended. No respectful Amish man would ever speak to his wife like that. Yet, despite what she knew was inappropriate by the standards of her family and church, she also knew that her insides fluttered when he talked to her like that, his eyes seeing through her and his voice caressing her heart. Her head felt light and woozy, and that surreal feeling flooded over her. She had no reply or comeback to his statement, so she merely looked away, hating the heat that colored her cheeks, clearly giving away what she was thinking.
“Stop,” she whispered.
He laughed and pulled her close to him, his arms wrapped around her. “Ay, mi amor,” he said, running his hands down the sides of her arms. “What you do to me.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Carlos was waiting at the hotel lobby when the limousine pulled up to the front entrance. A few people lingered nearby, craning their necks to see who would emerge from the long black car with tinted windows. Alejandro waited until the doorman opened the car door before he reached for his sunglasses and slid them over his nose. He got out of the car and paused to smooth down the front of his slacks before he turned to reach for Amanda’s hand.
The delay was enough time for a small crowd to gather, recognizing Viper and his young wife.
He started to wave to the fans and pose with Amanda when he felt a strong hand on his arm. “Alejandro,” Carlos said and leveled his gaze at him. The expression on his face said it all. Something was wrong. “There is no time. We must speak.”
Without so much as a second glance at the crowd, Alejandro clutched Amanda’s hand and hurried after Carlos into the hotel lobby. An elevator was waiting for them, and the hotel staff lowered their eyes as Alejandro and Amanda walked past them.
“What’s going on?” Amanda whispered, a sense of dread falling over her. Her heart began to race as a dozen different horrible thoughts flooded through her mind.
“I don’t know,” he replied and offered no more words.
Once in their hotel suite, Carlos said something to Alejandro in Spanish. Amanda chewed on her lower lip, feeling lost and scared. She saw Alejandro catch his breath and lift his chin at whatever news Carlos shared with him. Then he nodded his head twice and glanced at Amanda. She had seen that look before, and the blood drained from her face.
“If you’ll excuse me, Princesa,” he said, and without waiting for her reply, he followed Carlos into a private sitting room in the suite. She stood there, staring at the closed door, and felt the racing beat of her heart inside her chest, remembering the only other time she had felt so scared.
“Now be careful,” she had warned, an edge to her voice.
“I know that,” he replied sharply, a quick roll of his eyes telling her that he was well aware of how to harness the horse. “I’ve done this before, you know.”
Amanda frowned at her brother. “No need to be sassing me, Aaron. I just don’t want you hurt, is all.”
He made another face as he turned back to the large horse. “Daed taught me how to do it,” Aaron mumbled. “I am almost a man, ja?”
She shook her head and leaned against the wall, wishing that he would hurry up and finish. Her mother needed to get to the store before they closed for the day. Tomorrow was Saturday, and they needed to make an awful lot of pies for the fellowship meal that followed church service on Sunday. They were supposed to go earlier in the afternoon, but nothing seemed to work according to Mamm’s schedule.
First, the neighbor stopped over and stayed far too long visiting. Then a sun shower had come and drenched all of the laundry that was hanging out to dry. Finally, Daed had needed help fixing a fence after one of the mules had broken through and was found in a paddock at the farm next door, bothering the cows. Everyone’s schedule had been thrown off-kilter, that was for sure and certain.
“You sure you don’t want me to help?”
Aaron glared at her. “I am done telling you already.
No!”
Frustrated, Amanda turned around and walked out of the barn door into the sunshine. She stared up at the sky, shaking her head. Not a cloud up above. Where had that rainstorm come from? Hadn’t been in the forecast, that was for sure and certain. Otherwise, Mamm wouldn’t have told her to hang the clothes outside.
She heard the scuffle of the horse, the nervous pawing, followed by the sound of a board breaking. Then silence.
“Aaron?” She cocked her head to the side, listening, but heard nothing. She didn’t want to turn around. The silence was deafening. “Aaron?” She forced herself to walk back into the barn, her eyes taking a moment to adjust to the darkness.
And then she saw him.
He was lying facedown, motionless, on the floor of the horse stall, blood slowly oozing from the side of his head.
She wanted to scream, but no sound had come out of her mouth. He wasn’t moving, his lifeless body on top of a broken board. The horse was standing to the side, sweating, biting at her flank, her ears pinned flat against her head, broken blood vessels invading the white in her eyes. Two things were immediately clear. The horse was in excruciating pain, badly colicky, and Aaron had been kicked by it as the horse must have mistakenly associated him with the pain.
“Daed!” The word came out of her mouth like a choked whisper. She took a step forward, staring at the body of her twelve-year-old brother. No movement. No flutters. No noise. And she knew. He was dead.
“Daed!” This time, the word came out louder, and then she managed to scream.
When Alejandro returned to the room, his face was pale and tense. He avoided looking at her for a moment, waiting for Carlos to leave the suite. Once the door shut behind him, Alejandro paused, thinking for a moment, his eyes staring at the carpet under his shoes.
“What is it?”
Taking a deep breath, he looked up and stared at her. She could see the sorrow in his eyes as he managed to say, “There’s been an accident, Amanda.”
“Who?” But she already knew.
“Your father.”
“Is he . . . ?”
Alejandro shook his head. “He’s in critical care at the hospital. I have a car coming to take us there now.”
She shut her eyes, saying a quick prayer to God, asking him to watch over her father. “What happened?”
Alejandro crossed the room and put his hands on her shoulders. “They think he had a stroke while in the buggy. He was driving and swerved. A car was passing and hit the buggy,” Alejandro said.
Her eyes flew open and she grimaced. Always the cars passing the buggies. Always the teenagers trying to scare the horses. How many times had she cringed as the cars flew past the horse-drawn buggies? Accidents happened all the time. “Is he going to live?”
“I don’t know, Amanda, but we will make certain he has the best care, the best doctors. I will fly in anyone from anywhere to care for your father.”
“I have to be there,” she said, her voice shaking. “I should have been there.”
He shook his head. “Don’t say that.”
The tears began to fall. “I never should have left.”
Alejandro cringed at her words. “Listen to me,” he said firmly and placed his hands on either side of her face. “I don’t ever want to hear that. You don’t know God’s plan. If you had stayed, you might have been with him. You might have been injured.” He paused. “Or worse.”
“It’s all my fault,” she moaned. “Everything. I took away everything from them. First Aaron, then Anna, now me!”
He pulled her into his arms, ignoring the way that she stiffened, trying to extract herself from his hold. “It’s not your fault, Amanda.”
She sat at the front of the room, the plain pine coffin resting atop a table before her. Her parents and sister were next to her, weeping as the bishop spoke about God and his plan for his children. The words didn’t make sense to Amanda as she stared at the small coffin. How could this be his plan? she wanted to ask.
There were over three hundred people crowded in the room. For the past two days, these same people had come to the house, paying their respects to the Beiler family. Neighbors had helped to clean out the back room, washing it from top to bottom after the furniture was removed to the barn. That was where Aaron’s coffin had been placed after the undertaker prepared and returned his body.
Amanda couldn’t look at him in the house. At first, she refused to go into the room. Instead, she had sat in the living room, her hands folded on her lap and her eyes downcast, not hearing the kind words that people said to her. They tried to comfort her, but her pain was too great.
It had been her fault.
No one said it. They didn’t have to. She should have listened to her instinct and not to Aaron. Her father’s horse was very large and powerful. That was why Daed had bought Aaron his own horse the year before. But Aaron had insisted on trying to harness his daed’s horse, and Amanda had given him that liberty. In return, one swift kick from the horse and Aaron had died.
Anna and her mother had heard the scream and ran out of the house, reaching the barn first. Elias had been on the other side of the barn, so it took him longer to run to where Amanda lay, crumpled on the ground, sobbing.
Her father assessed the scene, his eyes wide and full of disbelief. When he finally saw Aaron’s body in the stall, he simply said two words in an emotionless tone: “my boy.” Two words. But they said it all.
Within an hour, the house had been abuzz with people. Somehow Anna had managed to run to the neighbor’s house and, through her sobs, tell them what happened. The Amish grapevine took over from that point. The bishop and ministers descended on the house, neighbors flocked to the farm, and the Beiler family was comforted through prayer as their community took action in the preparation of the funeral.
As for Amanda, she watched everything as if she were floating above the room, a bystander who observed the activity. Nothing seemed real. Her twelve-year-old brother hadn’t just died. The neighbors weren’t cleaning out the room so that his body could be placed there in a coffin. Her father wasn’t really sobbing uncontrollably as people tried to comfort him. Her sister wasn’t pushing away the hand of Menno Zook, the young man who tried to comfort her. It was all a dream.
But she knew the truth.
She was quiet during the car ride to Lancaster. Alejandro sat next to her, watching her thoughtfully. After a while, he turned to his phone and began sending messages, his thumbs moving rapidly across the small keyboard. Twice the phone rang, but he didn’t answer the calls.
At the hospital, Alejandro led her through the lobby and past the information desk. He already knew where Elias was: the trauma center.
Amanda wasn’t prepared to see her father in the hospital bed, tubes in his arms and up his nose. Machines beeped and flashed next to the IV bag that dripped liquid into his arm through the tube. Her mother was sitting next to the bed, her face ashen and her eyes glazed over as she stared at her husband.
“Mamm!” Amanda rushed toward her mother and wrapped her arms around her.
“Oh, Amanda!” her mother sobbed, clinging to her daughter. “You came home!”
“Of course I did, Mamm,” Amanda said, a wave of guilt flooding over her. “Alejandro told me and we left at once.” She felt her mother stiffen at the mention of Alejandro’s name. “He’s here, too,” Amanda added softly. Extracting herself from her mother’s embrace, Amanda turned to look at her father. “How is Daed?”
Lizzie shook her head and fought the tears. “He’s in the Lord’s hands now,” was all that she could say.
For a long while, they stood there, side by side, looking down at Elias. For such a vibrant, active man to be motionless and incapacitated shocked Amanda. She couldn’t fathom her father being anything less than a constant blur of energy. But in a single day, all of that had changed. A stroke, Amanda thought
, wondering what he would be like if he managed to survive.
The door opened, and Alejandro cautiously entered the room. He glanced at Elias but quickly turned his attention to the two women standing at his bedside. It struck him how different they looked: Lizzie with her Amish garb, and Amanda in her plain black skirt and white blouse. She had transformed into an amazing woman in the past few months and now faced the biggest trial of them all.
“Buenos días, Lizzie,” he said softly as he crossed the room and approached Amanda’s mother. “I’m so sorry about Elias.”
Lizzie nodded in response but said nothing.
“The doctor is coming in,” Alejandro said, directing this statement at Amanda. “I requested that we speak to him. To get an update, sí?”
She nodded her head and reached for his hand. “Danke,” she whispered.
For a long time, life was in a holding pattern at the Beiler house. Family and friends stopped by on an almost-daily basis, checking on Elias and Lizzie. The garden went unweeded. The crops remained untended. Even the barn began to grow rank with odor from the lack of attention in cleaning the manure from the bedding.
Anna did what she could inside the house, and Amanda took over outside. It was too much for the girls to handle, especially as they were dealing with their own grief. Amanda blamed herself for having left the barn. Anna blamed herself for not having been there to help harness the horse.
For the rest of the summer and into the fall, there was a black cloud hanging over the Beiler house. Neither daughter attended singings. They were too tired after taking care of all the chores. The celery plants died and any talk of a wedding was long gone. When the wedding season came and went, Anna began to withdraw, losing weight and sleeping as much as she could.
Spring came and Elias managed to find the spiritual as well as physical strength to plow the fields in preparation for planting a new crop. Lizzie walked through each day as though in a trance, slowly trying to find a rhythm to her life, despite the gaping hole in her heart. By the time the one-year anniversary of Aaron’s death was upon them, the shadow of the lost child was all that remained . . . that and Anna’s depression.