Will and Christy were both glued to the window as we soared up into the sky. I was just happy to realize that even from where I sat, I could see out somewhat as well, especially when the plane tilted a bit, giving us a full view of the city below. Gazing down at the incredible sight, I gasped.
“I guess that’s what you call a bird’s eye view,” Christy quipped to her father.
I smiled, thinking we were likely too high for birds. No, to my mind, this was a God’s eye view—His whole, big beautiful world glittering below, a testament to His glory and a delight to His own eyes.
After we’d been airborne for a while, I took out Jane Eyre and settled in to finish it. Soon I could hear Christy telling Will about the book and how we’d been reading it together. She began recounting the entire plot, not just the parts that had been read to her but the full overview Morgan had relayed in trying to interest her in the story. I was pleased with the enthusiasm I could hear in her voice. Maybe she’d learn to love reading yet.
Later, I put the book away and turned my attention to Alice, who had barely moved since the flight began. I asked her if she was okay, and in response, she simply nodded and grinned from ear and ear. Will leaned toward us and said if he didn’t know better, he’d think she’d planned everything on purpose just for this flight home. We laughed, but long after that, his word kept ringing in my ears: home.
Home. Where Leah awaited. Where life would go on.
Where I would have to give Will up, once and for all.
By the time we landed in New York, Alice was exhausted. A wheelchair was waiting, and soon we were on a shuttle bus to a hotel. The next morning we took a taxi to the train station and then traveled on toward home.
By the time we reached Lancaster, we were all exhausted. Daed was at the station with a van and driver to meet us, and we dropped Christy, Will, and Alice off first. The twins, followed by their aunt, ran out the back door of the house as soon as the van stopped. They must have been looking for us.
The little ones were yelling for their daed, dashing across the grass, their little braids bouncing against their collarbones along with the ribbons of their little kapps. Their feet were bare even though it was cold. Will jumped from the van and scooped them up, followed by Christy. All four of them hugged for a moment until Mel squirmed down and called out my name.
As my daed helped Alice down, Mel slipped around them and into the van.
“Ada!” she yelled again. I lifted her to my lap and hugged her.
“Come on.” She took my hand and led me out of the van after Alice. Matty wanted a hug too, and I lifted her. As Christy wrapped her arms around me, I thought of how aloof she had been with me until Alice fell ill. I squeezed her tightly.
Will invited us in, but Daed said he needed to get me home. He said there were two women waiting for me who wouldn’t forgive him if he dallied.
“I understand,” Will said, chuckling. But then he invited us to come back the next afternoon, and to bring Mammi with us if she was up to it. “Alice doesn’t want Ada to have all the fun sharing her stories. She’d like to tell Frannie all about it as well.”
As the driver neared the highway, a buggy turned down the Gundys’ lane. It was Leah Fisher, waving at us, a big smile on her face.
I waved back, barely, reality smacking me in the face. Of course she would be there, eager to welcome home her future husband. Feeling nauseated, I decided that when the time came the next afternoon to visit, I would find some way to get out of it. If I couldn’t have Will for myself, then I couldn’t be around him at all, at least not for a while, not until the hole that had been ripped through my heart had been given a chance to heal.
To keep from crying, I simply closed my eyes and emptied my mind until the driver turned down our own lane. To the right, the corn had been harvested and all that was left was stubble. To the left, the cows grazed in the pasture, lifting their heads as we passed. The trees along the creek were completely bare, making the dark green of the fir trees in front of the white house stand out even more. Mamm stepped out onto the porch as the van pulled to a stop, pulling her cape tight with one hand as she hurried down the steps, a smile on her face. I climbed down into her arms, and she held me tight, not saying a word.
Daed paid the driver and then took my bag from me. While he headed into the house with it, Mamm and I started down the walkway to the daadi haus. “She’s been beside herself the entire time you were gone,” Mamm said. “Thinking about you, distraught over Alice becoming ill, worried about Giselle.”
As soon as we opened the door, Mammi started struggling to her feet. I hurried to her, helping her the rest of the way up, and then hugged her, her weathered face against my own.
“How is Giselle?” Her voice was but a whisper.
Daed joined us, and the four of us sat down and I told them everything—about Morgan, Giselle, the property, Alice falling ill, the snowy night, finding the deed and agreement, Daniel asking me to stay, and Giselle telling me not to.
“She said that?” Mamm’s hands were crossed over her chest in unbelief.
“Ya,” I answered. “She did.”
I gave them her message about how they had raised me word for word. In response, they simply nodded, but I could tell from the way they looked at each other they were as surprised and touched as I had been.
I told them about everything except of my love for Will. I could suffer through that as long as no one knew. If I told another soul, it would become unbearable.
Mammi said she wanted to see Alice as soon as possible, and Daed told her we’d all been invited back for tomorrow.
As we left the daadi haus, Mamm said she was afraid I’d be awfully bored at home after such an adventure. My eyes fell on my flower garden and then the windmill as I told her not to be silly, but the truth was, even though I wanted nothing more than to be back, there was a lot I was going to miss.
Later that night, in bed, I finished Jane Eyre, choking up over the line, “Reader, I married him.” Picturing Will, my heart was pierced with pain. Oh, how deeply I yearned to be able to say the same.
The next morning Aunt Marta, Ella, and Zed came for breakfast. Ella brought a platter of muffins that she’d made, and by the time we polished them off, I’d repeated all of my stories.
Ella asked to see the other two boxes, and I retrieved them from my room. I told everyone I would return Lexie’s to her and would keep the one of the Frutigen Bakery that Giselle had given me.
“What about the third one?” Ella asked.
“Mammi wants you and Zed to have it.” I handed it to her, explaining it showed the family farm in Indiana, carved from a drawing by Sarah, Mammi’s mother.
Ella was obviously pleased, but Zed just shrugged. I was pretty sure the box would be hers alone.
I showed her my copy of the drawing, and she examined it closely. “Did you notice the circles in the bottom corners?” she asked.
I hadn’t. I looked over her shoulder.
“They look like pies,” she said, grinning. “And this rectangle on the bottom margin looks like a cookbook.”
The objects were small and smudged. I wasn’t sure about the book, but the round objects did look like they could be pies with a sheaf of wheat drawn onto the top crust.
“Sarah was just a little girl when she drew that,” I explained.
Ella’s eyes lit up. “Maybe she liked to bake even then. I know I did. How cool. I guess my culinary skills were passed all the way down from her to me.” Running her fingers over the carving on the lid, she added dreamily, “I’d love to go here someday, to Indiana. To connect with this place from our family’s past.”
The clock marched onward whether I wanted it to or not, and eventually it was the afternoon and time to leave for the Gundys’ house. I’d been unable to come up with a good excuse for not going along. I was tempted to feign being ill, but that would only make Mamm hover again. I truly didn’t think I could face Will, especially not with Leah at his side, not a
fter everything he and I had been through together. But seeing no other way around it, I finally gave in.
Rikki wasn’t pleased with being forced out in the cold that afternoon, and Daed had to keep urging her on. It felt as if it might snow, and I realized that if it did this would be the only year of my life I would get to experience the first snow twice.
By the time we turned down the Gundys’ lane, I truly was feeling sick to my stomach. I tried to distract myself from the gathering ahead but couldn’t think of anything to concentrate on that didn’t involve Will.
He met us by his hitching post, and told Mamm, Mammi, and me that we should go on in and get warm. He’d help Daed put the horse in the barn.
We slipped our boots off after we entered through the back door and hung up our coats. Ella called out a hello from the dining room. I scanned the table. It was just Will’s parents and Ezra and Ella. I didn’t see any sign of Leah Fisher.
Will’s mamm invited us in and got us cups of hot coffee. Alice and Mammi sat side by side in easy chairs that had been brought in from the living room and placed at the head of the table. The girls came in to say hello, each one giving me a hug, and then the twins ran back off to play, but Christy stayed.
We settled in at the big table and chatted with Ella, who sat across the table much too close to Ezra. After a while Daed came in and joined us just as Ella was explaining to Ezra all about Daniel.
“He wanted Ada to stay there and live with Giselle so he could court her,” she said. “But Ada told him no because she didn’t think she could ever really learn to love him.”
She said this knowingly, with great authority, as if someday her poor old maid cousin just might come to know a love as deep as she herself had already found. Embarrassed and a little irritated, I glanced down the table, surprised to see a strange expression on Alice’s face. Eyes wide, she was looking at something over my shoulder, and I turned to see Will, standing there, staring at me. Then the conversation shifted.
“Did you hear the news about my teacher?” Christy asked the group at large.
Whipping back around, my heart began to race.
“She’s getting married,” Christy pronounced, answering her own question.
And there it was, the words I’d hoped I’d never have to hear. Leah’s engagement was official. I turned and looked straight at Will. Tears filled my eyes and began spilling onto my cheeks, and for a moment, I couldn’t even breathe, my grief was so strong.
I had to get out of there. Unable to stop myself, I stood, my chair clattering behind me, and ran from the room.
Everything was spinning as I made my way to the back door. I didn’t even bother pulling on boots or coat. I simply ran through the door and down the steps as fast as I could, not coming to a stop until I reached the oak tree.
Standing there, trying not to scream, I realized that the first snowflakes had begun to fall.
I heard the back door open and close. I stepped further around the tree, mortified that everyone had seen my reaction. Now they all knew how I felt about Will—including Will himself! Closing my eyes, I heard footsteps coming in my direction, but I didn’t even want to know who they had sent out to comfort me. Mamm, perhaps, or even Ella, who with all the good intentions in the world would still say the wrong things.
Instead, the voice that spoke into my ear was Will’s.
“Ada,” he said softly, causing my sobs to start anew. “Shhh,” he whispered, wrapping a coat around my shoulders. Then he knelt at my feet, sliding my boots over them, dressing me as if I were completely helpless. “We already had to warm you up once this week. I don’t think you want to have to go through that again, do you?”
I opened my eyes and watched through my tears as he stood and faced me again. Jokes? He was making jokes? At the moment of my deepest pain, did he really think I might laugh or at least smile? Surely he had to understand that I might never, ever smile again, much less now. Much less with him.
“I need to explain, Ada,” he told me. “I owe you that.”
“You owe me nothing,” I said, but a sob caught in my throat as I spoke. I pressed a hand to my mouth, wishing he would just get this over with.
“Remember last spring, when your sister was here and you fell beside her car and cut your head?”
I nodded. Though the whole event was a bit blurry to me, I remembered riding in the ambulance to the hospital.
“When I learned you’d been hurt and saw you soon after, that’s when I realized how I felt about you. I…” He hesitated for a moment and then looked me in the eye and said, “I decided then that I wanted to court you.”
“Court me?” I couldn’t help but cry. “Then why didn’t you?”
He held out his hands, palms upward, saying, “It was premature. The girls and I needed more time first.”
I breathed in deeply, trying to get my emotions under control. I could understand what he was saying. Lydia’s passing had still been too recent back then. But if that was how he felt about me, why had he ever allowed Leah to enter the picture later, once the timing was more appropriate? Unable to stop myself, I asked him that very thing.
“Leah was to be Christy’s teacher.” He shrugged. “I know she came around a lot, but I thought her interest was purely in the children, in helping out. In being a friend.”
A friend. I closed my eyes. Leah Fisher had managed to insinuate herself into Will’s life and then his heart without him even realizing what was happening.
“I was naive, I guess,” he continued, “or at the very least unobservant. I see that now.”
I opened my eyes, suddenly afraid that things had changed between them before he’d even come to Switzerland, that he’d been engaged to her the whole time. “When did this happen?” I asked, bracing myself for his answer, not wanting it to invalidate all that he and I had shared on the other side of the ocean.
“Leah came over yesterday as soon as we got back from the trip.”
I nodded, grateful for that much at least.
“And she and I sat down and had a very long conversation,” he added.
“She initiated it, then?” I whispered, not wanting to hear but needing to know just the same. He didn’t reply, so I pressed him further. “Was it hard for her to convince you, Will? Or did she need only to profess her love for you to see what you’d been so blind to before?”
“She did make her intentions clear, yes, that’s true. I was pretty surprised, to say the least.”
“And?”
“And it’s hard to describe the rest of the conversation without sounding…well, unkind.” He peered off in the distance, seeming to search his mind for the right words.
Unkind? To rip out my heart and tear it to shreds, he was calling unkind? Before I could muster a response, he spoke.
“It’s sort of like in that story you and Christy were reading.”
I squinted, my mind racing. “Jane Eyre?”
“Yes. Christy said there was another woman, the one who was determined to marry the hero.”
“Miss Ingram?”
“Right. Her. Do you remember what happened?”
“Of course. Miss Ingram changed her mind about wanting to marry Mr. Rochester once she found out that he wasn’t nearly as wealthy as she’d assumed.”
“Exactly,” Will replied, leaning closer. “My conversation with Leah was kind of like that. While we were over in Europe, she heard about the financial issues the nursery’s been having. She’d come here hoping it wasn’t true.”
“Did you tell her about the money from Herr Lauten? About how you can use it to increase your profits and turn things around?”
He laughed. “Why would I do that? I had no intention of encouraging her in the matter. I didn’t love her, Ada.”
Slowly, Will placed his hands on the sides of my upper arms, his touch radiating warmth clear through to my bones. I didn’t understand. The way he was looking at me, holding me, the words he was saying—all were in direct contradiction to t
he facts.
“Can you imagine how odd that conversation was for me?” he continued. “It was rather like being told hello and goodbye in the same sentence. Not that it would have ended any other way, of course, but still.”
“What are you trying to tell me, Will?” I pleaded, my heart pounding furiously in my chest. “That you and Leah aren’t getting married?”
He smiled, reaching up and gently brushing a snowflake from my cheek. “Oh, we’re getting married.” He nodded, his words like a knife in my chest. Then he grinned, adding, “Just not to each other.”
The world stopped in that moment. Will looked as though he wanted to kiss me, but I couldn’t even breathe, could barely even stand. Taking me into his arms and holding me securely there, he told me that Leah had decided to marry Silas Yoder. “I’d say that was the right decision, wouldn’t you?”
Slowly, he leaned down, moving his lips toward mine. When he was almost there, I turned away, needing to hear the words I thought I’d never be able to hear from the man I thought I’d never be allowed to love.
“And you?” I whispered. “Who are you marrying?”
“I think you know the answer to that,” he said, chuckling, his breath sweet against my skin. Tilting my face back and looking deeply into my eyes, he said, “God willing, if you’ll have me, Ada, more than anything in this world I’d like to marry you.”
“Oh, Will,” I whispered in return, “don’t you know that’s all I’ve ever wanted?”
Eyes glistening, he slowly leaned forward and then he kissed me, his lips warm and tender against mine. I wrapped my arms around his neck and kissed him in return, knowing one thing for sure: We may have crossed an ocean, but our real journey had just begun.
EPILOGUE
With Will’s status as a widower, we could have obtained a special exception from the bishop and married right away. But for various reasons we decided to wait and have a regular fall wedding instead the following year. That would give my mother time to prepare, the children time to adjust, and me time to go though my classes and join the Amish church—a transition I found myself embracing with great joy.
The Amish Nanny Page 36