The Haven (18 page)

Of course, she had no way of knowing what was running through his head. She turned to go. At the door, she stopped and quickly reverted to her starchy self. “Where did you hide that shirt with gasoline? It’s going to take all afternoon to get that stain out.”

Caught red-handed! “Under the bed.”

As he heard her hunting for the shirt in his room, he leaned his chin on the top of the baby’s head and nuzzled him close. What was it about Fern that made a person feel like he was out on a snowy night and had just turned the horse and buggy down the lane that led to home?

Blessed. He was a blessed man.

One morning in the middle of May, Sadie was in the kitchen getting a bottle of goat’s milk ready for the baby as Will knocked softly on the kitchen door and waved through the window. He had started a habit of popping in for a cup of coffee after he did a dawn check on the falcon couple.

Fern opened the door for him and said, “No secret what you’re after.” She tried to sound gruff.

Will gave Fern a kiss on her cheek. “Can you blame a man? There’s no better coffee on this green earth.”

Fern huffed, pleased. She handed Will a mug of hot, steaming coffee with two spoonfuls of sugar already mixed in, just the way he liked it. Little by little, day by day, Sadie had watched Will win Fern over with his easy charm and smooth compliments.

“No eyases to report yet,” Will said. “But it wouldn’t surprise me to find a chick or two has hatched any day now.” He walked over to where Sadie was sitting with the baby.

The baby opened his eyes and blew a spit bubble. “Isn’t he wonderful?” Sadie’s voice held awe. “He hardly ever cries anymore, and I think he knows me more than anyone else.”

“I’m counting on the first smile,” Will said, watching the baby over Sadie’s shoulder. He finished off the last sip of coffee and put the mug on the kitchen table. “I’d better get back to Adam and Eve. Since it’s Saturday, the bird-watchers will be out in full force.”

“Don’t forget about the gathering tonight!” Sadie called.

Will grinned and waved to her through the open window.

“Sadie, don’t tell me you asked Will to the gathering.” Fern frowned.

“Why not? You invited him to church and he’s come twice now. Same thing.” To be fair, Sadie knew it wasn’t the same thing. She knew Fern wanted Will at church to see how very different a world he was entering.

“It’s not the same thing. Not at all.” She wagged a finger at Sadie. “I’ve warned you to not get sweet on him. A boy like that—he thinks he can talk any girl around to his side with a smile and flicker of his eyelashes.”

Isn’t that exactly how he got you in his corner?
Sadie wanted to ask but knew enough not to.

Sadie couldn’t begin to explain how she felt about Will Stoltz. She couldn’t truthfully deny Fern’s assumption. A tiny piece of her was, as Fern had put it, sweet on him. How could she resist? Will had openly sought snatches of time with her, moseying by the garden when she was picking vegetables or appearing in the barn when she was preparing the horse for the buggy. She had recognized his ploys and managed to remain kind but cool in the face of his attentiveness, accepting his assistance without encouraging him to pamper her.

Will
was
charming. He was also handsome and funny and unpredictable and . . . oh how he made her laugh! Of course, there was always that other complication . . . he was English.

But if he weren’t—if there wasn’t a caution, an invisible boundary about the English that had been drilled into her as a child—Sadie would be falling head over heels in love with Will Stoltz.

Then there was Gid. Many times now, he had come over late at night and flashed his beam up at her window, but she ignored it and didn’t go down to meet him. Compared to Will’s silver tongue, Gid was . . . solemn as an owl. Lacking passion. He had little to say, and when he did say something, it seemed to come out all wrong.

Life was so complicated. A few months ago, everyone would have assumed that she and Gid would end up together one day. But Sadie had never felt absolutely convinced of that. She wasn’t sure what held her back from wholeheartedly returning his affection until she had started spending time with Will. In just a month, she felt as if she knew so much about Will—little things, like the fact that he hated tuna fish but loved sardines, or the reason he wore a cowboy hat was because he thought his head had a funny shape. It didn’t. His head was beautifully shaped.

And she knew big things about him too—there was pain in his eyes when he spoke about his father. He felt as if he couldn’t do enough to make his father proud of him. When Sadie held up her gentle and good father next to Will’s, she knew that her childhood was one long sunny spring picnic in the country compared to his.

Her thoughts traveled to Gideon. What could she say about Gid? She cataloged everything she knew about him:

He was almost twenty years old.

He had red hair.

He had a passel of older sisters who were married and raising families of their own. All but Alice. Oh, and Marty too.

He had a widowed father.

He was a schoolteacher.

He suffered from hay fever every spring.

He wore glasses.

He liked to read.

These were facts that everyone knew about him. Although they had grown up together, she was realizing that she hardly knew him, not really.

Gideon Smucker spent most of Saturday afternoon washing and polishing his buggy, thinking up what he would say when he stopped by the Lapps’ to see if Sadie wanted a ride to the gathering. It had to be executed very carefully so that it would seem like a casual thing and not so he would appear to be desperate or cloying. No, never that. He didn’t want Sadie to feel smothered. Girls didn’t like to be smothered, he had heard one of his sisters say.

More than a few times, he had gone over to Windmill Farm late at night to try to talk to Sadie. He flashed the beam of light against her window, but there was no response. Either she was sound asleep, not in her room, or most likely, she was ignoring his signal.

She was mad at him. Steaming mad. By now, he would have thought she might have forgiven him for assuming—like many others had—that she had a child out of wedlock. Yet she seemed far more angry with him now than she had weeks ago. Was that typical of females? For anger to multiply, like yeast in dough?

It was certainly true of Alice. She hadn’t lost a bit of her anger toward Mary Kate for the sledding accident. If anything, she did her best to try to convince Gid that Sadie’s indifference to him was a gift. A heaven-sent opportunity to avoid being permanently connected to the crazy Lapp family. “Take it and run!” Alice told him at least twice a week. But he would never do that.

Mary Kate had given him an idea at school last week. She mentioned that the baby was growing out of his basket. He would make the baby a cradle! Sadie couldn’t stay mad at him if he gave the baby such a gift—something the baby could use every day. It would be a way to show Sadie how he felt. It was always easier for Gid to show love than to say it. Trying to put what he felt for Sadie into words was impossible. To even say it out loud—those three little words—diminished it somehow, the way a firefly lost its spark in a jar. Simple syllables couldn’t contain something as rare as what Gid felt for Sadie.

He had spent the next few evenings in his dad’s workshop, cutting and sanding and staining, then placing pieces in a tight metal vise to let them dry, before coming back to stain and sand some more. He rubbed his hand along the narrow rails. They were like butter! When it was completed, he stood back, pleased with his work. Not a single nail was used. Every joint fit together like a glove on a hand. Ideally, he would have liked to wait one more day, for the glue to cure in the joints, but he really wanted to give the cradle to Sadie tonight.

At four o’clock, he set the cradle carefully in the backseat of the buggy, covered it with a blanket, and went off to Windmill Farm, reviewing again what he would say and do when he saw Sadie.

First, he would surprise her with the cradle. Then, he would offer to drive Sadie to the Kings’ for the singing. They would have time alone and he could finally explain and apologize for deeply offending her. She would forgive him and things could go back to the way they were, before she left for Berlin.

That was the plan. Ironclad! Foolproof.

As he drove up to Windmill Farm, M.K. flew out of the house, baby in her arms, to greet him before the buggy even reached the top of the drive. He barely hopped out of the buggy as she handed him the baby.

“Isn’t he precious?” she asked.

Gid looked down at the little face peering up at him. He had held his nieces and nephews and felt fairly comfortable with babies. This little one was cute, with round dark eyes and a headful of wispy hair. He held out a finger for the baby to grab. “They start out so sweet and innocent and trusting,” he said. “So full of awe at anything new, which is almost everything.” The baby was smiling at him now, really smiling. A big gummy grin.

Mary Kate leaned over and softly said, “You got the first smile! Wait until Sadie hears this. She’s been hoping for that first smile.”

Gid looked up at her. “Let’s not tell her, okay? Let’s wait for her to get the first smile.”

Mary Kate was lost in admiration. She gazed at him in such a way that he blushed. He actually blushed. It wasn’t like he was a hero or anything, but that was the way she was staring at him. As if he saved someone from getting hurt by a felled tree, or as if he stopped a runaway buggy. It embarrassed him.

“Is Sadie here?” he asked, handing the baby to M.K. He reached into the back of the buggy for the cradle.

“She left over an hour ago with Will. She wanted to show him Blue Lake Pond.”

He spun around. “The bird sitter? Blue Lake Pond?” All of his wonderful plans drifted away like smoke from a chimney.

She was staring at the cradle. “Gid, did you make that?” She bent down to rub her finger against the satin finish. “It’s beautiful. It’s the most beautiful cradle I’ve ever seen.”

He put it carefully on the ground. “Don’t use the cradle until tomorrow. Everything needs to set.”

She looked at him as if he hung the moon. “This will definitely butter Sadie up. To think
you
made a cradle for our baby.”

Gid was mortified. Was he that transparent? Now without a doubt Sadie would be convinced that he was desperate . . . Which he wasn’t! He definitely wasn’t. “Not a big deal. I was in the middle of making a cradle for my sister’s baby. When you said the baby was growing out of his basket—I just thought I’d give you this one. I can always whip up another one for my sister’s baby.” And now he was a liar. He hardly ever lied! Whenever he did, even a small one, he imagined the devil himself dancing with delight.

She gazed at him with clear, blue-gray eyes, their directness telling him precisely what he did not want to hear—she was probably thinking the same thing. He was a liar of the worst sort.

She sighed. “If this doesn’t convince Sadie to start talking to you again, well, then, I don’t know what will.”

C
ould it have been only a little more than a few weeks since Will had first met Sadie? It seemed that he had known her for years.

He was sitting on the bank of Blue Lake Pond with Sadie, watching the water lap onto the sandy shore. The lake was quiet, still, the surface so glassy—so smooth the sun shined off it like a mirror. The water rolled out in a reflection of the sky, uneven at the edges where it touched the shores, weaving into cliffs and crevices, hiding pitch-black under the shadows of overhanging trees. At times like this, with a beautiful lake looking so calm, without another human in sight, it was hard to believe there could be anything wrong in the world.

A whip-poor-will called in the distance, and from the tangle of branches, its mate trilled out a reply.

Afterward Will couldn’t say how it had happened, but as they sat there in the peace of that moment, he started to tell Sadie things about his family that he had never told another living soul. Ordinarily, Will deflected any discussion about his family. He’d always made a point to keep his issues to himself. He wasn’t sure if it was Sadie’s low musical voice or easy, nonjudgmental manner, but it all worked together to loosen his tongue. Will was astonished to hear himself describe the last time he had seen his father—when he had told Will to pack his bags and leave the house.

Sadie’s knees were bent and her elbows rested on top of them. “Do you think he really meant it?”

“He meant it. In the next breath, he told me where I was expected to go—to report to the game warden in Lancaster County. It’s like . . . my dad is a barbed-wire fence—the same kind that I put up around the falcons’ scape. That’s what our relationship feels like. The only thing that holds us together is rusted, sharp, twisted.”

Sadie drew a line in the sand with her finger. “And those barbs keep catching you?”

“Yes. Exactly! That’s what he did with Mahlon and this internship—it’s like he caught me.”

“Maybe his barbs are meant to hold you close, not to let you go. Maybe he just doesn’t know how to be close to you. Maybe he’s afraid he’ll lose you. Maybe barbs are all he knows. Fear makes people hold a little tighter than they should.”

Will thought about that for a while. He couldn’t imagine that fear of losing Will could be his dad’s problem. But what if it was? He never knew anything about his father’s family. Charles Stoltz had a habit of brushing aside any questions about his childhood. His mother didn’t have much to add to the story, and she looked uncomfortable when Will pressed for more details. “I met your father when he was a resident at the hospital,” she said. “He was estranged from his parents and put himself through medical school.”

Sometimes, he wondered how well his parents really knew each other. Even now, they lived side by side, amicably. They gave each other a lot of space. But they never laughed with each other, or sat around the dinner table, lingering the way the Lapps did, playing board games or working on jigsaw puzzles by the flickering firelight. He thought of the talks he and Amos had in the barn, how much Amos had told him about Menno, his son with special needs. Whenever Amos spoke about Menno, it was always about something he had learned from him. Patience, kindness, or how Menno helped Amos’s faith grow.

The world outside Windmill Farm would have looked at Menno Lapp as a problem to be dealt with, a burden to be endured.

Windmill Farm considered him to be a gift from God.

Will looked up at the sky. He had thought more about God in the last few weeks than he had in his entire life. Just last night, Amos pointed to Adam, soaring on thermals, and quoted a Scripture. Something from the book of Isaiah, about how a “youth can grow tired and weary, can stumble and fall, but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles.” It spoke to Will, deep down, in a way he couldn’t explain. It felt so right, so appropriate. This spring, he had felt weary. Not physically, but mentally. Weary of his father’s endless pressure, of never succeeding or pleasing him. And Will had stumbled and fallen.

Something was changing inside of Will this spring, something was softening. What a fluke! To end up on a quiet Amish farm and find himself reenergized, renewed, inside out.

But it didn’t feel like a fluke. It seemed that this place, Stoney Ridge and the people here, had been prepared for him, designed ahead of time as a nurturing nest, a soft place from which to grow new wings.

He looked over at Sadie. “Your parents loved each other very much, didn’t they?”

The corners of her eyes crinkled. “Yes, they did. They built a life together. It was a good life, and they were happy.”

He slapped his hands on his thighs. “Sadie . . . I’m going to follow your example. I’ve decided no more resentment.”

Her smile faded. “It’s really not something you can do without God’s help, Will. Only God is the true healer of hurts.”

Only God is the true healer. That was a phrase Sadie often said, especially when people came to her for remedies, which they were doing more and more. Hardly a day went by when someone wasn’t seeking her out for help. Will worried they were taking advantage of her because she didn’t charge them, but she said it brought her pleasure to help others. And then she would always say, “After all, only God is the true healer.”

What would his father, the brilliant neurosurgeon, say to that? He would probably be outraged. He believed that a good surgeon shouldn’t go into surgery unless he believed he was the sole instrument of healing. But then, his father would scoff at Sadie’s remedies too, saying that they were merely anecdotal and that she used unproven, unscientific methods. “My dad wants me to follow in his path and go into medicine.” He wasn’t sure why he admitted that to her.

“Have you considered it?” Sadie said.

Will lifted a shoulder in a careless shrug. “I considered nothing else. I even got accepted to medical school—assuming that I would be graduating this spring.” He took in a deep breath. “So what did I do? Nine weeks shy of graduating with honors, I get myself suspended by doing something stupid.”

That was only half the story. He then did something even more stupid, but he just couldn’t tell her about the DUI. There were only three people aware of that little problem—Will, the police officer, and his lawyer, Mr. Arnie Petosky, found at four in the morning through the yellow pages at the city jail. This particular lawyer was the only one who answered calls in the middle of the night and took credit cards for payment of criminal defense. “It’s your first offense, Will. Sure, you came up a little high on the blood alcohol concentration—and that can usually mean a little jail time—”

Will’s eyes went wide.

“—plus a $5,000 fine—”

Will’s eyes went wider.

“—plus your license could get suspended. But this was a routine traffic stop. No doubt your constitutional rights were violated—”

Will scratched his head. The police officer had actually been pretty nice to him.

“—we might even end up with a claim. Money back.”

Will doubted that. He really just wanted it all to go away. Will was trapped. Up a creek without a paddle.

As the calming water lapped against the shore, Will found himself telling Sadie about hacking into the registrar’s office, about losing his acceptance into medical school. He wondered what she thought of him. He was telling her things that shamed him. She didn’t say anything for a long while. Sadie was one of those people who knew the virtue of quiet patience.

“So you thought it would be easier to just walk away from your future, from your father, than to try, didn’t you?” Sadie spoke quietly, and when he lifted his head, he marveled again at the piercing depth in her blue eyes.

She tucked in her shoulders, like she was embarrassed to have brought up something painful. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s okay,” he said, and he felt her hand slip into his, small and warm. Her face turned upward, her eyes dark like liquid. Slipping a thumb under her chin, he tilted it upward, looked into her in a way he never had looked at a girl—all of the girls he’d dated but never got too attached to. With Sadie, things were different in some way he didn’t even understand yet.

He leaned over and kissed her, because they’d talked long enough.

Gid wondered what was wrong with him as he turned right onto the dirt road that led to Blue Lake Pond, through a thick canopy of pine trees. He shouldn’t be spying on Sadie like this! This was wrong, wrong, wrong. Unspeakably wrong. But still, his hands didn’t seem to get the message from his brain to pull back on the horse’s reins. Not until he saw Sadie and the cowboy sitting on the shore. Then, he stopped the horse abruptly.

He watched them for a moment or two, trying to decide if he could interrupt without looking like a fool.

Though the distance was enough that they didn’t hear his horse and buggy approach, Gid tried to make sense out of Sadie’s expression when she looked up at the cowboy. Was it gladness or dismay? Shyness? Or maybe just plain amusement?

The cowboy said something to make Sadie laugh. Gid heard laughter floating on the breeze, the cowboy’s deep and husky, Sadie’s light and young.

Suddenly something clicked in Gid’s mind. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t figured it out sooner. No wonder she had been ignoring him. A dark thought suddenly began to take form in Gid’s mind—he had always felt a tweak of concern that the cowboy was sweet on Sadie, but now he realized that she was growing fond of the cowboy! Gid saw Will’s head dip toward Sadie. Quickly. Briefly. Not so briefly he couldn’t have kissed her in that time. And Sadie made no move to shove him away from her.

Pain streaked through Gideon. He turned and left.

As soon as Sadie and Will arrived at the Kings’ for the gathering, they were called over to join in a volleyball game, already in progress. Gideon was taking a turn as server in the back row, so Sadie intentionally joined the opposing team and Will was sent to Gid’s team. She was feeling far too mixed up tonight to spend any time near Gideon. She was still reeling from Will’s unexpected kiss. She wished she had been prepared for it—she might have participated. Instead, she responded like a block of wood. A clay brick. A stone wall. And then, cheeks on fire, she jumped up and said they should be going.

But she was not going to let her nerves get the better of her. She was an adult now. Fern had said so. Tonight, she was going to act like she was kissed by handsome cowboys all the time. Practically every day of the week except for Sundays! The truth was, it was only the second kiss from a boy she had ever received. The first one was from Gid and it had made her knees go weak. Today’s kiss from Will felt sweet and gentle. Nice. Maybe it would have made her knees go weak if she had been ready for it.

She cast a furtive glance at Gid, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was talking to Will, tapping the ball delicately into the air, to show him how the game was played. Will waved Gid off, telling him he had played plenty of volleyball in his day. He threw his cowboy hat off to the side and winked at Sadie. She looked away, embarrassed.

Gid went back to the service line. He cracked his neck on each side, like the prizefighters did at the county fair as they prepared to head into the ring. He was staring at the back of Will’s head like he was boring a hole through it. He tossed the ball in the air to serve, and instead of the ball arcing through the air, sailing over the net, it was launched like a rocket, straight at Will’s head. Will fell to the ground, face-first.