The Outcast (24 page)

I am sure it is obvious to anyone who listened that these verses were chosen for me, the adulteress of Copper Creek. Mortified by this singling out, I stand and gather my son
close before striding down the aisle the new bishop just walked. Despite my exit being scrutinized just as much as my entrance, this time I do not blush. I do not need my sister’s arm to lean on. My steps do not falter as I leave. If the community thinks I do this because I am offended, let them; if they think I do this because my pride is hurt, let them. I am not going to squander my life trying to keep the boundaries of it under Old Order Mennonite lines. I am going to live my life as a woman who has fallen far enough to know that legalism is not the same thing as righteousness.

When I exit the schoolhouse, snowflakes left over from last night’s storm flutter down from the sky like tidbits of lace and cling to Tobias’s black buggy and horse. A flock of red-winged blackbirds peck at the grass impaling the white landscape. Tobias mutters something beneath his breath; his rage sends the birds spiraling into the air, painting the gray clouds with every flap of their crimson-accented wings. The double doors of the schoolhouse are still flung wide, so I make no noise when I come out through them.

Because of this, Tobias has no idea that I am standing here observing him, and as I do, I see that his foot is poised on the buggy’s step as if he’s trying to decide whether he should mount or descend. I watch the expressions shifting across Tobias’s features—anger, remorse, sadness, frustration—like each is part of a puppet’s face being manipulated by a much larger hand. Trying to turn from my mistakes as
Mamm
suggested, I let my heart go out to
this tormented man, not as someone who once shared my bed, but as someone who is so consumed with saving his reputation, he is in the process of losing his soul.

I bind my woolen shawl tighter around my shoulders and sweep up a piece of hair that has slipped from my
kapp
. Eli nestles closer to my bosom. The snow falls upon his face and melts upon his skin as if touching a fiery skillet. Stepping down the icy school steps, I touch my hand to his cheek and can feel the heightened temperature there. My son is running a fever. Not a high one, but high enough that his blue eyes—which I thought were just bright—now appear glassy, and his cheeks are red with something other than this fearsome cold.

“Tobias,” I call, walking over to him.

His head snaps up, his dark eyes narrowing when they alight on my outstretched hand. “What’re you doing?” he barks.

Putting the hand I had extended back around Eli, I say, “I just want to tell you I know why you read those verses, and I want you to know that it is all right.”

“It’s not my duty to make sure that you’re all right.”

“No,” I murmur. “I would say it’s never been.”

Tobias silences his inner argument and climbs up into the buggy, sits on the bench seat with his hands wrapping the reins. Even from where I stand, I can see how his fingers are shaking. “You need to go,” he says. “You don’t need to be seen talking here with me.”

Behind me, I can hear the clomp of shoes on the
schoolhouse steps, the distant chatter in Pennsylvania Dutch as the people make their slow way toward the double doors. I say, quietly so that no one else might overhear, “The truth of the matter is, Tobias, you don’t want to be seen talking here with
me
.”

But he’s turned deaf. I shake my head and turn to greet the person who is walking toward me. My sister. Her steps are measured as her blue eyes flit between me and her husband with a questioning look I have never seen in them before.

Dread punches the breath from my lungs. Smiling to mask it, I walk over and take her arm. “Didn’t our sons do good during the service?” I ask. But Leah says nothing, just watches Eli reach for his cousin and entwine their pudgy, drool-covered hands. Although they are very different in coloring, Jonathan and Eli’s facial features are becoming more and more similar the older my son grows. It is a bittersweet pleasure to watch how, even in infancy, the two cousins interact as if no distance has ever come between them.

Nothing like the distance I feel emanating from Leah now.

The entire congregation has filed out of the schoolhouse’s doors and is shuffling through the snow toward the individual buggies that look so identical,
Englischers
are mystified that we can tell them apart.

Tobias leans out of the buggy and calls brusquely to his wife. “Come now, Leah.”

Nodding at him, she turns back and looks at Eli and
Jonathan through unseeing eyes. “Don’t you think it’s odd,” she says, separating our children’s conjoined hands, “how our sons could almost pass as brothers?”

Feigning a migraine, after the church service I ask my
dawdy
to take me back to the
dawdi haus
, and then I watch through my parents’ front window as the caravan of horses and buggies begins the three-mile journey to Abner and Sadie Glick’s, whose turn it is to host the bimonthly fellowship meal. Not wanting Eli to sense my distress, I play with him on the pallet before lying down beside him. I stare at my child for a long time after he has fallen asleep—marveling at his dimpled hands clutching the silken edge of his blankie and praying that despite the sterilizing effects of radiation and chemotherapy, those hands will one day hold a child of his own. Willing tears from my eyes, I ease off the pallet and tiptoe into the kitchen. I take a seat at the table and look out the window to the sun glittering off the thawing patches of snow and the bare black branches of the sycamore sheathed in ice that drips like tinsel. Seeing the tree that Tobias and I stood under two nights ago calls to mind another tree that once sheltered me—not from the frigid wind, but from the summer’s heat.

One month passed between the time Tobias touched my face while we knelt on Leah’s stained kitchen floor and the afternoon of the Masts’ barn raising. The women were seated beneath a maple tree whose orange-leafed
branches fanned out over the yard, providing enough shade to keep both us and the leftover food from expiring beneath the Indian-summer sun. I tried to work on a quilt block but had never learned this typical Mennonite trade since, throughout childhood, I had always used the excuse that my fingers were not as deft as my sister’s. Setting the tangled thread in my lap, I peered out over the sun-parched field, watching the men climb up and down ladders with nails clamped between their teeth and hammers hooked over their pants pockets. Sweat trickled down many of their faces and necks, darkening the backs of their blue, white, yellow, and brown collared shirts. The few men who were not soaked through were so ruddy from exertion, I feared they might collapse, which is more than just a hindrance when you are putting tin on a fifty-foot roof.

Servitude did not come naturally to me, but it did to my sister. I knew what Leah would do if she could have been there. After refilling the bucket from the well, I went over to the fencerow and broke off a bundle of the meadow tea Katie Mast had uprooted from her Pennsylvania yard and replanted when they moved down to Copper Creek. This I tore into sprigs and dropped into the bucket. I let the water steep in the shade until the mint had blanched from the leaves, flavoring the liquid like tea. I carried this bucket and a wooden ladle across the field. The women stopped chattering among themselves as I drew closer to the men, but at that time—and as Leah’s sister—they did not question my motivations. At the time, neither did I.

Tobias was the first to come down the ladder. I had seen him on the roof peak, shading his eyes as he watched me make my way across the shimmering field. His smile widened as he drew closer, a white slice in a tan face heavy with beard. I felt my cheeks turn red from more than just the sun.

Pointing to the bucket, Tobias said, “You did this for me?”

“Not just for you,” I countered. “For
all
the
menner
.”

Tobias grinned, reached for the ladle, and dipped it into the well bucket, which I held with both hands. He took a long swig and dumped the rest of his ladleful over his head. The meadow leaves clung to the dark waves of Tobias’s hair; two water droplets glistened off his earlobes like jewelry.

Wiping his face on his shirtsleeve, he looked over his shoulder, where the other men—his brother, Judah, among them—were climbing down the ladders and making their way toward us. Tobias thanked me and turned away. But then he stopped. “Rachel,” he said, his back to me, his light shirt darkened with sweat and the water dripping off his hair, “I am glad you’re here. Before you, I . . . I never knew this land could be so dry.”

I kept watching Tobias walk away, even after Judah came to pick up the ladle and place his lips where his brother’s had been. He began to say something, but I could not pull my eyes away from Tobias long enough to pay attention.

Perhaps my ears were as closed to Judah as my heart because he was not the one who shared a relationship with my sister. And perhaps—in the inmost parts of me, where
that child craving her
dawdy
’s attention still lurked—I did not want Leah to enjoy another tender relationship with someone whose tenderness I could never know.

Now, lowering my forehead to the table, I keep my sobs silent so as not to awaken my son. My sister never had the relationship with our
dawdy
that I had imagined and therefore envied. If anything, her relationship with him was even more distant than mine was. I have destroyed two relationships in an attempt to feel the intimacy of one: Leah’s relationship with her husband, and my relationship with her husband’s brother, Judah King. I have closed my heart to him so often, I fear I will never have the chance to show him that I would put the world on hold just to hear him speak my name again.

AMOS

Russell Speck notes Rachel’s swollen eyes and the slope-shouldered way she follows him from her parents’ house to his truck, but he believes it must be because of Eli’s illness, and his heart goes out to her. Eli’s illness, though never in the back of Rachel’s mind, right now is not at the forefront of her problems.

Leah is.

Before starting the truck, Russell says, “You need to go somewhere first? Say good-bye or something?”

Rachel faces the window and shakes her head.

“Alrighty, then,” he says. “Just checking.”

They are halfway to Blackbrier before Rachel asks, “Is Ida Mae okay?”

Russell says, “She is,” but Rachel notices that he keeps his eyes a little too focused on the road.

“Right as rain?”

Turning to look at her, Russell says, “Huh?”

“When I called her cell phone, you answered because Ida Mae wasn’t feeling well, and you said that today she’d be right as rain.”

Russell’s grin relieves her. “I don’t know if I’d go that far, but she’s doing pretty good. Sometimes it just takes Ida Mae a little while to get her handle on things again.”

“You mean since what happened to her husband?”

Flexing his meaty fingers, Russell rewraps them around the steering wheel. “In one day, I took everything from that woman, and I’ve spent every day since trying to patch her life back together . . . to make it whole again.”

“You can’t take that on yourself,” Rachel says. “Nobody should live under that kind of burden.”

Russell shakes his head. “Nope. I don’t suppose nobody should, but sometimes it’s hard to remember that God’s removed our transgressions as far as the east is from the west, when we keep standing smack-dab in the middle.”

Resting her head against the truck seat, Rachel lets his words sink in. Perhaps, just perhaps, she should stop feeling condemnation for her sins, when the instant she turned from them and asked God to forgive her, he did.

Only now, Rachel wonders if her sister can be that forgiving.

When Russell drops her off at Ida Mae’s, Rachel finds that the blue room she and Eli share has been changed to a saltwater green so pale, it would be hard to discern it had any color at all if not for the calming presence the new paint exudes. Curtains as fine as dandelion seed hang over the small window and are pulled to the side with green ribbon, allowing light to flood in where the heavy, Western-themed material once blocked it. The bunk beds have been traded for the wrought-iron twin that was covered with quilts in the store. An eyelet-lace coverlet and pillows replace the blue and red comforters. A white crib with yellow covers and bumpers is against the wall where the toy chest used to be. A changing table is also there, covered with the same material as the crib.

“You don’t like it?” Ida Mae asks, mistaking Rachel’s silence.

Rachel pulls Eli against her chest, which heaves with the magnitude of love she feels for this woman who was a stranger a few months ago but now feels more like family than her own flesh and blood. “Oh, no. It’s the kindest thing anyone’s ever done for me.” She smiles at Ida Mae through her tears and kisses Eli’s forehead. “Anyone’s ever done for us.”

Ida Mae waves her hand in a self-deprecating gesture, yet it is easy to see the pride on her face. “Oh, it was time for a change.”

“But how’d you do this all by yourself?”

“Easy,” Ida Mae says. “I didn’t do it by myself. I had some help.”

“From whom?”

Rachel is surprised to see a blush creep up Ida Mae’s neck and settle in her cheeks. “I had help, is all,” she says, then turns and grabs Rachel’s bag by the front door and lugs it into the pale-green room. “Now enough with your yammering. Let’s get you and Eli settled. We’ve got us a big day tomorrow.”

Ida Mae Speck is not prepared for the fact that Eli’s new doctor comes strutting into the hospital room—where he’s kept them waiting for over an hour—wearing a Rolex watch and shoes that stick out from beneath his dress pants like a pair of lacquered boats.

Know how he afforded them,
Ida Mae thinks, folding her arms and raising one eyebrow.

Unaware of this scrutiny, pediatric oncologist Taizeen Sengupta pushes Gucci glasses higher up on his nose and runs through the steps required to prep Eli for surgery later that day. Rachel calmly nods when told about the removal of two of her child’s lymph nodes. She nods when Dr. Sengupta mentions the bone marrow aspiration that will surely be just as painful as it sounds. But after discussing the installation of a port in Eli’s chest—so the nurses can pump chemotherapy into him without having to search for
a vein that is still so small that the continual pressure of a needle inside it could cause it to collapse—Rachel begins to question her decision to bring her child to a place that would slice open his chest, then sew something back inside it as if Eli’s body were as unfeeling as a doll’s.

“You’re sure all this is necessary?” she asks.

Over his glasses, Dr. Sengupta cuts Rachel with one laser-sharp look. His face softens as he sees her terrified expression. “Your son,” he says, “has childhood non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Which is the third-most-common childhood malignancy and is very curable, yes. But the subtype is anaplastic large-cell lymphoma. ALCL, as it is widely known, composes only 10 percent of non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas, and although patients in the low stage like Eli often achieve 100 percent event-free survival within two months of intensive combination chemotherapy, many of these patients with ALCL are subject to future relapse.”

If you could see inside Rachel’s mind, it would look like a Rubik’s Cube: the tiny colored squares frantically struggling to rotate and find a match that is uniform, that makes sense. But Dr. Sengupta has been in the medical profession for so long, he cannot understand that the “layman’s terms” he gives his patients’ families aren’t layman’s terms at all.

Ida Mae’s mind, on the other hand, isn’t even scrambling to keep up with the doctor’s. Instead, she puts her hands on her hips and says, “I’m ’bout fed up with all you educated people trying to make us feel like hayseeds. You need to start talking some sense, or you’d better stop talking.”

Dr. Sengupta gives Ida Mae the same look of reproof that he gave Rachel. Instead of seeing a pale slip of a woman, however, he sees an overweight battle-ax with fire shooting from her eyes. “Okay,” he says to Rachel, inwardly wondering how these two very different people ever became acquainted, “I’ll put it to you like this: if you do not allow us to give your son all these intensive combination chemotherapy treatments, his chances of relapse are going to rise and his chances of survival are going to drop.”

“Finally,” Ida Mae says, looking at the doctor while patting the now-sobbing Rachel on the back, “you’re speaking our language.”

The doctor leaves. Ida Mae continues circling her hand across the girl’s bent spine. “Rachel, look at Eli,” she says.

But Rachel doesn’t look up, only grips the railings of the hospital bed and sobs harder.

“Rachel-girl,” Ida Mae says, “look at your son.”

Heedless of the tears streaming down her face, this time Rachel does look up.

“See how he sleeps?” Ida Mae asks. “He’s not in pain. I know it may be hard for you to believe that, but it’s true. They got him all cozy and sedated for surgery, so that he don’t know which way’s up.”

Rachel begins to speak. Ida Mae holds her hand up, then goes into the bathroom and returns with toilet paper. Rachel mops her face and blows her nose before continuing. “When Eli does wake up, he’ll start feeling the nausea,
the pain, and he’s too little to understand why . . . and he doesn’t understand why I am doing this to him. I just can’t live with that.” She licks tears from her lips. “Not for two whole months.”

“Not even if it saves his life?” Ida Mae asks. “Not even if it means that little child lying there can grow up into a man?” Ida Mae spreads her hands to take in the machines, the bed, the bare walls, the constructed skyline beyond. “Eli won’t remember none of this, Rachel. All this will just be something you talk about at his graduation, at his wedding, when you hold your first
grosskind
in your arms.”

Rachel is silent and then says, “I don’t want to do this anymore, Ida Mae. Raising Eli alone. I thought I could. . . . I thought we’d be fine, but it’s too hard.” She turns and presses her face in Ida Mae’s lap, a twenty-year-old mother desperately needing to be someone’s child. “It’s just too hard.”

Ida Mae doesn’t bother reassuring Rachel that she isn’t alone. She knows the companionship Rachel craves is from someone other than a middle-aged woman rubbing a hand across her back and passing her a bundle of toilet paper to wipe her nose. No, what Rachel Stoltzfus desires is the companionship of a man. A good man. Running her fingers through Rachel’s hair, Ida Mae knows who this man is.

The man she now must find.

Rachel