The Outcast (32 page)

My sister took her arm from around my waist. Devoid of her support, I felt my body would collapse in on itself like a Chinese fan. I wanted to cling to Leah, to entwine myself around her slender frame that had grown in such
strength. But I couldn’t. She had to return to her home, to her husband, and this was when I realized something so obvious, only in my deliriously hopeful state could it have slipped my mind.

“Tobias.” My grip on Leah’s upper arms communicated the desperation I felt. “We forgot about Tobias. We can’t use Jonathan for a bone marrow donor if we don’t get his permission too.”

My sister pried my fingers off her arms. “Don’t worry, Rachel,” she said. “Let me take care of him. You just take care of yourself . . . and Eli.”

Leah stepped away from me and over to my son’s bed. The pain medication the nurses had given him to counter the burning from the radiation to the growth inside his chest caused Eli to be so drowsy, he wasn’t even aware that anyone else was in the room. My sister reached out and placed her palm to his forehead. I knew from all the times I had done the same action that she would be surprised by his skin’s dry texture that was so hot to the touch.

Sealing his forehead with her lips, she moved away from the bed and wrapped her arms around me. For the briefest instant, I could sense the sorrow emanating from below the surface of her determined frame. I held her even tighter and wept. “I’m so sorry.”

Her stomach heaved. Again, I felt the slight bowing in Leah’s womb that matched the swell left over from Eli. But the bulge in her womb, even though five months older, was strangely larger than my own. Moving a hand between our
bodies, I pressed it to Leah’s lower abdomen and looked up. There was such beseeching in her eyes, I held my tongue.

Judah maneuvered his body around ours. The door clicked shut. “Don’t worry,” Leah said, releasing me. “Everything will work out in the end.”

I knew my sister spoke not only of her and me, but of Eli and Jonathan and the promise of a bone marrow transplant, of this baby growing inside her womb when that womb was not supposed to bear the weight of any more children.

Not knowing what to say when there were so many things I couldn’t, I murmured, “Please, take care of yourself.”

Leah touched the back of her hand to my cheek. “I will,” she said. “You take care of yourself, too.”

Then, calling out good-bye to Ida Mae, my twin was gone, the only trace of her a crushed leaf that had fallen from her dress and a clod of dirt that had dropped from the bottom of her lace-up shoe.

AMOS

Leah had collapsed enough times to recognize her body’s warning signals and, even better, to know exactly how to fake them. At first, the ruse was not meant to manipulate her husband in one direction or another. She just knew the only way to stop the fight between Tobias and Judah was to
cause a diversion, and the physical distress Leah felt at that moment—looking down from the porch as her husband and brother-in-law wrestled over her twin—would have caused even the stoutest of hearts to grow faint. The rapid breaths, dilated pupils, frantic pulse, and pale skin: these symptoms of another collapse were quite easy for Leah to duplicate.

After she did collapse, Tobias carried her upstairs to their room and stretched her out on the bed. He eased her shoes off her feet and dragged a blanket up to her chin as though Leah were a child. Tobias looked so alarmed that she had to suppress the impulse to sit up and smile, to tell her husband that everything was fine. But there was no faking the fact that everything was
not
fine. That their marriage had been a hoax from the moment Tobias’s letter arrived in her parents’ mailbox outside their yellow house on Hilltop Road, and that it had only grown into more of a hoax as the years passed by.

Leah was tired. She was tired of living a lie, and she was tired of the lie’s repercussions. She might have known it was wrong to respond to that letter addressed in Tobias’s hand, but surely such a simple deception was not worth such a punishment of sorrow and loss. Surely it was not worth having your husband and sister conceive a child beneath your own roof, in the room right next to the room where, five months before, your own child was conceived. These thoughts revolving around her son and her sister’s child were what drew Leah out of the past
and back to the present. She had promised Rachel before leaving the hospital that she would take care of Tobias if Rachel would just promise to take care of herself, that she would somehow talk her husband into letting Jonathan become Eli’s donor. That was when Leah realized, by continuing this ruse of illness, she could manipulate Tobias into helping save her ill nephew’s life.

Three days have now passed since Leah resigned herself to self-imposed bed rest, the longest three days of her life. When she was on bed rest before, she had felt so unwell that the room for the most part had felt more like a refuge than a cage. But whenever Leah hears the children downstairs eating a meal that Miriam has prepared or the screen door slapping shut as they venture into the balmy warmth of spring, it takes all her willpower to remain in bed. She knows her ruse of sickness is working, though, which strengthens her resolve to stay. Each time Tobias comes up to check on her, she can tell by the expression haunting his dark eyes that he believes everything that has happened to her has been his fault, and he would do anything to rectify it. Anything to make her well again. Despite this, Leah has not made her request known. She has been biding her time so that whenever she does mention it, Tobias will have no need for suspicion.

There is a rap on the door so gentle, it is more a brush of knuckles on wood than a knock. Nudging the door open with his hip, Tobias brings in an oil lamp and a bowl of
hinkel rivvel supp
and places both on the cedar chest parallel
to the bed. Tobias sits on the edge of the mattress, which hammocks beneath his weight, and takes his wife’s hand, threading her fingers with his. “How are you feeling?” he asks, resting his other hand against her cheek.

Leah manages a fatigued smile even as her heart starts to pound. She wonders if this is the time to bring up the origin of Eli’s birth and how their son could now save this illegitimate child’s life,
his
illegitimate child’s life. For despite the shame surrounding Eli’s conception, he is still Tobias’s son, is he not? Wouldn’t Tobias still like to see Eli whole even if that meant revealing to Copper Creek that
he
was the child’s father?

Leah licks her lips. Mistaking her nervousness for thirst, Tobias stretches over to the cedar chest and brings her a cup of water. She smiles her gratitude and takes a sip. Tobias fluffs her pillow before she settles back against it and, for a moment, Leah’s resolve to ask him these questions fails her. Looking up at Tobias, she instead tries to discern this man she married who is such a shifting amalgam of darkness and light. But by the gilded wash of the oil lamp, she cannot tell where one part of him lets off and another begins.

“Tobias,” Leah says.

Her husband leans down and smooths a strand of unwashed hair behind her ear. “What is it?”

“Aren’t we ever going to talk about you and Rachel?”

His hand drops from her ear. Sitting up higher on the mattress, Tobias folds his arms. “What is there to talk about?”

“I think there is plenty.” Leah has to make an effort to keep her voice weak.

Striding to the end of the bed, Tobias winds both hands around the carved footboard. “Like what? What’s in the past should remain in the past.”

“Not when it’s affecting the future of your son.”

Tobias’s head snaps up. “Jonathan?” He points at the cradle although their child is playing downstairs. “What does
he
have to do with this?”

“Everything,” Leah says. “Eli needs a bone marrow transplant, and Jonathan could be his donor.”

“His donor? What do you mean, his donor?”

“Because you have fathered both Eli and Jonathan.” The muscles of Tobias’s face spasm, and although Leah’s insides are trembling, she forges ahead. “And because my sister and I are identical twins, Eli and Jonathan could share as much DNA as siblings. Norman Troyer said there would be a 25 percent chance that—”

Tobias’s arms fling wide, the span of them almost the width of their bed. “You talked to that powwow
doktor
about this?”

“Yes.” Leah forces herself to stare into her husband’s hostile eyes. “I talked to Norman. I had to ask him if it was even a possibility before I got Rachel’s hopes up again.”

Tobias stalks toward the front of the bed. “How many know?” he asks.

“Ida Mae from the Amish store. Judah, Rachel, Dr.
Sengupta, and—” Leah’s body cowers beneath the covers, but she sticks out her chin—“and my
mamm
.”

Tobias’s beard twitches as he clenches and unclenches his jaw. His fists following this same movement, he creeps toward her. “And why did you tell your
mudder
?”

“Because . . . because she came over here when she heard that I collapsed in the yard, and I told her that Eli might be able to have his transplant after all.”

The light of the oil lamp captures the dark sheen lurking in her husband’s eyes, and Leah knows which side of Tobias’s dual character has won out. Peering down at his wife for a suspended moment, Tobias draws his hand back—the hand that had caressed her—and brings the splayed flat of it against the side of Leah’s face. Her head cracks to the side, her loosened hair floating before settling back around her shoulders. Tears fill Leah’s eyes and trickle over her face, but these tears are caused more by the pain rupturing her heart than the pain inside her head. Pressing the sleeve of her nightgown against her bleeding nose, Leah glances up at her husband and is amazed by the transformation she sees. Tobias’s face is pulled back in a deathlike mask of horror. The obsidian of his eyes that Leah had glimpsed right before he struck her has been replaced with such shock, the dark irises are completely ringed with white.

“I’m . . . I’m sorry.” His tongue stumbles over the syllables. “I never meant to—to hit you.”

Leah would like for her sister or
mamm
’s strength to
rise up in her now. But right when she needs it most, Leah finds that all the strength she has exuded since Rachel left Copper Creek has vanished from her painstaking reserve. Instead, Leah looks up at her husband, who has somehow captured her heart even as he was in the midst of giving his own away, and weeps. She weeps so hard that the pulsing sensation in her nose balloons across her skull, causing yellow starbursts to dance before her eyes. Leah knows that if Tobias were to climb into the ruse of her sickbed and hold her that she would let him, that she would weep against his broad chest and forgive him for everything,
everything
that he has ever done.

Yet Tobias does not hold her.

The image of his twenty-year-old wife curled up in their bed with blood spilling from her nostrils is too searing for him to bear. Muttering an oath, he stalks across the room and jerks open the door. Leah lies there in their defiled marriage bed, staining her pillow with blood and tears, and listens to the sound of Tobias charging down the steps as if the whole world is on fire.

Rachel

The call comes at midnight. At first I think the tinny beeping is the monitor saying that another tube has become disconnected from Eli’s port, but then Ida Mae sits up from her cot and staggers across the hospital room. Slinging her arms left and right, she slaps her hands on the food tray table until they land on the cell phone.

Ida Mae flips it open and grunts, “Yeah.” The caller hasn’t talked for long when Ida Mae pinwheels the arm not holding the phone. I dart over, wide awake.

“Who is it?” I ask.

“Your momma.”

“What’s wrong? Let me talk to her!”

Ida Mae hands over the phone.

“Everywhere,” my
mamm
sobs. “We’ve been looking everywhere!”

“What for?” I ask. “What did you lose?”

She gasps for breath. “Not what, Rachel.
Who!
Tobias. He’s disappeared!”

I am not too alarmed. If Tobias dropped off the face of the earth, I would be sad for Leah and their family, but I wouldn’t exactly grieve for him. But if he is not here to sign the permission form for Jonathan to be Eli’s donor, I know Dr. Sengupta will never go through with the transplant.

“When did this happen?” I ask.

“About three hours ago. He and Leah got in this awful fight, and he just left. Didn’t take a horse and buggy . . . nothing.”

“They got in a fight?” I don’t know what surprises me more: the fact that Tobias has vanished or the fact that he and my sister—who was so passive throughout childhood, she would never even raise her voice in play—have quarreled.

My
mamm
’s sigh is so immense, I can feel the weight of it through the phone. “Rachel, he struck your sister.”

“No.” My body flushes with heat even as goose bumps prickle across my skin. I begin pacing the floor in front of Eli’s hospital bed like a horse on a short lead, my nightgown swishing around my ankles, my bare feet making sucking sounds on the tile. Ida Mae watches all of this
with concern but doesn’t mouth any questions I do not have the answers to. Crushing the phone against my ear, I hiss, “Tell me he didn’t.”

“
Jah.
He did. Leah said they fought about the bone marrow transplant. Tobias doesn’t want the community knowing he’s Eli’s
vadder
. After he hit Leah, he ran out of the
haus
. Leah sent their
buwe
out looking for him—they even searched the woods—but he’s nowhere. Reuben came over and got
Dawdy
and me out of bed about an hour ago, but we can’t do much but wait. Judah’s out looking now.”

“I’m going to come.”

I hear my
mamm
sigh again, but this time from relief. “I hoped you would. I didn’t want to ask . . . not with Eli.”

“I’ll have to get Russell to come here before we can leave.”

“Don’t be too long, Rachel,” my
mamm
warns. “Leah needs you. I don’t think—I don’t think Tobias is well.”

“I think you’re right,
Mamm
.” I watch the peach-colored city lights sparkle through the blinds and remember that night I saw the sun rise over Copper Creek Mountain, knowing as it did that my life would never be the same. “I don’t think Tobias has been well for quite some time.”

This is the first I’ve ridden with Ida Mae that she has not played the radio, and I am relieved. My mind is so cluttered with thoughts, I do not think it could withstand any more
stimulation. Resting my head against the window, I try to keep my breathing regular as I replay an incident as shocking as Tobias striking my sister before disappearing into the woods.

Those five months after I moved down, so many questionable episodes took place between my sister’s husband and me, it is now hard to determine which was the catalyst that set the events of that raw December night into motion. A night so cold, no amount of covers and shivering could get my body warm. I was padding downstairs to make tea when Tobias came into the house, holding his muddy boots in one hand. His suspenders were looped down on either side of his black pants, his white shirtsleeves rolled to his forearms and stained around the edges.

“Leah?” Tobias squinted up at me standing on the moonlit steps.

“No,” I clarified. “Rachel.”

“Rachel.”

A shiver arched up my spine. I tried to keep my voice steady as I said, “How’s the horse?”

“Not
goot
. The Epsom salts didn’t work.”

“Did you try packing the frog with calcium sulfate?”

Tobias shook his head.

I listened to the wind howling around the house like it was searching for a way to get in, to the glass chattering at the windowsills like teeth. “Perhaps I should take a look at her?” Tobias knew how much I had helped my
dawdy
.

He pointed over his shoulder. “It’s bad out there.”

“Can’t be worse than Pennsylvania. Let me get my coat.”

When I came downstairs, Tobias had his boots back on and was facing the door, clutching a lantern in his hand. I went to stand beside him, still in my nightgown but weighted with my coat and a satchel of holistic medications my mother had forced me to take in case Leah needed them.

“You’re sure about this?” Tobias searched my face without meeting my eyes.

In response, I smacked open the door and marched into the blustery weather. Tobias followed, the lantern he carried throwing circles of light across the dead grass. The wind cut our cheeks and sliced through our jackets like a knife. Side by side, we stepped into the barn’s shelter, which felt immeasurably warmer than outside. I inhaled the muddled compost of hay, fermented silage, saddle soap, and dung: the scents of my childhood.

Tobias held the lantern high. “She’s in here,” he said.

I motioned for him to lead, then took one step and tripped over a pitchfork. Tobias turned and caught me. Staring up at him, I watched pieces of sawdust filter down from the haymow and dust his broad shoulders and hair. I reached out and brushed a strand of hay from his right shoulder. His grip tightened on my ribs. My sister’s husband leaned his head closer to mine. Even by the lantern’s murky glow, I saw Tobias’s pupils bleed into his dark eyes. His lips parted.

The infected horse stamped once and snorted. Tobias removed his hand from my back and strode into the stall. I took a breath and followed. The huge Clydesdale was standing in the far left corner, favoring her right foreleg with the abscess. Her head was down, her nostrils dripping, velvety lower lip hanging slack. With every wave of pain, her powerful muscles rippled beneath her smooth, fawn-colored hide. I knew her case was hopeless even before seeing how far the tentacles of infection had reached.

I tossed my coat over a loosened hay bale the horse had been too sick to eat and rolled the sleeves of my nightgown. Kneeling beside the mare, I tapped the back of her right knee. “Lift,” I commanded, squeezing her feathered hock. “Good girl.”

Her hoof was the size of a serving platter. The fever snaking up through the soft lamina radiated out through her skin and warmed my hand like a flame. Though drained of pus, the flesh still smelled like rotten cheese. Breathing through my mouth, I asked, “You have a hoof pick?” Tobias nodded. “Can you run it through the lamp’s flame first?”

He did and passed the silver pick to me. I prodded the inflamed frog, but my first instinct had been right: the infection had spread so high up the white line connecting the hoof capsule to the bone, there was little we could do besides euthanasia. I still had to try. Growing weary of her awkward stance, the Clydesdale began to rest her massive
weight on me. I crab-walked into a firmer position. “That bag over near the hay bale,” I said. “I need a bottle that says calcium sulfate.”

Tobias sorted through the contents and dropped the blue bottle in my lap. I unscrewed the cap and tilted the bottle until a steady stream of powder poured out into the softened frog. Batting at the cloud hanging over my head, I asked Tobias to pass me a spool of gauze. This I wound around the frog to seal in the calcium sulfate and block out any more infection. I slid the hoof into a burlap sack that Tobias held out for me, fastened this with a strip of twine, and lowered the mare’s foot to the freshly mucked floor.

Hobbling to my feet, I rested a hand against my lower back and stroked the mare’s muzzle. Her limpid brown eyes flicked up and met mine with such a look of intense suffering, they almost seemed human. “Oh, Tobias,” I sighed. “I don’t think there’s anything we can do.”

Tobias rose from the bucket he’d turned upside down and used like a chair. Coming to stand beside me, he slipped his arm around my lower back. This time, I did not look up at him in confusion or try to decipher his actions. I just leaned against his body, savoring its warmth and strength when I had no right to.

My brother-in-law and I were silent as we exited the horse stall and crossed the short distance between the farmhouse and barn. My pace was far more hurried, causing the wind to iron my nightgown to my legs and flap open the lapels of my coat. Plodding up the porch steps, I opened
the front door without letting the screen door slam behind me. I was halfway up the staircase when Tobias came in. I did not turn or say good night, but continued mounting the steps until I’d reached the safety of my room. Leaning against the door with my heart rushing in my ears, I could still feel Tobias’s eyes burning their way through the wood, burning the clothes off my back as they had the entire time I climbed the stairs.

Bathing my face and hands in the
weschbohl
of frigid water on the dresser, I unbuttoned my nightgown and dabbed at the skin of my neck and chest with a cloth. Even without the mirror we were forbidden to possess, I knew how flushed I was. I could feel a fever roaring through my body as aggressively as that infection was spreading throughout the horse. I was attracted to my sister’s husband. I had known this since that hot afternoon Tobias so tenderly wiped the stain off my face as we knelt in the kitchen. But I had never admitted how much this attraction consumed me until now. I had thought that he and I could just continue living a hairbreadth away from each other while aware of our temptation, yet doing nothing about it. Recalling how the two of us had locked eyes after I stumbled in the barn—our bodies trembling although our limbs barely touched—I knew it was no longer safe to remain here, to remain sheltered beneath my sister’s roof when that meant sleeping one thin wall away from her husband.

There was a gentle rap on the door.

“Yes?” I said.

The door opened as I turned from the dresser and put down the cloth. My breath caught. There Tobias stood with my sister’s wedding-ring quilt draping his arms like an offering. But when his gaze fell on me—on the moonlight spangling my open nightgown and flushed skin—the quilt fluttered from his arms and pooled at his feet. Tobias reached behind him and closed my bedroom door without taking his eyes from my face. Trampling the quilt, he strode across the room; his steps were so careful on the floorboards that, although the whole house was moaning with the wind, there was not a single creak.

Tobias’s breath pattered against my face. I could smell the salt on his skin. “Rachel?” Leah’s husband asked.

I did nothing to shield my nakedness or to shield the naked look of longing in my eyes. “Yes,” I said, not knowing what he had asked or what I was really answering. “Yes, Tobias.”