The Outcast Page 19
“How you holding up?” I ask her as a customer leaves.
Groaning, Ida Mae drops her forehead to the countertop. “I need coffee. Chocolate . . . butter.” She looks up at me from beneath a spiky fringe of bangs. “Who came up with this whole organic thing anyway? I bet it’s a conspiracy from the government. They’re not putting pesticides on our food anymore ’cause they’re trying to poison us with bugs.”
Rolling my eyes, I say, “You’re so full of it.”
“Nuh-uh,” Ida Mae says. “Not anymore. That green stuff I drank this morning cleaned me out.”
“Ida Mae. Really. I would’ve been better off not knowing that.”
After one more customer and two hours of solid complaining, Ida Mae blows out the cinnamon bun candle and flips the store sign to Closed. I put the fruit pies and fried pies in the refrigerator. Arm in arm, we head back to her cottage with the electric candles glowing in the curtained windows and the white picket fence whose entrance is guarded by a passel of green-eyed cats and one obese dog. Smoke from the neighbors’ fire uncurls lazily from their chimney and catches in the branches overhanging our roof. Leaning back, I look up at the stars and imbibe the wood smoke’s earthy perfume. I am suddenly overwhelmed by the emotions that I can’t put into words, and I squeeze Ida Mae’s arm.
“I know,” she whispers, “it’s mighty good to be home.”
My mamm and Norman are ready to leave as soon as we come in the door. Every other afternoon, the two of them make the hour’s journey from Copper Creek to Blackbrier in Norman’s old Buick Skylark. As Norman peers into Eli’s eyes to check on something only he knows how to see, and then prepares some herbal concoction to heal what the chemotherapy has hurt, my mamm will be in Ida Mae’s tiny kitchen, soaking vegetables and fruits in alkali water, chopping and dicing so we have enough food until she comes again. I haven’t minded their company, and though it may seem callous to say it, having a two-hour break now and then from being Eli’s mother restores my senses and gives me strength to face the week of chemo ahead.
“Won’t you stay for nachtesse?” I ask. “We’re having . . .” I look over at my mother and grin. “What are we having?”
“Boiled red cabbage, sweet grummbeere, and a spinach salad with Greek yogurt and walnuts.”
Ida Mae unzips her Carhartt jacket and slings it over the back of the chair. “Sounds delicious,” she quips.
I am awakened by a strange sound around midnight. Fearing that Eli has become sick again, I toss the covers and walk over to his crib. I turn him on his back and rest my hand on his forehead. His skin is cool and dry, and his chest not labored with what seems to be a daily effort to breathe. His lips are open, though. Even in the darkness, I can perceive the small sores that ring them, which have made it difficult for him to nurse and heartbreaking for me, who cannot give him the nourishment his ailing body needs.
But this is the first day in weeks I have not cried; I cannot break that record now. Taking Ida Mae’s robe off the peg, I wrap it around myself without tying the belt and walk into the kitchen. That’s when I hear it: that strange sound again, like a mouse has gotten trapped in the cupboards. Grabbing a rolling pin from the crock beside the stove, I reach over and flick on the lights. Ida Mae is sitting cross-legged on the tile floor, crouching possessively over a whole fudge pie (or what was once a whole fudge pie) from Hostetler’s Bakery. Her mouth is dark with chocolate; her eyes gleam with a recklessness I’ve seen in my dawdy’s horses before a storm.
“Don’chew ’udge me,” Ida Mae garbles. Swallowing, she smears her mouth on her pajama sleeve. “I been living on nothing but pinecones and berries for days and days. . . . And I’ve had it. I ain’t never eating that organic junk again.”
I don’t say anything, since I’m afraid I will laugh and awaken Eli. Instead, I pull out a drawer in the cupboard and reach for a spoon. Lowering myself beside Ida Mae with her old paisley robe pooling around me, I fold my legs to the side and hold my spoon over the pie. She clamps the lid back on the box and pulls it against her chest.
“Aren’t you going to share?” I whisper.
Ida Mae whispers back, “Only if you go pour us two glasses of milk. I’m ’bout dying of thirst.” Her face pales. She reaches out and touches my knee. “I’m sorry, Rachel,” she says. “That—that came out wrong.”
“You’re fine,” I whisper, getting to my feet and opening the refrigerator door. “We’re fine. Right now, I just want to eat my pie and drink my milk like Eli’s cancer never happened.”
After pouring the two glasses of milk, I sit back down. Ida Mae takes one glass from me and taps it against the other. “I’ll drink to that,” she says.
15
AMOS
Even though Judah has been living in Cody, Wyoming, for three and a half months, the single-wide overlooking the Shoshone River is bare except for an old mattress clumped with pillows and blankets, a coffeemaker, and a miniature fridge. Judah is hunkered over the kitchen sink with the cordless phone clamped between his neck and shoulder. All my son wears is a pair of low-rise jeans that look like they need washed as badly as his bathroom towel. His hair is so long, it laps at his neck in sandy waves, and his broad shoulders are blotched with freckles left over from the summer afternoons he and the nochber boys spent swimming in the cow pond after they’d finished morning chores. He is more muscular than I remember, but I haven’t seen my son without his shirt since he was ten.
The one-bedroom trailer suddenly seems to shrink with Judah’s violent intake of breath, and I know that Ida Mae must have revealed to him the news. “Is Eli okay?” he asks, gripping the sink like a crutch. “Is Rachel?”
There is a moment of silence as Ida Mae replies.
My son spins to face the spartan bedroom and drags a hand over his face. “Is there anything I can do? . . . Really? You don’t think she’d mind?”
Ida Mae must put her whole heart into convincing him, because when she is finished, Judah says, “All right. I’ll start as soon as I can.”
Rachel
Nighttime is the hardest. Parents throughout this city are zipping healthy children into footie pajamas and tucking them into bed, and I spend the hours like an insomniac, clutching my son’s hand and begging the Lord not to take him from me. There have been many nights like this. For some reason, though, tonight is one of the worst. Perhaps it is the urgency surrounding Eli’s elevated temperature, causing the nurses to cycle in and out more often to check his vitals, after which they say nothing, as if sensing I do not want my fears confirmed.
I have tried reminding myself that the moment I repented and asked for the Lord’s forgiveness, he wiped away the scarlet stain of my sin. But when I look down at Eli, whose face is wet with tears even in sleep, I feel like surely this tribulation is punishment for what Tobias and I did. That if I had married Judah King and we had conceived a child inside the parameters of God’s sovereign plan, the child would be healthy and whole and not tasting the bitter wine that his parents’ wanton actions have pressed.
“Lord, please . . .” I rest my forehead on Eli’s thigh, swaddled with soft cotton sheets that remind me of a funeral shroud. “I know I have already asked your forgiveness for my adultery, but I need to know that you really forgive. That you are not punishing my child for the sins I have committed. That my sins are truly separated from me as far as the east is from the west. That you do not withhold from your child any good thing, and so you are going to bring redemption to my child, to this situation that seems so impossible to redeem.”
The night-shift nurses do not often knock, not wishing to disturb our sleep. So I am still praying—still letting tears drip on my son’s body—when the door opens and Donna comes into the room. “Can I get you anything, Rachel?” she asks. “Sprite, water?”
It doesn’t matter if it’s ten at night or two in the morning, Donna never whispers. But tonight this does not irritate me. I am just grateful to rest in her grandmotherly presence when Eli’s cancer makes me feel so
ill-equipped to be his mamm.
“Thank you . . . no,” I reply. “I’m fine.”
Donna turns from the computer’s blue glare and glances over her bifocals at me. I wince, knowing she has heard the tears in my voice. Slipping a thin plastic sheath over a digital thermometer, she leans over the bed and carefully inserts the elongated tip into Eli’s ear.
“My son was here too,” she says. The thermometer beeps. Donna turns and types in the information. “Well, not here . . . but over there at 11 North.” She points toward the window, as if the adjacent hospital can be seen at night. “Robert had aplastic anemia. You know, where your body stops making platelets to clot up your blood?” I nod, but I hadn’t known. “He was given a bone-marrow transplant by an anonymous donor, then—five years later—a clean bill of health.”
Donna slips the thermometer into her pocket and fingers an earring glinting in the frosted tips of her hair. “I don’t often tell patients, because sometimes even happy endings don’t help when you can barely wrap your mind around your own story, but I thought that you might need to hear it tonight.”
Wiping my eyes on the corner of the sheet, I sit up. “What’s he doing now?”
Donna rolls her eyes. “Nothing . . . and everything. After the transplant, Robert went back to college on a scholarship with the marching band. He graduated five years ago, and now he’s married with two little ones. The youngest is a girl about Eli’s age, named Leah.”
My heart catches in my throat; somehow I murmur around it, “Leah?”
Donna nods. “A precious creature with huge dark eyes and a temper like her daddy.” The soles of her sneakers squeak as she walks past Eli’s bed to where I am seated on the edge of the chair. In the darkness, I watch her reach up again into her hair. “Hold out your hand.”
I do, and Donna places in its center one tiny gold earring shaped like a drum. “There was a time when I didn’t think Robert would ever play again. But he did. And soon, all that racket made me wish he would stop.” She laughs and curls her warm hands around mine, closing my fingers around the gift. “Just know that whatever happens, you’re not alone. He sees everything. Everything you’re going through, as if your lives were cradled right there in his palm.”
After Donna leaves, I place the earring on the sheet, the gold plating brilliant even in the dim light. I take Eli’s hand. But this time, I do not hold on to it like I alone can keep him here. Instead, I hold it with the assurance that despite the tribulations we must face, we are also being held.
AMOS
By the time Judah hits Kansas, his eyes are so heavy despite the caffeine jittering through his veins, he parks at a truck stop crowded with snoring semis. But no sooner has he lowered the driver’s seat and rested his head on the pillow of his jacket than his mind floods with images of Rachel and himself throughout childhood: poring over contraband Englischer books in the dairy barn, teaching her how to read and write just so he had an excuse to spend time with her, playing kick the can with the other nochberen and tweaking Rachel’s pigtails so she would chase him—only him—so he could let her catch up and then collapse with her onto the grass and laugh until both their sides were stitched with knots.
He recalls other memories—memories too recent for time to have subdued their sting. After Rachel moved from Muddy Pond to Copper Creek, Judah thought the camaraderie they’d shared in Pennsylvania would continue in Tennessee. But though she ate beside him during fellowship Sunday and once stopped in at the smithy to visit after buying King Syrup at Kauffman’s General Store, the camaraderie between them wasn’t the same at all.
Judah consoled himself with the fact that adult propriety would not let them demonstrate the same affection their youth had allowed. He also understood that Rachel’s independent nature—one of her personality traits he loved most—would initially balk against letting him court her, just because it was what the entire community had predicted before she had moved down.
Plus, Rachel was busy taking care of her sister and his brother’s family. Surely once Leah’s baby was born, he and Rachel might have a chance to rekindle their old friendship and perhaps, over time, awaken something more. Until then, he would give her the space to realize that marriage to him would not take anything from her. He just wanted to build a life with his best childhood friend and grow old together with her.
Then word spread throughout the community like wildfire: at nineteen years of age and without the legitimacy of a husband’s last name, his best childhood friend, Rachel Stoltzfus, was herself with child.
Judah recalls how, after Tobias broke the news to him, he marched out to the barn, grabbed a pitchfork and a wheelbarrow, and furiously began mucking out the heifers’ stalls—only stopping in between loads to wipe the burning mixture of sweat and tears from his eyes. Judah usually found that the mind-numbing tasks of farm life took away the worry surrounding life’s questions that never received answers. But once the stall was scraped clean and the new straw bales spread, Judah’s beleaguering thoughts returned.
Slanting the pitchfork against the wall, he collapsed next to the milk storage tank just like Rachel and he used to do when they were young and innocent. He must have sat there for hours on the dirty cement floor of his brother’s barn, digging fingers into his skull in an attempt to rip out the visuals of her with a man who wasn’t him, who would never be him; then—once his anger was spent—crying over the girl who’d become a woman he didn’t even know but whose heart had somehow already claimed his.
Judah cannot take any more memories. Snapping his seat into the upright position, he cranks the engine of the blue Ford, guns it up the ramp and back onto the interstate. He turns the local rock station as loud as his radio will go, more to block out his thoughts than because he enjoys the words.
He knocks back Red Bulls and then tosses the crushed cans to the floorboard; he digs through an open bag of pizza-flavored Combos he keeps in his lap. Grating lyrics screech to a stop and then drive full-throttle into the next song; radio stations fade in and out; DJs’ velvety voices disappear into the void of airwaves, only to be replaced by another slew whose voices are just as gravelly as the others were silken. All the while, Judah wishes something would occupy his mind besides Rachel. Besides Eli. Besides himself and his own mistakes.
Just as the sun rises over I-24, turning the four lanes of asphalt from gray to gold, Judah crosses the Tennessee state line. He pulls over at another truck stop on the outskirts of Nashville and pays for a shower whose availability is called out over the intercom like an order of fast food.
He is standing at the sink in a fresh set of clothes, shaving off his three-day beard with a two-dollar razor and soap from the dispenser, when he pauses and stares into his eyes. They are bloodshot from lack of sleep and an overabundance of caffeine, but there is something different about them that is due to more than just exhaustion. He then realizes that his eyes—albeit the same honeyed brown—are as hard as fossilized amber. Though my son avoided the more overt temptations, he knows a lot of his innocence has been lost in the short time he’s been away. Judah’s only hope is that Rachel will not see this, for he fears she might blame herself, when Judah knows he has only himself to blame.
Bundling up his dirty clothes in the stiff towel that is even dirtier than they are, Judah walks out into the truck stop’s store and purchases from a rotating glass case a crystal figurine of a horse that is small enough to fit inside a thimble. For Eli, he gets a bouncy ball that lights up when thrown and is too large to be swallowed by a six-month-old throat. These gifts are a paltry attempt at consolation, he knows, but the idea of walking into that hospital room empty-handed and hollow-eyed fills Judah with so much dread that he would never have the courage to go in.
Thirty minutes later, Judah enters the south garage of the Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital. The ceiling is so low it makes him feel claustrophobic as he circles his vehicle around and around the numerous levels trying to find a space.
He marches up th
e sidewalk with his heartbeat roaring in his chest as loudly as the thoughts inside his head, wondering if Rachel will even want to see him or let him see Eli. Walking through the double set of automatic doors into the hospital, Judah is amazed by its festive appearance when the people who come here do not have much to be festive about. There is a wide, curving staircase with a star-and-ribbon banister, and just past the elevators, an elaborate train set encased in protective glass that winds past minuscule homes, snowy lakes, and evergreen forests whenever a patient presses a red button.
Judah walks into the waiting elevator and presses the button for the myelosuppression floor as Ida Mae instructed. In the elevator with him is a hospital volunteer with a Rubbermaid cart heaped with toys and a young Spanish couple whose son looks completely healthy but is wearing a white hospital wristband. Stepping off the elevator when it reaches the sixth floor, Judah walks over to the intercom box and is buzzed in once he can reveal to the nurse the room number and name of the person he is visiting.
Slipping his truck-stop gifts into the pocket of his coat, Judah rubs his hands with the mandatory disinfectant and strides down the ocean-themed hall toward Eli’s room. His breath grows shallow and his legs weak the closer he comes to that door. Taking the gifts out of his pocket, Judah holds on to them with everything he has, hoping that such small tokens can be enough to let him back in.