The Outcast Page 21

  I murmur, tears filling my eyes, “But you weren’t in a car.”

  Norman wipes the sorrow that pools in his own eyes, even after all these years that are supposed to lessen grief. “The impact splintered the buggy into matchsticks. Killed the horse instantly. Along—” Norman chokes, clears his throat, and tries again—“along with my bruder and my younger nephew. My legs were so badly mangled in the collision that I couldn’t move. I would’ve died in that buggy if Russell hadn’t helped us. I told him to get my nephew first. The one who was still alive . . . Daniel. I begged Russell; I screamed at him, but he saw the blood covering Daniel’s face from having broken off his teeth in the wreck, and Russell thought he was too injured to save. So he helped me out of the buggy first.”

  Norman shakes his head, as if trying to dislodge the painful memories. I want to reach out to him, to somehow ease his suffering, but I know that remaining quiet and still is the kindest thing I can do.

  “Russell carried me over to the side of the road and carefully laid me on the grass. Something must’ve sparked in his truck that ignited the gas spilling from it, because by the time he turned around to get Daniel, the buggy had burst into flames. I wailed there along the side of the road. I wailed so hard, veins ruptured in my eyes. Since my legs didn’t work, I tried dragging myself over to the buggy with my arms. I remember how the fire was so hot, even the blacktop seemed to melt beneath my hands.

  “It seemed like a long time, but it was probably only seconds that I didn’t know where Russell was. I thought he’d been killed in the fire, but then he came walking out of the carnage with this wall of flames behind him. He was carrying Daniel in his arms, and even from that distance across the road, I could see how his blond hair was singed to the scalp and the clothing branded onto his skin.”

  Norman is crying harder now. I get up and rip some toilet paper off the roll in the bathroom. Coming back, I pass it to Norman just like Ida Mae passed it to me, knowing from experience how the simplest gestures provide the greatest relief.

  Norman wipes his face and blows his nose. I sit with my back straight and hands folded as the details of this horrific recounting play on the silver screen of my mind.

  He clears his throat. I open my eyes to see that Norman is ready to continue. I sense then that this is not just a story he is telling me; more than that, it is a story he has long needed to tell. “Ida would’ve kept Daniel on life support forever, but he was so badly burned, if he ever did come out of that coma, he would never have lived a normal life.” Norman sighs, lifting the shackles of his braces. “A life even harder to live than mine.

  “The Amish church, as you know, shares medical expenses. Even after Russell’s trucking company paid their part through insurance, there were plenty of bills rolling in long after the accident. And once the church heard that Daniel was probably never coming out of his coma, they decided they didn’t want to pay the medical expenses of someone who was only alive because of machines. Ida fought them. She fought the Amish church like it was a matter of life and death. In her eyes, that’s exactly what it was.”

  Norman swallows, wets pink lips surrounded by white beard. “Russell was really scarred after the accident. Not physically, but emotionally. He started drinking, lost his job—which he didn’t even want anymore—but once he sobered, he moved from Tennessee to Pennsylvania to fight alongside Ida. I guess it was his own kind of penance. The church did not agree with fighting at all, but especially against them. Ida was asked to repent for rising up, but she was so angry that this only made her fight harder. She and Russell tried pooling what little money they had and hiring a lawyer, but the only lawyer they could afford was an inexperienced one who doubted a case could be won against a group of people who would never fight back. The wheels of the meiding were put into motion then. Ida Mae knew it, but she didn’t care. She’d already lost those she loved most, so she left the church before she could be shunned.”

  “So her kind, Daniel, was taken off life support?” I whisper the words, as if that will negate their meaning.

  “That’s just it,” Norman says, seeming surprised by the unfolding story, although I am sure he has rehashed the nightmare countless times. “Ida is the one who took Daniel off life support, not the Amish. Eventually it had to happen, but it was as if once she’d lost everything—fought everybody—she was at peace to do what needed to be done.”

  I remember how angry I was after Tobias blackmailed me into leaving Copper Creek, an anger that caused me to reject to the same extent I had been rejected. I am thankful that I did not have to lose everyone I loved before I was willing to make peace with my past.

  One of the night nurses, Leslie, knocks on the door and opens it without waiting for my reply. She must sense that Norman and I are in the middle of a deep conversation, because she doesn’t pause to start one with us. Walking over to the computer monitor, Leslie rolls out the keyboard beneath it and types in the information required before she can give Eli his treatment. She slips on a pair of latex gloves she has pulled from the cardboard box next to the bed, extracts from her scrubs pocket a capped syringe, then reaches into her other pocket for a glass bottle shaped like a baby food jar.

  Taking off the cap, Leslie stabs the syringe’s needle into the top of the jar filled with clear medicine, then expertly pulls the plunger back until she has the specified amount. With a fingernail that glows lime green even through her latex gloves, she points the syringe to the ceiling and taps the barrel to make sure no air bubbles are trapped inside. Leslie leans over the bed and inserts the filled syringe into the color-coded lines trailing like serpents from Eli’s port. She does this same routine three more times—reaching into one pocket for a capped syringe, reaching into another pocket for a jar of medicine—and each time I wince, although I am told that Eli cannot feel the poisonous medication slithering through his veins.

  Leslie discards the syringes and bottles of medicine in the metal hazardous-material bin with the red trash bag and rolls off her gloves from the backs of her hands to her fingers so that the gloves are inside out. Throwing these away as well, she smiles and offers a little wave, which Norman and I return. The door clicks shut. Norman and I face each other, oddly shy in the light of such blinding revelations.

  “A month later,” Norman continues, “Ida and Russell married at the courthouse. I went down to Tennessee for the wedding because blut was so bad between Ida and the Amish that no one else would be her witness. That was such an awful day. Attending that wedding brought back memories from my bruder and Ida’s own wedding eight years before. Even now, I don’t know why Ida and Russell got married. I think the two of them were just so bound up in their mutual agony surrounding the accident that they confused it with love, and they feared that losing each other would just bring the pain of their loss back.

  “I was still so angry at Russell for not leaving me in that buggy and saving Daniel that as soon as the wedding ceremony was over and the marriage license signed, I went outside and told my driver to take me back to Pennsylvania. Some time later, I heard through one of my patients that Ida and Russell got divorced before their third anniversary. For nineteen years, I didn’t see Russell or Ida again. And our lives probably never would’ve intersected again if your mudder hadn’t called two months ago and invited me down to look at Eli. That’s when I walked into this hospital room and found Ida Troyer—forgive me, Ida Mae Speck—sleeping next to your son’s bed.”

  I remember the mask of disbelief Norman wore while watching Ida Mae sleep, and how angry she had been when he woke her up—an anger she used to defend me to my mamm. “That must’ve been quite the shock,” I say.

  “It was. But I’m sure it was a shock for Ida Mae, too. Waking up and seeing me here would’ve been like seeing my dead bruder all over again.”

  “Your brother, Henry—did he wear glasses?” I ask, recalling the crushed pair I’d found in the back of Ida Mae’s jewelry box.

  Norman nods. “We looked so much alike, t
hat was the only way some people could tell us apart.”

  “Did they survive the accident? The glasses, I mean?”

  “They were shattered,” Norman says, “but, jah, they survived. When Henry was thrown from the buggy, the glasses were thrown too. A fireman found them when he was sorting through the wreck.” Norman smiles sadly; when he speaks, tears coat his voice. “I guess you could say everything that survived the accident was shattered in one way or another. Henry’s glasses, my legs, Russell’s heart. . . . Before that night, I am told that Russell Speck was a very happy man.”

  Eli emits a pain-filled sound that should never come from someone too young to speak. I go over to the corner sink and run a hunlomma under warm water. Wringing it out, I wipe my son’s swollen face, then refold it and drape it across his forehead. Even without having heard the results of Eli’s PET scan, I doubt Dr. Sengupta is going to release him tomorrow.

  Norman says, “I should go.” I am suddenly too tired to protest.

  It is considered inappropriate for Plain men and women to embrace or even to shake hands. But before Norman Troyer leaves, he gives me a hug and even rests his large hand on my head like a benediction.

  “Remember,” he says before closing the door, “I’ll come back if you need me.”

  It seems impossible that I have any tears left after these emotionally taxing months. But listening to Norman shuffle down the hall, I find that tears stream down my cheeks as if they have never stopped.

  How very different my life would have been if Norman Troyer had been my dawdy rather than Samuel Stoltzfus, who hasn’t been to check on his grosskind in the weeks we’ve been in Vanderbilt, while Norman’s been here every day since he arrived. I have forgiven my dawdy for his detachment, which prompted me to seek an intimacy I should have never known, and I know I cannot blame him for my mistakes. Still, I believe that if Norman Troyer had been my father, my unholy union with Tobias wouldn’t have been one of them.

  AMOS

  Although Tobias has convinced himself that if not for Rachel’s powers of seduction, he would not have been seduced, as he now peers out the window at crows forming curlicues across the frosted sky, he admits that the night he entered Rachel’s room as if by accident was no accident at all. The lust for his wife’s twin had grown at such a slow rate that—like a steady spreading of cancer that’s not detected until it chokes out a vital organ—Tobias didn’t know it was happening at all. Of course, he was aware of Rachel, had been aware of Rachel from the time he was twenty-two and she was ten. He sneers at his stupidity, recalling how he would forge a horseshoe in the fire and watch Rachel run up and down the hill beside his parents’ Lancaster County home, chasing Judah. Her braided pigtails (a lighter blonde than they are now) would flutter out behind her and her laughter tinkle with this sound trapped inside it, like brass bells in a stone church. Tobias was not captivated by her then, and even though he was aware that she was a pretty girl soon to grow into a beautiful woman, he was not even attracted to her. He just knew that Rachel Stoltzfus was as different from her identical twin, Leah, as two roses that happened to grow from the same vine: one choosing to spread its blossoms in the sun, while the other remained ensconced in the shade.

  My eldest son does not dig deep enough into his psyche to uncover the darkness that lurks there—that festers as it continues to grow without the antiseptic of light—but Tobias envied Judah from the moment he was born, and envied him even more when he realized that I was going to protect Judah from his abuse and the abuse Tobias encouraged in his siblings. At twenty-one years old, when Tobias should have been a man above such childish behavior, this envy he harbored for nine-year-old Judah extended over to the young girl Tobias knew his young brother idolized. As Judah’s tales bordered on garrulous, Tobias listened; he listened to how Judah would insert Rachel’s name into a dinner table conversation or watched his elaborate gestures describing the simple things the two of them had done: making mud pies along the cow pond, playing kick the can with Leah and Eugene, drinking millich from jelly jars out in the dairy barn. Tobias would nod and smile, take a bite of dried kiehfleesch or a sip of sassafras tea, acting the part of the indulgent older bruder, even as he was counting the days until he could take away from Judah the one thing he wanted most.

  After two years passed, however, Tobias realized his quest to get back at Judah was going to take too much time. He did not want to wait five more years until Rachel was old enough to court and then another year to marry. Tobias resigned himself to a long-distance courtship with Esther Miller from a community in Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania. She was a dark-haired, dark-eyed girl with a clear complexion and a singing voice almost as musical as young Rachel’s laugh. Yet Tobias did not love her. He did not know if this was because, for years, he had placed in his mind that one day he would take Judah’s bride away before the two of them could even contemplate being wed, or if those summers he spent watching Rachel run and laugh up and down the hillsides had welded in his heart as irrevocably as he had welded the horseshoes with the forging hammer that the woman he would one day marry would have the same wavy blonde hair and stormy blue eyes as twelve-year-old Rachel.

  Once Esther died shortly after Sarah’s birth, Tobias’s old pact to make Rachel his bride was what caused him to avoid her at his and Leah’s wedding ceremony. He was beyond grateful to marry Leah, a soft-spoken mudder to nurture his kinner during the day and a soft body to warm his bed at night. But whenever he looked at Rachel sitting there in a cape dress the same hue as her eyes, it was all he could do to turn away and look at the blushing woman who—after listening to three hours’ worth of sermons and exchanging a few words—would become his second wife.

  Throughout that humid spring day in the schoolhouse, then at Verna’s and my place for the wedding esse, he couldn’t help comparing the two sisters, which was easy to do as they were often side by side. Their features were the same—a snub nose, a thin but shapely mouth, eyebrows a shade darker than their hair, and those blue, blue eyes—but there was something about Rachel’s personality that turned these regular features into something ethereal. It was the way she would tilt her head in conversation like she was gripping every word; the way her cheeks could so easily burn with passion or become extinguished and pale; the way her eyes tilted up at the corners, giving the appearance that she was smiling even when she frowned; the way she moved across the room like her feet, although encased in the same clunky shoes as the rest of the female community, never touched the floor.

  All these things Tobias saw, making a point not to look Rachel’s way. It was as if the harder he tried to fight his attraction to her, the stronger that attraction grew. By the end of his and Leah’s wedding day, his obsession had become so consuming that Tobias feared he would not be able to perform his conjugal duties that night, and later—as he held his trembling bride on their marriage bed, kissing Leah’s temple and closing his eyes—he willed these images of Rachel back to the pit from whence they came. But they would not leave. And so that first night, the only way Tobias could get through the act that made him and Leah truly husband and wife was by envisioning that he was not caressing his bride but the woman who looked identical to her, the woman he had wanted for almost ten years.

  In the early months of his and Leah’s marriage, this carnal illusion never waned. When Rachel came to live beneath their roof, Tobias let himself imagine that she was coming down not to care for her bedridden sister, but because she cared for him. Before fantasy eroded his reality, Tobias knew this was not true. But the more time that passed and the more interactions he and Rachel had, the more he began to believe that she wanted him too. Soon afterward, Rachel dropped that jar of beet juice in the kitchen. Tobias desired her so much as he was wiping the scarlet stain from her red face that he had to get up and leave, stalking out through the living room without minding his shoes and smacking his way out the front door. My son spent the rest of that afternoon in the blacksmithing shed, heating wrought iron over the fire
until it bent like taffy, then forging it into a shape he was never going to use, for the moment it hardened, he melted it down and forged it into shape again. This monotony lasted for hours. Sweat coursed down his forehead and stung his eyes. His clothing clung to his back and his ribs heaved with the intensity of labor. But he did not stop. Tobias could not stop. He was determined that he would not go home until he had pounded out the demons that tormented his mind.

  When darkness swept its cloak over the community, the demons were still there and the refining fire burning out. Tobias walked home—blistered hands hanging like anvils at his sides—and all he could see for twenty miles were the stars arching over Copper Creek Mountain, like a bridge constructed in the heavens, and the oil lamps burning behind netted screens on the farmhouse porches. When Tobias came to the V in the lane, he began walking up toward the huge dwelling, its white clapboard a beacon in the night, contradicting the unease he felt when he was inside it. He saw a lamp lit in an upstairs window, and his pulse thumped. Had Leah been able to wait up for him? Had the nursing bobbel for once not sapped her strength?

  As Tobias got closer to the house, he realized the light shining in the window was not coming from his and Leah’s room. It was coming from Rachel’s. With a heavy heart and an empty stomach, Tobias let himself in, mounted the staircase, and let his blistered hand slide up the banister, relishing the pain caused by the abrasion of raw skin on unsanded wood. He paused at the landing. His breathing grew ragged; his blistered palms became slick with sweat not brought forth by the temperature increase upstairs. Tobias could imagine Rachel sitting behind that closed door in a cotton nightgown like her sister wore, with her blonde hair hanging long and loose. He imagined that she had worried about him throughout the afternoon and evening, that her face had burned with the remembrance of their kneeling together in that stifling kitchen. All of this caused my son to stride toward her door. He even stretched out one hand to turn the knob. But the moment his raw skin touched the cool metal, Tobias jerked his hand back like it’d come in contact with a branding iron.