Lifted Up by Angels

by Lurlene McDaniel

  She thought about her stay in the hospital and her terror when she’d been told by the doctors that they wanted to amputate her leg. And she remembered how Rebekah and Charity and Ethan had come into her life and made her less fearful. Now she felt helpless and useless.

  “Leah.” Ethan’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “How are you?” He slipped into the pew.

  “Not too good,” she answered truthfully. “I’m really scared, Ethan. I’m scared that Rebekah isn’t ever going to wake up.”

  “She hasn’t once acted as if she’s really here with us,” he admitted. “But I will not give up hope.”

  “I keep thinking about Gabriella and how she kept showing up last December. Where is she now when we need her? She’s an angel! So why doesn’t she do something?”

  “What if she wasn’t really an angel?” he asked. “What if there is some other explanation?”

  Leah shook her head. “I was so sure she was. And you told me that you thought so too.”

  “All we know for certain is that we cannot explain her strange comings and goings. But even if she is an angel, you cannot expect her to show up in every crisis.”

  “I’m not asking that she show up in every crisis. But Rebekah needs her now. She should be here. What kind of a guardian angel is she anyway? Why wasn’t she on duty when that truck went out of control?”

  “Angels are not servants of people. They are servants of God.”

  “Then God should have sent Gabriella to stop the accident from happening in the first place.”

  Ethan took a deep breath and smoothed Leah’s hair. “But God did not. I do not understand why either. But he did not stop the accident.”

  Leah laid her head against Ethan’s broad chest and began to cry softly.

  On Sunday, while the Amish community attended church and prayed for Rebekah and her family, the Longacres remained in the ICU waiting room. Leah stayed also, knowing she couldn’t return to her apartment as long as Rebekah was in a coma. The medical tests on Rebekah continued to be discouraging, but still Leah clung to hope. That evening, she called Mrs. Stoltz and quit her job.

  “How is the little girl?” Mrs. Stoltz asked.

  “No change,” Leah said sadly.

  On Monday morning the doctors arrived, their expressions unreadable, making Leah feel especially uneasy. She had once seen such carefully guarded looks on the faces of her own doctors before they’d delivered the devastating news that she had bone cancer.

  The neurologist held a clipboard and spoke directly to Jacob and Tillie. “We’ve repeated tests on Rebekah for days now,” he said in a kind but firm voice. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Rebekah has no higher brain activity. She hasn’t had much since she was brought in, but still we wanted to give her every opportunity for recovery. Medically, your daughter is brain dead, Mr. Longacre. The only thing keeping her alive is the machines. I want your permission to turn the machines off and let her body join her spirit.”

  In the stunned silence, no one spoke. Leah wanted to scream at him. She wanted to strike him. She wanted to knock him down and step on him. She stood frozen to the floor and watched Tillie’s face crumble with grief and a trail of tears run down Jacob’s craggy cheeks. “You are sure of this?”

  The doctor held out a long piece of paper with computer-drawn squiggles on it. “This is her EEG, a measurement of her brain activity from the time she was brought in. As you can see, the line gets progressively flatter. And her reflexes are gone. Plus, her pupils are fixed and dilated. All these factors convince me of the diagnosis,”

  Jacob stared long and hard into the doctor’s face. Tillie hung on his arm, as if it were her sole means of support. “We will tell her goodbye,” Jacob finally said.

  Leah trembled. Why didn’t he fight? Why didn’t he yell no? How could he accept the doctor’s word so completely? Doctors could be wrong. Tests could be incorrect. Hadn’t that been true in Leah’s own case?

  The doctor said, “Take all the time you need.” As Jacob turned to lead his family toward their final visit into the ICU cubicle, the doctor added, “Even if Rebekah had awakened, sir, she would never have been normal. There was simply too much damage.”

  Jacob nodded, then stepped inside the cubicle.

  Leah trailed behind hesitantly, acutely aware that she was not family but only a bystander in Rebekah’s life. So she stood outside the enclosure, her palms pressed against the glass, watching. One by one, each member of Rebekah’s family bent and kissed the little girl’s cheek. They surrounded the bed, hovering like darkly dressed angels, holding hands and bowing their heads. Leah could hear them murmuring in German, and she could see the expressions of quiet acceptance on their faces.

  Leah felt numb all over, as if all the blood had been drained from her body and replaced with ice water. She couldn’t accept this. It was horrible and undeserved sentence on a sweet, loving child with her whole life ahead of her. Perhaps the Longacres could see it as God’s will, but Leah could not. God was unfair!

  When the family finished praying, they sang a hymn in German, then touched Rebekah one last time and left. Leah rode down with them in the elevator. In the parking lot, she blinked in the bright sun. She had not been outside in days. She heard Opa say, “The buggy is over here, Jacob.”

  As they started toward it, Leah took Ethan’s hand, holding him back. “Ethan, please, don’t go yet. Tell me what to do. I don’t know what to do now.”

  He stroked her cheek. “Now we go home and prepare for Rebekah’s wake and funeral.”

  “May I come?” she asked in a small voice.

  “Certainly, you may come. For now, go home, get some rest. Come to the house tomorrow morning.”

  “I—I’m not one of you—”

  Ethan silenced her by placing the tips of his fingers against her lips. “Rebekah would want you with us,” he said. “Charity and I will help you. You will not be alone.”

  “Should I tell anyone? I—I was thinking of your brother, Eli.”

  She felt Ethan stiffen. “There is no way to tell him.”

  “I guess it wouldn’t make sense, would it? I mean, he never knew of Rebekah in life. Why should he know of her now that she’s—” Leah stopped, unable to say the last word.

  The buggy pulled to a stop beside them, and Ethan climbed aboard. His father handed him the reins. Leah heard Ethan say, “Ya,” and watched him slap the reins on the horse’s rounded rump. She stood in the parking lot, in the hot August-sunshine, and listened to the clop of the animal’s hooves on the asphalt. Ethan guided the plain black buggy into the flow of auto traffic. Leah watched it wind its way slowly up the road toward the outskirts of town.

  Numb, Leah went to her car. The surface looked dull. She could barely see her reflection in the chrome and mirrors, and what she could see looked distorted. Just as she felt on the inside—deformed and misshapen. Rebekah Longacre was gone. For her there would be no miracle, no restoration of her life to those who loved her. The heavens were silent. God had turned a deaf ear to the prayers and pleas of Amish and English alike. Rebekah was dead. Dead.

  NINETEEN

  Leah slept fitfully, waking with sudden starts, and, remembering that Rebekah was dead, cried herself back to sleep. Early in the morning, she gave up on sleep, dressed in dark, somber clothes, and drove out to the farm.

  When she arrived, the yard was already full of black carriages. Realizing that her red convertible stuck out like a sore thumb, Leah left it at the very edge of the property, on the far end from where the accident had happened. At the site of the accident, Leah saw that every scrap of wood had been cleaned up. All that remained as witness to the horrible event were the smashed rows of corn.

  Leah walked toward the farmhouse. Even so early in the morning, the air seemed stagnant. The heat rose off the ground in waves, making her hair stick to the back of her neck. She found Charity in the front yard, sitting beside the wagon wheel, hugging her knees, her eyes red and puffy. Leah sat down be
side her. “Hi. I couldn’t stay away any longer.”

  “I miss Rebekah, Leah. All night, I kept waking up and looking over to her side of the bed. It was empty. Only Rose sat up on the pillow. Like she was waiting for Rebekah to come to bed. I could not bear to even look at her doll.”

  Fresh tears pooled in Leah’s eyes as Charity talked. “I didn’t sleep much either.” Leah sniffed hard. “Will you tell me what’s going to happen? I—I’ve never been to an Amish funeral.”

  “The ones I’ve been to have been for old people. They are expected to die.” Charity dabbed at her eyes with a white handkerchief. “But I will tell you what to expect.” She sat up straighter. “The Amish undertaker has taken Rebekah’s body from the hospital. Papa and Ethan and Opa worked most of the night to build her coffin in the barn. Usually, coffins are made by others, but Papa wanted to make Rebekah’s with his own hands.”

  Leah stared off toward the barn, imagining the sad sound of hammers banging long into the night.

  Charity continued. “Other men picked up the coffin this morning and took it to the undertaker’s. The hearse will return with it this afternoon for the viewing.”

  Suddenly it struck Leah that everyone in the community would be arriving to see Rebekah’s body lying in the coffin. She shuddered, not certain she could participate in the ritual.

  “Many people are helping us now,” Charity said. “The men are doing the chores. The women are cleaning the house and setting up for the funeral tomorrow morning. Tomorrow we will have a church service here. Then we will all go to the graveyard at the back of our farm for the burial. Afterward, people will come back here for a meal and help us clear the house of the extra chairs and things. Then everybody will go home.”

  And life will go on, Leah thought. Chores would be done, cows milked, chickens fed, gardens tilled. Rebekah would be under the ground, and life would go on. She turned to Charity. “You’re burying her on the farm?”

  “Our family has lived here for many years. In time, all of us will be buried on this land. It is ours.”

  Leah recalled movies in which cemeteries were portrayed as dark, creepy places where the dead haunted the living. But here, in this land of the Amish, cemeteries were merely resting places for loved ones. There was nothing ghoulish about cemeteries. “What should I do?”

  “Just be with us.”

  Leah plucked a flower from the flower bed and rolled it between her fingers. “Can I send flowers for her funeral?”

  Charity shook her head. “That is not done. Amish bury plainly, just as we live.”

  “Where’s Ethan?” All at once, Leah ached to see him, to touch him.

  “He is at the family cemetery. He is digging our sister’s grave.”

  Leah followed Charity’s directions to the family cemetery, located beyond the barn and the woods, at the back side of the property. She passed the garden and remembered the first day she’d come to the farm and how Rebekah had run to meet her. Leah turned her head. She passed the chicken coop and the barn, remembered the day of the water fight, and felt a lump the size of a fist clog her throat.

  Leah skirted the woods and saw a short white picket fence marking off an enclosure of well-kept grass. Within, she saw headstones. She entered by a small gate, covered with an arched arbor, heavy with jasmine and morning-glory vines. She heard the sound of shovels digging in earth and crossed slowly to a pit. There, deep in the hole, stood Ethan, Simeon and Jonah. Emotion almost overcame Leah as she watched them scooping up soil and tossing it up to a pile heaped alongside the grave. “Ethan,” she called quietly.

  He looked up. Sweat poured down his face. His homespun shirt was limp and soaked. “Leah! What are you doing here?”

  “I—I wanted to see you.”

  Ethan glanced at Jonah, who said, “Go.”

  Ethan came up a ladder and swung over the top edge of the hole. Leah stepped closer, but he stepped away. “I am dirty. I will mess you up.” Dirt clung to his work boots and hands.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “I want to. It is the very least I can do for her.”

  Leah realized that this was Ethan’s way of easing his grief, of sweating off his own pain. The physical labor was good for him. She read it in his expression. “Is there something I can do to help?” she said. “Can I bring you water?”

  Ethan shook his head. “We have water with us.”

  Leah shrugged and glanced around the cemetery. “Whose is the earliest grave?”

  “Joseph Longacre. He was the infant son of my great-great-grandparents. He died one winter of scarlet fever.”

  “Sad,” Leah said. “When babies die, it’s really sad.”

  “Dying is part of living,” Ethan said. “Nothing can bring my sister back to this life. Now she lives with God, in heaven. I know baby Joseph is playing with her.”

  Leah wanted to believe it too. How she wished to have Ethan’s simple faith! But she was angry at God. He should have allowed Rebekah to live. “I guess I should go back to the house,” Leah said.

  “We will not be much longer,” Ethan told her. “I will clean up and see you there. Many will come this afternoon and evening.”

  Leah returned to the house and stayed close to Charity. Later in the afternoon, Leah watched through the kitchen window as a lone black horse pulled a simple springboard wagon into the front yard. In the back of the wagon lay an unadorned child-sized pine coffin with two long poles attached to it. Six men, including Ethan, stepped up and pulled the coffin off the wagon, shouldered the poles and carried it up onto the porch, in through the front parlor, and into a small room at the back of the house.

  Leah followed Charity and other family members into the room, a room swept meticulously clean, with only a table to hold the coffin, a single chair and a few candles. Both fascinated and repelled, Leah watched as the coffin was set upon the table turned bier. The window in the room was open, but without fans the room felt stifling. Leah left the small, airless room. She pressed herself against a wall, hoping not to faint from either the heat or her burden of grief.

  Back in the kitchen, she splashed water on her face from the hand pump over the sink. Minutes later, she felt Ethan’s touch on her back. “More people are coming,” he said, looking out the window. “To pay their respects.”

  Leah saw buggies pulling into the yard—a yard cleaned, weeded and clipped to receive friends and neighbors at its very best. Leah murmured, “I—I’m not sure I can go in there and look at her, Ethan.”

  “It does not matter. Only her body is in the coffin. Her spirit is with the Lord.”

  “There was a chair in the room. Why?”

  “We will keep an all-night watch. It is our custom never to leave the body alone.”

  She wanted to ask why but decided he probably didn’t know. He rarely knew the why of their customs, only that it was always done that way. She looked back to Ethan. “I think I should go.”

  “You do not have to.”

  Leah shook her head. “Yes, I do. I don’t belong here. I’m the only English.”

  “That should not trouble you.”

  Tears filled her eyes. “But it does, Ethan. It does.”

  Ethan followed Leah outside. The undertaker had gone, but the memory of where his wagon had stood forced Leah to make a wide arc in the yard before she headed toward the road and her parked car. Ethan caught her elbow at the edge of the yard. “What will you do, Leah? Where are you going?”

  “Back to my apartment, I guess.” She wiped under her eyes. “I should start packing. There was a message on my answering machine from my mother when I got in last night. She and Neil are in Los Angeles and will be flying to Indianapolis today. She plans to come help me get my stuff home next week.”

  Ethan stared down at her. “I had forgotten. You will be leaving. But … so soon! I will miss you.” The last was said haltingly, as if he was pulling the words from deep inside.

  “You know, two weeks ago, the thought of leaving was dri
ving me crazy.” Leah looked over his shoulder at the rambling farmhouse. “Now … well, I’m sort of glad. It would be hard to stay, to expect to see Rebekah whenever I came out here.” Her voice wavered. “It’s best this way. I’ll go back to my world. You’ll stay in yours.”

  “You will always be a part of my world, Leah. Because you will always be a part of me.”

  Her gaze flew to his face. His clear blue eyes were serious, tinged with grief. Was some of it for her? For them? Leah choked down a sob, holding it at bay with steely resolve. “I have to go now. I don’t think I can take any more sadness, Ethan. I can’t.”

  He caught her arm once more. “Will you be here tomorrow?”

  Leah nodded. “I have to come. I have to tell Rebekah goodbye.”

  “Yes,” he said. “We will all tell her goodbye.”

  Yet as Leah drove off, she couldn’t imagine watching that plain, undersized coffin being lowered into the cool, dark ground. She drove to town, weeping all the way.

  TWENTY

  It took Leah a long time to decide what to wear to Rebekah’s funeral. Anxious that she might be the only English among the mourners, she didn’t want to stand out any more than necessary. After much deliberation, she chose a simple black denim jumper and added a white T-shirt underneath. She brushed her dark hair and plaited it into a French braid. She wore no makeup, not even lip gloss.

  She drove slowly to the farm, often following black buggies headed in the same direction. When she arrived, she saw a long line of buggies parked in the farmyard and along the country road fronting the farm. Younger kids helped with the horses, tying reins to hitching posts. Leah also took note of several cars. Glad not to have driven the only automobile, she again parked at the far end of the Longacre property and walked to the house. The first person that she saw in the yard and recognized by name was Martha Dewberry.