Reflection

by Diane Chamberlain

  "Maybe she'll apply for a teaching job." CeeCee laughed.

  "Yeah," said Polly "My sister has way too many kids in her fourth-grade class. Maybe Rachel could take over teaching for her."

  CeeCee howled as though this was the funniest thing she'd ever heard, and Lily walked toward the rear of the beauty parlor and through the open door to the supply room, where she leaned against one of the shelves and waited for the gray haze to lift. Gradually, she became aware of their voices, nearly whispering now, and she cocked her head to listen.

  "…your insensitivity," Marge was saying. "How do you think those kind of jokes make Lily feel? And here she is, getting ready to go to her uncle's funeral today and all, and you're joking about—"

  "You're right," Polly interrupted her. "We were terrible. I completely forgot."

  "It's not like something you think about every day," CeeCee said. "I mean, Lily's so well adjusted and everything."

  "I don't think we should talk about Rachel Huber in front of her again," Marge said.

  Polly and CeeCee muttered words of agreement.

  "All I can say," Polly said, "is that this town's going to chew her up and spit her out in little pieces."

  Lily took a bottle of shampoo from one of the shelves and left the supply room. At her approach, the other women immediately busied themselves at their stations.

  "Tomorrow's my mother's birthday," Polly said. "I thought I'd get her that striped skirt in the window of Daley's."

  "Oh, no! I love that skirt." CeeCee fluffed her short, dark hair in the mirror. "I wanted to get it."

  "So get it," Polly said. "You and my mother don't exactly attend the same social events."

  Lily stopped in the middle of the room. "I think she has guts coming back here," she said.

  They all turned at the sound of her voice.

  Polly approached her, touched her arm. "I'm sorry we were joking about her before," she said. "Really, Lil, I wasn't thinking."

  "Me neither," CeeCee said.

  "She has guts," Lily repeated. "And I hope no one gives her a hard time."

  * * *

  It was nearly three-thirty by the time Lily and Ian left her aunt's farmhouse after the funeral service and headed toward the cemetery for the burial. Lily had not been close to her uncle, but she'd felt a certain obligation to be there to represent her side of the family, and she'd found the service moving in its simplicity. She'd had trouble concentrating on the words of the people who spoke about her uncle, though. Her mind was too clogged with thoughts about Rachel Huber.

  Ian eased the car over one of the gentle crests in Farmhouse Road, and Lily shut her eyes at the blinding intrusion of sunlight through the windshield. She pulled down her visor and then could see the long processional of buggies ahead of them, a sinuous black snake stretching between their car and Reflection. Ian began riding the brake, and Lily wondered if they should have gone ahead of everyone else to the cemetery. But then she would have felt even more set apart from the others. As far as she knew, she and Ian had been the only people at the service to arrive in a car.

  Ian glanced over at her. "It's slow going, but I think it's better this way," he said. "Makes you feel more like part of the family, doesn't it?"

  She smiled. "Yes." She had long ago stopped marveling at her husband's ability to read her thoughts. Ian was a magician—a professional magician—and there were times she was convinced he possessed powers other human beings didn’t.

  Ian eased up on the brake a little. "Do you wish you'd known him better?" he asked.

  Lily sighed, thinking of the reserved man, her mother's brother, whose body lay in a pine coffin in the horse-drawn hearse at the front of the procession. "I'm not sure how knowable any of my Amish relatives are. They've always treated me kindly, but I am my mother's daughter, you know."

  "Ruth the Rebel," Ian said with some glee. He loved hearing about the adolescent adventures that ultimately led to Ruth Zook's excommunication from her family's Old Order Amish church and to the shunning he considered barbaric. Lily had tried to explain to him that shunning was not punishment but rather an incentive to bring those who had strayed back into the fold—although she knew her mother's interest in the fold was nonexistent. Ruth was still alive, living in Florida. She would not have cared about attending her brother's funeral even if she had been allowed to do so.

  "I bet she was like you," Ian said. "Wild and crazy. I can't picture you Amish, no way, no how. You're too rowdy. Too earthy."

  She smiled. Lily couldn’t imagine her mother wild and crazy, either, although at one time she must have been, at least by Amish standards. Ruth had been baptized into the church at the age of sixteen, a devout and pious girl, according to all who knew her then. But she'd met a sweet-talking Mennonite clerk in the dry-goods store and had quickly gotten pregnant with Lily and her twin sister, Jenny. Unrepentant, she was excommunicated and banned by her community and family. Lily wished she'd known that spirited girl. Ruth had become a sad woman, soured on life.

  The procession reached the more congested section of Farmhouse Road, and the cars of tourists and locals stopped to let them pass. A few people got out of their cars and aimed their cameras at the long line of buggies.

  The woods surrounding Spring Willow Pond were on their left, a lush, cool oasis in the sea of farmland. The road hugged the forest for nearly a mile, and since they were traveling at a snail's pace, Lily could see deep into the woods.

  "Do you think they'll leave any of the trees?" she asked.

  "Not many," Ian said. "Too expensive. The more trees they knock down, the more houses they can put up and the more money the Hostetters will have in their greedy little pockets."

  Lily looked away from the woods, not wanting to think about their transformation from heaven to tract housing. She turned the air-conditioning up a notch, adjusting the vent so that it blew into her face. The heat had to be unbearable in those buggies.

  Ian followed the buggies onto narrow Colley Lane, the woods still on their left, the Amish-Mennonite cemetery with its rows of unadorned headstones on their right. He pulled off the road onto the left shoulder, parking in the shade of the trees, and they got out of the car and walked across the street to where everyone was gathering.

  A dozen children immediately surrounded Ian, trotting along next to him as he and Lily walked toward the crowd. Ian grinned at Lily. He'd been playing with the kids before the service, stunning them silly with magic tricks. With his dark ponytail and magician's charisma, he'd been an immediate hit, earning himself a group of little followers.

  When they reached the outskirts of the crowd some of the children walked over to their parents, but a few stuck close to Lily and Ian, standing quietly. Lily watched as four men carried the coffin, supported by two thick poles, to the open, hand-dug grave. She could see the backs of the men rounding as they lowered the coffin into the ground. Then she heard the thumping sound of dirt as the pallbearers began covering the coffin with earth.

  Jenny was buried in this cemetery. Lily glanced toward the far corner near the woods, where her sister's plain headstone backed up to the trees. She'd always taken comfort in the thought that Jenny was cradled in the protective green of those trees. The more trees they knock down, the more houses they can put up, Ian had said. Lily turned her attention back to her uncle's grave.

  Midway through the burial, the men stopped and took off their hats, and a man standing near the side of the grave read something in German. Lily glanced around her. Meticulously manicured farmland surrounded the cemetery on three sides, and across narrow Colley Lane the forest provided a tall, thick shield from town. She tried to imagine the woods replaced by houses, built tightly together, each looking like its neighbor. No privacy for these mourners then. No privacy for the dead. Children would play on Jenny's headstone. Lily's eyes burned. These people would not fight well for themselves. It was up to others to fight for them, others like Michael Stoltz. She trusted Michael to know what to do. Everyone was co
unting on him.

  She and Ian declined the invitation to return to Lily's aunt's house for a meal. Ian gave hugs to the children, promising to teach them a trick or two the next time he saw them, and then they were off, driving away in the only gas-powered vehicle lining the shoulder of Colley Road.

  The dogs greeted them when they got home. Lily let them knock her over in the hallway of the small house she and Ian had been renting since they married five years ago. She didn't bother to get up, just lay there on the floor, getting stepped on and licked and nuzzled, and laughing for the first time all day.

  Through the blur of gold and black and white fur, she saw Ian drop to the floor next to her.

  "My woman's laughing!" He joined the dogs in their affectionate attack, tickling her until she was breathless. "We are extremely happy to see our woman laugh again, aren't we, fellas?"

  Lily lifted her arms through the crush of dogs to put them around Ian's neck. She pulled the leather band from his ponytail, and his straight black hair fell on her cheek. "I love you," she said, raising her head to kiss him.

  Ian frowned at her. "Something's bothering you, chickadee. Something more than your uncle."

  "How can you possibly know that?" she asked. "I'm lying here laughing, for heaven's sake."

  "Yeah, you're laughing, but right here"—he touched the space between her eyebrows—"is this teeny tiny little line that you only get when you're upset about something. Or have a bellyache. Do you have a bellyache?" He slid one of his long-fingered hands under her skirt until it came to rest on her stomach.

  She shook her head. "No. I wish it were that simple."

  Ian's expression immediately sobered. "What is it?"

  Lily sighed. "I found out something this morning," she said. The floor was growing uncomfortable, but she liked Ian's nearness and the warmth of the dogs at her head and side. "Rachel Huber is in town."

  "Whoa. Damn." Ian let out his breath. "Is she just passing through, or what?"

  "I'm not certain. She's here to take care of Helen, and I don't know how long Helen will need help."

  "Whoa," Ian said again. He sat up and leaned his back against the wall.

  Missing his closeness, Lily reached for his hand. "It's not anything to get all worked up about, I guess," she said. "It just took me by surprise this morning. Shook me up a little."

  "Sure it did." He nodded. Ian had moved to Reflection as an adult. He didn’t have the memory of September 10,1973, ingrained in his mind as most residents of the town did, and Lily never treated that date as if it were significant. Yes, she closed Hairlights on Reflection Day last fall—it wouldn't have felt right to keep it open when all the schools and other shops were closed—but otherwise she pretended that the second Monday of September was just another day on the calendar. She didn’t even attend the Reflection Day observance anymore. But she knew that Ian understood how she felt.

  "Can I help you somehow?" he asked. "What can I do?"

  She touched his cheek. He always wanted to fix things for her, but some things were beyond repair. "I don't know," she said. "All I know right now is that she shouldn't be here. She shouldn't have come. People are"—she shook her head—"no one's ever forgiven her."

  "Have you?"

  "Yes. Absolutely. I never blamed her in the first place."

  Ian leaned over to kiss her. "You're a good woman, Lily Jackson."

  They cooked and ate together, then took the dogs down to the small park near their house. They let their own three dogs run loose but kept the two foster dogs on leashes. She didn't trust them yet. Too many foster dogs had taken off on her. Maybe tomorrow she'd give them a chance.

  She was tired when she climbed into bed that night, but she couldn't sleep. She listened to Ian's even breathing for more than an hour before finally getting up and slipping on her robe. In the second bedroom, she stood on a chair to reach high into the closet for the old photograph album. She carried the album into the living room and turned on the light in the corner.

  The pictures she wanted to see were in the middle of the thick album. Spring Willow Elementary used to take class photos every year in each grade. There was her kindergarten class, 1971, nineteen little students squinting into the sun, and Mrs. Loving, looking far too old to be managing a classroom of squirmy kids. Lily had been the squirmiest of them all. Her problems with authority had started very early. She was standing right next to Mrs. Loving, and it appeared that the teacher was gripping her arm, probably in an attempt to get her to hold still long enough to have the picture taken.

  On the end of the front row stood Jenny. The other children had refused to believe that she and Jenny were twins. Twins were supposed to look alike, they argued. Lily had been very blond, while Jenny's hair was fine and dark and straight. Lily had been tall; Jenny tiny. And Jenny knew how to hold still. She was the good twin, no doubt about it. The twin who got all "excellents" on her report cards, while Lily's cards were covered with handwritten messages of doom and frustration from her harried teachers.

  Her class had been reduced to eighteen in the first grade because Danny Poovey's family moved to Lancaster. The first-grade picture had been taken indoors. Miss Lintock stood with the boys in the back row. All eyes were wide, giving the children surprised expressions. Lily knew the name of every child in the picture, and she went over them, categorizing each: living, dead, moved away. Jenny wore a startled look in this picture, as though something had frightened her, and the image brought tears to Lily's eyes. She wished she could pull that little girl from the photograph and hold her close, tell her that everything would be all right. A year after the picture was taken, Jenny and nine other children from that class had died, and in their collective sense of powerlessness, the citizens of Reflection had pinned responsibility for their deaths on the children's young second-grade teacher, Rachel Huber.

  There was no picture of that second-grade class. Pictures had been scheduled to be taken in late September, and no one even thought to suggest taking a picture of that diminished class of children once the tragedy had occurred. There were no other class pictures in the photograph album, either, although Lily supposed they had been taken. She'd asked her mother about that once, and her mother had replied that she didn’t want those reminders in the house. Lily had wanted to say, "But you still had a child in those pictures." Of course she didn't dare. Her mother had, after all, lost her good twin that day.

  –4–

  Helen rested her head against the back of the green Adirondack chair. She was slightly winded and dizzy from the effort of walking out to the porch from the bedroom. The cane she was using was more a nuisance than a help.

  Rachel appeared next to her chair. "Are you comfortable?" she asked. "How about one of those little pillows for the small of your back?"

  "A pillow would be very good," Helen said, and she watched as Rachel stepped back inside the house. She was getting accustomed to asking for things, to accepting the help Rachel offered so freely. It had been hard at first, but she'd gradually come to the realization that her granddaughter truly enjoyed taking care of her and the house.

  From the Adirondack chair, Helen kept an eye on the sky. It was blue, a little hazy, with just a few clouds. Good. Safe for one more day, she thought. She was growing idiotically fearful of storms.

  Rachel returned with the pillow, and Helen leaned forward to let her granddaughter slip it behind her back.

  "Do you like polenta?" Rachel asked as she sat down on the porch swing and opened one of the household's vegetarian cookbooks on her knees.

  Helen nodded. "All that stirring, though. It's been a long time since I made it."

  "We'll have it tonight."

  Rachel had been with her for four days, and Helen could feel the life returning to her house. The young woman had cleaned the windows and opened them up to let in light and air, making Helen feel less trapped by her invalidism—even though every time she passed the piano she stared in frustration at the keys and her wrist throbbed. Rachel
went for bicycle rides and long walks, which Helen envied, and returned with armloads of wildflowers to scatter throughout the house in the collection of old vases. Rachel was not a vegetarian, but she was eating like one and cooking like one as well, and Helen found her own appetite returning. It had been a long time since she'd eaten so well.

  Sometimes when they were sharing a meal at the kitchen table Helen would study Rachel's face and see John, her son, in the younger woman's features. The light brown hair, large gray eyes. The narrow, slightly Roman nose and sharp cheekbones. The similarity pained her, and she didn't allow her gaze to rest for very long on her granddaughter's face.

  Helen had initially blamed her daughter-in-law, Inge, for driving the wedge between John and his parents. At some point, though, she'd had to admit to herself that the estrangement had been John's decision. He had simply rebelled against them, as most children did, she supposed. She and Peter had raised him a liberal-thinking Quaker, and he'd turned into a narrow-minded Lutheran. He became conservative, bigoted. She and Peter disgusted him, he'd said, wounding her deeply. Fortunately, John and Inge didn’t seem to have ruined their lovely daughter. Helen could discern no hint of intolerance in Rachel.

  She could see a sadness in her, though. The girl was still grieving. Still trying to adjust from being married to being alone. Only time could help with that.

  She and Rachel didn’t talk much. Oh, they talked about food and the garden and the house and the birds and the wildflowers. But they never touched on anything of substance. A few times Helen considered bringing up the past, but Rachel seemed so guileless—almost naive—that Helen couldn’t find a suitable opening for the conversation. Rachel would talk occasionally of going into town, and Helen would find ways to discourage her, but at some point she would have to let her go. She didn't know what would happen in town. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps no one would even notice her. That was unlikely, though. Strangers stood out in Reflection. Besides, people already knew she was there. Marge had called the day before to ask Helen how she was doing and had told her that customers in the salon were talking about Rachel being in town. Marge trimmed Helen’s hair every month or so, and Helen knew what Hairlights was like. News traveled quickly anywhere in town, but you could double the speed if you started it out in the beauty parlor.