“You,” she told her restless child, “will know only a complete and willing love, not a half-grudging one. You might have only one parent, but she will love you enough for two, though she will miss your father until the day she last closes her eyes.”
Sitting there, looking down that lonely road, Sara knew she had no choice. She could not go back. One parent who loved was better than two, if one of them made a child yearn for what could not be. Better to be content in life than feel as if something was missing.
For the child pressing and turning in her womb, she must go. To relieve her husband of the burden of her presence, she must. As she must to relieve the community of a midwife who could kill.
And she must do it now, before anyone could change her mind, before good-byes could weaken her determination or tears sever her resignation. She would make this sacrifice for the child she carried, for the family she loved, but did not belong to, and for the people and community she’d failed so miserably.
Mourning the babes who’d died at her hands and would never know the joy of life, Sara turned her buggy toward the road to Pennsylvania.
Her community needed better than a fumbling Amishwoman for a midwife. They needed a book-taught doctor. If they were too foolish to call Jordan … well, that was not her problem anymore, was it?
Though her people had not embraced or welcomed her rebelliousness easily, leaving even them was more difficult than she expected. With every mile she placed between them, she mourned. The thought of not seeing those faces, of never seeing her new mother and sister again, made her cry out with the unfairness of it.
She hoped that someday Lena and Emma would forgive her for her part in their arguments. They would be good to the girls, to children of their own blood. Blood made the difference. Lizzie, Katie, Pris, baby Hannah; they were not Sara’s blood and never would be, no matter how badly leaving them lanced her heart.
Lizzie would learn to cook fine without her. Katie would still giggle, maybe not for a few days, but giggling was inside that girl, no matter what. Sara worried about leaving Pris, though, and Hannah.
She swiped at her eyes so she could see the road better.
The greatest break in her heart, the one that pained her more than her back right now was the ache of leaving that big, little boy of a man. That stone-for-a-heart male with his beard of wire and nibbling lips of silk that could turn her to water.
That same headstrong man had made a space for himself in her wary heart and would reside there forever. If she were to be honest with herself, Sara had to admit that the place Adam Zuckerman occupied was very, very big. So big that maybe her love for him had overflowed into her very soul when she wasn’t looking.
Silly her, for letting it happen.
For a minute, Sara stopped and held the reins, unmoving, not certain she could go on.
She wanted to go home.
Home to Adam.
To her children. Except, they were not hers.
She could do this. She was strong, and a scrapper, everybody knew it, stubborn, passionate, determined.
If that were so, then why did she feel so much the opposite right now?
Even as she sat there, the air turned to a snap and the temperature plummeted, much like a certain leaf-crackling night about a year ago. The temperature had chilled fast the night she went to deliver Abby’s baby.
Her words to Adam still haunted her. She had stood in judgment, foolish, stupid. That girl; that was the one she most resembled now, she thought. Foolish, stupid, weak, afraid. Still stubborn, though, because she flicked the reins and continued in the direction she’d set, away from everyone and everything she loved, for their own good.
Before long, snow swirled around her in tiny flakes. Barely there, but enough to remind her of getting lost in the snow before. She stopped the buggy again. She was not terribly far from home, yet something in her rebelled at turning back. Not just because she was stubborn, but because she simply could not bear to go back, then have to make the same, painful decision another day.
She could not. This was best.
The snow, she saw soon enough, was no more than a flurry, a hint of the future, nothing like the other time. She could bear the chill that was left after it stopped, but what about her child? Could he bear it?
Where had Adam said the shack stood, precisely? At the least, she needed an outhouse. At the most….
Sara pressed her hand to the small of her back. Oh she did not like this backache at all.
* * * * *
Adam bedded down Titania and Tawny after his trip to the buggy factory where he’d replaced the reins to his mother’s buggy. She’d had them repaired and re-braided so many times, it was a wonder she and Emma had made it all the way to Ohio from Indiana without an accident.
It was a wonder they’d not snapped that night in the snow as he’d searched for Sara. Adam shivered. He never wanted to spend a similar agony of hours again. Even now, bad as the day had begun, he could hardly wait to set eyes on Sara.
He hadn’t wanted to leave this morning, but he’d not been able to bear waiting for her to return, and he knew she wouldn’t want him at Mercy’s, their argument distracting her. He’d needed to keep busy, but the trip to Millersburg had been dull, lonely.
Funny how one journey with Sara and the girls, and one with Sara alone, could change the way a man thought. He didn’t like traveling alone any more. He supposed he had to admit that he liked having company on long rides. And not just any company, but Sara with her smiles and laughter, and the girls with their trips to the trees every twenty feet, and the kinds of questions could drive a man mad.
Adam nearly smiled. Imagine Mad Adam thinking such a thing. If Sara were here, he’d take her hand and share the joke.
Damned if he hadn’t found himself smiling over some of the girls annoying questions on the ride home today. Damned if he didn’t anticipate a house filled with noise, even Emma’s screech when he walked in.
Sara should be back and exhilarated after delivering twins. Lord, he wanted to take her to bed. And she wanted him as much as he wanted her. Was he crazy to worry so about the birth? Was he crazy to deny himself, and her, during this safe time?
Probably.
He raised his head. Perhaps he’d tell her so tonight.
Ah, but how would he bear not having her after their child’s birth, if he did not begin the way he must go on?
When he got home, the house was quiet. Too quiet. But for a lop-eared rabbit on a bed of quilts, no one raised their head in greeting. No dinner scents lingered, no supper pans of hot food simmered on the stove to answer the growl in his stomach.
All the times he’d wished for quiet returned to haunt him, and he imagined any number of frightening reasons for the silence.
He cursed. Foolish. His mother and Emma had probably taken the children and—
Was Sara still here, alone? His body quickened at the notion. Adam rolled his eyes over his eagerness for his wife. Then again, what was different about that? He supposed, with the child due in less than six weeks, he’d best be thinking about something else. Still, six weeks was a long time….
He entered their room, hoping Sara was napping and hadn’t heard him come in, but his fantasy of waking her with kisses took wing when he saw the empty bed.
He headed for the stairs.
Every single bedroom was empty. The house was empty.
Had she spent all day tending Mercy?
It wasn’t till he came back to the kitchen that Adam found the note tucked into the jelly cupboard latch. ‘Sara is still with Mercy. Took girls to Verna’s quilting. Knew you would be hungry. Bread, cheese and cold beef inside. Mutter.’
Sara must have found the note and gone to join them. He went back out for his buggy. Nobody would expect Mad Adam Zuckerman to show up at a quilting supper. For a minute Adam was uncomfortable with the notion of sitting down with all those women, but then the look on Sara’s face when he did—on all the women’s faces—was eno
ugh to make him anticipate the scene.
Old Verna about swallowed her smacking gums when he walked into her best room. Her look alone would have been worth everything, if Sara had been there.
Emma screeched when she saw him and quit the room, but his mother rose and came to him. “Is Sara all right? I didn’t like her backache yesterday. I hope she’s not still at Mercy’s. She needs to rest. I told her to rest.”
A buzz started in Adam’s head. His heart, for some reason, took on a tripping beat. The faces of the women around the quilting frame held different expressions, expectant, curious, worried.
Adam took his mother’s arm and led her to the kitchen. “She isn’t resting. She isn’t home.” He scrubbed his face with a hand. “I thought she’d joined you, here.”
“She must still be with Mercy, then.”
“I’ll go get her. She shouldn’t be trying to drive that buggy with— Why are you worried about a backache?”
Adam could have sworn his mother said, dummkopf, below her breath. She shook her head. “Go find Sara.”
An hour later, Adam left the sad house of Mercy and Enos Bachman. Mercy had been feeding little Saramay when he arrived. “It wasn’t her fault,” she said when she saw him. “How is she? I was afraid she was in labor too.”
Too? As if she’d slapped him upside his head with a barn-beam, Adam reeled.
Mercy’s boys had not survived their birth. Three of them, lost. Sara would blame herself and bear triple the guilt. Adam knew that as well as he knew his own name, and the knowledge chilled him.
He would not allow her such guilt. Self flagellation, especially over death, could be crippling. Worse. It could make you crave death, yourself.
Adam swore but tried to stay calm.
Mercy’s boys had been born before ten this morning and dusk drew purple streaks on the horizon even now. Sara should have been home hours before.
But nothing would be simple with Sara, especially with guilt as a dark companion. Where had she gone? Even if she believed she deserved punishment, she would not hurt the child she carried, which calmed Adam a great deal.
At the end of the Bachman drive, he stopped his buggy to think. Sara did not run from her problems. She faced them. But she was not herself these days. The Scrapper who’d faced down Mad Adam Zuckerman was carrying a child. She had turned into the woman who’d wept when she tripped over a rabbit and sent a platter of pigs knuckles and sauerkraut across the kitchen to splatter the walls and dirty the floor.
Adam urged the horses onward. He could almost laugh again, as he had that night—at the sight, at her fury at him for laughing—if he were not so out-of-reason worried about her.
She had believed, if she were a midwife, that there would be no more dead mothers or babies, which worried him the most. He’d tried to tell her that she shouldn’t take such burdens upon herself.
He only wished she’d listened.
Deep down, Adam hoped Sara understood that she could not blame herself for those babies’ deaths. She had told him the day Abby died that she was not a doctor, just a midwife. After today, did she still understand the sense of her words?
Just a midwife, not a doctor. Jordan. Much as Adam disliked the man, much as he hoped Sara would seek her husband out first, she might have gone to the medical man, in these circumstances. His opinion on the deaths of Mercy’s babies would matter to her.
Adam swore and stopped at the side of the road to light and hang his buggy lanterns. While he did so, he thought he heard something flapping in the trees, but it was too dark to see much of anything. He climbed back into his buggy and turned his horses back toward the doctor’s house on the far side of town.
Chapter 19
As Adam drove, something ate at him. He felt as if he shouldn’t be going to the doctor’s. As if he would waste precious time, if he did. And Mercy’s question nagged him.
Is Sara in labor too?
Adam turned the buggy around to go back to the Bachman house. He wanted to know every detail of the morning, of the way Sara had left them.
Once there, when he learned what Mercy’s husband had done, what he had accused Sara of, Adam wanted to strike the man. Then again, he, himself, had been more than brutal to those around him, after Abby died.
If Sara was safe, he supposed he would someday be able to forgive Enos Bachman.
“She left just a few minutes before Doctor Marks arrived,” Mercy had said. “But the doctor said he had not seen her on the road and we thought that was odd. But then he said he expected Sara was not ready to face him with what she would think of as a failure. When he left, he was going to find you, Adam.”
Adam had wanted to shout at the poor grieving woman. He wanted to rage because she had not told him all this before. But it was a quirk of their people to keep their business, their thoughts, to themselves. Coaxing was always required when information was sought. He had often been guilty of withholding it, himself, most recently, from Sara.
He should have explained to her why he could not love. He should have laid bare his past, his deep secret and great weakness. A woman should know the evil her husband inherited from his father. Sara deserved at least that much. More.
If … when he found her….
He turned back to Mercy. “What made you think she was in labor?”
“That backache of hers.”
“She’s had a sore back for weeks.”
“But when it moves low and around to the sides—”
“Labor?”
Mercy nodded.
Adam begged blankets, bread, cheese, and left Sara’s friend praying for her safe delivery. Mercy did not blame Sara for her loss, but Adam blamed Mercy’s husband for his relentless quest for sons.
Adam caught himself. Lord, he had stumbled into the trap Sara once fell into. Judgment. And he knew better than anyone what could happen, even with the best of intentions. Like Abby, Mercy might whine and beg for her husband’s attention. Like Sara, she might drive him wild with her very scent. And in bed, touching him as she rolled into and against him all night long. Despite his determination, Mercy’s husband might be no match for her womanly wiles.
Adam loved Sara’s womanly wiles. He loved—
He cursed and backed his team up. If Sara had missed seeing the doctor, she had not driven toward town.
When he heard that flapping sound again, Adam stopped the buggy. He took the lantern off its hook and followed the direction of the sound.
It had not been that long since he’d climbed a tree, and yet he found the task grueling, given the fact that his heart raced with fear and worry.
What if Sara was in labor?
Lord this was a tall tree.
What if she were calling his name even now?
No wonder he hadn’t been able to see the flapping thing from the ground, it was black.
What if she needed help?
Adam wiped the sweat from his brow. A black cloth. No, it was an apron. Could it be Sara’s?
Who could tell?
With no apron, what would she wrap the baby in, if she were in labor and if she delivered it alone, and if she….
Damn it, aprons were all the same, white or black, big or small.
Big? Adam held the lantern over the apron again and examined its pleats, not tucked and stitched, but open to accommodate an expected child. He cursed, jumped from the bottommost branch of the low-slung oak, and nearly turned his ankle. “Dummkopf,” he said, returning to his buggy.
He knew Sara didn’t go through town and she didn’t go home. He took the fork toward the pike, toward the shack where they had made lo—
“Go, go fast,” he urged his team. “Run like the racehorses you were meant to be, and don’t dopple.”
Pray God she remembered shelter awaited in this direction.
What if he lost her because he couldn’t get to her in time?
If he broke a wheel, he would kill himself, but better him than Sara. Besides, the wheels were good. He’d checked
before he left for the buggy factory, in case they needed tending while he was there.
He was an idiot, thinking about wheels and buggy factories. Sara’s very life lay in the balance. One thing he knew for certain, he could not live without Sara in his life. He could not.
She would not die. She would not.
* * * * *
Sara didn’t quite recognize the shack, but for a vague memory of her struggle for air and Adam’s description of that night. From his words, she had located the near-ruin, praise be. She would tell him later that he gave good direct—
She would tell him nothing. There would be no later for them.
Rubbing the result of that night, crooning her love for the child who seemed to be seeking a comfortable spot—she knew exactly how he felt—she tried to adjust her vision to the dark interior of the one-room wooden structure.
She found a blanket on the floor in the corner, one of theirs, she thought, left behind the last time, and shook it out. It was dusty, but warm. Wrapped in it, Sara found dry enough wood in the lean-to out back, and matches, a lantern—theirs too.
She unhitched her horse so it could graze and forage.
The blaze did not take long to catch. Sara sat on the hearth, her head against the stone, skirts tucked beneath her. She wished she had a mattress, a pile of hay, anything soft on which to lay her tired body and soothe her aching back.
She would move away from the blaze when she warmed.
A long three-quarters of an hour later, an overwhelming sense of relief and gratitude engulfed Adam when he found her in the shack, asleep against the fireplace stones, her cheek pillowed against her hand.
A miniscule ember from the fire sat smoldering on the blanket in which she was wrapped. He brushed it away and tried to be angry with her for getting herself into this mess. She might have been in grave danger. But he could not help his grin over the wild rejoicing in his heart just for looking at her, safe and sound.
Christmas Carols, he heard in his head. Alleluias and angels singing praise to God. Joy, he felt in his heart, as if the world had suddenly righted itself after spinning out of control.
Butterfly Garden Page 25
