Hidden Life (9781455510863)

by Senft, Adina

“No, no.” She wasn’t about to let a stranger make off with her case, even though it held nothing but a dress, some underthings, a hairbrush and some extra pins, and a toothbrush. “I’ll carry it.”

  “Suit yourself. Follow me, ma’am, please.”

  She should tell him not to call her ma’am, that plain folk didn’t hold with honorifics. But instead, she merely obeyed with a relief so sweet it was almost a blessing. Someone who knew where he was going. Denkes, lieber Gott.

  Down the tunnel. Across an underground plaza and up some stairs. On the other side, a river of people was so thick it rippled and moved like a waterfall down the stairs. She would never again think that a writer who referred to a “river of humanity” was exaggerating. Then outside to a cacophony of car horns, screeching brakes, loud music, and the hum of millions of people.

  “Is it always this loud here?” she shouted to the driver as he opened the door of a car parked at the curb.

  “Loud?” He looked blank. “Watch your head, ma’am.”

  She slid inside and the car took off like a spooked horse. She rocked back against the upholstery, which pushed her bonnet down over her forehead. By the time she’d righted it, they were swimming through traffic at a rate that would make her sick if she thought about it.

  So she didn’t think about it. She prayed instead.

  They surfaced in front of a glass building and the car rocked to a standstill. “Just in there, ma’am. Eighteenth floor. You can’t miss it.”

  “Denk—I mean, thank you.” She fumbled in her pocket. “How much was it?”

  “Don’t worry about that, ma’am. It’s taken care of.”

  She’d barely got the door shut when the car whipped away from the curb and vanished into a stream of yellow cars and black ones just like it. Then she turned to face the building. A door. There. She could do this.

  “Emma?”

  She couldn’t remember a time when the sound of her name had been so welcome. Turning, she saw a whip-thin young man who looked about as old as Alvin Esch coming toward her, hand outstretched.

  “Emma Stolzfus, right? I was in the lobby making some calls while I waited for you, and saw you get out of the car.”

  She took his hand. Better ask this time, just to make sure. “Tyler West?” His handshake was firm, his hair curly and brown, and his green eyes full of merry intelligence. She would overlook the pink shirt and the cherry-and-gray striped tie. Perhaps he didn’t have a wife to choose his clothes for him.

  “That’s me. You look just how I pictured you, only younger.”

  Younger? What had he been expecting—someone’s mother? “We all look much the same.”

  He laughed as if she’d told the best joke all year. “I knew there was a reason I was looking forward to this. Come on up. Let me take your case.” She surrendered it to him. “Do you want to talk a few minutes first? Our reservation’s not until seven-thirty.”

  “Reservation?”

  “Yes, for dinner.” A glass wall whooshed open and he ushered her inside. The doors closed and her knees nearly buckled as the floor rose under her feet. “Oops, steady there.”

  “This is an elevator.” Her ears popped and she swallowed.

  “Sure is. Never been in one?”

  “There are no buildings this tall in Lancaster County.”

  “Good point. We wouldn’t survive without elevators around here. Eighteen flights of stairs four times a day? No thanks. Anyway, we’re going to Eleven Park West. Ever heard of it?”

  The door opened and he indicated she should get off. Her legs still felt a little wobbly, and she swallowed again. “I’ve heard of parks. Those we have.”

  Another laugh. “This is a restaurant. It’s kinda different. I hope you like it. Anyway, here’s where I earn my keep.” He showed her into an office that, like his building, was all glass and metal. Outside the window, the world fell away into empty space, punctuated by buildings as tall as this one, some of glass, some of concrete, all rather forbidding and gray.

  Emma’s stomach still hadn’t recovered from the elevator. The view out the window did not help. When he waved her into a chair, she didn’t protest, and focused on the piles of paper standing in heaps all over the place and the colorful spines of other people’s books on a big wood shelf.

  Which was gut, because then she didn’t have to meet his eyes as he took her in from top to bottom. With her, there was a lot to take in. Emma didn’t think she could bear the part that inevitably happened next—the polite smile and the dropping of the gaze beneath the hat brim as a man turned away to go and find the girls who were prettier and livelier.

  Tyler West noticed the direction of her gaze. “Those are the books of the people I represent,” he said. “Someday maybe I’ll see Inherit the Earth there.”

  At least he was still talking. Because this was a business meeting, and he was not a boy at a Sunday singing, looking for a girl to ride home with him. Keep that idea in your head, Emma.

  “That isn’t likely.” Kind as he had been, sending a car for her and paying for the train ticket, she had to make him understand before he spent another dime. “It’s not our way to publish books. Especially not a woman.” Imagine if it were, though. Imagine people paying cash money to read her words. They would not turn away to find someone more interesting. They would listen to what she had to say—listen voluntarily.

  Nei. That was the devil talking, doing his best to tempt her with the thing she wanted most.

  “I’ve been doing a little research.” He reached over and poked a big book on top of one of his stacks of paper. On the front of it was a woman from Ohio, from the look of her Kapp, walking down a road and holding the hands of her Kinner. “I understand about the Ordnung and about Gelassenheit and all that.”

  “Your pronunciation is very good.” Surely he hadn’t grown up plain. Not a man who wore a shirt like that.

  “I took German in college. The thing is, I could make it part of any book deal that you wouldn’t have to do promo. That you’d write the books and maybe have a Facebook page, but that’s it. No book tours, no TV, no radio—though that might be tough to get past Marketing.”

  She stared at him, helplessly. “What is promo? And a book of faces? Are they anything like die Bekanntmachung? Or maybe es Pickder?”

  He stared back. “It’s—they’re—”

  Unbidden, she felt a smile coming. She tried to fight it, but the look on his face was so identical to the one she no doubt had on her own as they both tried to translate the other’s language that she finally gave up and let it go.

  At her hoot of laughter, he relaxed and stopped staring. His gaze lost the quality that made her think of people looking in shop windows, and became the kind that one person gives to another when they meet among friends. “I’m so sorry, Emma. You’re absolutely right. You don’t know about any of that stuff—and it’s exactly why your work is so different and appealing.”

  He got up from behind his desk and came around to fold his long body into the other guest chair. “So now that we’ve got that cleared up, tell me about yourself. I want to know about the woman who wrote that book.”

  She’d wanted someone to listen, hadn’t she? Well, here he was…and Emma couldn’t think of a word to say. “It’s—it’s not seemly for me to talk about myself.”

  Tyler didn’t miss a beat. “Tell me about your family. What does your house look like?”

  That was easy enough. “I live in the Daadi Haus with Mamm—with my mother. It’s on my sister Karen’s—I mean, my brother-in-law John’s farm on Edgeware Road.”

  He nodded. “I have to confess that I cyberstalked you. I checked out the address on Google Earth.”

  She shook her head at him. “You’re doing it again. Speak English.”

  “How about I show you?” He pulled a thin computer off the desk like the librarians had in the Whinburg Public Library, and tapped a few keys. He spun it around so she could see the screen.

  She blinked. “That
’s our barn.”

  “A bird’s-eye view. So this little building here—” He made the world zip sideways. “—this is the grandfather house?”

  Goodness. There was hers and Mamm’s washing on the line, for the whole world to see.

  Literally the whole world.

  Blushing, she looked up. “How does it do this?”

  “Satellites, up in the atmosphere, taking pictures.”

  “Hmph.” She sat back, giving his computer a dirty look. “They shouldn’t take pictures of us. We don’t like it.”

  “It takes pictures of everyone. Any address you want, you can have a look.”

  “It isn’t right.”

  “Maybe not, but it’s there. I hope you don’t mind I floated over your farm to see what kind of world you live in.”

  “The starlings do it and there’s nothing I can do about them, either, except throw a rock.”

  He threw up his hands. “All right, I promise I won’t do it again. So you started to say ‘Karen’s farm.’ Who’s Karen?”

  She told him, and before she knew it, she was telling him about Mamm and Maryann looking after her and Pap’s funeral and the quilting frolic she had missed. And he told her about his apartment in the Village, wherever that was. It must be a long way away, because there was nothing but city for miles, and finding a place with a bit of grass around it couldn’t be easy. He had two sisters, both married, and his parents lived in Florida. And that took them into a discussion of whether it was better to swim in the ocean or in a river, and then he was looking at his watch and saying they’d be late for dinner if they didn’t get moving.

  At the restaurant, she realized it was possible to be surrounded by flowers and beauty and space, and still be so uncomfortable that she could hardly sit still. Did everyone she met have to call her ma’am? A man in a suit pulled out her chair and she stared at him, wondering why she could not sit there. Once Tyler resolved that, the menu was another puzzle. Tyler explained that she could choose one thing from each row on a card, and they would make a dish out of it. She finally told him to order two of everything, and eleven courses later, wondered how such tiny, pretty little bites could make a person feel so full.

  “I’d love to take you to a show,” Tyler said as they waited outside for a yellow taxi.

  “A show? Do you mean a movie?”

  “No, a Broadway show. A play, usually with music.”

  She shook her head. “I would not go in any case. Paying for food is one thing. We all have to eat. But paying for someone to entertain me is just frivolous.”

  He waved an arm and a cab swerved over to the curb. Emma wondered if she could make one do that.

  Probably not.

  He pointed out one thing after another—Times Square, lit up as bright as daylight, the crowds waiting in line outside theater after theater—as if he expected her to know landmarks from his roaring city. Maybe this Empire State Building was where he turned to go home, the way Moses Yoder’s fence told the horses. Or that enormous television on the side of that hotel, as big as Amelia Beiler’s new garden—maybe that one told him he was close to a friend’s house.

  “Is there nowhere green in this place?” she finally asked. “Nowhere quiet?”

  For answer, he leaned over and spoke into the little window to the man driving. “Central Park.”

  And within minutes, there they were in the midst of trees and lawn and flowers—even a lake. With huge relief, she climbed out of the taxi and allowed Tyler to take her bag.

  “We should have dropped this off at the hotel, but never mind,” he said. “It doesn’t weigh anything. Is it empty?”

  “A change of clothes doesn’t weigh much. It’s not as if I was going to be gone for a month.”

  “My sisters would be amazed. They can’t go away for a weekend without the van being stuffed to the gills.”

  “Do they have big families?”

  “One has a baby. The other one doesn’t plan on kids.”

  No children? On purpose? “I have a friend who would thank the good Gott on her knees if she could have a baby.”

  “Not my sister. She made good and sure her husband felt the same way before she married him. And, you know, whatever. It’s a personal choice.”

  “We believe each child is a blessing from God.”

  “And what does Emma believe?”

  Unaccountably, her throat closed up, and she paused to look across the lake at a little restaurant all strung with white lights. “It doesn’t matter, does it? Without a husband, there’s nothing to talk about.”

  “One of the girls in foreign rights adopted a baby girl from China. She’s single.”

  Emma began to walk again. It was dark, but the paths were brightly lit and full of people. There must certainly be stars up above, but she couldn’t see a single one. The lights of the city drowned even God’s handiwork.

  “It’s possible in Whinburg, too, that a woman could adopt if there were children in need. A woman will raise the children if something happens to her sister. The family will step in and help, no matter what happens. I know a man whose wife left him, and his family is helping to raise his girls and the baby.”

  Tyler huffed a breath, almost as if he didn’t believe her. “That’s what I call a support network. The girl I was talking about has a nanny. She must be independently wealthy—she sure isn’t dishing out a thousand a week on what the agency pays her.”

  “A thousand a week? To look after one baby?”

  “Plus room and board.”

  “Goodness. I’m in the wrong business.”

  She’d surprised another laugh out of him. “Me, too. I guess that’s the advantage of your big families, though. Lots of hands to help. So what’s he like?”

  They were passing under an arched bridge, so she couldn’t see his face clearly. “Who?”

  “This man you were talking about whose wife left. Is he a nice guy?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I guess it’s a roundabout way of asking if there’s anyone in your life. See, I get what you’re doing. We’ve spent a whole evening together and you’ve told me everything there is to know about Whinburg and your family and the church, and nearly nothing about what I wanted to know, namely Emma Stolzfus.”

  “That’s not true.” But the simple fact was, she and her community and everyone in it were one and the same, or as good as. Talk about one and you talked about the rest.

  “I make my living keeping my ear to the ground. I can tell what a person means by listening to what they don’t say.”

  “You’re a rosebush in a field of hay, then,” she muttered. All she wanted was someone to hear her when she spoke. This man was listening even when she didn’t. It was enough to make a woman want to hang around this awful place, just to lap up some more of it.

  “So let me guess. He’s a hardworking Amish man who wants to put a roof over his kids’ heads, so he does, but meanwhile, the kids need a mom, right?”

  “I think I pretty much told you that. And it’s wrong to be thinking that way. Their mother may have left with that Englisch boy, but they are still married in the eyes of God.”

  “Oooh. I smell a scandal.”

  “Poor Grant. If not for the Yoders standing around him like a fortress, the gossip would have been even worse than it was.” It felt so freeing talking about Grant like this. Chances were zero that it would ever get back to Whinburg from this source, even with the picture-taking satellites.

  “Not a lot of wives leaving their husbands where you live?”

  “No. We do not believe in divorce. It is still hard for me to believe she would do it. And with three little children, too.”

  “What did she do?”

  “All I know is that she lives in Springfield, Missouri. And we heard recently that she is missing.”

  He pulled out the slender wafer of glass and metal that he called a phone, and tappity-tapped on its surface. “What was her name?” When sh
e told him, he tapped some more. “Hm. Even Google can’t find anything. That doesn’t happen much anymore, with everyone putting their lives up for daily consumption.”

  “It doesn’t matter whether she is on your phone or not. She’d have done better to appreciate the gifts she had and not run after those she didn’t.”

  “Emma Stolzfus, I think you’re jealous.”

  In a sudden spurt of temper, Emma snatched her case out of his hand and marched away down the path. She was as tall as he, and her legs were toned from years of walking country roads. It wasn’t long before she’d left him in the dust, calling pathetically after her in the dark.

  Presumptuous, arrogant man, calling her names! She’d just show him!

  In the end, though, when her little tantrum had burned itself to cold ash, the joke was on her. She stood in the middle of acres of dark, with frightening shapes of people brushing past and not a familiar landmark or face to be seen. She would be robbed. Someone would hit her on the head and the police would find her in the morning, and people with their little phones could read all about her. None of them would know the truth of why she’d been in New York.

  “Emma!” She turned as Tyler West loped up behind her. “Look, I’m sorry I offended you. I didn’t mean it. Please don’t do that again—this place can be a little dicey after dark if you’re a woman alone.”

  Talk about pathetic. She was so glad to see him she would hug him if she knew how. “I’m sorry, too. My pride got pricked and if I had been knocked over the head by a thief, it would have been my own fault. How did you find me?” It was a miracle he had.

  He nodded toward her hair. “The bonnet. Even in the dark, it’s hard to miss.”

  She swallowed the lump of gratitude in her throat. “It’s called a Kapp. I’m glad I put my away bonnet in my case, then.”

  “Come on, let’s get you to the hotel. You must be tired.”

  She should have been. But she wasn’t. “You were right, Tyler West.” She picked up her steps to match his as they headed toward a glow of light.

  “That’s unusual. About what?”

  “I am jealous. Lavina Weaver has nothing, not her family or her husband or even the truth. And yet I’m jealous of her.”