A Daughter's Truth

by Laura Bradford

  “I’m sorry. I did not mean to make anyone worry.”

  Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out his phone, swept his finger across the screen, and then grinned. “I still can’t believe this—any of this.”

  “This?”

  “Yeah. That I’m standing here at Miller’s Pond, talking to my twenty-two-year-old daughter . . . That I’m about to call my secretary to tell her I tracked you down and we’re going to hang out together here for a little while . . . That I’m going to be able to call my mother tomorrow morning and tell her she has a granddaughter . . . It’s a little surreal, quite frankly.”

  “Yah.” Emma nudged her chin toward the rock but remained in place as Brad prepared to make his call. “I will meet you at the rock. There is something I must get first.”

  He paused his finger on the phone’s touch screen. “If you need to go somewhere first, I can take you.”

  “I just need to get something there”—she pointed to the opposite side of the pond—“and then I will bring it to you. I will be back before you are done with your call.”

  She smiled away the question in his eyes and shooed him toward the rock, his answering laugh soon followed by the sound of his secretary’s name. When he was safely in route to their chosen meeting spot, Emma turned and made her way around the outer edge of the pond, her mind’s eye skipping ahead to the drawstring bag housed in the oak tree on the other side.

  For so long, she’d imagined the trinkets she’d snuck off Ruby’s grave every year as a sort of birthday present. She’d always wondered who left them and why Dat had gotten so upset by them, but those questions had always shifted to the background against the fun of the new item. When she’d still been in school, she’d hidden the surprise in her lunch pail until it was time to walk home past the pond. When she completed her schooling, there had been no reason to hide the item as she’d always go straight from the cemetery to the pond. But no matter her age or the route in which she took to get to her secret tree, she always spent time on the rock with the new gift. She’d turn it over, study it, try to imagine its significance, and then carefully add it to the bag.

  Now, though, because of the locket and everything it had led her to over the past nine days, she was about to learn what everything meant and why Brad had been putting them there every year on the anniversary of her birth mother’s death—details she both wanted and maybe even dreaded a wee bit, too. Everything about her life had been a lie thus far. Except those presents. They’d made her feel special on a day that never was. Yet, in hearing the truth about each one, she’d have to say goodbye to yet another part of her childhood—a part filled with silly little stories and games she’d made up while carrying each new present to its home inside the tree.

  The crunching beneath her boots slowed as she reached the tree, her heart suddenly torn between knowing and not knowing. Slowly, she lifted her chin until all she could see in front of her was the early February sun peeking over the tips of the tree’s bare branches, its answering warmth on her cheeks quieting her heart. Three deep breaths later, she lowered her attention back to the tree and the hollow her seven-year-old self had disguised from the world with a piece of old bark.

  With practiced fingers, she removed the loose bark, set it against the base of the tree, and then reached inside for the dark blue drawstring bag she’d smuggled out of her room fifteen years earlier. Year by year, item by item, she’d filled the cotton bag and kept it hidden in this exact spot. And with the exception of Mary the other day, Emma had never shared its existence or contents with anyone.

  She ran her hand across the bag’s lumpy innards, her mind’s eye filling in the coordinating item.

  * The stuffed horse . . .

  * The red rubber ball . . .

  A second feel had her changing the rubber ball to the baseball before moving on.

  * The snow globe with the skaters . . .

  * The whittled bird . . .

  The other things were harder to feel through the cloth, but she knew they were all present. Clutching the bag to her chest, she peeked around the trunk to the Englisher on the other side of the pond. She took a moment to soak him in, to try to catch her heart up to everything she knew thus far.

  For twenty-two years, Wayne and Rebeccah Lapp had been Dat and Mamm. She never really saw herself in them the way she did her siblings, but they were Dat and Mamm. Now, she knew better.

  Now, she knew that her real mamm, Ruby, was buried not far away, and her real dat, Brad, was an Englisher with Emma’s same hair and eyes.

  Mamm said Brad hadn’t cared about Emma and Ruby, that he had left Ruby to deal with their sin, alone. Yet everything Brad had told her so far about his relationship with Ruby didn’t match Mamm’s words. In fact, the stories couldn’t be more different.

  So, who was right?

  And where, exactly, did that leave Emma?

  Glancing down at the bag, she gathered her breath and headed back around the pond, her need to know about the contents pushing its way past a whole different set of questions about herself and her birth parents—questions that seemed to multiply by the hour. She could feel him watching her as she maneuvered her way around downed limbs, through piles of old leaves, and across the plank of wood that served as a makeshift bridge from one side of a tiny inlet to the other. When she finally reached the rock, she saw him wipe the back of his hand across his eyes.

  “Is . . . is Sue Ellen okay?” she asked.

  He dropped his hand to his thigh and nodded. “She’s fine. Glad to hear you’re okay and that I found you. Why?”

  “You look . . . I don’t know . . . a little unhappy, I guess.”

  “I’m happy, Emma.” He patted the part of the rock she’d claimed earlier, and, when she accepted the nonverbal invite, he pointed a lazy finger in the direction she’d just come. “Watching you just now? Walking around the pond? It was like watching Ruby. You’re about the same height and there’s so much about the way you move, the way you carry yourself, that is just like her.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  His focus snapped back to her face. “No! Don’t be! It’s a good thing, Emma. It’s as it should be. You’re Ruby’s daughter. My daughter.” He nudged his chin in the direction of her lap. “I’m pretty sure my call to Sue Ellen took less than a minute—two at the absolute longest. Either way, it wasn’t time for you to go home.”

  She followed his questioning gaze to the bag now resting in her lap. “I-I didn’t need to go home to get this. I keep it inside an old oak over there. It has been there for many years—fifteen, in fact.”

  “You’ve kept a bag inside a tree for fifteen years? Why? What’s in it?”

  “I was kind of hoping you could tell me.” She inched her fingers up to the top of the bag and then yanked on the drawstring opening. “Every year, on my birthday, we would start the day with a visit to the cemetery. To Ruby’s grave. Mamm would get very quiet and I knew, when I looked up at her, there would be tears on her cheeks. I also knew, in those early years, that when I looked up at Dat, I would see anger.”

  “Anger?” Brad barked.

  “Yah. He did not like the things we would find on Ruby’s grave each year.”

  “He didn’t like the things?”

  “Yah. He would throw them in the English trash can when we would leave.” Sensing Brad’s growing irritation, she jumped to the part that mattered most at that moment—the part that got her to the bag. “The first time I went to the cemetery alone, I was seven. I stopped at the grave before school, and I put the little picnic basket in my lunch pail. I meant to throw it away as Dat had all the others, but I couldn’t. My birthdays were never like they were for the other kids. There was cake and some sort of present, but there were no smiles, no laughter, no special hugs. It was a day I didn’t get excited about the way my brothers and sisters did. But that day, when I went inside the gate at the cemetery, I was excited to see what was on Ruby’s grave. It was as if someone had left a present for me .
. . for my birthday. So that day, on the way home from school, I hid it in the oak tree. And when I was able to, I came back with this bag.” She lifted it up just long enough to give it a little shake. “I did the same the next year with the silver rose, and the year after that with the snow globe and the tiny skaters inside, and—”

  “The stuffed horse, the picture of the dandelion, the bubble blower thing, the torn ticket stub—”

  “So, it is a ticket?” She reached inside the bag and slowly removed each item, arranging them on top of the rock in the order in which she’d found them. When she got to the torn slip of paper housed in the clear plastic covering, she took in the details she’d all but memorized and then looked up at Brad. “What was it a ticket for?”

  “I took her to a carnival. The ticket was for her first ride on a Ferris wheel . . .” He fingered the clear plastic covering and, at Emma’s nod, took the torn ticket in his hand. “I left these things for you, but I never dreamed you actually got them.”

  “I know now that these things were for me, that what I pretended for so long was actually true, but I don’t understand why. Why would you leave presents for me if you thought I was dead?” she asked.

  “Because I had to. To get through the day. I never got to see you, or hold you, or tell you I loved you. So I did those things the best way I could with”—he waved the ticket stub at the items spread out between them—“these things. Every year. On your birthday. My mom suggested it as a way to help me through the pain. And it worked. At least a little. It helped me feel connected. Like I was getting to celebrate your special day with you from down here.

  “Even when I was away, still lashing out at the world around me, I always came back in time to leave your next gift. Never missed a single one.”

  Pulling her knees to her chest, Emma considered his words, the quiet relief they allowed warming her from the inside, out. “So they really were meant for me. . . .”

  “Every one of them.” He rolled a thin stick between his fingers before chucking it onto the ground. “They were my way of telling you about your mom and me. The way we were, the way we loved each other. Looking back, I think getting to stand there by the grave, telling you about them, helped validate all of it for me somehow. My feelings, the relationship, all of it.”

  She rested her chin atop her knees. “Validate it? How so?”

  “Ruby and I were seventeen and eighteen when we started up. People don’t take that seriously. They call it young love and puppy love and all sorts of demeaning terms. And maybe that’s the case for a lot of teen relationships, I don’t know. But I know ours was real. I know my love for Ruby was real. I know I wanted a future with her and with you. And I know my world was forever turned upside down when I lost her, and then you, too.”

  Emma dropped her legs back down to the rock, and picked up the miniature picnic basket that had started her fifteen-year collection. “I remember peeking inside my lunch pail many times that first day. I would peek to make sure it was still there, I would peek to make sure no one else had found it, and I would peek just so I could see how pretty it was. I even wished I could take it home and play with it, but I knew I couldn’t.”

  A darkness dulled his eyes. “And you say Wayne threw some of my gifts away?”

  “I do not remember anything about my first, second, or third birthdays, but I know he did on my fourth, fifth, and sixth.” She looked again at the tiny basket between her fingers. “Tell me about this first one.... Why a picnic basket?”

  Brad met and then followed her gaze down to her hands, the anger she had sensed in him just moments earlier chased away by a soft laugh. “We had a handful of cookie picnics, Ruby and me. Most of them here, at the pond. On this very rock, in fact. She’d fill an old lunch pail with cookies she’d made. Her oatmeal ones were my favorite.”

  “I make oatmeal cookies! Levi likes them a lot, too—though Liddy Mast makes them for him now.”

  He studied her closely. “Levi? Is he your boyfriend?”

  “N-no,” she sputtered. “He . . . he’s just a boy I know. His sister, Mary, is my best friend. I go to hymn sings with them.”

  His jaw tightened. “Ahhh, hymn sings. I remember those. It’s where you go to find someone to court.”

  “It’s not really like that. We go to be with others our age. But yah, many do court after meeting someone suitable at a hymn sing.” Emma turned the basket over in her fingers one last time and then set it back down on the rock. “So, the basket is because you had cookie picnics?”

  Shaking his head ever so slightly, he picked up the basket and studied it from all sides. “No. The basket is for the full-fledged picnic I put together for us one afternoon. I wanted her to see what an English picnic is like with the fancy basket, the traditional blanket with the red and black squares, sandwiches, grapes, chips, brownies, and Frisbee.”

  “Frisbee? What is that?”

  “It’s a round plastic disc that’s about the size of a dinner plate that you can throw in the air.” His grin spread into an all-out smile. “Ruby hadn’t ever seen one before, either. But by the time we had to call it quits so she could get home, she’d actually gotten quite good. That’s the way she was, you know. She had a way of picking things up quickly, and picking them up well.”

  Emma tried to imagine the game as he described, but without ever having seen it herself, she couldn’t be sure she had it right. Instead, she took the conversation back to more familiar ground. “And the food? Did she like it?”

  “She did. Very much. And even if she hadn’t told me that again and again on the drive back to our drop-off spot, I’d have known simply because of the way her eyes sparkled the whole time.”

  Nodding, she moved on to her eighth birthday and the tiny rose. “What about this?” she asked, holding it atop her open palm. “Why did you give me this? What does it mean? And how is something so small so heavy?”

  His laugh reddened her cheeks. “It’s heavy because it’s pewter.”

  “Ruby liked pewter?”

  “No. I didn’t give this to you because of what it’s made of. I gave it to you because of what it is—a rose. Pewter just meant it wouldn’t die like a real flower.” He took it from her hand and held it close to his nose. “I bought her a rose once. On Valentine’s Day. She said it was the prettiest flower she’d ever seen. I told her that made sense since she was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen. Because she was—the prettiest. Until I saw you standing in my office the other day, anyway.”

  Emma held her hands to her flushed cheeks and shook her head. “I’m not pretty. I’m Amish. We’re plain people.”

  “Funny thing is, I used to think that about Amish girls, too. To me, they all dressed the same, covered their hair the same, didn’t use makeup like the girls in my high school, didn’t wear rings or necklaces or anything like that. And then I met Ruby. She didn’t need that red garbage on her cheeks or all that stuff on her eyes. All she had to do was smile at me. Or laugh at something I said. Heck, even when she cried she was beautiful.”

  “Ruby cried with you?” At his slow, labored nod, she drew back. “Why? Was it because of me? Because I was coming?”

  “No, Emma. It wasn’t because of you. It was because . . .” He glanced across the pond, seemingly oblivious to the pewter rose he still held between his fingers. “Sometimes life just seems a little uncertain. A little scary, you know? Some people deal with it by yelling or stamping around. Others get quiet or cry. It’s life.”

  “The Amish are not to yell and stamp around.”

  Closing his hand around the rose, he sighed. “I know.”

  She waited to see what else he’d say, but, when he remained silent, she moved on to the present that had marked her ninth birthday.

  “I loved this one.” Scooping up the tiny snow globe, she took a quick look at the skaters inside, shook her hand, and grinned as snow fell down around the couple inside. “I know it is silly, but I would pretend it was me in there skating. Only I would pret
end the girl was wearing a kapp and a dress like me.”

  “She did.”

  Startled, Emma looked at him across the top of the clear, plastic dome. “I don’t understand.”

  “The girl did wear a kapp and dress.” Turning Emma’s hand so he, too, could see inside, Brad continued. “I took Ruby skating one afternoon. I borrowed some skates from a girl at school and I took Ruby to the pond next to my house. While we were there, it started snowing just like this.”

  Emma returned her attention to the figures now covered with white flecks. “Did she like it?”

  “She loved it. Took her a little while to get the hang of it, but by the time we were done, she was trying to make patterns in the ice by turning in little circles.” He dropped his hands to the rock and leaned back. “Whenever I hear her laugh in my thoughts, it’s from that day.”

  “I wish I could hear her laugh,” Emma whispered.

  “I do, too, kiddo.”

  Again, she looked at the skaters. Only this time, instead of the happiness they’d always stirred inside her, there was a sadness she didn’t want to feel. Not with him—

  “Emma? Are you okay?”

  Setting the globe back on the rock, she shrugged off his question in favor of her tenth birthday gift—the stuffed horse. “It took me the whole walk here that day to come up with just the right name for her, but I did.” Emma ran her fingers down the toy’s silky mane and then handed it to Brad. “I called her Sugar. Still do.”

  “Sugar . . . I like that.” He turned the horse over, inspected it from all angles, and then set it back down.

  “Her color made me think of the cinnamon sugar Mamm—I mean, Rebeccah—sometimes puts on the top of her apple pie. If she forgets, someone is always quick to remind her.”

  Brad’s jaw noticeably tightened, yet he said nothing.

  “One time, last year, when Esther had just turned four, she was helping me make an apple pie. She was standing on the bench so she could see what I was doing and she noticed I hadn’t put the cinnamon sugar on yet. When my back was turned doing something else, she dumped the whole jar onto the top.” Emma’s laugh echoed in the cool winter air. “That was too much sugar. Even for Esther.”