Piece by Piece

by Laura Bradford

  She forced herself to keep moving, to keep reading, to keep acknowledging the lives lost. Row by row, she made her way from the front to the back as the sun slipped still farther toward the horizon.

  Abram Bontrager, thirty-four . . .

  Miriam Dienner, eighty-two . . .

  Naomi Stoltzfus, seventy-six . . .

  Jonah Troyer, ninety-one . . .

  Rose Schlabach—

  Pressing her hand hard against her ensuing gasp, she shifted her eyes to the small grassless mound jutting up from the ground and then back to the flat white rectangular marker.

  October 15, 2019

  November 30, 2019

  Slowly, Dani lowered herself to her knees as her focus returned to the six-week-old’s name.

  No...

  It wasn’t possible.

  If it were, she would have known.

  After all, December may have been busy with the usual holiday trappings and parties that came with having a family, but there was no way Dani would have missed something so tragically awful in Lydia’s annual—

  The punch of truth pushed her back onto her haunches with a strangled sob.

  There had been no letter from Lydia this past Christmas. No update on the children, or Elijah, or even Lydia, herself.

  No, for the first time in twenty-seven years she hadn’t heard from the woman who’d gone on to open her heart and her home to Dani, and Dani hadn’t even noticed . . .

  Sinking down beside the tiny mound, she buried her head in her hands and began to cry. “Oh, Lydia . . . I’m so sorry, my sweet friend. I-I didn’t know . . .”

  Chapter 14

  Even without a clear vantage point of the driveway’s intersection with the road, Dani knew the buggy carrying Lydia and her family had made the turn toward whatever farm was hosting church that week. The man standing beside the barn with his hand now back in his front pocket told her that.

  On any other day, the epic battle of goodbye waves between the uncle and his niece might have coaxed something resembling a smile to her lips, but at that moment, all she felt was relief that it was finally over.

  Slipping into the jacket she’d draped over the kitchen bench, Dani stepped onto the front porch, drew in a fortifying breath, and then made her way toward the barn and the insistent moos reaching through the open door.

  “Every day you act as if you’re being starved, don’t you, Little Guy?” The ping of metal, followed by a muted thud, told her Caleb had liberated a bucket from its hook and turned it upside down on the ground within arm’s reach of the rapidly growing calf. A quick peek before she stepped inside showed she was right. “Yet I know you already had your first bottle of the day little more than three hours ago.”

  As he held the bottle steady while the calf latched on, Caleb’s low, quick laugh echoed across the barn. “That’s right, Little Guy, I know what you’re up to. You may be snowing other people with your act, but you’re not snowing me . . . I’m on to you and your ways. Big-time.”

  “He really is a bit of a drama queen, isn’t he?”

  Caleb’s head whipped around until she, rather than the calf, was the recipient of his slow, even smile. “Greeaat. Now you’ve gone and taught him just how far-reaching his cries can go.” He glanced back at the calf, mid–eye roll. “No place—not even the grossdawdy house—is immune from your theatrics, eh?”

  When the only answer came via a hard tug on the bottle, Caleb muttered something about gratitude and humility and then brought his complete focus back on Dani, his brow furrowing as he did. “You don’t look like you got much sleep last night.”

  “I need to ask you something,” she said, crossing to the pen and the view it afforded of both the calf and Lydia’s brother. “Something important.”

  His gaze traveled back to the calf for as long as it took to gauge the bottle’s rapidly decreasing contents. “Absolutely. I’m all ears.”

  She cut to the chase. “Did Lydia lose a child in the fall—a little girl named Rose?”

  The second the words were out and she saw the way Caleb pulled back on the bucket, she rushed to smooth away the crassness of her delivery. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have blurted that out the way I just did. It’s just that . . .” Tilting her head back, she searched for the right words, the right tone. “I went for a walk yesterday. While everyone else was eating dinner. I-I needed to clear my head. Needed to distract myself with something other than my life for a little while.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “I walked that way”—she pointed in the direction she’d gone—“and I saw a few farms, a creek, and the one-room schoolhouse I imagine the boys attend.”

  A strong tug from the calf, followed by a satiated moo, prompted Caleb to withdraw the now-empty bottle and rest it atop his knee. “Construction paper flowers in the window?”

  She nodded.

  “Then, yeah, you found their school.” He turned the bottle round and round inside his calloused hand and then rose onto his feet. “Same place Lydia and I went to when we were kids, too.”

  She heard his answer, even processed it on some level, but the one-room schoolhouse was already in her mind’s rearview mirror. “I still had enough daylight to keep walking after that, so I went a little further.”

  “You went to the cemetery.” It was a statement, not a question.

  Again, she made herself nod, her throat tightening.

  “And you saw Rose’s grave.”

  Squeezing her eyes closed against the image of the tiny dirt mound, she nodded a third time.

  “I see.”

  “Tell me,” she whispered.

  Caleb tipped the brim of his cowboy hat lower on his forehead and turned his face from Dani’s direct view. “I can still hear the slam of the front door when Lydia came running out with the baby in her arms that day. I was standing right there”—he nudged his chin toward the area to the left of the main door—“helping Elijah fix a wheel on the buggy. I heard the door, I heard the sound of feet running across the front porch and down the steps, and when I looked outside, and saw the way she was looking down at Rose, I knew it wasn’t good.”

  “What happened?”

  “It was SIDS.”

  “Sudden Infant Death Syndrome,” she said, processing.

  He spread his arms wide, the bewilderment he still felt even now, months later, plain to see. “She wasn’t wrapped too tight, she wasn’t in a room that was too cold, and she’d been on her back, not her stomach. But none of that stuff matters with SIDS. It just happens. No rhyme or reason.”

  Pushing back from the pen, Dani wandered over to the stall where Elijah’s buggy horse had started her day. Inside, waiting for the animal’s eventual return from a day of worship and visiting, was a bale of hay, a bucket of water, and the remnants of an oat breakfast. Dani tried to focus on her surroundings, to let them quiet her growing restlessness, but she couldn’t.

  “It’s only been what?” she asked, moving on to the mules and the pigs before circling back to Caleb. “Six months?”

  “Five as of last week.”

  Five months . . .

  “I thought maybe it was a different Schlabach at first. Maybe a niece or a cousin of Elijah’s . . .”

  Returning to the calf’s pen, Caleb scooped up the bucket on which he’d been sitting, and carried it back to its hook. “You should have seen Nettie and the boys with her. They were always trying to outdo each other in the hopes they’d be the first one to make her laugh. And they were close. Her little smiles were getting bigger and coming faster every day. It wasn’t gonna be long before she was doing that funny little heh sound babies make when they laugh at that age.”

  She remembered it well.

  “I . . .” She cast about for the right words, the right something, but came up empty. “I don’t know what to say.”

  Even after the bucket was safely back in place, Caleb still kept his hand on the hook as if he needed it to remain standing. She realized he did when he leaned his h
ead against the wall and released a breath so labored and so troubled it stole her own. “I tried to bring her back. To do CPR until the crew got here, but she was gone. At six weeks old.”

  “Where were the other kids?” she asked when she could think of nothing else to say.

  “The boys were still at school, and Nettie was inside with my sister.”

  “So Nettie was there? When Lydia found—” She stopped, unable to finish the sentence.

  “Yes.”

  It was too much to take in, too much to absorb.

  “I took them home to my house that night. The four of them. I wanted Lydia and Elijah to have some time alone before the buggies started arriving, in droves, for the viewing and then the funeral.” He pushed back from the wall and wandered his way back to the calf’s pen. “The Amish believe death is God’s will. Always. But even the most devout have to struggle when it’s someone so young. I know I did. Still do, as a matter of fact.”

  She thought about Maggie and Spencer and Ava and how she could barely move, let alone function, without them. She thought about Jeff and how she felt his loss most at night, when his arms should be around her, holding her close. She thought about her mom and the sensation of being rudderless in her absence. She thought about how the passage of time only made everything harder.

  “I don’t understand,” she said, shaking her thoughts back into the moment. “How . . . How can Lydia be so cheerful all the time? How can she go on the way she does—playing with the children, making sure I have food, keeping up with all the chores around the farm? How does she go on at all?”

  He reached across the top of the pen, rubbed the calf between the ears, and then turned back to Dani, his expression pensive. “She has to,” he said, his voice not unkind. “The Lord called Rose to be with Him, not Lydia.”

  “But that was her baby,” Dani rasped, wrapping her arms around herself. “She carried that child inside her for nine months for . . . what? So He could snatch her back six weeks later?”

  “It is not the Amish way to question God’s will.”

  The weight of his words pressed down on her chest. “God’s will?” she echoed. “God’s will? Have you seen the kind of mother Lydia is? The life she’s giving those children? They smile all the time! She lets them be kids who play with kittens, and feed baby bottles to cows, and”—her voice faltered and broke—“get soaking wet jumping in puddles in the rain. And she does it with them.”

  Caleb nodded, his gaze never leaving her face.

  “Lydia isn’t the type to dream about time away from her kids,” she continued. “No, that was—” Clamping her lips together, she waited for her breath to slow, her budding anger to abate.

  “Finish your sentence, Danielle.”

  She held up her hand, palm out. “I just don’t know how she can go on the way she does. How she can move through her days so unaffected.”

  Caleb jerked back as if her words were a slap. “I didn’t say she was unaffected, Danielle. Quite the contrary, in fact. I said she goes on because the Lord called Rose home, not Lydia. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t hurt, doesn’t mourn, doesn’t struggle with all the whys and hows you’d expect in the wake of something so awful.”

  “But she smiles, and she laughs,” Dani said by way of explanation. “I can’t imagine ever being there again. I’m in too much pain. And”—she lifted her gaze to his—“I’m angry.”

  “At whom?”

  “Myself, mostly. For not going with them, for not nixing the outing completely, for not insisting they come home sooner, for losing track of time, for—” She stopped, closed her eyes, and then opened them to find Caleb watching her, waiting.

  “Who else?”

  “Who else what?”

  “You said you’re mad at yourself, mostly. That means there’s someone else, too.”

  “I’m mad at God.”

  “For taking them?” he asked.

  “For not taking me, instead.” Dani started toward the door but thought better of it and returned to her spot beside the calf’s pen. “The way Lydia still smiles and laughs? That won’t ever happen for me again.”

  “Lydia smiles and laughs on occasion, sure. But she has hard days, Danielle. Really hard. There are days when she has difficulty getting up in the morning, and other days when she barely has enough energy to get through a conversation or a routine chore. There are days when the smile that has always come so easily for her is just not there. And sometimes there are days when I can tell, just by looking at her, that she’s somewhere else completely. Somewhere dark and sad and lonely, somewhere I just can’t reach no matter how hard I try.”

  Something about his words rewound her back to the last time they’d been in the barn together. So much of what he’d said at the time seemed inconsequential. Yet now, in light of the news about Lydia’s profound loss, it all took on new meaning.

  “On days when she goes all blank like that,” Caleb continued, “I try to draw her out, to get her talking in the hope that’ll help her somehow, but I can’t seem to get it right. I prod when she doesn’t want to talk, and I miss the boat when it seems like she does.” He looked past her to something she knew wasn’t in the barn. “But even with all that, Miss Lottie was the one thing I’ve done right. For Lydia and for me.”

  The name rang a faint bell of recognition. “Who is this Miss Lottie person, again?”

  “An English friend to many.”

  “Including you?”

  “Including me.” He removed his hat and slowly turned it between his hands. “In terms of Lydia and losing little Rose, Miss Lottie helped me to see that there are other ways I can help my sister that go beyond trying to get her to talk. I can play with the kids so Lydia can take a moment for herself here and there, I can stop by to help with some of the more odds-and-ends kind of chores she might otherwise have to do, and I can even pop over for dinner from time to time so the kids can pelt me with all their stories from the day.”

  Stilling the hat, he released a weighted sigh. “That said, though, I still wish she would talk to me about what she’s thinking and what she’s feeling. Keeping all that sadness bottled up inside isn’t making it better.”

  “Nothing can make it better, Caleb.” She traveled her gaze to the open barn door and the Sunday morning sky beyond. “Nothing short of a total do-over of that day, that is.”

  Chapter 15

  Double-checking the address on the car’s display screen with the address on the front of the single-story office building, Dani pulled into a parking spot not far from the front door and cut the engine. If it weren’t for the fact that her fingers smelled like gasoline from her brief stop at the station a mile or so back, she might actually consider the possibility she was having a nightmare.

  But unlike those nightly occurrences, this one didn’t have her walking along the side of a highway searching for her family, or reaching toward their outstretched arms only to wake up alone, drenched in sweat and feverishly wiping a trail of tears from her cheeks.

  No, this one had her sitting outside a nondescript brown brick building, with an equally nondescript matching sign, and marveling at a reality that was both cruel in its timing and ironic in its delivery.

  Movement to her left had her glancing over in time to see a woman, about her own age, opening the door of a white SUV and carefully placing an infant seat onto its base atop the back seat. Once the carrier was secure enough to the woman’s liking, she took a moment to whisper a kiss across the snippet of baby skin Dani could see from her vantage point and then pushed the door closed. Feeling her body begin to tremble, Dani deliberately turned away, her watery gaze falling on the front door just as another woman was escorted through it by a man wearing a smile as big as the woman’s protruding belly.

  Dani skirted her eyes to the ignition key and gave some thought to the notion of restarting the engine and making haste back to the Amish countryside, but she couldn’t. Because if she didn’t make herself do this now, Lydia would soon
enough.

  Lydia . . .

  How many times had she stood at the window and quietly observed her friend with a fresh pair of eyes since the conversation with Caleb in the barn? A dozen, maybe more . . . And now that she knew about Rose, she could see something lurking beneath the surface whenever Lydia was alone. The slump of her shoulders . . . The slow, almost directionless steps . . . The rush to don a smile when Nettie or one of the boys came galloping around a corner or across the front porch . . .

  Lydia, who saw with her eyes.

  Lydia, who knew that simple didn’t have to mean boring.

  Lydia, who encouraged her loved ones.

  Lydia, who truly drank in her children, her husband.

  Lydia, who’d masked her own soul-crushing grief to be a safe harbor for Dani.

  “God’s will,” Dani mumbled, tossing the keys into her purse. “If taking a baby from someone like Lydia is Your will, then . . . yeah . . . no thank You.”

  She tilted her head back against the headrest, breathed her way through the anger now holding her jaw and her fists hostage, and then stepped from the car onto the pavement. Once she was inside, a check of the building’s directory had her entering the first door on the right.

  “Good afternoon, do you have an appointment?”

  Dani turned toward the voice and the sixty-something woman seated behind a desk with a welcoming smile on her face and a headset atop her thick gray hair. “I-I do. I’m Danielle Parker. I called yesterday afternoon and you squeezed me in on a cancel—”

  The woman’s eyes glanced up from the computer she was already consulting and the clipboard she was already sliding across the desk in Dani’s direction. “Please fill out this packet of information as completely as possible. The first page goes over your rights as a patient, the next is about your insurance, and the last two concern your medical history. When everything is filled out, just bring it back to me here at the counter, and the nurse will be out shortly thereafter to get you. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask.”