Piece by Piece

by Laura Bradford

  “You don’t feel them when you think about them?” Miss Lottie asked.

  “Oh, I feel them, all right. And I hear them, too. Every single night.”

  “Good . . . Good . . .”

  “I feel my children’s hands as they’re reaching for me, and I hear them crying for me to help them. But I can’t stop the accident. ”

  Miss Lottie’s answering swallow was audible. “I mean when you think about the good things: the vacations, the holidays, the sleepy kisses, the—”

  “Stop. Please. I don’t want to talk about me; I want to talk about Lydia.”

  “About giving your baby to Lydia, you mean . . .”

  “Yes.” She wandered over to the railing and lifted her chin to the afternoon breeze rustling the leaves of a nearby tree. “I didn’t do right by my children. I know that now. But I can do right by this new baby. I can give her a chance to run, and explore, and do all those things kids should be able to do.”

  The creak of Miss Lottie’s chair gave way to the quiet thump of her cane against the porch floor. “So it’s a girl then?”

  “Not officially, no. But I know it. Inside. I’m feeling many of the same things I felt when I was carrying . . .” Trailing off, she ran her finger along the top of the railing until her breath steadied, her hazy vision cleared. “Anyway, I think a little girl will be perfect for Lydia and Elijah. It’ll round things out in their boy-heavy home just a little bit.”

  Miss Lottie came to stand beside Dani, her gaze slipping across the horizon. “If you don’t mind me asking, what makes you think you didn’t do right by your children?”

  “Seeing Lydia with her kids.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Have you not seen her with them?” she asked, pushing away from the railing. “She’s seriously the perfect mom.”

  The woman’s quick laugh gave way to a quiet shake of her head. “I can tell you, with absolute certainty, Lydia would be the first to dispute those words.”

  Dani took in the porch, the pair of idle rocking chairs, the cookies they’d yet to really eat, and the still-full glass of lemonade beside her own abandoned rocker as Miss Lottie’s words rang a distant bell of familiarity. “Just because she practices humility doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

  After a beat or two of silence, Miss Lottie turned, her right hand atop her cane, her left braced against the railing at her back. “Tell me what you see when you see Lydia. As a mother, I mean.”

  “I see someone who lets them be kids. I see someone who lets them play in the rain, dig in the dirt, and chase barn cats. I see someone who teaches her children empathy and compassion in a hands-on way with animals. I see someone who will slow her day down just so she can soak them up in the moment. I see someone who listens to them talk, and who rolls up her sleeves and enjoys the things that make them happy.”

  “And you don’t think you did that? With your children?”

  “I know I didn’t.”

  “I see.” Miss Lottie flexed her hand around her cane, rolled her shoulders forward and backward, and then ventured back over to her rocking chair and her own waiting glass of lemonade. “What were they like?”

  “Who?”

  “Your children . . . Your husband . . . Your mom . . .”

  She closed her eyes against the sudden slide show of faces and expressions flipping past her mind’s eye and tried to catch her breath. “They were—they must have been so scared,” she said, jamming her fist against her lips. “All of them. And I-I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”

  The tears she hadn’t intended to shed were back. Only this time, instead of being alone in an empty room, there were arms to pull her close and a shoulder in which to bury her head. “There was no way you could have known, dear. You weren’t with them.”

  “But that’s just it. If I’d been the kind of mother I should’ve been all along, I’d have been with them that day instead of taking time for myself that I didn’t need and shouldn’t”—her voice broke, sob-like—“have wanted.”

  Miss Lottie’s aging hands slid back around to Dani’s shoulders and gently yet firmly moved her back a step. “Good heavens, child, you not being with your family in that car isn’t a reflection on you. It . . .” Stopping, the woman waited for Dani’s tear-soaked eyes to find hers. “It just wasn’t your time. You were meant to stay here, to be”—her hand lowered to Dani’s abdomen—“this one’s mamma.”

  “I want to be Maggie’s mamma! I want to be Spencer’s mamma! I want to be Ava’s mamma!”

  “You will always be those children’s mamma,” Miss Lottie said, cupping Dani’s cheek. “Death doesn’t change that.”

  “They’re not with me like they should be!”

  “In their physical form? No, they’re not. But that doesn’t mean they can’t still be with you. You just have to let them, Dani. For you and for them.”

  Reaching up, Dani pushed away the woman’s hand along with the last of her tears. “I have to go. I just came to make sure there wasn’t some Amish rule against adoption I didn’t know about.”

  “No, no rule.” Miss Lottie caned behind Dani to the top of the steps and halted her departure with a gentle hand. “Please. Sleep on this for a while, dear. You have time. No decisions need to be made today.”

  “The decision has already been made, Miss Lottie. The only thing still left to do is tell Lydia.”

  Chapter 22

  She didn’t know how long she’d been sitting there, staring out at the distant windmills and silos, the utter peace and tranquility of her surroundings little more than white noise against her internal clutter. There was so much she wanted to say, so much she needed to share, but every time she tried, every time she got close, the shake of her hand made it so anything she managed to actually write was completely illegible even to her own eyes.

  Maybe, instead of abandoning the litter-strewn table in tearful frustration, she should have just taken it as a sign. A sign that the baby growing inside her would be better off completely untethered from—

  “Danielle ?”

  Dropping her feet onto the patio, Dani turned toward the voice and the familiar face standing just inside the shade of the main house. “Oh. Lydia. Hi . . . I-I guess I didn’t hear you walk up. Is everything okay?”

  “I knocked on the door, but you did not answer.” Slowly, tentatively, the Amish woman approached the patio, her hands tightening around the handle of a different, larger basket than she normally packed for Dani.

  “Is it noon, already?” she asked, glancing back at the sun’s position in the sky.

  “Yah.”

  She swallowed. “I didn’t realize.”

  “You have gotten it the way you want it to be?”

  “It?”

  “What you were trying to write.”

  Heat rose into her cheeks. “How do you know I was trying to write something?”

  “I saw the mistakes on the table.”

  “You . . .” Grabbing the armrests of her chair, Dani tried to process what she was hearing, her mind’s eye rewinding through the same sentence she’d tried to write more than a dozen times before finally calling it quits—each attempt crumpled into a tight ball alongside other tight balls. “You opened them up and read them?”

  Lydia’s eyes widened in horror. “No! I saw them only through the door. I would not read something that was not mine to read.”

  Dani sank back against her chair and waited for her heart rate to return to normal. When it did, she looked back up at her friend. “I’m sorry, Lydia. I just thought . . .” Waving off her idiocy, she rose onto her feet, her eyes meeting and holding Lydia’s. “Actually, it doesn’t matter what I thought. I was wrong to accuse you like that and I’m sorry. I’m just trying to work through a lot right now.”

  “Yah. Perhaps that is why you should come for a picnic.” Lydia lifted the basket between them and gave it a little shake. “With me and Nettie.”

  She looked past her friend but saw no sign of
anyone—big or small. “Where is Nettie?”

  “She is telling Wooly of our plans for the day.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To Miller’s Pond.”

  “Where is that?”

  “Down the road, past the second bend.” A mischievous and knowing smile played at the corners of Lydia’s mouth. “Where it has always been since the last time you saw it.”

  “I haven’t been to a Miller’s Pond.”

  “Yah. You have been next to it and you have been in it,” Lydia teased.

  She stared at her friend, the woman’s words delivering Dani to a different time and place. “Wait. Is that the pond where we tried to make boats out of leaves and race them across to the other side?”

  “Yah. That is Miller’s Pond.”

  “Wow,” she murmured. “I’d forgotten about that day.”

  “I do not know how. You got very wet.”

  “I did, didn’t I?” She wandered over to the edge of the patio and tried to remember the direction they’d walked that day so long ago. The different starting point, though, made it difficult to discern. “When I first fell in, I remember being a little scared and just wanting to get out. But then, when you and Caleb jumped in, too, I didn’t ever want to get out.”

  “Yah.”

  “I imagine it looks the same?” she asked, turning back to Lydia.

  “Come with us. You will see.”

  “Lydia, I really can’t. I have something I need to . . .” She let the words trail away in favor of truly seeing the woman in front of her, a woman she needed to talk to preferably sooner rather than later.

  Pulling in a deep breath, Dani nodded. “Actually, on second thought, I think a little time with you at the pond would be nice.”

  “Yah?” When Dani nodded again, Lydia beamed. “Nettie will be happy to hear you are coming. Even if she will be too busy chasing butterflies and picking wildflowers to pay us any mind.”

  Perfect . . .

  “Would you like me to drive?” she asked, falling into step behind Lydia as they made their way around the house toward the driveway.

  “No. It is a lovely day for a walk.”

  And she was right. Together, they walked along the edge of the road, the crunch of gravel beneath their feet muted only by the sounds of life around them—birds chirping, sheep bleating, cows mooing, and even the whir of a gas-powered weed whacker. A few times, Lydia stopped to point out a neighbor’s garden or a particular horse she spied in a field, but most of the talking came via Nettie as the little girl urged them to walk faster or slower depending on whatever animal she spotted at any given moment.

  Just beyond the one-room schoolhouse and its empty playground, Lydia motioned them off the road and onto a well-worn path. “It is just beyond that last tree.”

  “I’m not really remembering this at all, but . . .”

  The words fell away as they stepped into a clearing and Miller’s Pond stood before them. Suddenly, Dani was eight again, and she was there, standing between Lydia and Caleb, their laughter filling the air. To her left, where picnic tables and park benches now dotted the grass, they’d played tag in the once-wide-open space—Caleb the fastest of all of them. Up ahead, where she’d leaned just a little too far in her attempts to move her leaf boat along faster, a sign now stood warning visitors to swim at their own risk. But the large boulder-sized rock to her left? That was still there, still exactly the same, its wide, flat surface perfect for sharing cookies as they’d done, or daydreaming the hours away as she’d imagined doing at the time.

  “Oh, Lydia,” she whispered. “I remember this place. It’s changed a little, sure, but not so much—not too much.”

  “It is a favorite spot for many Amish that I know.” Lydia glanced down at her daughter. “Do you want to eat at one of the picnic tables or on the rock?”

  “I like the rock.” Nettie grabbed hold of Dani’s hand and swung it happily. “Mamm says I can put my feet in the water today!”

  “That sounds exciting . . .”

  “Yah!” Glancing to the left and then the right, Nettie hopped once, twice. “Do you want to chase butterflies with me first?”

  “I—”

  “Look, Mamm! The flowers are here!” Nettie took off in a half hop, half run, around the pond to the picnic area. When she reached her destination, she crouched down in the middle of a ring of wildflowers and began to sniff each and every one, the joy on her tiny face mesmerizing.

  Dani watched the little girl for a few moments and then turned back to her friend. “So I guess that offer to chase butterflies is off the table?”

  “For now. But that is good. It will give us time to talk.” Lydia led the way to the rock, set the basket down on top, and then gestured toward a flat patch of ground closer to the water’s edge. “Perhaps, until it is time to eat, we could sit there, where I can see Nettie best.”

  “Of course.”

  Together, they made their way down to the pond and carefully spread the blanket across a bed of dried leaves. When they were settled, Lydia lifted her face to the sun and closed her eyes. “What a blessing the Lord has given you.”

  She looked a question at her friend. “Blessing?”

  “Luke spoke of your yes and no machine and how it adds.”

  Confusion quickly switched places with truth. “Oh. Right.”

  “But I would have known even without such a machine.” Lowering her chin back to start, Lydia smiled at Dani. “The way you hold your back. It is something I did with Luke and with Rose.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t say something sooner,” she said, resting her hand atop Lydia’s. “I didn’t get the official word from the doctor until last week and then, well, I didn’t want to hurt you with talk of a baby.”

  Lydia’s gaze wandered across the pond, settled on her daughter for a moment, and then lifted to the crystal-blue sky. “I wish you could have seen her, Danielle.”

  She recovered her hand. “You mean Rose?”

  “Yah. Her eyes were shaped like Elijah’s but were most like Luke’s. And her nose? It was like Nettie’s and like David’s.”

  “Which means it was like yours,” Dani mused.

  “Yah.”

  “Tell me more.”

  Lydia followed a cloud behind a leafy branch above and then slowly lowered herself onto her back, her arm coming to rest across her eyes. “She liked to watch the other children. Elijah said she was paying close attention so she would be ready when she was old enough to run like the others.

  “My favorite time with her was at night, though, when I was putting her in her cradle. She would reach for my chin and try to hold it between her little hands.” Lydia exhaled against her arm and then struggled up onto her elbow for yet another visual of the flower patch. “When I say it out loud, I know that it does not sound like much—that it sounds silly, even. But it was something that was just us.”

  “It doesn’t sound silly at all,” Dani countered between hard swallows. “It sounds . . . beautiful.”

  “Sometimes, when I’m missing her, it is hard to breathe. It’s like someone is covering my mouth and I can’t make them stop.”

  It was a feeling she knew well. One she would liken more to being buried alive . . .

  “I wonder if she would still be here if I would have taken her for a walk when she napped instead of putting her in her cradle. I wonder if I had waited for one more burp, or checked on her five minutes sooner, would she have lived? I wonder, if Caleb had been in the house with me instead of in the barn with Elijah, would he have been able to . . .” Lydia’s words fell away with a deep and labored sigh. “I know it is not for me to wonder, or for me to question. But still, I do.”

  “If I had shooed everyone away from the breakfast table a little faster, or let that last batch of pancakes cook just a little longer, Jeff and Mom and the kids wouldn’t have been in that exact spot when the other driver crossed the center line,” Dani said, her voice husky even to her own ears. “If
I’d listened to my gut and gotten in that car with them, I’d have been there, with them, instead of at home, completely oblivious to the world around me. Maybe if I had been with them, I’d have noticed something about the other car—something that would have made it so I was able to yell out, to warn Jeff so he could’ve swerved sooner.”

  Slumping forward, Lydia nodded, her eyelids half-mast. “Do you ever wish you could go back to that day? So you could do it all different?”

  “All the time.”

  Silence grew between them for a moment—a silence broken first by a bird’s chirp, next by the faint clip-clop of a buggy’s horse just beyond the trees, and, finally, Lydia herself, the woman’s grief so raw it was painful to hear.

  “I want my baby back, Danielle.”

  “I know.” Blinking against the tears that blurred Lydia’s face from view, Dani shifted her focus to the trees . . . The clouds . . . The shafts of sunlight reaching through the branches . . . A pair of squirrels playing chase through a pile of dried leaves . . . The bird watching from his perch above them . . . The patch of yellow and purple wildflowers swaying in the soft breeze . . . The—

  She sat up tall, wiped the last of the wetness from her eyes, and looked again at the flowers, the sea of yellow and purple no longer broken by the top of a gauzy white kapp. “Lydia? Where’s Nettie?”

  Chapter 23

  She heard Lydia’s voice blending with her own as they fanned out around the pond looking for Nettie. Lydia went left toward a trio of butterflies she was certain had attracted her daughter, and Dani went right, a second slightly wider stretch of wildflowers beckoning her close.

  “Nettie!” Lydia called.

  “Nettie!” Dani echoed.

  Midway to the flowers, Dani stopped, the flash of white she sought noticeably absent. “Is there a farm nearby? Maybe she caught a glimpse of an animal and went to say hello?”

  “Nettie wouldn’t go off like that without me. She loves it here at the pond; she wouldn’t leave.”