by Linda Byler
“I think your buddies went home the other way.”
“I guess so.”
When had their friendship turned into this? They were both more relaxed this evening than ever. It was an easy, natural feeling. It seemed as if she had known Mark all her life, and this was an evening where everything would go right. He had come to the end of his driveway with her. Not once had he laughed at her or made sarcastic remarks about the Amish. And that was something. Perhaps it was the circumstances, the danger, or maybe it was Paris, or something other than themselves to worry about.
Uh-oh. There they came.
At first she thought it might be a tractor; they were moving so slowly. Then she saw the gleaming silver smokestacks and heard the rumbling of that diesel engine. Her heart beat faster with the realization that they might be stopping.
Were they dangerous, armed men? Or was this all a figment of her imagination? Maybe this truck had absolutely nothing to do with the drive-by shootings.
The truck came slowly—slowly—over a low rise. She could see three men in the vehicle, all wearing hats pulled low. The driver was a big man; the other two were smaller. They were watching the road and the fields intently for any movement.
Oh! There was Mark. He just stood there with the weed wacker. Sadie shifted so she would be able to see the rear of the pickup. The truck slowed even more when the driver spied Mark.
Sadie could see the license plate. The numbers! She could see them!
Just as Mark stepped forward and Sadie thought the truck would stop, the driver accelerated. The tires screeched as the truck seemed to lift in the front. It fishtailed as the driver gunned the motor, and they were off down the road at a dangerous speed.
Mark stood by the side of the road, scratching his head in bewilderment, while Sadie scrambled out of the tree and ran to his side. She was breathless when she reached him.
“I could see the license plate as plain as day!”
“Definitely something odd with that bunch.”
“They’re smart. Oh, Mark, I know they’re the ones doing this. I just have this feeling. An intuition or something.”
“I bet you anything this is the end of the diesel truck,” Mark said shaking his head.
“Why?”
“They’ll use another vehicle now. They didn’t trust me at all, or they wouldn’t have taken off like that.”
“Oh.”
“Well, there’s not much we can do now,” he said. “So? You want to come in? See where I’m staying? I don’t have a house yet, you know.”
Sadie looked around at the fast-approaching night.
“How am I going to get home? I can’t ride Paris.”
“What were you doing on the road riding that horse to begin with? Don’t you know it simply is not safe right now?”
“I do now.”
“I’ll take you home. Paris can stay here.”
He laughed in a low, gravelly sound. “You could stay here all night as well.”
“Mark!”
“Just teasing.”
As it was, she stayed far too long anyway. He showed her the room he had done up for his living quarters. It was surprisingly tidy and neat. His bed was made with a brightly-colored Indian blanket. A huge gun cabinet contained many guns of all sorts, and there were racks of guns on the wall. A glass-fronted cabinet held almost as many hunting knives.
His dog, Wolf, rose from the floor in front of the brown leather sofa. He was a magnificent animal, but fearful-looking. The wolf in him was so apparent he didn’t really seem like a dog at all.
“The color of his eyes!” Sadie exclaimed.
“Isn’t he beautiful?”
“He is. But, oh my, Mark, I’d hate to meet him in the dark.”
“That’s why I have him. I met too many ghosts in the dark as a child.”
“You mean you had him when you were little?”
“Fifteen.”
“Seriously?”
“About the age I learned to protect myself, yes.”
Sadie sat down as Mark continued to speak. She sat quietly, her hands in her lap, watching his face. He never looked at her when he talked this way, which was all right if that made it easier to bare his soul.
She hung onto every word, knowing that understanding his aching past is what would play the most powerful part in understanding this man.
“See, before I started with … the substance abuse, oh… Did I tell you about my uncle? He was Amish. A member of my parents’ church. I don’t know how old I was, but we … my brother and I were there for a time to help in his produce fields. That’s when my whole world flipped upside down and I felt as if I had nothing … no gravity, even, to keep me upright, centered. I was basically floating around in a misery of having nothing to hold onto.
“You couldn’t trust English people, but neither could you trust Amish. My uncle, anyway. I often wonder how much he had to do with my mother’s leaving.”
“Is this uncle the same man you told me about before? What was his wife’s name? Betsy?”
Mark nodded.
“Why didn’t you tell me he was your uncle?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Embarrassment. Afraid you’d never look at me again. Never date me … or marry me.”
Sadie remained quiet.
What had he just said? Marry me? She bit her lip, hard.
“When I worked for my uncle, I realized that Amish people, men of faith, were lower in nature than even the foster system. That’s really when the pins were knocked out from under me. Every person needs something they can believe in, and often, for children especially, God is not that real. So children depend on good people to give them food and clean clothes and love. But when you live without the love of your parents, you’re like a stray dog. You have to scrounge through trash cans to get whatever you can. A smile here, some food there. You look for any tiny bit of kindness and grasp it with greedy, hungry fingers, and you never forget it.
“So my parents were gone, but the hardest part of my life was when even my uncle betrayed me. At first, I looked up to him. I wanted so desperately to believe he was good, that he was someone I could finally trust. Even the first beating, Sadie, I thought I deserved. My self-blame made him seem like a better person.
“So I tried even harder. I checked every tomato, every cucumber, and placed it carefully in the basket. When he tied me in the silo chute overnight for accidentally knocking over a stack of plastic tomato hampers, I gave up. There was no goodness, no mercy in this vile man. Recognizing that was a sort of freedom, but that’s when I could no longer keep my feet on the ground. I free-floated in a world of hatred.
“The hate bit into my wrists that night I was tied to the steps of the silo. Those ropes became the hate in me, and that hate gave me strength to pull free. I almost lost my one hand to infection.”
“Not hate, Mark. God helped you become free.”
Mark shook his head. “No, Sadie. There was no room for God in that silo chute. It was filled with rage, my silent screams, my determination to kill that man.”
“No, Mark! Please don’t say those things.”
“So now you see. Now you know why I’m not good enough for you.”
“It’s in the past.”
“Never totally. I guess finding God is harder for a person who has hated the way I have. The alcohol was a sort of haven for awhile. So were the drugs. But I couldn’t go on. Once I was so messed up, I almost died one night. I guess … that was probably the first time I could recognize God in my life. It must have been him, or else I’d be dead.
“But God acts like a missing parent sometimes. He’s often hard to find. At first, you have to survive on bits and pieces. A sunset, for instance. Or a sunrise. Little things sort of pierce your armor of hardness, but it’s elusive. God is terribly hard to understand. Why does he allow a life like mine? Why?”
“Your life is good, now, Mark,” Sadie said quietly.
“By all outward appearances, yes. But I
struggle. It’s tough. I want to be free of my past, completely, but … I can’t.”
“Is that … is that …?”
“What?”
“I can’t say it.”
“Come on, Sadie. Out with it.”
“Is that why we don’t date like normal young people in an Amish community do?”
“Yes.”
She was silent at that. Mark paused.
“You see, Sadie, I’ll hurt you. My jealousy, my anger, it’s not fair to you. I hurt you now, and we’re not dating.”
Like a star falling across the night sky, the knowledge awakened her. She almost gasped audibly. She clasped her hands firmly around her knee to keep them from going around Mark’s shoulders.
She knew then. She knew that she was the link, the gravity, the conduit of God’s love to Mark. He needed her. Her love was from God. She was only a vessel he had prepared, and would continue to prepare, as long as Mark needed her.
What did it matter? Her life would not always be safe or secure. She would, no doubt, suffer at times. But only at times. They would have their good days, and many of them. If the bad times came, God would be there for her. Yes, he would. Oh, how he would!
She drew in a soft breath. Turning to him, she laid a hand on his arm.
“Mark, can we have a date on Saturday evening?” she asked.
Her arms slid around his shoulders when he bent his head toward hers, not knowing if the tears of joy between them were his or hers.
Chapter 14
SADIE LAID IN HER BED FULLY AWAKE. WHAT WAS that sound? Was it the creaking of the siding, the snapping of wooden floorboards? She heard it again. A hoarse sort of sound.
Retching. Someone was being sick.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed, tiptoed quietly across the hall to the bathroom door, and turned the knob. It was locked securely.
“Reuben?”
Her answer was another tearing sound. Someone was really sick.
Knocking, she called again, “Reuben?”
There was no answer, only the sound of the bathroom tissue being unrolled.
“Anna?”
“Go away.” The words were garbled, almost indistinct.
“Anna, let me in. Are you sick?”
“I’m all right. Go back to bed.”
“No.”
Sadie leaned against the wall outside the bathroom, crossed her arms, and waited.
Finally, the door opened a tiny crack, a thin sliver of yellow light from the kerosene lamp showing through. Anna appeared, carrying the lamp. At first, Sadie shrank back against the wall, then gave up and stepped forward.
She was shocked to see Anna’s face. It was so pale, with red splotches on her cheeks. Her lips were ballooned to twice their normal size, tear streaks in jagged, glistening paths down her swollen cheeks.
“Anna!”
“Go away!” Anna hissed, pushing past her.
The lamp chimney rocked unsteadily as Anna turned to enter her room. Her hands outstretched, Sadie followed her.
“Anna, stop! I’m going to wake Rebekah and Leah if you don’t act normal. Why are you so angry? Do you have the flu?”
“Course I have the flu! What does it look like? You think I want to throw up, or what?”
Sadie stepped up and took the kerosene lamp from Anna’s nervous hands, guided her back into the bedroom, and closed the door noiselessly.
“Yes. I think you want to throw up,” Sadie ground out, pushing her face very close to Anna’s, watching as her pupils dilated with fear.
Sadie set the lamp on the small dresser. Turning, she said, “Sit down.”
Anna obeyed, hanging her head in shame. It touched Sadie’s heart. So young and still obeying her elders in her innocent way as she was trained to do. At 16 years old, when she started her years of rumspringa, she would be given more freedom to make her own choices. But for now, she still obeyed the voice of her parents or older sisters.
“Anna, listen to me. You don’t have a stomach virus, do you? You want to throw up to get rid of food you ate because you feel fat. Am I right?”
Anna shook her head from side to side, her eyes downcast, picking at her white T-shirt with fingers that never stopped moving. Sadie said nothing until the back-and-forth movement stopped.
“Have you been making yourself vomit for a long time?”
“I don’t … do that. I feel sick.”
“Then we have to take you to a doctor. You may have a serious disease that causes the nausea.”
“No!”
“Why not?”
“I hate doctors. They … they weigh you.”
“You’ve been losing weight, Anna.”
“I am?”
Anna lifted her head, hope shining from her swollen eyes. Sadie watched quietly as Anna pulled her T-shirt tightly across her stomach, then released it abruptly.
“Anna, it’s okay if you want to lose weight, but you can’t do it like this.”
“Like what?”
“Purging. Making yourself throw up.”
“I don’t.”
“Yes, you do.”
Confronted with the truth, Anna began to cry. It was a pitiful mewling sound at first, then deeper, hoarse sobs. She twisted her body and threw herself face-first into her pillows.
Sadie sat down on the twin-size bed, her hands in her lap. Instinctively, she knew it would be better to let Anna’s misery boil over for awhile.
Her eyes roamed the small room. She noticed the poster of dogs, the cheap Wal-Mart candle that didn’t match any color in the room, the clothes in a heap by the closet door, a cellophane wrapper by her bed.
The furniture was mismatched hand-me-downs of dressers that had been used by her sisters as they grew through their early teens. When Anna reached 16, she’d have a larger room filled with new furniture, beautiful things, art on the walls, a room that stated her own tastes.
A wave of pity washed over her Sadie. Poor Anna was stuck back here at the end of the hall, in a room that was almost an afterthought, unimportant, forgotten—too much like Anna herself. As the youngest daughter, she sat in on her older sisters’ conversations, listening in awe to their vivid accounts of weekends with girlfriends and interesting boys, all of it a faraway, scary place for Anna to imagine.
The youngie. As she approached rumspringa, her own inadequacies quadrupled in size, her apprehension mounting into inconsolable proportions. She filled that worried place with food, the source of her comfort and happiness.
Anna was quiet now, only an occasional hiccup reminding Sadie of the sobs, the onslaught of her despair. Slowly, she placed a hand on Anna’s shoulder.
“Anna, you aren’t fat.”
There was no answer, only a long, drawn-out shudder.
“Do you know how much I weighed when I was 15?”
Silence.
“140.”
Anna sat straight up, staring at Sadie.
“You did not!”
“Yes, I did.”
“I only weigh a little more than that,” Anna whispered, the corner of her lips lifting.
“Of course, you do.”
Anna pulled up her pajama-clad knees, wrapped her arms around her legs, and talked. She told Sadie she had been perfectly content to be who she was until some friends had a sleepover at Sarah Ann’s house. There they compared skin problems, hair color, sizes and weight. Jeanie told Anna that she was the heaviest by 10 whole pounds, and why was she so much bigger than her sisters? Why was her hair lighter?
After that, Anna had sat in the sun all summer spraying vinegar-water in her hair, then lemon-juice water, then baking-soda water, anything to change the color. She had even tried spraying it with mosquito repellent, but all she got was an itching, flaky scalp.
She was always hungry, that was the thing. She could eat all day long, every day. Doughnuts, peanut butter crackers, chicken corn soup with saltine crackers, applesauce, hot dogs with sauerkraut, and potato chips. She loved Mam’s snickerdoodl
e cookies and Subway’s sandwiches. Everything in the whole world was delicious, except brussels sprouts. They tasted like spoiled cabbage.
At the dentist’s office, she watched a lady on the television eat spaghetti. It made her so hungry for spaghetti that she asked Mam to make it for supper, and she ate it for days and days with dried Parmesan cheese sprinkled all over it, and homemade bread with butter and garlic powder, oregano, and more cheese. She put it in the broiler of the oven, and it was the best thing ever.
At the produce stand where she worked with Leah, she loved to eat a garden-fresh tomato, sliced thick and sprinkled with salt and pepper. She ate great sections of cantaloupes and oranges and blueberries, as well.
“Then I gained over 25 pounds,” she said sadly.
Sadie laughed, a sound of genuine understanding.
“It’s all right to eat. You’re hungry, you’re growing, and you’re healthy.”
Anna shook her head. “I’m fat!”
Sadie looked at her steadily, unflinchingly. “You are not fat.”
“According to Sarah Ann and Jeanie, I am.”
Sadie nodded. “Girls can be so cruel. So terribly, unthinkingly, crushingly cruel. So mean. But you know what, Anna? The reason they say those things is because of their own insecurities. They don’t feel good about themselves, or they wouldn’t put other girls down.
“Every 14- or 15-year-old girl has her own struggles with feeling adequate, secure, able to move among her peers with ease and confidence. It’s tough out there. We have a close circle of people being raised in the Amish way, but we’re only human beings, and we suffer in the early teen years same as everyone else.”
“I can’t believe that you did.”
“I sure did. Sometimes I wished the end of the world would come so I wouldn’t have to be 16. I was terribly hurt by the loss of Paris and by moving to Montana. I hated it.”
Anna told Sadie about how she felt left out by her and Reuben, with their tremendous riding skills and their way with horses. She felt as if she had no talent at all. She couldn’t even sew a decent dress on the sewing machine.
Sadie listened quietly and felt some remorse. A plan formed in her mind.
“I’ll tell you what, Anna. If you cross your heart and promise that you will never, ever, as long as you live, make yourself cuts again, then I will get a horse for you. Reuben won’t ride with me anymore, so you can. I’ll teach you.”
