Mending Fences

by Suzanne Woods Fisher

  “How in the world did you ever go back in to talk to her? To face her?”

  “As I stood out in the hallway, praying desperately, it struck me that the chance of this meeting couldn’t be an accident. It had to be a divine appointment. And if so, then God was going to have to give me the courage to get through it. And if this was a divine appointment, if God was at work, then he was doing something remarkable. Maybe even miraculous. I didn’t want to interfere with that miracle.” He paused, then took in a deep breath. “So here we are, my friend. On the brink of watching God’s redeeming work.”

  Oh, David, Amos thought, his heart finally settling back to a normal pace. How do you do it? How are you able to lead us toward right living despite your own pain?

  When the Lord brought David Stoltzfus to Stoney Ridge, that was a miracle in the making. There were times when Amos wondered if the Israelites had the same sense of respect and awe for King David as he, and many others, felt for their bishop. Yes, David Stoltzfus was a man with flaws, yet he was also a leader with a spirit deeply sensitive to God’s leading.

  If that man could seek this woman’s best, having suffered the very same personal casualty from her that Amos had, then he would follow his bishop’s lead. Amos knew he was not standing alone, but shoulder to shoulder with David.

  The weather had turned cold and stayed cold. After breakfast Friday morning, Izzy was upstairs changing sheets on her bed, breathing in the scent of sun-dried cotton, when she heard the familiar sounds of a horse and buggy come up the driveway. She went to the window to see David Stoltzfus jump out of the buggy as Amos walked outside to meet him.

  It was a sight Izzy’d seen many times over the last year, bishop and deacon, conferring together over church matters. They walked toward the house and stopped to talk at the bottom of the porch steps. Izzy stuffed a pillow into a clean casing and went downstairs to see if they wanted something to drink, and they did. The kitchen was strangely quiet as she poured two mugs full of Fern’s fresh-brewed coffee.

  “She puts chicory in with the grounds,” Izzy said as she handed David a mug.

  “Fern Lapp is the best cook in town,” David said, then his eyes widened in alarm. “Please don’t tell Birdy I said that.”

  “Es schmackt immer’s bescht an annere Leit ihrm Disch.” It always tastes best at other folks’ table. “That’s a Fern Lapp quote.”

  “Your accent sounded good.” David smiled, but not with his eyes. They looked exhausted.

  Izzy wondered what was weighing David down as she put the coffeepot back on the burner. She turned around to find the two men facing her with strange looks on their faces. Fern stood nearby. Where had she come from? Fern’s eyes looked shiny, and she wondered whether she should offer to bring her a tissue.

  It took an instant for Izzy’s brain to register what was happening. Fern? Crying? “Something’s happened, hasn’t it?” The first thought that came to mind was that Luke had been hurt. And then she was annoyed with herself for even worrying one second over Luke Schrock. But she was! “Tell me what’s wrong. Have I done something?”

  “Izzy, sit down with us,” David said. “We want to share some news with you.”

  As she settled into a chair, the worrisome thoughts came too fast, one after the other. Memories bounced through her head like popcorn in a skillet: social workers showing up at foster families’ houses to tell Izzy it was time to pack up. Oh yeah, she thought. She knew this drill. “You want me to leave,” she said in a crisp business tone, trying to sound in control of her feelings. She could feel her face grow warm, her heart pound, as she fought back the automatic panic that rose within her. Where would she go? What would she do? She had no idea. In a defiant move, she crossed her arms and tucked her chin to her chest. “So then, I’ll leave.”

  “Leave us?” Fern’s voice rose an octave. “Oh, Izzy, we don’t ever want you to leave. This is your home.”

  Amos reached over to pat her shoulder with his big farmer’s hand. The gesture was clumsy but tender, and it touched her deeply. Then he added a few words in his gruff voice that rocked Izzy’s world. “You’ve become a daughter to us.”

  A daughter? Amos Lapp just said he thought of her like a daughter, and Fern was nodding furiously in agreement, like her head was on a coiled spring. Someone considered her to be like a daughter. First time. Tears pricked Izzy’s eyes. She lowered her gaze as she asked, “Then . . . what’s going on? What’s happened?”

  Amos cleared his throat. “Do you remember when I used to buy you a burger at the Lancaster Public Market?”

  Slowly, she nodded. Where was this going?

  “One time, you asked me if I knew a family named Stoltzfus. Do you remember?”

  She lowered her glance, and gave a quick nod. Oh no.

  “Back in Ohio,” David said, “there was a little girl named Bella who lived across the street from us. Her mother would leave her alone for long periods of time, sometimes even overnight, and this little girl would wander over to play with my children. I remember that she was a sweet little girl, with big, sad brown eyes. She didn’t talk much, and she never asked us for anything. My wife, Anna, she had a special fondness for this little girl. Anna had a phrase she used, and this little girl, only five or six years old, used to mimic her. Whenever Anna was surprised or overwhelmed or happy, she would say, ‘Oh my soul.’”

  Izzy’s palms started sweating. She felt almost feverish, shaky and sticky and cold and hot, all at once. She kept forgetting to breathe. Her mind felt filled with barn swallows, swooping through her rafters with the most ridiculous contingency plan: If I act fast, I can escape out the kitchen door and run to the road. Maybe hitch a ride to Lancaster? And then . . . and then . . . go where? And why? Why am I running? Who am I running from? These are the people I was running to, not away from.

  David’s voice broke through her craziness. “Izzy, are you that girl? Are you Bella?”

  Her hands twisted the edges of her apron as she struggled to respond. “I never forgot your family.” Her throat seemed to close up. She started, “Three years ago . . .” Her voice cracked and she had to start over again. “Three years ago, I went to your old farmhouse, and the lady who lived there gave me your new address. I hoped you could help me find my mother.”

  “Is that why you came to Lancaster? You were trying to find us?”

  Izzy nodded again. She didn’t dare look up. A fallen tear made a dot on the front of her dress. One dot, then another.

  “Izzy,” Fern said softly, “tell us why you’ve been so determined to find your mother. What is it you want from her?”

  Everything. Nothing. “I have a question to ask her.” Tears were falling fast now, splashing down her face.

  “What question?”

  “Why did she give up her parenting rights so I became a ward of the state?” Even to her own ears, Izzy could hear the faint note of hysteria in her voice. “I need to know. Not knowing has plagued me my whole life.”

  “Izzy, honey,” Fern said, her face full of worry, and that made Izzy want to cry even more. “Can’t you see how the Lord’s been watching over you? He directed you right to Bob the buggy horse, just when Amos happened to be dropping Sadie at the market.”

  Oh no. Not that. Anything but that. Up came the misery, the loneliness, the anger. Up, up, and over. Out of her burst something aloud she had never dared to say before, something she barely allowed herself to think. “If God was watching over me, then where was he when my mother gave me up? Why did I have to spend a childhood in foster care?” She was practically screaming, even to her own ears, and she didn’t care! “Where was he when I was living on the streets? Did he just show up that one day when Amos drove the buggy into town?”

  “I don’t know the answer to that,” David said, as calm as a man could be. “You’re not alone in experiencing hardship. All through the Bible are stories of good people who have been dealt difficult circumstances. Look at Joseph, sold off by his own brothers into slavery. He must
have felt the abandonment that you feel. I can promise you what the Bible teaches, that God brings good out of everything for those who love him. Everything can be redeemed, and used for good. Izzy, I want to tell you something that I’ve told Luke, over and over again. At any given moment, your life is going to be determined by your view of you or God’s view of you.”

  “Don’t you see? That’s my point exactly!” How could she make them understand? She had grown up adrift in the world, standing outside the current and watching it go by. Never belonging to it, nor to anyone. “The reason God hasn’t noticed me is because I’m not worth it. I know that.”

  Amos, tough old Amos with his careworn face, even he was crying now. Big tears were running over his cheekbones and into his beard. “Oh no. No no no, darling girl. Just the opposite.” His voice quavered as he spoke. “Do you remember what I told you once? You’re a pearl of great price to God.”

  Fern handed Izzy an entire box of tissues, for she was sobbing now, big huge wracks of sobs. She was too deeply into crying to stop or feel embarrassed by the display of raw emotion, so she just kept on crying for a while. Now and then, Fern awkwardly patted her hand; David and Amos looked at her with eyebrows knitted in concern. It took a long time, but at last the tears slowed and her breathing eased from great gulps to a more normal sound.

  Then, in the calm that resulted, at times so quiet a fly could be heard buzzing against the windowsill, David slowly rolled out the story of her mother, of Luke finding out where she was, of the conversation he’d had with the judge, and of meeting her in jail. “Grace Miller agreed to go to a rehab clinic to avoid going to prison. She made a plea bargain to reduce a DUI charge down to drunken disorderliness. She’s still on probation, of course, and if she leaves the rehab, she’ll be arrested. The judge was clear on that. But if she stays, then there is hope. If she stays.”

  Izzy just listened to the sound of his voice, like it wasn’t happening to her. Like this wasn’t her mother whom he was talking about. Why would David bother himself to help Grace Miller?

  After David had relayed the entire story, he cocked his head to one side. “You’re awfully quiet, Izzy. Do you have any questions? I’ll answer what I can.”

  Oh, she had plenty of questions, an endless amount. Which one to ask first? What she wanted to ask was, What is she like? Do we resemble each other? And . . . did she even ask about me? Instead, as coolly as she could, she said, “So then, are you paying for her rehab?”

  “No one acts alone in our church,” David said. “We all work together. Our church will provide for Grace Miller. We have a fund for these kinds of special circumstances.”

  Special circumstances? Grace Miller was a stranger to them. She was a stranger to her own daughter.

  Why? Why would those church people care enough to turn over their pennies to help a stranger? These Amish, they baffled Izzy. They ran counterclockwise to the rest of the world. “Why was my mother here? Why did she come to Lancaster in the first place?”

  David and Amos exchanged one of their bishop-deacon looks. “She came for a wedding, she said. She’d been invited. She was trying to get to it when a police officer found her pulled over on the side of the road.”

  A wedding. Her mother was going to a wedding. Izzy twisted the edge of her apron with her fingers as she rolled those words over and over in her head. She felt scalded to the core. Grace Miller was in Lancaster County not because of Izzy, not because of the countless letters she’d sent. Obviously, her mother had no intention of coming to find her. She never had. All those years of hoping, wishing, wanting, even praying . . . and the one scenario Izzy hadn’t allowed herself to think was the one that was true: her mother didn’t care about her.

  When she wiped her eyes again, David said, “Sometimes, the strangest things come out of great pain. You block the pain and you block everything. Izzy, something wonderful has been discovered in all this. It turns out you have two half siblings. A sister and a brother.”

  She blinked. Siblings? “Where?”

  “Your brother, his name is Chris. He lives in Ohio. Married with children. But your sister, she’s closer. Closer than you think.” Outside, there was the clip-clop of a horse and buggy coming up the drive. David got up and looked out the window. “In fact, she’s here now.”

  Izzy went to the door and opened it. She saw Luke driving the buggy and realized someone else was with him. Before he could even bring the horse to a complete stop, the buggy door slid open and out jumped a blur of a female. Her arms were lifted in the air as she bolted toward the house, shouting, “Izzy! Izzy! Izzy!”

  Jenny?

  “You! Me! We’re sisters!” She ran straight at Izzy, almost flattening her in her joy.

  Late that night, Izzy climbed into bed, but she couldn’t sleep. In the course of one short day, she had multiple life-altering changes. She had a half sister, and a half brother. Family of her own. It astounded her. She still couldn’t wrap her head around all that was revealed in the kitchen this morning.

  Jenny had dragged Izzy down to the phone shanty to tell Chris the news. She tried to convince Chris to come to Stoney Ridge for Izzy’s baptism this weekend, but he couldn’t get away that quickly, he said. Thanksgiving, though. He promised he’d bring his family to Windmill Farm for the holiday. And that was just weeks away.

  Something else happened today. A few words were said that struck to the marrow. Amos and Fern said they considered Izzy as a daughter. First time. And they wanted her to stay at Windmill Farm. She’d never been called a daughter before, not even by that one foster family who’d kept her as long as they could, until the father lost his job and they had to move away. Even them. They referred to her as a foster child, not a foster daughter.

  Yes, today was the best day in Izzy’s life.

  And the worst day too.

  When Izzy found out that Jenny’s wedding was the reason her mother had come to Lancaster, that she’d kept tabs on Jenny all these years but not on Izzy’s whereabouts, she felt joy slip away. Jenny wanted to explain more about their mother, but Izzy stopped her. She felt as if she’d had all she could handle today. Her mind would explode if she heard anything more.

  Jenny had asked David if they could visit Grace while she was in rehab. He said that he’d hoped there’d be a time for that in the future, but not now. Izzy felt relieved by David’s answer. She no longer wanted to see her mother. Not now. Not ever.

  Listening to the patter of rain on the roof, she finally drifted off to sleep, but it was not with a peaceful heart. She felt anxious about the past, anxious about the future, and then anxious about being anxious.

  twenty-six

  Izzy hadn’t had a chance to privately thank Luke for finding her mother until Saturday afternoon. She found him down in the barn. He’d just finished a major cleanout of Bob’s stall and was replacing old straw with new. He saw her come in and gave her a nod, but kept pushing fresh straw around the stall with a pitchfork.

  “I appreciate what you did,” she said, standing at the open stall door. “Finding my mother. Going to the prison. And to court too. I’m sure it wasn’t easy.”

  Luke set the pitchfork against the stall door. “Couldn’t have been easy to grow up in the foster care system.”

  “Well, that was then. This is now.”

  “I’d like to hear more about then. I’d like to know more about you.”

  She shrugged. “Now that you’ve met my mother, you might know more than I do.”

  “Are you going to go visit her? Your mother, I mean?”

  “No,” she said, a little too quickly. “No. David said to hold off for a while.” She brushed some bits of straw off her arm. “I mean, I will, eventually. Jenny too. Just not now.”

  Luke tilted his head. “She can’t fix you.”

  Izzy jerked her head up. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Your mother. She can’t fix you.”

  She stiffened. What did he know about it? About anything? She turne
d to leave but he reached out to stop her.

  “Hold on. Listen to me for a minute. That empty feeling inside that drove you to find your mother—she’s not going to give you what you want. What you need.” He let go of her, although she hadn’t tried to pull away.

  “I know that.” His gaze searched her face until she turned away.

  “That need you have, it’s not wrong, Izzy. It can be filled up.”

  “And I suppose you,” she said, sarcasm dripping, “you think you can provide everything a girl needs.”

  His eyes went round with surprise. “Me? No. No, not me, Izzy. I was talking about God. He’s the only one who can fix you.”

  She looked down at her sneakers so he couldn’t see her face. She could feel the heat rising in her cheeks. “So now you’re a preacher?”

  “No, no. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to preach at you. I’m trying to tell you what it’s been like for me, what I’ve had to figure out. Our childhoods can’t be compared, that’s for sure, but I know what it’s like to want more from a parent. I kept looking in all the wrong places. It took . . . a lot, I guess, until I understood that only God can fix me. You know, fill up what’s been missing.” Leaning against Bob’s stall, he watched her thoughtfully. “Tomorrow’s the day. Baptism. You’re going to make a promise to the church that’ll set the course for the rest of your life. It’s a big, big deal.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m not sure you do.” She stiffened so visibly that he lifted a palm. “Wait. Before you get your knickers in a twist, just hear me out.” He folded his arms against his chest. “I know you love the Plain life. It’s full of habits and traditions . . . and even predictability. After meeting your mother, I can see why you’d be drawn to it. But you’re missing the best part if you miss out on the faith part.” He thumped his chest with his fist. “It’s the heart of this Plain life.”