Until the End of Time: A Novel

by Danielle Steel

They visited her that afternoon at the hospital. Lilli held the babies one by one, and as Bob watched her, he knew he wanted to have children with her. He had never wanted children before in his life. It was frightening what being with her was doing to him. He was falling apart, but it didn’t show.

  They had brought Mary flowers and two little blue teddy bears, and the babies were adorable. She was naming them Trevor and Tyler. It reminded Lilli of when her little brothers were born when she was thirteen and she had been so excited. Her mother had had them at home, and Lilli had been there when they came into the world.

  She admitted to Bob as they walked to the hotel that she didn’t want children, and he looked surprised.

  “Why not?” She had been so good with the babies he just saw, and looked completely at ease with them in her arms, more so than their mother, who seemed overwhelmed.

  “I’ve done all that, for my mom when she died. I brought up my little brothers. I don’t need to do it again.”

  “Maybe if you fell in love with someone, you’d want kids of your own.”

  She shook her head in answer. “I don’t think so. My father thinks I should marry one of the widowers in the community and have children. I won’t marry someone I don’t love.” He was relieved to hear it. And then she laughed her mischievous giggle. “I like the idea of me being a grumpy old spinster, doing what I want.” But she couldn’t do what she wanted, only what her father wanted, and they both knew it.

  “Well, invite me to the wedding, if you get married,” he said, with an aching heart.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t,” she said, drawing closer to him and tucking her hand into the crook of his arm. He loved it when she did that, and he could feel her close to him, walking along at his side. And then she said what neither of them wanted to hear or think about. But the work she had come to do was finished. “I should go home soon,” she whispered. He had dreaded hearing those words all week.

  “I know.” It was Wednesday.

  “Maybe Friday?” she said hesitantly. It was the week she had promised her father and no more, which was fair.

  He nodded. “I’ll order the car. What would you like to do tomorrow, for your last day?” he asked her.

  “Just be with you,” she said simply, as though she knew what he was feeling. He wanted to spend the day making love to her and keep her with him forever, and thinking it, he knew he was insane and hoped she didn’t know it too. He wanted to beg her not to leave him, but he couldn’t. “Maybe go back to Central Park?”

  They did just as she requested. They rowed on the lake, and lay on the grass on a blanket he had brought, and talked. They had a picnic, and walked through the zoo. It was like a day in the country while being in the city. They listened to a steel band and watched children and jugglers, and at the end of the day, they stopped outside the Plaza again, and Bob had that same odd feeling that they had been there together before, and then they hailed a cab and went back downtown.

  They went out for pizza again, and Lillibet smilingly said that her rumspringa was about to be over, and she would have to be a grownup now, forever.

  “Will you come back to New York?” His heart was in his mouth when he asked her.

  “I’ll try.” But she didn’t want to push her father too far. Maybe for the next book, when he forgave her for this one. And until then they would have to be content with Bob’s visits to Pennsylvania, if her father allowed them. It was entirely up to her father.

  And then he said something that sounded strange, even to him. “If anything ever happens, I want you to call me, or just call the limo company, and come back … come home … I’ll be waiting for you here. Or I’ll come to get you if you want. You’re not trapped there if you don’t want to be. I’ll be here for you anytime you need me.” He had never meant anything more in his life.

  “I’m not trapped, Bob. I belong there. I’m Amish like they are.” She said it proudly, with a straight back, and he realized that she meant it.

  “Just know that I’m here, and you’re never alone, if you have a problem.” She smiled, and hoped she wouldn’t need it, but was grateful to hear it. And he reminded himself to give her the card of the limo company when she left. You never knew. Her father was a difficult man, perhaps more than even she realized, Bob thought to himself. She was used to his dictatorial ways.

  Bob had to tear himself away when he left her at the hotel that night, and he said he’d come back in the morning when she left. She wanted to come by the office to say goodbye to everyone and thank them, and Bob was with her when she did. It was noon when she got in the limo outside his office, and she thanked him again for everything with grateful eyes. He had done so much and been so kind to her. She threw her arms around his neck, standing on tiptoe, and hugged him like a child. And he wanted to keep his arms around her forever.

  “Take care of yourself, Lilli,” he said in a gruff voice. “You have all my numbers if you need me.” She nodded with tears in her eyes and then pulled away from him and looked into his eyes and wondered why she was leaving.

  “You take care too. Come to see me.” He nodded, and she got in the car and put her seat belt on. She waved as the car drove away, and Bob stood looking after her on the sidewalk. He had never felt lonelier in his life.

  Chapter 21

  The drive to Lancaster took longer than she’d expected in Friday afternoon traffic. Bob called her in the car twice, and they both tried to sound lighthearted, but she felt like she was in a spaceship going back to another planet, and she was. She was going back four hundred years to where she lived, as far away from Bob as if she lived on Mars. And he knew it too.

  They stopped to get gas, and the driver gave her his card as Bob had asked him to, so that she would have it if she needed it in an emergency. And they didn’t enter Bart Township till after six o’clock. He couldn’t leave her at the dairy, because she couldn’t call her brother, and there was no one to pick her up or drive her home. The dairy was closed by then. So she told the driver to take her to the house. She gave him directions, and she wanted to call Bob to say goodbye again, but she didn’t. She was home now, and she had to face it. It felt familiar and safe as they drove toward her father’s farm. And no matter how much she had liked New York, this was home, and she belonged here. Nothing had changed. She knew her father would probably still be angry at her for the next few weeks, or maybe he had missed her enough in the past week to forgive her and be glad she was back. She was ready to take her place and do the work in his home now. And she intended to write her new book by candlelight at night, just as she had done the first one.

  She thanked the driver when he dropped her off, and he handed her her valise. She stood there looking at the house for a minute, as he drove off, and then she walked inside, happy to be home again. She was wearing her bonnet and cape and full Amish garb. She had worn it in New York much of the time too. But the English clothes had been fun for a change, along with all her other adventures in New York, and the time she had spent with Bob. They had formed a deep friendship, which she was grateful for, but her place was here.

  The house was quiet when she walked in, which surprised her, since it was almost seven o’clock. They should have been eating dinner then, unless they had gone to one of her older brothers’. And she had had no way of warning them she was coming home. She thought the house was empty, and then she jumped as her father walked out of the parlor and stood looking at her in the kitchen. There was no sound from the boys, so she knew they were out.

  “Hello, Papa,” she said, smiling at him. “I’m back. I missed you all so much. Where are the boys?” He had sent them to their brother’s, thinking she might come home that night. He wanted to see her alone.

  His face was like granite as he approached her, pointing at her and then at the door. He spoke to her in German with fury in his voice.

  “Be gone from my house. You are no longer my daughter. You don’t live here anymore. We don’t know you. Do not come here ever again.�
� Lilli looked at him in shock and tried to go to him and put her arms around him, and he pushed her away. She had never thought he would do this to her. He loved her, how could he shun her? But obedience and the Ordnung were more important to him than she was. Lilli couldn’t understand it. Everything about it was so wrong. “You want to live among the English in New York? Go to them then,” he shouted at her. “You cannot leave as you did, and come back here when you want, and disobey me. Lillibet Petersen, you are shunned!” He strode to the door then, yanked it open, and pointed to the outside. “Go! Now!” She couldn’t believe it and tried to run past him up the stairs to her room, and he stopped her and dragged her to the front door, with her suitcase in his other hand. He threw the suitcase out and flung her out the door. She fell onto the dirt outside, sobbing, looking up at him.

  “Papa, no!” she said. And with that he slammed the door and slid the bar across it from inside. It was why he had sent the boys to their brother’s. They all knew she had been shunned. He’d been waiting to tell her. She lay there sobbing for a few minutes, and then picked herself up. Her knees were scraped from where she’d fallen, and her heavy wool stockings were torn. And then, not knowing what else to do, she walked to Margarethe’s, crying. And when she got there, she found the door barred there as well, but Lilli could hear her inside. Lilli kept pounding on the door and shouted that she knew she was there. She was sobbing, and finally Margarethe took pity on her and came to the door but didn’t open it and spoke to her from the other side.

  “I can’t let you in,” she said softly. “You are shunned.”

  “Did the elders shun me or just Papa?” she asked through her tears.

  “I don’t know. But he forbade me to let you in. He knew you would come here. He won’t take you back, Lilli. You must go. You have money. Go back to New York. You can’t stay here.”

  “Oh my God,” Lilli said in despair, “he can’t do this.”

  “Yes, he can,” Margarethe said firmly. “No one will help you. Go now.” She was crying on the other side of the door, and Lilli was sobbing. He had meant what he had said and done the unimaginable. She was shunned.

  “I love you, goodbye,” she said, as both women cried, and then, stumbling, in shock, Lilli walked toward the dairy. She sat down several times by the side of the road to cry, feeling sick. She had never thought he’d do this. He was crueler than she’d thought. He had done it because of the book and because she’d gone to New York and defied him. Obedience was all.

  It took her an hour to get to the dairy, and it was eight o’clock by then. She had some coins in her pockets, and the card the limo driver had given her. She didn’t want to call Bob in the condition she was in and admit how cruel her father had been to her and that she’d been shunned. It was her worst nightmare come true, and she was terrified and deeply ashamed, of herself and of her father. And she wanted to regain her composure before she talked to him. She felt pathetic, and she’d never been so frightened in her life. And as she walked into the phone booth, she prayed silently to her mother to help her.

  She called the limo driver and asked him to come back. He said he was on the New Jersey Turnpike by then, and it would take him an hour to get back to her, but he agreed.

  She waited on the bench at the dairy where she had sat with Bob that summer, and had found the book before that. She had no idea what would become of her now. She didn’t want to live in New York, she wanted to be here, where she belonged. She was Amish.

  She thought of her mother. She would never have let him shun her. He was so much harder now, since her mother’s death, and with age.

  The driver came back for her at nine-thirty, and she was still crying when he got there. Her face was streaked with tears and dirt, and her apron was filthy and torn. She pulled her cape around herself and got into the car. He had put some bags of food on the backseat and told her to get in the front, if she didn’t mind. And when he got a good look at her in the car, he saw the condition she was in. She was a mess.

  “Are you all right? What happened?”

  “I fell,” she said, not wanting to explain it to him. Nor to Bob. She didn’t know where to go, except back to New York. She had Bob’s address and cell phone number. She would call him when they arrived. The driver headed back to New York then, and Lilli said nothing, she just sobbed a few times and blew her nose on the tissues he had on the front seat. They got back on the turnpike and headed north. And she noticed that the driver was weaving a couple of times. “Are you okay?” she asked him.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Are you tired?”

  “No, I’m fine,” he insisted, and drove on, as Lilli stared out the window, and thought about the scene at the house when her father had literally flung her out the door and she had landed on her knees. She had flown through the air like a rag doll with his full force. He meant what he had said.

  They had been on the road for two hours, and she was still gazing numbly out the window when they swerved again. She turned sharply to look at the driver. He had dozed off, then jerked awake, and at the same moment she realized it, she saw bright lights coming toward them at full speed. He had gone over the divider, and a truck was coming toward them. Lilli saw it and screamed, and the driver noticed too late and turned sharply as the car flipped and rolled, and the truck hit them with its full force. There was the sound of grinding metal as the town car literally flew through the air, and the truck crushed it, and a horn was shrieking in her ear as Lilli passed out, and she smiled as she went to sleep.

  It took the highway patrol three hours to pull the tangled mass apart. They closed the highway, and traffic came to a dead stop, but it was after midnight, so there were few cars. There were fire trucks and several ambulances, and they used the jaws of life and a crane to lift the truck and pry the car from under it. The driver of the town car was dead and so was the truck driver and a man in the cab with him. There was one sole survivor, a young woman who had been in the car. She carried no identification, and she was rushed to the hospital in New Brunswick in critical condition. She was listed as a Jane Doe, and no one expected her to live. She had severe head injuries, and her arms were broken. The nurses made note, when they cut her clothes off, that she was Amish, judging from what she wore.

  The police called Jack Williams, the owner of the limo company, the next morning and told him that the car had been totaled and the driver was dead. An autopsy was being performed to check for drugs and alcohol. They mentioned a passenger, but the owner said he had had none, so maybe he had picked up a hitchhiker on the way.

  “Great,” Jack Williams said unhappily to his secretary when he hung up, “Grayson died, and they’re checking him for alcohol. Thank God he didn’t have a passenger of ours with him. He picked someone up, I guess, but we didn’t dispatch it.”

  “Poor guy,” she said. He had no wife or family, or children that they knew of, and they had no idea who to notify. And the next day, they were told he’d been drunk. There had been 0.10 alcohol in his blood.

  The highway patrol called the local police to visit several Amish communities within a radius of a hundred miles to inquire about a missing girl. But no one reported a missing person. She was a mystery, as she lay in a coma. And six days later, the limo company received the contents of the totaled car, what was left. There were tools, a blanket, some paperwork, and a small suitcase, which the police had examined for ID, and there was none. They had nothing to go on. Jack Williams opened the suitcase himself, to go through it. It was filled with women’s clothes in a very small size, and no ID. But as Jack dug through the valise, he found a small envelope with Lilli’s name on it that had escaped the highway patrol’s notice. It had a note from Bob Bellagio in it, and the envelope showed the address of the dairy. Jack recognized the dairy as the place where they’d picked up the girl for Bob Bellagio, and driven her to New York and then back to Lancaster a week later.

  “That’s the girl we were driving for Bob Bellagio last week,” Jack said
to his secretary with a troubled expression. “Grayson took her back to Lancaster on Friday.” He looked puzzled. “Maybe she forgot her suitcase in the car.” The police had told him that their driver had a passenger, but their dispatcher had confirmed that he had dropped the girl off at her home. So why did he still have her suitcase in the car? It made no sense, unless she forgot it. Or had the driver picked her up again and not reported it to dispatch? Was she the passenger in the front seat? Maybe she was it. Jack knew their driver had been on his way back to New York when he died, and he had called the dispatcher after he dropped Lilli off and headed back. But Jack had a strange feeling now, and he called the highway patrol to report the suitcase he’d found and the letter, and to inquire about the passenger they had mentioned earlier.

  “She’s still alive, in a coma,” the highway patrol reported. “She’s still a Jane Doe, we have no ID on her. The hospital thinks she’s Amish, but none of the communities we were able to reach are missing anybody. We have no clues so far. All we know is that she’s between twenty and twenty-five, five foot one, and weighs roughly ninety pounds, blond, green eyes.” Jack Williams didn’t know what Lilli looked like. He’d never seen her. Only their driver had. But with a strange queasy feeling, he called Bob Bellagio a few minutes later.

  “We’ve had kind of an incident,” Jack Williams began cautiously. “The driver who took Miss Petersen back to Lancaster last Friday had an accident on the way back. Head-on collision with an eighteen-wheeler on the New Jersey Turnpike. Drunk driving, I regret to say. He died in the accident. He had called us after he dropped her off, so he had no passenger that we know of, but the highway patrol reported a passenger in the front seat. We assumed he’d picked up a hitchhiker on the way back. They’re not supposed to, but they do sometimes. The passenger is still unidentified. I just got the contents of the car back, and there’s a suitcase here. I found an envelope with Miss Petersen’s name on it, with a letter from you in it. Either she forgot her suitcase, or he picked her up again and didn’t tell us and was bringing her back to New York.” Jack Williams sounded puzzled.