Kitabı oku: «Between You and Me»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Part One: Harvest

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Part Two: The Match

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by Susan Wiggs

About the Publisher

Prologue

On the day you were born, when you were only a few hours in this world, I tucked you into an old apple crate and left you behind like a piece of my beating heart, like an offering to a god I didn’t believe in but didn’t dare not believe in. Some might say you were a human sacrifice, but in that moment, I felt as though I was the sacrifice, not you.

Because in that moment, something inside me died.

Though I was too young to know anything, I truly imagined I was leaving you to a better life … I didn’t want to walk away, but I was scared of what would happen if I didn’t.

After all we’d been through that year, I was self-aware enough to realize my youth and ignorance would be a danger to you, yet smart enough to figure out what to do. I didn’t know anything about the modern world, about the city, about the law, about the inexorable ties that bind the heart. All I knew was that you’d be better off with a different future. With some other family to guide you. With some other life, far from Middle Grove.

By that time, I understood very well what happens at a hospital. They save people. They saved me. So I took you to a place where I knew you’d be saved.

Of course, that’s not how the papers reported it. The news media focused on the most sensational aspect of the case—an abandoned baby, a mysterious puzzle to be solved, a terrible family secret hidden by a distrustful, closed community that walled itself off from the rest of the world.

But the papers got it wrong.

ONE
Harvest

AUGUST

Difficulty is a miracle in its first stage.

—AMISH PROVERB

1

The silver flash of a jet plane glinted in the morning sky. Caleb Stoltz tipped back his brimmed hat and watched it soar high overhead. Against the flawless summer blue, the plane glittered like a rare jewel—precious and out of reach.

“Hey, look, Uncle Caleb. Plane tracks,” said Jonah, pointing out the twin white plumes that bisected the sky in the flight path of the jet.

Caleb grinned at his nephew and handed him a galvanized milk pail, half-filled from the milk house. “They’re called contrails. Don’t slosh it,” he cautioned. “I’ll be in to breakfast shortly.”

Lugging the pail, the boy headed for the white clapboard house, his dusty bare feet leaving shallow impressions in the dry earth. Jonah’s skinny legs, browned by a summer of swimming at Crystal Falls up the creek a ways, protruded comically from his tattered black trousers, which only a short while ago had fit him. Now eleven, the kid was growing like the corn in high summer. Caleb would have to get Hannah to sew him a new pair of pants before school started in a few weeks. If not for the way the kids were growing, he would have no notion of the passage of time.

On a farm, the seasons were important, not the years.

Caleb washed down the milking shed, the stream of water hissing on the concrete and misting his work boots. He turned off the hose, reeled it in, and left the shed, glancing up at the puffy trail of clouds dissipating in the sky. The jet was long gone, off to New York or Bangkok or some other place Caleb had no hope of ever seeing. He studied the flight path and then wondered why it was called a path when there was no visible roadway, nothing to mark its way but invisible air. It was only after the jet had passed that its route could be seen.

If Rebecca were with him, she would quirk her brow and scold him for idle thoughts. Then he would challenge her to offer proof that any thought could be idle, and her quirked brow would knit in incomprehension. “I swear, Caleb Stoltz,” she would say, and then she’d change the subject. That was her way.

Ah, Rebecca. She was going to be the most difficult part of his day. The problem had been weighing on his mind for far too long. Time to stop putting off the inevitable. They were supposed to have an understanding. She believed that one of these days, she would get her clock from him, the traditional gift of engagement, and she’d present Caleb with an embroidered cloth to symbolize her acceptance. Baptism, marriage, and a family wouldn’t be far behind. Though she wasn’t keen to raise Caleb’s niece and nephew and take care of his father, she was willing to do her duty.

Caleb needed to acknowledge the truth his gut had been telling him since the day the church elders had presented him with the notion that he and Rebecca Zook should marry. And that truth was going to make for a hard conversation. He had a fine, warm affection for Rebecca, but it was not the deep love that would bind a man and woman for life. He wasn’t even sure that sort of love existed.

It wouldn’t be fair to string her along.

Standing in the yard, he surveyed the farm for a few moments, taking in the sweep of the broad valley that ran down from the Pocono hills. The fields were an abundant patchwork of corn, wheat, alfalfa, and sorghum, spread out over rolling landscape as far as the eye could see. In the distance, Eli Kemp and his sons were cradling wheat. Their scythes swung in tandem to the rhythm of a hymn they were singing, the sound traveling across the valley in the quiet of the morning. They moved along the rows like a line of industrious soldier ants, the forked cradles felling the stalks neatly to one side. Eli’s wife trailed behind, bundling sheaves.

That was Middle Grove, Caleb thought. Faith, work, and family, stitched together by the common thread of devotion. Other farmers in the district might breathe the sweet air and offer up a silent prayer. Thank you for this day, O Lord. But not Caleb. Not in a long, long time.

From the neighboring farm, the roar of a hydraulic engine broke the stillness of the morning, its mechanical cough obliterating the Kemps’ singing. The Haubers were getting ready to fill silo today. The diesel-powered shredder would be used to chop the corn for blowing into the silo.

Caleb would be going over to help after he spoke with Rebecca. In the meantime, he stayed busy. He liked being busy. It kept him from thinking too hard about things. The sun was out, there were chores to do, and the work went fast when neighbors pitched in together.

Taking off his hat, he wiped the sweat from his brow and headed inside. Despite all the open windows, the kitchen was stifling hot. The old iron stove door yawned open with a metallic protest as his niece, Hannah, added fuel to boil the coffee. Smoke and the reek of burned toast layered the room in a misty gray haze.

“Hannah burned the toast again,” Jonah announced, unnecessarily.

His sister, who was sixteen and as incomprehensible as an alien life-form in a science fiction novel, planted her fists on her hips. “I wouldn’t have burned a thing if you hadn’t spilled the milk.” She glared accusingly at a blue-white puddle on the scuffed linoleum floor.

“Well, I wouldn’t have spilled it if you hadn’t called me a brutz baby.”

“You are one,” she retorted. “Always pouting.”

“Huh. You’re gonna get married and have a real baby and then you’ll know what it’s like.”

“Hey, hey.” Caleb held up a hand for silence. “It’s not even seven o’clock and you two are squabbling already.”

“But she called me a—”

“Enough, Jonah.” Caleb didn’t raise his voice, but the sharpness of his tone cut through the boy’s sass. The brother and sister bickered a lot, but a deep bond held them close. Orphaned by a horrendous disaster, they shared a sense of vulnerability that made them cling together, closer than most siblings. “Did you get something to eat?”

“He made grape slush out of his cornflakes again,” Hannah said. “It’s disgusting.” Jonah’s strange habit of putting grape jelly on his cereal never failed to gross her out.

“It’s better than burnt—” Catching Caleb’s warning look, Jonah snapped his mouth shut.

“Go on over to the Haubers’,” Caleb said. “Tell them I’ll be along shortly.”

“Okay.” Jonah jammed on his hat and headed for the door.

“Be sure you watch yourself around the machinery, you hear?” Caleb cautioned, thinking of the shredder’s sharp blades and the powerful auger at the bottom of the silo.

“Don’t worry, I’ve been helping out since I was knee-high to a grasshopper,” Jonah said with a cocky grin, the one that never failed to chase away Caleb’s annoyance. “Oh! Almost forgot my lucky penny.” He scampered to his room and returned with the token. It was a coin flattened in a penny press machine at the old water-powered sawmill over in Blakeslee, a souvenir of Jonah’s only trip away from Middle Grove. He tucked the coin into his pocket, then yanked open the screen door.

“See you at lunchtime,” Caleb said.

“All right.”

“And don’t slam—”

The door banged shut.

“—the door,” Caleb finished, shaking his head.

Hannah was still mopping up the milk while Caleb washed at the kitchen sink. Through the window above the basin, he could see Jonah racing like a jackrabbit across the field to the silo. Jubilee, the collie mix that followed the kid everywhere, loped along at his side. With a sudden leap, Jonah launched himself into the air, then planted his hands on the ground as his legs and bare feet flew overhead in an exuberant handspring. This was the boy’s special skill, his lithe young body’s expression of pure joy, perhaps his way of embracing the perfect summer morning.

In the kitchen, an awkward silence hung as thick as the smoke. Lately, Caleb didn’t know what to say to his sullen niece. She had been so young when he’d left Middle Grove under a glowering shadow of disapproval from the elders. He’d had every intention of finding a life away from the community. But he had returned, reeled back in by a hideous tragedy. By that time, Hannah had turned into a skinny, nervous twelve-year-old, haunted by nightmares of her murdered parents.

Now his niece was a stranger, the lone girl in a household of men, with no woman’s hand to guide her. Just Caleb, who was ridiculously ill-equipped to deal with her, and his father, Asa, a man who clung with iron fists to the old ways. Already, some of Hannah’s friends were getting baptized and promised to young men. He could scarcely imagine his little niece as a wife and mother.

He finished scrubbing his hands and dried them, then fixed up a tray with his father’s breakfast and left it on the table as usual. Asa always got up early to read Die Botschaft in the quiet of the toolshed adjacent to the house. Caleb opened a cupboard and took a wad of cash from the coffee can, folding the bills into his wallet. After chores, and after his talk with Rebecca, he planned to go up to Grantham Farm to bring home a new horse. Baudouin, the sturdy Belgian, was old. He’d given his all and had earned a fine retirement in the pasture, and now Caleb needed a replacement. He ran a yoke of draft horses to make extra money to keep up with the bills on the farm. His team was in demand, especially in winter, when cars got stuck and fallen trees needed to be dragged out of the way. It was remarkable how much hauling English folks needed.

Glancing out the window again, he saw Jonah scrambling like a monkey up the conveyor belt to feed the bound corn shocks into the grinder. The kid loved high places and always volunteered for them. Caleb had always liked that chore too. The world looked entirely different when viewed from the high opening of the silo. He used to imagine the tower scene from Lord of the Rings, a forbidden novel that had once earned him a caning from his father when he’d been caught reading it. While feeding the stalks to the shredder, Caleb used to pretend that the mouthful of whirring, glistening blades belonged to a fierce dragon guarding the tower.

“Sorry about the toast, Uncle Caleb,” Hannah spoke up, taking the charred remains out of the wire rack.

“Not a problem.” To lighten the moment, he grabbed a piece and took a huge bite, closing his eyes and pretending to savor it. “Ah,” he said. “Ambrosia.”

She laughed a little. “Oh, Uncle Caleb. Don’t be silly.”

He choked down the rest of the toast and grinned, showing his charcoal teeth. “Who’s being silly?”

“What’s ambrosia, anyway? You’re always using big words, for sure.”

“It’s what the gods of Greek myth ate,” he said. “So I reckon it means something good enough to feed to the gods.”

She gasped at the mention of Greek gods—another forbidden topic—then whisked the toast crumbs from the counter. “You’re so smart.”

“Knowing the meaning of a word doesn’t make me smart.”

“Sure it does. I heard Rebecca say you went away and came back smarter, and that’s why you still haven’t joined the order—’cause your head’s all full of prideful English nonsense.”

“Rebecca likes to hear herself talk.” At the mention of her name, Caleb felt a trickle of sweat slide down his neck. Rebecca’s notion that his time away had made him proud was yet another reason they weren’t a good match. Getting an education didn’t make a man proud. Instead, it was humbling.

In his time away, Caleb had done the unthinkable. Against all Amish principles, he had attended college classes. The traditional eighth-grade education had left a thirst in his soul, and he’d sought out books and knowledge the way a man seeks cold lemonade on a hot August day. He used to ride his bike thirteen miles each way to take classes at the community college, soaking up lessons in history, philosophy, logic, calculus, and the kind of science that had nothing to do with crop yields or tending livestock. It was humbling to discover how much he didn’t know about the world, how much he had yet to learn. He had just been starting out when he’d had to come back. These days, he imagined the world he’d discovered beyond Middle Grove shimmering like a chimera on the horizon, out of reach, yet tauntingly real.

Hannah finished tidying the kitchen in her negligent, haphazard way. When Caleb’s father came in, he’d likely point out the crumbs on the floor and the dish towels left out on the counter. He’d probably also scowl at his breakfast tray and remark that a proper Amish family broke bread together around the table, their scrubbed faces lit by the inspiration of silent prayer before they dived into hotcakes with berry preserves and thick slices of salty ham.

But they weren’t like other families. Caleb could only do so much.

“Uncle Caleb?”

At the tentative note in Hannah’s voice, he turned to her. To his surprise, her cheeks shone a dull red against the loose strings of her black kapp.

“What is it, liebchen?” He used the old endearment, hoping the familiar word would sound soothing to her ears.

“There’s, um, a singing Sunday night at the great hall,” she said. “I was wondering, um, could I go?”

“I reckon you could do that,” he said. The singings took place on a church Sunday after services. The adults would leave for the evening so the kids could gather around the table and sing—not the slow morning chants meant for devotion, but the faster ones, meant to get the kids talking. And “talking” actually meant sizing each other up, because the goal was to get the young folk started with their courtships. It seemed contrived, but no more so than a high school dance in the outside world.

“All righty, then,” Hannah said, all fluttering hands and darting eyes.

“Anything else?” he asked.

“Can I get a ride home in Aaron Graber’s buggy?” she asked, all in a rush.

Caleb felt an unpleasant thud of surprise in his gut. Aaron Graber, he thought. More like Aaron Grabber. Caleb wasn’t so sure he liked the idea of little Hannah running around with a boy, particularly that one, who looked at girls the way a fox eyes a hen.

A distant, frenzied barking sounded through the window, but Caleb gave his full attention to his niece. This was kind of a big deal. She wanted to go courting. His little Hannah, courting. It seemed like only yesterday he was showing her how to get a hit in slow-pitch softball and making her giggle at his stupid jokes. Where was that Hannah now?

“Well,” he said, “I don’t think—”

“Please, Uncle Caleb,” she said. “He asked me special.”

Before he could reply, the kitchen door slapped open with a violent bang. Levi Hauber’s face was the color of old snow, and his shoulders shook visibly. Even before he spoke, the sheer horror in his eyes froze Caleb’s blood.

“Come quick,” Levi said. “It’s Jonah. There’s been an accident.”

2

“Oh, fuck me sideways,” muttered Reese Powell as her work phone buzzed rudely against her side like a small electric shock. God. She’d just closed her eyes for a much-needed nap. Checking the screen, she saw that it was a summons from Mel, her supervising resident, in the ER. With brisk, mechanical movements, she put on her short white lab coat, looped a stethoscope around her neck, and headed out of the break room.

The long, gleaming corridor was littered with equipment and gurneys, the occasional patient slumped in a wheelchair, a rolling biohazard bin or two. Nurses and orderlies swished past, hurrying to their next call.

Reese blinked away the last of the foiled nap and took a deep breath. I will do right by my patients. This was her mantra, the one she’d adopted as a fourth-year medical student. I will do right by my patients. She had spent three years studying, cramming her head full of knowledge, memorizing, observing, but this year, the year she would earn the title of doctor, she set one simple, powerful task for herself: do the right thing.

One of the things she liked about working in the ER was the element of surprise. You never knew what was coming through the door next. Her parents had been appalled when she’d informed them of her interest in the ER. They had been pushing her toward pediatric surgery, and they expected her to explore something closer to that field. But for once, she had dared to inch a little to the left of their proposed path. She wanted more experience in emergency medicine. And Mercy Heights had a level-one trauma center, the best in Philadelphia.

Patients, family members, and personnel were clustered around the admittance center, the nucleus of the ER. As she scanned the area for Mel, a nurse stuck her head out of an exam room.

“Oh, good, you’re here,” she said. “We need someone who speaks Spanish. We’ve got a one-woman shitstorm.”

Reese hurried into the small room. “What have you got—oh.” For a second, she just stood there, trying to take in the scene. The patient was a young dark-haired woman in a stained dress, crouched on the bed, her posture defensive and her eyes cloudy with fear and distrust. Someone was asking her what she took, when she took it, but she recoiled from the questions.

“They found her wandering on the street,” said the nurse. “All we know so far is that she’s pregnant. And probably altered. She told the EMTs she was intoxicated. We’re trying to find out what she took.”

A security guard stood ready, restraints in hand. Mel shook his head. Reese knew he feared things would escalate if they tried to restrain her.

“This is not a place of healing,” the woman said in rapid-fire Spanish. “This is a place of death, a place of eternal curses.” Then she lapsed into a muttered prayer.

Reese’s Spanish kicked in. She spoke the colloquial version she’d learned from Juanita, her childhood nanny. Growing up, she’d spent more time with Juanita than she had with her busy, ubersuccessful parents. Putting on a warm, professional smile, she slowly walked toward the woman. “Hola, señora,” she said softly. “¿Qué pasa?”

At the sound of her native tongue, the woman stopped speaking and glared at Reese. “I’m Reese Powell,” Reese continued in Spanish, never losing eye contact. “My colleagues and I would like to examine you, and make sure you’re all right.”

“Get away from me. These are bad people.”

“We want to help you,” Reese said. “Do you understand English?”

“No. No English.”

“Please, may I ask you some questions?”

“My secrets are mine to keep.”

“Sometimes it is best to share a secret. Is this your first baby?”

“Yes.” The woman unfurled a little, dropping her arms from her drawn-up knees.

“What is your name, ma’am?”

“My name is Lena Garza.”

“How old are you, Lena?”

She hesitated. “Nineteen.”

“Ask her what she took,” someone said. “We heard her say she’s intoxicated.”

Reese studied the drawn, olive-toned face. The girl looked older than nineteen, her deep brown eyes haunted and scared.

“You were wandering around in traffic,” Reese said, rapidly translating for one of the EMTs. “Why were you doing that? Did you take something?” She had been taught to practice empathy—direct eye contact, a physical touch—and at first, reaching out to a stranger in this way had felt strange to her. Now that she’d been at it for a while, the gestures felt natural. It was gratifying to see the woman relax slightly, taking a deep breath before she spoke.

Lena Garza twisted the band of silver she wore on her forefinger. “Estoy intoxicada.”

“Ask her what—”

“Wait,” Reese said. “Intoxicada just means that she ingested something. Could be food, a drug, anything that makes a person sick.” She turned to Lena. “Can you tell me what you took?”

“My mother told me I will burn in hell,” she whispered. “I am not married. That is why I took the herbs.”

Reese’s heart skipped a beat. “She took something,” she told Mel in English. “What did you take, Lena?”

The girl reached into the pocket of her faded dress and drew out a crinkly cellophane bag. “She said this would cause my period to start.”

Reese grabbed the bag and showed it to Mel. “Angelica. Said to have abortifacient properties.”

Mel sniffed the yellowish-brown herb. “Also called dong quai. When did she take it? Was it within the last four hours? How much did she take?”

Reese asked the patient.

“I don’t remember. I will burn in hell,” she moaned.

“Only if you die,” Reese said in Spanish. “And we are not going to let that happen, not today.”

Mel said, “We’re going to need a gastric lavage, stat.”

While the techs prepared the lavage tray and measured activated charcoal into a beaker, Reese coaxed a bit more information from the patient—When did she have her last period? Had she seen a doctor? Where did she live?

Reese reported the answers, then convinced the woman to lie back and be connected to monitors. “I’m going to have a listen to your baby, all right?” She gently lifted the dress and slid the gel-slicked Doppler wand over Lena’s flat belly, trying to detect heart sounds.

“Ay!” the patient yelled. “That is cold. You torture me.”

“I’m sorry,” Reese said. “We need you to be still and be quiet. We’re trying to hear your baby’s heart sounds … There it is,” she said as the Doppler emitted a rhythmic wow-wow-wow. “That’s the sound of your baby’s heart.”

Lena went limp on the table and laid her forearm over her eyes. “Yes,” she said. “I hear it. I can hear it. My mother says it’s a sin to have a baby before I’m married.”

Reese let the moment stretch out a few seconds longer. Then she said, “Mothers aren’t always right about everything.” She offered a brief conspiratorial smile. “Mine thinks she is, though. Let us take care of you, and when you’re feeling better, someone will talk to you about your options.”

She explained the lavage process and convinced the girl to cooperate by swallowing the gastric tube. The girl gagged and fought, but Reese kept up a soothing patter, the way Juanita used to when Reese was small and scared of the dark.

A short time later, Lena’s eyes were closed, and her hands lay slack on the sheeting. Mel gestured, and Reese followed him out to the corridor. “You did a good job in there,” he said. “She’ll be ready to turf out before you know it.”

Reese thought about the disturbed young woman, her frightened eyes and the strange, deep knowing that lived in her like an old, old soul. “Before you turf her, let’s get someone to talk to her about her choices. I’ll be the interpreter.”

“That’s a great idea,” Mel said. “I’ll call social services and OB/GYN.”

Moments like this gave Reese a feeling of satisfaction. An overachieving fourth-year at the end of a long rat race, she was full of plans, but full of questions, too. Her parents had their own plan for her—acceptance into an elite residency program, a path to join their carefully built practice. But sometimes, the wall of her armor cracked open to reveal a glimpse of something else—another dream, maybe. A different dream, not her parents’ goals.

At the end of the hallway, the double doors burst open and Jack Tillis, the chief of trauma, swept through. His lab coat wafted open like a set of wings. He was surrounded by his team of devoted acolytes—the residents, nurses, support staff, and technicians who made up the trauma team.

“What’ve you got?” Mel asked, perking up.

“Just had a red phone pre-alert. Major trauma, coming in by life flight,” another resident said. “ETA twenty minutes.”

Reese exchanged a glance with Mel. She felt a twist of anticipation in her gut. “Can I help?”

The resident nodded. “You don’t want to miss this one. Some kid had his arm ripped off in a farming accident.”

The helicopter descended from the sky like a huge metallic insect, its giant rotors beating the cornstalks flat against the dusty field. Kneeling on ground soaked by his nephew’s blood, Caleb instinctively leaned forward over the boy’s body, which lay on the rescue workers’ shiny yellow board. The shadows of his neighbors and the rescue workers fell over him, blocking out the morning sun. Above the violent rhythm of the chopper blades, he could hear crackling radios and shouts, but all his attention stayed focused on Jonah.

Only a short time earlier, Jonah had been racing across the field to help fill silo, something he had done dozens of times before. Now he lay broken and bleeding, his left arm and his boyish face slashed by the vicious metal teeth of the shredder. And despite the injuries, Jonah was sweetly, horrifyingly conscious.

White-faced, blue-lipped, his eyes dull with shock as his life drained away, the boy tried to speak through chattering teeth. “Cold,” he kept saying. “I’m ssso … cold.”

“I’m here, little man,” Caleb said, his voice a rasp of panic. “I’ll keep you warm.”

The rescue workers had immobilized the arm with an air bladder and enclosed his neck in a stiff collar. They covered him with every blanket they had, but it wasn’t enough to keep Jonah from shivering like a leaf in the wind. Then they prepared to load the stretcher into the helicopter.

“You cannot take him in that … that thing.” Caleb’s father stepped forward, thumping his hickory cane on the ground. “I won’t allow it.”

From the moment the county rescue crew had declared that Jonah’s only hope of survival was to be airlifted to a trauma center in Philadelphia, there had been a division in the community. Dr. Mose Shrock, who supervised the emergency services of the local hospital, had been contacted by phone. He’d confirmed the rescuers’ plan, and Caleb had approved the transport without hesitation.

Now his face felt carved in stone as he glared at his father. “They’re taking him,” he said simply. “I’ ll allow it.”

“Sir, you’ll have to step aside,” a man shouted, jostling in front of Asa. “We’re going to load him hot, while the chopper’s still going.”

“These people will take care of you,” Caleb said to his nephew, climbing to his feet. “I love you, Jonah, don’t ever forget I love you.”

“Uncle Caleb, don’t leave me.”

Despite the noise of the beating rotors, Caleb heard his nephew’s faint plea, piercing his heart.

The nurses and paramedics of the life flight lifted the board as the pilot did a walk around the helicopter, checking the landing area. Jonah was lost amid a pile of blankets and gear. His blood stained the ground everywhere.

“I’m going with him,” Caleb said loudly. “I have to go with him.”

A nurse in a utility vest looked at him, then over at Jonah.

“Please,” Caleb said. “He’s just a little boy.”

“It’s the pilot’s call. I’ll see what she says about the fly-along.”

Caleb turned and found himself face-to-face with his father. Asa held his hat clapped on his head to keep it from being blown away by the rotors. His straight-cut coat and broadfall trousers flapped in the wind. He stood flanked by the neighbors, forming a somber wall of fear and disapproval.

The last thing on Caleb’s mind was Amish Ordnung. Clearly it was uppermost in the minds of his father and the elders.

“If it’s God’s will that the boy is to survive,” Asa stated, “then he will do so without being lifted into the sky.”

Caleb didn’t trust God’s will, and he hadn’t in a long time. But he didn’t argue with his father. He hadn’t done that in a long time either.

Hannah rushed to his side. Her face was pale gray and awash with tears. “You have to go, Uncle Caleb. You have to.”

Alma Troyer stepped forward, her mouth set in a firm line. She cut a quick glance from Asa to Hannah. “You go, Caleb. I’ll keep Hannah with me while you’re away.”

The flight nurse touched his arm. “You’re in. The pilot said you can come.”

Caleb nodded and turned to his father. “I’ll call.” The Amish families shared a phone box in the middle of the village, its use limited to necessary business and emergencies. Without waiting for a reply, he turned on his heel and followed one of the EMS technicians to the chopper.

In a tangle of tubes and monitors, Jonah was being loaded into the side bay of the shiny blue helicopter. “Whoa, you’re a tall one. Keep your head low,” a technician cautioned Caleb, pointing upward. “Stay to the front and left of the chopper.”

Hardwired to her radio equipment, the pilot glanced at Caleb. “You’re a big fella,” she yelled. “What do you weigh?”

Caleb never weighed himself. “Two hundred pounds,” he estimated, aware of the broad blade swinging overhead. He was nineteen hands tall, judging by the draft horses he worked with. Well over six feet. He was definitely at risk of having his head lopped off by the rotating blade.

“Our weight limit’s two-twenty,” the pilot said. “Let’s do it.”

The technician kept his hand on Caleb’s shoulder and guided him aboard. Someone tossed his hat to him. They showed him where to sit and how to strap himself in. In the cramped space, he was close enough to Jonah to reach the boy, but he couldn’t figure out a place to touch. He rested his hand somewhere—the kid’s foot. Even through layers of thermal blankets, it was cold as ice.

“Jonah,” he said, “I’m with you. Hear me? I’m coming with you.”

He was given a set of headphones with spongy earpieces. Radios crackled and screeched. Monitoring equipment beeped, straps and clamps were locked into place. A mask was put over Jonah’s nose and mouth, and one of the workers squeezed an air bag at regular intervals. In minutes, the doors were pulled shut. The pilot rattled off a series of orders, simultaneously checking things in the cockpit and snapping a series of switches and levers. With a roar of increasing power, the chopper lifted straight off the ground.

Caleb’s stomach dropped, and the breath left his lungs. Through a rounded glass opening, he saw the people gathered near the landing site. Neighbors and friends, his father still holding his hat to his head, growing smaller and smaller as the copter ascended into the sky. They looked like a black-and-gray cloud against the golden fields. Hannah lay crumpled on the ground, her skirts surrounding her like an inkblot. Someone should go to her, put a hand on her shoulder to reassure the girl. But no one did.

The helicopter passed the silo in the blink of an eye, but in one glimpse Caleb could see the conveyor slanting up to the opening, the shredding machine positioned at the top. And on the ground, on the green-and-brown earth where the farm had stood for generations, he saw the livid stain of his nephew’s blood, oddly in the shape of a broken star.

The helicopter nurse was yelling information into a radio, most of which Caleb barely understood. Jonah’s BP and respiration, absent pulses distal to the injury site, other things spoken in code so rapidly he couldn’t follow. He did catch one word, though, loud and clear.

Incomplete transhumeral amputation.

Amputation.

The helicopter lurched and careened to one side. Caleb pressed his hand against the hull to steady himself, and his stomach roiled. Another feeling pushed through his terror for Jonah, a feeling so powerful that it made him ashamed. Because in the middle of this devastating trauma, he felt an undeniable thrill. He was up in the air, hovering above the earth, flying.

All his life he had tried to imagine what it was like to fly, and now he was doing it. So far, the experience was more amazing and more terrible than he’d ever thought it would be. The land lay in squares made of different hues of green and yellow and brown, stitched together by pathways and irrigation ditches. Shady Creek was a slick silver ribbon fringed by bunches of trees. There were toy houses connected by walkways and white picket fences, a skinny single-lane road with a canvas-topped buggy creeping along behind a horse. Caleb could tell it was the Zooks’ Shire, even from the sky. He knew practically every horse in Middle Grove.

The chopper moved so fast that the view changed every few seconds, sweeping over the Poconos. The nurse finished punching buttons on some piece of equipment. “Sir,” she said to Caleb, “I need to ask you some questions about your son.” Her voice sounded tinny and distant through the headphones.

No time to explain that Jonah wasn’t his son.

“Yeah, sure.” At her prompting, he reported Jonah’s name, his age, the fact that he didn’t suffer from any allergies Caleb knew of. She wanted to understand the nature of the accident and he did his best to explain how the equipment worked, how the blades shredded the corn and blew it into the silo, how sometimes a piece got fouled up and needed an extra push with the next stalk in line. From the look on the woman’s face, he could tell his explanation was as incomprehensible to her as her medical jargon was to him. Another thing he could see on her face was the real question, the one she would not ask.

How could you let a child work around such dangerous equipment?

Caleb couldn’t even answer that for himself. It was the way things had always been done on the farm. From the time they learned to walk, kids helped out. The tiniest ones fed chickens and ducks, weeded the garden, picked tomatoes and beans. When a boy got older, he helped with plow and harrow, the hay baler, sheaves, fetching and carrying from the milk house, anything that needed doing. It was the Amish way. And the Amish way was to never question tradition.

He tried to check on his nephew, but there was little of Jonah to see amid the tangle of tubes and wires and the guy squeezing the big plastic bulb into the boy’s nose and mouth. The chopper veered again, and the landscape quickly changed. Philadelphia was a bristling maze of steel and concrete giants arranged along the wide river and other waterways. The city had its own kind of strange beauty, made up of crazy angles and busy roads. Atop one of the buildings, a series of markings seemed to pull the chopper from the sky like a magnet.

“They’re going to do a hot unload,” the nurse explained. “They’ll get him out even before the chopper stops. You just wait until it stops, and the pilot will tell you when it’s safe to get out.”

“Got it.” Caleb was startled when he looked down and saw that his hat was still clutched in his bloody hand.

His other hand lay on the blanket covering Jonah’s bony bare foot. Please, Jonah, he said without speaking. Don’t die on me.

The Amish never prayed aloud except at meeting. They were a people of long, meditative silences that made folks think they were slow-witted. Caleb begged, with wordless contemplation, for mercy for his nephew.

He’s only a little boy. He sings to the ducks when he feeds them in the morning. He sleeps with his dog at the foot of his bed. Every time he smiles, the sun comes out. His laughter reminds me that life is beautiful. I can’t lose him. I can’t. Not my Jonah-boy.

Caleb was praying for the first time in years. But for him, prayer had always been like shouting down a well. Your own words were echoed back at you. Only the truly faithful believed someone was actually there on the other end, listening.

3

In Philly, traumas were plentiful and Reese had attended her share. Gunshot wounds, stabbings, and automobile wrecks accounted for most of them. But every once in a while, something new and unexpected came through the heavy doors of the trauma bay—a guy crushed in a logrolling contest. A window washer who had fallen from a scaffold. A skydiver whose chute hadn’t opened properly in midair and who had hit the ground at seventy-five miles per hour.

The dramatic, over-the-top traumas had a peculiar effect on the team. Everyone felt the sting of the razor’s edge, reminding them that anyone could be a hair’s breadth from death. The sole purpose of the team was to reel the victim back from tragedy.

According to the advance reports coming from the life flight crew, this boy, too, balanced on the edge. On the one hand, he was young and strong and in a good general health. But on the other, he had suffered a devastating injury and had lost a lot of blood. If the shock didn’t kill him, sepsis or secondary injuries could.

“They’re bringing him down now,” the lead trauma nurse reported.

“Get ready, people,” Jack added. The trauma chief worked the team like a drill sergeant, preparing the high-tech bay with painstaking attention to detail—airway, IV, monitoring equipment, essential personnel, lab and radiology backup. With everything in readiness, the area resembled the inside of a strange, futuristic cathedral, the bed in the center like an altar where victims were brought forth to appease a pantheon of wrathful gods.

The last moments were silent, team members’ minds weighted by the tension of expectation while their bodies were physically weighted by the heavy purple X-ray vests. Everyone was alone with their thoughts—the team leader, primary physician, airway team, nurses and patient care techs, radiology tech, CT, pharmacy, recorder, support staff, chaplain. Reese imagined that some were praying. She herself clung to her mantra: do right.

The team members stood poised in their designated positions. Reese felt a surge of adrenaline course through her, starting in her chest and spreading like a drug through her neck and shoulders, arms and legs. She understood the physiology of the human body, but no textbook could adequately describe certain things—the heady rush of anticipation, for one thing.

Stone-cold fear, for another.

During this rotation, she was learning that in a trauma situation, there was almost no time to think. Though her head was crammed with facts and procedures, she shut down everything except that which would help the patient. In a trauma, she didn’t feel hunger or fatigue or even the need for the bathroom. She got so focused that she didn’t even feel emotion, which worried her.

Mel said it was a good thing. When a patient was coded, the doctor needed cold algorithms, not empathy. He’d told her to consider a residency in trauma, but she had dismissed the suggestion. That wasn’t where she was headed.

But in moments like this, she caught herself reconsidering.

“Keep an eye on Jack,” Mel murmured in her ear. “Watch and learn. He is the maestro.”

Reese nodded. There were a few more moments of breath-held anticipation, tingling with the awareness that everything was about to change. Then the wire mesh doors exploded open with a loud thud, and the patient arrived.

“Coming through,” someone said, walking backward and pulling the gurney along a hallway marked with a red line on the floor and the words All Trauma. “Clear a path.” More paramedics ran with the stretcher between them, preparing for the transition into the trauma bay. Reese craned her neck but couldn’t see the boy amid the cluster of personnel and equipment—just an oversize C-collar and two vacu-splints painted with fresh blood.

Behind the stretcher was a man so large he dwarfed everyone else. His shirt and hands were covered in blood. Beneath a dramatic wave of golden blond hair, his expression was a mask of agonized worry—a guy facing every parent’s worst nightmare.

The stretcher was angled into the middle of the trauma bay and the team went to work.

“How’s he holding up?” Jack asked, positioning himself at the foot of the bed.

“Not so hot.” Irene, the life flight nurse, stepped back from the rig, consulted dual tablets, and gave a swift MIVT report—mechanism, injuries, vitals, treatment. She stated that the boy had been given blood agents to lower the risk of hemorrhage. Monitors beeped and screeched off-key as the patient was transferred to the X-ray table. In the corner, a server’s lights flashed green and gold.

Reese tried to make out his features with the clear mask cupped over his nose and mouth. Deep lacerations slashed one cheek, as though he’d been clawed by a huge bear. His eyes were blue, darting from side to side.

“Dear God,” she whispered. “He’s conscious.”

“Been that way since it happened,” Irene said. “You’re an amazing guy, Jonah. You’re doing great.”

“I’m Dr. Tillis,” Jack said, looking straight down into the kid’s face. “We’re going to take good care of you.”

The boy’s lips moved inside the mask, fogging the plastic. He wasn’t crying. Reese suspected that shock had pushed him well past that point.

“Right,” said Jack. “Let’s have a look at that arm.”

The field dressing was removed and the arm exposed, and even the seasoned members of the team gaped in awe at the injury. It was a ragged horror of a wound, the tissue and bone and bloody dressing so tortured that it hurt just to look at it.

He never even lost consciousness, Reese thought. What the hell kind of kid was this?

“Jonah, can you move the fingers of your left hand, buddy?” asked Dr. Tillis.

The hand lay unresponsive.

“How about a thumbs-up or an okay sign,” Tillis suggested. “Can you do that?”

The boy’s eyes narrowed in pained concentration, but there was still no response. Everything had been shredded or severed. “Completely ablated,” someone nearby murmured. “Oh, man …”

“Get in here, Powell,” said Dr. Tillis. “Move in closer. This is something you don’t see every day. Let’s have you remove the lower-extremity clothing and do the blood draw.”

Most of the kid’s clothes had already been removed, cut or ripped off by the EMTs, or maybe in the accident. His skinny chest and pelvis looked as pale as marble. He wore jockey shorts, plain white turned gray from laundering, which she scissored away, looking for further injuries to report to the lead doctor. “No sign of bruising or trauma to the pelvis,” she said.

Then she prepped the site with Betadine and palpated the femoral artery with her fingers. “You’ll feel a pinch, Jonah,” she said, then felt ridiculous warning him about a pinch while his arm was hanging in shreds. She inserted the needle at a right angle. The slender curl of tubing filled with bright red blood, filling the syringe. While another student applied pressure to the site, Reese carefully labeled the blood draw and handed it off to a lab tech.

Jack rapped out orders for further assessments and pain management along with X-rays, piles of warm blankets, a Foley for urinalysis. Reese had a powerful urge to touch the boy—somewhere, somehow—but focused instead on following instructions. IVs were connected, and the surge of fluids and drugs worked quickly. Reese wasn’t sure whether or not she imagined it, but she thought the boy looked directly at her as she leaned forward to check a line and a monitor. Then his eyes fluttered closed. She wished she’d touched him.

The work of prepping Jonah Stoltz for surgery was done swiftly, each member of the team playing a part. They debrided and dressed wounds, scanned and tested the slender, broken boy, stabilizing him as best they could and seeking secondary injuries. Three floors up, the surgeons of the OR scrub team were already gearing up for the most likely outcome—amputation. The mobile bed was pushed out into the gleaming stainless-steel maw of the elevator.

With a rubbery squeak, the doors whisked shut and silence filled the trauma bay again. In a vacuum of silence, the adrenaline rush subsided.

People in the emergency department, and especially members of the trauma team, had a brief but vital relationship with the patient. It was like a missed encounter on a bus—they had minimal details about what preceded the trauma, an intense flurry of total focus and attention, during which the patient was the center of their universe. And then, once the patient was rushed off to surgery, everyone moved on. There was no closure. They glimpsed a single page from the narrative, never the whole story.

The room emptied quickly. The once pristine suite now resembled a bloody field in the aftermath of battle. Orderlies appeared to clear the area. Reese glanced around the room. She spotted something on the floor—an elongated penny that had been flattened on a train track, or maybe in one of those machines. The words Old Blakeslee Sawmill had been pressed into the copper.

She slipped it into the pocket of her lab coat. Then she went out to the garden adjacent to the emergency department, where there was an outdoor seating area favored by the staff. From here she could see the river, its banks flanked by long green swaths of parkland populated by kids playing Frisbee and shooting hoops, people lying on the grass in the sunshine, strolling tourists and cyclists rolling by.

She thought of the boy being rushed to surgery, and a shiver passed over her. At the far end of the garden, one of the trauma nurses stood alone, smoking a cigarette and staring into space as she blew a thin stream of smoke into the warm, unmoving air. Reese didn’t judge her for the habit, nor did she remind her of the property’s ban on smoking. After a major trauma, everyone involved seemed to deal with it in their own way. Some were chatty, expending the excess adrenaline in conversation, while others stayed quiet, floating in some placid reflection pond in their mind until balance returned.

Reese was still discovering what sort of trauma team member she was, but this rotation would probably end before she figured it out. She stood mulling over the incident, putting it into the context of her long-term plan.

For as long as she could remember, she had been focused on this career. She didn’t even recall choosing it. Perhaps it had chosen her, or more accurately, it had been chosen for her. Sometimes she felt like a stranger in her own life, like Rip Van Winkle waking up twenty years in the future. She blinked and looked around, wondering, How the hell did I get here?

On paper, the journey was as clear as a road map. Her parents were physicians, hugely successful in their fields of infertility and neonatology. Her father had an endowed chair at Penn. Hector and Joanna Powell were known for their groundbreaking work. Reese was their most successful experiment of all. She had been a test-tube baby, the result of her parents’ in vitro fertilization. She owed her very existence to their efforts and expertise.

It wasn’t anything she thought about too often, but every once in a while it made her feel … different. On the one hand, she knew she had been so desperately wanted that her parents had gone through an amazing medical ordeal to bring her into the world. On the other hand, the idea of having started life in a petri dish was downright strange.

Her parents had sent her to the best schools in the country, financed by their work for other infertile couples. That she would be a doctor was a foregone conclusion. There was never any other decision to be made. After completing her BS in premed, she went straight into the MD program and was now aimed like a straight arrow toward a career in pediatric surgery, the perfect complement to her parents’ practice. A five-year surgical residency followed by two years of peds surgery would bring her into the fold.

Sometimes thinking about the journey ahead gave her a migraine.

Mel came outside, his affable, slightly disheveled presence a welcome interruption. He was a good doctor and a good teacher, and he was happily married, for which she was grateful. No danger of come-ons or late-night gropings in the on-call room, something she’d dealt with far too often in medical school.

“So what did you think of that?” he asked. “Pretty intense, huh?”

“Yes. That team is incredible.” She shook her head. “Poor kid. His life will never be the same.”

“The flight nurse said he’s an Amish kid.”

She frowned, digesting the info as she pictured horse-drawn buggies, bonnets, barefoot children. “No shit. So how did he get mangled by a piece of machinery? I thought the Amish did everything by hand.”

He shrugged. “I guess not everything. But the nurse said some of the neighbors and family made a big stink about the chopper. They didn’t want him to fly. It broke one of their rules.”

“I’m glad the father went ahead and broke the rules, then. Is that why the media showed up?” She gestured at the parking lot. News vans from the local affiliates had already disgorged cables, gear, and primped on-air reporters. This was what was known in the hospital as a “drama trauma”—an unusual and often tragic event that drew the local press and created a storm on social media.

“Probably,” said Mel. “A hospital spokesman will handle it.”

“Good. The last thing the family needs is the local news hounding them.” She glanced through the broad windows into the building. In the ER consultation rooms and waiting area, people huddled in worried clumps or paced the floor. A tall blond man, as upright and still as a tree on a windless day, stood looking outside, his face seemingly carved in stone.

Reese frowned. “Isn’t that the father?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Why isn’t he up in surgery?”

Mel shrugged again. “Maybe nobody told him.”

Reese felt a hitch of irritation. A big hospital was a wonder in many ways. But sometimes things slipped through the cracks. “Damn. I’ll go tell him where the surgery waiting area is,” she said.

Mel nodded, and she went back into the building. The boy’s father looked wildly out of place in the high-tech trauma center, with his pinned-on dark clothes and a flat-brimmed hat clutched in his hands. There were smears of blood on his shirt and hands and boots. This man had set aside his principles to save the boy, but clearly at a cost, for he looked miserable.

She felt a well of sympathy for the guy. Thanks to her parents’ profession, the hospital had always been a familiar environment, the place where they worked. For most people, it was an alien world—and not a friendly one.

“Excuse me,” she said. “Are you Jonah Stoltz’s father?”

The man turned. This one didn’t have the big U-shaped beard she associated with Amish men. Blond guys always seemed to look younger than they actually were, and special, somehow, a breed apart. He had the same clear blue eyes as the boy. His mouth was set in a grim line of suppressed fear.

“I’m Caleb Stoltz,” he said in a rich, slow voice. “Jonah’s uncle.”

“My name is Reese Powell.” The guy inspired a welling of sympathy within her, perhaps because he seemed so alone. “Will his parents be coming soon?”

“His parents are dead.” The blunt words fell into the silence between them.

“Oh … I didn’t realize,” she said, the warmth in her throat turning into an ache. She wondered if some awful farm accident had taken them. Were such things common in an Amish community?

“I’m raising Jonah now.” He focused briefly on her name and school embroidered on her lab coat. “Is there news? How is he?”

“Mr. Stoltz,” she said, “has someone given you a report on Jonah’s progress? Has a social worker talked to you?”

“They said he needed surgery. I already signed the papers.”

Hadn’t anyone bothered to explain things to this man? Reese’s irritation returned. “The trauma team stabilized him, and he was taken up to the surgical unit. It’s in a different part of the hospital. If you like, I’ll show you to the waiting area.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Okay. I’ll wait there for as long as necessary.” As he spoke, she noticed two things about him. He maintained a curious stillness in the way he held himself. And when he looked at her, his gaze was rock steady, never wavering.

She walked with him to the elevator. People glanced at him and some did a double take, noting his height, his bloodied clothes, the hat of woven straw he held in his large hand. He was wildly out of place here. But then, maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing to be out of place in an emergency ward.

She pressed the button for the elevator and a moment later the doors cranked open. She thought he might hesitate before stepping inside, but he didn’t. She pushed the fourth-floor button and the car glided upward.

At a loss for words, she cast a surreptitious glance at him. He had put his hand against the wall as if to steady himself, and his gaze focused on the lighted buttons. She knew very little about the Amish, but their clothes were distinctive—flat-front trousers, a plain shirt with rolled-back sleeves, suspenders, a brimmed hat, and work boots.

Reese felt something she didn’t recognize. Surprise, maybe, and a funny warm sense of compassion. He was absolutely striking. He had a face she knew she would never forget, as perfectly made as a sculptor’s masterpiece, with square jaw, high cheekbones, piercing eyes.

He caught her staring, and she felt a flush rise in her cheeks. “My colleague told me you’re Amish.”

“That’s right.”

Amish. What did she know about the Amish? Quilts and bonnets, the Plain people. “Where do you live? Over in Lancaster County?” The area was known for its Amish population. People from the city took weekend trips to poke around the markets and craft shows there, to sample the homemade goods and stay in cozy inns. Reese had never visited. Her spare time was mostly devoted to studying or networking with people her parents thought she should meet. Every once in a blue moon, she found time to go on a date.

She’d read somewhere that a blue moon occurred twice a year.

That was about right.

He shook his head. “Not Lancaster. We live north of here and a little west, in a place called Middle Grove.”

“So, um, the flight nurse said you came in the helicopter,” she ventured. “Was that your first time to fly?”

“It was. The Amish have rules against flying in the air,” he said. “I understand that. But I have rules against a little boy bleeding to death.”

Reese winced at the anguish she heard in his voice. “I’m sure everyone would agree you made the best choice for Jonah.”

“I’m not sure of that at all,” he said, sending her a dour look.

The conversation was going brilliantly, thought Reese. Well, she had better things to do than make small talk with this guy. When the elevator whispered to a stop at the fourth floor, she led him past the nursing station and to the waiting lounge, furnished with green sofas, low tables, hopelessly dog-eared magazines and books. A large monitor displayed coded updates of the ongoing procedures.

“You can have a seat here,” she said. “I’ll let them know at the nursing station that you’re here for Jonah.”

“Okay. Thanks.” He made no move to sit down.

“Well,” she said, backing awkwardly away. “I know they will take excellent care of Jonah. The surgeons here are the best in the country.”

He sent her a curt nod. She couldn’t blame him for being skeptical of such a common platitude. Ask anyone at any hospital, and the likely answer was that this was the best in the country, and the patient was in good hands.

She hurried to the nursing station. The three nurses present were lined up at the counter, all staring drop-jawed at Caleb Stoltz. Under different circumstances, Reese would have laughed at their transparent lust.

“That man is—”

“—grade-A eye candy,” said one of the nurses.

“Mr. Stoltz,” she said, lowering her voice. “Caleb. He’s the uncle and legal guardian of Jonah Stoltz.”

One nurse, whose name tag read ALICE, glanced at a monitor. “The boy is in OR seven.” She gave Reese a dismissive glance. Med students were distinguished by their short white coats and afforded no special privileges.

“So somebody keep him filled in, okay? I found him still waiting around in the ER, lost. Show him how to track his nephew on the big monitor board.”