Butterfly Garden (31 page)

“Sorry you married me.”

“If you remember,” Adam said, “I had no choice.”

“As if I did. So you are sorry?”

Adam sighed. “Being married to you has been both the best and the worst experience of my life. It has been, at times, better than heaven, and at others, worse even than hell.”

Sara said nothing more. She could not speak for the sorrow choking her. Her silent tears fell until she slept.

Toward dawn, she sat up and rubbed her back. Adam tried to sooth her with his big capable hand, but despite the depth of her craving for his touch, she pushed him away and rose to don her robe. “The hell is happening now, isn’t it, Adam?  Too bad we were pushed into marriage so quick. If we had waited, your mother would have arrived soon enough to care for the girls and we would both have been saved.”

“If we could arrange life the way we wanted it,” Adam said, sitting on the edge of the bed, his voice tired. “We would be God.”

“The way you want your life is not with me in it, I think.”

“Sara, don’t. Come here. Where are you going?”

She had awakened because she thought she heard someone at the kitchen door. And she’d just heard it again.

Mercy’s husband stood on the porch. “She is in labor,” Enos said. “It’s too soon. You have to come. She’s calling for you.”

“Go get Jordan—Doctor Marks—and tell him to meet me there. Hurry.”

Sara went back into her bedroom to dress. “It’s Mercy,” she said when Adam questioned her.

“Give me a minute,” he said.

“Enos is waiting for me. “Go back to sleep.”

“No, I….”

“It’s an hour till dawn and, frankly, Adam, I don’t want you, at this moment, any more than you want me.”

Licking salty tears from her lips, Sara hurried to the barn to hitch up her small buggy. She had lied to her husband. Twice. Enos was not waiting for her. And she wanted Adam so badly, she could die of it. But that was not to be considered right now.

Mercy needed her.

An hour later, Sara was certain she could feel every single one of Mercy’s labor pains deep in her own womb, in the small of her back, especially.

Thank God her own babe wasn’t due for a month and a half yet.

The minute Sara arrived, before she saw Mercy even, she prepared a tea of Gossypium root bark, as she had done during Mercy’s last delivery, to induce stronger contractions.

Mercy drank it dutifully, but her labor did not proceed at all as it had done the year before. It blazed a flash-fire trail of agony through her. Within the first half hour, her pains came closer and closer, until they were already a minute apart.

“Seven times I have labored, but I have never felt such agony before,” Mercy admitted during a moment of respite. “The pains are ripping me apart, Sara. I am afraid.”

Only Sara knew that Mercy was not alone in her fear. Sweat poured down her own brow. “How long were you in labor tonight, before you sent Enos for me?” Lord, she wished Jordan would hurry.

“An hour, no more.”

“And before you told Enos you were in labor.”

Mercy nearly smiled. “Minutes only.”

Oh, Lord. Oh, God. She should have gotten that information from Mercy before giving her the tea. Suppose she’d made matters worse with the infusion. Suppose she’d caused her friend more pain.

Suppose Mercy died.

The thought was not to be borne. Sara thrust it dutifully aside, so she could give Mercy and her twins her full attention.

Twins who would be born a month too soon. “I won’t lie to you, Mercy. This is not good. The babies will be small for sharing their nourishment and growing space, and smaller still for coming early.”

“I know,” Mercy said even as she cried out with pain.

Sara bathed her friend’s face and pressed her cheek to Mercy’s cool brow. “I wish….” She sighed. “For your sake, my friend, I wish to God I knew more.”

“Jordan will be here any minute,” Mercy said.

Sara went back to check her progress. “So will one of your little ones. One with hair as pale as corn silk.”
And a very weak pulse, if any.

Mercy gasped a laugh and screamed as she pushed.

The blonde mite of a boy slipped into Sara’s hands with no sign of life. Sara sobbed and worked on it for as long as she dared, but the next child that needed help entering the world might have a chance.

She turned her attention back to Mercy, who knew, without words that the first of the twins had not survived.

The second took a bit longer, which worried Sara. “When did you last feel life?” she asked Mercy.

“I … I don’t remember.”

“Yesterday?  Last week?”

“I don’t remember,” she wailed.

Damn, damn, damn. “The child came. Another son. To be placed, as he was in his short months of life, beside his brother … but in death.

More labor, but not for the afterbirth, Sara realized with shock.

“A third boy,” Sara said, her voice wavering. She held up the lifeless child, no bigger than the cupped palms of her hands, regarding it through a mist of tears with an overwhelming sense of wonder and loss.

Sara washed and wrapped each babe separately and brought Mercy all three to hold. Crooning, she kissed small fingers, tiny noses, and Sara wept with her.

Mercy ran out of tears.

Sara did not.

She put the babies back in the cradle and helped deliver the afterbirth. It came fast, easy, and in one piece, thank God. Mercy was not bleeding overmuch.

“It’s not your fault, her dear friend kept saying, but Sara did not hear nor heed her words.

She had just got Mercy washed, and clean padding placed between her legs, when Enos returned. “The doc’s on his—”

He fell to his knees beside the cradle.

“Boys,” Mercy said. “I’m sorry, Enos.”

Enos turned on Sara. “This is your fault. What did you do?  How could you let this happen?”

I don’t know, I don’t know, Sara kept thinking, but words would not come. She had cost the lives of three babies. She had failed her best friend.

“No, Enos,” Mercy kept saying, “It’s not Sara’s fault,” but the grieving man knew nothing but rage.

“Get out,” he ordered Sara. “Out.”

Sara kissed Mercy’s cheek. “I will be sorry until the day I die,” she whispered, then she hurried outside, as fast as her clumsy gait would allow, and climbed into her buggy.

When she topped the rise, Sara saw Jordan’s fancy carriage climbing Hickory Hill from the valley, headed in her direction. She did not want to be forced to see him. She could not bear to confess her failure. Rather than take the direct route to Walnut Creek, Sara turned her buggy onto Maple Valley Road to go around the town.

She had been a fool to think she could be a midwife. She had all but killed three babies. She could no longer allow herself to risk the lives of the women who might entrust themselves to her care. She did not, after all, possess the skill to be a midwife.

That dream was not meant to be, neither was her dream of having a husband and family of her own. If she kept going, no family would miss her, none of her own, that was.

Adam’s family would be better off without her.

Was it only a year ago that she had been so young and so filled with a sense of purpose and invulnerability?

A lot could happen in a year.

Sara tried to concentrate on her driving. She needed not to run the buggy wheels through so many holes. The jostling was killing her. Her back was killing her. She hurt so bad, she had to untie her apron because the strings binding her belly were making her discomfort worse.

Untied, her apron flapped in her face, so she pulled it off, over her head, and tried to stuff it behind her seat. It fell out almost at once and a gust of wind took it and lifted it in the air. Sara reached for it and nearly fell from the buggy.

She stopped and got down, but when she saw the wind carry the apron upward and toward the woods, her sore back reminded her she wasn’t in any condition to climb a tree, so she gave up chasing it and got back in the buggy.

Sara started driving again, heedless of her direction, so long as she went far, far away from all she could never have.

Once she had believed she could save every mother and child she tended. She had believed that she could make Adam love his children. “As if he could love anyone.” He didn’t even love the child she carried with so much hope, until now. She had even believed he would come to love her. Sara laughed aloud, but ended on a broken sob.

“Poor baby,” she crooned, rubbing her big belly, ignoring her aching back. “I want you, even if your Datt does not. He doesn’t even want me. He only got stuck with me, because the Elders made him marry me. He needed somebody, anybody, to nurse him back to health. He needed somebody to take the responsibility for your sisters off his shoulders.

Sara stopped the buggy. She still found Adam’s giving her the girls to be something of a puzzle, the pieces of which she could not seem to fit together, no matter how many ways she tried. Another foolishness on her part, most likely. She mocked herself with a curse and regarded the fork in the road. One road lead back home—well, to the Zuckerman farm. The pike would lead her toward the far reaches of the state, where Ohio met Pennsylvania. She had heard there were several Amish communities in that vast, unknown place.

Sara pushed her hair more securely beneath her bonnet and looked around. The weather was turning. Despite the October date on the calendar, winter was almost upon them, the wind brisk, the air cool. She might have to stop for the night and she had no money for shelter, but the shack where her child had been conceived lay along the pike to Pennsylvania.

Why not take the pike?  Join another community. Start again.

She had failed Mercy.

She had failed as a daughter and sister.

She had failed to teach Adam to love. He was sorry he married her. He had his mother and sister now; what did he need her for?  Lena and Emma would take good care of the girls.” Sara wiped her eyes with an angry hand. Yes, she would miss them. Her arms ached to hold baby Hannah even now, but soon she would have her new little one to fill the emptiness.

“You,” she told her restless child, “will know only a complete and willing love, not a half-grudging one. You might have only one parent, but she will love you enough for two, though she will miss your father until the day she last closes her eyes.”

Sitting there, looking down that lonely road, Sara knew she had no choice. She could not go back. One parent who loved was better than two, if one of them made a child yearn for what could not be. Better to be content in life than feel as if something was missing.

For the child pressing and turning in her womb, she must go. To relieve her husband of the burden of her presence, she must. As she must to relieve the community of a midwife who could kill.

And she must do it now, before anyone could change her mind, before good-byes could weaken her determination or tears sever her resignation. She would make this sacrifice for the child she carried, for the family she loved, but did not belong to, and for the people and community she’d failed so miserably.

Mourning the babes who’d died at her hands and would never know the joy of life, Sara turned her buggy toward the road to Pennsylvania.

Her community needed better than a fumbling Amishwoman for a midwife. They needed a book-taught doctor. If they were too foolish to call Jordan … well, that was not her problem anymore, was it?

Though her people had not embraced or welcomed her rebelliousness easily, leaving even them was more difficult than she expected. With every mile she placed between them, she mourned. The thought of not seeing those faces, of never seeing her new mother and sister again, made her cry out with the unfairness of it.

She hoped that someday Lena and Emma would forgive her for her part in their arguments. They would be good to the girls, to children of their own blood. Blood made the difference. Lizzie, Katie, Pris, baby Hannah; they were not Sara’s blood and never would be, no matter how badly leaving them lanced her heart.

Lizzie would learn to cook fine without her. Katie would still giggle, maybe not for a few days, but giggling was inside that girl, no matter what. Sara worried about leaving Pris, though, and Hannah.

She swiped at her eyes so she could see the road better.

The greatest break in her heart, the one that pained her more than her back right now was the ache of leaving that big, little boy of a man. That stone-for-a-heart male with his beard of wire and nibbling lips of silk that could turn her to water.

That same headstrong man had made a space for himself in her wary heart and would reside there forever. If she were to be honest with herself, Sara had to admit that the place Adam Zuckerman occupied was very, very big. So big that maybe her love for him had overflowed into her very soul when she wasn’t looking.

Silly her, for letting it happen.

For a minute, Sara stopped and held the reins, unmoving, not certain she could go on.

She wanted to go home.

Home to Adam.

To her children. Except, they were not hers.

She could do this. She was strong, and a scrapper, everybody knew it, stubborn, passionate, determined.

If that were so, then why did she feel so much the opposite right now?

Even as she sat there, the air turned to a snap and the temperature plummeted, much like a certain leaf-crackling night about a year ago. The temperature had chilled fast the night she went to deliver Abby’s baby.

Her words to Adam still haunted her. She had stood in judgment, foolish, stupid. That girl; that was the one she most resembled now, she thought. Foolish, stupid, weak, afraid. Still stubborn, though, because she flicked the reins and continued in the direction she’d set, away from everyone and everything she loved, for their own good.

Before long, snow swirled around her in tiny flakes. Barely there, but enough to remind her of getting lost in the snow before. She stopped the buggy again. She was not terribly far from home, yet something in her rebelled at turning back. Not just because she was stubborn, but because she simply could not bear to go back, then have to make the same, painful decision another day.