Destiny Calls (13 page)

She wanted to feel small and feminine and cherished, but also safe. Perhaps she was just not meant to know such levels of intimacy. She may be all girl on the inside, but on the outside she was too round, too pushy, too short, and too independent. On the inside she was so incredibly lonely, waiting for the right man to come along and recognize the female she hid inside, the one that wanted to be coddled and taken care of, the one that wanted to take care of her man because, in actions rather than words, he earned her adoration.

“Ah, you know you’ve arrived in Amish Country when you can smell the horse shit.”

She ignored her brother and continued to stare out the window as the pretty farmland rolled by. Even in winter, when the grass had grown dry and the earth was unturned, she found peace out here. Some called it God’s country, and by the way the sun caressed the gray clouds and kissed the fields below with trails of gold, she could almost understand why.

Throughout her life, she moved in stages, an evolution that led her to who she was today. She was thirty-two and painfully aware of certain absolutes regarding herself that would likely never change.

As Destiny huddled farther into her seat, she returned to her reflections. She was an independent, capable, intelligent woman, but there were times she wished she could let it all go. She loved to feel necessary. She had so much to offer a man, if only she could find the right man, completely deserving of all she could give. And one she could totally trust. She read enough erotic romances to know what a woman like herself was called. She was submissive.

She wanted control over her own life, but, deep down, wished for a man who desired her submission, a man who defined what it was to truly care for a woman, be kind and generous, yet firm and responsible without question. If she found a man like that she would gladly give him the gift of her submission. It was a gift others, especially most modern women, wouldn’t understand, but after thirty-two lonely years, she no longer cared what others thought.

She had to believe he was out there. She had pushed past her initial shyness in hopes of finding him, but never found more than a shadow of a real man in the trappings of boys. She was exhausted with the games. Destiny had done the bars, the Internet thing, the socials, and even the exhausting long line of blind dates her friends set her up on. She had met nice men, but the chemistry was never quite right, and she wasn’t sure exactly how she was supposed to announce that what she wanted was a far cry from politically correct.

Destiny smiled to herself as her mind played over a familiar fantasy. She found comfort in the daydream and had come to refer to it as her perfect day. It would begin with her rising before her man to make sure his breakfast was ready and coffee was poured. He would come to greet her with an affectionate kiss, which, even years into their relationship would still hold the ability to curl her toes.

Her perfect man would be affectionate and soft-spoken with her always. He would know that he was respected enough that he would never have to raise his voice to get what he wanted.

Destiny would work hard to keep their home nice, making it a place he could be proud of. She would take time to make herself presentable for him, taking special care to wear things she knew he liked.

At the end of the day they would sit and share a nice meal. There would be no phone calls or televisions playing in the background. That time would be only theirs. He would have her full focus, the same as he would give her his. After dinner her man would unwind, perhaps watch a show while she cleaned up the kitchen, and routinely they would sit together at the end of the night, sometimes watching TV, sometimes just talking. Either way, he would be touching her, showing her she was cherished and she would always be affectionate to him as he would be the man she adored, her protector, her love.

He would know he could have her. That would be her gift to him, that she was always available. She could trust him with this gift because she knew he would never abuse it or humiliate her. He would hold the authority. Thrills ran through her at the thought of her fantasy man’s confidence. He would be capable of directing her in all intimate matters rather than passively asking deeds of her. He would understand what it did to her to be told.

He would always be in control, and she would continuously feel like the girl on the first date, unsure what to expect, but excited all the same. He would be certain in all matters, stern, direct, completely in control. And just as her submission would be a gift to him, his dominance in the home would be a gift to her, taking away all the burdens of life and decision making. Her focus would be solely on him, and she would surrender safely into his care because he would have invested years of proving his trustworthiness.

He would understand her so well. Know when she would need to be softly held and petted and when she would need to be taken. His unapologetic aggressiveness would be what she loved most about him, a gift that only comes with complete trust for one another.

There would be days that she would awaken, touched by how incredibly he loved her the night before and days when she’d be reminded of the passion they shared simply by the imprint of his handling left on her skin. And that would be why she would get up and do it all again the next day. It would be her gift to him for being so with her.

Destiny sighed. She could almost see the fantasy she had created through the years, see the china upon which they ate, the bed upon which they lay. The only thing she couldn’t see was his face. Perhaps because she had spent so long dreaming she had created a man so perfect he couldn’t possibly be real.

She often wondered if she was wasting her life waiting for a dream, if she would be better off swallowing her hurt and marrying a man like Adrian so that she could at least some day hold her own babies in her arms.

As much as Destiny loved her job as a reporter, it was only a flicker next to the glow that filled her when she dreamt of being a wife and mother. It would be so easy to give it all up for the right man.

While her fantasy usually took her mind away on a pleasant journey, today it had only managed to make her feel more morose. She tried to push away the nagging feelings of disappointment and think on happier things. Then she saw a barn.

“Stop the car!” she suddenly shouted, and Vito gave her a concerned look. He quickly pulled over along an empty field. An old stone barn sat in the distance, a low rock wall led from the edge like the tail of a kite winding over the green backdrop as unending as the blue sky. She knew that barn. Destiny opened her door and unbuckled her seatbelt.

Vito called her name, but she ignored him. Shading her eyes, she stepped over the gravel edge of the poorly paved road and onto the cushion of dried winter grass. Small houses dotted the property, and colorful quilts flew in the breeze like sails sewn of rainbows.

Vito got out of the car. “What’s going on, Destiny?”

“I’ve been here,” she said, taking in the smell of the land and recognizing it as more than just a familiar memory. Here. She had been here, stood in this exact spot, but when? Her mind strained as she sought the precise memory. As if she were reaching into a black pond trying to catch a tiny fish, the memory kept slipping through her fingers. She began to walk.

“Where are you going? D, this is someone’s private property.”

Vito huffed in frustration then went back to the car to retrieve the keys and lock the door. Her feet carried her swiftly over the uneven farmland, and her brother panted after her.

“Destiny, will you hold up a second?” He speed walked beside her. She continued to catalog little landmarks along the way, each one restoring a sense of familiarity in her mind. “Will you talk to me? I don’t understand what you’re doing?”

“I was here. I know it. I can feel it.”

“When?” Her much larger brother sounded ready to have an asthma attack.

“I need to talk to someone.”

Distant voices traveled over the land from the valley, and as they climbed a steep hill, she hurried to the top. When she reached the summit she was frozen by the beauty that lay before her. It was the closest vision she had stumbled across, here in America, that came close to matching her memories of her family’s farm in Portugal, but that wasn’t why it was familiar. This place came from another memory, a memory she couldn’t quite place. Taking another step would be like leaving a fingerprint on a work of art hanging in a museum. She hesitated. There was something final about deciding to go any farther.

“Whoa,” Vito said as he stood beside her. Then, in a more serious voice, he pointed and said, “Destiny, we don’t belong here. Look.”

Like little specks of blue, green, and mauve, she watched as a gaggle of Amish children chased one another around a maypole just outside of a small schoolhouse with a tiny copper bell on top. Each little soul was cloaked in black, and the boys wore wide brimmed hats, looking like little men with the cheeks of cherubs.

Destiny took a breath and moved to step over the invisible boundary protecting this land just as Vito stopped her. “Destiny, wait. You can’t trespass here. It’s private. It isn’t right.”

She felt the same reluctance he spoke of. This land was isolated, private. There was something sacred about this place. She didn’t know much about the Amish, although she had pretty much grown up less than a hundred miles from the Dutch parts of Pennsylvania.

What she did know was that they were somehow protected by law in a way that honored their privacy and kept them apart from the modern world, and their existence was entrenched in strong religious values, one of those fundamentally valued elements being their isolated privacy. She didn’t know if they could vote, but she knew they lived somehow outside of the bounds of normal society in almost all matters. It made her feel tainted and inferior as if her proximity to their simplicity showed how pure they were and how damaged the rest of the world was becoming.

Amish didn’t use electricity and never mingled with modern-day people. She had seen some around some of the older towns of Lancaster, but they were merely picking up supplies to take back to their farms. They didn’t drive cars and dressed uniformly in stiff fabrics and approved colors. They were devout in their beliefs, and Destiny wasn’t exactly sure what their beliefs were, but they believed they deserved their privacy and people had no right to impose on their way of living, but still, she couldn’t deny herself this.

“I need to do this, Vito.”

“Why?”

She sighed. Today had been nothing but peculiar, and she really didn’t want to get him all riled up again. “Something happened to me,” she confessed. “I’m not sure what, but I know something happened when I was gone. I feel it. I can’t remember things, and I know I should.”

She shook her head. She didn’t understand how to explain this without sounding crazy. “I remember being at some sort of convent or whatever it was, but I don’t remember getting home or what the officer who escorted me looked like. Why? That doesn’t make sense. I can’t even really remember what Sister Larissa looked like other than the impression that she was too beautiful to be a nun. I know I was somewhat recovered when I was in the company of the nun, so why wouldn’t I remember things that happened after that?”

“Are you saying you think you were drugged or something?”

“I don’t know. And if I hit my head so hard that I lost some of my memory, then why don’t I’ve a bump? I didn’t want to tell you this, but there were other things I noticed since getting home that weren’t right.”

“Other things like what?”

She felt the blood rush to her face. “I woke up in a man’s shirt, and my panties were missing.”

“
What?
”

“And my back is all scratched up.”

“What the fuck, D! Why didn’t you tell that to the cops?”

“Because I don’t think anything…bad happened, I just think it’s weird that my clothes were different. I don’t know. Something doesn’t make sense, and I need to figure it out. Jim Thorpe’s only about twenty or thirty miles from here, and for some reason this place seems really familiar. I don’t want to offend anyone, but I need to find someone and ask them if there’s a convent around here or at least see if anything else triggers a memory. I mean, they’re just people under those Amish clothes.”

He sighed. “I really don’t feel right about this. The Amish aren’t like us. They won’t like two strangers coming onto their land.”

“How do you know? They’re supposed to be Christians.”

“Fine, but we’re in and out. I don’t want to get ourselves hauled off in some horse-drawn paddy wagon because we broke some sort of sacred Mennonite law.”

She grinned. “Mennonites are different. These look like old school Amish. Just stick with me and don’t say anything, and we shouldn’t have any trouble.”

They walked mostly in silence. The novelty of being so close to certain antiquated things rendered them speechless. Destiny was aware that they had been spotted. The closer they drew to Amish men, women, and children, the more they disappeared. It reminded her of the first time Dorothy arrived in Oz and all the munchkins slipped into the gardens and shut up the shutters upon the tiny houses.

Vito pointed out an impressive home that was grander than all the rest and suggested they knock there. They climbed the great stairs of the porch, and before they could knock on the two tall wooden doors, one of them opened. They had definitely been spotted.