Keeping Secrets (22 page)

Anna was quiet now, only an occasional hiccup reminding Sadie of the sobs, the onslaught of her despair. Slowly, she placed a hand on Anna’s shoulder.

“Anna, you aren’t fat.”

There was no answer, only a long, drawn-out shudder.

“Do you know how much I weighed when I was 15?”

Silence.

“140.”

Anna sat straight up, staring at Sadie.

“You did not!”

“Yes, I did.”

“I only weigh a little more than that,” Anna whispered, the corner of her lips lifting.

“Of course, you do.”

Anna pulled up her pajama-clad knees, wrapped her arms around her legs, and talked. She told Sadie she had been perfectly content to be who she was until some friends had a sleepover at Sarah Ann’s house. There they compared skin problems, hair color, sizes and weight. Jeanie told Anna that she was the heaviest by 10 whole pounds, and why was she so much bigger than her sisters? Why was her hair lighter?

After that, Anna had sat in the sun all summer spraying vinegar-water in her hair, then lemon-juice water, then baking-soda water, anything to change the color. She had even tried spraying it with mosquito repellent, but all she got was an itching, flaky scalp.

She was always hungry, that was the thing. She could eat all day long, every day. Doughnuts, peanut butter crackers, chicken corn soup with saltine crackers, applesauce, hot dogs with sauerkraut, and potato chips. She loved Mam’s snickerdoodle cookies and Subway’s sandwiches. Everything in the whole world was delicious, except brussels sprouts. They tasted like spoiled cabbage.

At the dentist’s office, she watched a lady on the television eat spaghetti. It made her so hungry for spaghetti that she asked Mam to make it for supper, and she ate it for days and days with dried Parmesan cheese sprinkled all over it, and homemade bread with butter and garlic powder, oregano, and more cheese. She put it in the broiler of the oven, and it was the best thing ever.

At the produce stand where she worked with Leah, she loved to eat a garden-fresh tomato, sliced thick and sprinkled with salt and pepper. She ate great sections of cantaloupes and oranges and blueberries, as well.

“Then I gained over 25 pounds,” she said sadly.

Sadie laughed, a sound of genuine understanding.

“It’s all right to eat. You’re hungry, you’re growing, and you’re healthy.”

Anna shook her head. “I’m fat!”

Sadie looked at her steadily, unflinchingly. “You are not fat.”

“According to Sarah Ann and Jeanie, I am.”

Sadie nodded. “Girls can be so cruel. So terribly, unthinkingly, crushingly cruel. So mean. But you know what, Anna? The reason they say those things is because of their own insecurities. They don’t feel good about themselves, or they wouldn’t put other girls down.

“Every 14- or 15-year-old girl has her own struggles with feeling adequate, secure, able to move among her peers with ease and confidence. It’s tough out there. We have a close circle of people being raised in the Amish way, but we’re only human beings, and we suffer in the early teen years same as everyone else.”

“I can’t believe that you did.”

“I sure did. Sometimes I wished the end of the world would come so I wouldn’t have to be 16. I was terribly hurt by the loss of Paris and by moving to Montana. I hated it.”

Anna told Sadie about how she felt left out by her and Reuben, with their tremendous riding skills and their way with horses. She felt as if she had no talent at all. She couldn’t even sew a decent dress on the sewing machine.

Sadie listened quietly and felt some remorse. A plan formed in her mind.

“I’ll tell you what, Anna. If you cross your heart and promise that you will never, ever, as long as you live, make yourself
cuts
again, then I will get a horse for you. Reuben won’t ride with me anymore, so you can. I’ll teach you.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I’m too
blottchich
.”

It was then that Sadie realized that the brick wall Anna had built around herself was impossible to breach in one heartfelt talk. How deep was her problem?

Oh, dear God, Sadie prayed silently. Bless Anna, look upon her with grace. She’s so young and so mixed up about what’s important in life.

She yawned and stretched.

“Well, if you think you’re so
blottchich
, then we’ll drop it.”

She stood up, gathered her robe around her, shivering.

“Winter’s coming,” she said sleepily.

Anna watched her wearily.

“I … I can’t ride a horse. I’m scared of them. I’m not like you. You just look at a horse and it likes you. They don’t like me. They bite me.”

Sadie laughed. “You know that’s not true.”

“It is.”

“Goodnight, Anna. Sleep well. No
cutsing
, okay?”

“Okay.”

The wind was moaning among the eaves, a sad sort of harmony with the night, as if they had put their heads together and written this symphony for the approaching winter.

Sadie heard very little of it, falling asleep the minute her head touched the soft pillow.

In the morning, Dat sat at the table poring over the newspaper as Mam expertly flipped the sizzling golden rectangles of cornmeal mush in the cast-iron frying pan. Each year when the leaves turned color and the air carried a frosty nip, Dat wanted fried mush for breakfast. It was an item of food that had been passed down for many generations. He liked it cut in thick slices, then fried in oil for at least half an hour. He ate it with two eggs sunny-side up and a glass of orange juice. Then he had oatmeal as a sort of breakfast dessert, often accompanied by shoofly pie.

Sadie wondered whether to tell them about Anna’s problems.

Mam put the mush on a platter, then cracked the eggs into the same pan. Sadie poured the juice, looking up as Leah walked into the kitchen.

“Morning.”

“Mm-hm.”

“Cleaning today?”

Leah nodded.

“Can someone make toast?” Mam asked.

Sadie sliced thick slices of homemade white bread, raising her eyebrows at the lack of whole wheat flour.

“Out of it,” Mam said, observant as always.

“That’s unusual.”

“Well, I called Johnny Sollenberger yesterday to take me to town. He’s my least favorite driver, but no one else could go, and guess who he had going to town with him?”

Sadie pushed the broiler closed with a squeaky bang and looked at Mam.

“Fred Ketty.”

“Ach, my.”

“So I just didn’t go. Figured we could eat white bread.”

Dat chuckled. “Ach, Fred Ketty. She means well.”

“I’d go into hiding if I was called Fred Ketty,” Leah observed sourly, pulling up her chair.

Reuben slumped in his chair, rubbing his eyes with his fists.

“Where’s Anna?”

“Let her sleep. She was up late.”

They bowed their heads, asking a silent blessing on the morning meal. When they raised their heads, Sadie decided to bring up the subject of Anna’s purging.

Mam listened wide-eyed while Dat shook his head in disbelief. Reuben promptly stated that nobody noticed Anna, same as him, and she was just doing it for attention. A generous portion of egg and fried mush churned in his mouth as he spoke, until Dat told him to swallow his food first, then finish speaking. This sent Reuben into a dark silence, and he shoveled food into his mouth at twice the speed.

Mam said it was more than just ordinary teenage angst, which Sadie agreed was true. Leah nodded her head in acknowledgment as well.

“She needs a horse,” Sadie said.

“You think that would help her snap out of it?” Dat asked.

“Anything to build some confidence.”

Reuben snorted. “Well, what about me? I still don’t have a horse. If it would help, I can start throwing up.”

Dat explained patiently to Reuben that he had shown absolutely no interest in another horse, so they figured he’d have to be ready for one first.

“I hate horses,” Reuben said quite abruptly.

He left the table, hurried into the living room, and threw himself on the couch, burying his face in his arms. Mam opened her mouth to call him back, but Dat waved his hand to quiet her.

“He’ll be okay. This thing with Cody will take time.”

It was Saturday, so there was no hurry, except for Leah going to her housecleaning job. Sadie lingered with her parents, discussing the issues of the day, then told them that Mark would be coming to the house that evening.

Dat drank his coffee to hide his smile, but Mam lifted her eyebrows in concern.

“He’s sure given you the runaround already,” she observed dryly.

Sadie nodded in agreement, deciding not to try and prove a point. She’d have one date and see what occurred. She giggled to herself, wondering what her very proper mother would say if she knew that Sadie had asked for the date, instead of the other way around. But Sadie knew it was all right. At this point, they were closer than many couples who had been dating for some time.

She cleaned the refrigerator and defrosted the freezer while Mam baked shoofly pies, discussing Anna and Reuben all the while.

Mam poured water on the mixture for the pie crust, felt it with her fingertips, then poured on a bit more. She pushed the mound to the middle of the stainless steel bowl and molded it into a perfect pile of moist pie dough.

She went to the flour canister and scooped some into a bowl. She scattered a generous amount of the snowy white flour onto the countertop. Pinching off the right amount of dough, she sprinkled more flour on top. Then she grabbed the rolling pin and began an expert circular motion until she had a perfect orb of evenly rolled dough. Folding it in half, she pressed it into the tin pie plate, then took a table knife and cut off the extra, overhanging dough.

She made six pie crusts, ladling the brown sugar, egg, water, molasses, and soda mixture into it, measuring the amounts carefully. Mam said if there was too much liquid, the pies ran over in the oven; too little and you had a dry shoofly pie.

Next she took up a handful of crumbs made from flour, brown sugar, and shortening, sprinkling large handfuls of them on top. It never failed to amaze Sadie how the liquid and crumbs merged to create the three perfect parts that made a shoofly pie: the “goo,” the cake, and the crumbs on top.

Mam was an expert, her shooflies always turning out with the deepest amount of goo, the softest cake, and just a sprinkling of crumbs. She said it was from doing it over and over for years.

“Well, if you have a date, perhaps I had better make a ho-ho cake,” Mam said, her smile wide and warm as she watched Sadie clean the shelves of the refrigerator.

“A what?”

“A ho-ho cake. A chocolate cake with creamy white filling topped with fudge sauce. You eat it with ice cream. Or without.”

“Oh, yes. They’re a lot of trouble, aren’t they?”

“Well  yes.”

“Then don’t.”

“Of course, I will. You have a date!”

Sadie grinned, then her nose stung as she tried to hold back the tears. She would never forget the anxiety of passing through the dark valley of her mother’s mental illness. She hoped she’d also never forgot to thank God for her mother’s ordinary, everyday awareness and love for life.

There were still times when she would catch her mother gazing out the window with tears gathering in her eyes. On those days Sadie’s heart would plummet to her stomach as she wondered if the depression would return. But it never did as long as she faithfully followed her doctor’s orders, with Dat’s full support.

Sadie sincerely hoped Anna was not following in her mother’s footsteps. Sadie knew depression could be hereditary sometimes, and she wondered if Anna was showing signs of it.

As Sadie cleaned the rest of the house with Rebekah’s help, she noticed it was close to dinnertime. What time might Mark show up? Had he made plans with anyone else?

“Isn’t Kevin coming over this evening?”

“No. He has church tomorrow.”

Reuben brought the mail, thumping it down on the kitchen table as loudly as he possibly could. Letters rained down on the freshly scrubbed linoleum, squeezed out from between the magazines and catalogs.

“Letter for you! Looks like a guy’s handwriting!” Reuben said, chortling.

“No, it’s not,” Sadie said automatically, before examining the handwriting.

She held very still as she gripped the blue envelope with both hands. She felt a slight tremor as the handwriting leaped at her.

Reuben was right!

Oh, had Mark done the same thing again?

Her breath came in quick gasps that she struggled to hide from Mam and Reuben. Rebekah peered over her shoulders.

Oh, please God, no. Not now.

With shaking hands, she tore open the envelope, unfolded the single white sheet of writing paper, flipped it over, and read the signature.

Daniel King.

She sagged in the recliner in pure relief, her limbs folding as if the joints were liquid.

Dear Sadie,

I am miserable. I cannot forget you. I’m almost 2,000 miles away, and all I want to do is go back to Montana. I think I love you. Why don’t you write to me?

Sadie’s fist went to her forehead, and she thumped it without thinking.

I didn’t write because Mark became a very important part of my life, that’s why, she thought wryly.

His letter was full of his praise for Sadie and reproach for the terrible distance between them and his aching heart. Sadie folded the letter slowly, then shoved it back into the envelope, her eyes unseeing.

He was one of the nicest people she had ever met. She knew he would be an easy person to love, to marry. He was so normal, with such a good heart, a grounded attitude, a wonderful appetite for life and love.

Suddenly, she was unsure about seeing Mark that night. She felt waves of doubt lift and bear her away, floating up and out, dipping low as a wave dropped her, and then rising up when the next one came. She drifted in an ocean of restlessness that never ceased movement.

Daniel. His hair streaked blond. His laughing eyes. Always smiling. So easy to understand and … well, get along with. Her life would be so easy.

Reuben peered at her. His intense gaze brought her back to earth.