The Choice (6 page)

With help from neighbors, Carrie and Daniel moved into the farmhouse at the apple orchard by week’s end. Since Carrie and Daniel married in September, with their apple crop ready to harvest and sell, they skipped the honeymoon visits to relatives.

Carrie knew that Andy was never fond of school, but she couldn’t understand why, after the first few weeks, he seemed reluctant to leave the house each morning. “You’re sure you’re not sick?” she asked him, putting a cool hand to his forehead.

“Nah,” he said, pulling away from her. “But maybe you should pack me another brownie. I get awful hungry.”

“But I packed you two yesterday. How could you still be hungry?” Carrie asked, frowning. “And put your shoes on. You are not to go barefoot. Ever, ever, ever. You know that. Too much risk of cutting yourself.”

Andy sighed wearily and bent down to put his socks and shoes on. Daniel was sipping his coffee, his eyes on Andy, narrowed slightly in the way of a man studying a mildly perturbing question.

Carrie packed up a third brownie and handed Andy his lunch pail, then opened the door for him. “Go, Andy! You’ll be late!” Andy poked his head out the door, looked both ways before stepping out on the porch, then lit into a sprint and flew down the lane.

Carrie leaned against the doorjamb watching Andy for a minute, puzzled. As she closed the door, Daniel blotted his mouth with his napkin and got to his feet. He scooped his straw hat off of the peg and stepped around her.

“Where are you off to, Daniel?” she asked. “To the orchards? Should I tell Eli you’ll meet him there?”

He was halfway out the door when he tossed a “no” over his shoulder.Then he hopped onto a blue scooter, resting against the house, to catch up with Andy.

Carrie turned to Yonnie and shrugged, exasperated. “Why use two words when one will do?”

Yonnie smiled and continued to drizzle white icing over cinnamon rolls, hot from the oven. “Daniel doesn’t say much because he’s busy listening. He hears what others miss because he listens more than he talks.”

Carrie looked at her, puzzled.

“He feels the sounds deep inside him.”

Solomon Riehl didn’t receive his mother’s letter until he returned to Lancaster after traveling with the Barnstormers to Maryland, New York, and New Jersey. All of the team mail for the players had been held at Clipper Magazine Stadium. Sol had started to receive so much fan mail that he didn’t even notice his mother’s familiar handwriting until he had read halfway through the pile of letters. He read the letter, then reread it. A clear stream of fear pooled from his throat to his stomach, the quick panic that comes when you realize something has gone terribly wrong, something that it is simply too late to fix.

“Who’s that one from, Amish boy?” asked Pete, an outfielder on the team. “From the look on your face, you just got dumped.” He guffawed loudly.

Sol looked over at Pete, not really seeing him. He took his mother’s letter and hurried outside of the locker room, then ran to his car. The keys shook in his hand as he stumbled to unlock the door. Some paint flaked off in his hands as he yanked the door open to climb in. Carrie had called his car Rusty because it had so much rust under its chassis.

Carrie,
he thought
, how could you do this? How could you have
married someone else?

He locked the door, sank down low in the seat, and cried like a baby.

For the next few days, Daniel rode Andy to school on the scooter and met him, each afternoon, as school let out. Emma passed by them one morning in her buggy as she came to help Carrie cut up apples to dry on racks for snitz.

“Morning, Carrie.”

Somehow, Emma could make a simple greeting sound worried, Carrie thought, as she hung Emma’s bonnet upside down on the peg, hanging next to hers and Yonnie’s like three black coal scuttles. Emma lived most of her life in a near panic.

“You know why Daniel’s doing that, don’t you?” Emma asked. Carrie bristled, irritated by Emma’s nosiness. “Of course I know why.” Though the truth of it was that she didn’t really know why, but she was grateful that Daniel took an interest in Andy. Andy needed a man in his life. At least, that was Carrie’s reasoning when she told Esther she was taking Andy with her to live. Carrie thought Esther would have been relieved, but instead, she reacted with a cold fury. She barely spoke to Carrie during the wedding and hadn’t come to visit Carrie at all since. Esther always had something to be angry about, Carrie knew. She had learned long ago that the only way to handle her was to stand up to her, but Esther nursed her grudges with the same loving care she gave to her roses.

Emma pulled up a chair to sit down, eager to divulge her news. “Well, I heard that your new English neighbor boys take Andy’s lunch on the way to school. They wait for him at the end of the lane.”

Carrie looked out the kitchen window. “Who told you that?” “I heard it at a comfort knotting at Ada Stoltzfus’s farm. You should have gone to the frolic, Carrie. Yonnie too. You learn all kinds of things.”

Carrie frowned. She wasn’t ready for a frolic yet, for all the questions about married life. “So, what’s he like then, this Daniel? What sort of man is he?” her well-meaning friends would ask. Carrie wondered those questions herself. She wasn’t sure she knew Daniel any better today than she did a few weeks ago.

“Why would those boys be taking Andy’s lunch?”

“Well,” Emma started out breathlessly, cheeks turning pink with pleasure, “they found out he’s a bleeder, and they told him they want to see him bleed. They’re picking a fight with him so he’ll bleed.”

Carrie threw the dish towel down and ran down the lane. By the time she reached the end of the lane, Daniel was on the way back.

“Emma told me!” she said, out of breath, when she reached him. “About the boys teasing Andy.”

Daniel glanced over at the neighbor boys, who were throwing rocks at a treetop, trying to knock down a bird’s nest. The mother bird flew close by, making distress calls.

Carrie saw them too. She frowned at them, but said to Daniel, “You can’t take him to and from school for the rest of his life. Maybe I could speak to their parents so they’d understand how serious hemophilia is.” Andy was small, built like Jacob, and looked younger than his years. She worried about him. She always worried about him.

Daniel’s eyebrows lifted in warning. “And shame him with a fuss?”

“I’m not making a fuss,” she said indignantly.

Daniel’s gaze turned toward the boys. “As soon as the weather gets cold, they’ll lose interest in meeting him so early.” Daniel put one foot on the scooter. “Coming?”

She sighed and hopped on behind him for a lift.

“Mother, you ought not to be eating dessert for breakfast,” Eli said quietly when he came inside from the barn one morning.

Yonnie was seated at the kitchen table having a slice of pie. “The way I see it, just in case the day doesn’t turn out well, at least I’ve had my dessert.”

“I like that way of thinking!” Andy said, bouncing down the stairs.

Eli looked at Yonnie and shook his head. Carrie handed him a cup of coffee as he sat down. “You see, Mother? You’re a bad influence on the boy. Carrie, I’m counting on you not to let her get away with this nonsense.”

Carrie smiled at the teasing, but she knew Eli was counting on her for much more than minding Yonnie. She knew he had hopes that Carrie would be able to turn Daniel around from his burden. Daniel seemed to have an invisible cloud of sadness hovering over him. She hadn’t figured out what Daniel’s burden was, but she had a hunch it had something to do with Abel, his cousin, raised as a brother to Daniel, who had left the family during his Rumspringa. Every so often, a letter from Abel would arrive and she would see Daniel quietly tuck it into his pocket. The letter’s contents were never discussed. But for the rest of the day, Daniel and Eli would go quiet, even by their standards.

Carrie was filled with wonderings about this Abel fellow, whether he was younger or older than Daniel and where he was now. But it was Daniel’s place to tell her these things and he was not one to volunteer information. Abel’s name was hardly spoken between Eli or Daniel, or even Yonnie. It was like he had stopped living, like he was shunned, even though that couldn’t be right. Carrie knew Abel hadn’t been baptized, so he wouldn’t be shunned. Yonnie had let that slip once. Carrie tried asking Yonnie more, about where Abel was now, but she could see Yonnie’s mind drift off to another place and another time. Yonnie never did answer. Yonnie was a Miller, to be sure.

Carrie had wanted a home of her own and a future for her brother. In exchange, she received the hidden secrets and heartaches of the Millers.

In the middle of the night, Carrie woke and went downstairs, out to the porch to look at the stars. A few minutes later, Daniel joined her, wrapping a quilt around her shoulders.

Daniel was a deep sleeper. He could fall asleep instantly, she could tell so by the sound of his breathing. But he always seemed to know when she left the room. Maybe it was part of his listening, she realized. Even in his sleep, he seemed to listen.

“I had a nightmare,” she said, hoping he would stay for a moment. “Andy had fallen and needed my help, but I couldn’t get to him. It was like I was in quicksand. He kept calling for me and I couldn’t get any closer.”

“Just a dream,” he said.

Carrie pulled the quilt tightly around her. “If anything ever happened to Andy . . .” Her voice drizzled off.

“It won’t.” Daniel leaned on the porch railing and looked up at the night sky.

A barn owl flew over them so closely they could hear the whir of its wings.

“The winged tiger,” Daniel said, watching the owl disappear into the treetops.

Carrie tilted her head toward Daniel. “That’s what my father used to call owls! They fly silently as moths and seldom miss their prey.” She gave a short laugh. “Esther would correct him and say they’re just flying rat traps.”

“You miss him.” He said the words simply, his voice low and flat.

“I do miss him. So much that at times I . . .” She shrugged, pressing her lips together.

Daniel nodded, as if he understood.