The Outcast (28 page)

Leslie discards the syringes and bottles of medicine in the metal hazardous-material bin with the red trash bag and rolls off her gloves from the backs of her hands to her fingers so that the gloves are inside out. Throwing these away as well, she smiles and offers a little wave, which Norman and I
return. The door clicks shut. Norman and I face each other, oddly shy in the light of such blinding revelations.

“A month later,” Norman continues, “Ida and Russell married at the courthouse. I went down to Tennessee for the wedding because
blut
was so bad between Ida and the Amish that no one else would be her witness. That was such an awful day. Attending that wedding brought back memories from my
bruder
and Ida’s own wedding eight years before. Even now, I don’t know why Ida and Russell got married. I think the two of them were just so bound up in their mutual agony surrounding the accident that they confused it with love, and they feared that losing each other would just bring the pain of their loss back.

“I was still so angry at Russell for not leaving me in that buggy and saving Daniel that as soon as the wedding ceremony was over and the marriage license signed, I went outside and told my driver to take me back to Pennsylvania. Some time later, I heard through one of my patients that Ida and Russell got divorced before their third anniversary. For nineteen years, I didn’t see Russell or Ida again. And our lives probably never would’ve intersected again if your
mudder
hadn’t called two months ago and invited me down to look at Eli. That’s when I walked into this hospital room and found Ida Troyer—forgive me, Ida Mae Speck—sleeping next to your son’s bed.”

I remember the mask of disbelief Norman wore while watching Ida Mae sleep, and how angry she had been when
he woke her up—an anger she used to defend me to my
mamm
. “That must’ve been quite the shock,” I say.

“It was. But I’m sure it was a shock for Ida Mae, too. Waking up and seeing me here would’ve been like seeing my dead
bruder
all over again.”

“Your brother, Henry—did he wear glasses?” I ask, recalling the crushed pair I’d found in the back of Ida Mae’s jewelry box.

Norman nods. “We looked so much alike, that was the only way some people could tell us apart.”

“Did they survive the accident? The glasses, I mean?”

“They were shattered,” Norman says, “but,
jah
, they survived. When Henry was thrown from the buggy, the glasses were thrown too. A fireman found them when he was sorting through the wreck.” Norman smiles sadly; when he speaks, tears coat his voice. “I guess you could say everything that survived the accident was shattered in one way or another. Henry’s glasses, my legs, Russell’s heart. . . . Before that night, I am told that Russell Speck was a very happy man.”

Eli emits a pain-filled sound that should never come from someone too young to speak. I go over to the corner sink and run a
hunlomma
under warm water. Wringing it out, I wipe my son’s swollen face, then refold it and drape it across his forehead. Even without having heard the results of Eli’s PET scan, I doubt Dr. Sengupta is going to release him tomorrow.

Norman says, “I should go.” I am suddenly too tired to protest.

It is considered inappropriate for Plain men and women
to embrace or even to shake hands. But before Norman Troyer leaves, he gives me a hug and even rests his large hand on my head like a benediction.

“Remember,” he says before closing the door, “I’ll come back if you need me.”

It seems impossible that I have any tears left after these emotionally taxing months. But listening to Norman shuffle down the hall, I find that tears stream down my cheeks as if they have never stopped.

How very different my life would have been if Norman Troyer had been my
dawdy
rather than Samuel Stoltzfus, who hasn’t been to check on his
grosskind
in the weeks we’ve been in Vanderbilt, while Norman’s been here every day since he arrived. I have forgiven my
dawdy
for his detachment, which prompted me to seek an intimacy I should have never known, and I know I cannot blame him for my mistakes. Still, I believe that if Norman Troyer had been my father, my unholy union with Tobias wouldn’t have been one of them.

AMOS

Although Tobias has convinced himself that if not for Rachel’s powers of seduction, he would not have been seduced, as he now peers out the window at crows forming curlicues across the frosted sky, he admits that the night
he entered Rachel’s room as if by accident was no accident at all. The lust for his wife’s twin had grown at such a slow rate that—like a steady spreading of cancer that’s not detected until it chokes out a vital organ—Tobias didn’t know it was happening at all. Of course, he was aware of Rachel, had been aware of Rachel from the time he was twenty-two and she was ten. He sneers at his stupidity, recalling how he would forge a horseshoe in the fire and watch Rachel run up and down the hill beside his parents’ Lancaster County home, chasing Judah. Her braided pigtails (a lighter blonde than they are now) would flutter out behind her and her laughter tinkle with this sound trapped inside it, like brass bells in a stone church. Tobias was not captivated by her then, and even though he was aware that she was a pretty girl soon to grow into a beautiful woman, he was not even attracted to her. He just knew that Rachel Stoltzfus was as different from her identical twin, Leah, as two roses that happened to grow from the same vine: one choosing to spread its blossoms in the sun, while the other remained ensconced in the shade.

My eldest son does not dig deep enough into his psyche to uncover the darkness that lurks there—that festers as it continues to grow without the antiseptic of light—but Tobias envied Judah from the moment he was born, and envied him even more when he realized that I was going to protect Judah from his abuse and the abuse Tobias encouraged in his siblings. At twenty-one years old, when Tobias should have been a man above such childish behavior, this
envy he harbored for nine-year-old Judah extended over to the young girl Tobias knew his young brother idolized. As Judah’s tales bordered on garrulous, Tobias listened; he listened to how Judah would insert Rachel’s name into a dinner table conversation or watched his elaborate gestures describing the simple things the two of them had done: making mud pies along the cow pond, playing kick the can with Leah and Eugene, drinking
millich
from jelly jars out in the dairy barn. Tobias would nod and smile, take a bite of dried
kiehfleesch
or a sip of sassafras tea, acting the part of the indulgent older
bruder
, even as he was counting the days until he could take away from Judah the one thing he wanted most.

After two years passed, however, Tobias realized his quest to get back at Judah was going to take too much time. He did not want to wait five more years until Rachel was old enough to court and then another year to marry. Tobias resigned himself to a long-distance courtship with Esther Miller from a community in Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania. She was a dark-haired, dark-eyed girl with a clear complexion and a singing voice almost as musical as young Rachel’s laugh. Yet Tobias did not love her. He did not know if this was because, for years, he had placed in his mind that one day he would take Judah’s bride away before the two of them could even contemplate being wed, or if those summers he spent watching Rachel run and laugh up and down the hillsides had welded in his heart as irrevocably as he had welded the horseshoes with the forging
hammer that the woman he would one day marry would have the same wavy blonde hair and stormy blue eyes as twelve-year-old Rachel.

Once Esther died shortly after Sarah’s birth, Tobias’s old pact to make Rachel his bride was what caused him to avoid her at his and Leah’s wedding ceremony. He was beyond grateful to marry Leah, a soft-spoken
mudder
to nurture his
kinner
during the day and a soft body to warm his bed at night. But whenever he looked at Rachel sitting there in a cape dress the same hue as her eyes, it was all he could do to turn away and look at the blushing woman who—after listening to three hours’ worth of sermons and exchanging a few words—would become his second wife.

Throughout that humid spring day in the schoolhouse, then at Verna’s and my place for the wedding
esse
, he couldn’t help comparing the two sisters, which was easy to do as they were often side by side. Their features were the same—a snub nose, a thin but shapely mouth, eyebrows a shade darker than their hair, and those blue, blue eyes—but there was something about Rachel’s personality that turned these regular features into something ethereal. It was the way she would tilt her head in conversation like she was gripping every word; the way her cheeks could so easily burn with passion or become extinguished and pale; the way her eyes tilted up at the corners, giving the appearance that she was smiling even when she frowned; the way she moved across the room like her feet, although encased in
the same clunky shoes as the rest of the female community, never touched the floor.

All these things Tobias saw, making a point not to look Rachel’s way. It was as if the harder he tried to fight his attraction to her, the stronger that attraction grew. By the end of his and Leah’s wedding day, his obsession had become so consuming that Tobias feared he would not be able to perform his conjugal duties that night, and later—as he held his trembling bride on their marriage bed, kissing Leah’s temple and closing his eyes—he willed these images of Rachel back to the pit from whence they came. But they would not leave. And so that first night, the only way Tobias could get through the act that made him and Leah truly husband and wife was by envisioning that he was not caressing his bride but the woman who looked identical to her, the woman he had wanted for almost ten years.

In the early months of his and Leah’s marriage, this carnal illusion never waned. When Rachel came to live beneath their roof, Tobias let himself imagine that she was coming down not to care for her bedridden sister, but because she cared for him. Before fantasy eroded his reality, Tobias knew this was not true. But the more time that passed and the more interactions he and Rachel had, the more he began to believe that she wanted him too. Soon afterward, Rachel dropped that jar of beet juice in the kitchen. Tobias desired her so much as he was wiping the scarlet stain from her red face that he had to get up and
leave, stalking out through the living room without minding his shoes and smacking his way out the front door. My son spent the rest of that afternoon in the blacksmithing shed, heating wrought iron over the fire until it bent like taffy, then forging it into a shape he was never going to use, for the moment it hardened, he melted it down and forged it into shape again. This monotony lasted for hours. Sweat coursed down his forehead and stung his eyes. His clothing clung to his back and his ribs heaved with the intensity of labor. But he did not stop. Tobias
could
not stop. He was determined that he would not go home until he had pounded out the demons that tormented his mind.

When darkness swept its cloak over the community, the demons were still there and the refining fire burning out. Tobias walked home—blistered hands hanging like anvils at his sides—and all he could see for twenty miles were the stars arching over Copper Creek Mountain, like a bridge constructed in the heavens, and the oil lamps burning behind netted screens on the farmhouse porches. When Tobias came to the V in the lane, he began walking up toward the huge dwelling, its white clapboard a beacon in the night, contradicting the unease he felt when he was inside it. He saw a lamp lit in an upstairs window, and his pulse thumped. Had Leah been able to wait up for him? Had the nursing
bobbel
for once not sapped her strength?

As Tobias got closer to the house, he realized the light shining in the window was not coming from his and Leah’s room. It was coming from Rachel’s. With a heavy heart
and an empty stomach, Tobias let himself in, mounted the staircase, and let his blistered hand slide up the banister, relishing the pain caused by the abrasion of raw skin on unsanded wood. He paused at the landing. His breathing grew ragged; his blistered palms became slick with sweat not brought forth by the temperature increase upstairs. Tobias could imagine Rachel sitting behind that closed door in a cotton nightgown like her sister wore, with her blonde hair hanging long and loose. He imagined that she had worried about him throughout the afternoon and evening, that her face had burned with the remembrance of their kneeling together in that stifling kitchen. All of this caused my son to stride toward her door. He even stretched out one hand to turn the knob. But the moment his raw skin touched the cool metal, Tobias jerked his hand back like it’d come in contact with a branding iron.