The Outcast (31 page)

I have no idea how long I have slept when someone shakes my shoulder. Bolting upright, I wipe a hand across my mouth and look up into the smiling face of my twin.

“Hated to wake you,” Leah says. “You looked peaceful.”

The fog of slumber clears from my mind, and I find myself again amazed at the nonchalance with which my sister approaches our reunion. I have not seen Leah since that snowy day outside the schoolhouse when I felt such distance between us. But now, here she stands in her flowered cape dress and black bonnet, smiling down at me as if she doesn’t know the turmoil I have endured over the past three and a half months. The turmoil, if it had been up to her, I would have endured alone.

“Where have you been?”

“What do you mean?” Leah asks. “I just got here.”

“No. Where
have
you been.” I point to the stained-glass window depicting a multiethnic array of children smiling and laughing because their young lives have recently been freed from disease. I point out the words
Faith, Hope, Love
parading around the room, reminders of all the things the patients and their parents have in short supply. “Where
were
you when my son was throwing up in his crib? Where
were
you when his tube slipped from his port and blood gushed down his chest? Where
were
you when he had such a high fever, I wasn’t sure he’d live through the night?”

Exhaustion removes my filter, and the condemnation of my words pours out of me, toxic as gall. Tears pour down my face, but they are only a visual extension of the anger erupting inside. Mopping my face with my sleeve, I suddenly panic and turn toward the double doors of the chapel that are standing wide. But no one is viewing this quarrel between two oddly dressed women who are identical twins.

Leah follows my gaze and then looks back at me. Giving me the same measured glance as that Sunday she came out of the schoolhouse to find me talking to her husband, she walks over to the doors, kicks the stoppers away with her black lace-up shoes, and lets them swing closed. She grabs a box of Kleenex, tugs out two tissues, and dabs the skin beneath each eye. Balling the tissues up in her fist, she strides toward me with her narrow shoulders squared.

“I did not come here today to confront you,” she says
in Pennsylvania Dutch, her body and voice shaking. “But then you come at me like this. You tell
me
that I have betrayed
you
, when you, dear sister, are the one who has betrayed both me and yourself. You, who I fought for when no one else in our family, no one else in the community, would. You, who I let remain in my home when no one else, knowing the full depth of the situation, the full depth of your betrayal, would. But I didn’t
know
the situation; I didn’t know that you had betrayed me. I was too blind to see the adultery taking place beneath my own roof. The adultery taking place in the room right next to my husband’s and mine.”

My thoughts crash over one another like waves racing toward shore. But my heart does not race so much as it ceases to beat. If my sister had walked across the chapel and slapped me across the face, I could not be more surprised; her words and the tone in which she conveys them are a slap in the face in themselves. And though every word is painful to hear, I find an odd relief in having my culpability exposed by the person my selfishness has destroyed.

“Even when you first moved in with Tobias and me,” Leah continues, “I had to repress this feeling that you were the other woman, his other wife. I thought it was just because of how we were in childhood, me always vying for
dawdy
’s attention while you had it effortlessly, and that it had scarred me to the point I carried it over into adulthood. I told myself that I was being foolish,
even immature. That I could trust my husband. And even if I couldn’t, I could at least trust
you
 . . . my sister, my twin.”

Leah’s voice cracks, the only disclosure of pain she gives. Staring at the lacquered floor running down the chapel’s center aisle, she says, “Even after that day I saw you and Tobias kneeling together in the kitchen, I never thought you would betray me. To this day, I
still
cannot believe it, but somehow I know it’s true. I know it by the anger you and Tobias have for each other—an anger that was spawned through the debasement of immoral love. I know it by how frustrated Tobias is whenever you come around. This frustration that he takes out on his children, on me, was created because of what the two of you have done. And yet . . .” My sister’s head comes up. Anger settles in her cheeks. If someone from the community saw us, they would think we have never looked more alike than we do now. “And yet, Rachel—my sister, my twin—I cannot help but love you. Despite everything you have done, despite how you have betrayed me and betrayed my family, I do not want to cause you the same level of pain that you have inflicted. I do not want your son to suffer even more because of the sins of his father. Because of the sins of his mother.”

My voice is both confused and contrite as I ask, “What do you mean?”

“I mean, why I came here today: not to confront you about your betrayal with my husband, but to give you the most precious possession I have ever had.”

I am so perplexed, I can’t ask any more questions because I do not know where they would begin.

“Eli’s bone marrow transplant,” Leah says. “I think I have his match.”

Shaking my head, I say, “But he doesn’t have any siblings. The doctor put him on a waiting list for a donor—”

“Rachel,” she interrupts, “you’re wrong. Eli
does
have a sibling.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Genetically,” my twin says, like this should be common sense, although I have never been more mystified, “genetically, Eli
does
have a sibling.” Leah puts a hand on my arm, a smile returning to her face even as her cheeks are still bright with anger. “Rachel, he has my son.”

AMOS

Leah has not mounted the first porch step when Tobias digs a hand into her forearm. “Where have you been?” he snarls.

Her curved spine straightening, Leah scrapes his hand away like it is leeching blood from her flesh. “I was at the hospital.”

“I already told you—” Tobias scrutinizes her features to gauge if she is lying—“you can’t go see your sister.”

“I wasn’t going to see my sister.” Leah marches up the steps, turns, and looks down at her husband, who is no longer in position to tower over her. “I went to see our nephew.”

Slamming his truck door, Judah strides across the yard and spits from between his teeth, “Or, not your nephew so much as your
son
.”

Tobias knocks Judah’s accusing finger away from his chest, dismissing both his younger brother and his younger brother’s viewpoints as he has always done. Judah’s temper that has been simmering since Rachel’s confession reaches its boiling point. Rearing back, he shoves his brother with both hands; the impact sends Tobias sprawling on the division line between gravel and grass. But my firstborn does not remain down for long. Scrambling to his feet, he crouches low and drives his head into Judah’s stomach, ramming the breath from his lungs. Judah staggers backward but remains standing. In the middle of the driveway in front of the white farmhouse, my eldest and youngest begin circling each other—their fingers outstretched and nostrils flaring—resembling a dark and a light alpha wolf from the same pack.

“Leah and I know everything,” Judah gasps. “Rachel told us. . . . She told us that
you
fathered Eli.”

Tobias cuts his eyes up to the porch. Seeing Leah’s face, her wan features highlighted only by her blonde hair and tear-filled eyes, his black gaze narrows into slits. “Why would you believe that harlot?” he growls. “I bet Rachel can’t even remember every man she’s slept with.”

Judah lunges. Binding both arms around Tobias’s torso, he drives the arrogant bishop to the ground. In Tobias’s thirty-two years and Judah’s twenty, neither has been
allowed to fight. Now, it seems the energy they have suppressed throughout childhood comes surging through their adult veins, causing them to grunt and curse as they wrestle more than swing fists. But the tumbling of their flesh across stones lances blood from their faces and scores cuts and bruises into their skin.

“You knew I loved her,” Judah cries through broken lips, his wrath transforming into pain. “You knew I loved Rachel for years and you—you slept with her!”

Flipping his body on top of his younger brother’s, Tobias grabs Judah’s head with both hands and smashes it back against the gravel, the golden curls spilling over gray stones. “I did
nothing
to Rachel that she didn’t want,” Tobias hisses, the spittle of his words carrying further than he knows. “She wanted it all. She
encouraged
me.” Judah turns his head from the stink of his brother’s sweat and lies, but Tobias grapples Judah’s cheeks, forcing him to listen to these words Tobias knows have the power to wound his brother more than any physical blow. “Rachel
never
loved you.”

Tobias actually does not know if Rachel ever loved Judah or not. In this frenzied moment, he just wants his younger brother to learn the lesson that Tobias has yearned to teach him for years. That Judah—the overindulged child the Lord granted to Verna and me in our old age—cannot have everything he has ever wanted without sacrificing anything in return. Judah cannot have Rachel, the woman he dreamed would be his bride, for Tobias has already taken her, and in that one fleshly act, he has already taken her from Judah.

“She
never
loved you,” Tobias repeats, not able to resist pouring salt into the wound he has just inflicted. “She never has, never will.”

“Stop it!” Leah releases the porch post and stumbles down the steps as if awakening from a dream. “Just stop it!” she wails. “
Both
of you!”

She is almost to them when—without closing her eyes or breaking her fall—her knees give way and her body crumples onto the gravel. Clambering to his feet, Tobias runs over and scoops his wife against his chest. Leah’s reed-thin legs dangling over his arms, Tobias rushes up the porch steps and bangs the front door closed with a hind kick of his boot.

Judah remains lying in the bloodied gravel outside his elder brother’s farmhouse with tears leaking from his honey-colored eyes and sliding into the roots of his hair. He is grieving the loss of the woman he loves. But more than this, he is grieving the loss of the life with her that he will now never have.

Rachel

The day Dr. Sengupta went through the innumerable risks Eli faced if a transplant match was ever found, he also explained that there would be no real risks for the bone marrow donor himself. The donor could not be very active
for a few weeks, but in comparison to Eli’s being confined to a hospital room for one hundred days and not being allowed to be carried into the hall without a mask first placed over his face to protect him from airborne infection, the side effects for a donor were really quite mild. When Dr. Sengupta told me this, I had pictured the donor as a thirty-five-year-old man with shaggy hair and an athletic build, a person who would bounce back from the surgery not feeling like something had been taken from him but that he had given something away. A gift, the incomparable gift of life.

But now that Jonathan might be going through the procedure involving a hollow needle inserted into the wings at the base of the spine to extract bone marrow, I am filled with dread. What if something goes wrong? What if Jonathan gets an infection? What if the transplant does not work and he lives with survivor’s guilt, even if he cannot remember the infant cousin who died? With this perspective, a bone marrow transplant no longer seems like the best choice out of a selection of impossible ones. Yet, as I sobbed these questions through the sieve of Leah’s skirt, she stroked my hair and reminded me that we were beyond the spectrum of best and worst choices, that we were at a crossroads where we must do whatever it takes to sustain life—even if it means risking the life of someone we love as much as the life we are hoping to save.

Leah and I must have remained in the chapel for over an hour; the milk shake Ida Mae had requested showed no
semblance of its former state once I gathered it to leave. Still, no one entered the chapel in all that time. Twice, I heard one of the double doors open, then close, the people—displaying empathy only known when you have been in such a distraught place yourself—understanding that my sister and I needed the sanctuary of the chapel’s walls a little more than they did.

When Leah and I returned to Eli’s room, Judah and Ida Mae looked up from the foil wrappers holding their hot dogs and tater tots. “What happened with y’all?” Ida Mae took a slurp from the milk shake she must have asked Judah to get, since I never returned with her order. “You two get in a fight or something?”

Judah’s eyes darted between my tear-streaked face and my sister’s uncomfortable one. Wiping his mouth with a napkin, he cleared his throat.

“Cat got y’all’s tongues?” Ida Mae prodded.

Leah chose to lead. “We think we might have a bone marrow match for Eli.”

“Yeah?” Ida Mae popped a tater tot into her mouth. She garbled, not bothering to swallow, “Who?”

My sister’s smile was a combination of triumph and nerves. “Jonathan,” she said. “My son.”

“Jonathan!”
Ida Mae squawked. “That won’t work. He might be a cousin, but he ain’t no brother.”

Breathing hard, I glanced at Judah. The whole time he visited Eli and me in this hospital—bringing my favorite foods and books and the card game Dutch Blitz that he
and I, and sometimes even Ida Mae, would play in the family lounge if Eli was sleeping—Judah never once hinted about that day we kissed in the sleeting rain. I knew Judah remained silent because he wanted to let me focus on my son’s health. Though I appreciate his consideration, Eli was not the reason I could not allow myself to speak. I loved Judah. I believe I always had, but my heart had been so encrusted beneath past scars, it could not reciprocate a healthy love when the opportunity came. But now that my heart had healed enough to realize that Judah always had a place inside it, Judah was about to learn the truth—causing me to believe that our love would never again be spoken of. This time, however, Judah would remain silent not out of consideration, but because he would no longer want a life with a woman whose past was as desecrated as mine.

I took another deep breath, and Leah slipped an arm around my waist. The reassurance of her support when I least deserved it was what gave me the courage to say, “Actually—” I paused and shifted my eyes away from Judah’s—“Jonathan
is
Eli’s brother. At least genetically. And genetically is all that matters as far as bone marrow transplants are concerned.”

“I don’t get it,” Ida Mae said. “I don’t get it at all.”

My eyes drifted over to Judah’s, but his were closed. A mottled flush had crept up his neck and soaked into his hairline. Standing, he pivoted and faced the window. Ida Mae might not have grasped the situation, but Judah King somehow did. I had to wonder if Judah knew without
understanding every medical detail because a part of him had always known that Tobias was Eli’s father.

“Ida Mae,” I said because I could not bear to make Leah have to say it, “Tobias King, Leah’s husband . . . he—he’s Eli’s father.”

Ida Mae looked at me, then at Leah, then from Leah back to me. This ping-pong reaction reminded me of the times my sister and I had been at Root’s Market or at the New Holland horse sale and people—both
Englischers
and Plain—stared between the two of us before asking if we were twins. This time, though, I knew that Ida Mae was looking for more than an uncanny resemblance. She was searching between the two of us to see what difference there could be in our character to make one twin and not the other fall so far.

“You saying that you—” Ida Mae took the straw from her mouth and pointed it at me—“you had a baby with your twin sister’s husband?”

I nodded. Although Judah was still looking out the window, I knew my silent response was confirmation enough.

Spinning around so the get-well cards and balloons trailing along the window fluttered with his movement, Judah looked at Leah. “You ready? Everybody’s probably wondering where you’re at.”