I didn’t know what to make of my mother’s letter. There was no mention of my request for more time, and I worried that she might intend to personally bring me home at the end of her visit.

But she did want to see Aunt Beth. Right away, I called Beth and asked if she could stop by on her way home from work. She arrived at Rachel’s door just as I was putting a casserole in the oven for the family’s dinner. I took Beth’s hand and pulled her upstairs. She hadn’t seen my room before, and I watched her smiling approval of my space in Rachel’s home. Then I handed her the letter, waiting for the moment of recognition.

Her face changed. She made a sound like she was out of breath, and she put her hand over her mouth. Her eyes were wide.

“I know!” I said, although she hadn’t said anything. She lowered her hand and reached it out toward me. I rushed to hug her, feeling her body tremble against mine.

There followed a flurry of letters back and forth between my mother and me, selecting dates, confirming the time of arrival at the train station, arranging for her to stay at Rachel’s house (though Beth was already preparing her guest room). Her arrival was a week away. She would be staying for six days, the longest she had ever been away from home as a married woman.

All the while I was filled with worry. I worried about how the meeting would go between the two sisters. And I was concerned with what her plan was for me. I also had to reconcile my feelings about this woman who had shunned her own sister.

One afternoon, with the children off to camp and my household tasks completed for the day, I sat on my bed with my journal open on my lap and flipped through the pages, reading snatches of my rumspringa life. Buttons everywhere, I had written in one of my first days. Beeps and buttons.

I smiled and turned to another page. ANNIE WAS RIGHT, I had written in big letters. Yankee boys are cute! Josh draws out his grin in a slow way, until his face becomes a smiling one by inches.

On the night of Daniel’s visit, I wrote:

Daniel appeared at my door

I was

happy to see him

sad to see him leave

a little mad at him during the visit

relieved that we made up

nothing is new.

One day, after Valerie and I returned from the mall, I wrote, Valerie envies my eyelashes. What an odd thing. And why does that make me feel so satisfied?

One Sunday, after returning from Beth and John’s house, I wrote, Oh, Uncle John, you didn’t cause the Cubs’ losing streak. No, you’re not a jinx.

I closed the journal and hugged it to my chest. I hadn’t kept a meticulous record, as I’d promised my mother, but I enjoyed these little glimpses into my English life. I thought about what it might be like to read it later, when I was grown and remembering this place and this time. I tried to imagine what this future Eliza would look like as she read the journal. Would she be sitting in a kitchen lit by kerosene lamps, her kapp snug on her head, her apron cinched around her waist? Or would she be in a kitchen surrounded by beeping machines, wearing trousers and a blouse with buttons?

I turned to the end of the journal to see how many blank pages remained, and a puffiness inside the back cover caught my attention. It crinkled against my fingertips. My fingers roamed the inside the back cover until I felt the opening of a pocket that I hadn’t known was there. I reached in and pulled out a sheaf of folded pages, yellowed and creased. Opening the pages, I saw my mother’s familiar looped lettering in blue ballpoint ink. My heartbeat quickened and I began to read.

I am only one week here and it feels like I’ve always lived in this world. Now I flip on the light switch without a thought and turn the knob on the radio to listen to music. How will I be able to leave the ease of this life? How will I ever go back to hanging wash on a line and drying the dishes one by one with a damp towel?

I swallowed back a gasp. This was my mother’s rumspringa journal. She must not have remembered that these pages were there.

I read her writing like I was thirsty, gulping it, inhaling it. The early pages detailed the wonders of television, movies, the dishwasher, the dryer, the garbage disposal. Others were musings. In one entry she wrote, I thought I would miss the Sunday services and the quilt circles. But they have been replaced with other activities. Discussions around the dinner table about things that happened in the news. Trips into town to museums and movies. Shopping excursions to find a shirt in just the right shade of blue to match a new pair of pants. I want to miss the gentle affairs of home, but they seem far away and unimportant. Here I am, and there’s a chance I will stay put.

I turned to another entry, with the lyrics of every song on James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James album. It was hardly possible to think that my mother had listened to pop music. How could those songs not have stayed a part of her when she returned home? How could she have left them so completely behind?

Another entry read: The chores here take up so much less time. Laundry at home occupies an entire backbreaking day. Here, the clothes don’t have the same smell of the wind and sun, but they are clean in an hour or two. Is it sinful to cherish these bonus hours that are tacked on to each day? If so, then I am a sinner and I don’t plan to repent.

Some entries were about Debbie, the tailor’s daughter, who taught her how to use the CD player and what stores in the mall had the cool clothes.

About halfway through the pages, a name caught my eye. I know that Beth is lonesome for me, and I admit that I don’t think about her as much as I should. This is such a selfish time, this rumspringa. I am consumed only with my own wishes. I am not Good Amish while I’m here. Actually, while I’m here, I’m not Amish at all.

Drenched in my mother’s words, I read on. There were only a few pages left, and the entries were shorter and farther apart. I realized that I was searching for something. And then I found it.

Matthew came over tonight. We went down to the basement to talk and et cetera. His hair is such a golden color I can’t stop looking at it.

Matthew. My mother had had an English beau and his name was Matthew. My heart was throbbing now. I turned the page eagerly and scanned ahead.

Matthew’s name was mentioned a few times, but with scant details. I stopped reading for a moment, unsure if I should go on. Should I be reading about a romance my mother once had with a boy whose name, over all these years she has never mentioned? I wondered if I should set the pages aside, but then I thought about this gift from my mother. She could have given me any book of pages for journal writing, but she had purposely handed me this one. I inched toward a new realization. My mother wanted me to know about this. These tucked-away pages were a message from my mother to me. I went back to her words, to the story my mother had never told me.

Now some entries were only one or two sentences long. We fit together perfectly. We are supposed to be together. Others alluded to the complexities of their relationship. We talked for hours and still said nothing new. We argue even though we are both in agreement. On the second to last page the writing was faint, as though she wasn’t sure about committing the words to paper. I shouldn’t have let things get so far. I don’t know if there is a way out of this.

My chest tightened and I closed my eyes. My mother had been in trouble. I turned to the last page. I leave tomorrow on the 8 a.m. train. Debbie cried when I told her I was going. She said, “I thought we were friends.” I told her lies. I said that my family needed me. That I’d write to her. That I’d see her again. All lies. Matthew said he was sorry. He offered me money. I waited to see if that was all he would offer. It was.

Then, at the bottom of the last page was one sentence:

I hope that Amos is a forgiving man.

I caught my breath. I felt dizzy, the air around me too thin to take in a full breath. I didn’t want to think about what this meant.

But I knew. It all made sense now, my mother’s rush home, her transformation into a dutiful Amish woman, her hasty marriage to a man she might not have loved at the time.

My hands shook as I folded the pages and pushed them back into the hidden pocket. I closed the notebook and felt the wild need to hide it. The camp bus was rumbling up the street, and I went downstairs. Taking in breaths of the too-thin air, I pasted a smile on my face as the children tumbled off the bus, backpacks slipping from their narrow shoulders.

Janie greeted me with a hug, as she always did, and I squeezed her tightly. Walking the children into the house, I listened to their jumbled chatter about the day’s adventures. I made them a snack and put their damp towels and swimsuits into the washing machine, setting their backpacks aside until I would repack them in the morning. My movements felt outside of myself. My body was here, carrying out my commands, but my mind was somewhere else. It was in a place over twenty years ago, when a girl named Becky tiptoed too close to the edge.