Ezra stopped his buggy by the bridge at the edge of the village as his eye was caught by a motion on the bank of the stream below it. Chipped concrete walls showed where vehicles had struck the old bridge. The walkway on the far side of the walls had been fenced off because it was no longer safe. As for the bridge itself, there was some concern it could continue to support a fully loaded milk truck. The farms between it and Gordonville depended on that truck to take their milk to the processing plant about twenty miles to the west. That was one of the reasons he had decided to start experimenting with making his own cheese before he had more Brown Swiss cows in his herd.
Getting out, he looped the reins over the wooden slats that blocked the walkway. An easy leap over the railing dropped him down onto the grassy slope. Leah stood at the bottom on the stony shore. She was fishing patiently in the fast-moving water. An open creel basket and long-handled net sat by her bare feet. Her black sneakers and socks were safely away from the water.
“Any luck?” he called as he got closer.
With a wave, she motioned him to come down. He hadn’t been sure if she would after their conversation yesterday had ended abruptly. He half walked, half slid down toward the stream.
“Look!” She pointed at the woven willow basket. “I’ve caught three nice trout already. When Mamm said she’d like some fish, I decided to sneak away after Mandy got home from school and see what I could catch. I hope to hook one more. If I get my full limit of five, that would be gut, but four should be enough for us for supper.”
“Mind if I watch?”
Surprise blossomed in her eyes, but she said, “If you want.”
Sitting on the edge of the grass, he was quiet as she waited for a bite. He moved only when her line went taut. As she fought with the fish to bring it ashore, he picked up the net. She glanced at him and nodded. He had the net ready when she reeled the fish up out of the water. It was more than a foot long, and it must have weighed, he guessed, close to two pounds.
“Nice one,” he said as he lifted it from the net and carefully undid the hook. He placed the fish in the creel before handing the line back to her so she could continue.
When she tossed the line back into the stream close to where she’d caught the other fish, he sat again. He was quiet once more and took the time to admire how the strands of blond hair that had escaped from her kapp glistened in the sunlight. Her pretty mouth was slightly open, and a corner of her tongue peeked out as she waited eagerly for the next bite. Her dimple was only faintly visible on her left cheek. He was sure he had never seen a sight more beautiful than she was as she reveled in the game between her and the fish.
How could she ever have been happy in Philadelphia? He’d been there once many years ago, and he recalled the streets where nothing green grew except in flower boxes on the houses. Even the sun was banned on the ground around the tallest buildings. He’d gone past both the Delaware and the Schuylkill Rivers, and he hadn’t seen any place where a person could toss a line in the water in the hope of hooking a fish.
Her line tightened again quickly, and he rose to hold the net up to snag the fish as soon as it was out of the water. It was always disappointing when the fish threw the hook and escaped at the last minute.
“Danki,” she said when he released the line after unhooking the fish. She looked into the creel. “That should be enough for tonight, and I’d better head home if I want to get them cleaned and cooked for supper.”
“Next time you go fishing, ask me to come along.”
“Really?”
“I wouldn’t have said so if I didn’t mean it.” He flipped the top of the creel closed and lifted it by the shoulder strap, holding it out far enough so any water didn’t splash on his boots. “Why don’t you believe me?”
Leah didn’t give him a quick answer. Instead, she went to where she’d left her shoes and socks and, leaning her pole against the slope, pulled them on. She looked up at him.
“Forgive me, Ezra. You’ve never given me any reason to disbelieve you. I appreciate you always being honest with me.”
He was glad when she turned her attention to tying her sneakers so she didn’t see his expression. Though he tried to keep his smile in place, he knew it must look grotesque. He hadn’t always been honest with her. He had been too scared to tell her years ago that he wanted to court her to discover if friendship really could become love. What would she say now if she knew that his faith had weakened since she left? Or that he was afraid of asking a simple question—Are you staying?—because the answer could be no.
“I wish everyone would be as honest,” she continued when he didn’t answer. “Some act as if I’m hiding horrible secrets about my life while I was away.”
“It might have been easier if folks knew where you’d gone before you came back.”
She came to her feet. “They could have asked Daed. He knew.”
“He did?” He picked up her rod. “How?”
“My return address was on the letters I wrote to him almost every week while we were gone.”
“You wrote to him? Every week?”
Tears glistened in her eyes. “Ja.”
Something didn’t make sense. As he walked up the slope beside her, he asked, “How did Abram keep from sharing the news of Johnny’s accident or Mandy’s birth? I’m amazed Fannie could keep from saying anything to Mamm.”
“She didn’t know about the accident or Mandy. Neither did Daed.” Her voice broke as she whispered, “He returned my letters unopened.”
Ezra mouthed the word unopened, but no sound emerged past his shock. Abram Beiler had always been a stern daed and a stubborn man. In spite of that, Ezra had never doubted that he loved his kinder. How could any man turn his back on his kinder completely? Most Amish daeds tried to locate their kinder who had jumped the fence and went to them, urging them to come home. Abram had never gone to Philadelphia as far as Ezra knew.
“Neither Daed nor Johnny could relent and admit they’d been wrong to let their anger take their quarrels so far.” Leah’s words remained hushed. “And neither of them was willing to be the first to ask for or offer forgiveness. Maybe Daed forgave Johnny, but Johnny couldn’t forgive him.” She pressed her hands to her face. “I pray that, in his final moments, Johnny found peace by granting Daed the forgiveness that God has given freely to us. I can’t stand the idea that he went to God with that burden on his soul.”
He set the creel basket and fishing rod on the grass. Slowly, knowing what he risked, he drew her quivering hands down from her face. Seeing the torment in her purple eyes was like having a knife driven into his heart.
Lord, help me find the words to help Leah. You have given me this opportunity to ease her anguish. Now please give me the words.
He took a deep breath before he said, “In spite of the fact that Johnny made plenty of bad decisions, your brother wasn’t a bad person. He was generous and a gut friend to those he counted as his friends. He cared deeply for the animals in his care, and his love for you never wavered. He wouldn’t tolerate bullies, whether they were plain or Englisch. One time, I saw him stick up for a younger boy against a couple of louts who were bigger than Johnny was. He never flinched when they threatened to beat him to a pulp. He simply stood there between them and the kind until they walked away.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“He never spoke of it after it happened. Even Abram knew that Johnny had a gut heart, though he was frustrated by your brother’s wild spirit.”
“I wish I could believe that. I haven’t heard Daed speak Johnny’s name once. It’s as if he wishes Johnny was never born.” Her voice caught. “And me.”
Lord, Ezra prayed silently, if it is Your will, help Leah and her daed. If I’m not Your instrument of change in their lives, bring someone else into her life who can open her daed’s heart so he will reveal how special she is to him.
Aloud, he said, “That’s not true. Abram was as devastated as your mamm was when you two disappeared. Even if he doesn’t let you or anyone else see it now, I witnessed his pain right after you left, and I know it was real.” As she opened her mouth to protest, he quickly added, “It doesn’t matter what we think. God knows what is in our hearts, and He judges us on that. He knows the depth of your daed’s love for his kinder—all his kinder!—and he knows the true reasons that kept Johnny from coming home.”
She blinked back tears. “Danki, Ezra. I needed that reminder of God’s love. I should have known that I could talk to you about anything, even how Daed can’t forgive me for leaving.”
He realized he really didn’t want to talk. He wanted to gaze into Leah’s shining eyes. He wanted to do more than that. If he drew her into his arms now, would she pull away again or would she come willingly? Did she guess how often she was in his thoughts?
“What about you, Ezra? Have you forgiven me for leaving?”
“Certainly.” His voice caught, and he cleared his tight throat. “Though from what you’ve said since your return, there seems to be nothing to forgive you for other than loving your brother too much.”
“Can anyone love a brother too much?”
He tilted his hat back and swiped a hand across his brow. “I don’t have an answer for that because I’ve never faced the choice you did.”
“But you believe I was silly to follow Johnny blindly.”
“I don’t think you followed him blindly. You wanted to save him from himself. Abram might have given up on him, but you never did.”
“He’s my twin.” She gulped and stared at the ground. “He was my twin.”
He cupped her chin and tipped her face up so she couldn’t hide it from him. “Johnny is still your twin. Eventually you will be reunited.” He lifted one corner of his mouth in the best smile he could manage. “I hope that isn’t for a long time to come.”
“I miss him.” Her voice broke on the few words.
“I can’t imagine what it must be like to lose a twin.”
“Is the void in my life any greater than if I lost someone else I love? I wouldn’t say greater. It’s different. More like a part of myself died along with him. He was always there, even from before I can remember.”
“Me, too.” He sighed in a mixture of sorrow and discouragement as she stepped away after stirring memories he had tried to submerge for longer than she’d been gone.
“What happened with you and Johnny?” she asked, again proving that she was privy to his thoughts even when he didn’t speak them. “One day, you were the best of friends, and then, the next, he acted as if you didn’t exist.”
“You don’t know?” He doubted there was anything she could have said that would have surprised him more. Picking up the rod and creel, he started up the slope again. “I was sure Johnny told you how he believed I’d betrayed him.”
“No. He only said that he’d been dumm to consider you a friend. He didn’t say anything else. Why would he think you betrayed him?”
Even now, the hurt Ezra had suffered burst forth, as strong as when it was fresh. “At least you didn’t ask me if I betrayed him.”
“I know both of you.” She didn’t add anything more.
Climbing over the guardrail, he leaned the rod against the side of the buggy and set the creel on the ground beside it. He turned to assist Leah over the metal rail, but she’d already managed by herself. He swallowed his disappointment, because he had been looking forward to putting his hands on her slender waist, lifting her over and bringing her down right in front of him.
“It happened a long time ago,” he said. “I’m not sure resurrecting it is a gut idea.”
“I’m not asking you to speak ill of the dead. Tell me what happened.”
He rested his arm on the buggy and watched as a car swept by and over the bridge, heading toward town at a speed too high for the winding road. The bright red car looked like the one that was often parked in the yard of the house next to his brother Joshua’s house.
“Ezra?” Leah prompted.
He couldn’t deny her the truth. “It started with plans that some of the older kids, the ones on their rumspringa, made to go to Hersheypark.”
“Lots of kids go to the amusement park during their rumspringa years.”
“And they talk about the rides and how much fun they are and the food and the other amusements.” He looked at her directly when he said, “Johnny really wanted to go. So much that when he heard the Hershberger brothers weren’t going, he decided we should.”
“But you were boys then, too young for a rumspringa trip.”
“Ja.” He sighed. “I told Johnny that, but he wouldn’t listen. He kept trying to persuade me to go with them. They believed that the van driver wouldn’t notice we were younger than the other kids because Englischers have a hard time telling us apart when we’re wearing our straw hats and shirts of the same color.”
“Them? Who else?”
“Do you remember Steven McMurray? The Englisch boy who lived on the farm about a mile down the road toward Gordonville?”
She frowned as she nodded. “He was always getting in trouble. Johnny thought he was great. Whatever happened to him?”
“He’s the police chief in Paradise Springs now.” He chuckled when she stared at him. “Who would have guessed that the same boy who talked your brother into trying to sneak off to Hersheypark would now be doing a gut job of keeping the peace? Maybe he’s always one step ahead of the kids because he always was in the middle of trouble himself growing up.”
“Johnny and Steven planned to sneak onto the van?”
“Ja, and they invited me to go with them. When I said I didn’t think their plan would work and I wanted no part of it, they told me I was a coward.”
“That is when you stopped being friends?”
In the light coming through the leaves on the trees along the road, he could see her holding her lower lip between her teeth, waiting for his answer. He would have liked to say it was, that he—rather than Johnny—had brought about the end of their friendship, but he wouldn’t lie to her.
“It was later, Leah,” he said sadly. “After their scheme was discovered, Johnny accused me of tattling on them. He believed it was my fault they got caught, even though the driver refused to let them get in the van because he saw they were too young. The driver contacted Abram and Steven’s daed, and they both came to collect their sons. I was told that by Joshua, who went on their trip.”
“I didn’t know.” She crossed her arms in front of her. “Even then, Johnny and Daed were arguing so often that I’d stopped listening to what they were quarreling about.”
“He told me I’d be sorry that I betrayed him, and he didn’t like when I turned my back on him and walked away.”
“It must have been after that when Johnny became furious that you and I were still friends.”
“But you remained my friend.”
“Johnny and I are twins, not the same person. We often had different opinions.” Her eyes rose to meet his gaze. “I’m sorry he felt he had to end your friendship. He paid a high cost for fulfilling his threat. Johnny never was able to forget what he saw as a slight. He held on to grudges, even though it only hurt him. I loved him, but I wasn’t blind to how he couldn’t turn the other cheek. He sought revenge, instead, waiting weeks or months if he had to.”
Or years? Johnny must have known for a fact that Leah would go with him to plead with him to come back from the Englisch world. Shock rushed through Ezra. Had Johnny lured his sister away, being aware that while his leaving would hurt Abram, Leah going would be even more painful for his daed...and for Ezra?
It was a heinous thought, and he should be praying for forgiveness for even allowing it to form. Yet he couldn’t help believing there was some truth in his suspicions. Maybe Johnny hadn’t made his plans to leave with such a goal in his mind, but the result had been the same.
“Being angry now is useless.” She put her hand on his bare forearm. “It’s time to let the past go.”
“I agree.” He splayed his fingers across her cheek, savoring the warmth the sun had burnished into her skin. As he touched her, confirming that she really stood in front of him, he realized how much he had harbored the fear that none of this was anything more than a dream. That she hadn’t truly come back. His own yearning to see her had created a realistic dream.
He had been thinking about their one kiss more and more often. But he was startled by how he didn’t want only to kiss her. He longed to bring her into his arms and cradle her close as he lost himself in her amazing eyes while her loosened hair fell in a golden cascade down over his hands.
The thought should have startled him even more than his doubts about her twin, but it didn’t. Since the year he turned seventeen and really started noticing girls and realizing that eventually he needed to choose one to marry, there had been only one he’d considered.
Leah Beiler.
He had taken other girls home in his courting buggy, but he’d asked each of them after Leah accepted another guy’s invitation. At the time, he’d been too worried about ruining their friendship to ask if he might court her.
What a fool he’d been!
He’d been even a greater fool her last night in Paradise Springs. If he’d told her that night how he felt, would she have stayed in Paradise Springs to be with him, or would she have run away with her brother in an effort to save Johnny from himself?
But she was home now, and perhaps if he gave her a gut reason to stay, she would remain here. As he tipped her face toward him, her lovely eyes closed in an invitation to kiss her. An invitation he would gladly accept.
Leah jumped away from him as another car approached the bridge. She grabbed her fishing pole and creel. “I should get these fish cleaned before they go bad, and I promised Mamm that I’d get the mail so she didn’t have to leave...” As her voice trailed into silence, she looked down at her creel.
She might be checking the fish in it, but he guessed she was trying to avoid revealing something she was keeping a secret. What? Something about the mail? Had Mandy received another invitation to Philadelphia? Had Leah?
“I’ll give you a ride home, if you’d like,” he said, hoping she would open up on the short journey.
She nodded and handed him her fishing equipment. As he moved to put it in the storage area behind the buggy’s cab, she climbed in by herself.
He hoped it was only because she was in a hurry to get her catch home. Thinking of the alternatives was too painful.
* * *
Leah let happiness enfold her as Ezra kept silence from filling the buggy. When he began talking about how Esther planned to have a work frolic for the scholars’ families at the school, she let him keep the conversation light and on something that was part of their present. The past was over, and she wanted to enjoy that she and Ezra were chatting with an ease she had been unsure they’d ever regain. His arm brushed hers as he drew on the reins to slow the horse before turning into the lane leading to her daed’s farm.
It was tempting to take his hand, but she didn’t want to do anything to disrupt the easy peace that had settled between them. With the birds chirping in the trees along the road and the late-afternoon sun warm on the buggy, she sent up a silent prayer of gratitude to God for the wunderbaar day He had given them.
“‘This is the day which the Lord hath made, we will rejoice and be glad in it,’” Ezra said.
She swiveled on the seat to face him. “I was thinking the same thing.”
“Great minds.”
“Or great faith.”
He sighed. “I’m working on that.”
“Me, too.”
“You? You rush in where others fear to tread without thought of what you might encounter.”
“Maybe I need to think a little bit more before I jump in.”
“Maybe you should.” His voice had a hushed roughness that sent a tingle of delight through her. Drawing back on the reins, he smiled when she asked why they were stopping. “You said you needed to get the mail on your way home.”
“I’m glad you remembered.” She used humor to cover her shock that she could have forgotten how she had told Mamm she’d collect the mail so her mamm and Mandy could remain close to Daed in case he fell again.
“Let me.” He stretched to open the mailbox. Gathering the mail inside, he handed it to her.
“Danki.” She flipped through the envelopes and paused at two thicker ones. “Oh, Mamm will be pleased. There are two of her circle letters. One from her sister and the other from mine.”
Her mamm had been writing these round-robin letters all of Leah’s life. It was a simple system where each person wrote about the new events in her life and, after taking out the page with her previous note, mailed it to the next name in the circle. Usually it took about a month for each letter to complete its circle, so some of the news was stale while other bits were very recent.
Below the envelope from her sister was another with her name typed on it. “I wonder who’s sending me a letter.”
“From where?”
She looked at the postmark. “Philadelphia.”
His shoulders straightened beside her, and tension radiated off him like heat from a stove.
Why hadn’t she thought before she blurted out the answer? Ezra seemed to react that way whenever the city was mentioned. Quickly Leah checked the return address and smiled.
“It’s from Mrs. Whittaker,” she said, “the owner of the shop where I sold my quilts in Philadelphia.” She opened the envelope and drew out the single, folded sheet inside.
“You don’t need to read the letter. I’ll tell you what it says. She’d like more of your quilts.” Ezra’s tone became more relaxed as he urged the horse forward again.
She looked up, surprised. “Ja, but how did you know?”
“I have seen your work, Leah. It’s beautiful, and I’m sure she’d like having more of your quilts to sell in her shop.”
“I doubt I could make enough to sell in her shop and also in Amos’s store.”
“You may earn more in Philadelphia because city folks seem to have more money than country folk.”
“But people come to Lancaster County to find quilts made by plain seamstresses. Oh!” she added as she continued to read. “She wants me to come to Philadelphia and teach a series of classes in quilting.”
“I am sure you would have enjoyed that. I remember you teaching Esther to love quilting.”
“Would have enjoyed? Why do you assume that I won’t go?”
Again his shoulders grew taut. “Are you considering it?”
“Her offer is generous, and I’m sure I could arrange to go at the same time Mandy wants to attend Isabella’s party.”
“You make it sound easy to leave.” His accusation lashed her like a fiery rope.
“What’s wrong? If I go to Philadelphia, it doesn’t mean I’ll stay there.”
“Mandy wants to, and you won’t let her stay there alone.”
“I’m her guardian. I’ll decide where she needs to be.”
“Even if she’s unhappy here? As unhappy as her daed was?”
Reaching past him, Leah tugged on the reins to stop the buggy in the middle of the lane. She jumped down and snatched her fishing rod and creel out of the back. She looked up at him as she said, “I don’t know how to answer your questions, Ezra. They plague me every night and keep me awake. I’ve been praying for guidance, but I haven’t gotten an answer yet. However, I do know that I have plenty reasons of my own for coming back.”
“What are they?”
She saw the raw vulnerability on his face, and, for a moment, she considered saying he was one of the reasons. If she did, he might ask her about the others. So all she did was thank him for the ride. She couldn’t reveal how concerned she was with Daed’s spells of dizziness and the falls that left him bruised. Mamm had asked her to keep the information to herself, and, even though she hated being caught up in more secrets, she wouldn’t break that trust.
Not again.