Chapter 4

Using her shoulder and the wall as a guide, Dani made her way down to the first floor, her legs quaking between steps. Sometime during the night, the slow, steady beat of dread had switched into warp drive, expanding its way beyond her ears and into her chest. But even as she’d prayed it was a sign of the heart attack she’d begged God to give her, she knew better.

Beyond the occasional sip of water, and the two crackers she’d found in Jeff’s suit pocket that had taken her nearly four days to consume, she hadn’t eaten since the repast. Longer, if she didn’t count the single, solitary crouton she hadn’t been able to keep down, anyway.

She’d tried to ignore the rapid heartbeat, the clammy hands, her nearly paper-dry throat, but to do so meant continuing to stay upstairs where every sound, every sight, made the emptiness in her heart all the more crushing. No, she needed a chance to catch her breath no matter how shallow and fleeting it might be . . .

At the bottom of the steps, she stopped, collected her balance, and reveled, momentarily, in the sameness of the noises that had greeted her in this same spot every morning for nearly a decade. There was the quiet yet steady ticking of the kitchen clock, the faint hum of the ice maker, and the distant bark of the Andersons’ dog as it spotted the Ridgeways’ cantankerous cat heading home after yet another night of carousing.

It was all so normal, in fact, that for a few quick strides she actually found herself mentally inventorying the pantry as she wavered between making pancakes or French toast. But it didn’t last. Because as normal as those first few sounds had been, the absence of Ava’s sweet “good morning, Mommy,” and Spencer’s running feet on the stairs compared to Maggie’s more methodical pace told her everything was different.

Grabbing hold of the edge of the center island, Dani closed her eyes through the sudden yet powerful wave of nausea. When it passed, she crossed to the refrigerator and made herself pull it open.

Sure enough, the milk she would normally have picked up on a Friday afternoon wasn’t there. Neither was Jeff’s favorite brand of orange juice. Instead, in the places where she would have put them, there were stacks of Tupperware in assorted shapes, sizes, and lid colors. The stack of red-lidded containers, according to the sticky note on top, was from the Andersons and included a tuna casserole, a side salad, and a homemade biscuit. The blue-lidded containers were from the Ridgeways and included the various components of their family’s favorite comfort meal.

Dropping her hand to her side, she stared at the containers in front of her even as her mind’s eye wandered to the freezer and the packed shelves she didn’t need to see to know were filled. It was what she and her neighbors did for one another when someone’s parent passed, or the season’s creeping crud rendered a mom too sick to feed her family. In fact, not more than six months earlier, while battling a flu she’d picked up in Spencer’s classroom, she’d opened the refrigerator to these same colored lids with the very same contents. Only that time, the containers were bigger, their contents intended to feed five people . . .

Jeff.

Maggie.

Spencer.

Ava.

And herself.

But now, despite the same families using the same colored lids, the containers were smaller, their limited contents reflecting the single mouth left to feed.

The quaking in her legs was back. So, too, was the nausea that had her closing the refrigerator door on food she needed yet had no desire to eat. Instead, she grabbed a glass from the cabinet, filled it halfway with water from the sink, and carried it over to her spot at the kitchen table. It wasn’t that she wanted to sit there, surrounded by four empty chairs, but it was getting harder and harder to stay standing without feeling like she was going to faint.

She needed to eat. She knew that. But knowing it and doing it were two different things.

“Baby steps get you to the same place, Dani . . .”

Startled as much by her own gasp as the clarity of her mother’s voice in her head, Dani rushed to right her glass before she spilled its water down her chin and neck. She knew her mother wasn’t there, knew it just as surely as she knew her own name, but still she looked toward the hall . . . the pantry . . . the sixth chair at the table, and held her breath for half a beat just in case she was wrong.

She wasn’t.

The voice, the words, had been so real, so true to what her mother would have said in that moment, she dropped her head into her hands and hitched out a sigh. “I don’t know how to do this, Mom,” she whispered. “How to do any of this.

“Jeff and the kids—they . . . they were my world, Mom. My everything.” She tried to clear the rasp from her throat but to no avail. “You all were.”

Lifting her chin, she wiped the growing wetness from her cheeks. “That’s why I didn’t take time for me. Why I didn’t want you pushing me to stay behind.

“But you did!” She shoved back from the table so hard the chair smacked into the corner of the island. “Why? Why did you do that? Things were fine the way they were—I was fine. I was great!” she spat through clenched teeth. “I was whole! And now?

“Now?” she repeated, shrieking. “Now Jeff is gone . . . Maggie is gone . . . Spencer is gone . . . Ava is gone . . . You’re gone . . . And I’m here—here without them, and without you! And why?”

She scanned the island, the countertops, and the table before settling, finally, on her desk and the hardback book in its center. “So I could read a book?” she screamed. “A book?”

Racing across the room, she grabbed the book, looked down at the same cover that had once enticed yet now repelled, and threw it across the hall so hard it left a mark on the wall where it hit. “I was reading a book when my family needed me most!”

The anger that had propelled her across the room bowed to a wave of grief so strong her knees buckled her onto the edge of her desk chair.

“The other vehicle jumped the median at such speed, your husband’s attempt to swerve out of the way was futile.”

She held her hands to her ears in an attempt to block out the trooper’s description of the accident, but it, too, was futile. Jeff had tried to swerve. That meant he’d seen the car coming at them.

Had he yelled?

Had Mom looked back at the kids?

Did the kids see the car?

Did they call out for her in their fear?

Did they wonder, in those last moments, why she’d chosen to stay behind, why she wasn’t there to hold them . . . to comfort them . . . to protect them . . . to tell them she loved them?

Or did Maggie think about the brochure she’d caught Dani looking at that morning—the one for the spa and its promise of peace and quiet without the kids?

Extending her hands, Dani gripped on to her roots and pulled, her teeth clenching in anger even as a fresh set of tears spilled down her cheeks. “How could you stay behind? How could you leave them to go through that alone? How could you lose track of everything about them because of a book?”

Slowly at first, and then with gathering speed, she tore into herself, her throat growing rawer and rawer with each accusation she was unable to hold back.

“How could you not know they needed you? That they were scared? That they were hurt? That they were screaming your name? How could you”—she let loose a guttural noise from somewhere deep inside her chest—“not know your family was dying? How could you not know they were dead?”

She heard the words as they left her lips, heard them echo through the empty room, but for just a moment, it was as if they belonged to someone else. Someone she didn’t want to know. Someone awful and selfish and—

The ring of the desk phone stole her thoughts and sent them toward the caller ID screen and the out-of-state number she didn’t recognize. She knew the likelihood that it was a solicitor was high, but for just a moment she wanted someone to yell at, someone to unleash her anger on besides herself.

But when she reached for the phone, her fingers hit the button on the answering machine instead, unleashing a trio of giggles that stole her breath from her lungs. As she worked to catch it, Maggie’s sweet voice emerged in the greeting they’d painstakingly rehearsed together.

“Hi! You’ve reached the Parkers’ res-i-dence. We are not home right now, but if you tell us your name and your phone number, Mommy or Daddy, but probably Mommy, will call you back very”—Maggie’s voice bowed to a flurry of whispers, a loud yet quick “very” from Spencer, a softer and not-so-quick “very, very” from Ava, before returning—“soon! Bye!”

Lunging forward, Dani grabbed the phone. “No! No! Don’t go yet, please! Don’t . . . go,” she rasped. “Please . . . I’m sorry! I-I didn’t need time.”

There was no use; she simply couldn’t hold back the sobs that rattled her body from head to toe. Maggie’s voice was gone, taking with it the confusion that had let her believe, for the most wonderful of moments, that their presence was in real time, rather than a recording of the past.

A recording—a recording she could listen to again . . .

Tightening her grip on the phone, she reached for the machine’s play button only to pull her hand away as a different voice, a hesitant murmur really, cut through her sniffles.

“Danielle?”

She pulled in a breath, held it for a beat. “Yes . . . Who is this?”

“This is Lydia. Lydia Schlabach.”

The familiar name pulled her shoulders up and then sank them back against the chair. “Lydia?”

“Yah. It is me.”

Her mind’s eye rewound back to her own childhood and the trip she’d taken to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, with her parents when she was Maggie’s age.

Maggie . . .

Squeezing her eyes closed, Dani willed herself to breathe. To focus. To—

“Wait,” she rasped. “You’re calling . . . On a telephone . . .”

“Yah. It is the phone between our farm and the Zooks’.”

She rested her elbow on the desk and, using her thumb and index finger, kneaded the area near the outer corner of her eye. “I-I didn’t know you could call like this. I thought it was just letters—like the ones we send each other at Christmas.”

“I could not send just a letter for this.”

And then she knew. Somehow, someway, the eight-year-old Amish girl she’d befriended nearly a lifetime earlier had heard the news about Jeff and the kids. A chill that began in her chest inched its way outward toward her limbs . . .

“Danielle, I am sorry to hear of the loss of your family.”

She stopped kneading and, instead, dropped her free hand onto the desk. “How? How did you know?”

“It was Abram Zook’s wife, Katie. Her twin sister, Hannah, phoned to speak of the accident.”

“But I don’t know anyone named Hannah who is Amish,” she murmured.

“Hannah was not baptized. She lives an English life now in the big city. She takes care of a little boy—Jack.”

Jack . . . Jack . . .

Was there a Jack in Spencer’s—

“Hannah told Katie that Jack’s kin live next door to you,” said Lydia.

Dani lifted her gaze to the window as the woman’s words rang true. “Wait. I think I remember this now. Hannah grew up by you—in Blue Ball. Roberta’s sister is a bit of a socialite and this Hannah—your friend—is her son’s nanny. Roberta mentioned her one day when I was talking about you and how we’ve been pen pals since we were eight. I made a mental note to ask you if you knew her when we next exchanged letters, but I guess I got busy with the kids and . . .”

The explanation died on her lips as her eyes, her thoughts, returned to the answering machine and the voices she knew it held. “Lydia, I . . . I have to go. Thank you for calling. It means a lot.”

“Please do not go yet,” Lydia asserted, shyly. “There is more I want to say.”

“You’re sorry. For my loss. I-I get it; I do. And I’m grateful for the call, truly. It’s just that”—she stopped, gathered her breath, and then released it slowly—“sorry doesn’t bring them back. I . . . I-I wish it did.”

“Sometimes it is difficult to understand God’s will. It—”

She jerked upright in her chair. “God’s will?”

“Yah.”

“Wait.” Gritting her teeth, she pulled the phone so tight to her face it hurt. “You’re telling me it was God’s will to have my husband’s car at the exact spot where another one could hit it with such force it killed my entire family in one shot? That was His will?”

Her question, her tone, was met with a heavy silence.

“Lydia?” she prodded, her anger audible. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“It is not I who says such things, Danielle. The Bible says: ‘Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.”

“And that is supposed to make me feel better?” she asked, shrieking. “That God chose to do this to a man like Jeff, who was kind and thoughtful and smart and true? That God chose to do this to my eight-year-old daughter, who loved helping people? That God chose to do this to my five-year-old son, who was going to move mountains one day? That God chose to do this to my little one, whose smile rivaled the sun? And that God chose to do this to my mom, who loved them all—and me—so fiercely? That’s supposed to make me feel better somehow?”

“It will not, at first. But, in time, it will . . . help. For the Bible also says: ‘Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.’ ”

“Lydia, please. This isn’t helping.”

“It is not my wish to upset you.”

“Then what is your wish?” she said, her throat tight.

“For you to know I know. And for you to know that Elijah and I have spoken and there is room for you if you would like to get away for a little while.”

Like clockwork, her gaze dropped to the bottom drawer and the brochure that taunted her thoughts around the clock. “Trust me, Lydia, the last thing in this world I want or need is a getaway.”

“But perhaps, if you come, you can begin to heal, too.”

“Heal?” Dani echoed, her anger draining into a heavy, choking sadness. “You don’t heal from something like this. You”—she looked up at the ceiling and then back at the answering machine—“you just wait. Until you get to die, too.”

“Yah. But until you do, you must learn to keep living.”

Keep living . . .

It sounded like a death sentence.

“Danielle, I must go. Elijah will be wondering where I am if I am not back soon. But please know that when you are ready, you do not need to send word. Just come. There is room and friendship for you here.”