Hidden Mercies (2 page)

This comment infuriated her. How dare he continue to pretend about this! She had never realized before that Ben had such a streak of cruelty in him.

“Where is he?” She grabbed the front of his shirt in both hands and began to shake him. “Where is my Matthew? What have you done with him?”

Two hands grabbed hold of her and pulled her away from Ben. “Calm yourself, child,” Bishop Weaver said, and gave her a slight shake. “The Lord has promised not to give you more than you can bear.”

That was the moment she knew Ben’s words were true. Bishop Weaver was the most humorless person she had ever known. He would never agree to be part of such a prank. This was not a joke. The unthinkable had happened. Her glorious, laughing, beautiful Matthew was dead.

Unlike Rose, Claire did not cry. Her emotions were too deep and tangled for her to be able to cry.

One of the
Englisch
van drivers volunteered to take her and Rose to the hospital. As he drove off, she pressed her face to the window and saw the women starting the process of putting the food away. There would be no wedding feast today. Instead, the stalwart people of their church would begin preparations for a funeral.

Twenty-seven years later . . .

T
ime had slowed to a crawl for Captain Tom Miller. The minute hand on the hospital clock seemed to take forever to make it around the clockface. Finally the big hand hit eight o’clock, and he congratulated himself for having made it through another hour. The almost imperceptible tick-tick-tick of the clock had become a constant companion, ticking away the seconds of his life.

The nurse kept her eyes averted as she fussed with taking the lids off the various containers of his breakfast tray. He didn’t blame her. There was a mirror on the underside of his bed tray. He had seen the damage. If he were her, he would keep his eyes averted, too.

Evidently it had fallen on her to feed him today. She must have drawn the short straw.

“The weather?” His voice was raspy. Inhaling the heat from the explosion had caused damage.

The nurses had learned to have the answer ready to that question before they came through the door in the morning. The weather had become a small obsession with him. It reassured him that the outdoors still existed.

“Cold and snowy,” she said.

“How cold?” he asked. “How snowy?”

“Maybe four or five inches fell overnight,” she said. “I don’t know the exact temperature, but it was so cold this morning, I had to wear my heaviest coat.”

From his room at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, he could see the sky . . . but only the sky. There had been a heavy layer of nimbostratus clouds yesterday evening, and he had silently predicted that there would be anywhere from three to six inches of snow accumulation before morning. It gave him a small feeling of pride that he had predicted correctly. A man didn’t spend as many hours in the air as he had without being able to read the clouds.

“We have some yummy peach yogurt today.”

The nurse was young. She had no idea how emasculating the word
yummy
sounded to him. He shoved his pride down as she tucked a napkin beneath his chin. He was forty-four years old. A captain in the U.S. Marines. A decorated war hero. He had been trained to withstand torture and avoid capture, and had the skills to escape if incarcerated. The one thing necessary to his survival that he had
not
been taught was how to keep his ego intact while being fed like a baby.

His hands were still bandaged from instinctively shielding his face when the bomb detonated. His body was covered with multiple shrapnel wounds, and he’d had reconstructive surgery on his left jaw and cheekbone.

“Do you want a sip of milk?” The nurse opened a carton and inserted a straw into it.

Actually, he would prefer a cup of hot, black coffee, but that was not an option. The chances of getting scalded by some clumsy nurse were too great, and he refused to sip his coffee through a straw. Instead, he swallowed the milk and waited for a spoonful of—what was it she’d said? Peach yogurt?

Good grief.

Eggs and bacon would have been his first choice. Fried crisp. The eggs scrambled in real butter. Half a loaf of homemade bread, toasted, with a pot of his mother’s good strawberry jam. Now,
that
would be a breakfast, but until his throat healed, he was reduced to eating only those things that were easy to swallow.

The nurse glanced over her shoulder at the silent television hanging on the wall. “Do you want me to turn it on for you?”

He had been asked that question so many times.

“No.”

“It would make time go faster.”

“No.”

She shrugged and scraped the last bit of yogurt from the plastic container. “Suit yourself.”

The television had been blaring when he first came to this room. At the time, his throat had not healed enough to tell them to turn it off. He had lain there, fighting against the most intense pain he had ever felt, wondering if he would live, wondering if he
wanted
to live, while being forced to listen to the canned laughter of some silly sitcom when nothing was funny.

The first whispered, raspy words out of his mouth had been “Turn that thing OFF!”

Post-traumatic stress disorder. That’s what the hospital shrink called it. PTSD.

He didn’t buy it.

In his opinion, PTSD was one of those catchphrase mental illnesses that the medical establishment used to pigeonhole and categorize people. Wrap up all the pain, shove it into a neat file folder, and tie it up with a bow.

Oh, that guy? The one with all the bandages. The one sensitive
to noise. He has PTSD. Classic symptoms. Understandable under the circumstances. Okay, next patient.

He did not believe that he had PTSD. What he had was a perfectly reasonable desire for quiet. Raised voices, canned laughter, stupid commercials—noise of any kind made his nerves fizz with anxiety and irritation.

Now, at least, he could lie in blessed silence—or as close to it as a hospital could get—dozing in a drug-induced stupor after the morphine shots, enduring the minutes after it had worn off until the next shot was due.

He did not complain. Marines did not complain, and even though he was battered and broken, what was left of him was still every inch a soldier.

He was not a man who often prayed unless the helicopter he was flying was under fire. Then he would toss off a quick prayer during evasive maneuvers. More often than not, that prayer included a few curse words.

Since the explosion, a set of very specific prayers began running through his head.

If you’ll pull me through this, Lord, I promise to go back home and make things right with my father and Claire. Please let me live. Please let me heal. Please let me walk out of here on my own two feet.
Then a scrap of Scripture, vaguely recalled.
Remember not the sins of my youth.

A
valentine, a man’s work handkerchief, and a lock of hair. After twenty-seven years, that’s all she had left to remember Matthew by. She touched each item gently, remembering.

If she were
Englisch,
she would have old photos. There would be an engagement picture clipped out of the local newspaper, perhaps a yellowed wedding dress hanging in the closet, maybe an engagement ring.

As much as she wished she had a picture of Matthew, she did not disagree with their Amish leaders’ decision to forbid cameras.
Graven images,
they called them, and had she owned a photo of him, it probably would have become a graven image for her. Something to worship. Something to hold close to her heart.

“You aren’t asleep yet?” Her sixteen-year-old niece, Maddy, stood in the open doorway in her long nightgown, brushing her hair.

Claire’s first instinct was to shove the items out of sight, but she stopped herself. With her husband, Abraham, gone now, there was no one left to hide them from. She had been a good wife to Abraham. He had no cause to be jealous of Matthew—but he would have been furious had he ever come across her looking at these things.

She did not pull them out often, but every once in a while she took them out just to reassure herself that Matthew had actually existed—that he had not been some glorious figment of her imagination.

“Sure,” Claire said. “Come in.”

“What are those?” Maddy sat down on the bed beside her.

“Some things I probably should have thrown away a long time ago.”

Maddy picked up the valentine and read it. “Who is Matthew?”

Claire hesitated. “Matthew was Levi’s father.”

“Oh.”

Claire could tell that Maddy wasn’t sure how to respond. Many in the community still struggled with the fact that Levi had been born out of wedlock.

“Did you love him a great deal?”

“When I was seventeen, I thought I could not take a breath without him.” Claire folded the handkerchief into a neat square. “Then one day I learned that I had no choice.”

“Is that a lock of his hair?”

“The day he died, I asked the nurse at the hospital for a pair of scissors. I wanted something of him that I could keep with me always.”

“But you had Levi to remember him by.” Maddy’s voice was tentative, as though she didn’t know whether or not this was a forbidden topic.

“I did not know that at the time.”

It was not the Amish way to speak of intimate things with children—or even with other adults, if it could be avoided, and yet, as a midwife, Claire believed there were things Maddy should know. The girl had just turned sixteen. Her
Rumspringa
would be starting soon. She needed to be taught that there were consequences to decisions.

“Levi was conceived two days before Matthew and I were to be married. We loved each other very much, and with the wedding so close, we thought it would be . . . safe.” She brushed a strand of loose hair behind Maddy’s ear. “Until one is married in the eyes of man and of God, it is not right to express one’s love too passionately. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes.” Maddy glanced down at her hairbrush, as though embarrassed. Claire wondered if she had said too much. The girl was still so innocent, and yet . . . Claire was trying to raise her brother’s two girls with as much wisdom as she could muster. There was more to her responsibility to them than just food and clothes.

“Why did you keep the handkerchief?” Maddy asked.

“I cut my foot on a jagged rock one day. A group of us were having a picnic. It was summer and I was barefoot. There were others about, but it was Matthew who knelt, took this handkerchief out of his pocket, and bound up the cut. He was so tender and kind. That is when I fell in love with him.”

“He sounds wonderful.”

“He was.”

“What do you keep to remember Abraham by?”

The girl’s question was innocent, and yet it hurt. The truth was, her marriage to Abraham had not been a success, but Maddy did not need to know that.

She smiled brightly. “I have this house, and this farm, and my four other children to remember Abraham by.”

“Didn’t you want a lock of his hair?”

“I was fighting for my life when he died. It did not cross my mind.” The random intruder who two years earlier had shot and killed her husband and deliberately wounded her had ripped all their lives apart.

“Do you ever get scared that something bad like that might happen again?”

She pondered the question. It was understandable why the girl asked. But she had determined early on that she would not allow the evil they witnessed that day to define who they were.

“No. By the grace of God, I do not fear that will ever happen again.”

It was true. It had taken a great effort of will and much, much prayer, but by God’s grace, she no longer trembled every time she heard a vehicle pull into her driveway.

For a moment, there was only silence as Maddy pondered her words. Then Maddy’s head lifted. “Was that the telephone?”

They both grew silent and listened—yes, the phone in their outdoor phone shanty was ringing. It was faint, but they could hear it. This late at night, a phone call usually meant only one thing.

“Whose baby is due?” Maddy asked.

“Nancy and Obed’s.”

“I will get your birthing bags.” Maddy, a veteran of many late-night phone calls, rushed out the door.

Claire grabbed her birthing dress and pulled it on over her head. She had been expecting this call. Thank goodness she and Maddy had been awake and heard the phone ring. With all her heart, she wished she didn’t have to rely on such an unreliable form of communication between her and the women she served. The shanty was far enough away from her house that she often missed calls altogether. Too many times, fathers had had to leave their laboring wives to come pound on her door.

By the time she had pinned up her hair, rushed outside to check the message on the answering machine, returned Obed’s call to assure him that she was on her way, and hitched Flora up to the buggy, Maddy had placed her birthing bags and a few sandwiches in the backseat of the buggy.

“I put fresh batteries in,” Maddy said, handing Claire a flashlight. “Be careful.”

Claire put a foot on the one metal step attached to the buggy and sprang in. “What would I ever do without you?”

“The question is,” Maddy answered, “what would Amy and I do without you?”

Claire clucked to the horse, and the buggy lurched forward.

“I will be gone awhile.”

“I will be praying for you.”

“Please do so,” Claire said. “I’m afraid this birth might be difficult.”

As she drove the three miles to Nancy and Obed’s, she gave thanks once again for the gift of each of her children. Her two nieces, competent and kind Maddy and thirteen-year-old Amy, who was crippled in the same accident that had taken their parents. Her oldest, Levi, now grown and living next door with his new wife. And the four precious little souls who were the fruit of her marriage with Abraham. There had been hints lately about a couple of available men in two other nearby church districts, in whom she had adamantly expressed no interest. She could not imagine ever wanting to marry again. Her children were her life. To watch after and care for them was all she asked. The fact that she had a skill, with which she could support them and help others, was a gift from God.