Hidden Life (9781455510863) Read online

  Emma nodded. “It wasn’t a secret.”

  “A secret is something you don’t talk about. And you don’t talk about that book.” Her mother’s logic was infallible. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me you did such a thing.”

  Emma had expected her to be angry. But what was this? Could she possibly be…hurt?

  “I—” Didn’t want anyone to know. “I—” Thought you would make me burn it. “I’ve told you now.”

  “Did you girls know about this?” Carrie and Amelia had settled uneasily on the new burgundy couch like a pair of birds on a power line in a high wind.

  Amelia shook her head. “I know Emma writes articles, but up until recently I didn’t know anything about a book.”

  “What’s it about, Emma?” Trust Carrie to try to steer the conversation onto a less rocky road.

  “It’s about…us. The Gmee. Well, one I made up. It’s about this woman and her friends and their man problems and…oh, never mind. That’s not the point. The point is, do I go to New York and talk to this Tyler West or not?”

  “Amelia, may I see that letter?” Wordlessly, she handed it to Lena, who scanned it rapidly. When she lifted her head, Emma swallowed and prepared herself. “He seems very thorough.”

  “Ja.”

  “Very forward, too. This ticket is for Tuesday, coming back Wednesday. As if you had nothing in the world to do but drop everything and go to New York.”

  “Ja.”

  Lena folded up the letter with the ticket inside and handed it back. “So you had better go and see your sister. I think I’d like Maryann to stay with me instead of asking Katherine to leave her family and come all the way here from Strasburg.”

  “Ja— What?” Emma took it with fingers that hardly knew what they were doing.

  “There’s no sin in talking with the man. A trip would do you good.”

  “But—” She must be hearing things. Either that, or her mother’s mind had finally given way.

  Lena’s gaze softened. “Emma, Liewi, don’t think I don’t know what it’s like for you. If this man is willing to pay for something so crazy, without expecting anything in return but a conversation, I think it is safe to do it. You don’t have to give him your book. That would open up a whole new can of worms, and I have to believe you’ve already counted the cost of it.”

  “Ja,” Emma whispered. She could never be published while she was a member of the church. It was foolish to even toy with the idea. Then why was Mamm so bent on her not only toying with it, but taking it and throwing it in the air and playing with it?

  Carrie stared at Lena as if she’d never seen her before, but Amelia’s face held the slow light of recognition. “Lena Stolzfus, you radical,” she said softly. “Didn’t you sit in this very room and tell me I ought to throw caution to the winds, as well, when everyone else thought I should stay home and do as I was told?”

  Lena reached into her knitting basket and settled a half-finished shawl on her lap. “I might have.”

  “That was different, you said so yourself,” Emma told her friend.

  “Maybe. But if it’s advice you’re looking for, you’ve had mine and Carrie’s.”

  “And it’s left me right where I began, where two ways meet, and me without a clue which way to go.”

  “The colt didn’t worry about which way to go,” Lena told her. “It let the Lord decide.”

  Emma sank onto the couch next to her mother, who even at seventy-eight and a half could still surprise her—and then bring her to her knees.

  “You’re absolutely right. This colt had better do some praying, whether that train leaves from Lancaster on Tuesday or not.”

  Chapter 7

  Emma had been in the Lancaster train station only twice before—once to go to Florida, and once to go to Mamm’s mother’s funeral when she’d been a little girl. The Stolzfus family, needless to say, did not believe in traipsing around the country. A tiny girl, she’d stood in this very spot on the platform, watching a train roar down the track, thinking it was going awfully fast for something that was supposed to stop and let her and her family get on. With an explosion of wind as cruel as a blow, it had flashed past, the sound of it louder than ten thunderstorms all at once. It had taken Mamm ten minutes to stop her screaming, hands over her ears, her Kapp blown down her back and its straight pins irretrievably lost.

  Emma stepped to the concrete lip of the platform and looked down at the track. They were probably still there, buried in rocks and cinders. Then she moved back, gripping the overnight bag Karen had lent her. “Just you keep an eye on it,” she had told Emma. “You never know when someone could walk by and steal it right out from under your nose. And keep your money in your skirt pocket, under your apron, where no one can see it. You don’t want to invite someone to rob you in that dreadful place.”

  To Emma’s knowledge, Karen had never been nearer to New York than Lancaster herself, so how she had become such an authority was a mystery. Still, under the bossy exterior, she saw the concern, and had merely hugged her in reassurance.

  But being Karen, her sister was more than concerned. She’d spent half an hour closeted with Mamm, trying to ferret out all the details of why on earth Emma should need to go to New York, and when that didn’t work, she’d settled for going to the source. “It’s business, Karen,” was all Emma would say, no matter how many ingenious ways Karen found to ask the same question.

  It was kind of fun knowing something that Karen wanted to know. It lessened the sting of her attempts at matchmaking.

  But this morning Karen had got the best of her. When she heard the Englisch driver’s car crunching up the drive to the big house, she’d gently hugged Mamm good-bye. “Remember, medicine at six o’clock without fail, and make sure she takes it,” she told Maryann. Then she picked up her bag, touched the pocketbook in her skirt pocket for the twentieth time, took a deep breath, and walked down the lane to meet the car.

  “You’re heading to the Lancaster train station?” The Englisch woman—a friend of Amelia’s who worked at the Dutch Deli—shook hands and opened the front passenger door.

  “I am.” It wasn’t until Emma slid into the car that she realized she was not the only one traveling more than ten miles this morning.

  “Guder Mariye, Emma,” Joshua Steiner said with enough cheer to fill the back of a spring wagon. “It’s a gut day for a journey, wouldn’t you say?”

  Astonished past the point of speech, Emma turned to gape at him before the Englisch woman reminded her about the seat belt. Since the woman wouldn’t go unless Emma was buckled in, she had no choice but to turn and face the front. “What are you doing here?” she finally managed by the time they got to the end of the drive, having gotten herself secured. “Do you have business somewhere so early?”

  “Ja,” he’d said, grinning as though he’d put one over on her. “I’m taking you to the train.”

  That was when she’d realized Karen had outsmarted her. And once they’d reached their destination, he wasn’t satisfied with waving from his window when she got out of the car, either. Oh, no. He’d come into the station, and now here he was on the platform with her, waiting as though he meant to see her to her seat. She hoped that between the two of them, Karen and Joshua had enough money to pay the Englisch lady to wait.

  “Carrie would have taken me to the bus,” she told him for the third time. “Truly, you didn’t have to put yourself out like this.”

  “Still as humble as ever,” he said in a tone that made her wonder if he thought she was humble at all. “Besides, if you’d taken the bus you’d be on it yet. This way, we have a little time to visit. I wonder how long it took them to paint all this woodwork white?”

  She didn’t want to talk about the woodwork. Or the odd way the square blocks of the station gave way to all this painted fanciness on the platform for no apparent reason. She wanted him to go so she could savor the novelty of traveling alone for the first time.

  “As long as it would
take Grant and his crew to paint two houses, a barn, and a bunch of outbuildings, I bet,” she said. “Look, Joshua—”

  “Ah, Grant.” He didn’t seem to realize he’d interrupted her. Men seldom did. “How is he doing?”

  “As well as can be expected,” she said. “You know him. He doesn’t show much.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. He did a good job on the Daadi Haus?”

  “I thought so. Mamm is pleased—and so is Karen.”

  “It seemed to take him a long time, in my view. He took extra care, painting all the trim, for instance.”

  She squared him in the view allowed her from under the brim of her away bonnet. “Nothing wrong with taking care on a job. I suppose that’s why he has a reputation as a good workman.” Unlike some people, whose reputations could use more than a coat of paint.

  Emma felt a sudden plunge inside, as if the train platform had dipped and swayed like the floating wharf in Moses Yoder’s pond. What would happen to her reputation when it got out that Joshua Steiner had gone all the way into Lancaster from Whinburg to see her off at the train? Oh, goodness. People were going to have a field day—her destination would take a pale second place to who her companion was on the journey. Next time he went to town for feed or seed, the Gmee would decide he was there to buy an engagement clock.

  “I’m not so sure.”

  She reined in her galloping thoughts and tried to remember what they’d been talking about. Paint. Grant. Yes. “What do you mean?”

  He gave her a teasing glance, then gazed up the line as if he hadn’t a care in the world. “I mean that a busy man doesn’t hang around a place doing what the ladies of the house could do if he doesn’t have a reason.”

  What on earth was he nattering about? Had he been this aggravating when they were Kinner? “Speak plain, for goodness sake, Joshua. You’re making me tired and it’s not even noon yet.”

  “Don’t be so coy, then. I think Grant had a very good reason.” He paused. Grinned. “You.”

  Had the man lost his mind? They might have been friends close enough for teasing a decade ago, but not now. “I think your mouth works faster than your brain, and always did. Grant is a married man and it’s wicked of you to say such things.”

  “It’s not just me. When your sister let me know you’d be traveling, and asked if I had any business in Lancaster—which I do; she’s a very considerate girl, Karen—I’d already heard a little bird or two peeping on the subject.”

  “Most birds don’t know a fact from an earthworm.”

  “They’ve got sharp eyes, though. So I told myself that I’d better hitch a ride with your driver, because if I didn’t, I’d miss the train in more ways than one.” When she didn’t dignify this with an answer, he lowered his voice even though the nearest people were a tourist couple twenty feet away, trying to take a picture without looking like they were doing it. Emma turned her back and gazed up the line as well.

  “I hear there’s a get-together on Friday evening at Lehmans’ for Eli Fischer’s birthday. Would you care to go with me?”

  Her cheeks cooled as the blood drained out of her face. That would be making such a statement that she might as well go and buy the clock herself. “I can’t leave Mamm.”

  “You’re leaving her this morning.”

  “Maryann is looking after her, as you know very well if you’ve talked to Karen.”

  “Maryann can look after her again.”

  “She’s not a child, Joshua, to be babysat every time her parents want to go out.”

  “And you’re not a child, either. You’re a woman who deserves all the joy life has to offer.”

  Oh, the vanity of the man! “And going to Lehmans’ with you will bring me joy?”

  “I hope so. I know it will for me.”

  The laughter had faded from his hazel eyes and in them she saw not vanity, but the shadow of the boy he had once been. Before bad decisions and too many years had changed him. The boy who was still standing on the outside, looking in.

  Like her.

  And just like that, her temper, which had been approaching a rolling boil, calmed as though someone had turned off the flame. “That’s the first sincere thing you’ve said all morning.”

  In the silence, below the rushing of the wind and the sound of traffic from the other side of the building, she heard him swallow. “I mean it, Emma.” He turned to her. “I miss you. I miss our friendship. I would like to have it again.”

  She answered the boy who had gone tubing with her down the river, not the man who had left the district in disgrace. “Then I’d be happy to go to Lehmans’ with you. But let’s not arrive in a buggy and make a big show of it. Let’s walk across the fields together, as we used to.”

  The train rolled into the station with a roar and a rattle, and she didn’t hear his reply. Since the stationmaster had told her it would only stop long enough for passengers to get off and on, she counted cars and got onto the one that had a placard on it saying Business Class. In the door of the car, she turned.

  “Good-bye, Joshua. Thank you for waiting with me.”

  “Hurry back,” he called.

  When she found a seat, settled her bag in the rack, and looked outside, he was still there, still smiling, as the train pulled away from the platform.

  And his smile was not the mocking one that he used with other people. It was the boyish one she had not seen in sixteen years.

  Did the people of New York realize that when you entered their city on the Pennsylvanian, it was like coming up from the underworld? Did they really mean their welcome to look like the gates of hell?

  Comfortable in her cushiony seat, Emma gazed out the window, seeing black walls and tunnels that vanished into night, even though it was only five in the afternoon. Her journey had been uneventful, and she had even taken out her notebook and written an article for Family Life about backsides. Not of people, mind you, but of places. Traveling by train, you got to see the backside of everything—yards, towns, fields…and now an enormous city. The backside really told the truth about a place. The dark lightened enough for her to see the underside of a bridge; then the track seemed to rise and they came up out of the dark and into the city proper.

  How ugly it was! Goodness, you’d think with all the money people had in cities that they would take a little care with where they lived. But no. It was all metal and tumbled buildings and miles of traffic and concrete and junk. A few trees struggled on the sides of roads, but there wasn’t a flower to be seen anywhere.

  The train pulled into the platform and stopped, and when she stepped out, Emma was whirled into a rush of humanity that pushed her up a set of stairs whether she wanted to go or not. She emerged into a set of tunnels that looked like a shopping mall, with people scurrying hither and yon—hundreds, maybe thousands of people. And the noise! It was as bad as the train from her childhood—and she’d left the real trains somewhere below. Clutching her overnight case, Emma took refuge in an eddy of the current of people, next to a sign advertising a movie of some kind.

  How on earth was she to find where she was supposed to go? Here half a dozen ways met, and they all looked exactly the same—tunnels packed with the same noise and craziness. Tyler West had told her she’d be met. Foolish Emma. She should have written to ask by whom. Or where. Or when, even.

  All around her, people ran headlong, rushing under signs with the names of streets on them. She had no map to tell her what street she should wait on. She had nothing. And the people who weren’t striding as if sheer determination would take them where they were going were walking past slowly, staring as if they’d never seen a woman in a cape and apron and bonnet before. Now they were pointing. Now someone was getting out a camera. Emma whirled, the too-bright, unnatural colors of the movie poster blinding her.

  Stupid. Stupid. You should never have come. A whole day spent to accomplish what? You could have been working in the garden or getting milk or—oh, woe, you’ve missed the quilting frolic. Carrie and
Amelia probably went on without you, together, enjoying each other’s fellowship, and what do you have? Nothing. Just a lot of noise and confusion.

  Noise and confusion and loneliness so acute its edge cut her self-confidence to pieces.

  Tears burned into her eyes. This was what she got for all her vanity.

  “Ma’am?” It took a moment to realize someone was speaking to her. “Excuse me, ma’am?”

  “I do not pose for pictures,” she told the movie poster. She would not look. They would snap the camera in her face and she could not bear it.

  “Pardon me, ma’am, but is your name Stoles Fuss?”

  She turned to see a huge man with skin as black as coal. He was dressed in a black suit that must have had an acre of fabric in it, and his shirt was blindingly white in contrast. Someone knew what they were doing with the bleach.

  “I am Emma Stolzfus.” At his expression of relief, she went to pieces. “Please, please, I beg you to take me out of this insane place. I didn’t know where to go, I’m so confused, and those people want to take a picture and—thank you, Tyler West, for coming to get me. I’ve never been so glad to see anyone in my life.”

  Something in his eyes made her babbling mouth stop its flapping.

  “Ma’am, excuse me, no, I’m just the driver.”

  “The driver?” This was not Tyler West, the man who had said all those lovely things in his letters about her work? “What driver?”

  “I’m here to pick up an Emma Stolzfus—” This time he pronounced it correctly. “—and take her over to Fifty-eighth. You’re her, right? ’Cause I don’t see too many other Amish ladies down here. You’re kinda hard to miss.”

  The driver. Hot color rose in her face and for two cents she would have fled back down the tunnel and climbed back on the train.

  “Yes, I’m Emma Stolzfus,” she repeated feebly.

  “Great. Here, let me take that for you.”