Leah's Choice (20 page)

She turned slightly, not wanting to stare at him while he read her carefully written reports. But doing so brought her around so that Stacie was in her line of sight. The woman’s head came up again, and she stared at Leah.

Taking a deep breath, she ordered herself not to fidget. She was not a nervous scholar, turning in sloppy homework. She was a conscientious volunteer, and the interviews had been conducted to the best of her ability. If John found something to criticize, she would learn from that and do better the next time.

The desk was a pale gray metal, and when John moved slightly, his knee bumped it, making a small thumping sound. Behind him, a coffeemaker burbled on a countertop.

Two long-haired young men passed them, arguing loudly about something to do with the computers, she thought. The terms were so unfamiliar that she couldn’t be sure.

John glanced up, frowning in annoyance, as they seemed to settle in front of the coffeemaker to continue their conversation.

He gathered up the papers.

“I can’t hear myself think in here.” He beckoned to Leah. “We’ll move this to the conference room.” He turned and walked away, leaving Leah to follow.

Conscious of the men’s gazes on her, Leah went after him down the hall, around a corner, and through a glass-paneled door. A rectangular table with chairs around it filled most of the room.

John jerked out a chair and slumped into it, spreading the papers out with an intentness that made her uneasy. Was something wrong with her work?

She slid into the chair that stood at right angles to his and waited. At least here she was away from Stacie’s gaze. She was used to the stares of the curious when she was out among the English, but she wasn’t used to having someone look at her with such open dislike.

On the other hand, here she was alone with Johnny. Business, she reminded herself. He seemed perfectly able to keep this on a businesslike basis, and she could, too.

Finally he pressed his hands against the sheets. “Who told you to do a family tree?” He shot the question at her.

“Well, I . . . I think Stacie said something about how seeing the family Bibles would be useful, but I told her I didn’t believe people would be willing to lend them out. I thought perhaps a transcription of the tree would work, but if not—”

“If not?” That smile lit his face again, this time tinged with something like triumph. “Leah, this is fantastic. It’s exactly what we need.”

A footstep sounded in the hallway outside, and Dr. Brandenmyer poked his head in the doorway. “Do I hear the noise of a scientific triumph in here?”

Johnny waved the paper. “Leah has brought us a complete family tree for the Miller family, going all the way back to the early 1700s. It gives us exactly when the genetic illnesses began showing up.”

“I copied it just as it was worded in the original.” Her hands twisted in her lap again, and she forced them to be still. “I hope—”

“Excellent, excellent.” Dr. Brandenmyer studied the sheets and then beamed at her. “We’ve never had such a detailed source before, not even from the families seeking treatment here. You’ve done a superb job, Ms. Beiler. Superb.”

She could feel the heat rushing to her face. It wasn’t the Amish way to lavish praise, and to accept it was prideful. She lowered her gaze.

“The Miller family has a very complete family tree in their Bible, and because we are nearly related, they were willing to let me copy it. I can’t hope to obtain such results every time.”

“If you bring in something half as good, we’ll be pleased.” Dr. Brandenmyer reached out, as if he intended to pat her shoulder, and then drew his hand back. “Excellent,” he said again. “Well, I’ll leave you to it. Get those results into the computer as soon as possible, John. Well done.”

“I will, sir.” Johnny straightened in his chair, looking almost as if he would like to salute, as the older man walked away with that long, loping stride.

Once he was gone, Johnny turned to her, his expression exultant. “I knew I was right to bring you in on this, Leah. You have access the rest of us couldn’t possibly get.”

Her hands gripped each other. “Don’t count on that much information every time. Please. I can’t promise to do that with every family.”

“It’s fine,” he said quickly. Maybe he thought he was putting too much pressure on her. “I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable, Leah.”

“Praise is what makes me uncomfortable, as you well know.” She felt a trace of annoyance with him. She couldn’t expect the English to understand, but Johnny certainly should.

“Oh, yes.” His mouth tightened. “I remember. Accepting a compliment would be prideful. Lacking in proper Amish humility.”

She would not apologize for her beliefs. “The instruction to have a humble and contrite heart is not only for the Amish.”

He lifted his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I’m sorry. I guess I still have trouble with that one. What’s so bad about accepting that people think you did a good job?”

For a moment she couldn’t speak. John did sound like an Englischer now. He’d been raised on the same Scriptures she had.

Blessed are the meek. Do not think yourself better than anyone else, but humble yourselves in obedience to God
.

Apparently he had forgotten.

“I don’t want to argue with you about it.” She started to rise. “If that’s all—”

“Leah, don’t. Please don’t leave. I didn’t mean to offend you.” He rubbed the back of his neck with his palm, as if trying to wipe away tension.

“Is it hard?” She asked the question abruptly, thinking about his obvious eagerness to please Dr. Brandenmyer. “Feeling you belong in this world now?”

A muscle jerked at the corner of his mouth. “Sometimes not at all. Sometimes every minute of the day.”

“I’m sorry.” She was. Not trying to convince him he’d been wrong in his choice. Just sorry it was hard for him.

He shrugged. “It was worth it.”

Did he really feel that? Apparently so.

He stared down at the chart of the Miller family. Finally he cleared his throat.

“I remember Naomi. So she married Nathan Miller. Everybody thought they’d make a match of it.”

“Ja.” Everyone had thought that. Just as they’d thought she and Johnny would.

He smiled suddenly. “Remember when Nathan and I took our daads’ buggies out on that dirt road behind the Esch farm and tried to have a harness race?”

“I remember that Naomi and I told you not to. And that you both ate your meals standing up for a few days.”

“Don’t give me that.” His eyes laughed at her. “I distinctly remember Naomi jumping up and down waving her bonnet, and you yelling at me to go.”

She couldn’t prevent the chuckle that escaped her. “We did not.”

But she remembered that day so clearly—the dust hanging in the air like fog, the buggy wheels flashing, the boys standing up in the buggies like chariot racers.

Johnny laughed, a delighted chuckle that was so familiar it plucked her heartstrings. “You’re a liar, Leah Beiler.” He closed his hand over hers. “You were just as ready to get into that mischief as I was, but you got off easier.” His fingers tightened, and his gaze was warm on her face. “Admit it.”

For an instant they were Leah and Johnny again—young and in love. A flush mounted her face.

They weren’t, and she couldn’t let herself think that way.

She pulled her hand away. “We did plenty of foolish things when we were young. It was a long time ago.”

“Afraid, Leah?” His voice mocked her. “Afraid holding hands for a minute with a fence-jumper will ruin your reputation as the perfect Amish schoolteacher?”

She clasped her hands in her lap and took refuge for the tumult of feelings in anger. “At least I can accept who I am.”

Anger, quick as summer lightning, sparked in his face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that if you were as confident you made the right choice as you claim you are, you’d correct your friend Stacie’s misconceptions about what it means to be Amish.”

His chair scraped as he stood, planting his hands on the table. “And are you so convinced you’ve made the right choice? Maybe that’s what you tell yourself, Leah, but don’t expect me to buy it. I know you—I know how much you’ve always wanted to learn and know and experience the world you can only dream about.”

Would his words hurt so much if they weren’t true? “I know my place,” she said, fighting to keep her voice even. “I have my family, my faith, the children I teach. That is what matters to me.”

“Is it? You give kids an eighth-grade education that doesn’t prepare them for the real world and think you’re doing a good job. Well, you’re not.”

She looked at him steadily. Johnny said he knew her. Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t, but she knew him. That moment when he’d admitted his struggle had shown her too much, and she could sense the pain beneath his words.

“I’m not preparing them for the English world,” she reminded him. “I’m preparing them to be Amish men and women. But I don’t think you’re talking about my scholars, anyway. I think you’re talking about yourself.”

Her hands were shaking, and she had to concentrate in order to pick up the folder with the unused forms.

“I think I’d best meet with Stacie in the future,” she said, and walked quickly from the office.

A
car approached the buggy from behind, going fast, if the sound it made was any indication. Hands firm on the lines, Leah kept Betty moving at a steady pace. She darted a glance to the side of the road—hardly any berm and then a drop-off to a deep ditch.

A horn blared. Leah’s nerves tightened but Betty, bless her, merely flicked an ear. And then the car whizzed past the buggy, so close that she could have reached out and touched it, cutting in again sharply in front of the horse.

The horn blared again, a harsh, derisive sound. Leah stared after it as her pulse steadied. Bright red it was, filled with teenagers, it looked like, and one—

Her fingers tensed on the lines. That sheet of pale blond hair flying in the wind as the girl turned to look back at her looked familiar. Too familiar.

Anna. But it couldn’t be, could it? Anna was supposed to be working at the bakery this afternoon. She couldn’t be riding around out on the Hedgeville Road in the farthest reaches of the district. The only reason Leah had come so far up the valley was to do an interview with another family.

It had been a branch of the Stoltzfus family, this one with four affected children. The mother had been willing to talk, but unfortunately hadn’t known much about the ramifications of her husband’s family.

The grossmutter knew it all, she’d said, but she was on a visit to a married daughter over near Mifflinburg. Teacher Leah was welcome to come back another time and talk with her.

Leah glanced down at the black case that sat beside her feet. That would mean another long buggy ride, eating up time that could have accommodated visits to two or three closer families. She would not have anything near as satisfying to report this week as her triumph with the Miller genealogy.

She backed away from that word, frowning.
Triumph
. What a decidedly un-Amish concept that was. If God led her to learn anything that helped the children, His was the glory, not hers.

There was more traffic on the road as she approached Hedgeville, and she had to concentrate on that, putting aside for a moment thoughts of the work. And especially worries about the girl in the red car who could not possibly have been Anna.

Hedgeville sported a small area of strip development on its outskirts—an auto parts store, a donut shop, a fast-food place. She frowned. A red car, surely the same one, was parked at the fast-food restaurant.

Without giving herself a chance to think too much, she turned Betty into the parking lot. It was hot, and she had a long way home yet. A cold drink would taste good.

As was usual in Pleasant Valley, the restaurant provided a hitching rail at the back of the parking lot, under the shade of the trees that lined it, for their horse-and-buggy customers. She drew up to the rail and Betty halted. Before she could get down, someone was there, beside the buggy, blocking her way.

Anna. But not the Anna she knew. This Anna had a wave of straight, silky hair falling nearly to the waist of her tight jeans. Her gray T-shirt bore the logo of a local college. Only the sneakers on her feet were familiar.

“You recognized me.”

“Barely.” A flicker of anger went through Leah. “You might have told your friend not to blare the horn at a buggy horse.”

Anna dismissed that with a flick of her fingers. “Betty’s too stolid to let that bother her.”

“Every buggy horse in the valley is not so well-trained as Betty. Driving like that could cause an accident.”

“The way the English see it, roads are for cars. It’s the horses and buggies that cause the accidents.”

“And is that what you believe, Anna?” Leah studied her sister’s face, trying to find some indication of the Anna she knew.