The Amish Nanny (7 page)

The route she took kept us on back roads, winding past farms and alongside woods. As we went Sophie told us this was real “Oregon country,” the place where many of the pioneers who followed the Oregon Trail had settled. I hadn't heard much about all of that, so I asked her a lot of questions.

“No offense, Ada,” she said finally, “but didn't they teach you any of this in school? It's basic American history.”

“We touched on it, I suppose,” I said, startled by the bluntness of her words. “But not so much in depth.”

“The Amish might be big on their own history as a people,” Zed added, speaking to Sophie, “but they are not nearly as concerned with the overall history of the country.”

She nodded thoughtfully, without judgment, but at that moment I felt strangely embarrassed.

“Actually,” she said, slowing to make a turn, “once you start teaching, I would imagine a class discussion of the Oregon Trail might make an excellent jumping-off point for your students. You could talk about what might compel people—all sorts of people, including the Amish—to leave their homeland and make a new start somewhere else far away.”

“True,” I replied, heat suddenly rising in my cheeks. In the backseat, Ella and Zed grew conspicuously silent.

“Have you finished putting together all of your lesson plans yet?” Sophie continued, unaware of the hornet's nest she was stirring. “If not, maybe you could find a way to slot it in. Children love to hear stories of the Oregon Trail, and I think knowing that you've actually been to this area and seen the region firsthand would make it doubly fascinating for them.”

Even if I had known how to reply, I don't think my voice could have made a sound. Fortunately, Ella cleared her throat and spoke on my behalf.

“Ada won't know for sure whether or not she got the teaching job until we get back home,” she said.

“Oh, well. A mere formality, I'm sure,” Sophie replied, accelerating as she merged into a line of cars. “Those people would be fools not to hire you. Anyone can see you're a natural. You've been teaching us about Amish life all week.”

“Thank you, Sophie,” I whispered, and then I looked away, my face turned to the side window, praying I wouldn't start to cry.

I thought of the text message Ezra had sent to Ella yesterday. Had he been reporting rumor or fact? I still didn't know, but in the light of this new day I was starting to fear that it was, indeed, the latter.

I kept reminding myself of my only consolation, that something else was brewing back home, something that had to do with going to Europe, and maybe that would end up being even better than the teaching would have been.

Still, vague possibilities from a situation I didn't even understand paled in comparison to the certainty of a confirmed teaching job. I kept wondering what was wrong with me. Why didn't they want me? Did they think I wasn't good enough to teach their children?

Ella spoke from behind me, interrupting my thoughts. “Ada would be, like, the best teacher
ever
,” she said emphatically. “They would be lucky to have her.”

I could see Ella's reflection in the car's side mirror. As if sensing my gaze, her eyes suddenly met mine, and I knew
she
was the one who was starting to cry. After wiping away her tears with her fingertips, she gave me an encouraging smile and then followed it by reaching forward, placing a hand on my shoulder, and giving it a squeeze.

Ella could try my patience sometimes, but her heart was good.

Though the rest of the drive was uneventful for us, Sophie received several calls from a patient who seemed to be moving into the first stages of labor. The woman was a month early, and I could see the concern on Sophie's face as she talked to her over her speaker phone. When we reached Portland, I told her she could just drop us off at the station and go, that we could find our way inside and onto the train ourselves. She did not protest.

Traffic near the entrance was heavy, so she pulled to the curb half a block away and we jumped out, quickly unloading our things onto the sidewalk. After a quick hug and round of goodbyes, she was gone.

Gathering up our belongings from the ground, I was feeling somber and very quiet, but Ella and Zed were the opposite, babbling excitedly about the train trip ahead. We walked toward the station, and as we neared the entrance, I noticed a familiar figure coming toward us from the opposite direction: Silas Yoder.

Growing up, Silas was the kind of boy who had never been any good at baseball or volleyball, but when it came to wilderness-type activities—hunting, fishing, hiking, and camping—he had turned out to be a natural. I had known he would be out here on his own Oregon adventure, so prior to the trip my mother had given his parents our travel dates and times, saying that Silas would be welcome to join us for the return home if things worked out that way for him. I hadn't expected to see him at all, but now that he had come, I was glad.

“Silas!” I called out, waving.

He looked up, squinting through his glasses, and then he hurried toward us, the pack on his back bouncing up and down as he came. “Ada! Hi! I'm so glad to run into you folks out here. I was afraid I'd have to search the whole station.”

Grinning, we greeted each other, and though Ella and Zed vaguely knew Silas already, I reintroduced them just to be polite.

I had always thought of Silas as the reserved, quiet type, but soon he was acting the very opposite, chatting excitedly about his wilderness adventure and emphasizing his words with broad, sweeping gestures. He kept talking as we all moved into the building, got in line, and checked our bags. As we followed the signs to our gate—Zed and Ella walking ahead and the two of us falling into step behind—Silas's nonstop chatter continued. He quieted briefly as we found the waiting area and sat down, but then Zed asked Silas if he'd seen any bears while he was hiking, and Silas was off again, telling us a long story about how he'd woken up one morning and come out of his tent to find fresh animal tracks not five feet away from where he'd been sleeping.

“I think they were bear prints,” he told my wide-eyed cousins, “and there's likely nothing I could have done to protect myself if the animal had decided I'd make a tasty breakfast.”

“You're so brave,” Ella gushed, but Silas merely shrugged.

“‘Courage is merely fear that's said its prayers,'” I told them, echoing a proverb familiar to all four of us.

Nodding solemnly, Silas continued the saga of the animal prints and then went on to explain what he would have done if he'd come face-to-face with a bear. I tuned them out after a while, keeping my eyes on the wall clock and the sign that was to tell us when we should head to the tracks.

That time finally came, so we all stood and gathered our belongings and fell in step with the crowd filing toward the door. Our little group of four was separated in the confusion, but we managed to find each other again once we reached the boarding area outside. There, I expected Silas's chatter to resume, but instead he surprised me by taking my elbow and apologizing for his verbosity, his cheeks blushing a vivid pink.

“It's just that I've been alone for so long, up on Mount Hood,” he explained. “Except for a few polite exchanges with other hikers, I've barely spoken to another living soul for more than a week.”

Poor thing, he really did seem embarrassed. “Then it makes perfect sense,” I replied reassuringly. “You have lots of words stored up that just needed to come out somewhere,
ya
?”

We both chuckled. It struck me that I was relieved to have someone along for the ride home who was closer to my own age. On the trip out I'd had the company of our older chaperones, of course, but they had kept to themselves for most of the trip, barely interacting with us at all. As for Ella and Zed, though they were quite mature for their ages—and I did love them dearly—there was still a big difference between thirteen, sixteen, and twenty-four. Silas seemed older than his twenty-two years, probably because his many travels made him so worldly-wise.

I didn't explain any of this to him. I simply told him that I was glad he'd been able to wrap up his trip in time so he could join us for the ride home.

“We were hoping you'd make it, but we didn't think you would,” I added.

“Me either, but I finished early. The trail was in good shape, so that last leg didn't take nearly as long as I'd thought it would.”

I was about to reply when I heard someone gasp. Startled, I looked up to see an older, well-dressed woman standing nearby, gaping in our direction. Glancing around, I realized a lot of people were watching us, whispering to each other behind their hands, some also openly staring. Though this had happened a lot on our trip out, there hadn't been as much of it for the past week. In Lexie's small town, people had been polite enough not to be so obvious, not to mention that practically everyone knew who we were anyway and why we were there. Now that we were back in a more populated area, among strangers, their attention had caught me by surprise, even though I knew it shouldn't have.

“Welcome back to the zoo, fellow animals,” Silas muttered under his breath. I nodded, and the four of us exchanged knowing glances.

As we stood there stoically waiting for the train, a man sidled over and asked if we were Russian Orthodox. Everyone else within hearing distance seemed to perk up their ears so they could hear our answer as well.

“No,” Silas replied evenly. “She and I are Amish and they are Mennonite.”

The man nodded politely and stepped away, but to my surprise, the woman who had gasped earlier now snickered rudely behind one hand.

I glanced at Silas, who was working his jaw but remained silent. None of us said much after that, not until the train arrived and we had climbed aboard and found four seats together. After putting our things in the overhead racks, Ella and I sat side by side with the boys directly across from us and facing our way. Once we were all settled, we relaxed a bit, putting the incident behind us.

The train pulled out of the station and quickly gathered speed, the city of Portland flying past. Soon we were rumbling alongside the incredible Columbia River Gorge, Silas acting as our own personal tour guide as he pointed out Mt. Hood and Beacon Rock and told us all sorts of interesting facts about the region.

Though he was obviously more familiar with the geography of the area than the three of us were, we all knew what to expect on the trip home, which would be a reverse of the trip out. After crossing Washington and a little ribbon of Idaho, we'd reach West Glacier, Montana, by morning, where Sam and Lizzie would be joining us. After that, we would continue on through the rest of Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois, finally getting to Chicago by tomorrow afternoon. There we would change to a different train and spend our second night passing through Indiana and Ohio, reaching Pittsburgh by the next morning. Then we would change trains one last time for the final six-hour leg across Pennsylvania, all the way to our final destination of Lancaster. We would arrive there in the early afternoon, three days from now.

If our ride home was anything like the trip out, then what remained of our voyage would be by turns fun, irritating, fascinating, boring, and exhausting. Along the way we would relax in our big, comfy seats in the passenger car, spend hours playing board games in the lounge, eat as inexpensively as possible in the dining car, and try to sleep through the nights back at our seats, which never seemed nearly as comfortable once bedtime rolled around. Still, it was worth all of the trouble, especially when the sun would come up to reveal the vistas outside of rolling plains, city skylines, and endless trees. I wanted to savor every minute of what was left of our trip, but something about moving eastward, toward home, felt completely different than had moving westward, toward Oregon. In a sense, if the ride out had been like one long, extended intake of breath, the return home was its exhale.

I thought about all of this as Ella, Zed, and Silas continued to babble almost nonstop. They seemed so happy, but I continued to grow more melancholy. I was eager to get back, yes, but I was also sorry our trip was ending. Mostly I was afraid to face whatever news awaited me in Pennsylvania, terrified that once I got there I would learn the horrible truth: I wasn't wanted, wasn't needed, and wasn't going to be of any use to the school after all.

At one point Zed asked Ella for her phone so he could show Silas the film he'd made, explaining he'd titled it “Lexie and James Get Hitched.”

Silas laughed, taking the phone in his hand and holding it close to his face so that he could watch the tiny screen. As the movie played, he seemed to enjoy it, laughing in all the right places. Zed's face beamed with every reaction that Silas gave.

I had never really considered Silas Yoder to be attractive—had never thought to look at him that way at all—but seeing him now, so relaxed and engaged, his ruddy cheeks sporting such a healthy, outdoorsy glow, there was something appealing about him in a brotherly sort of way. He hadn't joined the church yet either, but from what I'd heard he planned to soon. I couldn't imagine he'd stay single long after that. His family was wealthy, with enough land still available for parceling out into a second farm, a rarity in our area these days. The rumor among the youth was that once Silas married he would be getting not just the land but a house to go on it as well, which made him a vital marriage prospect indeed.