Lifted Up by Angels (8 page)

Leah stared openmouthed, unable to imagine sweet, dear Charity sneaking around behind her parents’ backs. It seemed so out of character. “Then you’ve been seeing him for a long time?”

“Over a year.”

“Wow, Charity. I never thought … I mean, I had no idea.”

“We are special to each other. But it is a secret because we don’t want to be teased, and because he is not ready yet to join the church.”

“Are you telling me that he’s the guy you want to marry?”

Charity squared her chin. “I am sixteen now and I want very much to be married. I want to have my own house, like my sister Sarah. Jonah is a good choice. Once he is baptized, he will ask Papa if he can marry me.”

“I had no idea things were that serious between you two.” Leah vowed to be nicer to Jonah. “Is this going to happen any time soon?”

Charity laughed. “It may be years before I marry. You must promise to come to my wedding.”

“I’ll try.” Leah thought about her own future—where she was headed and what might be in store for her. Marriage seemed a scary choice. Until now, it hadn’t worked for her mother. Leah certainly didn’t want five passes at it to get it right for herself.

Charity broke into Leah’s thoughts. “Let the bread rise again and help me with the cookies.”

The bread looked thoroughly beaten, so Leah wrestled the globby mass into a couple of bread pans and covered it with a cloth as Charity directed. They set it aside again, scooped spoonfuls of the cookie dough onto cookie sheets and set the sheets in the oven. Soon the apartment was filled with the aroma of buttery chocolate.

When it was time to bake the bread, Leah removed the cloth. “Yikes! Look how fat it’s gotten. Is it safe?”

“It is perfect. You are a good baker, Leah.”

Leah’s only memory of baking was from when she was a small child. She and her grandmother Hall had baked and decorated Christmas cookies one rainy afternoon.

The bread was tucked into the oven and the two of them had collapsed on the sofa to chow down on cookies and milk when Ethan returned.
“Smells good,” he said, glancing from one to the other.

“Want one? Plate’s on the counter.” Leah pointed.

He stood looking at the mound of dirty bowls, utensils and cookie sheets and at the sticky, floury countertops. He stared hard at both of the girls. “It looks like an explosion has happened. Were you hurt, Leah?”

Leah stood, glanced into a mirror and gasped. Flour streaked her clothing and hair. It was even stuck to her eyelashes. Chocolate smudged her nose. Charity looked neat and clean, without a speck of flour on her skin or dress. The three of them looked at each other. They began to giggle, then to laugh. “I look like I took a flour shower,” Leah managed to say, which started them laughing all over again.

Ethan grabbed a sponge. “I will help,” he said. He gently lifted Leah’s chin and swiped the cool, damp sponge down her cheeks, along her chin and forehead, and then softly across her lips. Her laughter quieted as she gazed up at him. His expression was intense, his touch feather soft. Light from a window across the room slanted through the curtains, casting him in bronze, his hair in gold. Her mouth went
suddenly dry. Her pulse pounded in her ears. Every nerve ending in her body tingled. She was only vaguely aware when Charity slipped out of the room. “Thank you for the cleanup,” Leah told him.

He dropped the sponge and cradled her face between his palms. “You are welcome, Leah,” he answered. “Believe me, it is my pleasure.”

She rose on her tiptoes to accept a kiss from his warm, full, honey-colored mouth.

Leah kept postcards from her mother and Neil stuck to her refrigerator with colorful magnets. One had been mailed from the Los Angeles airport, several from Hawaii. Each held detailed descriptions of their vacation. The latest one read:

Added was a postscript from Neil sending his love too.

In the same batch of mail, a letter arrived from Dr. Thomas, her orthopedic oncologist in Indianapolis, telling her that her appointment for testing and a checkup had been scheduled for the following Thursday.

The next day after work, Leah drove out to the farm. She went directly to the barn, where she thought Ethan might be working. She found him repairing tools. “What is it?” he asked when he saw her.

She told him about the upcoming appointment. “Did you mean what you said about coming with me?”

“I will come.”

Just then Mr. Longacre came into the barn. He stopped short when he saw Leah talking to Ethan. “Good day.” He greeted her without smiling.

“I—I was just leaving,” Leah said self-consciously. No matter how many times she saw Ethan’s father, she never grew accustomed to him. The man was not rude to her, but she felt his disapproval whenever she came around. She hurried out of the barn, pausing to catch her breath and slow her rapid heartbeat. Then she heard Ethan and his father talking in German.

She couldn’t understand the words, but their exchange was loud and sounded angry. It ended with the noise of a slammed door.
My fault,
Leah told herself. She hurried to her car before anyone could catch her eavesdropping and sped away.

I
t rained the day Leah drove the hundred and twenty miles to Indianapolis. But she couldn’t have cared less. With Ethan riding beside her, the day didn’t seem one bit gloomy.

As she sped along the freeway, Ethan asked, “Are you nervous about the testing?”

“A little. I wish it was over. I hate hospitals. Don’t you?”

“I’m not so sure. The only time I’ve been in one, I met you. This does not seem like such a bad thing to me. Without the hospital, how would we have ever known one another?”

He had a point there. “Okay, so I won’t hate them so much anymore.”

He watched as she passed a semitrailer. “You drive well.”

“I like to drive. Honestly, if you ever want to get your license, I’ll let you use my car to take the test.”

“Papa would never approve.”

To Leah, it seemed that there was very little Jacob Longacre approved of. “Jonah drives.”

“I am not Jonah.” He reached over and turned on the car radio, listening intently to several stations before settling on one that played country music.

“You rebel, but you don’t really do anything too far out in left field,” Leah said, shaking her head. “I don’t understand you, Ethan. Why don’t you go all the way? Like Jonah does?”

“I cannot,” he said, turning his attention to the countryside passing outside the window.

Leah realized he was closing the subject. She warned herself not to pry. He would always be an enigma to her. In English clothes, he appeared to be a regular guy. But she knew her world was still foreign to him, and despite his testing of the English lifestyle, he was Amish at his core.

Once they arrived at the hospital, Leah went
to the X-ray department, filled out paperwork, and sat with Ethan in the adjacent waiting room. She was scheduled for both bone scans and MRIs of her leg and hand. Since the original X rays had shown that cancer had eaten away bones in these places, these were the areas the doctors were most concerned with. “The doctors make me feel like I’m parts of a puzzle,” she told Ethan while they waited for her name to be called. “Like these few pieces of me are all that matter. Sometimes a doctor hardly even looks at my face. He just stares at my knee and finger as if they’re separated from the rest of my body.”

“But your face is so pretty. How could he not stare at you?”

Ethan always said things that touched her. She gave him a smile. “Have I ever told you how much I appreciate you?”

When it was Leah’s turn, she squeezed Ethan’s hand, took a deep breath and followed the technician into the X-ray room. The procedures took about an hour, and when both were over, she and Ethan went to another lab, where she filled out more paperwork and waited to have her blood drawn. “This is my least favorite part,” she told Ethan. “During my chemo treatments,
they were always sticking needles in me and testing my blood. I think they wanted to see if the chemo was helping me or killing me.”

He looked alarmed. “The chemo could have harmed you?”

Hastily she added, “It’s all right. Sometimes you have to take a little poison and kill off good cells along with the bad ones. The important thing is killing off the bad guys.”

He seemed to understand her point. “In farming, it is the same. Some of the chemicals used to kill insects and blight can be harmful to healthy things. Once Rebekah’s chickens got into rat poison and several died.”

“I’ll bet it broke her heart. I know how much she cares about those chickens.”

“She never knew. When I found the dead ones, I quickly took them away, went to a neighbor’s, and bought others to replace them.”

Ethan’s confession endeared him to Leah even more. Who else would have tried to protect his sister’s sensitive heart so discreetly? “I think that was sweet and caring.” To prove it, she kissed him on the cheek.

He pulled back, his eyes twinkling. “If I am to get such a reward for substituting chickens, I will tell you about every good deed I do.”

“Don’t push your luck.”

“I probably did her no favor,” he added thoughtfully.

“Why’s that?”

“Death is part of the cycle of life, Leah. We learn that lesson very early on a farm. We see it in the changing of the seasons. We see it in the birthing of new calves. Only the strongest ones survive. We help all we can, but if it is too much expense, it is better to let the weak ones die.”

His point of view surprised her. “You mean you allow money to decide whether or not a calf lives? That sounds kind of cruel.”

“Feed is expensive, and a farm must be productive. It is the way of things.”

“Good thing you don’t feel that way about people.”

“People are different. People have souls. Animals do not.”

Leah thought about her dead father and grandmother. She still missed them and hoped their souls had found peace after death.

Once her testing was complete, Leah returned with Ethan to the floor where she’d spent so many days just before Christmas. As they rode the elevator up, Ethan asked, “Why
do you want to visit this place? It is depressing you.”

She wasn’t sure herself. “I’ll never really understand what happened to me here, Ethan. But
something
happened. I think I’m still trying to sort it all out.”

“You had an extraordinary experience, that’s for sure,” Ethan told her. “But perhaps it is better not to think upon it too much.”

Leah knew he was right, but she couldn’t help herself. The days and nights she’d spent there; the fear she’d felt; the mysterious appearances by Gabriella, whom Leah had assumed was a nurse but who wasn’t; finding the diary of Molly’s dead sister—all came back to her in a rush. She couldn’t let go of any part of the experience.

Leah and Ethan got off the elevator and went to the nurses’ station. Nobody behind the desk looked familiar. She asked one of the nurses, “Is Molly Thrasher working today?”

“Molly’s taking a patient down to the lab,” the nurse explained.

“We must have just missed her down there,” Leah told Ethan. Then she said to the nurse, “Would you please tell her that Leah LewisHall
is here and that I’ll be in the rec room for the next thirty minutes?”

Leah and Ethan walked down the hallway, stopping at the door of the room she and Rebekah had shared. Two young patients were in the beds, each watching TV. The room looked smaller than she remembered. She had no desire to go inside.