A Simple Hope: A Lancaster Crossroads Novel (12 page)

When she woke up, the clock on the wall was swinging toward four o’clock. It was still dark out, but Shandell felt a little better. Mom always said that things would feel better in the morning. Well, it would be morning in a few hours.

Mel was gone, and the deputy was talking on the phone with the dispatcher’s headset on. She figured that Mel was probably on break. It was a good time to leave. She appreciated the woman’s kindness, but Shandell knew that Halfway’s police department wouldn’t let her camp here for the week. She had to leave—
before
Mel realized that Shandell had been lying to her.

She left the folded blanket and the stack of magazines on the
counter. The deputy glanced up and she gave him a friendly wave, then headed out the door.

Her backpack didn’t seem so heavy anymore, but now loneliness was a dull ache that made her feel hollow inside. So cold and empty. Her life was in ruins, like the bag of scraps in Elsie’s shop. But while Elsie could finish patches and sew them into a beautiful quilt, Shandell was clueless when it came to piecing her life together.

Feeling like the last person awake in the world, she plodded down the road in search of open land.

The old one-room shack was rustic, and super isolated. Shandell had turned down a farm lane and walked for at least a mile, following as it passed a dark farmhouse and narrowed into more of a footpath. Her plan had been to zip into her sleeping bag under the cover of some trees or bushes, but when she came upon the old deserted outbuilding, she began to think that maybe God hadn’t forgotten her, after all.

There was no electricity that she could find, but there were plenty of matches and a big black woodstove with a stack of dry wood beside it. The small fire she’d built chased away the damp cold inside the hut, and the kerosene lantern gave her enough light to do a quick cleanup of cobwebs and dust with the broom she’d found leaning against one wall. Once she brushed off the two stackable plastic chairs and the wooden bench, the place actually took on a warm personality.

Now that the cabin was relatively clean and warming up, she unzipped the sleeping bag from her backpack and spread it out on the wooden bench across from the fireplace. Good thing she’d brought that! She had thought she might need it to sleep on the floor at Gary’s sister’s house. She rooted around inside her pack
until she found the plastic bag that had remained stashed away during most of the trip. Her fingers framed the book inside. Many times she had longed to take the book out and lose herself in the familiar pages, but she didn’t dare let Gary see. She knew he’d mock her, either with laughter or with a speech about how she was eighteen years old and should be done with children’s books.

Shandell couldn’t count the nights when she’d been soothed by this little blue book. Sometimes just the colorful illustrations and encouraging captions gave her comfort. Nestled inside the sleeping bag, she opened the book, inhaling the sweet scent of the pages.

The book fell open to a chapter about the parting of the Red Sea. A wicked king was being mean to God’s people, so God told Moses to lead the people away. But the king and his soldiers chased them. She thought of her escape from Gary that day. It seemed like long ago, but the snap of fear was still vivid in her mind. She understood the fear the Israelites must have felt at being chased from their homeland. Turning the page, she saw the happy little cricket holding a banner with the word of the lesson:
Safe
. “God’s love keeps us safe,” she read aloud.

With a deep breath, she let the open book fall on her chest as she took in the raw wood beams of the shack and the uneven wooden boards that made up the ceiling. Even in a deserted shack in the middle of nowhere, God knew where she was, and He had the power to keep her safe.

She snuggled into the puffy ridge of her sleeping bag and closed her eyes. Maybe she wasn’t ready for the real world. If growing up meant giving away the book that soothed her troubled mind, well, then she would never grow up.

E
aster Sunday brought sunshine that warmed the earth and thawed the chill in James’s heart. This morning, as he had wheeled through the orchard, memories of Doddy’s Easter traditions had sparked a smile. His grandfather had loved hiding eggs in the orchard. When Mammi had worried that it might be a waste of good eggs, he had said it was a good exercise for the children to hunt down Easter eggs. Practice for sorting out rotten apples.

Now, looking over at the pear trees, he imagined a blue egg in a crook of the branches, and a green one nestled by the roots of a tree. The thick grass would be dotted with purple and orange and pink.

“And all these years,” Doddy used to tell the Amish women, “my children and grandchildren never missed an egg yet. I hide two dozen, they find twenty-four. Children can be good finders when you make it a game.”

How James missed his grandfather! Elmo Lapp would have
known how to handle the doctors and balance the Englisher visits with the ways of living Plain. Doddy wouldn’t have given up on the hope of James walking again. That twinkle in Doddy’s eyes had always been full of hope, brimming over with Gott’s love.

But Doddy was gone, and there would be no eggs to find this morning. The younger ones had dyed eggs, but with Hannah, the baby of the family, ten now, the egg hunt tradition was dwindling. Doddy wouldn’t have liked that. James decided to ask Peter and Luke to hide some eggs when they got home from church in the afternoon.

With a sigh, James turned his chair back toward the house. There was no time to roll out to the sugar shack today. When he’d left the house, Mamm had warned him not to go far. After a quick breakfast of cold cereal or toast, they’d be loading up the buggies and heading over to the Beilers’.

In the lane beside the barn, James came upon his brothers Peter and Luke, who were already harnessing horses for the family’s ride to church. The sight of the old apple cart, ready to be hitched to a horse, hit him like a blow to the chest.

“What’s that doing out?” James asked, pointing to the cart.

Peter and Luke both glanced up from either side of Patches.

“That’s for you to ride in,” Luke said. “Dat told us to harness a horse to the cart for you. He says it’s easier to push you up the ramp in your chair than lifting you into the buggy.”

James felt his nostrils flare as he drew in a breath. It was another example of Dat’s downright stubbornness. Many times James had told him how he hated riding in the back of the cart.

“I don’t want to be any bother,” James said, fighting to keep the annoyance out of his voice, “but there’s something about riding in the back of that cart that makes me feel like a hog on its way to auction.”

Peter straightened and tipped his hat back. “You don’t like it, and
that’s no surprise. With your wheelchair lashed down in the cart, you’re on display like a pyramid of apples in the market.”

“We can leave the cart, and you can ride in the buggy with us,” Luke said as he leaned into Patches to rub the horse’s neck. “Between Peter and me, we can lift you to the buggy, easy as pie. We’ll tie your wheelchair to the back of the buggy with a bungee cord.”

“That’s a better way to go,” James said, relieved that his brothers didn’t mind moving him in and out of the buggy. Peter and Luke had been a big help since the accident. Everyone in the family had pitched in to take on James’s workload and care for him.

But through it all, Dat had stopped listening to James. This idea of making him ride in the cart was just one more example of the way that Dat had started pushing James to his father’s way of doing things. It was as if Jimmy believed his son had lost the ability to think, as well as walk.

During church, Dave Zook preached about the risen Jesus:

“Early in the morning, the women brought some spices and things to the tomb. But when they got there, the stone had been rolled away and they did not see the body of the Lord Jesus. No one was quite sure what had happened until later, when Jesus himself stood among them.” Dave pressed his black glasses up on his nose as he looked over the congregation. “Imagine their shock to see him. They thought they were looking at a ghost!”

James smiled. He knew this story well. Every spring, Amish children were reminded of the true meaning of Easter: The celebration of how the Heavenly Father made His son rise up, body and soul, to the heavens. Gott’s promise of a heavenly kingdom for those who loved Him.

There was no limit on the miracles Gott could do. Was it wrong of James to pray for Gott to bless him with a miracle in the next medical procedure? Was it wrong to hope that he would walk again? Dat wanted James to give up this hope, but who could know the Almighty’s plan for tomorrow and the day after that?

At the thought of the future, James’s gaze latched on to Rachel, who was sitting with the young women and girls who had not been baptized. Regret was sour on his tongue when he thought of how he had pushed her away last night. Throughout the past year, her sparkling eyes, clear as a blue summer sky, had held steadfast love for him. Even when his lameness disgusted James himself, Rachel seemed blind to his injury. She still saw the man he used to be. James turned away quickly, not wanting to catch her gaze now. His love for her burned strong, but he hated the way his burden was heaped on her shoulders.

And on his family.

He was grateful to the twins, lugging him around when he needed a hand. When he’d first left the hospital, it had been easier to maneuver, with Dylan driving him where he needed to go. In the beginning, Dylan had come by and driven James to church every other week. Dylan’s van had a lift on it so that getting in and out took less than a minute. Not that James minded the time—he was in no rush to get anywhere—as long as he wasn’t sitting on display in the back of a cart. He hated having so much attention lathered on him, like an expensive horse. He was still bristling at Dat’s insistence on cutting the Englishers off, but there was no getting around it. A father’s rule was law.

When the last song had been sung and the Ausbunds had been closed, James watched as the ministers left the barn, followed by the elders. Old Jacob Fisher nodded as he rolled past, his wheelchair pushed by his son Kevin. Jacob had also been injured in the van crash. A few of his ribs had been cracked, causing a punctured lung.
Gott had blessed him with good health once again, though he was now eighty-eight.

When it was their turn, Dat pushed James out of the barn.

“It was a right good service,” Dat said. “Easter always brings renewal and new life. Look at Eve Beiler’s flowers there.” A garden thick with yellow daffodils and red and purple tulips bordered the front of the Beilers’ house. “Those daffodils, reaching toward the sun, show us how we must reach for the light of the Savior.”

“Ya, spring is a time of hope,” James agreed. “Makes a man think he can do anything with Gott’s blessing.” Of course, he was hoping Gott would help him rise from his wheelchair, but he knew his father didn’t see that as a possibility anymore.

As the rest of the folks filed out of the barn, Peter emerged and headed toward them. “There you are. I got James now, Dat.”

As if James were a little one to be corralled, his family took extra care so that there was always someone by his side to wheel him around at church and social events. James hated it. And this was the time after church that was most awkward, as most of James’s friends, like Jonah King, Ruben Zook, or Rachel’s brother Abe, were off helping to reset the church benches for seating for the church meal.