Jodie Picoult - Plain Truth

Sarah lifted her face from her mending. “Ellie’s done?”

Beaming, I nodded. “Want to see?”

Even Aaron put down the paper. “Of course,” he joked. “This is the biggest event since Omar Lapp sold his twenty acres to that real estate developer from Harrisburg.” He lowered his voice. “And just about as unlikely.” But he was grinning, too, as Katie helped me unfasten the quilt from the frame and hold it up to my chest with pride.

I knew that if Katie had completed a quilt, she wouldn’t show it off so, and it would have been far more worthy of praise. I knew that the stitches on her side of the quilt were neat and even as baby teeth, while mine scurried drunk across the marked pencil lines. “Well, that’s just fine, Ellie,” Sarah said.

Elam, in the La-Z-Boy, opened one eye. “Won’t even keep her feet warm in the winter.”

“It’s supposed to be small,” I argued, then turned to Katie. “Isn’t it?”

“Ja. It’s like a baby quilt. For all those children still to come,” she said with a smile.

I rolled my eyes. “Don’t go holding your breath.”

“Most Plain women your age are only half done with having their children.”

“Most Plain women my age have been married for twenty years,” I pointed out.

“Katie,” Sarah warned, “leave Ellie be.”

I folded my quilt as carefully as a fallen soldier’s flag and hugged it. “See? Even your mother agrees with me.”

A terrible silence fell over the room, and almost immediately I realized my mistake. Sarah Fisher didn’t agree with me-at forty-three, she’d have given her right arm to be still bearing children, but the decision had been taken out of her hands.

I turned to her. “I’m sorry. That was very tactless of me.”

Sarah was still for a moment, then she shrugged and took the quilt. “You’d like me to iron this for you?” she asked, hurrying from the room before I could tell her that I’d rather she sit down and relax.

I looked around, but Katie and Aaron and Elam were back in their seats, quietly occupied, as if I had never spoken thoughtlessly at all.

In the next instant there was a knock at the door, and I rose to answer it. I could tell from the look that crossed between Aaron and Elam that in their minds, a caller arriving this late on a weeknight was a sure messenger of trouble. My hand had just reached the knob when the door swung open, pushed from the outside. Jacob Fisher stood there. He met my stunned gaze first, a wry and nervous smile playing over his lips. “Hey-Mom-I’m-home,” he said breezily, a parody of TV sitcoms that only the two of us would even understand. “What’s for supper?”

Sarah came running first, drawn by the sound of a son she had not seen in years. Her hand clapped over her mouth, her eyes smiling through tears, she was a yard away from Jacob when Aaron stopped her by simply slashing his arm through the air and saying, “No.”

He advanced on his son, and in deference Sarah melted against the wall. “You are no longer welcome here.”

“Why, Dat?” Jacob asked. “It’s not because the bishop said so. And who are you to make a rule stronger than the Ordnung?” He stepped further inside. “I miss my family.”

Sarah gasped. “You will come back to the church?”

“No, Mam, I can’t. But I want badly to come back to my home.” Aaron stood toe to toe with his son, his throat working. Then, without saying a word, he turned and walked out of the room. A few seconds later a door slammed in the rear of the house.

Elam patted Jacob on the shoulder, then moved slowly in the direction his own son had gone. Sarah, tears running down her face, held her hands out to her oldest child. “Oh, I can’t believe this. I can’t believe it’s you.”

As I watched her, I understood why a mother would starve herself to feed a baby; how there was always time and room for a child to curl close to her side; how she could be soft enough to serve as a pillow and strong enough to move heaven and earth. Sarah’s fingers traced the slopes and planes of Jacob’s face: beardless, older, different. “My boy,” she whispered. “My beautiful boy.”

In that moment, I could see the girl she had been at eighteen-slender and strong, shyly offering up this brand-new infant to her young husband. She squeezed Jacob’s hands, wanting him all to herself, even when Katie leaped up like a puppy to get her own embrace. Jacob met my gaze over the women’s heads. “Ellie, it’s good to see you again.”

Jacob had quickly agreed to serve as a character witness for Katie-the best I could do, since there was no way her mother or father was going to set foot on the witness stand. I had been working on his direct examination questions just that day. However, I’d planned to rehearse with him in State College, simply because I believed it was too difficult to sneak him close to the farm without raising Aaron’s suspicions. But now it looked as if Jacob was playing by his own rules.

He let Sarah lead him into the kitchen for some hot chocolate-was that still his favorite?-and one of the muffins she’d made that morning. I noticed, and I’m sure Jacob did too, that when he settled down to eat, the baptized members of the family stood, overjoyed at the reconciliation but still unable to sit at a table with an excommunicated Amishman.

“Why did you come back?” Katie asked.

“It was time,” Jacob answered. “Well, it was time for you and Mam to see me, anyway.”

Sarah looked away. “Your father was wonderful mad when he found out Katie had been coming to visit you. We disobeyed him, and he’s smarting.” She added, “It’s not that he doesn’t want to see you, or that he doesn’t love you. He’s a fine man, hard on others-but hardest on himself. When you made the decision to leave the church, he didn’t blame you.”

Jacob snorted. “That’s not how I remember it.”

“It’s true. He blamed himself, for being your father and not bringing you up in a way that made you want to stay.”

“My book learning had nothing to do with him.”

“Maybe to you,” Sarah said. “But not to your Dat.” She patted Jacob’s shoulder and kept her hand there, as if she was loath to let him go. “All these years, he has been punishing himself.”

“By banishing me?”

“By giving up the one thing he wanted more than anything else,” Sarah answered quietly. “His son.”

Jacob stood abruptly and looked at Katie. “You want to take a walk?”

She nodded, radiant to be singled out. They had nearly reached the back door when Sarah called to Jacob, “You’ll stay the night?”

He shook his head. “I won’t do that to you,” he said softly. “But whether he likes it or not, Mam, I’ll keep coming back.”

Sometimes when I was lying in my bed at the Fishers’, I wondered if I would ever be able to adapt back to city living. What would it be like to fall asleep to the sound of buses chugging, instead of owls? To close my eyes in a room that never got completely dark, thanks to the neon signs and floodlamps on the streets? To work in a building so high off the ground that I could not smell the clover and the dandelions under my feet?

That night the moon rose yellow as a wolf’s eye, blinking back at me in my bed, where I waited for Katie to return from her walk with Jacob. I had hoped to talk to him about his testimony a little bit, but he and Katie had disappeared and had not come back, not by the time Elam made his way back to the grossdawdi haus, nor when Aaron returned from a last check on the livestock and headed upstairs in silence, nor even when Sarah went from room to room, turning off gas lanterns for the night.

In fact, it was well after two in the morning when Katie finally slipped into the bedroom. “I’m awake,” I announced. “So don’t worry about keeping quiet.”