Return to Grace. Karen Harper
carried up the back wall. She opened her eyes, then closed them again. It was bad enough to have to look at the wrapped gauze and taped bandage on her left wrist and the array of pills on the bedside table but worse to feel she was in a time warp. Except for moving her twin bed to the guest room and storing some wedding supplies here, Naomi hadn’t changed much of their shared back-corner bedroom after Hannah had left.
From the top of the familiar maple dresser, Hannah’s bonneted childhood doll seemed to stare at her for all the things she’d done wrong, despite being eyeless and faceless. Strange to have the feeling she was being watched in this private, second-story bedroom in the middle of open fields.
Despite her pain pills, she hadn’t slept well because she’d heard some sort of unfamiliar flapping, like bird wings, from time to time. Maybe it was a loose shingle on the roof in the brisk wind that had now calmed a bit. If Seth was working up on the roof today, she hoped he’d be careful. Amish men didn’t use safety harnesses, for whatever happened was God’s will, one thing she’d learned to question during her days in the world. After all, sometimes people’s injuries were their own stupid fault.
But one huge change in this spot of her happy childhood and rumspringa years were the signs of Naomi’s coming wedding adorning the room: a treadle sewing machine with a nearly completed, sky-blue wedding dress, bolts of burgundy material for her four attendants’ dresses, boxes of favors and inscribed napkins stacked in the corner by the closet. The talk at supper last night had been all about the Esh-Troyer marriage. Well, of course, Hannah could see why. It wasn’t just to avoid talking about the mess she’d made of her life. Amish weddings were planned and prepared quickly after the announcement in church of the betrothal. With so many invited, lots of people pitched in, preparing to feed nearly four hundred guests at a wedding feast with a traditional, home-cooked meal.
In the emotion of her reunion with Naomi yesterday—Hannah knew her younger sister had looked up to her just as she had to her older, now-married sisters, Ida and Ruth—she had promised not only to attend the wedding but to help with it. Nothing like facing the entire Amish community she’d let down. At least she had until a week from today to prepare herself for that.
Hannah groaned, sat up carefully and gasped to see a small, round face staring up at her over the side of the bed. So that’s why she felt she was being watched. It was a darling little Amish doll—a living one, with a pert mouth and wide, azure eyes.
“Where Naomi?” the child asked in their German dialect. Then Hannah knew who it was. Not the niece whose birth she’d missed while she was gone, but Seth and Lena’s little daughter, Marlena, now around two and a half years old.
“I’m Hannah,” she told the child, and her voice broke. Like an idiot, she blinked back tears. The little girl resembled Seth more than Lena. “I—I can help you find Naomi.”
“Daadi go up,” Marlena said, pointing at the ceiling or, more likely, the roof since Seth was reroofing the house, though she hadn’t heard one hammer or nail when it must be midmorning. “Mamm go up, too,” Marlena added.
“Oh, there you are!” Naomi cried, rushing into the room and scooping up the child. “She was playing in the hall when I went to use the bathroom.”
“Naomi,” Hannah said as she swung her feet carefully to the floor, “you do not have to move out of your room for me, especially not with all you have going on here.”
“It was our room for years and still is!” Naomi insisted. “And now it can be yours, because after next Thursday, we’ll be living with Josh’s folks for a while. I’m fine in Ida and Ruth’s old room.”
“Daadi go up,” Marlena said again, pointing. “Up to the sky.” The child squirmed to be put down, toddled to the back window facing the barn and craned her neck to peer skyward.
“I’ll have to tell Seth you’re up, and he can pound away on the new shingles now,” Naomi said. “He didn’t want to wake you, so he’s helping Daad stack firewood. As for this little one, she thinks her daadi goes up on the roof looking for her mamm, who is in heaven.”
“Oh, that’s what she meant. But Seth or anyone else does not have to work around me.”
“You know it’s our way, whether you’re a guest or family, and you’re both,” Naomi said with a nod. Taking Marlena’s hand, she started from the room. “Oh,” she said, turning back, “someone else is waiting for you to get up. Special Agent Armstrong will be here right after noon meal to take you to the graveyard to walk through … through what happened. Sorry, but that’s what he said when he came by earlier. Give me a shout if you need help getting dressed,” she added, and pointed toward the chair in front of the sewing machine as they left the room.
Hannah gasped. Now she saw why Naomi’s wedding dress was only partly done. It was not just because they were letting Hannah sleep in this morning. She saw, laid out over the chair back and arranged on its seat, a new Amish dress in emerald-green, a good color for a maidal; black undergarments, no bra of course, which would take some getting used to again; a new pair of white, laced walking shoes like the women wore; a new cape—no, it was one of her old ones—and a new black bonnet. But no prayer kapp for her red-dyed, short-cut head, the sign of a dedicated Amish woman. All this kindness and generosity—but the lack of that precious kapp—spoke louder than Naomi’s words.
Tears blurring her vision, Hannah walked slowly to the small oval mirror they kept turned to the wall unless it was absolutely needed. After all, it was prideful to preen and to change the appearance God gave to each of His children. The true reason photographs of Amish faces were forbidden was that it could lead to individualism and conceit in one’s appearance, even though it also defied the Biblical warning “Thou shalt make no graven images.”
Hannah turned the mirror outward and jolted as her image stared back. Scarlet hair, though it now lay flat and looked softer after Mamm had washed and brushed it in the hospital. A face plain and naked without the dramatic mascara and black lipstick. Just Hannah Esh’s Amish face again, only one now lined with pain, perhaps fear, eyes narrowed, full lips pressed together, and the lower one trembling. She realized she was shaking all over and not just because she’d risen from a warm bed.
Was she scared to be home? Afraid of having to face everyone, especially Seth, again?
She thrust out her lower lip in defiance and walked to the clothing. One-handed, she reached for it to get dressed. It was only then she noticed that the screen to the side window behind the sewing machine was cleanly slit along its edge. Maybe that was what she’d heard flapping last night. But it was so unlike her daad to leave something not repaired. She leaned closer and gasped. Long, dark marks on the sill inside of the screen made it look like some sharp object had tried to pry the window itself open.
“You didn’t lean a ladder at the driveway side of the house, even to carry the shingles up, did you?” Bishop Esh asked Seth as he sat at the far end of the dinner table from Hannah, with Marlena in a high chair beside him. Seth was pleased to see Hannah at the table and dressed Amish, though she hadn’t covered her head. As ever, she seemed for him some sort of magnet and he the compass needle pulled to her true north.
He had to focus on the bishop’s words. “No,” Seth answered. “I’ve kept the ladder between the flower beds in back, near where the shingles were unloaded. Since the peak of the roof is on the driveway side, my ladder wouldn’t reach it. Is there a problem?”
“Yes, one we will have to run by Agent Armstrong, that’s for sure,” the bishop said, frowning.
Naomi, sitting on the other side of Marlena’s high chair, put in, “Someone cut the screen in the side window to my bedroom—now Hannah’s—and it wasn’t my Josh, that’s sure. He wouldn’t do that, even if the ladder marks were under the cut window. And someone tried to pry it open, too, but it sure wasn’t Josh and me!”
“We know that, Naomi,” Mrs. Esh said, and reached over to pat her youngest daughter’s hand. “You’ve always done things on the straight