Summer Promise (12 page)

Sarah gave a derisive snort. “No, you haven't. I'll give you that much. But I'm not stupid, you know. Just because I live among the
Englischers
now doesn't mean I can't tell when something's wrong. You've been angry with me for weeks, Miriam, but I'll be darned if I know why. I was hoping we could be sisters, just like we've always been. Apparently, I was wrong.”

“And just because I'm Plain doesn't make me stupid, either,” Miriam replied, stung. “I
am
your sister. I'll always be your sister. But you can't just waltz back in here like nothing's changed. It has. And I don't just mean Daed dying. You changed things yourself, the day that you left.”

“And you've never forgiven me for that, have you?” Sarah demanded, swinging to face Miriam fully now. “You blame me for leaving home.” She stopped for a moment, studying her sister's face, then said in a calmer tone, “Daed
understood and accepted it. Why can't you accept me the way I am now?”

“I do accept you as you are,” Miriam said, trying to make her voice equally calm. “You didn't give us much choice in that, did you? There you are, thousands of miles away, living among the
Englischers
, wearing jeans and talking on a cell phone, as if you were not brought up Plain, as if our way means nothing to you.”

Sarah shook her head, suddenly looking old beyond her years. “That's it, then,” she said. “You think I did something unforgivable when I left. And that the way I live my life is wrong. You think I'm a bad person now.”

“I don't think you're a bad person,” Miriam cried. “Stop putting words in my mouth!”

“Then what's the matter with you?” Sarah all but shouted. “What's the matter with
us
, Miriam? Why can't we talk? We used to be so close.”

“I'm not the one who changed that,” Miriam came right back.

“There! See? You
do
blame me!” Sarah pounced.

“No!” Miriam countered, growing heated in turn. “How many times do I have to say it? I don't. But I've never understood how you could do such a thing. How could you leave us, Daed and me? How could you walk out and leave your whole life behind?”

And how could you make that decision without telling me? You never shared your thoughts. Not once.

Sarah's expression softened, and Miriam saw both sympathy and sadness in her eyes. “You make it sound like I was willful and rebellious.” She gave a small, unhappy laugh. “Or like I gave up my life here for cell phones and jeans. But that's not how it was. It was far simpler than that. I had no choice, Miriam. I followed the path laid out for me by God.”

Miriam flushed. It was as if a fire raced through all her veins. “How can you say such a thing?” she gasped. “How can abandoning the way you were raised be God's will?”

“That's simple, too,” Sarah answered, but suddenly she sounded exhausted. “I didn't abandon anything, Miriam. In fact, I tried to take as much with me as I could. I'm still trying. That's the whole point.”

“What point?” Miriam asked, pushing down a surge of frustration. “I don't understand,” she said. “I don't understand anything about this. I don't understand
you
anymore.”

“That makes us even, then,” Sarah said. “Because these last few weeks, I don't understand you, either.”

Unexpectedly, Sarah sat down. Miriam hesitated, and then moved to sit facing her sister, cross-legged, her knees bumping against Sarah's. They had often sat just this way when they were small. For several moments, neither of them spoke. Miriam felt the sun, warm on her back. The blackberry canes rustled ever so slightly as the wind moved through them. She heard a bird call, high overhead. But she did not speak. Sarah had started this. It was up to her to speak first.

“Do you remember that game we used to play when we were little,” Sarah finally asked, “the one we called Close Your Eyes?”

“Of course I remember it,” Miriam answered, though she had not thought of this game in a very long time.

It was Sarah who had originally created it as a way to help conquer her fear of thunderstorms. Though Miriam had never been much interested in games of imagination, she had been frightened enough by thunderstorms herself to be more than happy to play along.

Whenever a storm got too close, whipping the trees in the yard by the house into a frenzy, the thunder booming loud enough to shake the walls of their bedroom, the lightning so bright it made the whole yard look like day, the sisters would huddle together under the bedcovers and close their eyes. The game was to imagine you were someplace else, anyplace else, as long as there was no thunderstorm. It could be a place you knew or one that your mind conjured up out of nothing.

Miriam had never traveled very far in her imagination. In fact, she hadn't really traveled at all. Most of the time the place she conjured up was her very own room, her very own bed. She just subtracted the thunderstorm. But Sarah had imagined all sorts of places when she closed her eyes. Places that, even as a child, Miriam had known that she could never go.

“When I was trying to understand what I should do,” Sarah went on softly, “whether I should stay and live a Plain life or go and live among the
Englischers
, I played a sort of grown-up version of Close Your Eyes.”

“You played a
game
?” Miriam said, aghast. “To make the most important decision of your life?”

“I didn't think of it as a game,” Sarah said, and Miriam could hear the effort her sister was making not to sound defensive. “I thought of it as—I don't know—a way to focus. To shut out all the distractions of the here and now and try to imagine the future.

“I thought—if I could just see some part of it, even if it was only one image, then I would know what I should do. I would know where I belonged.”

“And did you see something?” Miriam asked, her own voice quiet now.

“Yes,” Sarah said softly. “Yes, I did.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all.”

Miriam tried to imagine that. If she had been the one to see that nothing, she would have been paralyzed with fear, caught in terrifying dread. She had always known where she belonged. Here, in the community in which she was raised, in the house where she had grown up. What must it have been like to see only a great emptiness where the future was supposed to be?

“That must have been terrible,” she said.

Sarah gave a short, unamused laugh. “It was. I don't think I've ever been so scared in my life, if you must know. It was as if God were telling me I didn't have a future. I suppose if I'd been less . . .” Sarah paused, as if struggling to find the right word.

“Stubborn?” Miriam suggested and was rewarded with Sarah's quick smile.

“Okay, stubborn,” Sarah acknowledged. “I'd have stopped trying so hard. Accepted the fact that the reason I couldn't see anything meant that there was nothing
to
see. That what was important was what was right in front of me when I
opened
my eyes. But I
was
too stubborn. You're absolutely right about that. So I kept on trying, over and over, night after night. And then, one night, when I closed my eyes and no image came to me, I realized that I wasn't afraid anymore. That was the night I thought I understood.

“The reason I couldn't picture the future was because I was supposed to go someplace I'd never been before.”

Miriam sat still, trying to digest her sister's words. How brave Sarah was! she realized. To keep doing what made her afraid, night after night, never being certain she would ever see an outcome, let alone a positive one.

“What finally happened?” she asked quietly. “Did you ever see anything at all?”

Sarah gave another quick laugh, more open and free this time.

“Yes,” she said. “It's going to sound like pride, but the moment I realized I'd stopped being afraid, the thing I saw was myself. I still couldn't see my surroundings, but I could see myself, very clearly, and I was walking forward, as if there was a path all laid out for me, as if it had been there all the time. It just took letting go of my fear to see it. I
did
have a future, but I would have to make it for myself. The only thing I would take from my old life would be . . . me. Not just my body, but also my heart and soul. What I had learned, what I believed. And it seemed to me that I could not have seen or felt these things on my own. God must be guiding me. This was the path He wanted me to walk.”

“But why choose to live among the
Englischers
?” Miriam asked. “Why go so far away? There are Mennonite communities close by. You could have just gone there.”

But Sarah was already shaking her head.

“No. It had to be someplace totally new.”

“But
why
?”

“Because of who I am, I think,” Sarah said. She wiped a hand across her face once more, leaving a trace of blue on her cheek this time. “Because I was raised Plain.”

Miriam laughed. “Now you have me more confused than ever.”

“You remember when we were having supper with Daniel's parents?” Sarah asked. “And I was talking about teaching the young people how to garden? I wish that you could meet some of them, Miriam. At first, they seem so angry. But get to know them just a little and you see the truth: They're lost. They have no sense of fellowship, not with others, and not within themselves. I sometimes think this is the biggest difference between the Plain folk and the
Englischers
. We don't want to be connected to the outside world. But, for all their laptops and cell phones, the
Englischers
have forgotten how to be connected to one another and to themselves.”

Sarah paused. Miriam gazed at her sister's face. All the anger and frustration in it was gone. Instead, Sarah's face was filled with strength and purpose, with a glowing inner light.

“But you should see what happens when these young people see the first shoots come out of the soil!” she went on. “It's like the whole world opens up. They realize that life has possibilities—that they, themselves, have possibilities—for the very first time. You can almost see the desire for fellowship grow just as quickly as the carrot tops!

“This is what God wants me to do,” Sarah said, her voice ringing with conviction. “He wants me to bring this sense of fellowship to the
Englischers
, particularly the young people. This is what I believe, Miriam. I believe it with my whole heart.”

“Did Daed know this?” Miriam whispered.

“Yes.” Sarah nodded, and now a shadow crossed her face. “At least, in part. He didn't know about the job, of course, and for that I will always be sorry. That
was
pride. I wanted so much to tell Daed in person. I wanted to be able to see the expression on his face when I told of my accomplishments. That was wrong of me. I think I even knew it at the time. But, after I told him I did not wish to be baptized, I did my best to explain why I felt I had to go.”

“But you didn't tell me,” Miriam said.

Sarah met Miriam's eyes. In them, Miriam saw the glint of tears. She felt her own eyes fill.

“I wanted to,” Sarah said. “You have no idea how much. But I simply did not know how. Something came between us, Miriam, even before I decided to leave home. There were days when I swore I could almost see you stepping back, stepping away from me, once you had been baptized. It was as if you were trying to put as much distance between the two of us as possible.”

“No,” Miriam protested. “It wasn't like that at all.”

But it was,
she thought. Until Sarah had spoken, Miriam had had absolutely no idea that her sister was considering leaving the Plain life. But she had been sure, so very sure, that Daniel wanted to ask Sarah to become his wife.

I did step back,
Miriam realized. Not to hurt her sister, only to put some distance between herself and the pain she was so sure would come. It never had. Not in the form that she'd expected, anyhow. Sarah had gone to live among the
Englischers
. Daniel had asked Miriam to be his wife. And for all the days between that one and this, Miriam had lived with the pain that came with the belief that she had been her husband's second choice.

And I can't tell Sarah any of this,
she thought.
Not here. Not now.
Sarah had just revealed a story full of faith and hope. How could Miriam reveal one of pain and unrequited love? She could not. She would not. But she could do something else.

“I'm sorry,” she said quietly. “I never meant to hurt you, Sarah. And I”—Miriam's breath caught—“I've missed you so much! Particularly once we knew how sick Daed was.”

“I should have been here,” Sarah said as the tears began to slide down her cheeks. “I should have been here to help, and I should have been with Daed when he died.”

“He
was
proud of you,” Miriam said, her own tears spilling over. “He saved every letter you ever sent. He read them over and over. He might not have known about your job, the wonderful work you are doing, but I think he understood, Sarah. In his heart, you had his full support. No matter where you were or how you chose to live, you always had his love.”

“Thank you,” Sarah whispered. “Thank you, Miriam.”

She leaned forward and threw her arms around Miriam's neck. Fiercely, Miriam returned her sister's hug. All the pain, the uncertainty about her relationship with Daniel, seemed to fade into the background. How she had misjudged Sarah and her reasons for leaving home! But this, at least, she could repair. She could assure her sister of her love. She gave Sarah one last squeeze, and then let go. The two sisters sat back.

“Oh, no!” Sarah cried. She began to laugh, though the tears continued to slip down her cheeks. “I think I got blackberry juice on you.”