Before she left here for good, my mother had been confused as well. I knew that much from what I’d been told by her brother Thom, who had been sixteen at the time. As a child, I hadn’t known much about my mother at all, or at least not the person she was when she lived in this world. She had never talked much about her years growing up Amish. I don’t remember her telling me about the house, or the smell of the horses’ tack, or the sounds the buggies made when their wheels rolled on pavement, or how quiet the dark was on winter nights.
Most of what I knew about my mother I had learned from my aunt and uncles and from Daadi and Mammi. They told me she loved peaches and jonquils and her horse, Nutmeg, and the first snowfall. That she liked surprises and twirling and laughter.
Even though she had never joined the church, they would always see her as Amish. I looked Amish too, but lately it seemed as though underneath the Plain clothes and the hat and the language, there was a different man. Rachel Hoeck, who was the closest friend I had besides Jake, said I was as Amish as any man born right here in Lancaster County. I grew up here. I went to school here. I’d worked in my grandfather’s buggy shop since I could tighten a bolt. I was on the verge of church membership and baptism. At twenty-three I was more than old enough to take my vows as an Amish adult—vows of commitment to the Amish life and vows of marriage to an Amish bride. Those faraway years when I lived in the Englisch world were just that, Rachel would say—far away. But how could she know? I’d never brought her here at the crack of dawn. She’d never seen the man in the pond who stared back at me with questioning eyes. Then again, if she did see him, I knew what she would say to me.
That is just your reflection, Tyler. That’s you. The Amish man I love.
And I would want to believe her.
But there would be this tugging inside me, as there was every time I came to the pond now, pulling at all that I knew to be true of me. As though a loose thread was in the grasp of something or someone who wanted to yank it free…
My thoughts were interrupted by the subtle sound of a hundred tiny bubbles breaking on the surface.
A beautiful sight. The diffuser was doing just what it should.
I rowed back to shore, returned the rowboat and oar to the tall grass, and whistled for my dog. Then I gathered my things and started up the path toward home, Timber trotting alongside. I knew I should have felt good. After all, the aerator was working again, it was a beautiful morning, and God’s presence was everywhere. But up ahead, as the farmhouse came into view, I felt a surge of emotion I couldn’t even name. Loss? Joy? Hope? Fear?
Maybe all of the above, simultaneously?
My mind again went to my mother and one of the few memories I had of her, the first time she ever told me about this pond. We’d been far from here—a world away, in fact—but the way she talked, that small body of water had come as alive as if I’d been standing on its banks myself.
I had been in my bed, crying because there was a thunderstorm outside and lightning was scissoring over the house as though it wanted to slice me in two. My mother was sitting on my bed, trying to convince me the storm couldn’t hurt me. Then, to take my mind off what was happening outside the window, she began telling me all about the pond, her favorite place on the farm where she grew up. She went on and on, finally concluding her elaborate description with the words, “You can see a different world in the water. It’s like there’s always another place besides the one where you are.”
I hadn’t known what she meant by that, but I remember asking her if there was thunder and lightning at that other place too.
She chuckled softly. “Every place has something about it we would change if we were in charge.”
Swallowing hard, I closed my eyes now as I walked, trying to picture my mother’s pretty face from that night, her gentle hands as she smoothed the covers around me. But then a voice echoed across the silence and the image tumbled away, back to the unseen place where I kept all of my memories hidden—or at least my memories of her.
“Tyler!”
I opened my eyes to see Jake watching me from where he stood in the drive, arms crossed over his chest. He and I were supposed to have loaded some additional benches we’d made in the buggy shop into the wagon first thing so that right after breakfast we could deliver them over to the Bowmans’ farm for Anna’s wedding. But my task at the pond had taken longer than I’d expected, leaving him to do the loading all by himself. I felt guilty, as I knew my errand could have waited for a more appropriate day. To be honest, I had probably just used the diffuser replacement as an excuse to get down to the pond this morning and have a little time to myself.
I gave him an apologetic smile and a shrug, and though I could tell he was about to lay into me, when he saw that my shirt and pants were covered in dark, slimy mud, he hesitated and then simply grinned.
He and I both knew that whatever my grossmammi doled out once she saw what I’d done to my clean clothes would be payback enough.
Stepping inside, I tried to soften the blow by warning her first.