A Change of Heart

Chapter Four

SIRENS SHRIEKED IN THE DISTANCE, INTENSIFYING THE fear in the room as their father continued his efforts to breathe life into Edna. But when Edna began to flail her arms about, their father backed away. Edna began to gasp for air, as if there were a shortage in the room. With each deep inhalation, a tiny bit of color came back to her face.

They’d all subconsciously moved closer to the bed, and Daed told them to step back. “Give her some room,” he said, holding his hands outward.

Leah had seen her father angry, even frightened, but nothing like this. Even in the midst of a crisis, he always showed a level of calm. She recalled a fire in the kitchen a few years ago when a lantern got knocked over at suppertime and ignited a small rug by the sink. The fire had spread quickly and scared them all, but their father stayed reasonably calm as the old kitchen floor splintered and glowed. He hadn’t hesitated but quickly retrieved the fire extinguisher and put out the fire.

They’d all had accidents as kids, and once their mother even fell down the porch steps carrying a casserole dish. She busted her knee up good, and Lydia had watched her father run from the fields when he was called. But again, he’d handled the situation calmly. But Daed looked anything but calm now, and Leah knew that Edna had been dead. Somehow she just knew. And their father had brought her back to life. Their father—and God. Thank You, dear Lord.

Sweat trickled from Daed’s wrinkled brow and poured over eyes that were wild with a mixture of terror and relief. The sirens grew louder, and Edna continued to cough and gasp, but she was breathing. Leah let the tears flow full force. If anything had happened to Edna . . .

Mamm clutched Edna’s hand and seemed to take over where their father couldn’t. “Edna, dear. Breathe slowly. Help is on the way.”

Edna’s eyes sought relief from their mother, but she continued to inhale and exhale, each breath crackling into the room with effort. Leah heard footsteps bolting up the steps, and within seconds two men dressed in navy blue entered the room. They brought in machines and gadgets Leah had never seen before, and they instructed everyone to move away from the bed. The first thing they did was put some sort of mask over Edna’s face, and her breath clouded the clear plastic in shallow bursts.

The men didn’t say much as they worked on Edna, but after about fifteen minutes they said that they were going to take her to the hospital in the ambulance, and that there was only room for one parent to ride along. All eyes were on their father, but it was Mamm who stepped forward.

“I am going,” she said, standing taller. Then she reached for Edna’s hand and squeezed it tightly within hers. Leah wanted to go so badly she could hardly stand it, but she could see that her father wanted to go equally as much, and they’d said there was only room for one anyway.

“I am going also.” Daed stood taller and spoke with an authority that challenged the men in uniform. “She is my—my daughter.” His voice broke as he spoke.

The two men in blue glanced at each other. Leah thought they could almost be twins, brothers at the least—both short and stocky with thick crops of unruly dark hair. And the shape of their eyes, more round then oval, was similar.

“I guess we can make room,” one of the men said.

Leah recalled her trip to the movies with Clare and Donna a few months ago. Her father would have been furious, but she suspected her mother must have known she was indulging in the freedoms of her rumschpringe when she saw Leah leave in Clare’s car that day. In the movie, there had been a scene where an ambulance picked up a sick girl, and the girl died on the way to the hospital. Leah closed her eyes and squelched the thought.

The men popped up a sort of portable bed right next to Edna’s bed, and Daed helped them get Edna onto it and down the stairs. Once they reached the first floor, things happened quickly.

“We’ll get word to you soon!” Mamm yelled as she and Daed followed Edna and the men across the yard. Her parents crawled into the back of the ambulance with one of the men, and the door slammed shut. The other man in blue scooted into the front seat. For what seemed like an eternity, the ambulance didn’t move. Leah could feel her heart pounding in her chest.

After a while, the ambulance eased down the driveway and onto the main road. Thin beams of sunlight speared through gray skies as dawn approached, but thunderous rumblings from far away lent confusion as to what type of weather the day would bring.

The men didn’t turn the sirens on. No swirly, colorful lights either. Leah presumed this to be a good thing. No sense of emergency.

“Edna will be all right, no?” Kathleen turned toward Leah. She blinked back tears and her lip trembled.

Leah reached for Kathleen’s hand. “Ya. She was breathing on her own.”

“But it sounded terrible, like she was choking, and her face was so blue,” Mary Carol said, sniffling. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”

Leah knew it was her job to reassure her younger sisters. “But her color started to return, and she was breathing. If it were that bad, they would have turned on the sirens.”

Then Leah recalled why they didn’t turn on the sirens in the movie.

The girl was dead.

Aaron picked at his eggs and stifled a yawn.

“Aaron, I got up at midnight to go to the bathroom, and I could see a light shining from beneath your door,” Annie said. “What in the world were you doin’ up at such an hour?”

He was too tired to deal with his sister this morning. She had a way of talking to him that he classified as clucking. Her tongue met with the roof of her mouth in an annoying manner.

“Reading.” It was true, although he sure didn’t want to elaborate—that he was reading to impress a girl.

“At that hour?” Mary chimed in. “What were you reading?”

“Nothing that would interest you,” Aaron said, hoping to halt the inquisition. He stuffed a piece of biscuit in his mouth.

Annie and Mary shuffled around the kitchen with his mother while Aaron, his father, and his youngest sister, Mae, waited for breakfast to be served. Five-year-old Mae had already placed jams, jellies, and butter on the table, which was her only job for breakfast. Aaron suspected Mae had been a surprise, even though his parents denied it. But Abner was twenty, Aaron was nineteen, Annie, seventeen, and Mary, fifteen.

Aaron yawned. This time he didn’t try to hide it. It just took too much effort. He reached for the bowl of applesauce to his right and scooped a generous helping onto a buttered biscuit. Then he piled eggs on top and took a big bite, thinking there was no better combination in the world than applesauce, egg, and buttered biscuit. Now if he could just have a cup of coffee, he might make it through the day. But his mother didn’t believe in coffee. “We shouldn’t need stimulants to get us through the day,” she’d say.

Ridiculous. Other families in their district certainly enjoyed coffee. He’d asked his father about it once, and his father quickly said, “It was the only rule your mother said she wanted to enforce when we got married, and I choose to abide by it.” Then Daed had smiled. “Coulda been a lot worse things to give up.”

Aaron knew his father liked to sip wine in the barn from time to time and even enjoy a cigar occasionally. But on this morning, nothing sounded better to Aaron than a steaming cup of freshly brewed coffee. A mocha latte would certainly work. He’d had plenty of those in town. Maybe he could convince his father to stop at the bakery on the way to the furniture store this morning.

After two more buttered biscuits with egg and applesauce, Aaron excused himself to milk the cows. As he strolled out to the barn, he couldn’t stop thinking about Leah and her story. He was anxious to see how the tale ended, but didn’t see how he was going to stay up another night reading. Then he thought about having Leah by his side at the Sunday singing, and just the thought gave him a burst of energy comparable to that from any cup of coffee.

Leah, Mary Carol, and Kathleen tried to stay busy all morning, but when the storm finally rolled in midmorning with lightning that lit up the skies and thunder that shook the china cabinet, a sense of dread further settled over the girls.

“It’s so dark outside,” Kathleen said. She lit another lantern and took a seat at the kitchen table. Mary Carol was seated and chopping cucumbers into tiny cubes.

“What’s that for?” Leah slid in beside Mary Carol and studied the cucumbers.

“A new recipe Kathleen is trying,” her sister said, not looking up. Then she slammed the knife down on the table. “Why haven’t we heard anything?”

“I don’t know.” Leah figured her parents would have sent word by now. She glanced at the clock on the wall. Ten thirty. “Everything must be okay, or Mamm and Daed would have sent someone to pick us up.”

Kathleen twirled the string on her kapp with her finger, then jumped when another flash of light lit the room, followed by a clap of thunder that Leah could feel in her chest.

“Look! Lights!” Mary Carol jumped from the table and walked toward the kitchen door.

Leah and Kathleen followed her onto the porch where they were misted with cool rain blowing up under the rafters. Leah put her hand to her forehead and watched the car coming up the driveway. Another bolt of lightning caused them all to jump, but they stayed on the front porch and waited.

“I don’t recognize the car,” Kathleen said. “Do either of you?”

Mary Carol shook her head. Leah strained to see past the headlights glaring onto the porch. “It’s one of those big truck-like things with a backseat.”

“It’s a Cadillac Escalade Hybrid,” Kathleen finally said, relief in her voice. Not because she knew who was in the vehicle, but because she’d identified it.

Kathleen had a strange fixation with automobile makes and models. She even had a Car and Driver magazine hidden in her room. “Front engine, rear-wheel drive, and it will hold eight people. Zero to sixty miles per hour in 8.4 seconds.”

Leah glared at her sister in disbelief. “Who cares!” she snapped. “It’s not like you’re ever going to have one.”

Kathleen’s lip turned under, and Leah shook her head and sighed. She was about to apologize, but then the car eased all the way into the driveway and cut the lights.

All three of them moved a little closer to the edge of the porch, peering through the downpour to see who it was. Hopefully, it was their parents with Edna. But Leah knew right away that it wasn’t anyone from her family when she saw the brightly flowered umbrella pop from the open car door and a high-heeled brown boot step into the mud below.