Loving Mariah Read online

  Still, when the door opened, he wasn’t prepared for what greeted him.

  For a moment, he barely recognized her. He thought she had a roommate, maybe, someone who wasn’t Amish. She certainly didn’t look Amish in that moment. Then his heart stalled. Words—whatever greeting he had been about to speak—caught midway in his throat. Her hair.

  It was so incredibly long, so rich, wild and spilling, and he’d never had any idea, with it tucked neatly into that bonnet she always wore, just how much of it there was. He’d acknowledged from the start that she was beautiful. But all week he had thought of her as somehow untouchable, distant, even prim. And now a woman opened her door.

  A woman in—God help him—a nightgown. Adam shoved his hands hard into his pockets, confused.

  “What’s happened to you?” she gasped.

  “To me?” His eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

  “You look...bad.”

  One brow went up. “Bad?”

  Her mouth curled. “I guess I could put it in terms you’ll understand. Just once. You look like hell.”

  He was surprised. Then he shocked himself with a hoarse bark of laughter. “Yeah. I imagine I do.”

  She stepped back from the door. “Come in.”

  “I don’t want to cause you any trouble.”

  “I was up. Awake.”

  “No, I mean—” What did he mean? He broke off and looked around at the quiet, deserted street. The windows would have eyes.

  “I don’t want to bring the wrath of your church down on your head all over again.”

  “You won’t.” She shook her head, motioning him inside again. Still he didn’t move.

  “Letting a man into your house in the middle of the night wouldn’t get a rise out of them? Your deacons or whatever?”

  “Ah, Adam, you have so much to understand yet about my people. Please come inside. It’s cold. I want to close the door.”

  He still thought going in was a bad idea, because although one long curl of hair had fallen forward over her shoulder, the rest of it streamed down her back when she turned around, a midnight waterfall tumbling clear to her hips. She was barefoot, and he couldn’t decide if she still looked like some kind of otherworldly angel or if she had stepped out of the pages of time. But he knew that going inside her home, being alone with her while she looked like this, was perhaps the poorest choice he could make in a lifetime full of many. He was feeling too...raw. And a raw, vulnerable man would take solace where he could find it, right or wrong, and the repercussions be damned.

  He stepped over the threshold anyway, into her home.

  It was tiny, neat and country pretty. He was startled and a little shaken to see the hooked rug he had imagined on the floor. It was a hundred blended shades of mauve and violet, burgundy and rose. A lantern hung on the wall nearest the door. She went to it and lit it, and it threw off a golden glow. The heat from a wood stove in a corner hearth was barely adequate. There was a single sofa, an armchair for reading, and a rocker to one side of the stove.

  “Have you eaten?” she asked, closing the door behind him.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “That’s not what I asked.” She disappeared through a door in the back of the room. He followed her into the kitchen and found rose-colored curtains there.

  She was rummaging through a refrigerator.

  “You don’t have electricity.” He was bemused all over again. “Do you?” He hadn’t noticed any wires leading into any of the houses on this narrow street.

  Mariah glanced over her shoulder at him. “No. That would bring the Meidung upon me for sure.”

  “So how does that run?” He motioned at the refrigerator.

  “A hydraulic motor, just outside.”

  Adam shook his head slowly. “What’s the difference? It’s like the cars. What’s the point? A refrigerator is a refrigerator, no matter what it runs on.”

  “You disapprove.”

  “I’m confused. I like consistency.”

  She finally straightened with a casserole dish in her hands. “It’s not electricity we’re against, so much as all the things that come with it,” she explained, nudging the refrigerator closed with her elbow. “Televisions, radios, telephones—they all intrude upon family life. But...” She trailed off and began slicing at a brisket. “It would be very, very difficult and time-consuming to keep food cold any other way.”

  “Compromise,” he muttered, forgetting that he had meant to tell her to put the food away.

  “That’s right The biggest purpose of the Ordnung—”

  “The what?”

  “Our rules. Their purpose is to keep us insulated from the outside world, not to make it impossible for us to function.” She smiled. “Family,” she repeated. “The concept of family has to be protected at all costs. If you really think of it, that’s our reason behind everything. The point is not to live in an outdated world. Adam, in the past. That’s simply the result of the Ordnung. Its purpose is to preserve our values. We decry the modern world because it would threaten them. Look at your lives, and look at the simple peace of ours. We don’t want to lose that.”

  Adam made a sound in his throat that might have been agreement. She put a plate on the table. He didn’t mean to sit, and did it absently. “I guess it would be hard to remain separate if you got hooked on the power companies.”

  “Yes.” She beamed at him as she would a student who had just figured out a difficult lesson. “That’s it exactly. So, you see, 12-volt current is perfectly acceptable because it comes from batteries. Whereas 110-volt electricity is tapped from public lines, from your companies, so that’s unacceptable.”

  He shook his head, worried because it suddenly seemed to make sense to him.

  “Eat,” she urged.

  “I don’t—”

  “Try.”

  He cut off a piece of the meat and put it in his mouth because he didn’t want to offend her. He took a second bite because he had always loved corned beef and this was really good. With the third, he wondered just when he had last enjoyed a home-cooked meal, and he was shaken because he honestly couldn’t remember.

  Years, he thought uncomfortably. It really had been years.

  Mariah hovered. She was unable to sit still. She had expected he would come back sooner or later, but she hadn’t expected that he would come here. Now she was nervous and self-conscious because she wasn’t dressed, and because she had been largely instrumental in bringing this hurt upon him.

  She poured him a glass of milk and went to adjust another lantern hanging from the kitchen wall, keeping her back to him.

  “What is it about women?” he muttered, “That so many of you think you can fix anything with food?”

  “It’s a nurturing instinct, I think.”

  “My mother used to do this.” He helped himself to more cold potatoes. She had left the casserole dish on the table. “Before she...well, when I was young. Skinned knees, broken hearts, anything, and out came the leftovers.”

  “Used to?” Mariah asked. He wasn’t ready to talk about Bo, so she would listen while he rambled.

  “My mother’s gone,” he answered flatly.

  Mariah felt her heart move. “Like your wife?”

  “Ex-wife,” he said shortly. “No, my mother died. Eight years ago. Her liver gave out. She had a drinking problem.” She had never known Bo, he thought. He had always wondered if that might have made a difference, if Bo could have infused some sunshine into her miserable world. Probably not. And even if he had, when he disappeared it would have started her drinking all over again.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Adam jolted a little at Mariah’s voice, lost as he was in his own past. “Don’t be,” he answered shortly. “We weren’t a close family.” He and Jake had only bonded after everyone else had been gone.

  “How many of you are there?”

  “Counting my parents? Five to start. We’re down to two now.”

  “Two siblings?�
�� She wasn’t sure she wanted to understand.

  “I have a brother, a year younger than me. And a sister who’d be...twenty-seven now, I think.”

  Her breath stalled. “You think? Is she dead, too?”

  “Hell if I know.” She was staring at him, appalled. Adam tried to explain. As though there was any explaining the Wallaces: “Kim vanished ten years ago. We’ve never been able to find her, either.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “Lately I’ve been too busy looking for Bo to dwell on it. And my brother Jake seems to think she wants to stay lost.” Then something else occurred to him. “What about you?” he asked suddenly.

  She had brought the lantern back to the table, but now she was fussing at the sink. She glanced at him over her shoulder, scowling. “What about me?”

  “No husband, no children?” A thunderbolt hit him. “Did they Meidung you, too?”

  Mariah turned sharply. “No! Oh, no. I had the choice.”

  “What choice?” Were there kids who didn’t speak to her? Was there a man who loved her, but who had actually turned his back on her? Adam realized that the possibility bothered him, immensely and absurdly so, on some deep level he didn’t want to look at too closely.

  He scowled at her, his eyes narrowing. For the first time he tried to guess her age, and he put her somewhere around thirty.

  “I had the choice of marrying,” she said quietly. “I was... supposed to marry. I left instead.”

  “Left.”

  “For State College. Penn State. To go to school. Eventually I went to school,” she clarified. “It took me about four years to earn enough money to be able to enroll. Scholarships don’t come easily when your high-school diploma comes from a correspondence course.”

  His eyes narrowed. “What did you do?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “To earn the money. How did you do it?”

  “Oh. I was a sort of governess for a while, for a wealthy family in Huntingdon. I lived in there, but I was free evenings, so I waited tables in town.”

  A simple education shouldn’t have been so hard for her, he thought. It seemed unfair, and it bothered him deeply.

  She gave him her back again. And he knew that that was all she was going to say on the matter, at least for now. He thought she’d probably tell him more, all the sordid details, when she knew him better.

  That thought stunned him. He was not going to know her better. He was going to solve this nightmare, somehow, and go home.

  Adam finally pushed his plate away. “Where’s Jannel?” he asked finally.

  Mariah finally came back to the table. She sat across from him, clasping her hands together in front of her, in that way she had. This time she put them on the table. “Who?”

  “My ex-wife.”

  “I don’t know.”

  The anger, the impatience, that was never far from the surface tightened his face again. And she wondered suddenly what he would do when he understood how deeply involved she had been in all this from the start. She shivered a little.

  “Adam, I honestly don’t,” she rushed on. “Sarah and Sugar Joe have had Noah for four years now, or so I’m told. I’ve only been back from State College for two. I wasn’t here then, when he came to us. I don’t know what happened.”

  Sarah and Sugar Joe. Where they pretending to be Bo’s parents now? Dear God, had Jannel just dropped him off and left him? He didn’t know if he was relieved or horrified not to have found her, too.

  “What the hell kind of name is that?” Adam snarled, because he had to strike out somewhere.

  Mariah’s eyes widened. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Sugar Joe.”

  “Oh.” She reached down and smoothed her nightgown over her thighs. He found himself watching too closely, leaning infinitesimally to the side to see, and dragged his eyes back to her face. “In all the settlement, there are maybe ten surnames,” she explained. “We’re all descended from the same group of immigrants. There are many thousands of us, but we’re all Fishers or Bylers, Lapps, Millers, Esslers. And our given names are generally either biblical or German. So we have a lot of Joseph Lapps, for instance.”

  “Sugar Joe is Joseph Lapp,” Adam said hoarsely. Noah Lapp. Dear God. The hurt, the panic, the denial began churning in his gut all over again.

  “One of many Joseph Lapps,” Mariah was saying. “There’s Sugar Joe Lapp and Joe Junior Lapp—there are many Joe Juniors, actually—and there’s Boundary Joe Lapp.” She began ticking names off on her fingers. “There’s Chubby Joe and Chicken Joe and—”

  “I get your drift,” Adam interrupted shortly. “Okay, so where did the Sugar part come from?”

  She heard all he didn’t ask: Who are they? What are they? How do they treat him? “Joe is from Berks County, from one of the other Gemeides that I told you about. He visited ours with his family on one of their off-Sundays many years ago, and that was when he met his Sarah for the first time.”

  “Off-Sundays,” he repeated.

  “We only have services every other week. They’re all-day affairs with a community dinner. Sometimes supper, too, depending on how many visitors there are from other Gemeides. On alternate weekends, we just spend time with—”

  “Family,” he supplied for her.

  “Yes. Anyway, Joe Lapp was so besotted with Sarah Gehler when he met her that he barely had enough sense to bring his mama a cup of coffee. He was finally making it for her, staring at little Sarah, and he poured nearly the whole sugar bowl into the cup. So he’s been Sugar Joe ever since.”

  “Sounds like an imbecile,” Adam snapped.

  “Oh, no, he was in love.” Her eyes glowed.

  “He’d never laid eyes on her before.”

  “You outsiders don’t believe in thunderbolts?” she asked softly.

  He opened his mouth to answer. And then he saw Jannel Payne again, across a crowded room, and felt that old electricity, the jolt.

  It hadn’t been love. He knew that now. It had been pure...sex. Physical attraction, a tangible pull. Pheromones, maybe. Once he’d begun to know that there wasn’t too much going on inside that perfect shell, that drive had begun to wane.

  He hadn’t understood it then. It was just another revelation of the many that had come tumbling in on him lately.

  “It’s never smart,” he answered finally.

  “I’m not sure smart has anything to do with it,” she said wryly. “The Lapps—Bo’s Lapps—are a good family, Adam. They have four children of their own, besides your Bo.”

  “Only four?” He was too troubled to be really curious. It was an idle question.

  “Sarah bled badly when her youngest was born. She really shouldn’t have more children. Birth control goes against the Ordnung , but...” She shrugged. What she didn’t say was clear. Sarah had stopped having children, so something was afoot.

  “So...what you’re saying in a roundabout way is that she loves Bo like her own.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  His voice darkened, lowered. “And it would kill her to lose him.”

  “Kill is a strong word, Adam. It would certainly break her heart, as it broke yours.”

  Suddenly, without warning, he drove a fist against the table. Mariah jumped.

  “Would you prefer that he wasn’t cherished?” she chided. “First by you, then by the people who took him in? Would you prefer that he didn’t know love?”

  He looked at her, his eyes angry, then bleak. “I don’t know. No. God, of course not. I just don’t know what to do,” he admitted hoarsely. “I don’t know what to do about this. There’s no easy way to break it to him. Not if he doesn’t remember me.”

  “You don’t have to do anything, Adam,” she said softly. “Not now. Not right away.”

  He looked at her, his eyes tortured. He didn’t answer.

  “What do you have to rush home to?” she asked.

  And the answer came easily, troubling him. “Nothing.” ChildSearch, he thought. B
ut ChildSearch had always been run admirably by Jake in his absences. He’d been out of town these past four years more often than he’d been in Dallas.

  Mariah shook her head slowly. “You think you must make an unconscionable decision right away. That you must decide to leave Noah—Bo—where he is, in the life he’s embraced, and turn your back on him, and that is intolerable. But to hurt him, to wrench him away, is unbearable, too.”

  He had come here because he had known she would understand. Yet hearing her speak the words aloud almost terrified him. “Yeah,” he said.

  “But that’s simply not true.”

  “I’ve got to move one way or the other,” he snapped. “There’s a fork in the road, and I can’t just stand here. I’ve got to go left or right.”

  “Why? Why not just stay put and contemplate it for a while?”

  “I’ve got to make a decision.”

  “But not tonight, Adam. Not tomorrow. Not even next week, if it comes to it.”

  “What the hell—” He broke off at her expression. “What are you saying?” he corrected himself.

  “That Bo isn’t going anywhere, and you have nowhere to go.”

  He waited, his heart beating too hard, and a small part of him wondered at that unconscious reaction. As though he was on the brink. Of something. “Go on.”

  “You should stay for a while. You could enjoy Bo’s company. You could watch him, see how he’s grown up, get to know him all over again. You could love him. You don’t have to tell him who you are to do any of those things.”

  No, he thought, he didn’t. His heart both swelled with the possibility and ached that it was even necessary.

  “You could give yourself some time, and when it’s right the answer will probably just come to you. I don’t think you’ll have to search for it or torment yourself over it. Some day you’ll just...wake up and it will simply be there, and you’ll understand which way it is you should go.”

  His eyes narrowed on her, and he smiled mirthlessly. “How come you got to be so smart in college, when all I did was blunder through?”