Free The Outcast by Jolina Petersheim Page A

must be reflected in mine.
AMOS
    Had Samuel and Helen Stoltzfus known that their young driver left the Amish church only three months before so he could become the next Dale Earnhardt, they surely would have asked for a refund rather than paying him that extra hundred dollars to make it from Pennsylvania to Tennessee in eleven hours instead of the standard twelve. But Helen takes pride in sticking to her word, especially since her husband doesn’t, so, standing outside the hospital with a large suitcase leaning against her skirted legs, Helen hands over the crisp Ben Franklin without giving the young driver the scolding his terrible driving deserves.
    Samuel and Helen ride the elevator up to the third floor, where their daughter lies in a hospital bed recuperating from severe blood loss and dehydration. As the elevator doors slide open, ushering them down the corridor’s maze, Helen reaches for Samuel’s hand in a demonstration of affection considered odd to them both. Still, their fingersremain intertwined as they hurry toward Leah’s room and Helen knocks on the door.
    Tobias opens it at once, his rumpled face relaying the feelings of anxiety and relief his eccentric in-laws somehow always bring.
    Helen’s lips are poised to ask, “How is she?” but she can see for herself the pallid tone of her daughter’s features, the skeletal hands overlaid with parchment skin and an embroidery of thin blue veins. Clucking her tongue, Helen strides to the end of the bed and takes Leah’s feet in her hands. She presses her thumbs into the swollen arches, and Leah, still asleep, emits a soft moan.
    Moving away from Samuel, whose one-track mind is causing him to discuss his latest set of matching ponies rather than his daughter’s health, Tobias looks at his mother-in-law and barks, “What’re you doing?”
    Nothing about Helen acknowledges Tobias but her lips. “I’m seeing which of her organs are inflamed.”
    Tobias’s thick eyebrows form a V over his eyes and his jaws clench. Striding over, he jerks the thin blue blanket over Leah’s feet. “I did not invite you down here to do witchcraft on my wife!”
    It is easy to see where Rachel inherited her temper as Helen Stoltzfus looks up at the man towering over her and snaps, “I guess you invited me down here to watch her die, then.” She points to the machines clustered around the bed and the IV filtering fluids into her daughter’s arm. “These Englischer contraptions are only masking the problem; they’re not getting to the source.”
    “And you think your powwow doktor ing can?”
    Helen shakes her head. “It’s not powwow doktor ing, Tobias. It’s holistic medicine.”
    “Still sounds like witchcraft to me.”
    “That’s because you don’t understand it.”
    Looking at Leah lying there in a shifting purgatory of wakefulness and sleep, Tobias says, “That’s not the only thing I don’t understand.”
    Samuel drags a hand over his white beard. “I’m hungry.” He yawns.
    Not attempting to hide his annoyance, Tobias asks, “I take it you want to go down to the cafeteria?”
    Samuel nods and gets up from the hospital chair. “You wantanything, Fraa ?”
    Helen shakes her head. Only when she hears the sound of the door clicking shut does she feel like she can breathe again. Getting up and walking over to the suitcase, Helen kneels down, unzips it, and throws back the flap. She digs into the netted compartment where she packed her black tights. In the left heel of one pair she feels the small glass bottle. Glancing over her shoulder, trying to listen for the sound of the nurses’ rubber shoes squeaking across the tile, Helen rolls the bottle out of the tights, unscrews the cap, and gets to her feet.
    If Leah were in her right state of mind, she would never drink this elixir of healing herbs. Helen knows this; thatis why she must work fast. Leaning over the hospital bed, Helen whispers, “Open your mouth, Dochder .”
    Leah, always complaisant about