Hidden Mercies Read online

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  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Reading Group Guide

  About Serena B. Miller

  To Jacob “Wingman” Miller

  IT specialist

  Thank you, Son, for your limitless patience.

  Acknowledgments

  Deep gratitude to:

  Dr. Elton Lehman: 1998 Country Doctor of the Year, who led the Amish community in building the Holmes County, Mt. Eaton Care Center—a freestanding birthing center for Amish and Mennonite women. Thank you for taking the time to talk with me about your work.

  Katie Weaver: Lancaster County–trained Amish midwife. Your forty years of service to your people is an inspiration. As you said, “Childbirth is a holy thing.”

  Ivan Weaver: For supporting your wife’s ministry, and for taking the time to teach us about your faith.

  Mabel and Effie Miller, Old Order Amish sisters: For allowing me to share your poetry with my Amy.

  Stephanie Miller and Marybeth Coriell, labor and delivery nurses: For taking the time to brainstorm, share your medical knowledge, and proofread.

  Sandra L. Hess: For the in-depth information about your work as a certified professional midwife.

  Lisa Morrison: For your prayers and allowing me to borrow your brilliant, eccentric horse, Copycat, for a few pages.

  Tim Finley: For sharing your expertise about horses.

  Jack Davis, Colonel United States Marine Corps, retired: For looking out for my two civilian kids when they were living in Hiroshima, patiently answering my questions, and for a lifetime of service to our country.

  Remember not the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions: according to your mercy, remember thou me for thy goodness’ sake, Oh Lord.

  —PSALMS 25:7 (KJV)

  Prologue

  In the seventeen years Claire Keim had been on this earth, she had seen only one movie—a horror film. It gave her nightmares for weeks. Her Rumspringa, her “running around” time, began and ended in one miserable night spent at the movie theater in the company of Englisch friends.

  Yes, Claire had only seen one horror film—but at the moment, she felt like she was living in one.

  “Where is that boy?” Aunt Beulah, hard of hearing and apparently under the impression that she was whispering to Claire’s mother, was shouting the very question that was on everyone’s mind.

  Where on earth was her groom?

  Enough food had been prepared to feed upward of three hundred people. Chickens, butchered at her uncle’s farm, had been cooked to tender goodness. At the moment, carefully made stuffing baked in the ovens. Vats of potatoes boiled on the stoves, ready to be mashed by the dozens of women who, in order to finish preparing the food, would voluntarily miss the wedding that was to start in—Claire glanced at her mother’s kitchen clock—that was scheduled to start right now!

  She gazed out the living room window, willing Matthew to hurry up. From her vantage point, she could see the sea of black buggies that flooded her father’s hay field. Two white sixteen-passenger vans, noticeably out of place, sat among them, hired to bring relatives all the way from upper New York State.

  All of these people sacrificing time and money to get here now milled around the Keim farm. Some, ignorant of the fact that the groom had not yet arrived, were already seating themselves on the benches in the barn. From the window, she could see them through the maw of her father’s dark red barn, men and women demurely facing one another. Waiting.

  Her parents, not wealthy by any means, had sold some of the timber from the back of their farm in order to pay for this wedding. It was a sacrifice worth making, her mother said.

  It was a sacrifice worth making. That is, assuming the groom ever showed up!

  She intended to be a gute Frau, a good and obedient wife, but before the day was over, Matthew would be hearing her thoughts on being left to worry about whether or not he would come to his own wedding!

  A clear, early-morning October sun broke through the fog, promising a lovely day. The threat of rain that had kept her awake all night had lifted.

  She did not think she needed all that teaching in order to become a faithful wife to Matthew. A life without him was unimaginable. Even when they were apart, she spent every waking minute thinking about him. She knew they were going to have a wonderful future together. How could she not have a wonderful future with Matthew as a husband?

  To an outsider, she would have looked like any other Amish girl; but this morning, she felt like a princess. Her dress was brand-new, handmade for this occasion by her grandmother, who had insisted on sewing it for her in spite of arthritic hands.

  “Has that oldest boy of Jeremiah’s run off?” Aunt Beulah shouted into her mother’s ear, and thereby to everyone else sitting in the living room lined with older women. “What did he do, head back West? I told you those two were too young to get married.”

  Claire’s face grew hot. The wall clock, which struck a chime every fifteen minutes, announced to everyone in the room that Matthew was now a full fifteen minutes late to his own Hochzeit.

  This was unheard of. He should have been here before dawn helping her father, brothers, and uncles set up the church benches in the barn and taking care of any other last-minute things that needed to be done.

  Matthew’s father, a widower, was the most punctual man in their church, but he was not yet here, either. Nor was Matthew’s brother, Tobias, or his little sister, Faye. It was not like Matthew’s family to be late. Their buggy was always the first to show up on Sunday mornings.

  “I’m going to saddle Pansy and ride over to their house to see what’s holding them.” Claire’s older brother, Eli, patted her on the shoulder. “Someone should make certain they have not been in an accident.”

  “Thank you.” Claire gave her brother’s hand a squeeze. “I will pray that nothing bad has happened.”

  Claire dutifully did pray that everyone in Matthew’s family was safe and sound, but in her heart she was beginning to wonder, along with Aunt Beulah, if Matthew had run off.

  They had not gone together all that long. Their Swartzentruber church did not approve of long courtships, and with good reason—too mu
ch temptation. Could it be that Matthew had changed his mind? Could it possibly be that he had gone back West, to that ranch he had worked at last year? Sometimes his voice held a note of longing when he spoke of the great open spaces he had seen in Montana. Had she made a mistake in trusting him?

  There had never been, in the collective knowledge of the people of their church, a groom who was late for his own wedding. She knew that to be a fact because Beulah, not only the deafest but also the oldest woman in their church, had just now trumpeted that particular piece of information to her mother.

  The kitchen clock struck nine o’clock. The comfortable chatter that usually swirled around a bride died out. People were silent now, as the awful realization that something had gone terribly wrong settled over everyone. Claire saw one of her uncles take out his pocket watch and check the time.

  Claire’s twin sister, Rose, put her arm around her waist. “Henry is not here either,” Rose said. “I’m worried about him as well.”

  Until this moment, Claire had not noticed that Henry, the boy who was courting Rose, had not arrived. He was supposed to stand up with them as a witness to her and Matthew’s wedding.

  Not for the first time, Claire wished their people were allowed to have a telephone shanty near their home. The liberal Old Order Amish thought nothing of having a telephone at the end of their driveway. Not her people, though. The Swartzentrubers would have excommunicated any member who attempted such a thing.

  She stiffened. A lone rider, bent low, galloped toward her house. It was Matthew! He had come!

  She ran out into the yard to greet him, overjoyed. Perhaps the ministers could shorten their sermons a bit so that everyone’s dinner would not be late. She would soon be a married woman after all!

  But it was not Matthew. It was Benjamin, a young neighbor of the Troyers, who leaped off the slavering horse.

  “There’s been an accident,” he said. “The state patrol was just at the Troyer house. Jeremiah and Faye have gone to the hospital. Tobias and Henry are injured, and Matthew is”—he gulped for breath and her heart stopped—“Matthew is . . . gone.”

  “Matthew is gone? Where did he go?”

  “He’s . . . gone.” Ben fidgeted, looking around at the crowd forming around them. “He was racing a new horse of Henry’s and now he’s dead. I don’t know anything else.”

  “How badly hurt is my Henry?” Rose asked.

  “I don’t know. All they said was that it was bad.”

  Rose burst into tears.

  Claire stared at her sister, wondering why she was crying. Certainly Rose knew that this was nothing more than a bad wedding joke. Matthew’s friends loved playing pranks. No doubt they had “kidnapped” Matthew early this morning just to tease her. She smiled, relieved to have a reasonable explanation for Matthew’s absence. In fact, if she knew Henry, he was probably at the bottom of this. Sometimes Henry took things a little too far. “Ben, go tell Henry and the others that this isn’t funny,” she said. “And tell him it’s time to bring Matthew back. The bishop isn’t going to be happy about this, and neither are my parents.”

  Ben looked at her and she saw real pity in his eyes. Oh, he was a good pretender, he was!

  There was a long, long silence among the people grouped around her. She kept waiting for Ben to burst into laughter and for Matthew and Henry to come walking around the corner of the barn, but not one person moved. They all seemed to be waiting for something. Even Rose had quit crying and was now looking at her, puzzled.

  Claire glanced around at her friends. She realized that she was the only one smiling. A knot began to form in the pit of her stomach.

  “Henry!” she yelled. “You stop this right now! You bring Matthew out from wherever you’re hiding him. I have worked too hard on this wedding for you to spoil it with your tricks!”

  Once again there was nothing but silence. Many of her friends were staring at the ground. News had somehow traveled all the way up to the women preparing food, and they had stopped their work beneath the kitchen canopy. Everything seemed frozen in time.

  “It is not a joke, Claire,” Ben said. “With all my heart, I wish it was.”

  This comment infuriated her. How dare he continue to pretend about this! She had never realized before that Ben had such a streak of cruelty in him.

  “Where is he?” She grabbed the front of his shirt in both hands and began to shake him. “Where is my Matthew? What have you done with him?”

  Two hands grabbed hold of her and pulled her away from Ben. “Calm yourself, child,” Bishop Weaver said, and gave her a slight shake. “The Lord has promised not to give you more than you can bear.”

  That was the moment she knew Ben’s words were true. Bishop Weaver was the most humorless person she had ever known. He would never agree to be part of such a prank. This was not a joke. The unthinkable had happened. Her glorious, laughing, beautiful Matthew was dead.

  Unlike Rose, Claire did not cry. Her emotions were too deep and tangled for her to be able to cry.

  One of the Englisch van drivers volunteered to take her and Rose to the hospital. As he drove off, she pressed her face to the window and saw the women starting the process of putting the food away. There would be no wedding feast today. Instead, the stalwart people of their church would begin preparations for a funeral.

  chapter ONE

  Twenty-seven years later . . .

  Time had slowed to a crawl for Captain Tom Miller. The minute hand on the hospital clock seemed to take forever to make it around the clockface. Finally the big hand hit eight o’clock, and he congratulated himself for having made it through another hour. The almost imperceptible tick-tick-tick of the clock had become a constant companion, ticking away the seconds of his life.

  The nurse kept her eyes averted as she fussed with taking the lids off the various containers of his breakfast tray. He didn’t blame her. There was a mirror on the underside of his bed tray. He had seen the damage. If he were her, he would keep his eyes averted, too.

  Evidently it had fallen on her to feed him today. She must have drawn the short straw.

  “The weather?” His voice was raspy. Inhaling the heat from the explosion had caused damage.

  The nurses had learned to have the answer ready to that question before they came through the door in the morning. The weather had become a small obsession with him. It reassured him that the outdoors still existed.

  “Cold and snowy,” she said.

  “How cold?” he asked. “How snowy?”

  “Maybe four or five inches fell overnight,” she said. “I don’t know the exact temperature, but it was so cold this morning, I had to wear my heaviest coat.”

  From his room at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, he could see the sky . . . but only the sky. There had been a heavy layer of nimbostratus clouds yesterday evening, and he had silently predicted that there would be anywhere from three to six inches of snow accumulation before morning. It gave him a small feeling of pride that he had predicted correctly. A man didn’t spend as many hours in the air as he had without being able to read the clouds.

  “We have some yummy peach yogurt today.”

  The nurse was young. She had no idea how emasculating the word yummy sounded to him. He shoved his pride down as she tucked a napkin beneath his chin. He was forty-four years old. A captain in the U.S. Marines. A decorated war hero. He had been trained to withstand torture and avoid capture, and had the skills to escape if incarcerated. The one thing necessary to his survival that he had not been taught was how to keep his ego intact while being fed like a baby.

  His hands were still bandaged from instinctively shielding his face when the bomb detonated. His body was covered with multiple shrapnel wounds, and he’d had reconstructive surgery on his left jaw and cheekbone.

  “Do you want a sip of milk?” The nurse opened a carton and inserted a straw into it.

  Actually, he would prefer a cup of hot, black coffee, but that was not an option. The chances of getti
ng scalded by some clumsy nurse were too great, and he refused to sip his coffee through a straw. Instead, he swallowed the milk and waited for a spoonful of—what was it she’d said? Peach yogurt?

  Good grief.

  Eggs and bacon would have been his first choice. Fried crisp. The eggs scrambled in real butter. Half a loaf of homemade bread, toasted, with a pot of his mother’s good strawberry jam. Now, that would be a breakfast, but until his throat healed, he was reduced to eating only those things that were easy to swallow.

  The nurse glanced over her shoulder at the silent television hanging on the wall. “Do you want me to turn it on for you?”

  He had been asked that question so many times.

  “No.”

  “It would make time go faster.”

  “No.”

  She shrugged and scraped the last bit of yogurt from the plastic container. “Suit yourself.”

  The television had been blaring when he first came to this room. At the time, his throat had not healed enough to tell them to turn it off. He had lain there, fighting against the most intense pain he had ever felt, wondering if he would live, wondering if he wanted to live, while being forced to listen to the canned laughter of some silly sitcom when nothing was funny.

  The first whispered, raspy words out of his mouth had been “Turn that thing OFF!”

  Post-traumatic stress disorder. That’s what the hospital shrink called it. PTSD.

  He didn’t buy it.

  In his opinion, PTSD was one of those catchphrase mental illnesses that the medical establishment used to pigeonhole and categorize people. Wrap up all the pain, shove it into a neat file folder, and tie it up with a bow.

  Oh, that guy? The one with all the bandages. The one sensitive to noise. He has PTSD. Classic symptoms. Understandable under the circumstances. Okay, next patient.

  He did not believe that he had PTSD. What he had was a perfectly reasonable desire for quiet. Raised voices, canned laughter, stupid commercials—noise of any kind made his nerves fizz with anxiety and irritation.