be happy to listen.”
To her surprise, he nodded slowly. When he spoke of his nephew, his reserve fell away. “I was in the kitchen when it happened. I was with Hannah—she’s Jonah’s big sister. We were just washing up after breakfast. I could see him across the field working at the neighbor’s silo, and everything seemed to be going just fine. He’s helped fill silo dozens of times. All kids pitch in with chores. Then I guess I got busy with something else, and a bit later, the neighbor came running over, said there’d been an accident.” His hand curled into a fist. “The way they told it, something got hung up in the shredding machine. Jonah was trying to push a stalk through when the blades caught him. It all happened fast. Real fast.”
Reese kept her gaze fixed on the red and blue monitor lights that gave a constant readout of Jonah’s vital signs. She was beginning to understand that even a boy Jonah’s age played a vital role on a family farm. He had lost more, perhaps, than a non-Amish boy.
And suddenly her cheeks felt hot with a deep sense of outrage. With all due respect to the Amish ways, she seriously questioned the practice of letting a boy do the work of a man. She wondered if there would be any further investigation, if Caleb would be questioned for putting a child at risk.
Then she bit her lip to keep herself from speaking out. Now was not the time and she was not the one to judge or comment. She reminded herself of the things she’d learned in her medical compassion classes. Even after the worst of accidents, a doctor must never point the finger of blame at the patient, or at any friend or family member. That was the role of social services. And more often than not, an accident was exactly that—an accident. In her ER rotation, she’d seen any number of adored, protected children who’d suffered accidents. A bad landing in a gymnastics competition. A cupboard door slammed on a finger. A fall down the stairs.
Guilt was a powerful force. It didn’t need any help from an outsider. No doubt Caleb Stoltz was feeling plenty guilty already.
Glancing sideways at him, she noticed the tension in his clenched fists and angular face, and in the way he held his neck and shoulders. She tried to imagine the sudden shock of an ordinary day turning into a nightmare.
Finally he spoke again from a place of deep anguish; she could hear it straining his voice. “I yelled at him this morning,” he said in a quiet, flat tone. “I yelled at him for teasing his sister. I told him to get on over to the neighbors’ to fill silo.”
“What would you have done if he hadn’t been teasing his sister?”
Caleb looked down at his fisted hands and flexed them open. “I would have sent him over to the neighbors’ to fill silo,” he conceded.
“Then you can probably quit trying to claim responsibility for an accident. As awful as this is, you should understand that things like this happen.”
“I’m his guardian. I love this boy more than my own life. But I failed him. I didn’t keep him safe.”
“Don’t keep torturing yourself about Jonah’s accident,” she said, though she knew words of comfort didn’t always allay the guilt. “Lots of people seem to do that in the ER, and it’s not helpful. Things happen. It’s awful, but the only choice is to go on.” An idea occurred to her. The Amish were a people of deep, abiding faith—or so she assumed, since they had created an entire way of life around it. “I’m sorry, I don’t know much about your church. If you’d like to pray, there’s a chapel.”
“I’m not a prayerful man.”
She was surprised to hear him say that, having assumed his faith was what bound him to the Amish community. Not a prayerful man … and behind his reserved expression she detected a peculiar sadness. He represented a world so different from her own. She wondered what that world was like.
He stood unexpectedly close, and his nearness flustered her in a way she wasn’t prepared for. She detected no danger from him, it wasn’t quite like that; yet she felt something profoundly physical that she hadn’t experienced in a long time, maybe ever. And something spiritual as well; yearning mingled with hope, as though he represented a long-buried desire. Despite her exhaustion and the fact that she had canceled dinner plans with her parents for his sake, despite the fact that she had a policy against connecting too closely with a patient or his family, she felt drawn to this man with a strange affinity that was more than curiosity. When she looked at him, a gentle, peaceful feeling settled over her. Her vital signs seemed to slow down; the relentless pressures of the ER ebbed away.
She wished the social services counselor or someone from the chaplain’s staff—anybody—would show up. She left another message at the extension on the house phone.
The charge nurse came in to do a routine check on Jonah. Though she worked swiftly and efficiently, Reese could see her sneaking glances at Caleb Stoltz. Women seemed to stare at him the way people stared at a work of art, or an exhibit at the zoo. He appeared to have no notion of the feminine interest he sparked. Negligently handsome, with a body sculpted by hard, honest work, he looked far more intriguing than the doctors and staff who populated the halls of Mercy Heights.
She shared a look with the nurse and realized they understood each other perfectly.
Oh, for fuck’s sake. What on earth was she thinking? Hospital fatigue must be getting to her. Maybe she was experiencing some sort of end-of-rotation ennui. She had absolutely nothing in common with an Amish farmer. Maybe, though, the unbreachable differences between them actually piqued her interest. She found him as exotic and baffling as he seemed to find the big-city hospital.
She tamped down a barrage of nosy questions. Her schedule was crammed, and she needed to sleep at some point. It was time, past time, to move on, to re-establish that professional distance. “Well,” she said, unsettled by her own thoughts, “I should go.” She made a point of checking Jonah’s chart. “Your nephew’s stable but still critical,” she said.
Caleb pressed himself as close to the bed as he could get. He eyed the bandaged stump of Jonah’s arm, and the look on his face made Reese’s heart freeze.
“I’m sure in the next few days, you’ll learn a lot more about the therapy and prosthetics I mentioned,” she tried to reassure him. “Really, Jonah will be able to live a normal life.”
He was silent for so long that she wasn’t certain he’d heard her. Then he looked up. “What’s a normal life?”
“I suppose it’s different for everyone. Jonah will have to find the answer on his own.”
“That’s a big question for a little boy.”
Another long silence. Reese had no idea what more to say. She was rescued from having to respond when someone from the chaplain’s staff stepped in. She said a reluctant farewell, and on her way out she took a shortcut across the skybridge that led to the maternity ward, which was called, not incidentally, the Powell Pavilion. It had been named in honor of her grandfather, a pioneer in human fertility in his day. She had a thought of her parents and their high-stakes, high-tech world, playing God and bringing miracles to life. What would Caleb Stoltz think of doctors whose daily work involved chemically freezing a woman’s uterus to force her to conceive?
And why should she care what he thought?
When Reese got to her apartment that night, she stepped inside, locked the
