The Amish Midwife - By Mindy Starns Clark Page 0,124

was two, I was living on the other side of the country. How could I possibly have been here when my baby sister was being born? I said as much to Marta now, but she didn’t reply at first. Instead, she just watched me as I thought it through. Finally, the truth hit me like a slam of ice water against my chest, knocking me breathless.

“I wasn’t given away as an infant,” I whispered. “I lived here longer than that.”

Marta nodded. “You lived here until you were two and a half. Then you went away.”

I was dumbfounded. This knowledge generated a flood of new questions, which I began throwing out to Marta now. She shook her head, pursed her lips, and looked out the side window, refusing to answer a single one. Wanting to throttle her, to scream, to pound my fists, instead I gripped the steering wheel and kept my eyes on the road, not responding to Marta or speaking all the way back to the cottage.

As we turned into the driveway, I could feel my anger slowly melting into something else entirely, a deep and overwhelming grief. By the time I parked the car, tears were coursing down my cheeks. Once inside, upstairs in the alcove, I buried myself under the covers and sobbed, not caring who heard me or what they might be thinking.

The lie in Marta’s words pierced my very soul: Then you went away. How wrong she was. I hadn’t merely gone away. I had been sent away. Banished. Ripped from the only home and family I had ever known, not as a relatively unknowing infant but as a little girl. A little two-year-old girl. The more I thought about it, the more I cried.

At one point, Sean called and asked if I wanted to go to Baltimore with him the next day, but I squeaked out a quick, “No, thank you,” and gave no other explanation. He sounded annoyed as he said goodbye.

Finally, I dozed a little, but then I was woken by my Realtor, who called to say she’d had an offer on the house and orchard. I took a deep breath and asked how long I had to make a decision. “Customarily a day,” she answered.

“I need three.” She acquiesced but sounded annoyed too. I began to sob again as I closed my cell phone.

An hour later James called. I could barely speak, I was crying so hard. I babbled out what Marta had told me. “I wasn’t adopted until I was two. Why didn’t Mama and Dad ever tell me?” I felt so betrayed. All along I’d imagined myself as a newborn in their arms. Not a toddler. No wonder they had kept my name.

Instead of being the size of Elizabeth Alice, I’d been the size of Melanie and Matty. I’d been with Giselle until then. I must have felt as if Mammi had given me away—or as if Mama and Dad had kidnapped me. I fell into another round of sobs.

“I’m coming out,” James said.

“No. You can’t. You have school.” I took a deep breath. I didn’t want him ruining his education because of me. “I’m all right. Just talk to me. Tell me what you’ve been learning.”

“Well,” he spoke slowly. “I’ve been praying about things a lot, and I know what I need to do.” He laughed a little. “I don’t know what you should do. And I don’t know what we should do. I just know what I need to do.”

I heard the clicking of a keyboard in the background. No doubt he was writing a paper as we talked. That was something James could actually do. “What do you need to do?” I asked.

“Pray every day. And trust God.”

That brought on a fresh round of tears, and then I told him how, when Caroline was so sick, I felt God tuck me in at night, how I felt Him close after so many years of not. But now He felt far away again.

“Know He’s close,” James said. “Right beside you. And He has been all this time.” The clicking stopped. “I’ll pray He tucks you in again tonight.”

I didn’t feel God’s presence that night, nor the next day when the tears kept coming. James must have told Sophie what was going on, though, because I had a text from her asking how I was. I sent a message back, asking why she’d never told me I was two when I was adopted. It wasn’t my place, she