The Amish Midwife - By Mindy Starns Clark Page 0,50

heard she was ill again.”

“I hadn’t heard,” Marta said. “I’ll have to ask Klara.” Marta started toward the back door, but Will kept talking.

“Who is this?” He was looking at me now.

“My assistant,” Marta answered, her hand on the doorknob.

I stepped forward and extended my hand. “Lexie Jaeger.”

“I’m pleased to meet you.” His shake was firm. “So you’re a relative of Marta’s?”

My eyes popped wide. Why would he assume that?

Marta answered quickly. “She’s from Oregon.”

“W-why do you say that?” I stammered at the same time.

He shifted the girls higher in his arms and they squealed again. “Well, for being Englisch you look like—”

Marta interrupted him. “We need to go.”

“Like who?” My voice was loud.

Will glanced at Marta and then at me. He opened his mouth, but then Alice swooped into our half circle and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Marta needs to get home,” she said. The next moment we were out the door.

In the car, I tried to get Marta to talk. “Whom do I look like?” I asked.

“Will was just making conversation.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Ella mistook me for someone else the first time she saw me.”

“Well, I’ve said this before. She’s a fanciful girl.” She backed the car around and started toward the highway.

“What is Klara and Alexander’s child’s name?” I asked.

She didn’t answer me.

“Marta?”

“Ada,” she finally said. “Her name is Ada.”

I asked why Will referred to her as Klara and Alexander’s only joy.

“She’s their only child,” Marta said.

“Klara couldn’t have any more?”

“Something like that,” she answered. She turned onto the highway in the opposite direction of her home and said she needed to stop by the store. She seemed distracted, more than usual. I had my nose to the window, taking in the countryside. We passed a farmhouse that was just a few feet from the road and then a stucco schoolhouse with a bell in the tower. The children had all gone home. “Did you see Christy?” I asked, still looking out the window.

Marta shook her head. “Alice said she’s having a hard time, but she needs to accept that her mother is gone and move on.”

My back stiffened. What did Marta know about losing a mother? Hers was still alive and well, while Christy’s and mine had been taken from us far too soon. In many ways, I knew the child would never get over such a fundamental loss. Certainly, I hadn’t.

“What’s wrong with Ada?” I asked, trying to keep the anger from my voice.

“She has hereditary spherocytosis.”

“Pardon?”

“Abnormally shaped blood cells. It causes hemolytic anemia.”

That I had heard of. Not great, but at least it wasn’t life threatening. “So she has transfusions? For treatment, right? And she has to be careful not to rupture her spleen?”

Marta nodded.

“Did they catch it when she was little?”

“Not until she was twenty. She’d always been sickly, but it took them a while to figure out what it was.”

“Does anyone else in the family have it?” I asked.

“Not that we know of.”

We rode in silence for a few minutes, me thinking about what all might be in my genes that I had no idea about and then about the past that I had no idea about, either. I wanted Marta to bring up Amielbach without being asked, but I knew the chances of that were thin. Finally I said, “It’s time to pay the piper.”

“Later, when we are home.”

“Might be better to talk here in the car, where the kids can’t eavesdrop.”

She didn’t respond to that as she slowed for a carriage just ahead. Two little boys, preschool age, peeked over the back end of it. Both wore black hats, and one held a baseball in his hand. I turned my attention to the fields. A lane appeared, then a silo, and then a barn. For some reason, my pulse quickened. Then I saw the house, off to the side in a stand of pine trees.

“Stop,” I said, rolling down the window and reaching for my camera in the pocket of my jacket.

The house wasn’t anything spectacular. It certainly wasn’t Amielbach. It was white, like so many other Old Order Amish houses, but it had a balcony on the second floor. A balcony that somehow seemed familiar.

Marta appeared not to have heard me.

“Please stop!” I said, this time louder.

Instead she pulled around the horse and carriage and sped away.

TWELVE

It was no surprise that Marta marched in the direction of her office as soon as she parked her car, leaving the gallon of milk and the bag