The Hope of Refuge Page 3

  Her attention shifted to the diary resting on her arm. Maybe the faded words her mother had written to her more than twenty years ago had kept her from seeking men or drugs to help numb the ache inside her—maybe not. But she’d read the beautiful entries ten thousand times over the years and couldn’t separate herself from the woman her mother hoped she’d become.

  A middle-school teacher once said that Cara’s mother’s diary sparked her love of dissecting books for understanding. It probably had, and she was a good student, but then life changed, and books and schooling faded in comparison to survival knowledge. That’s where Kendal came in.

  As one thought strung to another, Cara realized somewhere inside her, beyond her fear and jumbled thoughts, it hurt for Kendal to give up the way she had. No last-minute message of encouragement for either her or Lori. No whisper of wanting to meet up once Cara worked free of Mike again. Just a final good-bye. And after she’d packed and hailed a taxi.

  The numbness gave way to grief, and in some odd way that Cara couldn’t understand, it seemed right to be inside this place—the building where her father had abandoned her.

  “Mom,” Lori elongated the word, half whining and half demanding, “I want to know where we’re going.”

  Cara thought for a moment. They needed to get out of the city, but their traveling funds were limited. “Jersey, I think. We’re fine and safe, so no worrying, okay?” The words didn’t leave her mouth easily.

  She had no real answers. But she knew one thing—any life she could give Lori would be immeasurably better than foster care, where she’d have to live with strangers who were paid to pretend they cared.

  It seemed unfair that Cara had spent all her life trying to be good, always aiming to live in a way her dead mother would be proud of, just to fall victim to Mike’s power to find her time and again. Maybe that’s what had made her and Lori an easy target for him.

  Regardless of whatever she needed to do—lie, cheat, or steal—no one was separating her from her daughter.

  Needing a few moments to think, she moved to an empty table outside Au Bon Pain. She opened her diary and thumbed through it, looking for signs of a life she wasn’t sure ever existed. The frayed leather binding and bulging pages were hints to how much she loved this book. She didn’t write everyday stuff in it. This book was used mostly for sharing things between mom and daughter—first her and her mother and now her and Lori. It made her sick to think of Mike reading her mother’s thoughts and hopes for her, the special things they’d done, and Cara’s most treasured memories with Lori.

  Standing in front of him less than an hour ago, she’d envisioned rows of tall corn, heard a boy’s laughter, and remembered feeling welcomed by an old woman in a black apron and white head covering. But her treasured journal revealed none of it. Why?

  Lori pulled a baggie of stale cookies from her backpack—the kind that had ingredients dogs shouldn’t eat, but they were tasty enough and were always able to remove the worst of the hunger. With Mike probably watching and waiting outside her apartment—maybe inside it—she and Lori would leave New York with the clothes they were wearing, whatever that schoolbag held, and the diary.

  Cara flipped page after page, skimming the entries written by her mother. She’d had this book since she was younger than Lori. With one exception every available spot had been written on. Each line had two rows of writing squeezed in. The margins were filled with tiny words and drawings. Even the insides of the book’s covers were written on. There were places where she’d taped and stapled clean paper onto existing pages before filling them with words too. Only one spot, about three inches high and four inches long, remained blank.

  Her mothers instructions written above that space told her never to write in that spot but to remember. A sadness she’d grown to hate moved into her chest as she read her mother’s words.

  Don’t write inside the area I’ve marked. When the time is right, my beloved one, I’ll fill in the blank.

  Beloved one. The phrase twisted her insides as it’d done for what seemed like forever. Had her mother ever loved her like it sounded?

  Obviously her mother couldn’t fulfill her plan, and Cara had no recollection of what she might have been talking about. According to the date on the entry, her mother wrote those words when Cara was five. She raised her head and skimmed her index finger over the spot.

  Demanding the emotional nonsense to cease, she buried her head in her hands, trying to gain control of her feelings.

  Lori smacked her palm on the blank spot of the diary. “What’s that?”

  Cara brushed off the specks of cookie that’d fallen from her daughter’s hand onto the page. “An empty place my mother said not to write in.”

  “Why?”

  Cara shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Can I sign my name there?”

  She hesitated for a moment before sliding the book toward Lori. “Sure, why not?”

  Lori dug into her book bag and came up with a pencil. She began trying to write in cursive. At seven, Lori’s marks were more swirls than real letters. Cara eyed the few leftover cookies, but she refused to eat one. Money was limited, and Lori might need those before Cara found another job.

  The good thing about waitressing was it came with immediate money. She’d have to wait for her paycheck, but she’d make tips the very day she started. Time and again the need for immediate food money after they moved kept her waitressing—that and the fact that being a tenth-grade dropout didn’t qualify her for much. But she was capable of more. She knew that. Her school years had proved it. Got great grades, skipped the third grade, and always landed at the top of her classes. But she’d probably never get a chance to prove she wasn’t who others thought—a poor quitter with no potential.

  “Mom, look!”

  Cara glanced while closing the baggie of cookies. Her daughter had given up on cursive and made a thick, double-edged L. Then she’d filled the middle part with light sketching. “Very pretty, Lori.”

  “No, Mom, look.”

  She moved the book closer, seeing that letters had shown up under the shading.

  “Oh, that’s from words written on the opposite page.” She slid the book to Lori.

  The time is long past, my beloved… Like a whisper, her mother’s voice floated into her mind from nowhere.

  “Wait, Lori. Stop writing.” Cara pulled the book in front of her. Through the light gray coloring of pencil, she saw part of a word. “Let me see your pencil for a minute.”

  “No.” Lori jerked the book away from her. “It’s my spot. You said so.”

  Cara resisted the desire to overreact. “Okay. You’re right. I gave it to you.” She placed the cookies into the backpack and zipped it up. “If you look at the date on that entry, you can see that I was a couple of years younger than you are now when your grandma wrote that.” She pointed to the words her mother had written above the blank space. “Maybe it’s nothing. Or maybe your grandma hid a secret in the diary. But… if you’d rather write your name…”

  Lori pulled the book closer, inspecting the blank space. “You think she wanted to tell me something?”

  “No, kiddo. How could she? She didn’t know you. But we should still figure out what she wrote.”

  Lori’s brows furrowed. “Let’s do it together.”

  Cara nodded. “Good idea. We need to run the pencil over the whole area very, very lightly or we might scratch out the message rather than make it visible.”

  Lori passed her the pencil. “I already went first. It’s your turn.”

  Relieved, Cara took the pencil and began lightly rubbing the lead over the page. Words that had been there since before her mother died suddenly appeared on the page. It looked like an address. The street numbers were hidden under the heavy-handedness of her daughter’s artwork, but the road, town, and state were clear.

  Mast Road, Dry Lake, Pennsylvania

  “What’s it say, Mom?”

  Hope trickled in, and te
ars stung her eyes. Lori had no one but her, a single mom who’d been an orphan. She had no support system. She wanted… no, she ached to give Lori some sort of life connections, a relative or friend of Cara’s mother, something that spoke of the things life was supposed to be made of—worthy relationships. Maybe this was the answer. It had to be better than Jersey. “It says where we’re going.”

  “Where’s that?”

  Cara closed the book. “As close to Dry Lake, Pennsylvania, as a bus route goes.” She put the backpack over one shoulder and held her hand out for Lori. “You discovered a secret I didn’t know was there. Come on. We’ve got bus tickets to buy.”

  In a blur of confusion and fears, Cara bought tickets to Shippensburg, Pennsylvania. The man at the ticket counter said they were heading for the heart of Amish country. When she shrugged, he told her they were easy to spot—wore clothing that looked like something from the eighteen hundreds and traveled by horse and buggy.

  With the tickets in hand, they boarded one bus, rode for hours, had a long delay at another station, and then boarded another bus. Now it was night again. Between purchasing bus tickets and food, she had little money left. The uncertainty scared her, and it stole all sense of victory for getting free of Mike and discovering the long-held secret in her diary.

  While Lori slept, Cara studied each passing town, hoping something would look familiar.

  Hours of light mist turned into pelting rain, making it difficult to see the landmarks. Her eyelids ached with heaviness. She blinked hard and sat up straighter, concentrating on each thing they passed.

  Spattering drops smacked the window endlessly. She wiped the fog from the glass, studying the water-colored world. As the bus pulled into a Kmart parking lot, the bus driver said, “Shippensburg. Shippensburg, Pennsylvania.”

  A peculiar feeling crawled over her. An elderly woman stood and made her way to the front of the bus.

  The idea of waking Lori from a safe, dry sleep to enter a rainy, unknown world was ridiculous. She had a few dollars left. Maybe she could pay to ride farther.

  “Shippensburg?” The driver looked in the rearview mirror, giving each passenger a chance to get off.

  She clutched the armrests, assuring herself any good mother would stay put. When the doors to the bus began to close, Cara jumped to her feet, signaling her intention to get off here.

  She stuffed her diary into Lori’s backpack and lifted her sleeping child into her arms. She stopped next to the bus driver. “Any idea how to get to Dry Lake?”

  “Follow this road for a few blocks.” He pointed in front of the bus. “When you get to Earl Street, go right. It’ll be about six miles.”

  “Thanks.”

  “There’s a nice motel straight ahead, Shippen Place Hotel. Only hotel I know of near here.”

  “Thanks.” Cold rain stung her face as she stepped off the bus. Since she didn’t have enough money for a fancy hotel, she’d have to find somewhere free to stay for the night.

  Lori lifted her head off Cara’s shoulder, instantly whining. “No, Mom. I want to go home.”

  “Shh.” Cara eased Lori’s head against her shoulder and placed the backpack against her little girl’s cheek, trying to shield her from the rain. “Listen, kid, you’ve got to trust me. Remember?”

  Lori wrapped her little hands around the back of Cara’s neck, whimpering. Within seconds her daughter fell asleep again, deaf to the sound of the rain beating a pattern against her backpack like a tapping on a door.

  Through the window behind the kitchen sink, Deborah watched as broad streaks of sunlight broke through the remaining thick clouds. She continued slicing large hunks of stew meat into bite-size pieces—all the while her mind on Mahlon.

  Since her birthday the day before yesterday, she and Mahlon had made the rounds throughout the district, telling their family and friends about their plans to marry in the fall. She didn’t think she’d ever had so much fun as they’d had Thursday night, popping into homes to share good news. Nothing would be announced officially until October when the bishop “published” all the couples who were to be married. He’d make a declaration of everyone who would marry that wedding season, but they had to make plans long before then. And she’d ordered an engagement present for Mahlon—one she’d spent a year saving for. She’d give it to him just as soon as her order arrived at the dry goods store.

  Her heart raced with anticipation of the coming months. She tossed the freshly cut stew meat into a skillet to brown before she began washing the breakfast dishes. The desire to get done with her morning chores and go to Mahlon’s pushed her to hurry. Beds were made, laundry washed and hung out to dry, and she and Becca had cooked breakfast for the family. The items left on her to-do list grew smaller by the hour. Mahlon had taken off work until after lunchtime today so they could start on their plans, and she didn’t want to waste a minute of it.

  Becca walked into the kitchen, carrying a twin on each hip. Her round, rosy cheeks gave her an appearance of sturdy health. As her brown hair gave way to more and more gray and she picked up a few extra pounds with each pregnancy she no longer looked like the much-younger second wife of twelve years ago. She looked like and felt like a mom to a large, ever-growing family.

  “How many houses do you and Mahlon have lined up to look at today?” Becca placed Sadie and Sally behind the safety gate of their playroom before moving to the stove.

  “There are only two inside Dry Lake. Maybe three, because there’s one that belongs to Englischers that might fall inside our district lines.”

  She lifted the lid off the meat and stirred it with a spatula. “Ya? Where’s that one?”

  “About half a mile from Mahlon’s place.”

  “On the right or left?”

  “Left. Their last name is Everson.”

  She shrugged. “That might be Yoder’s district. If it is, they have their church Sundays on our between Sundays. It’ll make finding time to visit with your family harder. Your Daed won’t like that.”

  “Ya, I know. Mahlon’s determined to find a place in Dry Lake, but he said we may have to settle for something in Yoder’s district.”

  “Do you like that home more than the others?”

  Deborah dried her hands. “It doesn’t matter to me where we live.” She went to the refrigerator and pulled out carrots, onions, and potatoes. “I’d be perfectly content to move into the home where he and Ada live now.”

  “It’s small, but it seems like that’d be a great place to start out.” Becca turned the eye to the stove to low, poured a quart of water over the meat, and replaced the lid on the skillet.

  Deborah rinsed the carrots and potatoes before placing them on the chopping block. “Ya, but Mahlon says the landlord wants his daughter to live there. He has for nearly a year.”

  “Oh, that’s right. I remember now. They rent their place. It was a shame the way Ada had to sell their house after Mahlon’s Daed died.” Becca grabbed a dry dishtowel and began emptying the dish drainer. “The community wanted to keep that from happening, but too many of us were dealing with our own losses. Besides, Ada was determined not to burden anyone.”

  While peeling potatoes, Deborah felt old grief wash over her. It didn’t hurt like it used to, but it always stung. Thirteen years ago she lost her mother in the same accident in which Mahlon lost his father. Becca’s husband died too and six others from their community. All in one fatal van accident. The Amish of Dry Lake had hired three Englischer drivers to take them to a wedding in Ohio. They were caravaning when one of the vehicles crashed. No one made it to the wedding. At the time there had been thirty families in their district, and nine of them lost a loved one. It’d taken Deborah years to push past feeling that they were cursed.

  Becca placed the last plate in the cabinet. “So, will Ada live with you and Mahlon?”

  “Ya. It’s not Mahlon’s favorite plan, but he can’t afford two places, one for us and one for her. I don’t know why the idea bothers him. Ada will be nothing b
ut a blessing all her days.”

  “Which will be a lot of days, because she’s young. What, forty-three?”

  Deborah nodded.

  Becca laid the dishtowel on her shoulder. “It seems odd to me that she’s never remarried, but as long as you don’t mind sharing a home with her, there will be peace in the house.”

  “The hardest part of living with Ada will be that both of us love to cook. I’m hoping one of the places has a huge kitchen. And then we can both have a workspace, and we could have some cookoffs, and may the youngest cook win.”

  Becca giggled. “Ada better watch out. It seems to me she’s spent years teaching all her best cooking secrets to an ambitious young woman.”

  For the first time in quite a while, Deborah recalled her one-time dream of owning an Amish restaurant. But they lived too far away from the flow of tourists for it to be practical. Although Hope Crossing had a more touristy Amish community, her family always needed her to live at home to help out. Besides, she’d been in love with Mahlon since she was ten, and she couldn’t imagine living elsewhere. But his mother gave her a way to do the next best thing—bake desserts for profit. Ada had taught her how to make all sorts of sweets, and together they made baked goods for a bakery that sent a driver to fetch the items three days a week.

  “Anytime you need a kitchen to bake in, you’re more than welcome to come here.” One side of Becca’s mouth curved into a smile. “Of course, what’s cooked here stays here.”

  Deborah chuckled. “But not for long… before it’s eaten.”

  Becca laughed. “Go fetch your horse. Maybe Ephraim will leave the shop long enough to help you hitch it to the carriage.”

  “You sure?”

  One of the twins started wailing as if she’d pinched a finger or the other one had taken a toy.