Between You and Me. Сьюзен Виггс
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She turned to him and seemed a little flustered at the way he was staring at her. “How did you do last night?” she asked. “Did a social worker come, find you a place to stay?”
When Caleb didn’t answer right away, Jonah angled his gaze at the molded plastic chair in the corner. Caleb’s hat still lay beneath it. “I bet he was right there all night,” the boy said.
“You were, weren’t you?” she asked Caleb.
He didn’t want to get anyone in trouble, so he merely shrugged and said, “I wanted to be here in case Jonah woke up.”
She bit her lip. She had very white, straight teeth and soft-looking lips he had no business noticing. “You’re not going to be good for anything if you don’t eat and sleep properly,” she said, her female bossiness reaching across any and all cultural lines between English and Amish. There was much to admire about this woman—her thoughtful gestures, taking the time to help him through his first evening in the city. And she had a clear, honest way of explaining things to Jonah.
He wondered what her world was like outside the hospital. Did she spend time with her family and friends? Did she live nearby? What did she do when she wasn’t working?
He pictured her in English clothes, driving a car, getting her fingernails polished by someone in a salon—a concept so foreign to the Amish it was almost inconceivable. Did she go out to bars with friends? Surf the Internet? Study her phone as if it held the secrets of the universe?
One of her pockets emitted a buzzing sound. She took out a flat mobile phone with a shiny screen. “I have to go,” she said.
“I wish you could stay,” Jonah said.
“That’s nice to hear. But I work in the ER, not surgery. I just came up here to see how you’re doing.”
“Oh,” said Jonah, clearly not understanding the difference between emergency and surgery.
She backed toward the door, still talking. “Tell you what. At the end of my shift, I’ll come back to see you again. If they move you to the ward, I’ll find you. And you know what else? We’ll figure out a place for your uncle to stay. Maybe get him a more comfortable chair.”
That drew a flicker of a smile from Jonah. “Yeah, that would be good, Reese.”
She gave him a look that even a wounded boy couldn’t resist. “You’re going to be okay, Jonah Stoltz,” she said. “That’s a promise. And you know what?”
“What?”
“Keeping promises is my superpower.”
For a place of healing, the hospital was a cold, noisy institution. Folks were so busy working that they barely noticed the visitors and bystanders. As they rushed about their business, most of them skirted around Caleb as if he were a piece of furniture. He didn’t mind so much, though. He didn’t feel like fending off what the English referred to as “small talk”—a habit of filling the silence with pointless chatter.
The Amish had no equivalent Caleb could think of. If there was silence, they let it be. No one felt obligated to fill the void.
In this world, if there was no one present to talk to, people talked to their phones, which they connected to with headphones, or tapped the screen, shooting text and pictures back and forth. They did so even while they walked, barely watching where they were going.
Patients were referred to by their afflictions rather than their names. Sometimes they were called a “code” or “that liver biopsy in room ten” as if their illness defined the sum total of who they were. The hospital staff members didn’t seem to want to acknowledge that “the aneurysm” was somebody’s grandmother, or that “the bypass” had worked at the public library for twenty-seven years.
Jonah drifted in and out of sleep as the hours crept by. When he was awake, he seemed like a boy Caleb had never met before. He was hollow, joyless, with the look of someone being punished for a crime he hadn’t committed.
While Jonah was napping, Caleb went to the men’s room and washed up, using a kit given to him by a nurse, with soap, a toothbrush and toothpaste, and a plastic-handled razor. Then he changed into his newly cleaned clothes, which had been washed and pressed and folded into a neat packet. His plain shirt had never been so crisp at the edges, better than brand-new. In his own clothes, Caleb felt slightly more like himself and was grateful for the bossy, thoughtful Reese Powell.
Slightly refreshed, he inhaled the manufactured air blowing through the hallway. At the end of the corridor was a window framing the blue sky and the tall, modern buildings. He told Jonah’s nurse where to locate him, then made his way down the stairs and out the door. He had discovered a garden on the hospital grounds, and during Jonah’s naps he would step outside, trying to find his balance in the chaos. He sat on one of the wrought-iron benches and stared at the grass and trees, taking refuge from the glaring lights and manufactured air of the hospital’s beeping, hissing wards. Jonah had to endure that every second of the day; there was no escape for him. Caleb felt vaguely guilty for escaping the strange and harsh environment, even for a few minutes.
There had been further questions from Child Protective Services. Different people had asked him the same question a dozen different ways to determine if the accident was caused by negligence, either Caleb’s or the Haubers’. He talked to a half-dozen folks with clipboards and laptop computers and name badges, but after all the questioning—or “interviews,” as someone called them—it was determined that the incident was exactly what Reese Powell had said it was—an accident. No one’s fault.
But Jonah’s to suffer.
As the day wore on, and Caleb met with doctors and other staff members, one thing became clear to Caleb. Reese had been right about something else—Jonah’s recovery was going to take a long time.
It was going to cost a lot of money, too. Various staff members had asked for information about his “status,” which Caleb soon discovered was their way of trying to find out if he could afford Jonah’s care. It was probably well known to the hospital folks that the Amish almost never carried insurance, as purchasing commercial insurance violated the rules. The notion behind this was that the people in the community took care of their own, fiercely independent of outside help. Middle Grove had an aid fund overseen by a committee, and when a huge medical expense came along, the community banded together to raise money, holding fundraisers and benefit auctions.
But Caleb was a realist. Given what had happened to Jonah’s parents, he had been diligent about insurance coverage. Over the strident objections of his father, he had enrolled himself and the children in a comprehensive insurance policy. Here at the hospital, he’d shown them the card he kept in his wallet. He filled out forms, offered the necessary information, and everyone seemed to calm down.
It was one of the few things that had been easy about this ordeal.
In the garden, the shadows of the beech trees and of people strolling along the walkways lengthened, and the traffic sounds from the busy streets increased as folks hurried about their business.
Passersby sent veiled looks of curiosity in Caleb’s direction. Amish people were used to being stared at. As far as he knew, they were the only group of people in America who constituted a tourist attraction simply by being who they were. Folks came on tour buses and in their cars to the Amish towns in the countryside. Visitors seemed drawn to the sight of farmers and artisans going through their everyday chores. Most tourists were pretty respectful, treating the Amish like rare, elusive birds, to be spied on from a distance and photographed without their knowledge.
A few were bold to the point of rudeness, poking and prying at the Amish like a cat sticking its nose into a mouse hole. More than once, English girls in short shorts and halter tops had planted themselves beside him for a photograph or a phone selfie without even asking his permission.
Jonah