hurling himself into the side of a garbage truck. Just another day on the job.
Matt slumped onto the orange vinyl couch in the doctors' lounge, dropping his head down on the squeaky tufted arm. He was tired, but his fatigue didn't have anything to do with the hours he'd been working. This was a weariness that went deeper than his muscles and sank into the essence of his being. He'd been back in Minneapolis a week and on the job for four days. The chief of staff had protested his early return, but not with much sincerity. His life as Matt Thorne, head honcho of County General ER, had fallen quickly back into the routine he remembered.
Only he didn't remember it being so emotionally empty. He had never before met the flirtatious teasing of the female members of the staff with a complete lack of enthusiasm. He didn't remember ever dreading going home to his apartment at night. He vaguely remembered charging at his job headfirst, but the man in those memories was a stranger to him. These days he operated on a kind of automatic pilot system—efficient and more than competent, but detached.
The city he had always loved and partaken of had lost some of its shine for him, as well. He found himself missing the rustle of cornstalks and the quiet of the country night. More than anything, he missed Sarah. Every time he thought of her riding on a bus full of strangers to Ohio his heart ached.
He had let her go and returned to “his world” only to find it wasn't the world he wanted to live in anymore. He had returned to his job because he was dedicated to helping and healing people, but this was no longer the way he wanted to go about it.
“Are you just resting or should I call the morgue?”
Julia flopped down into a chair of the same eye-burning orange vinyl as the couch and propped her big feet on a batde-scarred coffee table cluttered with old magazines and abandoned coffee cups. She wore the most relaxed version of “nursing whites” she could get away with—a lab jacket over an oversize T-shirt and baggy white sweatpants. Her wild red mane was more or less contained in a single long braid that hung over her shoulder like a length of rope.
“The juiy's still out,” Matt said. He pushed himself upright and mussed his hands through his hair, leaving it standing on end in tufts. “You want the truth, McCarver?”
“Always.”
“I don't want to be here anymore.”
“I know,” she admitted quietly, picking at the end of her braid.
“It's not that I don't care,” he went on. “It's just … I've done my tour of duty, that's all.”
“I know.”
He arched an eyebrow. “What? No fiery lecture on how needed I am?”
“No. This isn't the only place on earth that needs good doctors. You want the truth, Dr. T?”
“Usually.”
Julia sat up and leaned forward, dangling her long hands between her knees. “I think I bugged you about coming back more because I missed my buddy than anything else, and now I feel like a guilty slug because you're miserable. I think maybe you'd better go back to that cornfield. You know in
Matt made a face. “It wasn't heaven, it was Iowa.”
“Oh, big deal.” She scowled at him. “Don't screw up my lines here, Thorne. I'm trying to tell you what you should do with your life.”
“Pardon me.”
“Go back, get married, be happy.” She beat out the time of the sentence with one hand like a choir teacher
“That sounds like a plan,” Matt said with a sad smile. It was a plan he dreamed about during the long nights since his return to the Cities. He would hang out his shingle in Jesse, drum Coswell the Quack into retirement, marry Sarah, give her a dozen babies, and live happily ever after. Only Sarah wasn't there, and he didn't know if she ever would be there for him.
“It's not that easy,” he whispered, looking down at his sneakers, his voice smoky with emotion.
Julia gave him a long look of empathy and said, “Nothing worth having ever is.”
Sarah sat on her bed, staring at her suitcase. Her trip to Ohio had been postponed because of Jacobs illness, but her brother was back to his sweet, mischievous self now and she was to board the noon bus.
She wasn't going to go through with it. Day and night she had struggled with the conflicting emotions inside her. She had never felt so torn. She hated the thought of losing her family, especially of losing contact with Jacob. But Jacob was not her son and she couldn't live her life only halfway because she wanted to cling to him. It wouldn't be healthy for either of them. She loved her family, but remaining in the Amish faith out of duty alone was hypocritical and her other reason for staying—cowardice—was even worse.
All her life she had wanted something different. All her life she had known deep inside that she wasn't Amish, she was just pretending. All that time she had dreamed of other things and not reached out for them because she was afraid to leave the safe haven of her small close-knit community. That was what Ingrid had been asking her when she had wondered aloud if Sarah would really trust her life to Matt. Did she trust him enough to leave her people and give her life to him?
The answer to that was yes. The next question she had no answer for. Did Matt love her enough to teach her about his world and protect her from the worst of it? Did he love her enough to accept what she wanted to give him? Not knowing made her stomach tie up like a pretzel. He had left her. He had gone back to the city. He may have forgotten her already but she hoped and prayed not, and she was going to find out for a fact.
The bedroom door opened, and Anna stepped in. She had a beautiful quilt of purple and black folded over her arms like a giant muff. “You are ready to leave then?”
Sarah looked up at her with eyes that begged understanding. “I'm not going to Ohio, Mom.”
“I know,” Anna murmured with a sad smile, tears sparkling like stars in her eyes. “I've always known you wouldn't stay with us, Sarah. You belong to another world in your head and in your heart you belong with your English doctor.”
“Please don't hate me for it,” Sarah said. “It can't be wrong. I love him too much.”
“I couldn't hate you,
“Oh, Mom,” Sarah whispered through her tears. She rose from the bed and hugged her mother, quilt and all.
“I brought this for you,” Anna said, sniffling, trying bravely to smile as she held the quilt out when Sarah stepped back from her.
Sarah ran her hand over the fine patchwork of broadcloth. It was an Amish tradition for a mother to give her daughter a quilt when the daughter left home to marry. Sarah still had the one her mother had given her when she had married Samuel. It was a labor of love and duty, as was much of Amish life. It was a good life, a simple life, but it wasn't the life meant for her.
“It's beautiful, Mom,” she whispered, wishing this parting didn't have to be so painful or so permanent.
“For your new life,” Anna said. “Be happy, Sarah, and know that in my heart you will always be my daughter.”
Matt slowed his Jag as Jesse came into sight, and he rolled up behind an Amish buggy being pulled by a fractious-looking black horse. The car behind him honked impatiently, and Matt stuck his arm out the window to give the driver the one-finger salute. The moron. Didn't he know this was a part of the country where no one had any business being in a hurry?
The buggy turned off at the welding shop, but a tour bus had stalled in the middle of the street and there was no way around it. Matt sat listening to a Righteous Brothers tape, replaying his plan in his head. He would go to Ingrid first. There was a good chance her grapevine would know the name of the relatives Sarah had been sent to. Then he would beat a path south and do whatever he had to do to convince Sarah she belonged with him in his world more than she belonged in theirs.
His gaze wandered over the herd of tourists that had spilled out of the bus and were heading across the street toward the small depot and gift shop. Another small knot of people stood in the sunshine at the side of the little putty-colored clapboard building, apparently waiting to board a bus bound for some distant place—two elderly women, a bean pole youth with a buzz-cut and army fatigues, and a young Amish woman.
