The Outcast Read Online Free PDF Page A

your request, I haven’t done anything to help my sister heal. All I now ask is that you allow me to make her an appointment with a reputable English doctor.”
    Taking his thumbs from behind his suspenders, Tobias folds his arms. “Leah may be your sister, but she is my wife . My answer is no. Will always be no. Leah’s body will heal itself in due time. She doesn’t need some doktor taking out an organ God has placed there for good purpose.”
    “That is your choice,” Rachel says. “A bad one, butwholly yours. The only thing I ask is that you don’t make my sister with child, for her body won’t be able to withstand another pregnancy.”
    Tobias’s jaw pulses. “What happens in my marriage bed is entirely between my wife and me!”
    Scraping back the kitchen chair, Rachel stands to face him. “It would be entirely between the two of you if what you were doing weren’t risking my sister’s life!”
    “Tobias?” At the sound of Leah’s weak voice, Rachel and Tobias step back from each other and look toward the staircase where Rachel’s twin stands, her hands clutching the sturdy railing as her questioning eyes flit between the two people she loves most in the world. When neither of them will reveal anything, she asks, “What’s wrong? Did something happen to the children?”
    “No, Leah,” Tobias says, offering her a reassuring smile. “Rachel and I were just discussing the funeral.”
    Leah looks down at the step beneath her bare feet. “I’m sorry I couldn’t make it. I thought I could, but—” Her lips clamp shut, blocking her words.
    Tobias runs forward as Leah crumples onto the staircase. Crying his wife’s name, Tobias kneels on the step and takes Leah in his arms. Her head lolls back, her waist-length hair brushing dust from the steps.
    Crouching over her sister, Rachel places her right index and middle fingers against the side of Leah’s neck. “We need to call 911,” she says. When Tobias does not respond, Rachel digs her fingernails into the muscles of his shoulder.“If you do not run out to the barn and call 911, you will lose your wife. Do you understand?”
    Tobias nods as Rachel comes to take his place and supports Leah’s head, which feels as heavy as a stone. “Get me a hunlomma before you go,” Rachel calls.
    Tobias turns from the front door and looks at her in confusion. Rachel motions to her sister’s nightgown where patches of blood have started seeping through. Tobias’s eyes widen. He darts toward the kitchen table and jerks down the clothesline that hangs high above it during colder months.
    Tossing the threadbare hunlomma at Rachel, Tobias gives his wife one last fret-filled look before running out the front door and slamming it behind him.
    I watch him sprint in his stocking feet the whole way to the barn.

3
Rachel
    At lunchtime, when Tobias returns, I press my sister’s forehead with a kiss, leave the hospital room without acknowledging her husband, and enter the maze of corridors. One by one, the nurses lower their clipboards and stare as I walk past, still in the black cape dress and white kapp I was wearing at Amos’s funeral. I am not accustomed to such scrutiny. In Lancaster County, there is such a large concentration of Mennonites, Brethren, and Amish, tourists are the only ones to ever give us a second look. I nod and smile at one nurse. Her penciled eyebrows disappear into her bangs, but then she nods and smiles in return. Longago, I decided I was not going to bow my head and shuffle along like the rest of our community when faced with rude stares. No, I’d stare right back and remind them that I was a human being just living my life, not an oddity to be captured on film.
    Exiting the double doors, I sit on a concrete bench and watch for Gerald’s conversion van that is never hard to spot since he spray-painted it black due to his black-bumper Mennonite restrictions. Ten minutes pass . . . fifteen . . . but still our driver does not come. My