I was drunk. I mean, not usually. Not on a weekday. But that night, Bill had been out with Petra and then he’d texted me. He wanted to hook up. He and Petra weren’t married, not for another month, but she was my friend and she didn’t know and if I told her about Bill, I’d have to say I was the other woman.
And I wasn’t. Not usually. I turned off my phone and went drinking, down at Darby’s where they know me. I had too many. One too many, a few too many. I’m guessing they cut me off, probably Jack did.
I can’t remember getting in the car.
It was dark. Not late, but getting there. Eight? Nine? I was driving a little drunk but only because Bill and Petra were getting married in October and now I had to tell her. That’s what I was thinking. I’d been trying not to think it, so of course it was all I could think about.
The way home went through Strasburg, those back roads where you sometimes get stuck behind a buggy. Winding, hilly. Some of them like a rollercoaster and cars just come out of nowhere, their beams sweeping like sudden ghosts. Not good for a drunk adulteress, not safe at all.
There was a thud. I thought I’d hit a cow. I wanted to keep driving, but some part of me maybe knew, and I pulled over and stepped out into the dark countryside. It smelled like manure and hay, that sweet persistent stink that blankets Lancaster County until the frost comes. In the dark, something moved. A body. On the ground beside a scooter. A straw hat lay in the grass.
And then I was getting my phone and swiping away a text from Bill and calling 911 but a truck pulled over and maybe he called first. They took me to the hospital, because I couldn’t say if I was okay.
I killed a boy.
Seventeen. He was on a kick scooter. The Amish have them. They have two bicycle wheels with a board in between. No pedals. He shouldn’t have been in the road. I shouldn’t have been drunk. It’s possible I was weaving.
The family had me to their house. I wasn’t going to go, but they had asked and everyone—Bill, Petra, even Jack—said there’s time before the trial.
A small house, neat and made of white clapboard. Everything was orderly. In the living room there were benches like in church. Someone had gathered wildflowers, and they sat in a jar on the mantel.
An old man with a long white beard and no moustache led me inside. The young parents stood together and grew still as I entered. I nodded at the brown-bearded father, short and manly, wearing dark suspenders over a white shirt, his eyes bright with tears. They fed me. God, I remember it. Several children. A boy of eight or nine, he wouldn’t look up. His father said a word to him in their old Dutch. German, rather. Something I couldn’t understand—but when the boy glanced away, I knew this had been the brother he loved best.
Amos was the boy’s name. The one I killed. Amos. They told me about him. They spoke to me. They said they forgave me, even the mother said this, and she looked into my eyes. She was red-faced and her eyes were blood-rimmed. A white cap covered the back of her hair. I felt like an alien, my nails done, my hair accented with gold balayage. I was carrying my new Coach bag, the red one. It had helped me, getting dressed, pulling myself together. It was either that or drink in the morning, right out of bed.
My lawyer said the Amish didn’t want to press charges, but the state would press charges anyway. “Tell them nothing,” he said. “Just accept their forgiveness, and we’ll try to work that angle.”
“Amos liked to milk,” said the mother.
I nodded.
“He liked cows, especially Greta.”
A blonde girl looked up. She was wearing a dress, the kind you’d wear to a gingerbread house in a fairytale, right before everything went dark. “She’s a sturdy cow,” the girl told me.
I kept nodding.
“Amos led a good life,” said the mother. “God has him now.” The mother reached out and touched my hand, her rough fingers closing on my pink acrylic tips.
“I was drunk,” I said. “Too drunk even to remember.”
The mother squeezed my hand. “We forgive you.”
“And I’m an adulteress.”
The mother glanced at her young daughter, and I knew I should stop talking but I couldn’t stop talking. “I’m not married, but I’m cheating on a friend.”
The father stood, like he would usher the children out, and the mother shook her head at him. Here I was, the example. I killed their beloved brother. They should all know not to be like me. They should learn.
Except there was a softness there. They should learn and never be like me, but Christ-like they let me into their hearts. They were trying. I could feel it, that effort.
“We’re not going to jail you.”
“My lawyer told me the state will press charges.”
“We’ll petition the state.”
“You don’t have to do that.” I felt like tearing my face off. Like throwing myself to their wooden floor and howling, a wild thing, my true self revealed at last.
“Will you have children?” asked the mother.
I startled. “Maybe one day.” There was pressure building in my head. It was becoming intolerable. “What kind of mother lets her child out at night, onto those steep hills?”
The mother froze, her mouth open. Her round face was sunburnt; a spiderweb of broken red capillaries sprawled at one temple. She was younger than me. She looked at her hands. I hated myself.
The father said something to the mother in German and clasped her shoulder.
“It was dark,” I said. “It wasn’t safe to be out.”
The child nearest me stiffened with attention.
“No,” said the father. He gazed sternly at his family. Then he called out in German and an older man with a white beard came in quickly and led the children away.
“It was after his Rumspringa,” he said. “You understand?”
I’d heard about it, that brief, wild season.
The mother still wasn’t looking at me. “Amos always stayed to the side of the road,” she said. The father shook his head at her, and she answered him in German.
He turned back to me. “You are a child of God.” He was speaking to me and also, differently, to his wife.
She nodded several times, as if to herself. She turned her plain red face to me. I thought to myself what makeup could do for her, a little foundation, in my mind’s eye I was painting it on. These thoughts scared me, like maybe I was damned.
“Will you pray with us?” asked the mother, her voice freighted.
So I sank to the floorboards after all. I kneeled. The father opened a Bible and read aloud and I didn’t hear the words, I heard his voice, his perfect accent reaching back into the past, into a place I could never go.
My own parents separated when I was four. My mother was an “other woman” long before I knew the term. We got money from men. It was how we pulled along.
My knees hurt a little.
The father closed the Bible. Time for me to go.
I stayed kneeling. Right then, I wanted to be one of them. But I didn’t have it inside me. Actual faith. It could fucking remake the world.
The mother helped me up. “After,” she said, “come back and see us.” Her voice sounded a little easier.
She exchanged a word in German with her husband. “If they take you to prison,” she said, “you are welcome back with us when you return.”
“Yes, thank you.” If I came back, I was afraid I’d pledge my life to them. Marry a farmer and bear him sons. His wiry beard would scrub my cheeks. I wouldn’t like the plain clothes, but I could do something I didn’t like for the rest of my life. I already was.
We’d joked about the Amish in town. There were prostitutes who worked out of an old massage parlor called Whirl-a-sage in Lancaster city. Amish men showed up after ten on a Saturday. Outside, there was a post where they tied up their horses. You’d see it sometimes, a horse waiting for its master to be done fucking.
That boy, he shouldn’t have been out so late.
I walked from the house into the September morning, the sky low and gray. The air tasted wet. Ducks squabbled at my feet. Children laughed, and somewhere, one of them began to cry.
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Genevieve Abravanel’s short fiction is available or forthcoming in Indiana Review and elsewhere. She has published an academic book with Oxford University Press (Chinese translation with The Commercial Press of Beijing) and teaches English in Lancaster, PA, where she lives with her family and is working on a novel.