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Dennis is 21 years, 345 days, and three hours old when his plane lurches down the icy runway of Eppley Airfield.
It jumps and bumps as it climbs, and his stomach pitches with it.
Rachel, the ex-Amish woman who had helped him get the plane ticket, had warned him that takeoffs and landings was the worst part of it, but it was very safe. She brightly told him that more people died in car accidents then plane accidents every year, which honestly made Dennis just feel a whole lot more nervous. He’d thought he was ready for the plane ride, but thinking about it and living it turn out to be two very different things.
The man next to him peers over his newspaper, a little smirk tugging at his mouth, while Dennis keeps a death grip on the armrests.
“First time flyer?”
“Is it that obvious?” Dennis asks, though the white-knuckled grip he’s got on the armrest says enough.
The man chuckles. “Don’t worry about it, kid. It gets easier.”
“Thanks,” Dennis says, loosening his grip a fraction.
Once the plane steadies, they end up talking. The man’s name is Peter. He’s from Chicago, has a son who’s deaf, and he’s been vegetarian for years- “it keeps the blood pressure down, and trust me, you don’t want mine,” he jokes.
Dennis offers a little about himself in return. “I’m twenty-one, from Nebraska. Grew up on a farm. This is my first time flying. I’m heading to Pittsburgh for school.” He hesitates, then adds, “University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.”
Peter leans back, studying him. “First in your family to go to college?”
“Yeah,” Dennis says. “I finished my undergrad early, so… now I’m hoping I can get in.”
Peter blinks. “Wait. You’re moving to Pittsburgh before you even know if you got in?”
“Yes,” Dennis admits. It sounds foolish even to him when he says it out loud. But the interview was in Pittsburgh, and the ex-Amish community in Broken Bow had done all they could to help. So he’d bitten the bullet and took a train, three buses, and now this plane, one-way. All his hopes were riding on the chance that out of thousands of applicants, he might land one of the 148 spots.
Peter taps his fingers on his knee. “What’d you get on the MCAT?”
“516.”
“Solid. GPA?”
Dennis winces. “3.3”
He hadn’t really had a choice. Twelve-hour shifts at the Broken Bow Gas Station, classes crammed in wherever they’d fit. Something had to give.
Peter’s mouth quirks. “That’s not… terrible. What’d you major in?”
“Theology.” Dennis says, wincing again.
Theology, because he’d begged his parents. Theology, because he’d promised them it would make him a better servant of God. Maybe he could teach in the two-room schoolhouse one day, show people how to draw closer to God’s love.
“Okay… that’s a curveball.”
Peter twists his wedding ring as the flight attendants roll the drink cart down the aisle. He gets a soda. Dennis just asks for water.
“It’s bad, isn’t it?” Dennis asks morosely as the flight attendant moves on.
“Not necessarily,” Peter says, and he’s got this air about him that makes Dennis feel almost calm. Like he knows exactly what he’s talking about. “Lots of medical schools look for more than just grades and test scores.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re looking for stories, kid. Why you want to be a doctor, how you chose this path, that sort of thing.”
“Well, I want to-”
“You want to help people,” Peter finishes for him, rolling his eyes a little.
Dennis snaps his mouth shut.
“Yeah, that’s why everyone wants to be a doctor,” Peter says with a small smile. “The better question is: why medicine over other helping professions?”
Dennis bites his lower lip, turning the question over. Peter is nice, and he’s a stranger. The first real, true stranger that Dennis has ever met. A stranger who knew nothing about him or his background.
He thinks back to the moment he knew he wanted to be a doctor.
It was during his fourth week of rumspringa, when he was supposed to be running wild- using cellphones and drinking. Or at least decorating his buggy with fuzzy dice. But he hadn’t done any of that. Instead, he’d hitchhiked to the city, rented a tiny, grimy room in a miserable little motel, and spent his days in the library.
He’d never had access to so much information before. All those books. At first, he’d asked the librarian for help finding something, but she’d just pointed to the row of computers. When he told her he didn’t know how to use one, she’d softened and walked him through it step by step.
The Dewey Decimal System alone felt like a miracle.
Back home, he’d had a few books of his own and access to the little free library in front of Jane’s house, but it was always the same things. Cookbooks. Religious pamphlets. Maybe a devotional if he was lucky. Here, it was pure, unfiltered access to the entire world.
The librarian, Missy, had nearly blown his mind when she told him that with a computer, or better yet a smartphone, he could look up any question he had. She showed him hers: a tiny piece of glass and metal no bigger than his hand and let him hold it. Somehow, that little thing could hold the entire record of humanity. Literally every scholar, every recipe, every thought anyone had bothered to write down, from the time of Adam and Eve to the present day. All of it, sitting in the palm of his hand.
He’d checked out a book, Being Mortal, more times than he’d care to admit. It wasn’t like the books back home; all sermons and rules wrapped in veiled parables. This one talked about life and death in plain language, about how people deserved dignity and choice even at the end of their lives. It spoke about responsibility, about caring for others. But not because it was commanded by God, but because it was the right thing to do.
For Dennis it made an odd kind of sense. Out on rumspringa, he was supposed to be drifting, tasting forbidden things, but instead he kept coming back to that book. To the idea that helping someone through sickness, or guiding them in their final days, could be a calling just as worthy as preaching. Maybe even more so.
The sixth time he checked it out, Missy had winked at him and told him to keep it. He’d protested, but she waved him off, saying she’d already marked the book as lost in the computer.
He was sitting on a park bench in the early afternoon, halfway through another re-read when there was a terrible sound, and loud crash.
Dennis looked up to see a car crumpled against a light pole, smoke curling from the hood. Without thinking, he left his bag on the bench and ran toward it.
The driver, a white-haired man, climbed shakily out of the car, took a few uneven steps, and then collapsed onto the pavement.
Dennis froze for a fraction of a second. The crash had been bad, but… not bad enough to cause this, had it? Had he just watched someone die? The man’s chest wasn’t moving right or normally. His breaths were shallow and uneven. He was making these strange, guttural moaning sounds that sent a jolt of white-hot panic straight through Dennis’s ribs.
Out of nowhere, a dark-skinned woman darted across the street. Cars honked, but she ignored them, sprinting straight for the man.
“I’m a doctor, move!” she barked at the small crowd that had gathered. ‘Back away!”
Dennis stumbled a step back as she knelt beside the man, pressed two fingers to the crook of his neck, and swore loudly, using words Dennis would’ve gotten whipped for back home. She tore the man’s shirt open in one sharp motion, the buttons of his shirt going flying.
“You!” she shouted at a woman in a business suit standing next to Dennis. “Call 911 and tell them he’s having a heart attack and needs urgent help.”
The woman nodded, pulling out a sleek, buttonless phone just like Missy’s, and started dialing.
The doctor’s gaze snapped to Dennis. “You, kid! Know CPR?”
Dennis shook his head.
“Well, you’re about to learn. Get over here and watch me.”
Dennis knelt beside her. She locked her elbows, placed one hand over the other, and began pressing hard on the man’s chest.
“You’re breaking his bones!” Dennis blurted, flinching at the sharp cracks under her palms.
“Broken ribs mean the heart might start again,” she said shortly. “I need you to count for me. I’m at fifteen and I need thirty. Count every time my hands come down.”
“O-okay,” Dennis stammered. CPR, was that what this was? He started counting aloud, bewildered.
At thirty, she leaned down and…kissed the man? No, not kissed, but pressed her mouth over his. She pulled back and went straight into another round of pushing on his chest with her hands.
“Start again at one.”
“Okay!” Dennis counted to thirty once more, then watched her give another breath. Four more rounds passed before she suddenly stopped and pressed two fingers to the man’s neck again.
“Oh, thank goodness,” she breathed. “I’ve got a pulse.”
She looked up at Dennis, still frozen in wide-eyed confusion.
“His heart’s beating again,” she said. “It stopped, and we got it started. Good job.”
Dennis sat back on his heels, staring as she brushed the man’s hair away from his face, her own breathing finally slowing.
The man’s heart had stopped beating. He was dead.
Dennis knew about death. He’d seen it many times back home. With the livestock, and in his grandmother. One night, she’d wished them well and gone to sleep. But when Dennis went to wake her the next morning, she was pale, cold, and still. Her heart wasn’t beating.
And now this man’s heart wasn’t beating. But this doctor had brought it back.
Dennis knew a doctor. Doc Klein, just outside Broken Bow. But he was old, with a round stomach with salt-and-pepper hair and white goatee and always smelled faintly of old beer. Doc Klein handed out blackberry cough syrup, put band-aids on scrapes, and gave vaccines.
This was different. She was different.
“What-,” Dennis tried to speak, but his voice felt flat, unsure. “I’ve… that was… you’re a hero.”
The doctor smiled warmly. “Just my job. Lucky I was here. I’m visiting family, but I live in Pittsburgh full-time.”
“Pittsburgh,” Dennis echoed, the name unfamiliar in his mouth.
“Yes. I work at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center year-round, but my sister moved out here to middle of nowhere Nebraska.” She glanced at Dennis’s simple, clearly handmade clothes.
“Sorry,” she murmured, not sounding very sorry.
“It’s alright. That was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen,” he said, a little breathless. “What was that you were doing? CPR?”
She gave him a little look, like trying to decide if he was serious, but answered anyway.
“Yes, CPR. It stands for cardiopulmonary resuscitation. It’s an emergency procedure used when someone's heart stops or they stop breathing. It combines chest compressions and rescue breaths to circulate blood and oxygen, aiming to preserve brain function and possibly restart the heart.”
Rescue breaths. That explained the part he’d mistaken for kissing. Now he felt silly.
“So, his heart had stopped, and those chest compressions you were doing… you were manually making his heart circulate blood?”
“You got it. Hey, you’ve got a knack for this stuff.”
“You brought a man back to life,” Dennis repeated in awe.
When he was little, one of their dairy cows, Miss Daisy, had a calf. His father tried to help deliver it, but the calf got stuck. When it finally arrived, it wasn’t breathing right-it had gone too long without air. His father said the calf was going to die soon anyway and told Dennis to leave Miss Daisy with it, so she’d understand. That there was nothing to be done.
But Dennis had sneaked out that night and laid in the hay next to the dying calf and Miss Daisy. He kept trying to convince the calf to drink milk. It died the next morning. He’d cried.
His father found him weeping next to the dead calf in the morning. He took him aside and said, “It’s God’s plan when animals and people live or die. We can’t make those decisions. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away.”
And then he told him to go back inside for breakfast.
The woman smiled gently. “Only because I learned what to do. Isn’t that something? Think how far humans have come. Think what else they’ll figure out in the next five, ten, twenty years.”
The ambulance arrived, its siren piercing the afternoon quiet. Dennis watched as they whisked the man away, the doctor disappearing into the crowd before he could even ask her name.
That it was incredible. Dennis had literally just witnessed someone coming back from the dead. Because of a doctor. A doctor who worked at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center.
A sinking feeling settled in his chest, like hope and dread all at once.
His family has always found comfort and joy in the simple rhythms of their faith and community. God was their anchor in every moment. He had tried to find that same peace, but it always felt just out of reach, like a melody he couldn’t quite learn.
He’d spent countless hours wondering what his life would be like: getting married and moving down the road from his childhood home, joining his mother for Sunday supper, maybe having a few children of his own. He imagined building furniture like his father and his father before him, praying every day, and when his time came, accepting it because God would have meant it to be so.
But something about that future, about his purpose on earth, always felt just out of reach.
Now, that sinking ache in his chest twisted with a strange mix of joy and grief. He wanted to jump for joy and break down crying all at once.
Because now he knew what he was put on this earth to do.
And he knew he couldn’t do it the way things were.
“I’m Amish!” he blurts suddenly. Peter frowns, surprised. Dennis just went through that memory like it took ages, but really it’s only been seconds.
Peter looks him up and down, eyeing his blue jeans and machine-made sweater.
“I mean, I was Amish. Until a few months ago.” Dennis amends, his voice cracking a little.
Peter leans back, intrigued.
“Go on.”
Dennis swallows. “I left a few months ago. I saw a woman, a doctor,” he amends, “perform CPR on someone. She brought him back from the dead. It was the most incredible thing I’d ever seen.” he realizes he’s getting a little breathless, but it’s true because he is breathless. He’s in awe, still.
“See, there’s this whole thing about being Amish, it’s all really based on kind of obedience to God. And if someone’s heart stops, then it’s His will. But this man’s heart stopped…”
He catches his breath, feeling the weight of it.
“And she brought him back to life. And I wondered if… maybe God didn’t stop his heart on purpose. Maybe He put her there on purpose.”
Dennis looks Peter in the eye, steady now.
“I want to be like that. I want to live like that. Someone who can give life, who can bring hope when there’s none. That’s why I want to become a doctor.”
Peter listens, half-smiling like he’s seen a thousand versions of this moment.
“Yeah,” Peter says dryly. “That’s why you’re here. You want to be the guy who steps in when it’s all going to hell and makes it not.”
Dennis nods in confirmation.
Peter stares out the window for a moment, then looks back, voice low and steady.
“Look, you’re making a hell of a gamble, but sometimes that’s all you’ve got. You’ve got to leave the nest, kid. Burn the bridges if you have to.”
Dennis’s throat tightens. “I have already.”
Peter raises his eyebrows. “You mean you got shunned?”
“I officially got shunned when I told them,” Dennis confesses. “My parents said they’d never speak to me again. My siblings, too. I hitchhiked to the nearest town. There’s a small ex-Amish community there who helped me figure out undergrad and apply for medical school, but there’s only so much they can do.”
“One-way ticket, then?”
“One-way,” Dennis confirmed. “I don’t know what I’ll do if I don’t get in. I’ll keep trying. But if I never get in… I’ll have given up my entire life. My friends, my family, my God, literally everything for nothing.”
The plane jolts, and the pilot’s voice comes over the speakers. “We’ll be landing shortly.”
Dennis grips both armrests tightly again, definitely getting a little bit into Peter's space.
“Sorry,” Dennis mutters
“Don’t be,” Peter says, softer than before.
The plane touches down, but Dennis doesn’t feel truly safe until they’d taxied to the gate. The seatbelt sign clicks off and people stand, but since they ‘re near the back, they both wait to stand. When it’s their turn, Peter stands and turns to him.
“What’s your name again, young man?”
“Dennis. Dennis Whitaker.”
Peter extends his rough, calloused hand for a shake. Dennis takes it, feeling dwarfed by the size of the hand. He finds he’s surprised by the dexterity of Peter’s fingers as he gives a solid squeeze.
“Dennis Whitaker, I think you’ll get into medical school. And I know you’ll do great things.”
The words echo in his head. That’s what his mother had told him the day he left, right after he hugged her for the last time. That he’d do great things someday.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Please,” he says with a warm smile, “call me Peter.”
Dennis forgets about Peter as time goes on. He rents a small studio apartment and takes a night-shift job stocking shelves at a grocery store part-time while he waits for news about medical school. He sells his plasma to supplement his living costs. Every penny goes into his college savings. Safe to say he has other things on his mind than a man he met on an airplane.
Until the day he gets a thick envelope from the University of Pittsburgh.
He takes himself to the nearest body of water he can find. It ends up being Lake Elizabeth in Allegheny Commons Park. He gets to the tiny dock on the edge of the water and takes his shoes off. He lets his feet dangle over the water.
He stares at the letter. The envelope is large and thick and a little heavy. That was good news, surely. Schools don’t send big envelopes for rejections?
“Please,” he whispers, his eyes fluttering shut. It’s been months since he prayed. For the first time in what feels like forever, he sends out a plea to Him. “Please.”
He opens the envelope.
Dear Mr. Whittaker,
It is with great pleasure that I offer you admission to the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
Your application deeply moved our committee. Your journey demonstrates resilience, empathy, and an unwavering commitment to service. The strength of your recommendation from Dr. Peter Benton, Chief of Surgery at Northwestern University Hospital, attests to this. He only affirms what your record already shows: you are exactly the kind of physician the world needs.
We look forward to welcoming you to Pitt Med and supporting you on this next chapter of your journey.
The letter goes on to give details. Like where to find the course catalogue, orientation dates, that sort of thing. But Dennis barely reads past the top. He keeps reading the same line over and over:
It is with great pleasure that I offer you admission to the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
Then his eyes settle on another part, and he reads it again and again:
The strength of your recommendation from Dr. Peter Benton, Chief of Surgery at Northwestern University Hospital, attests to this.
The man he sat next to on the plane was a doctor. Not just a doctor, but a surgeon. A very important one. And he’d spent a few hours talking to Dennis, a complete stranger, and then written him a letter of recommendation.
For I know the plans I have for you,” Dennis whispers, touching his fingers to his lips. “Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”
A future. That’s what Dr. Peter Benton gave him. Because of faith. His faith in Dennis was a kind of hope placed on him even when Dennis hadn’t yet given him a reason.
“Thank you, Dr. Benton.” He whispers. “For your faith.”
Dennis is 22 years, 188 days, and six hours old when he reads his medical school acceptance letter at a lake in Pittsburgh. He’s hundreds of miles away from home, doesn’t know where his next meal is coming from, and he’s alone. But he’s not as scared as he was before.
And he sits at the lake for a long, long time.