Country Bride

by Debbie Macomber

  “Young man, if I have to ask you again, you will be removed from this courtroom. Do you understand?”

  “She doesn’t need to do this. It was all my fault. I was drinking. I was driving too fast. It’s all my fault.”

  “Mr. Beaumont. Sit down! You may continue with your statement, Ms. Thorne.”

  Taryn swallowed and another tear followed the first. After a pregnant pause, Charlie sank down onto the bench and buried his face in his forearms.

  “Can I...sit down now?” Taryn whispered.

  “Of course,” the judge said. Before Brodie could jump up to do it, the bailiff pushed the wheelchair into the correct position for her to transfer into. When Taryn sat down again, the man pulled the microphone from the podium for her and she held it on her lap.

  “So... Layla didn’t want to be there. At the cabin. She...wanted to go home. She told us it was w-wrong and we should go. Charlie said she was right. He said we needed to stop, that we were going to...get in real trouble. Jason told him not to be a...a pussy.”

  She looked embarrassed at the word and Evie wanted desperately to rush up to the podium, gather the girl into her arms and tell her to stop. Beside her, Brodie was a thick column of tension, his hand gripping hers tightly.

  “Ch-Charlie said he and Layla were leaving and if we wanted to walk home, we could. So we all got in his truck.” Her voice was shaking and she used her most unaffected hand to swipe at the tears now dripping down her cheeks.

  “Enough,” Brodie growled. “She needs to stop now.”

  “Ms. Thorne, would you like to take a recess?” Judge Kawa asked gently.

  Taryn shook her head. “No. I just...want to say it all. Is that okay?”

  “Go on.”

  She looked miserable and lost sitting alone there in her wheelchair. Had she been carrying this burden inside her all this time? Was that the reason the girl hadn’t wanted to cooperate with her therapy?

  “I didn’t put my seat belt on. Neither did Layla. I don’t know why. We just didn’t. Charlie was telling us on the way home he was going to turn himself in and tell the police what he had done. We were all f-fighting and yelling and then we...saw lights behind us. Charlie swore. He said he was going to pull over.” She hitched in a little sob of a breath. “I told him to go. I screamed at him, over and over. I said, Just go! Just go! Just go! I knew...my dad would kill me.”

  “Just be quiet, Taryn!” Charlie yelled, but his white-faced father restrained him.

  “No!” she shouted back. “It wasn’t...your f-fault. You wanted to stop. We all made you drive f-faster. Even... Layla said to keep going. She said her uncle wouldn’t chase us in the snow and we could get home. You wanted to stop. We should have let you stop. I’m so sorry. It’s my f-fault. All of it...was my idea. I should have been...the one to die. Not Layla. Not Layla.”

  She was weeping now, great gusting sobs. Brodie jerked to his feet and rushed to his daughter’s side, heedless of courtroom decorum. He leaned down and folded her into his arms and she sobbed against him and Evie’s heart cracked and broke apart with love for both of them.

  Through her own tears, her gaze landed on Maura. She looked stricken, lost. Beside her, Mary Ella hugged her daughter tightly.

  Even the judge looked shaken. She banged her gavel as the courtroom seemed to quiver with reaction. “Order. Order! Is that all you wish to say, Ms. Thorne?”

  Taryn’s head brushed Brodie’s shirt as she nodded.

  “In that case, I believe we need a recess. We will reconvene in fifteen minutes for the remaining statements.”

  Evie sat for a moment, not sure what to do. Poor, poor Taryn. She genuinely believed she was responsible for the events of that night. She likely thought she deserved everything bad that had happened to her.

  She had tried to tell them all, over and over, not to blame Charlie but no one would listen to her.

  Brodie was trying to push Taryn out of the courtroom, she suddenly realized, but was struggling to make it through the crowd milling in the aisle. Evie—well used to the strange phenomenon that people seemed to not heed a wheelchair even when it was nearly rolling over their toes—stood up to help clear a path for him.

  In the process, she ended up just ahead of them out in the hall. Almost as if they were a unit, as the Beaumonts had been, which she knew they absolutely were not.

  “I’m sorry, Dad,” Taryn said when they were clear of the crowd. “I’m so sorry. I know...you hate me now.”

  “I don’t hate you. I could never hate you, sweetheart.”

  Evie didn’t want to intrude on this private moment between them. She started to ease away but to her shock, Taryn reached for her hand. “Thanks... Evie. I had to tell the truth. Nobody...else would listen.”

  This was why she wanted so much to speak at the sentencing hearing, because her guilt was eating her up inside. Perhaps this experience would serve as a catalyst for change. Evie prayed that maybe now that the weight of this guilt was off her shoulders, Taryn would be able to truly turn her attention to allowing herself to heal.

  “Have I ever told you that you’re just about the bravest person I’ve ever met?” Evie said softly. She hugged the girl to her and closed her eyes, aching at how empty she would feel now that Taryn and Brodie were largely out of her life.

  When she stood again, she found Brodie watching her with an unreadable look in those blue eyes. He opened his mouth to say something but before he could, Maura approached them, her features pale. Evie almost stepped protectively in front of Taryn, just as Jacques might have done, but she knew that was silly. Maura would never hurt the girl, no matter how deep her own pain might run.

  “Taryn, there’s enough blame to go all around. Layla—” Her voice broke. “Layla wouldn’t have wanted you to carry this on your own, honey.” She pressed a hand to Taryn’s shoulder for just a moment before returning to the courtroom.

  Taryn had a distant sort of look in her eyes as if she wasn’t quite sure how to respond.

  “She’s right,” Evie said. “Sometimes tragedies are just that. Tragic. Nobody is to blame. Yes, people could have made different choices. You could have understood that your dad was only trying to help you make better choices with your life. He loves you and wasn’t being punitive. You could have chosen to take your frustration at him out in a healthier way. All along the way, one of you could have stopped what was happening.”

  The girl didn’t say anything and Evie frowned. Something didn’t feel right about Taryn’s posture and her vacant facial expression. “Taryn?”

  Suddenly the girl’s head tilted backward as if someone had cut the strings holding it upright and her limbs began to tremble. Evie stepped forward and saw that Taryn’s pupils were dilated and her eyes were jerking rapidly back and forth. Evie inhaled sharply. “Taryn!”

  Brodie instantly picked up on the panic in her voice. “What is it? What’s happening?”

  “I think she’s seizing,” Evie said.

  “Seizing? She hasn’t had a seizure in months! I thought she was done with them.”

  “Apparently not.” She didn’t have time to tell him lingering seizures could be a common side effect of traumatic brain injuries, a sort of short circuit in the brain’s complicated wiring.

  “We need to take her out of the chair and place her onto her side right away. It’s the best way to protect her airway.”

  Without hesitating, Brodie scooped his daughter out of the wheelchair in one fast motion and laid her on the wood floor of the courtroom hallway. He rolled her to her side and Evie tilted the girl’s chin down to her chest to keep it free of obstruction and to help saliva to flow out instead of choking her throat.

  “Should I call an ambulance?” Brodie asked, gazing at Evie with such trust she was overwhelmed by it.

  “Let’s give her a few minut
es and see if she can come out of it on her own. You don’t happen to keep Diastat in her bag?” she asked, referring to the instant medication that sometimes could stop a seizure quickly under certain circumstances.

  “No.” His features were tight, worried. “I don’t think so. Like I said, she hasn’t had a seizure since we left the hospital. We thought she was done with that part. Damn it! I should never have let her testify today. I knew it was too much for her.”

  Panic and memories swarmed her, harsh and biting, and it took all her strength to keep them at bay. She couldn’t do this. Not again. Cassie had died after a prolonged seizure in her sleep, when her heart had stopped and couldn’t be resuscitated. Evie had found her in the morning and now, with Taryn’s seizure, once more she was back in her house in the canyon, waiting for the paramedics to arrive while she desperately did CPR by herself and begged her daughter to come back, even knowing it was too late.

  No. That was the past. This was now and Taryn needed her.

  “Call an ambulance,” she finally said when the seizure didn’t abate after another minute or two.

  Brodie quickly dialed 9-1-1 and Evie was checking Taryn’s pulse—steady, thank the Lord—when Mary Ella, Claire and Katherine hurried over.

  “We just heard,” Katherine said, kneeling beside her granddaughter. “Oh, baby.”

  “What can we do?” Claire asked.

  “Just keep people away,” Evie said. “She would hate everybody staring at her like this.”

  Finally, what seemed a lifetime later, the EMTs arrived and rushed in with a stretcher. Again Evie fought the need to escape but made herself stay for now until she could be sure Taryn was safely on her way to a medical facility.

  “Somebody said Taryn’s sick. What’s going on?”

  She turned to find Charlie pushing through the crowd, his features tight and pale. “She’s having a seizure,” Evie said. “It can be common in people who’ve suffered traumatic brain injuries.”

  “Is she... Will she be okay?”

  “I’m sure she will,” she said, even as her mind flashed to Cassie, still and cold.

  He let out a shuddering sort of breath. “She shouldn’t have come today.”

  She glanced sideways at Brodie. Finally, something the two of them could agree upon. The paramedics began to load Taryn onto the stretcher and Brodie moved away from his daughter’s side slightly to give them room to work, which brought him closer to Evie and Charlie. She wanted to touch Brodie somehow, to reassure him, but she wasn’t sure whether he would welcome her presence now.

  “She wanted to set the record straight, I think,” Evie said to Charlie. “I know it bothered her to have people blame you when it sounds like you tried all along to stop events from exploding out of control. Why didn’t you say something?”

  He gazed at the paramedics bustling around the girl. “What she said—none of that matters. I was driving. I was responsible. I could have done the right thing and stopped when Chief McKnight first flashed his lights at us. I didn’t have to listen to everyone else. I should have been the leader and stood up to them, no matter how hard it was. None of it should have happened and if I had manned up, I could have stopped it.”

  Brodie was apparently close enough to catch that part. Though his attention remained largely focused on Taryn and the paramedics working on her, he turned slightly and after a long pause, he lifted his hand and rested it on Charlie’s shoulder.

  The boy lifted startled eyes to him, as if afraid Brodie would shove him to the ground, but he did nothing, other than stand beside the boy offering that small gesture of, if not quite forgiveness, at least reconciliation and peace.

  The accord lasted only briefly and Brodie didn’t even speak, but Charlie released a deep breath, astonishment and relief on his features, as Brodie turned his attention back to the paramedics, now readying the stretcher to head to the ambulance.

  Evie fought a hot sting of tears as she watched him return to his daughter’s side. Love for him was a heavy weight in her chest, painful and hot and wonderful at the same time.

  She wasn’t afraid anymore, she realized. Taryn was going to be okay. She didn’t know how she knew but it was a quiet assurance that settled in her heart. This wasn’t like Cassie. Already she could see Taryn’s trembling begin to ease as the medication the EMTs had administered began to take effect.

  She stood beside Charlie and watched the paramedics push the stretcher toward the elevator with Brodie holding his daughter’s hand, and a sweet assurance seemed to flow through her.

  She loved Brodie Thorne. If Taryn could confront her fears by coming to the courtroom and shouldering more blame than she should for the accident, and if Brodie could face his anger at Charlie and let the first seeds of forgiveness take root, surely she could show the requisite courage to let him into her heart.

  Fourteen

  He hated hospitals.

  Brodie had never been all that crazy about them—who was, really?—but after the last four months with Taryn, if he never saw the inside of another one he wouldn’t lose any sleep about it. Here he was again, though, at the Children’s Hospital in Denver, sitting by his daughter’s bedside while she slept.

  Her seizure had lasted about twenty minutes, start to finish. By the time the EMTs had taken her to the emergency room at the small hospital in Hope’s Crossing, it had begun to stop. Given her underlying condition, the E.R. docs hadn’t wanted to take any chances and had opted to transfer her by ambulance here, to the hospital where he had spent so many long and miserable hours in the early days after the accident.

  He knew every inch of this hospital, from floor to ceiling. Though it was a place of healing and hope to many and he had deep gratitude for the dedicated professionals who worked here trying to help children, these walls represented stress and worry and pivotal moments that had changed his daughter’s world.

  The uncomfortable bedside chair squeaked a little as he shifted position with the restless energy that was so tough to deal with in the close confines of a hospital room. At the sound, Taryn opened her eyes. They were slightly unfocused at first and then she smiled at him.

  “Dad?”

  “Right here, honey.”

  “Go home. I’m...okay.”

  Taryn was bleary-eyed and exhausted from the medication and the aftereffects of the long seizure. She could barely keep her eyes open. Doctors had a term for it—postictal, when the body sort of shut down to allow the brain time to reset itself. He just called it completely wiped.

  “I’m not going anywhere, sweetheart, except maybe to grab a bit to eat. Just rest. If you wake up and I’m not here, I just went downstairs to the cafeteria, but I’ll be right back.”

  She was quiet for several minutes and he thought she’d fallen asleep again, but she slowly pried her eyes open again. “Are...you mad?”

  Her halting words in the courtroom rang through his head, as they’d been doing through the long afternoon and evening. My fault...my idea... I was mad at my dad....

  His chest ached and he reached for her hand and curled his fingers around it. “No, honey. I’m not angry with you. How could I be? You’ve more than paid for a few lousy choices. We all made mistakes last spring. I promise I’ll try to listen better when you’re struggling and I hope you feel like you can come to me next time when things aren’t right between us.”

  “There won’t be...a next time.”

  “That’s good to hear.” He squeezed her fingers and she closed her eyes. Just as he started to ease his hand away, she opened them halfway.

  “What about Charlie?”

  A peculiar combination of anger and guilt settled in his gut whenever he thought about Charlie Beaumont. Since April, he had nurtured his hatred of the kid, blaming Charlie for everything that had happened to Taryn. He still didn’t quite know how to re
adjust his thinking. Some part of him still blamed Charlie. The kid had been driving and even the small amount of alcohol in his system had been enough to slow his reflexes and hinder his judgment. He could have stayed firm, no matter what kind of pressure his peers squeezed him with.

  Brodie’s anger didn’t have the hard edge it might have that morning, though. Taryn’s halting words in the courtroom had ameliorated much of it and left him conflicted about how he should feel.

  Evie would probably tell him he needed to forgive in order to move on.

  Remembering her and the quiet strength beside him in the courtroom also left him with that funny clench of his insides. He would have been lost without her, both during Taryn’s time on the stand when she had reached for his hand, and later during the seizure when she had taken over with that calm confidence as he fought wild panic.

  “Is he going to...jail?” Taryn asked.

  He wasn’t quite sure how to answer that. Judge Kawa’s sentencing decision had come down about two hours earlier. Brodie’s mother, at his request, had stayed in Hope’s Crossing for the hearing instead of coming along to the hospital. She hadn’t been happy about it but he’d asked her to wait until he knew how long the doctors would want to keep Taryn before she dropped everything and drove to Denver.

  Since he’d ridden in the ambulance anyway, he and Taryn would need a ride home in the morning and Katherine could drive in then with the van to pick them up.

  His mother had called to give him the news—Charlie had been sentenced to one year in a youth correctional facility, followed by three years’ probation and a suspended driver’s license until he was twenty-one.

  Earlier in the day, he would have been furious. How was one year enough to atone for the loss of one life and the destruction of another? After Taryn’s testimony, now he didn’t know quite what to think.

  “He’ll spend a year in juvenile detention,” he said, opting for honesty. “The judge left room for him to get out early for good behavior.”

  “One year,” she whispered. “I’ll miss him.”