Woodrose Mountain

by RaeAnne Thayne

She was quiet for several beats, so long that Evie could feel the leashed tension in Brodie and knew he was about a heartbeat away from jumping out of his seat and returning to her side.

  “Judge, I want to tell you,” Taryn finally continued, “Charlie shouldn’t go to jail. He shouldn’t. It’s wrong. None of it…was his f-fault.”

  “Yes it is!” Charlie suddenly jerked to his feet. “Don’t listen to her.”

  “Young man, this is a court of law. You can’t just shout things out. Please be seated,” the judge said sternly.

  “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She doesn’t remember!”

  “Yes. I do. I…remember. All of it.” Taryn gripped the podium tightly. “We were so stupid. Just…messing around. It was never Charlie’s f-fault. It was all…my idea. To rob those stores, I mean. I was mad at my dad. He was going to make me quit…cheerleading because I broke curfew a lot and my grades were bad. I wanted to hurt him.”

  Brodie’s jaw tightened and he drew in a ragged-sounding breath and Evie couldn’t simply sit beside him and do nothing. His hand was a tight fist on his thigh and she covered it with her own hand. After a startled moment, she could feel some of the tension seep away. He relaxed his fingers and turned his hand over to clasp hers, though he still didn’t look at her.

  “It was me and Layla and Charlie and Jason and Aimee. Jason Hoyt and Aimee T-Taylor. Jason knew…how to shut off the store alarms and unlock the doors. He broke into his dad’s security company or something. I don’t know how. But it was…too easy. After we took stuff at my dad’s store, we decided to do others. Just for f-fun.”

  Taryn looked guilty and small standing behind the podium. Her lip trembled as she spoke but she was still holding on tightly and remaining upright. “It wasn’t for the money. Not really. We…were stupid and…and bored, I guess. Jason and Aimee were high. I wasn’t. Neither were Layla or Charlie. At String F-Fever, we accidentally knocked a box of beads in the… dark and Jason thought it was so f-funny. He knocked over more and then we all…took turns dumping stuff out. We made…a big mess. I felt really bad afterward and sick to my stomach. I like Claire. But then I made it worse.”

  She shifted her gaze to Charlie, and Evie saw something she had missed all this time. How could she not have seen it? Taryn’s feelings for the boy were obvious all over her face. Though she might say she and Charlie were only friends, Taryn’s emotions ran much more deeply than that.

  “I grabbed…some scissors and cut up his sister’s wedding dress. It was dumb. I don’t know why I did it. But Charlie’s parents ignored him all the time. It hurt him. All they cared about was his sister’s stupid wedding. He was sick of it and I…wanted to help him.”

  She was beginning to look shaky up there and Evie wasn’t sure Taryn would be able to stand much longer. She wanted to go and hold her up but didn’t think the judge would appreciate the interruption.

  “The next night, Jason said he knew an empty cabin where we could hang out and watch a movie, with lots of…beer in the f-fridge. Charlie didn’t want to have any. He was driving.” A slow tear dripped down the side of her face, and beside Evie, Brodie made a low growling sound in his throat she doubted anyone else could hear. “We…we made him. We teased him until he had some beer with us.”

  “Taryn, shut up.” Charlie jerked to his feet, his fists clenched at his sides. “It doesn’t matter now. None of it matters.”

  “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 intru
de 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 minutes 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 se
eds of forgiveness take root, surely she could show the requisite courage to let him into her heart.

  CHAPTER 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?”