The Things We Wish Were True

by Marybeth Mayhew Whalen

  She took the phone from his hand, felt his gaze rest on her, and in it his assumption that she would do this thing. But would it be any easier with his complicity? She saw them in her mind, her two beautiful children, a perfect matched set. It was so tempting to perpetuate what she’d created, and guarded, for so long. It was right there if she wanted it, and all it would take is one more meaningless night. But of course, it wasn’t meaningless. That one night held more meaning than nearly any other before or since. It divided and defined, haunted and hindered. But no more.

  She exhaled, the whoosh of air loud in the silent room. She cupped his chin in her hands and gave him the barest hint of a smile. “No,” she said, and handed him back the phone.

  ZELL

  John honked the horn in the driveway, and Zell hurried outside to see the truck. He climbed out and swept his arm past the bed, loaded down with their surprise for Cailey and her family. She came over to stand beside him, rested her head on his shoulder. “You’re a good man, John Boyette,” she said.

  “You’re a persistent wife, Zell Boyette,” he quipped. He chuckled and shook his head. “I don’t know how you get me into these things.”

  She elbowed him. “You wanted to do this as much as I did. That child grew on you this summer.”

  “That she did.” He elbowed her back and raised his eyebrows. “She also got you out of going with the Robinsons to Lake Lure.”

  She waved her hand in the air, refusing to admit just how true that was. “She needed us a lot more than Clay and Althea did.”

  He touched his finger to her nose, gave her that look that told her he was wise to her ways. “And you needed her.”

  She smiled, holding her hands up in mock surrender. “Maybe just a little.”

  “You know,” he said, “I’ve been thinking.”

  She laughed. “Oh no.”

  “No, I’m serious. I think you should go back to teaching somehow this fall—Sunday school or maybe substituting again? Something where you can work with kids. You’re good at it.”

  “Yeah, I was thinking about calling around, seeing if there’re some schools that might need help with beautifying their grounds or even doing the Wildlife Habitat program. That’s how Cailey knew about it—they did it at one of her schools. So, seeing as how I know what to do now, I thought maybe I could put that hard-earned knowledge to use.”

  He nodded, smiled. “I like it.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Me, too.”

  He clapped his hands together. “You ready to go? It’s only gonna get hotter, so we might as well get started.”

  “Sure, I just need to make one quick phone call before we go.”

  “Whoever it is, you’re probably gonna see them there,” he groused.

  She paused, thought of the promise she’d made to herself. She couldn’t go love on someone else’s child unless she’d done the same for her own. Her son was hurting, but she’d been too wrapped up in her own shame to reach out to him. She couldn’t spend one more day with him thinking he’d failed her, when the truth was he was just like her.

  “It’s Ty,” she said.

  His smiled widened. “That’s my girl.” He pointed at Lance’s house. “I’ll just go see if Lance remembered his hedge clippers.”

  She nodded and went back inside. She picked up the phone, dialed the number, and listened as on the other end, it began to ring.

  CAILEY

  Two days after I got home, they all showed up. Zell and Mr. John, Jencey and Lance with Lilah, Alec, Pilar, and Zara all whooping and hollering as they chased each other around in that terrible bare yard of our eyesore house. Bryte came, too, and brought her husband, Everett, who hadn’t been around a whole lot that summer but who was very nice. They left Christopher with his grandmother, though, because they said they didn’t want him underfoot. They had work to do, they said. With big smiles on their faces, they pointed to a pickup truck parked in our driveway. It was filled with bushes and flowers and even a small tree.

  Zell came and stood beside me as I took it all in. “Every gardener should have a garden of her own,” she said.

  “Thank you,” I said, but I barely had a voice to say it with.

  She shrugged. “We all helped.” But I knew it was mainly her idea. She was the only one who knew how much this would mean to me.

  “The other night,” I said, “I never really got to say goodbye with everything that . . . happened.”

  She shrugged. “We don’t really need to say goodbye, do we?” She waggled her finger in my direction. “I mean, we’re still neighbors, and that means you better come see me.” She pointed at the little tree John was unloading from the truck with help from Everett. “Do you know what kind of tree that is?”

  “A sycamore?” I guessed.

  Zell laughed. “Well, yes, we thought it would be fitting to get a sycamore. But that’s not what I call it.”

  I raised one eyebrow, something I’d been teaching myself to do. It always made Cutter laugh. “What do you call it?”

  “The Miracle tree,” she said.

  “The Miracle tree?” It made me think about that Miracle-Gro stuff we used in Zell’s garden.

  “Yep.” She nodded. “We’re going to plant it in the front yard so that we can all see it as we drive by. It’ll be a nice reminder of the miracle that happened here this summer.”

  I looked at all the people gathered there—Lilah and Alec running around with Pilar and Zara, Jencey and Lance making goo-goo eyes at each other, Bryte looking a lot happier than she had when she showed up at Zell’s the other night. We had a lot of miracles going around. We probably needed a whole forest full of trees in my front yard.

  Zell put her arm around me and kissed the top of my head. “You were my miracle,” she said, her voice so low I didn’t know if I’d heard her right. But then I looked up into her eyes, and I knew I had.

  I had to change the subject before she made me cry. “Well, you know what I don’t want in my garden?” I asked.

  “What’s that?”

  “A pond!” I said, and we both cracked up.

  “Hey, Zell!” Jencey hollered. “We need you over here!” Zell gave me a little smile and walked away. As soon as she did, Lilah, Pilar, and Zara came over.

  “It’s really cool what you did,” Pilar said. Beside her, Lilah and Zara nodded their agreement.

  I shrugged because I didn’t know what else to say. I wasn’t quite ready to talk about what I did, or who I found, or how I came to find her.

  “Wanna help us plant the flowers?” they asked.

  “Sure,” I said. They handed me a trowel with a yellow handle, just like the one I used at Zell’s house. I looked around me to see Alec and Cutter standing together in the bed of the truck, helping pass out the plants. Lance took a flat of pink geraniums from Alec, then handed them off to Jencey, but made her give him a kiss before he’d let go of them, which made Pilar and Zara giggle. Bryte braided Lilah’s hair so it wouldn’t be in her face. She did such a good job that we all said we wanted her to do ours.

  “You’re good at braiding. You should have a little girl someday,” Lilah told her.

  Everett and Bryte looked at each other. “Actually,” Bryte said to Lilah, “we think we might adopt one.”

  “Cool!” Lilah said, then bounced away to help dig holes for the flowers.

  We worked until the sun went down and we couldn’t see to work anymore. When we were done, John ordered pizzas and we all sat on blankets in the front yard to eat, dirty and tired and hungry. I don’t think pizza ever tasted better. Mom came home from work with Gary the Ambulance Guy. She cried when she saw what they’d done for us, and then Gary went to the store and bought beers for the adults and sodas for the kids. Later, Everett disappeared and then came back with boxes of fresh, warm donuts from Krispy Kreme. And though Zell said, “Oh I couldn’t,” she did.

  We stayed that way past everybody’s bedtime—even the adults’—but no one made a move to leave. Alec an
d Cutter fell asleep on the blankets, tired from chasing each other around in the hot sun all day. I sat with Zell on one side and Mom on the other, and I didn’t think about James Doyle or Hannah Sumner or Cutter—quiet and still at the bottom of that pool—even once. We laughed and talked long into the night, and it felt warm, cozy, familiar. To quote that entrance sign, it felt like family, a family I never expected to have.

  JENCEY

  Jencey motioned for the girls to keep up and made a silly face at them, attempting to lighten the mood. They could be so serious sometimes. She supposed that was her fault, but she was doing what she could to be a different kind of mother.

  “Are you sure about this?” Zara asked, her voice quavering slightly.

  Jencey smiled. “Yes, I’m sure.” She kept her voice light, wanting to put her daughters at ease. Both of them had heard the story of what had happened to poor Hannah Sumner. Though all the parents attempted to keep the details from the kids, Jencey had seen them gathered at the pool in little clusters, parsing what they knew, creating their own narrative that was, Jencey suspected, probably worse than the actual truth.

  Hannah Sumner had escaped. She would never be the same again, but she was alive. She had a future ahead of her that was as bright as she chose to make it. Jencey supposed that was all anyone could ask for in this broken, screwed-up world.

  She moved branches and brambles from their path, clearing the way for her girls as they ventured deeper into the woods. Neither girl thought this was the best idea, but Jencey insisted. She’d lured them away from the house with the promise of an adventure. The thing about adventure was, it usually required at least a modicum of danger. They pressed forward and finally found the clearing. She tried to see it through their eyes, to remember what it felt like when she’d found it as a child, how it had felt like hers from the moment she saw it.

  Now she would bequeath it to her girls, passing it along as if it were hers to give. They looked at the copse of trees with wide eyes, then back at her, the concern on their faces giving way to excited grins. “It’s a hideaway,” she explained.

  “Can we go in?”

  “Sure!” she urged, motioning with her hands for them to enter.

  For a moment she felt fear creep in, a fist gripping her heart. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to show them this place. Look what she’d done here, after all. She wasn’t sure she wanted either girl holing up here with a boy. And yet, that had come much later. In the early days, it had been only about having a place of her own—a place to escape to, a place to dream. Since it looked like they’d be with her parents for a while longer, the girls could use such a place.

  She crawled through the branches after them. Pilar hugged herself and looked around, delight etched on her face. “This is so cool,” she breathed. Zara turned around and around in circles, her arms outstretched and her face tilted toward the little patch of sky. She stopped and staggered around, dizzy from the spinning. She lurched into the waiting arms of Jencey, who planted a kiss on top of her head. Pilar edged closer to the two of them, and they stood together in silence.

  “Can we show this place to Lilah and Alec?” Pilar asked, her voice still laced with a breathy excitement. The thought of Lance’s kids made her think of Lance, made her smile. He’d talked her out of Virginia, talked her into seeing what the future held in Sycamore Glen. They were taking it slow, but they were moving forward.

  “You can show it to whoever you’d like,” she said. “It’s yours now.”

  “I might want to keep it a secret,” Zara said, burying her head in the crook of Jencey’s arm.

  “Well, that’s for you girls to discuss.”

  “And you think we’ll be safe here?” Pilar, always the responsible eldest, asked.

  Jencey thought about how to answer. “I always was.” And as she said it, she realized it was true.

  “It’s kind of dark in here,” Zara said, doubt in her voice.

  “Let me show you how to fix that.” Jencey grinned and walked over to the border of trees. She looked over her shoulder at the girls as they watched with interest. She beckoned them over and gestured for them to stick their hands into the branches. “OK, now pull,” she instructed. “Pull hard!” Together they tugged the branches apart, pulling wider and harder as, together, they let the light in.

  ZELL

  As she walked to her car, Zell spotted a single yellow leaf on the drive, a harbinger of summer’s end. School was starting in a few days, but when she’d asked Cailey if she’d gotten her teacher assignment yet, she’d just said, “Ugh, don’t talk about it.”

  Cailey still turned up at Zell’s door quite often, making the trek across the neighborhood with Cutter in tow. His gait was still a bit off, and sometimes he had trouble accessing the right words, but other than that, he was doing well. He was healing.

  She looked across the street at James’s empty house. It was already starting to show signs of neglect. Some kind soul had found a place for Jesse to live, and of course James would likely never see life outside prison after what he’d done. Someone had graffitied their thoughts about what should become of him across the front door after the press finally went away. John had made noises about going over and painting over it eventually.

  He and Lance were trying to keep the grass cut, but they were busy and it didn’t always get done in a timely manner. There were still marks where some kids had egged the house late one night. Zell had been awakened in the wee hours of the morning by the rhythmic thunks of the eggs hitting the wood. She’d gone to the window to see figures moving around in the yard, the white projectiles shining in the moonlight as they took flight again and again. She supposed she should’ve been alarmed, but all she felt was fascination. This was how people healed: they went and did something—anything they could—to redeem the situation.

  It was time for her to do something, too. She was starting with the doctor’s appointment she had in thirty minutes. She would finally submit her knee for examination. She would perch on a cold, sterile table and answer his questions. She might even tell the whole truth about how it had happened. She would discuss surgery and rehab. She would ask how soon she could start exercising. She would let herself dream of the day she would run again.

  CAILEY

  Zell gave me a bulletin board to put up in my room for all the news clippings and photos about what happened. People said I was like David the shepherd boy, using a stone to topple a giant. The interviewers always asked the same questions:

  How did you know Hannah was there?

  What made you throw that rock?

  Do you consider yourself a hero?

  Will you and Hannah be friends forever?

  I even got paid money to come on TV and talk about what happened (even though I’m not supposed to say I did). And I got the reward money for finding Hannah, too. My mom said that made me a double hero. It was enough money to be able to put a down payment on a house of our own—even though moving didn’t feel so urgent now that we didn’t live in the eyesore of the neighborhood anymore, thanks to all the hard work our neighbors did. Mom and I agreed we would take our time and find the best house, a house of our own, something I never dreamed we’d have. I told my mom my only request was we had to stay in Sycamore Glen.

  When people ask me what I think a hero is (which they always do), I tell them about Cutter: how he nearly drowned, but after he got better, he got back in the same pool that nearly killed him. He stood on the edge, his toes curling into the cement as if he was grabbing hold. I could tell from the look on his face that he was thinking about turning away. I wanted to whisper in his ear that no one would blame him if he did, put my arm around him, and walk him over to the drink machine to buy him a Dr Pepper. He could try again next summer, or he could stay out of the water forever.

  But then I saw him look at that water like it was his opponent in a wrestling match he wanted to win. I saw his face get that determined look that I think I probably had when I launched that rock in
to that glass. His eyes found mine, and I nodded that I understood; I nodded that he’d be OK. His feet left the edge, and though his toes remained curled, he flew into the air. As I watched, I imagined that those same arms I’d felt that night were underneath him, holding him close and throwing him up at the same time, helping him fly without letting him fall.

  I heard everyone around me inhale as we watched my brother break the water’s surface. No one dared to breathe while he was under the water, and when his head popped back up, everyone started to clap, their held breaths all coming out in one relieved rush of air. Someone hugged me and someone else yelled, “Go, Cutter!” At that moment, I thought of the day the spider nearly blocked our entrance to the pool, and how we never knew what message he might’ve spelled in his web. And I realized that it didn’t matter what the spider said. It mattered that we knocked that web down and walked right in.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Several years ago, a little boy nearly drowned in our neighborhood pool. In the days after this event, I noticed how it united and changed our neighborhood.

  I could say that this novel was begun in the ensuing days, but that’s not entirely true. Instead, I think the novel began in earnest at our end-of-the-season swim-team banquet several weeks later, when that same little boy went forward to get his swim-team trophy. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house as we all witnessed the miracle of him—healthy and whole—going forward to accept a trophy for the thing that had nearly killed him. There was so much hope—so much joy—in that moment, and I knew then I would write about it somehow, some way, if for no other reason than to try to lasso some of what I felt whoosh through the room in that moment.

  I hope that in the final scene, when Cutter goes back in that water, you felt a tiny bit of what we all felt at that swim-team banquet. And I hope that maybe whatever you’ve been scared to dive into won’t scare you so much anymore.