by Anna Schmidt
“Jeannie? It’s Emma. Open the door.”
The silence that replaced the sobs was almost more distressing than hearing Jeannie wailing. Emma tried the knob and found the door locked.
“Jeannie?”
After what seemed forever but was in fact only seconds, Emma heard the click of the lock. She pushed in on the door at the same time that Jeannie pulled, and the door flew back, banging against the wall as Jeannie stumbled forward and into Emma’s arms.
Emma lost her battle to choke back the tears. She let them flow freely now. And the sisters stood locked in each other’s arms—one of them dressed plain with her prayer covering knocked sideways by her sister’s embrace, the other dressed in jeans and a T-shirt three sizes too large for her, her flaming red curls flattened into clumps against her cheeks by the rain and her tears.
“What happened?” Jeannie sobbed. “I don’t understand.”
Oh, the questions they must face in the days to come. Even if Tessa made a full recovery, Emma knew that once the relief passed, there were bound to be questions. The truth was that she was beginning to have a pretty good idea about what had happened.
The position of the driver’s seat had told its own story—too close for the long legs of Dan Kline. It had been the passenger seat that had been pushed back to its full depth—and reclined. Sadie would never recline a seat. Sadie had once told Lars that she thought that was so dumb. Why wouldn’t people want to see where they were going?
Had their impetuous, adventurous daughter persuaded Dan Kline to let her drive them to school? Or was it Dan who had suggested the switch in drivers? The roads were wet and slick with the heavy rain—a rain that followed weeks of drought. Surely the boy would have taken that into consideration. Surely he would have reminded Sadie that he was only eighteen and that Florida law required a driver on a learning permit to be accompanied by another driver over the age of twenty-one. He was a responsible kid—most of the time.
Oh, there was going to be blame enough to go around for all of them, Emma thought. But they would weather that and whatever else came their way as they always had—as a family of strong faith.
“Come on, Jeannie,” Emma said as she guided her sister across the tiled hall and into the carpeted waiting room. “Geoff needs you.”
Chapter 11
Sadie
Sadie, my name is Lieutenant Benson. I need to ask you some questions about what happened earlier today.”
Sadie kept her gaze fixed on the wall opposite her. She was in a hospital room. She could tell by the whiteboard on the wall that announced: “Your nurse is Marcie.”
She had little memory of how she’d gotten here. Her dad was standing by the window while her mom fussed over her, adjusting her pillow and rearranging the covers. They were nervous.
“I’m with the Sarasota police,” the man in uniform continued.
“Dad and I will be right here, Sadie,” her mom murmured. “There’s no reason to be afraid, okay?”
Until that moment, Sadie hadn’t really felt much of anything, but now as details of the morning came back to her, she felt heat rush to her face, and her stomach lurched. The clock read 10:25. At night? No. Morning. She could hear the rain beating against the window the way it had been scratching at the car windows when she was driving. She glanced toward the light and saw that it was still daylight outside.
Lieutenant Benson pulled a straight-backed chair closer to the bed and sat down. “Before I begin, there are some things I need to be sure you understand.”
Sadie found that the man’s voice was not unkind—not bossy like she might have expected. Or angry with her. She had really steeled herself for everyone to be so very angry. It was confusing that her parents weren’t upset with her for driving with Dan when they’d been so very clear about the rules.
“You have the right to remain silent. If you give up that right, anything you say can be used against you in a court of law.”
Her mom gasped and looked at her dad, but the officer continued, “Tell me what you think that means.”
“It means that you—” Emma began speaking to Sadie.
“I need your daughter to tell me, ma’am.”
Sadie swallowed, but there was no saliva in her mouth. “It means that I don’t have to talk or answer your questions if I don’t want to,” Sadie said. Her voice sounded like one of those automated message voices. “I don’t want to.” She did not blink or break her focus on the whiteboard: Your nurse is Marcie.
Lieutenant Benson cleared his throat. “Got that. You have the right to have an attorney present now and during any future questioning and—”
“It is not our way,” Lars interrupted, but Lieutenant Benson ignored him.
“If you cannot afford an attorney, then one will be appointed for you.” He waited for Sadie to respond.
“We’re not poor,” her mother said. “Just plain. My husband makes a good—”
Sadie saw her father’s hand move, and her mother stopped speaking in midsentence.
Lieutenant Benson spoke to her. “Sadie, do you understand that you can have an attorney—a lawyer—if you want one?”
“We don’t know any lawyers,” Sadie said. She pushed herself a little higher onto the pillows and locked eyes with the lieutenant. “I understand my rights—you just Mirandized me, right? Well, I don’t want to answer any questions, and we don’t do lawyers.” She glanced at her mom. “My stomach hurts.”
“Okay. Well, that’s your choice,” Benson said as he put away the notepad and pencil he’d taken from his shirt pocket. He looked up at her father. “My advice, sir, is that you consider hiring a lawyer to represent your daughter.”
Sadie sighed and focused once again on the whiteboard.
Her parents followed the officer into the hall, and she heard him talking to them. “…right now culpable negligence but…”
Sadie’s eyes darted toward the door, and for the first time it dawned on her that she was possibly going to be arrested and charged. She listened harder.
“Dan Kline,” she heard her father say.
“He’s been ticketed for allowing your daughter to operate his car.”
“So you’re telling us that Sadie might be arrested while Daniel…”
Sadie felt a wave of panic. She didn’t want to cause trouble for Dan. He had a full college scholarship. If he was arrested, that could ruin his whole future. She pushed back the covers ready to go to Lieutenant Benson and tell him everything.
“Dan Kline wasn’t driving the car, sir,” Lieutenant Benson said. “There are witnesses that saw your daughter at the wheel.”
Sadie tried to swallow around the lump that suddenly seemed to fill her throat. Uncle Geoff had seen her. So had Tessa. “I was the one,” she whispered as once again she saw Tessa’s face in the instant before she was struck, her eyes wide and questioning as the car careened toward her. I was the one, repeated in Sadie’s brain as she climbed back into bed and pulled the covers around her, covering her ears to block out everything that had happened. But even there she heard the drumbeat of the words. I was the one.
Seemingly out of nowhere, her mother’s arms came around her, holding her, protecting her. “Shhh,” she whispered. “Everything will work out.”
“Dr. Booker has admitted your daughter for observation,” she heard Lieutenant Benson tell her father. “But once she is discharged…”
Sadie’s choking sobs blocked out the rest of his words.
“And then?” she heard her father ask moments later as her sobs tapered to a whimper. His voice was shaking in a way that Sadie had never heard before.
“She’ll be taken downtown for booking. Again, sir, right now the case against her is borderline.”
All of the air seemed to go out of her mother as if someone had pierced her with a needle, and Sadie realized that she had been listening to what the officer was saying as well. “No,” she whispered and held Sadie tighter.
“Mr. Keller, take my advice an
d do your daughter a favor. Hire a lawyer,” Lieutenant Benson repeated.
“That is not our way,” Sadie heard her father reply, and then she heard the quiet click of the door as her father came back inside the room and closed the door, leaving Lieutenant Benson out in the corridor.
She pulled away from her mother and found her voice. “Am I being arrested?”
“No,” her father assured her through gritted teeth. Then very softly, he murmured, “Maybe.”
“It’s what they have to do, apparently, when there’s been a serious accident,” her mom explained.
“But Tessa’s going to be all right?”
“She’s in surgery,” her mother said. “The doctors are…”
There was a tap at the door, and Sadie’s dad opened it to Hester Steiner. Her mom’s friend looked really awful, as if she had just heard the most horrible news ever.
“Hester? Are you… What is it?” her mom asked in a voice that sounded like she couldn’t find the breath she needed.
Hester glanced at Sadie and tried a smile that didn’t come close to working. She motioned for Sadie’s parents to follow her into the hall.
“We’ll be right outside the door,” her mom said as she gently shut the door.
Sadie strained to hear what Hester was telling her parents. “…did everything they could but…”
Then she heard her mom moan, “Tessa? Please, God, no.”
And in that moment, she knew. Tessa was dead.
And it was her fault.
Part Two
The beginning of strife is like
letting out water…
PROVERBS 17:14
Chapter 12
Jeannie
Jeannie glanced around the kitchen. She was home, but how was that possible? She had no clear memory of how she’d gotten here. And how could this possibly be the same day? The same house? The same kitchen with its breakfast clutter untouched? And robbed now of the promise of Tessa ever coming through that door again, how could this place ever hope to lay claim to being a home?
Jeannie sat on the edge of the kitchen chair and waited for someone to tell her what to do next. Emma or Geoff, one of them would tell her how she was supposed to go on with her life without her beloved child—her only child—her Tessa.
She thought about Geoff’s face when they had heard the news. She had turned to him after Dr. Morris quietly reported that Tessa had died of massive internal injuries. She instinctively knew that Geoff’s expression of utter despair had mirrored what he was seeing in her eyes. In that instant, they had both gone from being the parents of a loving, bright, kindhearted, and generous child to being childless. There was a name for children who lost their parents. They were orphans. But for parents who lost their child? There was nothing. No longer a parent, what was she?
As if observing the activity around her from another universe, Jeannie was vaguely aware of Geoff now in the next room. He was talking to someone on the telephone. She caught snatches of his side of the conversation and understood that he was talking to their pastor. Across the kitchen from where Jeannie sat staring at nothing, Emma was making tea. It was what Emma did whenever something went wrong in Jeannie’s life. She came to her house, made tea, and listened while Jeannie poured out all of her frustrations.
How petty those discussions seemed now. Jeannie complaining about Geoff’s job and how much time he spent doing it. About how now with extra duties as vice principal he would be home even less, and when he was there, more than likely he would be working. She had even moaned over Tessa and how she spent all of her time studying, and why couldn’t she be more social like Sadie?
Sadie.
Suddenly she recalled seeing her niece sitting on the pavement next to the car, her arms wrapped around her knees, her head bowed. She remembered Emma kneeling next to Sadie. What she didn’t remember was asking after her niece.
“How’s Sadie?”
Emma glanced up, clearly surprised that these were her first words since coming home. “They’re keeping her overnight for observation,” Emma said. “The doctor ordered something to help calm her and make her sleep.”
Jeannie stared at Emma again, trying to make sense of her surroundings. It came back to her that Hester had driven Geoff and her home, where they had been given over to the gentle care of Geoff’s mom and her own stalwart parents who were now out on the lanai making phone calls of their own. Meanwhile Hester had returned to the hospital while Lars picked up Matt from school. “Why are you here? You should be with Sadie.”
“Lars is there, Jeannie, and Sadie was already sleeping when I left. He was going to sit with Matt and help him understand everything. I’m here with you—where I want to be.”
Jeannie went back to staring, this time at the dishes still on the table. Tessa’s empty juice glass. The napkin—cloth, she had insisted on for the environment’s sake—folded neatly to one side of a plate coated with dried egg yolk and the strawberry jam that she and Emma had made together earlier that year. In fact, they had put up enough jars that they were still being sold at the farmers’ market to raise funds for the fruit co-op. Her utensils perfectly aligned on the plate. On the chair near the door sat her backpack exactly as her backpacks had sat every school day morning since Tessa’s first day of kindergarten. Jeannie had clutched it to her chest all the way home from the hospital and then placed it there herself.
The very idea that either of them would ever again be able to function normally seemed ludicrous. How could anyone ask Geoff to go back to a job where he was working with children every day—where it would be impossible not to remember that this was the year Tessa was supposed to be there with him?
What was she thinking? This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. Surely any minute Tessa would come down the stairs, pick up the backpack by its double straps, and sling it over one shoulder. Just a day earlier she had practiced carrying it that way, noting that kids in high school who wore their backpacks properly were considered dorky, according to Sadie.
Surely Geoff would complete his call and then shout up the stairs for Tessa to hurry or they would be late. Surely none of what had happened over the last few hours was real. Surely she was ill—delusional with fever.
Emma set a steaming mug in front of her and then ran the flat of her hand over Jeannie’s back. But she said nothing, just stood there for a long moment as they both listened to Geoff’s side of the phone conversation.
“Yes.”
“No.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary.”
Jeannie realized that he was no longer speaking with their pastor. Every inflection told her that he was talking to a stranger, and the long pauses between his short replies made her curious. She picked up her mug of tea and walked into the den, where just the night before they had gathered as a family while Tessa opened her gift. Behind her she heard Emma start to clear away the breakfast dishes. She heard water running in the sink—Emma never used the dishwasher. She heard the back door open and close. Heard Emma greet someone in the low somber tones that she instinctively knew would become the norm for all conversations in this place over the coming days. And she ignored it all as she moved woodenly toward the den, where her husband was on the phone with a stranger that he really didn’t want to be speaking with.
He stood at the window, his broad shoulders blocking the view of the lemon-lime tree that he had planted on Tessa’s first birthday. He seemed older somehow, although his sable-colored hair was as thick as ever, and his stance was the same as when he stood on the sidelines of a game coaching his team.
“I’ll check with my wife,” he said now and turned around, startled to see her there in the doorway but recovering instantly as he slid one hand over the receiver. “Monday afternoon?” he asked.
“For?”
His face crumpled into a series of pockets and wrinkles as if someone had grabbed it like a piece of clean paper and wadded it into a ball and then released it. “The funeral,” he croaked.
Jeannie felt the way people did when they dreamed of falling and then woke with a start, as two strong hands clasped her shoulders and pulled her upright and Emma relieved her of the mug of tea now spilling its contents onto the carpet.
“You need to sit down, Jeannie,” their good friend Zeke Shepherd said in that calm no-worries voice that was his trademark. He helped her to a chair and then held out his hand for the phone that Geoff was still clutching. “And you need to let somebody else do that.”
Geoff willingly handed over the phone and then sat on the hard straight-backed desk chair while Zeke took charge. That in itself had to be an aberration. Zeke was not a take-charge kind of guy. He was a combat veteran who had chosen a life on the streets, the type of person who made his way through life in a live-and-let-live manner. Rules were for people who had no idea of who they were or why they had been put on this earth.
Jeannie was pretty sure that Geoff—like her—had not even realized Zeke was there. But then that was Zeke—he came and went on his own schedule and in his own way.
“Zeke Shepherd here, friend of the family,” he said and then listened. “Yeah, well, we’ll get back to you on that. Otherwise, have you got what you need to… to go get her?”
He listened again.
“Got it,” he said and clicked off the phone as he set it on Geoff’s desk.
Jeannie looked at the clock that sat on the bookcase. Two thirty. There were hours she couldn’t account for—time that had passed in a blur after the doctor left the waiting room. Any minute surely Tessa would walk through the door and calmly report that her first day of high school had been “fine.” Her teachers were “fine.” Her class schedule was “fine.” Her new classmates were “fine.”
Jeannie continued staring at the clock for a long moment. It was real, she thought, and nothing Emma or Geoff or anyone else could say would change that. The word funeral had been applied to their Tessa. She was to be mourned and buried within a matter of days. That was the way of things. How many times had she been at the homes of neighbors and family for this very purpose? How many times had she been the one uttering the meaningless words meant to bring solace and comfort?
