I heard the pounding of the water filling the tub. I crawled away from my mother, unable to walk. I reached up to turn the faucet off just as the water was about to overflow. It felt like I had stopped something bad from happening. And yet the worst had already happened to us. I leaned against the tub, listening to the drip of the water. I looked out to see my mother still on the floor. Past her, my outfits now seemed strewn about the room, meaningless in this new world.
SARAH AND HER BOYFRIEND HAD BEEN DRIVING HOME FROM OUR NANA’S house. They were seniors on the edge of graduation, and each was getting ready to go to college. Sarah was accepted at Baylor and Howard Payne University, both in Texas. Sarah’s mom, Aunt Debbie, planned a big party at her house in conjunction with the Senior Party. Sarah wanted to get rid of kid stuff and make a little money for a trip to New York, so she had gathered things to sell at the annual Harris Creek garage sale in Nana’s neighborhood.
That Friday, Sarah and her parents went with her boyfriend to get it set up for the following morning. Then they headed back, and Sarah got in her boyfriend’s pickup for the fifteen-minute drive home. Aunt Debbie and Uncle Boyd were about five minutes behind them.
There was a rodeo going on in McGregor, and there was a horse named Gracious Will, likely getting its name from the eleventh chapter of Matthew. Jesus marvels to God that children like Sarah can see what matters in life better than the supposedly wise. “Yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.”
Gracious Will did not perform well that day, and the kid in charge of the horse was angry. So angry he hit the animal, and so hard the horse took off running.
The horse made it to the highway, narrowly missing two cars as it galloped against traffic. It stopped and stood in a ditch on the side of the road. As the pickup was about to pass, the horse suddenly leaped in front of it, going through the windshield and landing on top of Sarah.
My aunt and uncle drove up, and first saw the horse, dead on the road. Then the pickup in a ditch. Sarah’s boyfriend was outside of the truck, in shock. He had one small scratch on his face.
My uncle Boyd was a Texas highway patrolman, so he’d worked wrecks his whole life. He’d seen all kinds of stuff, shepherded so many people at the worst moments in their lives, and here was his Sarah. My Aunt Debbie, she had such a strong faith that she believed God would heal her daughter if she prayed enough. He would bring her back.
The ambulance came, and they all followed it to the hospital. Sarah was pronounced dead when she got there. She was gone. I know there are families who have had tragedies. But we were always somehow spared. There’s a comfort you slip into as good Christians. God’s got his angels over me, you think. I was taught—and generations before me believed—that we were protected. Without that blind faith, what did we have?
Mom and I got on the next flight home. I was in shock, I realize now, thinking if we did everything right, we would somehow undo the reality. Maybe like Aunt Debbie’s prayers. I thought we would go up in the air and then touch down on a world where this hadn’t happened. Going through the clouds, I put my head down on my mother’s lap.
I don’t know if I fell asleep, but I had a dream that I had fallen asleep, if that makes sense. Whether it was a dream or a vision, Sarah came to me. She had her long curly hair again. She had gotten her hair cut shorter a few weeks before and told me she hated it. But there it was. “I’m okay,” she said, giving me that smile she gave me every time she gently shook her head and told me to relax. “Please tell my mom I’m okay. Please give her a hug for me.”
Mom stroked my hair, and I sat up. “Sarah just came to me in a dream,” I told her, adding what she’d said about her mom.
“Well, you should let Aunt Debbie know,” she said. “She needs to hear that.”
Once we were home, my mom was my aunt’s lifeline and naturally set aside everything to focus solely on getting her big sister through this. Aunt Debbie summoned such grace to surrender all that pain and put it in His hands. I learned so much about strength and vulnerability walking hand in hand during those days. Our faith had not protected the very best of us, Sarah, the most precious and kindest member of our family, but there was also no way to get through this without faith.
When we arrived at Aunt Debbie’s house, she asked my dad if he would do the service.
“Of course,” he said.
She had been reading through Sarah’s journals and shared them with my parents. I didn’t even know Sarah kept diaries. They were so moving that my father asked permission to take them home to pull things from them for the service. He wove together passages of her writing, along with scripture and songs of praise that she highlighted. He told me how mature she was for her age, and how much she trusted God’s will. Her last entry was about her upcoming graduation, and she wrote that it was not nearly as important as her faith. “Since I know God and Jesus,” she wrote, “when I die, I will graduate.”
“Jess, there’s something else,” he said. “When Sarah prayed for people, she wrote their name down and what she asked God to give them.” He handed a journal to me, and I opened it to see the bubbles of her handwriting. Again and again, leafing through it, I saw my name. “Sarah prayed for you every day,” he said. “Every single day, she put your name down.”
Even now, I burst into tears. I had grown up so lonely. Not always alone, but always lonely. And that whole time, Sarah had thought of me with love every day, possibly at the very moments when I felt the most lost. That realization—that I was never truly alone all that time—changed how I thought about heaven, it wasn’t some place in the sky. It was with Sarah, and Sarah was with me. What had seemed like blind faith when we lost Sarah, the naive thought that we were protected, was real. I was never alone, and everything was going to be okay.
I stayed up late to read through the journals, seeing for myself how Sarah was always thinking of ways to help people and be of service. As I read, I began to feel an overwhelming sense of purpose, and I realized that I had inherited Sarah’s. I would keep her work alive through my life. Those are pretty big shoes to fill, I remember thinking. Just as quickly, I pushed away my fears: Well, they’re the only ones you’ve got.
Sarah’s funeral was held at her home church, First Baptist Church, Woodway. The service was exactly what she would have wanted. In her journals, she mentioned a song she particularly loved, “How Beautiful,” which she hoped to play when she eventually married. Dad asked me to sing it, and I was afraid to. But I knew it would be what Sarah wanted, so I just asked her to help me through it. It was the only time I didn’t cry at the funeral.
I recently talked to Aunt Debbie to get her blessing to share Sarah’s story. She told me many people, young and old, later said that the service inspired them to accept Christ and to go into ministry or mission work. A day or so after the service, the letters started arriving. Sarah had written notes to every single member of her graduating class, telling them about Jesus and saying she was praying for them. She wasn’t preachy, just saying that in times of trouble she had found comfort in prayer and she wanted everyone to know they could come talk to her if they needed that support of Christ. She had mailed them a few days before she died, wishing everyone a great future. It was a powerful lesson in creating a legacy by choosing your words with intention. We are on this earth such a short time, cruelly short in Sarah’s case. What message did I want to leave behind?
I wasn’t the only person Sarah visited after her death. She came to Aunt Debbie and her boyfriend in dreams as well. She told him that she was okay, and he saw many kids around her that she was teaching. A girlfriend of Sarah’s told Aunt Debbie she saw Sarah in heaven, living in this big mansion, with white pillars . . . Aunt Debbie told me she nearly fainted, because what this young woman described was something Sarah had told her father about a week before her death. They were driving to check out Howard Payne, because she had been offered a scholarship there and had never visited. She was so excited on the two-hour ride. “I have this vision,” s
he told her dad, “that I’ll live in this huge house. With a big balcony and huge colonial pillars.”
“Well, you better marry someone rich out here,” Uncle Boyd joked.
“Or someone who loves you a lot,” Aunt Debbie recalled saying quickly. She told me: “I did not want her dreams crushed. If she wanted a mansion, I wanted her to have that dream.”
My aunt has extended that loving heart to so many. That poor boy who hit the horse, who set Gracious Will into motion, later reached out to her. He was just thirteen, a little kid, and his mom called and said, “My son’s gotta tell you something.” Aunt Debbie had to make a choice: Make this kid feel more terrible than he already did or tell this boy that he was okay and all was forgiven. She chose the latter, refusing to be bitter. Sarah’s boyfriend went on to be the great man that Sarah saw in him. He became an EMT. Another friend of hers named his daughter after Sarah. “I recently saw her, and she is such a beautiful, kind young woman,” Aunt Debbie told me.
Shortly after Sarah died, I started reevaluating what I was spending time on. The push-and-pull games with Jason now seemed childish, and I felt like God wanted me to make space for bigger things. Jason stayed very active in my dad’s church and went on to become a pastor.
I started journaling when I saw how Sarah could express herself so beautifully on the page. On May 13, 1996, I wrote: “I am starting a prayer journal. Sarah dying taught me how much I take for granted. God, help me keep this promise and please keep me accountable.”
God and Sarah began to keep me accountable, so I stuck with it. I listed the people I prayed for and the things that scared me. And as I wrote, I started to get to know myself better, readying myself for what was before me.
Part Two
6
Taking Flight
July 1997
The Casa Hogar Elim orphanage was about a dozen miles from the Texas border town of Laredo and a world away for us kids from church youth group. There were about a hundred of us that first time I went. On the bus from the airport in San Antonio, we leafed through magazines, showing each other a Ford Mustang convertible we had to have and the red, white, and blue Tommy Hilfiger ad for the white polo that was different from every polo we already had because this one was Tommy Hilfiger. I had begun to picture myself not just wearing the clothes in the magazines but being in the magazines.
It felt like I was getting closer. I was sixteen, just a few days from turning seventeen. On my birthday, July 10, I was going to fly to New York for meetings with record labels. I had plateaued on the Christian circuit and needed to go mainstream. Buster came to us shortly after Sarah died and told us the label was folding, so it seemed like all that work producing my gospel album would never see the light of day. My Nanny, one of my biggest champions, came to my rescue and gave my father $7,500 to do a pressing of the record so we could make CDs and tapes to sell ourselves at concerts. We named the album Jessica, and used one of my black-and-white Mickey Mouse Club audition headshots as the cover, giving it a sepia tint to make it look arty. I dedicated it to Sarah, and just as I had done with the Jump for Jesus videos, I was relentless, selling those CDs every chance I got.
Dad treated it like a business card, and he was effective. My vocal coach, Linda Septien, got us hooked up with Tom Hicks as a potential investor in my career. He was a near billionaire who had recently bought the Dallas Stars hockey team. I used to joke that my dad called 1-800-ENTERTAINMENT LAWYER, to find Tim Mandelbaum, but now I know it was from talking with Linda. Tim was in New York, where all the music labels were, and he shopped my CD around to drum up interest.
And there was. After the trip to the orphanage, we were flying straight to New York to meet with eight labels. Tim had lined up the meetings over a couple days, and I would basically be auditioning at each one, with my dad pitching me as my manager.
But first, there was the weeklong mission trip to the orphanage. When we drove up to the two-story complex of sun-bleached stone, everyone got quiet. Now we weren’t a bunch of pampered extras from Clueless. We’d seen poverty up close on mission trips before. As a group, we traveled to the Bowery mission in New York to sing and serve at the soup kitchen. And we’d done vacation bible school in Belize, where our van broke down during a rainstorm in the middle of the jungle. We were stranded, and I made everyone get out and pray in a circle around the bus. You know, to heal the van, I guess. Maybe it worked because a busload of soldiers, all with rifles on their laps, happened by. No one said a word the whole way back to the city limits. When we finally got back to the hotel, Carol Vanderslice, my Sunday school teacher, told me she thought, Great, I’m going to get the pastor’s daughter killed.
But there was something humbling about the trip to the orphanage, knowing all the kids who surrounded us had no one but each other and Mama Lupita, the woman who ran the organization. There were about eighty kids of all ages milling around in worn hand-me-down T-shirts with slogans and outdated video game characters. The orphanage had no running water or electricity, and since it was not state-owned, it relied solely on donations and the work of church groups like ours cycling through. Mama Lupita—Guadalupe Carmona was her real name—started the orphanage in 1986 when she took in four kids whose father couldn’t care for them after their mother died. My dad told me Mama Lupita also visited prisons to pray with people, and the women there often asked her to take in their kids, too. It just grew from there.
We spent our week doing odd jobs to fix up the place, cooking meals to serve to the kids, and doing lots of babysitting. We all got so attached to the children that we kept walking into town to buy them stuff because we had it to give. There was a new baby who had been found in a dumpster and brought to the orphanage the morning we arrived. I pretty much decided it was my job to hold her. I distinctly remember worrying that I was going to confuse her by speaking English, so I called over to one of the smarter kids in youth group.
“How do you say ‘I love you’ in Spanish?” I asked.
“Te amo, Jessica,” he said with googly eyes, and laughed.
I smiled back and turned my face to the baby. “Te amo,” I said, over and over again, meaning it. I wanted her to know she was loved. I wanted it to be a familiar feeling, so that when unconditional love came into her life, she would recognize it.
A few days into the trip, I was holding her when someone came looking for my dad. There was someone on the line for him, on the one phone in the whole place. When he came back, he told me it was Teresa LaBarbera Whites, a Dallas-based A&R rep for Columbia under Sony. A&R means Artist and Repertoire, so they’re supposed to scout the talent and then match them with the right material.
“How did she get the album?” I asked. The baby was sleeping, so I kept my voice down.
“No,” my dad said, knowing I wouldn’t like the answer. “She heard the demos.”
“What,” I whisper-yelled. “How?” The demos were three secular songs I’d recorded at a studio in Dallas and hated. I only did them because it seemed smart to record “regular” music so I could show the labels I was meeting with what I could do besides gospel. I sang the Céline Dion song “Seduces Me” and Whitney Houston’s “Run to You” and “I Have Nothing.” I had the nerve to be upset that I didn’t sound like Céline or Whitney on the playback. When the sound engineer, Chuck Webster, said they were fine, I said I was a perfectionist and asked him to just trash the tapes. If I was going to do mainstream music, I didn’t want it to sound like okay karaoke.
“Well, Chuck played the demos for Teresa,” my dad said.
“What part of ‘Never play this for anybody under any circumstances’ didn’t he understand?”
Dad shrugged and said Teresa was anxious to meet me in person to see if I could really sing. She was upset that I wasn’t going back to Dallas before New York. “She says she has to see you,” he said. “When we leave here, she’s willing to come down to San Antonio to see us before the flight.”
I looked down at the baby and sighed. Well, I tho
ught, what difference could it make? “Might as well,” I said.
DAD AND I ARRANGED TO MEET TERESA AT A HOTEL IN SAN ANTONIO. THE first thing I noticed was that she was very pregnant. She later told me she was eight months pregnant, and had brought her maternity records with her, just in case she went into labor. This was that important to her.
“You drove all the way down here to see me?” I asked. Now I know that being that pregnant on the four-hour drive down I-35 would mean hitting the bathroom at every single rest stop.
She smiled. “I flew,” she said. “Forty-five minutes in the air. I know we don’t have a lot of time, and I had to get down here,” she said. When she spoke, she was incredibly serene, with long black hair that hung loose around her shoulders. She looked more like a cool art teacher than a music rep. She told me she loved my voice on the tape but wanted to make sure I matched it in real life.
“I’m me,” I said. “We match.”
We made some small talk, which was very small on my end because I was so nervous. Teresa talked with her hands, and I was kind of mesmerized by the languid movement of these long fingers. Her hands seemed to glide and dip with her accent, which was deeper Southern than ours but still Texas. Teresa told me about her history with Sony and Columbia, how she prided herself on being what she called “an artist’s advocate,” nurturing young talent and putting them with the right songwriters and developing them as songwriters themselves. She had signed a Houston girl group, led by a singer she had known since she was nine. “She’s sixteen now, amazingly talented,” she said. “Her name is Beyoncé Knowles.”
I nodded. Dad said, “We’ll have to remember that name.”
Finally, I couldn’t stall any longer. “Should I just sing?” I asked. She nodded, and then seemed surprised when I started singing a capella. I did two songs, “I Will Always Love You” and “Amazing Grace.”
Open Book Page 9