What would they have thought if they could have seen this moment from those other courthouse steps so long ago, from that other day of decision in the past? Would they have made the same decisions? Chosen a different way to raise Natalie? Could they have done something that might have spared Sara’s life? Daria shivered involuntarily at the thought.
No, it was good that God did not allow a view into the future. And yet now she couldn’t help but long for a glimpse into Natalie’s future. A year from now, two years, would they be able to look back on this day the way they now looked on that other verdict? Would the passage of time allow them to rejoice that something good had come of this crucible, too? Would time benevolently diminish the anguish they had all experienced over the past weeks and months? Or did the future hold something even more bleak?
Finally, Cole sighed heavily, buckled his seat belt, and reached quietly across the front seat for Daria’s hand. Without looking her way, he squeezed her hand tightly in his own, and she knew that, in the tender language shared only by long-wed lovers, he was telling her, We’ll be all right. We cleared another hurdle, and we’re still breathing, still living, still loving. She squeezed his hand in return, and in her spirit, she whispered a prayer for her daughter.
Seventeen
The heavy door slammed shut. Its thunder reverberated down the corridor and back again, over and over, as though it would never end. Natalie put her face in her hands, but she could not weep.
She was grateful to find that the two beds in the room were empty. She could hear voices outside the door and knew that there were other prisoners in the pod, but for now, at least, she was alone in the small room. She looked down at the ill-fitting bright orange jumpsuit she’d been given to wear, and her face burned with humiliation.
Her lawyer had told her exactly what to expect from her time in jail. But her worst imaginings could not have prepared her for the degradation of being stripped of every personal belonging, searched, forced to shower and shampoo, and then being shown to this cell by the none-too-pleasant officer.
And yet she had received the treatment she deserved. She had no one to blame but herself. Sinking onto the bare mattress of the nearest bed, she sat with her elbows on her knees. Somewhere deep inside, a part of her desperately wanted the release of tears. She longed to cry and scream and wail. But it was all she could do to make herself continue breathing in and out.
She knew Mom and Daddy had tried to be strong for her sake, but she hadn’t missed the looks of agony on their faces as they left the courtroom. She had humiliated everyone she ever cared about. If she lived to be a hundred, she didn’t think she could ever make it up to them.
Time seemed to stand still, and her thoughts swirled in a swift current, like a whirlpool threatening to suck her into its vortex. Finally, her back and arms began to ache from sitting in one position for so long. She crawled onto the mattress, not bothering to put on the sheets that lay folded at the end of the bed. She curled into a fetal position and sought sleep, but instead, the accusing thoughts assailed her. Her breathing became shallow, and her skin felt clammy and cold. Panic rose in her throat, and she wondered if she was having some kind of attack.
“Oh, God. Help me. Forgive me. Please, God, forgive me!” she whimpered. “You have to forgive me!”
She waited, feeling nothing. But slowly the panic subsided, and she was able to stretch out on the mattress. Her racing heartbeat gradually slowed. Staring at the empty ceiling she prayed. Pleading for mercy, forgiveness. Begging God for a chance to redeem her life. But Sara was as dead as she’d been yesterday and the day before. How could that ever be made right?
Natalie grew drowsy and reached for the thick blanket that lay under the stack of unused sheets. She pulled the scratchy fabric around her shoulders and finally drifted off. When she opened her eyes next, harsh light from the central room of the pod shone in through the windowed door. Her room remained in shadow. She closed her eyes again and slept deeply.
When she woke again, she somehow knew it was morning. The smell of burnt toast hung in the air. She heard the clatter of some sort of cart being wheeled down the corridor. She sat up on the side of the bed and waited, not knowing what to expect. Her door opened, and a uniformed woman deposited a tray on her desk. Natalie got up and went to sit in front of the congealed oatmeal and soggy toast but soon returned to her bunk. After an hour, the same guard came to pick it up.
“You ought to eat something,” the woman said without emotion.
“I’m not hungry.”
The guard lifted broad shoulders in a halfhearted shrug. “Suit yourself.” She picked up the untouched tray and left the room. Natalie was alone again.
The next thirty hours crept by. Natalie was barely aware of her surroundings, scarcely moving from the utilitarian mattress on the stripped bed. When offered an opportunity to exercise in the facility’s gym, she declined. She wasn’t asked again. She’d been told that she would be allowed to call home, collect. What would she say to them, she wondered. It was better not to call at all. Besides, she couldn’t make herself go out among the other inmates.
Inmate. A label that—like the orange jumpsuit—she’d never, in a lifetime of thoughts and dreams, imagined she would someday wear.
Natalie refused the lunch they brought her as well, but when the supper tray came, she went to the desk, pulled out the chair, and ate the tasteless food. Later, after they’d taken the tray away, she could not remember what it was she had eaten. A Gideon Bible lay on the desk. Natalie stared at it, feeling drawn to it. But she couldn’t bring herself to open the cover and accept the comfort she knew it offered. These hours were part of her punishment. She didn’t deserve comfort. She deserved the dull ache, the numbness she felt in this place—this hell of her own making.
She scarcely moved from the bed for the rest of her incarceration. When the door swung open and the same uniformed officer who’d admitted her informed her that her parents were waiting to take her home, it was as though she’d awakened from a macabre dream.
She shed the orange jumpsuit and put on her own clothes again, but she could not shed the guilt that she’d worn into this place. That burden remained as heavy as it had been when she’d walked in through the doors of the county jail.
Natalie fell asleep in her own bed that night, one more debt for her sins allegedly erased from the ledger. But she knew in her heart that forty-eight years in jail would not be enough to atone for what she had done.
The music of children’s laughter floated across the playground, and an April sun turned the afternoon air balmy. Natalie walked across the winterbare lawn, gathering abandoned toys as she went. Here and there the cracked, parched earth beneath her feet had given way to brave blades of yellow-green grass. She came upon a set of building blocks at the edge of the yard. Stooping to collect them, she looked across the lawn. From this angle, closer to the ground, she could see that a fine, green haze covered the yard. With one good, soaking rain and a few days of sunshine, the whole lawn would wear a mantle of green. What a difference they would see in the barren countryside when spring truly made its appearance. Her heart felt lighter at the mere idea, and she thought how much she had come to enjoy her work here at the childcare center. Somehow it didn’t seem right. Wasn’t the whole point of community service supposed to be punishment—or at least restitution?
She looked up and spotted a toddler on the glider near the swing set. The little girl’s bright pink shoestring sailed back and forth with her as she swung. “Wait a minute, Jessi,” Natalie called out.
She left the pile of toys lying where they’d accumulated and trotted across the playground. Jessica Benson slid off the glider and stood waiting for her, an inquisitive expression on her cherubic face.
Kneeling beside the little girl, Natalie smoothed away a sweat-damp curl that clung to her rounded cheek. Natalie smiled. “Let me tie your shoe before you trip on this shoestring, okay?”
The petite girl nodded and plopped dow
n on the ground beside her. Offering her foot to Natalie, she gazed up at her with wide, blue eyes. With her strawberry-blond curls, pale eyelashes, and a button nose sprinkled liberally with freckles, she reminded Natalie of someone. A lump formed in her throat as she realized that it was Sara. Sara Dever had probably looked much like little Jessica when she was a toddler. And Sara’s children could have looked like this child. Natalie wondered how often Maribeth Dever would be confronted with moments like this. She didn’t like the direction her thoughts were taking, and yet it somehow seemed wrong for her not to ponder such things.
She swallowed hard and realized that the old ache was still there. Like this lawn she knelt upon, fresh green shoots of happiness had cropped up here and there in her life, but underneath, the ground was still hard and black and unyielding. When, she wondered, would the quenching, soaking rains fall to soften the hard soil of her heart? “Please, Lord,” she whispered, “help me.” It was all she knew to pray. But it was a beginning.
She finished tying the girl’s shoe. “There you go, punkin. You be careful now, okay?”
“Okay, Miss Natalie,” Jessi chirped as she ran off to play.
Natalie walked slowly to the other side of the playground to collect the pile of toys she’d left there.
It was strange, and rather frightening, that time was passing so quickly. Her physical scars from the accident had healed so that she scarcely thought of them anymore. Her time in jail was a vague memory that appeared only in an occasional nightmare. At Bristol High, the whole incident seemed to have been forgotten. The high-school yearbook was being dedicated to Sara and to Brian Wagner. It was as though, with that action, their classmates had paid their dues to the memory of two good friends. They could get on with their lives now. Natalie wondered when she would move on.
Evan Greenway had not been back to school since the tragedy, but rumor had it that he was staying with an aunt in Kansas City while undergoing physical therapy at a facility there. He was supposedly working on his GED at the same time, but no one seemed to know whether he would be back to graduate with their senior class.
The parties out at Hansens’ had come to an abrupt halt after the accident, and then the harsh winter had set in, keeping everyone indoors and close to home. But just two weeks ago, Natalie had heard that they were having a big “bonfire” out on the property. She wondered if anybody thought it made a difference if they called it a bonfire instead of a beer party. She had no desire to go and was disgusted that nobody seemed to have grasped the connection between those parties and Bristol’s greatest tragedy in years.
This last semester of her high-school career had been odd. She wasn’t sure if it was because of the accident and Sara’s death; or maybe it always felt weird to be ending a time in your life that you’d never been able to imagine being over.
Of course, how many high-school students spent time in jail or spent their evenings attending alcohol and drug rehabilitation sessions? And her hours here at the community childcare center—three or four hours after school every day for the past few weeks—had ruined any possibility of other extracurricular activities at school. When she got home each evening, most of her remaining hours were spent on homework and filling out college applications and admissions forms.
There were less than three weeks to go before her community service would be complete. A nagging thought itched at her subconscious mind: Two days in jail and a few short weeks of entertaining adorable toddlers were not going to do the trick, would not convince her that justice had been done. The court system, the law, could dish out what they saw as punishment for her crime, but it was going to take a far more powerful detergent to absolve a guilt as immense as hers.
Daria Hunter clenched a wad of tissues in the damp palm of her hand. She glanced up at Cole, who sat beside her in the gymnasium bleachers. Beneath the sun-roughened skin of his square, clean-shaven jaw, a muscle tensed. Daria knew he was struggling as much as she was to contain his emotions.
“Natalie Joan Camfield,” the principal solemnly intoned the name, as the president of the school board held out the imitation leather folder containing Natalie’s diploma. Wobbling a bit in a new pair of heels, their daughter crossed the gym floor and stepped onto the temporary dais.
Daria knew Natalie was feeling nervous and uncertain about this moment in the public eye, but she managed to look poised and happy as she accepted her diploma. While Cole stepped into the aisle and snapped pictures, Daria tried in vain to hold back a flood of tears.
Hannah Dickson was next to cross the stage. Daria wondered if anyone besides her and Don and Maribeth Dever realized that Sara would have been next in line behind Natalie to receive her diploma. Daria took one look at Natalie’s face as she returned to her seat, and she knew that she, too, was remembering Sara. Please, Lord, let this be the last hard thing. Let this be the last time Nattie has to mourn her friend so deeply—and so publicly. Let college be a new beginning for her.
Daria looked down the row and spotted Don and Maribeth Dever. She immediately felt guilty for her prayer. Daria knew Sara’s parents were here for Natalie’s sake. Maribeth had a serene smile on her face, but this had to be one of the most difficult days of her life since Sara’s death. So many dreams had died with their daughter. Daria couldn’t even imagine. Guilt stabbed her again when she whispered a prayer of thanksgiving for her own three beautiful, healthy daughters.
The posters were gone from her bedroom walls, the paraphernalia of her childhood cleared off the tops of the dressers and off the shelves. Her life had been reduced to a dozen cardboard boxes that were now stacked neatly in the back of Daddy’s SUV. Even the wallpaper had been stripped in preparation for the anxious future occupant of the room.
Now, while Natalie packed the last of the clothes from her closet, Nicole whirled around the room, crowing, “I can’t believe I’m finally getting a room of my own!” Eyeing the full-length mirror that hung on the back of the closet door, she ventured, “Hey, Nattie, are you gonna take that mirror with you?”
“Probably not, but don’t get too attached to it yet,” she told her sister. “Man, I can’t get out of here fast enough to suit you, can I?”
Nicole looked at her closely, as if trying to determine whether she’d hurt her sister’s feelings.
Natalie offered a reassuring smile. “Hey, I don’t blame you. I’d be all over it too. But do me a favor, will you?” She affectionately elbowed her sister out of the way and brought another load of clothes from the closet. “Give me a few minutes alone to finish packing.”
“Okay, okay … sorry,” Nicole said with a sheepish grin.
Her sister slunk from the room, leaving the door open a crack behind her, and Natalie was left alone. She slipped a sweater off its hanger and folded it slowly. The air around her echoed with a strange emptiness, and for a moment she was overcome with sadness. There were happy memories here, yes. But there were a lot of difficult ones, too. More of the latter, it seemed—or maybe they were just too recent. She’d begun to feel that it was a gift that she’d be able to leave those behind. College seemed to promise a new beginning. Yes, she would think about that, force herself to dwell on the hope the future held for her.
Though she hadn’t a clue what she wanted to study, it had always been assumed that she would go on to college. But the uncertainty of her situation had greatly limited her choices. In the end they’d decided it would be simpler to attend a college in the state. Her mother and father—Nate—had both graduated from the University of Kansas in Lawrence, and Natalie was strongly drawn to that school. Then she’d received a letter of acceptance from Kansas State University in Manhattan that essentially made the decision for her.
Nicole was ecstatic about Natalie’s decision, since Jon Dever was at K-State too. “Now I can come up and visit both of you,” she’d chirped when she heard the news.
Natalie didn’t tell her that Jon’s presence there was one of her biggest reservations about going to the school. But on suc
h a large campus the chances of their running into each other with regularity were probably slim. Still, it gave her pause. She had seen the way he looked at her since the accident, the vague sense of disdain in his eyes. It broke her heart, but she didn’t blame him. Still, she feared the old feelings were still there, buried not far enough beneath the surface.
Take away my wrong desires, Lord, she whispered within her spirit. She sighed as, almost immediately, a psalm she’d memorized in a long-ago Sunday school class came to her. Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart.
Yes, Lord … put your desires in my heart. It was new to her, these two-way conversations with her heavenly Father. There was not one moment she could point to when she’d suddenly decided to seek God wholeheartedly. But through the awful time of Sara’s death and the aftermath of the tragedy—and especially since her talk with Nathan Camfield—she had slowly begun to take her questions, her problems to the Lord and then to listen for his quiet, gentle voice in reply. She was learning that she could trust him, and there was no denying that a new peace had begun to fill her heart. Yet neither could she deny that there was still an ache there … a longing for something she couldn’t quite grasp.
She thought of her two fathers. Sometimes she felt she didn’t belong to either one of them. When Nathan Camfield had come back to the States after the accident, they had shared a warm, close time, and yet that very closeness had caused her to feel like a traitor to Daddy.
It seemed she and Daddy were so often at odds. She wasn’t sure why. Since the accident—no, even before then—he had distanced himself from her. Or maybe it was the other way around. She felt awkward in his presence, and he seemed to feel the same. And yet, her throat ached with the sweetness of treasured memories of him. In her little girl’s mind, she could see the view from his broad shoulders as he carried her all the way to the end of the lane to get the mail and pick a bouquet of wildflowers for Mom.
After the Rains Page 15