The Last Wish of Sasha Cade

by Cheyanne Young

  I send an email asking Elijah when he’s free to visit the church at sunrise. I feel awful that he’ll have to drive all this way so early in the morning, so I tell him it’s okay if we’re not there right at dawn.

  He doesn’t reply immediately, his username a grayed-out line on my email chat screen. I guess I can’t expect him to always be online waiting for me, but after twenty-four hours of no reply, the knot in my stomach has doubled in size, all filled up with worry and angst.

  The knot only grows when Mrs. Cade calls me on Tuesday and invites me over to dinner. I love her and Mr. Cade, but a tragic dinner is about the last thing I’d seek out right now, when I am finding flashes of happiness. But I tell her yes, obviously, because I’d never say no to my best friend’s mom.

  Mrs. Cade opens the door, wearing a smile as bright as her yellow dress. “Hi, sweetheart,” she says, pulling me into a hug. At my feet, Sunny’s tail is wagging and he’s looking out past me, like maybe he thinks I brought Sasha back from an extended vacation he didn’t know about.

  “Save some hugs for me,” Mr. Cade says, entering the foyer. Their foyer is about the size of my bedroom, and it’s lined with priceless artwork, a Tiffany lamp and an umbrella stand.

  Mr. Cade squeezes me so tightly all the air in my lungs whooshes out.

  “Thanks for having me,” I say, lacing my fingers together in front of me. “Dinner smells good.”

  “We’re having chicken Alfredo,” Mrs. Cade says, as they lead me into the dining room. “With homemade cheesy garlic bread.”

  “My favorite,” I say, though they already know. “Sasha’s favorite, too.”

  “It was always a struggle to get any of that bread,” Mr. Cade remembers. “Sasha would eat the whole damn loaf if you didn’t pay attention.”

  We share a laugh and settle into the plush high-backed chairs around their formal dining table. Mrs. Cade has gone all out tonight, using the same fine china she uses for Christmas dinners.

  “You didn’t have to go to all this trouble,” I say as Mr. Cade hands me the tray of garlic bread. “I’d be happy eating out of a pizza box in the kitchen.”

  Mrs. Cade’s diamond earrings sparkle under the chandelier and she waves a hand dismissively. “Nonsense. I love cooking a good meal every now and then, and since Walter actually got home at a reasonable hour tonight, I thought it’d be a perfect opportunity to have you over as well.”

  “I appreciate it,” I say.

  Mr. Cade talks about his work and how they’re going through the boring process of auditing the firm they recently acquired. I nod politely as we eat, trying to ask an interested question every so often, but eventually Mrs. Cade tells him to stop talking about work at the dinner table.

  “We don’t want to bore our guest,” she says.

  “I’m not bored,” I say, reaching for another piece of garlic bread. “People think it’s so cool that I know Walter Cade, the tough Texas lawyer.” At that, Mr. Cade’s face lights up, and I continue, “I think it’s really cool how you put so much effort into helping people.”

  “Thank you, Raquel. I’m one of the good guys in a field of sharks,” he says with a hearty chuckle. “Of course, that doesn’t mean I don’t play the role of shark occasionally. It’s all for the greater good in the end, though. That’s why I call myself tough in the commercials. I didn’t think that phrase would stick as much as it did.”

  “That reminds me,” Mrs. Cade says, taking a sip of her wine. “Remember that commercial we did when Sasha was about four? That was the cutest thing.”

  “What?” I say, eyes wide. “I didn’t know about this!”

  “Oh, we have to watch it,” Mrs. Cade says, hand over her heart. “It was so adorable. Sasha said something like, ‘My daddy will fix your problem because he’s the tough Texas lawyer.’” She makes her voice high and childlike as she imitates Sasha.

  I thought I knew Sasha nearly as well as I know myself. I wonder what other secrets I’ll discover now that she’s gone. “I can’t believe I never knew about that,” I say, recalling all of the Walter Cade commercials I’d seen over the years. They’d always just featured Mr. Cade and sometimes his happy clients.

  “She might not have remembered it herself,” Mrs. Cade says. “It was a long time ago.”

  Talking about the past makes me think of Elijah, and I realize I’ve never learned the answer to the biggest question of all.

  “What made you adopt Sasha?” I ask in the contented silence that lingers. Now that I know Elijah was out there, orphaned and alone, I need to know the answer.

  Mr. and Mrs. Cade exchange a look, and then Mrs. Cade answers. “I couldn’t have children of my own. Once the doctors confirmed that, they offered all those medical options, but I just had this feeling — this hunch, I guess you could say — that we should adopt.”

  “We went to an adoption agency in Austin the very next day,” Mr. Cade says, sitting up taller. “We were just going to talk to them, look around and see how the process worked and all that.”

  “Oh, honey, you make it sound like we were picking out a puppy or something,” Mrs. Cade says, rolling her eyes. She turns to me, one hand still on her wineglass. “We had arranged a consultation with the agency, but on the walk down to the woman’s office, one of the caretakers walked by carrying baby Sasha. Sasha was crying, so I tried to cheer her up by making these goofy faces and stuff, and it worked. She looked up with those beautiful blue eyes and stopped crying. She even gave me a little laugh, and that was it,” she says, lifting a shoulder. “I knew she would be my baby girl. It wasn’t as easy as that, of course, but we got through the long adoption process and soon she was ours.”

  The warm memory makes me feel all good inside, but only until I remember that Sasha’s brother never had the same thing happen to him.

  I twirl a strand of pasta around my fork. “Did you ever think of adopting another child?”

  Something dark flickers across Mrs. Cade’s eyes as Mr. Cade clears his throat. “We thought about it, but in the end, we just wanted to give all our love to our little girl. We’re too old to adopt now, but …”

  Mr. Cade wipes his mouth with his napkin and looks over at his wife. “We’re thinking about maybe fostering some kids. Just one or two at first, see how it goes.”

  “Really?” I say, looking to both of them. “That’s amazing. I think Sasha would like that.”

  Mrs. Cade’s eyes seem far away and she nods. “After that speech Sasha had you give at her funeral, we started talking about it. We certainly have the means to take care of other kids, and I think Sasha would approve. It could be something we do in her memory.”

  For the millionth time, I wonder why Sasha won’t let me tell them about Elijah. Sure, he’s an adult now and doesn’t need a foster family, but they’d definitely want to meet him. Now they want to foster more kids, but they should have sought out more when Sasha was a baby. Elijah needed that same love that Sasha bragged about in her letter. He needed the Cades. I bite down on the inside of my lip to keep from saying anything.

  After dinner, Mrs. Cade walks me out to my car and gives me another one of her motherly hugs. “We’ll do this again soon,” she says, pulling away and holding me by the arms. The dark circles under her eyes have eased up a bit, and that makes my heart feel lighter. “Next time, bring your parents, okay?”

  “I will,” I say.

  “Are you still dating that same guy?” Mrs. Cade asks, almost as an afterthought. “Zack?”

  I shake my head. “Not really. We broke up yet again and now he’s been calling a lot but I’m just ignoring him.”

  She squeezes my arm. “Good girl,” she says with a wink. “Sasha never liked him, so I didn’t either.”

  I snort. “Yeah, she told me.” A few thousand times.

  “You’ll find someone better,” Mrs. Cade assures me.

  A sudden
image of Elijah appears in my mind and I nearly choke on my own spit as I try to shove the thought away.

  “I hope so,” I say, opening my car door. My heart is now going all jackhammer inside my chest. “Thanks for dinner. I’ll see you soon.”

  Before I go to bed, Elijah replies to my email. I sit up in bed, my hands shaking as I read the message on my phone.

  Hey,

  I could do Friday morning at 6? The rest of the week is kinda tight for me, and I might not get back online before Friday, so if you can meet me, I’ll see you there. If not, no worries.

  Goodnight,

  Elijah

  He’s already offline, so I can’t talk to him. I reply anyway to let him know I’ll be there.

  Friday is three mornings away. Three whole nights of lying in this bed, staring at the ceiling and wishing time could go by faster. Two more days of suffering through school, pretending to give a single shit about what my teachers are talking about in class.

  In three more mornings, I’ll finally get to hang out with Elijah again, and I might be more excited about that than learning what makes this historical church so important to Sasha.

  And that scares me.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Thinking ahead, I tell my parents I have a chemistry study session before school. I know it’s a pretty risky lie and one that I can’t believe they buy, since school has been the last thing on my radar lately.

  Still, they bought it. I’m out the door at five forty-five on Friday morning, following the GPS on my phone to get to Mount Horeb Baptist Church.

  This is the first one of Sasha’s adventures that doesn’t have a backstory that I already know, and curiosity has been clawing at me since I first got her email. Peyton Colony is a small town in the Texas hill country, forty miles southwest of Austin. We have a population of five thousand people and a ton of historical sites along our main highway. None of them have been of any significance in my life, since they’re all just landmark signs with some kind of story on them about how so-and-so from the Confederate army did such-and-such a couple hundred years ago.

  But Mount Horeb is more than just a big metal sign on the side of the road. The church is located on the outskirts of our tiny town, nothing but cow pastures and empty land sloping all around it. I steer onto a gravel road that’s not on the GPS and drive slowly, my car jolting over the bumpy and unused gravel road toward the small white chapel that’s tucked away at the bottom of a hill. I guess you can spend every day of your life in the same little town and still not know everything about it.

  I don’t see Elijah’s motorcycle anywhere, so I park and climb out of my car, surveying the area myself.

  The church is ancient and abandoned, a white building with a shabby wooden roof and two steeples on either side of an ornate wooden door. The windows are pointed at the top, with dark-blue-tinted glass. Overgrown weeds crawl up the steps that lead to the door.

  The rumble of a motorcycle makes my heart leap. I’m about to see him again, and a giddy grin jumps to my face. I hold my hand up to block the harsh white beam of Elijah’s headlight.

  He rolls up next to my car, cuts the motor and pulls off his helmet. We’re here before the sunrise, but only barely. His skin is darker in the predawn morning, the blues of his eyes seeming to glow in the residual moonlight.

  “Morning,” Elijah says, knocking the kickstand with his foot. He eases off the bike and leans it until the stand catches the gravel road.

  “Good morning.” My words come out in a breath, and I almost shake myself like a freaking cartoon character. Get it together, Raquel. Yeah, he’s hot. And yeah, a muscular guy climbing off a motorcycle in the shadowy clutches of dawn is sexy as hell. But get over it.

  “I think there’s a note on the door,” I say, turning to face the church instead of the guy.

  It dawns on me now, in front of a church of all places, where the term heartthrob comes from.

  “Looks like it,” Elijah says, falling into step with me. His hand brushes my arm in a hello and our eyes meet for just a second — then he dashes up the two stairs to the church’s front door and pulls off the envelope that’s taped there.

  He peers at the note scribbled on the outside of the envelope in pink Sharpie. “‘If possible, read me before the sun rises.’”

  We both gaze upward, judging how long it’ll be before a ball of orange ascends into the cloudless sky above.

  Elijah flicks his wrist toward me. “You want to do the honors again? I like the sound of your voice.”

  “Um, sure.” I take the envelope and slide my finger underneath the seal, taking out another handwritten letter. “It’s kind of long,” I say, pulling the two pages apart. “Maybe we should sit down?”

  Elijah gestures to the steps in front of us, then sits on the top one. I join him, and try not to think about how he doesn’t pull away when my knee touches his.

  “Okay,” I say, exhaling. “Ready for this?”

  “I’m ready if you are,” Elijah says, his voice like honey.

  I glance at the emerging orange glow above the tree line, and then focus on Sasha’s words.

  “‘In the 1800s, Peyton Roberts was born a slave in Virginia. At the end of the civil war, he became a free man and moved west, settling right here in our hometown. That’s how Peyton Colony got its name. From a man born a slave. I find that really inspiring, that how you’re born doesn’t reflect how you’ll die. Peyton’s community founded this church in 1874, and like all good and noble things, it’s fallen into disarray.

  “‘But at least it got historical landmark status, amirite? You can read the history in more detail on that metal landmark sign by the road.

  “‘You’re probably wondering why I brought you here, especially since my parents are nondenominational Christian and not Baptist. Well … that day Gran died … Rocki, you might remember, well, I ran away. My mom called an ambulance for Gran, and in the crazed nightmare that followed, I hopped on my bike and got the hell out of there. I pedaled for what felt like freaking years and years, but it was really only 11.4 miles, and I found the landmark and decided to read it, if only for something to take my mind off Gran.

  “‘I was really inspired by the story of Peyton Roberts, since earlier that week, Gran and I were talking about how I probably have some African-American relatives in my biological family tree. After reading the sign, I biked up the gravel road and saw the church. I had a good ol’-fashioned yelling match with God, right then and there. I balled my fists and I screamed at the little cross on the door, and I told God that I hated him for doing this to me. To Gran.’”

  I stop reading because my mind is blown. So that’s where she went. She was here that night, and she never told anyone. Not even me.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Elijah says, his knee pushing into mine a little.

  I lick my lips and stare at the paper. “She never told me this.”

  “So keep reading. She’s telling us now.”

  I nod, let up on my bottom lip and keep reading.

  “‘Soon it got dark, and I got scared. I wasn’t sure how to get home and I knew that crazy murderers drove around at night, so I broke into the back door and went inside the church. It was terrifying, being in there all alone in the dark. I was heartbroken over Gran, feeling guilty that maybe it was my fault and pissed at God. I didn’t know what else to do, so I lay on a pew and fell asleep. When I woke up, it was dawn. The blue windows beckoned to me, and I followed them until I saw the sun rising up over the farm to the right. I went back outside and I sat on the front steps —’”

  The energy between Elijah and me ramps up at this. We look at each other, almost as if we both expect to see Sasha right here, right now. I take a shaky breath and return to the letter.

  “‘It may sound silly now, after the fact, when we’re all grown up and all, but back then, this moment
was magical. I sat on the steps and watched the sun rise, and I swear to you both, I met God that day.

  “‘I felt him. I felt his warmth and love, and I felt him grieving for my loss. He didn’t actually say anything — this wasn’t like Moses and the burning bush — but I felt it. I just knew. I just knew that God existed. That Gran died and that it sucked, but I wasn’t abandoned. I’ve never felt anything so crystal clear in my life, never had anything more reassuring since then. I just knew he was there, and that it would all be okay.

  “‘I cried, I thanked God and I went home. The cops were looking for me, and my parents were freaked the hell out, but once they saw me, it was all okay. As I knew it would be.

  “‘For the most part, things have been okay since then. And now, as I’m sitting here on these stairs again, writing this letter to you guys, I think I finally understand. Maybe Gran died just so I’d have that moment, that clarity and assurance. I am not afraid to die. I know I’ll be okay. I don’t think the same would have been true if Gran had never taken her life and I never came here as an angry kid who needed answers. Maybe everything does happen for a reason.’”

  The sun is rising, spilling out golden rays all over the dew-coated grass. To the right, we watch the farm from Sasha’s letter, a small shadow in the enormity of the sunrise. And then it happens. Subtle, like the rising rays of sun, I feel her.

  “Whoa,” I whisper. I feel her everywhere. My eyes tear up but I don’t bother blinking them away as I picture a frightened Sasha sitting on these same steps all those years ago, taking hope and grace from the last place she thought she’d find it.

  Elijah takes my hand, his rough fingers lacing between mine. No words are needed to know he feels it, too. It only takes a few seconds for the sun to do its thing, but those few seconds are every bit as powerful as they were when Sasha felt them, judging by the way he clutches my hand in his. I lean against his shoulder, my cheek pressing into his T-shirt. His head lowers on top of mine.