by Anna Schmidt
Chapter 46
Sadie
Sadie was nervous about actually going back to school. In the weeks that she was home while the judge decided her fate, her parents and teachers had agreed that homeschooling by Matt’s teacher was best. Now that she was free, it was time to start getting back into the life she had known before that terrible rainy morning.
But how would everyone react to her being back? How would her teachers treat her? Would her friends still walk with her between classes and want to sit with her and share the news of the day? Most of all, what was it going to be like to see Dan again?
She didn’t have to wait long for her answers. As she turned a corner to go to her math class, there he was.
He was not as tall as she had remembered him all those days she’d spent in detention—nor nearly as broad-shouldered. Compared to the huge guards—male and female—at the detention center, he was actually kind of small.
He saw her at the same moment she first spotted him. She looked away. But not before she saw his cheeks glow an embarrassed pink. His discomfort gave her courage.
“Hello, Dan,” she said as she eased past him and into her classroom. “Nice to see you.”
“Yeah,” he muttered as he hurried past her. “You, too.”
He was waiting for her when school let out.
“What was that?” he asked, his voice now filled with irritation. “Hello, Dan,” he mocked in a high falsetto. “Nice to see you.”
“I believe it was a socially acceptable greeting,” Sadie replied, fighting her own irritation. “How are you?”
“Fine—better.”
“Matt tells me you’re back playing football.”
They were standing on the steps outside the school. She was clutching her books to her chest, and he was leaning against the wall, his hands jammed into his pockets. In the past, he would have been smiling at her, watching her closely. She would have been looking down but smiling as well, unable to believe that this guy was even talking to her. What a baby she’d been.
“You lied in court,” she said. “I forgive you.”
He let out a snort of laughter. “Are you for real? I didn’t lie, Sadie, and I don’t need or want your forgiveness.”
“You’re not angry with me,” she continued, realizing that he was nervous and that being with her made him uncomfortable. Yet he had waited for her. “You’re upset with yourself, and you’d really just like for everything to go back to the way things were for you before.”
“And you know this because?”
“It’s something I’ve learned over the last several weeks. I’ve had a lot of time to work through some stuff—and a lot of help doing it. I wish you had someone you could talk to about what happened. Keeping it all bottled up is not good, Dan.”
“You sound like my pastor.”
Sadie shrugged. “So maybe you should listen to what he has to say.”
Dan pushed himself away from the wall. “You’ve changed,” he said, making eye contact with her for the first time.
“We both have.”
He ground a toe of his shoe into the concrete. “Do you think about it like all the time?”
“Pretty much.”
“Me, too.” He drew in a long breath and let it out slowly. “Coach is devastated, and yet he’s never—not once—said anything to me. Do you think he’ll ever forgive me?”
“I think he probably already has, but you should talk to him, Dan. It would do you both good.”
He went back to staring off into space, lost in thought, and Sadie turned to go. “I’ll see you around, okay?”
“Hey,” he called when she reached the bottom of the stairs, “how about I walk you home?”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea, but if you want to take a walk around here and talk some, that would be okay.”
Dan grinned at her, and a little of his usual self-confidence radiated from that handsome smile. “Good idea. How about down to the creek?”
They had shared their first kiss while walking along the banks of Phillipi Creek, and she understood all too well that need to latch onto something from the past that might just give them the feeling that nothing had changed.
But everything had changed.
“How about to the park? We can sit on the benches in the shade there and watch the play on the shuffleboard courts.”
“Gee, why didn’t I think of that?” Dan shoved his hands deeper into his pockets and scowled at something in the distance. He wasn’t used to not getting his way. He was used to charming others into giving him what he wanted, and right now he apparently wanted to pretend that everything was the same between them.
“We aren’t the same people we were before the accident, Dan,” Sadie said. “I want to be your friend, and I want you to be mine, but beyond that?” She touched his hand to draw his attention. “You and I both know we can never go back. There’s been too much…” She was surprised that her eyes had filled suddenly with tears and that her mind had brought forth an image of Tessa. “I miss her so much,” she whispered.
“She was a good kid,” he agreed. “Smart, funny in that quirky way she had. She always seemed older than she was.”
Sadie smiled. “I used to tease her about being an old lady before her time. Of course, to me then an old lady was like my mom—or her mom.”
Dan fell into step beside her, and he reached to take her books from her. “Have they forgiven us? Her mom and yours?”
“Us?” She glanced at him.
“Yeah, us,” he said biting the words off. “Look, I’m not proud of how I handled myself in court that day. I was scared. And my folks…”
Sadie didn’t want to hear excuses, so she took his hand. “Come on, I want to go by the cemetery, and it’s getting late. My folks get nervous if I’m not home ten minutes before they start to worry, which is about five minutes after they know school is out.”
They walked along in silence for a few blocks.
“You said you’ve forgiven me. I don’t get that. I ruined your life.”
“It’s just the way we do things,” she said. “I have to tell you that while I was locked up, I wasn’t feeling very forgiving toward you at all.”
They had reached the cemetery. Sadie led the way to Tessa’s grave. She put her books on the ground and then knelt to clear away some dead leaves and other debris. Dan remained standing.
“How was that? I mean, being locked up.” He actually shuddered.
“It was an experience I never want to repeat, and at the same time, I’m beginning to see that it was something that made a big difference in how I am, how I look at my future.”
“And your family?”
“My mom and Tessa’s mom have always been so close, and when I think about how close they came to never being able to know that closeness again, well, it was scary for me. But they were raised like they raised me—and Tessa and Matt—and that’s just who we are. We forgive.”
“And forget?”
“I can’t imagine ever forgetting Tessa, or that horrible day, Dan.”
“Because there were times when Coach—”
“Uncle Geoff has had a really tough time. I never realized this, but he blamed himself because he didn’t save Tessa. He thought that his job as her father was to protect her, and when he couldn’t, it must have been so awful.”
“He told you that?”
“He wrote it.” She explained about the VORP program and the contract, telling him about how everyone affected by Tessa’s death had taken part in making her see the ripple effects of her careless behavior. “And selfish,” she added. “I was so very selfish.”
“But he’s coming around? Coach, I mean?”
Sadie nodded and continued to pick dried flowers and leaves off her cousin’s grave. “Oh, he still looks at me like the very sight of me is a physical wound for him, but Mom tells me that in time… The most important thing is that he and Matt have become close again.”
Dan smiled and
bent to help her. “Yeah, it’s good to see the kid back on the sidelines. You know, sometimes he can explain Coach’s crazy plays better than Coach can.”
“Get me some water, will you?” She nodded toward a spigot, coiled hose, and bucket.
“I’d like to do something,” he said when he returned. “Will you ask that lady who did this VORP thing with you if I could meet with her?”
“Sure.”
“I’ve been thinking about asking if I could speak about all this at the next school assembly.”
“That’s a wonderful idea, Dan.”
Her uncle Geoff thought it was a good idea as well, and two weeks later at their weekly assembly where Dan usually presided as president of the student council, he walked to the microphone and cleared his throat. Sadie sat in the front row with Geoff. They both looked up at Dan and nodded.
“I want to talk to you this morning, not as the president of this student body. Not as the quarterback of your football team. I want to talk to you as someone who knowingly broke the rules—rules that seemed pretty dumb to me as rules often do when you’re our age. I thought I was above those rules. I thought that those rules did not apply to me because I was too smart, too cool to need them.”
Sadie felt as if she could hear people breathing throughout the packed auditorium—it was that quiet.
“Here’s the list of all the rules I violated in just one morning—in less than an hour,” Dan continued as he unfurled a scroll-like paper filled with printing. “I was running late but allowed no time for that. It was raining—pouring. I knew the defroster in my car wasn’t working properly. I…”
He continued reading, cataloging each item on the list, and when he finished, he looked out over the upturned faces and said, “Any one of those things was reason enough not to get behind the wheel of my car that morning, but I’m Dan Kline—senior, co-captain, council president, honor student. I was way too cool to admit that there was anything I couldn’t handle. And so I made one more mistake—I encouraged, no, I practically dared Sadie Keller to drive from her house to Coach Messner’s house so we could pick up her cousin Tessa, even though I was legally too young to ride with her.”
He looked directly at Sadie then.
“And I did that knowing that she would do almost anything I asked of her.”
Sadie realized that she was nodding, and she forced herself to be still.
“Then I made another mistake. Instead of coaching Sadie on how to drive, I took out this…” He produced his cell phone and held it up for all to see. “And I started texting my friends, making fun of Sadie’s driving and laughing at their replies—laughing at her, never for one minute realizing how every snicker only added to her stress.”
It was too much. She was as much to blame as he was. He was taking it all on himself. Sadie sat forward, but Dan stopped her with a look and a slight shake of his head.
“And when Sadie pulled into that driveway that rainy morning, she saw her cousin Tessa waiting, and you know who I saw? I saw Coach. I saw the man who has been my inspiration. The man who has spent hours shaping me and many of you as athletes and solid citizens. I saw a man that I love like I love my own father, and we were headed right for him. So I made my final mistake—I tried to make up for all the mistakes I had made that morning by grabbing the wheel away from Sadie.”
He paused for a moment, and Sadie heard a couple of girls sniffling behind her. “Only God knows what might have happened if I hadn’t done that, if I hadn’t done any of this.” He shook the long list and then dropped it to the floor. “Maybe Sadie would have swerved the other way. Maybe Coach would have jumped out of the way. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. But you all know what happened next. A girl who was to start her first day of classes here with us that morning died that day. A girl who a couple of years from now might have been standing where I’m standing now leading this student body died that day. A girl who was everything to Sadie and Coach and their families died that day.”
Sadie had thought she could not possibly have any more tears to shed, but she’d been wrong. Tears were leaking down her cheeks unabated. She felt a nudge next to her, and when she looked at her uncle, he was holding out his handkerchief to her.
Chapter 47
Jeannie and Emma
The sisters worked in tandem, going room by room as they cleaned Jeannie’s house. She had removed all of the extraneous clothing, furnishings, and—as she called it—just plain stuff. Much of it she had taken to resale shops around town. The profits from her sales were beginning to come in.
“I was in the consignment shop where I took most of my clothes the other day, and the owner told me they were selling like hotcakes,” Jeannie told Emma as they scrubbed down walls and washed floors side by side. “We’ll have our bills paid off in no time.”
“Das ist gut, Jeannie.” Emma stood up and stretched her back. “Ready for Tessa’s room?” she asked. It was the one room in the house that had remained untouched.
Jeannie looked away toward sunlight streaming through the upstairs hall window. “Yeah. It hasn’t had a good cleaning since…”
“We don’t have to take anything out or pack anything away if you’re not ready, Jeannie.”
“I know, but we should really move everything so that we can get behind the furniture and into the corners and all. Then we’ll put it all back, right?”
“Exactly as it is,” Emma assured her.
They worked together, each clearing off the various surfaces in the room—Tessa’s dresser, her desk, her bookcase. Emma stripped the bedding and carried it downstairs to put it in the washer. When she came back, Jeannie had moved all of Tessa’s clothes into the guest room. Together they rolled up the area rug and slid all of the furniture to one side of the room. Emma started sweeping the hardwood floor.
“Jeannie, when I went down to put the laundry in, I couldn’t help noticing that Tessa’s backpack is still there by the back door. Do you want me to go through it and have Sadie return any library books?”
“No, I’ll do it.”
Emma stopped sweeping when she noticed how reluctantly Jeannie moved toward the stairway. “Bring it up here. We’ll do it together,” she said.
By the time Jeannie returned with the backpack, Emma had finished sweeping one side of the room and was brushing the collected dust into a dustpan.
“So heavy,” Jeannie noted, “She was so thin. How did she haul this around?”
Emma leaned the broom against the wall and sat on the side of Tessa’s bed. She patted the spot next to her. “Come sit a minute. You know, this could wait.”
“No. Geoff and I talked last night about how Tessa would want us to move forward. She would absolutely hate the idea of some sort of shrine, and having the backpack there by the door day after day has been a little like that, I suppose.”
Emma resisted the urge to remind her sister that keeping Tessa’s room as it was might also be considered a kind of shrine. One step at a time, she thought and watched Jeannie unfasten the clasps on the backpack.
There were numerous compartments—pockets on the outside that held pencils and pens and markers, a hairbrush and a tube of pink lip gloss that made Jeannie smile. “I suggested that she might want to carry this with her. She, of course, rolled her eyes as if that was the dumbest idea she’d ever heard. But here it is.”
In another zippered compartment they found untouched notebooks and a daily calendar, and from inside the main compartment they removed a heavy dictionary, a thesaurus, Tessa’s Bible, and four library books.
“That’s it,” Jeannie said as she ran her finger down the spines of the stack of books.
“Not quite,” Emma replied, lifting the backpack. “There’s something in this compartment here inside the main part.” She pulled the zipper and took out a handmade journal with a fountain pen clipped to its cover.
“You found them!” Jeannie exclaimed happily as she reached for the book and pen. “Oh Em, I’ve turned this room upside down half a dozen
times looking for this, and all the time it was right there on the chair by the kitchen door.” She fingered the leather ties on the journal.
“Are you going to read it?”
“I don’t even know if she wrote in it. We only gave it to her that night after the picnic.”
“One way to find out,” Emma said as she scooted back on the bed and leaned against the pillows stacked against the wall.
Jeannie smiled and loosened the thin, knotted ties. She turned the first page where Jeannie had written, “To Tessa, Love, Mom and Dad,” with the date underneath. The next page was filled with Tessa’s unique printing.
“Let’s read it together,” Jeannie said as she pushed herself back on the bed so that she and Emma were side by side.
“Don’t you want to wait for Geoff?”
Jeannie took a minute to consider this and then said, “The way I see it is that it was no mistake that we found this together—you were the one who suggested I go through the backpack. I don’t think that was an accident. I think we’re being led to do this together the way we’ve always done everything together throughout our lives.”
“Maybe we should…” Emma was still doubtful.
“Em, it’s a prayer answered.”
“It is that. Your prayer that you would find this precious link to your daughter and my prayer that you would find it in your heart to forgive mine.”
The two sisters looked at each other for a long moment, and then Jeannie moved the journal halfway onto Emma’s lap as the sisters bent their heads toward each other and read Tessa’s journal.
Epilogue
Tessa
Mom and Dad have always given me a small gift to start the school year, but this is so special. Look how beautifully Grandpa’s pen writes—so much better than any roller ball or gel pen. I love it—and the journal. I think Mom made this for me. She’s been fooling around lately with some art projects, and I thought I saw the paper on the cover of the journal lying in the guest room a few weeks ago.
But it’s getting late and tomorrow is a big day—I’ve tried hard to be cool about it, but the truth is that I’m excited to be finally starting my years at the academy. Sadie has been there a whole year already, and the way she talks about it… well, I can’t wait. But I am making a promise to myself right now that every single night I will write in my new journal—filling it with all the things that happen over the coming year.