When You Believe Page 6

  He broke off his train of thought suddenly and stared down at her. “What are you doing? Checking up on me or something? You still want to know if I’ve had anything to do with that girl?”

  “Did you send something home in Shelby Tatum’s homework packet today?”

  He met her intent scrutiny head on, his face a shield. “No.”

  She needed to escape. The afternoon sun tinted everything around her a translucent saffron—the tree limbs, the jagged rocks along the sidewalk, the steeple that pierced the sky like a radiant awl. Uncle Cy had said once that he felt the golden presence of something here, as real as when he watched the sun rise and the blue haze sink toward the water like a coverlet, down at the Brownbranch.

  “Lydia? Don’t you believe me?”

  “I’ll take your check in, if you’d like. You can stay out here and fondle your new boat.” Fondle. Now why had she used such a word as that? “I need to get away.”

  He said nothing to her. He reached for his blank checks and tore one across its perforation with an angry, brittle sound.

  “You can’t act like what Shelby’s saying doesn’t matter.”

  For a long moment he just stood with that bruised expression in his eyes. And she stared up, past him, as if directions for what to do next were printed beside the steeple in the sky.

  “I wanted to talk to her, Lydia,” he said in the mangled voice of someone having a nightmare. “I wrote her that note to see if we could discuss this, if we could work out what’s going on. Please don’t judge me until I’ve had a chance to do that.”

  She took Charlie’s check from him. “I’m not judging,” she whispered, closing her eyes because she couldn’t look at him anymore, “but I can’t let you have access to her. I won’t let you talk to her or see her again.” In the silence between them, the contention began to grow, something tense and sullen and explosive. “I told her I would protect her. I don’t know what else I’m supposed to do.”

  WHEN LYDIA STEPPED through the heavy front door, the inside of Big Tree Baptist smelled faintly musty, like carnations and crisp paper and ginger windmill cookies. As she entered the narrow foyer with Charlie’s check in hand, she entered the place where she had first come to believe that she deserved to be loved. Aunt Donna, Uncle Cy’s wife-before-Jane, had brought her here every summer when she’d come to visit. She remembered pie suppers and Layne Shanholtz standing behind the microphone and singing “When We All Get to Heaven,” his voice turned up so loud on the speakers that it sounded like the woofers might burst. She wondered sometimes, out of all the kids she had met loitering in the kitchen, if one of them—even then—might have been Charlie Stains. There had never been time, during those visiting summers, to know everyone’s name.

  Although her own parents had never taken her to church, Aunt Donna had brought her and, in this place, Lydia had come to believe things always easy for a child to believe. And after she had graduated college, after she had accepted her teaching position and had moved to Shadrach full time, Lydia still came.

  She detoured now and stepped into the sanctuary. At the front of the little church, a hickory altar stood gleaming with furniture oil. Light streamed upon it in rays of gold, red, and blue from the pattern in the stained-glass window above it. How strange that, when Charlie had bought a boat, it would have to be picked up here.

  At that moment she heard a noise down the hall. A scuffling on the carpet, as if someone might be dancing.

  Then, blam. Something hard hit the wall.

  She wasn’t alone in the building. Lydia’s first fear was that someone might have overheard her conversation with Charlie outside. She stood listening, motionless, wondering if the sound would come again.

  It did.

  Charlie’s check for the boat was still crammed inside her pocket. Lydia began to make her way along the wall toward the sound. She followed the noise until she came to a door that opened like the barn door on Mr. Ed, separated into halves, the bottom latched tight, the top swinging open an inch or two.

  AGES 3 AND 4 read a metal placard that had been screwed into the drywall. Below that, in a red Magic Marker: Please pick up your child immediately following the service. No child will be allowed to leave without a parent.

  She tried the knob. Once upon a time, this had been where the smell of the cookies had come from. The hinges squeaked and the rest of the door began to swing wide. Suddenly, in an odd moment of providence, even before the door opened far enough for her to see, Lydia knew exactly who would be standing on the other side.

  Shelby.

  And sure enough, there she was, alone in the preschool Sunday school room, sidestepping her soccer ball, foot working it forward and back, as if the ball, the way she shot it, the way it moved, absorbed all of her attention. Shelby zigzagged the ball right, left, right, left, until she shot, bam, through a goal she’d set up through two miniature Sunday school chairs.

  “So this is what you do when you skip school? You come here instead?”

  The ball rebounded and Shelby grabbed it, tucked it against her right hipbone. She cocked her knee, a motion that belied the unease in her eyes. “Sometimes,” she said, her voice more broody than Lydia had ever heard it before.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I could ask the same question about you.”

  Shelby balanced the ball—HAND-SEWN BUTYL BLADDER it said—then spun it back and forth between both hands. She surveyed Lydia with suspicion. “Who said I was skipping school?”

  “A lucky guess, I suppose.” Lydia shrugged. “Your mother came to pick up your homework. Does she know where you’ve been all day?”

  A hard and fragile laugh, sounding as if she was about to break. “Why would she know where I am? I don’t fit into her perfect little world.” Then, with gusto, “I don’t fit into anybody’s world but my own.”

  Lydia looked around for a place to sit. She decided if she tried to fit into one of those nursery-school chairs, she might never make it out again.

  The resentment in Shelby’s voice eased, but only a little. “Were you trying to find me today?”

  “Yes.” Lydia had no reason to lie.

  “Why?”

  “Why do you think? I was worried about you.”

  “Well, you don’t have to worry about me anymore. I don’t need anything from anybody. Least of all you.” They sized each other up across the room. “You said you’d help me. But you didn’t do anything.”

  “You didn’t come to school today.”

  “Yeah, and I guess you’d know why.” A suspicious thump of shoes on the carpet. A suspicious gleam of disenchantment in her eyes. Shelby dropped the soccer ball on the floor again, began to dribble it frontward with slight touches of her feet.

  “Have you told anyone about this but me?”

  “What does it matter? Nobody cares.”

  “Did you try to tell your mom?”

  All of her focus on the ball, a wild, wayward-shaking “no” of the bunched hair.

  “Why, Shelby?”

  Everything in this playroom was on a Lilliputian scale—chairs so simple and small they might have come straight out of a nursery rhyme, tabletops on square legs so short they abutted a grown person’s shins. A row of crumpled little stained-glass windows, fashioned from flecks of crayon ironed between wax paper, lined one wall.

  Shelby evaded that question. She aimed the soccer ball, shot it in frustration, bam against the wall. “I should have known better than to ask anybody for anything. I’ve been taking care of myself for a long time now. Guess I’ll just have to keep on doing things on my own.”

  The shot rebounded against Lydia’s calf. She grabbed it with both hands.

  “Guess I’ll just make better and better grades,” Shelby said. “Guess I’ll just beat the pants off of every goalie who tries to stop me.”

  Lydia held the ball, made Shelby look at her, before she bounced it back. “You’re going to break a hole through the drywall, you keep hitting it wi
th the ball like that.”

  “The way you poked around and made me talk to you. I thought you’d be”—Shelby caught the ball beneath the weight of one foot, kicked again, shanked it—“different.”

  “Shelby, you don’t have to take care of yourself anymore. People are going to listen.”

  “I did something to make it happen, didn’t I? I’m the one who could have made it all go away.”

  Those words hit Lydia like a fist. They grabbed hold, turned within her, invoked something sinister there. A memory of her own school years; a memory she’d always tried to escape, a situation that she thought she had prayed about and taken to the Lord a long time ago. Her own sophomore year, and Mr. Buckholtz.

  She wanted to shake Shelby’s shoulders, but she couldn’t. “No. Listen to me. You didn’t do anything.”

  “I must have wanted it or I would have stopped it somehow. I’m thinking maybe I’m the one to blame.”

  “Don’t you ever think that, young lady.” Shelby’s words made Lydia panic. “You have enough information to know that if something like this happened to you, then what happened to you is wrong.”

  “It’s my fault. Everybody will know that.”

  If I do nothing else, I can still set this young girl straight about blaming herself.

  “You mustn’t think that. You mustn’t go there, Shelby.” Her voice sounded wise and fierce. All these possibilities and Lydia couldn’t let go of her own heart. And when she thought back to it later, she could never be sure why she’d jumped to this next declaration so quickly. “He’s outside this place right now, you know,” she said, in part because she wanted to warn and protect Shelby, in part because she wanted to shock Shelby enough to try to see where she stood.

  “He’s… who?”

  “Mr. Stains. He’s outside the church right now.”

  Shelby’s face blanched. Her expression changed in an instant from hostility to fear. She caught the soccer ball, held it against her like it was the only thing in the world she knew how to hold on to.

  “Does he know I’m in here?”

  For months Lydia would remember the sight of Shelby’s small hands clutching the polygons of the ball. Nubby nails peeling and innocent, fingers pale as doves, Sam Leavitt’s dainty promise ring still too big, listing sadly to one side.

  Those eyes, telling Lydia everything that she’d been struggling not to hear.

  “I should have been able to make it stop, don’t you think? I should have been able to do something and I didn’t.”

  “Shelby.” All this time, Lydia had been afraid to touch her. In frustration she gripped the girl’s shoulders, holding her there so she couldn’t turn away. “Stop believing that about yourself. Stop believing that you controlled it. Stop believing that you’re not worth protecting, that you don’t deserve to be taken care of, because you are and you do.”

  Shelby lowered herself into one of those midget chairs, looking haunted, her knees raftered up to her shoulders, parts of her folded frame hanging off the tiny seat.

  “Stop believing that anything about this is your fault.”

  “I used to go to Sunday school in this room once,” Shelby whispered, her voice ravaged. “I used to come here and sit just like this and listen to them say that God could do anything. They still tell little kids that these days, you know? I’ve heard them.”

  No, no, Lydia wanted to plead with her. Don’t talk about God right now. Don’t do it. Because that’s the last place I want to go.

  Like a drone of death, the thought poured into her. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away.

  The room was a lonely one for all its bright colors and its scribbled drawings, the Little Tyke slide and the wooden play stove in the corner. A lonely place, Lydia saw, for a teenager whose childhood was gone.

  A childhood that she claimed had been taken away by Charlie. It always came back to that.

  Charlie.

  He loves me, she’d remember at odd moments during the day. After which she’d walk a little taller, be a little more honest with people, notice more of them glancing up and smiling her way.

  Shelby’s body was jammed into a fetal position on the tiny chair, her elbows folded like a willowy bird trying to deflect something with its wings. Kids who’d been hurt the worst, Lydia had known for a long time, could be the most perceptive.

  “You don’t want to report it, do you?” Shelby’s eyes pleading with her even as they accused.

  Lydia had let go of the girl’s shoulders when Shelby sat. Now she stooped to the girl’s level, took the ball, set it on the floor. She gripped Shelby’s hands between her own.

  “Maybe not,” she said with great determination in her voice. “But it doesn’t really matter what I want.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Lydia found Charlie on the Big Tree lawn organizing things in his boat.

  He worked with dark determination, his arms up to his elbows in the hull, his expression set as hard as granite. He didn’t look her way the entire time he shoved things around.

  He stacked and secured two square lifejackets, one on top of the other, like a mason laying two slabs of stone. He thrust the dented first-aid box into a corner beneath the seat. He scraped the empty gas tank toward the outboard with a screech that made her flinch and created a new scratch along the keel.

  “Charlie,” she said, doing her best to keep her voice even. “Don’t.”

  “What do you mean, don’t? I’m just balancing the weight.” With angry relish, he thumped three coiled rope loops inside the bow. He crisscrossed the blue-and-yellow oars in the middle, blades forward, poles aft, and began to batten them down. “What took you so long in there?”

  She crossed her arms over her bosom the same way the oars were crossed in the boat. “I was… looking around.” She cringed, having to lie to him. Here they were, talking about trust, and she didn’t want him to know she had found Shelby inside.

  He jerked the bungee cord as if he were yanking tight the cinch strap of a saddle horse.

  A cluster of pecans lay rotting on the grass. Lydia stepped on them one by one, liking the sharp crunches they made underfoot.

  Charlie angled out the two-stroke spark-ignition engine for travel; it poked from the stern like a stinger. “How long can it take to hand somebody a check, anyway?”

  Lydia uncrossed her arms. She’d forgotten about that altogether. She stuck her hand in her pocket and felt the check there, still crumpled. She pulled it out.

  Charlie stared at it. “You didn’t give it to them?”

  “No.”

  He must have backed up the truck while she was inside. Alone he had maneuvered it ball-hitch to fender. They were ready to go. “Lyddie, my next class starts in five minutes. What were you doing?”

  She reacted like a cornered animal. She rounded on him. “I was in the church, okay? Maybe I wanted to pray. Maybe there are other things going on today that are more important than this secondhand scrap of a boat.”

  His hands stilled at that. He regarded her with sad, desperate eyes. He didn’t open the door. “You think she could be telling the truth, don’t you?”

  Of all the questions she’d thought he might ask, she had least expected this one. She came around the huge fender toward him. “Charlie, you have to try and understand this. It doesn’t matter what she’s telling me. I think I can do my job without having to be on one side or the other.”

  “You may think that, Lydia, but you’re wrong. Everybody’s going to come down on one side of the fence or the other with this.”

  “Charlie,” she whispered. “I’m on your side. That’s what side of the fence I’m on.”

  “She’s making you doubt me.”

  “No… no no no no. I don’t have any doubts. Not about you.”

  “It hasn’t been twenty-four hours. You’re going to Nibarger when we get back, aren’t you?”

  It hurt worse than hurt itself, like a sudden plunge into ice water, having to tell him this way. “Yes.” Her v
oice came so softly, it might have been the breeze mingling with the leaves. “I am.”

  They stood with the truck between them, her hand gritty with dust from the hood where she steadied herself, his hand on the handle as if he was ready to climb in.

  “I want you to do it,” he said, resolute. “If you are right about how important this is, then go ahead. There’s no sense you having to be a shield for me.”

  “I’m not doing that, Charlie. I—” These words opened something new, something she hadn’t yet seen in herself.

  She wanted to protect him.

  All this and she’d wanted to be a buffer for him. All this and, while she ached at the choice, she had been thinking she would be the one to choose.

  “It’s Shelby,” Lydia said. “If I turn away from this, I don’t know what will happen to her. Don’t you see?”

  And, suddenly, suddenly, after he’d been almost naïve about the situation earlier, it frightened her that he jumped to this next prediction with such ease. “It’s always the kids who come out ahead. It’s never the adults who win.”

  “If you’re innocent, you can prove it.”

  Oh Charlie, Charlie, and in the sun she could see the nick to the left of his chin where he’d shaved wrong and the spike of his cowlick and the two pieces of hair that fell to the aft no matter how many times he combed them the other way.

  “It’s too late for that already, isn’t it?” he said. “In cases like this, the damage is done the moment a word is spoken. After that, parents have a niggling doubt. They never want their sons or daughters in your classes again.”

  “People know you here, Charlie.”

  “The schools don’t want to risk it. And, whoosh, just like that, a teacher is gone.”

  Only three days ago they’d squatted on their haunches together at the edge of the dock, the wood still smooth and heavy green and smelling of cedar sap. Their favorite meeting spot, to watch the morning come into the patterns on the lake, like light comes into the facets of a diamond, magnified, multiplied.