Sadie-In-Waiting (17 page)

H
annah was crying.

Well of course she was crying. In the duration of a few short minutes she had learned of her own impending motherhood and of the death of her own mother almost thirty years ago.

April was stoic.

April was always stoic. But in this case it went beyond a state of mind or way of carrying one’s self in an uncertain world. Now it seemed to sink into the lines around her hard-set mouth, to have gotten under her skin. Her face looked gray, her eyes devoid of light—and of tears. She had followed Daddy’s chosen biblical admonition and girded her loins, and in doing so she had thrown up such a wall of defense around herself that she had blocked off the tentative new inroads she and Sadie had made earlier.

Sadie felt…

It didn’t matter what Sadie felt. She’d have plenty of time for mulling over the news she had heard and trying to make peace with it all. Right now Sadie had a job to do.

“Come on, y’all. It can’t be far now. Daddy’s note said the old downtown was just a couple blocks away, and the desk clerk at the motel said that the cemetery where Mama is buried lay just across the railroad tracks that run behind the old courthouse.”

They reached the town square. Alphina, for all its population advantage over Wileyville, looked deserted, almost ghostly. They had not kept up the old buildings. Most of them sat empty. Some looked in real disrepair. There was no quaint café. No antique mall to reclaim the ruins of what must have once been thriving businesses.

Things called superstores and retail chain pharmacies, quick-stop markets and the fast-food restaurants that had lined the highway into town must have taken the place of what had once been the hub of the community. Even the government buildings looked shabby. And the town monument to its fallen veterans stood lonely and unkempt amid what could have been a lovely garden.

Seeing this made Sadie appreciate her quirky old Wileyville more than ever. Walking along broken sidewalks past padlocked doors filled her with a longing to be back home again. She didn’t kid herself. The circumstances that she and her sisters now found themselves in only fanned the flames of that longing.

“Tell me again, Sadie, what the death certificate said.” Hannah wiped her nose and pulled her shoulders back as if to reassure her sister she could withstand hearing the coroner’s finding again.

“Overdose,” April said without a single spark of emotion.

“
Accidental
overdose,” Sadie corrected. “Of a prescribed medicine.”

“Did it say which one?”

Does it really matter? Sadie wanted to bark. Instead, she swallowed the lump lodged high in her throat and shook her head. “Hannah, honey, I did this all long-distance and quick. The death certificate came from someplace in Arizona, and I told you everything the local cemetery superintendent told Kurt.”

As a daughter, she probably could have gotten a look at the burial permit and pertinent information required for it without having gone through the Wileyville Sheriff’s Department. But that would have taken time and cutting through who knows how much red tape. Because of her job, she had known exactly what to have Kurt ask for, and she had her answer, such as it was, within the hour.

“And Daddy knew?” Hannah sniffled but did not break down again. “Do you think he knew?”

“I don’t dare speculate, Hannah. The information listed no next of kin to notify. It showed Mama as divorced.”

“Divorced. That’s the part I don’t get.” April lifted her chin and stared straight ahead. “Daddy never mentioned divorce.”

“Yes, but you didn’t think…If you suspected that Mama was alive, you didn’t actually think they would still be married, did you?” Not that it mattered, of course, beyond it being yet another piece of a puzzle that Sadie was reluctant to try to put together without more information.

“I guess not.”

“Daddy’s pride would never have let him confess that Mama divorced him.” Hannah spoke without looking at either of them.

“Not pride.” Sadie couldn’t help thinking back on the pain in her daddy’s face when he had mistaken Sadie for his beloved wife, a woman who obviously had always
been, and now would always be, unreachable to him. “He loved her. He still loves her. You know he taught us that marriage means forever. Maybe in his heart they never really got divorced.”

“Poor Daddy.” Hannah began to cry again, but this time without making any real sound, just tears and sniffles.

“Poor Hannah.” Sadie wanted to join her in those tears. “Poor tenderhearted Hannah. Whatever happened between Mama and Daddy, he’s dealt with it as best he could.”

“And now it’s our turn to do the same.” A strand of hair blew across the bridge of April’s nose. It was the closest thing to change that fell across her unwavering features.

They walked on another half a block before Hannah spoke again. “Since no one knew to notify us…”

“We were kids,” Sadie reminded her, thinking back on the date of the certificate.

“Okay, since I assume they didn’t notify Daddy, does that mean she was buried in an unmarked grave?”

By unmarked, her sister meant a pauper’s grave. She wanted to know if their mother had died unnoticed, unclaimed and alone. Suddenly she thought about the serene stretch of land where she and Daddy had last looked for Mr. Green, and her father’s empathy for the indigent man became all the more poignant to Sadie.

“No, Hannah. She had two plots in her name there already. Bought when she and Daddy lived here, I’d imagine. Guess that’s why she didn’t end up interred in Arizona. She must have left instructions to send her body back to Alphina.”

“Maybe that’s because she was…happiest here.” Hannah’s hand brushed Sadie’s. Her fingertips felt like ice, but there was warmth in her trembling voice as she finished her simple, heartfelt thought. “You know, because
we were born here. We were a family here, if only for a little while.”

“I’d like to think that.”

It was a hot, humid day. July in Tennessee was rarely anything but. Yet somehow, Sadie felt a chill that settled deep into her bones.

They crossed the street on green, and as soon as they reached the other side, April came to a halt, her arm out stiff to hold them back. “There it is.”

“We don’t know this town at all. It might not be the right cemetery. Maybe we should have done some more research,” Hannah said.

“It’s the right one,” Sadie whispered.

“How can you know?”

“Because…” Sadie reached out to guide Hannah forward by giving her shoulder a push, but instead her hand curved around her sister’s upper arm. Without over-thinking the need to make contact, Sadie slid her palm down until her hand fit nearly inside her sister’s. She cleared her throat, but that did not make her voice strong when she gave Hannah’s hand a squeeze and said, “Because Daddy’s car is parked on the far side of the fence.”

“This is it then.” April stared emotionless in the direction of the spot at the end of the block.

“What do we say to him?” Hannah asked.

“I’m more worried about what he’s going to say to us,” Sadie said. She had to shut her eyes to keep from searching the quiet graveyard for the solitary figure of her father.

“Why?” Hannah took a step and then another, her hand trailing away from Sadie’s.

“Because, Hannah, what can he say to make this all right?” April’s tone was sharp. She did not follow her
youngest sister’s movement toward the goal they had come so far to find. “Mama is dead. And maybe at her own hand. She didn’t run off from us. She’s
dead
. Daddy lied to us.”

“April, that’s enough,” Sadie snapped.

What had they done? The bond of silence between them all had been broken. They could not go back. They could no longer create elaborate fantasies to quell their fears that their mother might be out there, that she might one day come back to them. They could not pretend that their father was simply some eccentric victim of his own charm who never meant anyone any ill will.

As of this moment, everything had changed. It had been on the pathway to change for some time now. But here and now, when they walked up to that cemetery, looked into their father’s eyes and waited for him to tell them why he had done what he had done, nothing in their lives would ever be the same.

“What are we going to say to him, Sadie?” Hannah asked again.

“Why are you asking me? I can’t talk to my Heavenly Father Who has only wanted the best for me. What makes you think I know what to say to this father, the one who has deceived me my entire life?”

“You’ll know what to say, Sadie, because you’ve waited on the Lord to prepare you for this moment.” Hannah held her hands out to beckon her sisters to come on with her. “I’ve watched you this summer. I’ve seen how you’ve come around, how you’ve taken on new challenges and made every effort to fix your mistakes. I’ve seen you grieve and I’ve seen you grow.”

“True enough,” April said with a nod. She took Hannah’s hand.

Hannah gave her oldest sister a quick hug. “April here, she’s not the one to approach Daddy. She’s our warrior. She’s girded up good in her Godly armor. April is the one we’ll need in the aftermath.”

April hugged the youngest girl right back and murmured, “Peace, be strong, Hannah.”

“See? That’s me. In the midst of this, I’m here to bring peace and strength. It’s not for me to confront Daddy.”

“Confront Daddy,” Sadie said under her breath. A trickle of sweat snaked down under her collar. “I’m not…ready.”

She had said ready when in fact she’d meant
worthy
. Who was she—an awful mess of a person—to confront anybody about anything?

“You
are
ready.” Hannah shook her dark red hair back off her face. “You’ve got what Mary Tate calls ‘the fire’ in you. You’d lost it for a time there. But it’s back. At least enough to do this thing.”

Sadie started to shake her head no, but Hannah threw her hand up to stop her.

“You’ve waited on the Lord long enough, Sadie. You’re ready.”

Worthy!
She wanted to scream it in correction. No amount of waiting would ever make her worthy. Why couldn’t anyone see that?

Sadie lifted her eyes to scan the graveyard at last. “It’s going to change everything.”

“Well maybe it’s about time something did.” April held out her hand.

“What are you waiting for, Sadie?” Hannah’s hand reached out, as well.

What
was
she waiting for?

It didn’t really matter now. They had arrived at this place of no turning back, and her sisters had chosen her
to speak for them. She would face their father and somehow she would find it in herself to open her heart and ask him to finally tell them the truth.

H
ow long have you known? How can we ever trust you again? What else have you kept from us? Why, Daddy? Why?

Question upon question tumbled over one another in Sadie’s mind. Her pulse rose like the heat in her cheeks, until her head throbbed and her thoughts swirled into a muddy mess. What could she say to her father upon finding out that he’d lived most of their lifetime in lies? Where could she find the inner strength to look into the eyes of the man she thought would never hurt her and ask him why he had betrayed her?

She placed her hand on the wrought-iron gate surrounding the small, silent cemetery and closed her eyes. And in that moment uttered a prayer so simple that anyone hearing it might have accused her of being glib in her approach. But to Sadie it was a start. All things start somewhere, and here at this site of grief and confusion and, yes, even power and calm in the renewed relationship with Hannah and April, here Sadie chose to start, at last, to speak to God about herself again.

Lord, please, be with me now. Be in me. Speak through me. Do not desert me. Amen
.

The gate creaked. She stepped across from smooth sidewalk to a well-worn stone path.

Hannah and April closed in behind her.

Daddy did not look up.

The sisters stopped and took a collective breath.

Only a hundred feet away or so, Moonie was in another world. One inhabited by only himself and the unyielding marble stone that he knelt beside. Now and again he brushed his trembling fingers over the small white marker. His little gray hat lay on the ground. His shoulders rose and fell. More than once they shook, his head bent low.

“Sadie, maybe we should—”

“Shh, April.” Sadie raised her hand to stop her sister from voicing their shared misgivings. “We’re here now. We have to go forward with this or go back to pretending, to never really talking to each other, to always wondering. And I can’t go back.”

Hannah gave Sadie’s shoulder a squeeze. “What will you say?”

The questions bubbled up to the surface of her consciousness fast and furious. She squared her shoulders and lifted her head.

How long have you known? How can we ever trust you again? What else have you kept from us? Why, Daddy? Why?

But when she reached the solitary figure kneeling in the shade of a gnarled old tree beside the grave bearing their mother’s name, all Sadie said was, “‘Why seek ye the living among the dead’…Daddy?”

“She was a woman of faith, your mother. Some might look at her choices and conclude otherwise. But I want you
girls to know that she held firm to her spiritual beliefs.
Always
. She never let go of them. It was this world she couldn’t seem to keep a grip on.” He struggled to rise, his aging eyes rimmed in red.

“Let me help you, Daddy.” Hannah stepped up first and took one arm.

April moved in and took the other arm.

“Don’t know why you’d want to help the likes of this old man. I’ve made such an awful mess of things.”

“I’d deny that, Daddy, but after having chased you through two states only to end up staring at a headstone with Mama’s name on it, I don’t see how I can.” Sadie hoped he heard acceptance, not accusation, in her tone.

Moonie patted Hannah on the cheek, then April on the hand as he extricated himself from their aid. Bending down, he reached out and rubbed his fingers over the chiseled name on the stone.
Teresa Owens
.

Sadie’s eye was drawn to the dates below the name. “She was so young.”

“Thirty-one,” April murmured.

“Yes. Almost the number of years since she passed.” Daddy ran his weathered fingers under the final date.

“How long have you known, Daddy?” Sadie had to ask.

“So young.” He shook his head.

“Daddy?” Hannah lurched forward.

Sadie put her hand out to stop her younger sister from prying further. There was too much pain here now. The grief in their father was as fresh as if it had all just happened. Moonie would tell them everything, but they could not force it from him. Sadie understood that now, and despite all they had suspected he had done, she still trusted her father.

She bent and picked up the familiar gray hat from where it lay in the thick green grass. “Let’s go, Daddy. There’s nothing more for us here.”

“Now…now that I’ve found her again after all these years…” He folded his hands and bowed his head. “I hate to leave her.”

“It’s all right, Daddy,” April said, her voice hushed. “She’s not here now.”

“And besides—” Hannah stood over the grave, her face emotionless but her eyes filled with tears “—she left us a long time ago, even before she died.”

“Your mama didn’t abandon you.
I
left
her
.”

“What?”

He looked at the grave. “Your mother insisted.”

“Daddy, all my life you’ve told that story of how Mama ran off in the night.” Hannah stepped backward and crossed her arms as if to hold back the inevitable ache inside her as she added, “With me just three weeks home from the hospital.”

April and Sadie closed ranks around their sister. Sadie looked at their father and went into her role to speak for them all. “We’ve heard it a thousand times, Daddy. Mama ran off. Now you say
you
left
her
, taking along her blood child, a toddler and a newborn? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Sadly that’s about all it did make, was sense. It sure didn’t make us happy.”

April took a step toward Moonie. “I don’t recall Mama as ever being happy.”

His head snapped up. His gaze searched his stepchild’s. “She was, April, sugar.” Then he looked away. “At times. But…your mama was what we called back in those days ‘fragile.’”

“She suffered from depression, didn’t she, Daddy?” April persisted.

“I don’t know the right term for what had a grip on her, but suffer with it she did. Merciful heavens, girls—how your sweet mama did suffer.”

Silence enveloped the shaded plot.

Beyond them the sun shone in almost blinding light on the abandoned buildings and empty, weed-infested lots.

“The baby blues,” Moonie finally whispered.

“What, Daddy?” April leaned in to better hear.

“I recall that’s what Phiz called it when she came to help out.” Daddy nodded as he spoke, his head cocked slightly. “Said your mama had a bad case of the baby blues.”

“Postpartum depression, like Sadie…” Hannah started to point to her older sister, then froze midgesture and let her hand fall to her side. “That’s what it’s called, Daddy.”

Moonie looked to his middle daughter and nodded knowingly. “Phiz claimed Teresa might have fared better if she hadn’t had you two girls, Hannah and Sadie, so close together.”

Sadie tried to remember how she had felt after giving birth to Ryan and Olivia, desperate to find a pattern that might bring the answers she had sought for so long. “So are you saying it all started when I was born?”

“Pretty soon after. Yes, I think so.” Moonie glanced down again, then motioned toward the old convertible waiting beyond the side entrance. “I always carried some guilt over that, but back then, we didn’t know. We just thought she needed to perk up.”

“Or pray harder. Or put it behind you.” Sadie knew all the suggestions by heart. And she knew the greatest fear she had felt when she could not live up to the simplistic,
well-intentioned suggestions. The all-encompassing sense of failure. Her greatest fear that those she loved the most would finally see her for what she was: flawed and ineffectual, a waste of time. Worthless and then…

She shut her eyes and pulled the warm summer air deep into her lungs. She asked the Lord again not to desert her and in that same instant asked her father the one thing that she now had to know from him. “But if she suffered so much, if she was that ‘fragile,’ as you put it, why would you leave her?”

Their father edged close to Sadie and, extricating his beloved hat from her white-knuckled grip, said calmly, “Like I said, she insisted.”

“Why?”

“For the sake of you girls.”

“How could anyone come up with that, Daddy?” Hannah held back and did not follow the rest of them. “All our lives we missed out on having a mama because you two had split up. What possible benefit could anyone have seen in that?”

“That it spared you having a mama right there in front of you every day who couldn’t give you the most simple basic daily care that you three needed. And to spare you, I see now, the pain of losing that mama so young.”

“You don’t think she asked you to leave because she planned to…?”

“Kill herself? No.” He started again for the car. This time all three sisters followed, surrounding him to hang on every word. “I don’t believe that for one minute. But I do think she lived every day in a world of hurt, so much so that there weren’t enough tranquilizers and pain pills in the world to dull it.”

“There are so many things they’d do differently today.”

“I wish I’d done things different, that’s for sure. But your mama, she had one wish in this world, and I had to honor it.”

“That you leave her?”

“That I keep you girls together.”

“Why wouldn’t you keep us together?”

“Oh, I
would
. But there were some who said…To understand it, you have to remember that your mama had her good days and her bad ones.”

“I do remember that, Daddy,” April said. “I remember more bad days than good.”

Moonie nodded, his eyes cloudy. “I wish I could say the good days were a blessing, but in some ways they only served to remind her of what she might do—and give and have—if only she didn’t wrestle with that monster, that, tell me again that thing you called it—post…?”

“Postpartum depression,” Hannah said.

Moonie sighed as if the very term weighed heavy on his bones. “It was one of those days, one of those bad postpartum ones, that made up her mind. It came on the heels of a respectable spate of days so good that life almost seemed…”

“Magical?” Hannah asked.

He shook his head, slowly. “Doable.”

Sadie shut her eyes and mouthed the word again, feeling the full weight of understanding for her mother for the first time in her life.

“On one of those days your mother called me at the insurance office and asked me if I’d be willing to adopt April.”

“Which you did.” April moved ahead of them, probably intending to open the gate for Daddy when they reached it. “And then?”

“No. I never did. I never legally adopted you, April, honey.”

She stopped, blocking the path. “Daddy, yes, you did. I have your last name. All my school records show you as my father.”

“I fudged the documents. It wasn’t so hard to do back then. But I didn’t adopt you. I couldn’t.”

Sunlight brightened the top of her head. She squinted and ran her fingers down her braid. “Why not?”

“Because we waited too late. Starting up the adoption proceedings brought your mama’s fragile state to the attention of the child welfare.”

Sadie started to give the proper name for the agency that might have come to investigate their home life, then thought better of it. Her father was finally telling them everything, and picking at details wouldn’t make things easier.

“Teresa was pregnant then with our little Hannah. And weak as a kitten and withdrawn. But not so much so that she didn’t grasp the severity of the situation.”

“What situation?” Hannah pressed.

“That if a social worker looked too hard at our family, she might not like what she saw,” April said.

“She feared she’d be judged an unfit mother, unworthy of and unequal to the task.” Moonie studied his hat.

Sadie’s knees wobbled. How well she knew that feeling! Until this very moment “Mama” had remained an abstract to her way thinking. A concept, bittersweet and beautiful, but just not real. Intellectually Sadie understood that they shared the same DNA, but now to hear they also shared the very same fears and failings?

She could hardly breathe for imagining her mother carrying that pain…and all alone.

“And Teresa wasn’t far wrong. There was talk around town, and some said maybe they should take you girls away—or at least April, as she wasn’t my blood kin.” He
reached out and took the eldest girl’s hand. He held her gaze only a moment before he turned his beseeching eyes on the others. “I couldn’t let that happen, don’t you see? I couldn’t let my girls get torn apart. I couldn’t let them take you away, April.”

“So you took us and left town?” No emotion colored Sadie’s question. She felt stunned and angry and afraid all at once.

“At your mother’s insistence,” he reiterated.

“In a station wagon in the middle of the night,” April whispered.

“Well, after dark, but you were already in your pajamas, so it probably seemed later to you.”

April blinked, still fingering the end of her braid. “And we stayed at a motel with a park, with horses on springs and teeter-totters.”

“How’d you ever remember that?”

April pressed her lips together, a softness coming over her expression. “And Mama came to see us once. I remember her in that park.”

“Yes, to tell me she wanted to go away to get better and that we should move on, find a town and make a home and that she’d come when she could. When she drove off that day, I had no idea I’d never see her again.”

“Then Mama
did
leave us.” Always the stickler for details, Hannah gave a curt nod to emphasize the correctness of her assessment.

And though it humbled Sadie to admit it, she felt just as smug and satisfied with that conclusion as anyone. Daddy had not walked out on a woman in pain—he had done what he thought he had to in order to rescue the children he loved. It was a small distinction and not one she’d have thought noble at the time, but it was all they
had, and so much time had passed since he’d made his own Solomon’s choice that she simply could not dwell on “what ifs.”

“That’s right,” Sadie said with the finality of closing a door to the past. “Mama left us.”

“I…I suppose. But the way she was…I don’t think she felt she had any choice. It was this thing that consumed her that compelled her to leave, don’t you see? It wasn’t the woman I loved who left. It wasn’t your mama.” Moonie turned his head to try to make sure each girl understood. Then he whisked one open palm along the brim of the hat in his hand and shrugged as if trying to get out from under a heavy mantle. “Got divorce papers in the mail a couple years later. I didn’t want to sign them, but I had to protect you girls. I couldn’t leave an open end. I had to let Teresa go.”