When You Believe (25 page)

He nodded. “I guess so. But there are a lot of people who are looking at your side, too, Shelb. They get it. I’ve heard them
talking. It must have been horrible, having somebody in your family do something like that. I’ve heard people talking in the
halls. They said, if it was them, they would have tried to be free of it any way they could. Just the way you did.”

They stood there for a minute, looking at each other.

“I’ve got to do community service for stealing Mr. Stains’s boat. We all do.”

“What kind of community service?”

“We have to paint all the wooden campground signs down by the lake.”

“That doesn’t sound like much fun.”

“It won’t be.”

Their eyes met again.

“Tom and Mom say I don’t have to go back to school yet, if I don’t want to. Since I’ve already told the truth to Mr. Nibarger
and the police.”

“Do you want to come back?”

“I don’t know.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m still thinking about that, I guess.”

He picked up a napkin from one of the tables and set it back down again. “I don’t think you need to stay away too long.”

“Why?”

“They’re going to forgive you, you know. Since they’re so happy that Mr. Stains is coming back.”

“But there’s just so much—” She stopped again.

“Just so much
what?”

“You know.”

“What?”

She whispered, stepped back, waited. “About me.”

For a moment, all that she meant hung in the air between them. “You mean, about what happened to you?”

“Yeah.”

He thought about it. “You are who you are, Shelb. That other stuff doesn’t make any difference.”

“It doesn’t make any difference to you, maybe. But it does make a difference to me.”

“I guess it would.”

“Yeah. And to talk about it, to admit it happened and call it by name. That helps a little bit. I’ve still got some things
to work through.”

“I’ll miss you until you’re there again.”

She smiled at him, touched his arm. “It won’t be too long,” she said. “Because if you feel that way about it, Sam, then maybe
everything’s going to be okay.”

LYDIA EYED THE
IDLING MOTOR
on
Charlie’s Pride
with no small amount of skepticism. “I’m afraid you’ll get me in the middle of the Brownbranch and throw me overboard,” she
said. “I don’t know if I want to go.”

Charlie kept his hand on the throttle, ready to power it up.

“You can trust me,” he said and, right now, that was no small thing to say.
You can trust me.
“The middle of the lake is a good place to talk.”

Beside the Coca-Cola cooler at the marina, Charlie could see Cy shading his eyes and watching them. After everything that
had happened to his niece, Cy Porter wasn’t letting Lydia out of his sight.

Once she had climbed into his boat and had pointedly strapped herself into a life preserver, Charlie directed them away from
shore. “Look, Lydia,” he said over the throbbing engine, the churning water. “We’ve fished enough people out of the brink
for one week. This isn’t anything that you really need to worry about.”

“Okay.” She focused somewhere past his left knee. “I’ll stop.”

“You can drive this thing better than I can, anyway.”

She didn’t argue with that. “I can.”

Charlie knew her well enough to know she’d wait until they got to Humbert’s Finger before she asked any more questions. And
he was right. That’s exactly what she did. She picked words carefully.

“Are you ever going to be able to forgive her?” she asked.

One beat. Two. “I don’t condone the lying. But I think she may have taken the only route that was possible for her to take.”

Then, after another long, uncomfortable silence, “Are you ever going to be able to forgive me?”

This was the same question he’d been asking himself for days. Now that it was all over, could they go back to the place they
had been? He had to wonder.

Once Charlie had driven the boat to a protected place where the Brownbranch rocked them and the birds serenaded them and the
breeze danced over their heads, he cut the engine. “I have to be honest, Lyddie. If we had switched places, I don’t know what
I would have done.”

“That’s something you never do know,” she said, “until it happens.”

A mallard flew overhead, whistling with its wings. They both watched it. He said, “You had to believe her. It was your job.”

“Don’t let me off the hook like that, Charlie. I had to believe her because I had to believe her.
Somebody
needed to.”

“I knew there had to be something behind what she’d said. That’s why I wrote her that note that day. I wanted to talk to her.”

“And I stopped you from that, too.” Lydia shoved her hands inside her pockets.

“Yes. But you
had
to.”

“I’m a different person than I was a week ago.” Lydia gazed at the sky. “All of us are.”

Charlie hazarded a sharp laugh at that. “Glad you counted me in on that.” Another duck flew overhead.

“I can’t be everything you wanted me to be, Charlie. I failed you everywhere.”

“I’ve thought about things, Lyddie. How we looked at each other once. How we see each other now.”

“Which way do we turn, Charlie? I don’t know.”

“Maybe it’s a bigger test of faith to stand by someone when you have doubts.”

“And maybe it isn’t. I took the human way out.”

“You didn’t take any outs at all.”

She was silent.

“I have to think about that a lot,” he said. “I’m trying to see it through your eyes.”

“Now that it’s over, I’m not sorry. There are things in Shelby’s life that have been brought to light. There are things in
my own heart that have been healed.”

“Will you tell me?”

“Someday. Maybe when it isn’t quite so fresh and tender. In spite of her mistakes, Shelby took me down a road I needed to
follow.”

“It won’t be easy.” He ate a sunflower seed out of a bag and spit the hull into the water. “But I still care about you, Lyddie.”

“You’re right.” She stared at the water. “It won’t be. But maybe in time…”

“I’d like the chance to sort through everything that’s in my heart. Will you give me that chance?”

“I’m the one, Charlie, who ought to be asking for second chances.”

Charlie was looking at her in an odd way. “You may have saved Shelby, because you stuck by her. Do you realize that?”

“I didn’t know I deserved to be cared about the way you care about me, do you know that? I didn’t know I deserved to be loved
the way
He
loves me.”

“Well,” Charlie said very quietly, finally reaching across the orange block of life jacket and touching her face. “Now, you
do.”

“Yes.” And her eyes met his head on.

RUMORS FLY FAST
in Shadrach because it is the way of every small town. Everyone along Main Street today felt the buzz in the air. Of course
the news had started at the counseling office at the high school. Spine-tingling, if it was true.

In the windows at the bank, the tellers counted money with a little less
snap
and a little more smile. Patrice Saunders’s dog even got two dog bones at the drive-through window instead of one. Cy Porter,
who usually wouldn’t leave Viney Creek Marina as long as there was a chore to be done, could be seen mid-afternoon just strolling
through town with Jane at his side. Mo Eden carried her basket full of bandages across the road for health class and, when
the wind came up and took a few, she laughed and strewed a few more.

Charlie Stains was coming back to work at the high school.

At last he would be able to teach his woodworking students how to complete their lodgepole pine chairs. In spite of the gorilla
glue, the chairs that they’d started with a substitute had all collapsed inward within three days.

And maybe they would build another dock somewhere, if Mr. Stains could scout out another one that needed fixing.

Rumor had it that, if Mr. Stains built another dock, Miss P might be along to help. Some people, who had been at the services
up at Big Tree Baptist last Sunday, said they’d seen her wearing a ring. Some people said she’d even gotten her fingernails
done up because she knew everyone would see.

The kids in Shadrach High School didn’t know how they’d feel about that yet. They’d already started talking about how hard
it was going to be, remembering to call her Mrs. S instead of Miss P. But who could say how difficult it would really be.
Because the Lord had a way of working things out in Shadrach.

BRAD GRITTON
had his entire class of video students on the front lawn when Lydia Porter and Charlie Stains came out together.

“Okay. Okay,” Brad said to his students, his voice raised. “Practice a zoom shot here. Nagle, you need to take the lens cap
off or you’re not going to get anything. Cassie, I don’t think you’ve got your camera turned on.”

“What do we zoom in on?” Cassie asked.

“Anything you’d like. That goose flying up there. The flag blowing in the breeze on top of the flagpole. Anything. Just to
get the feel of the video equipment.”

While his students began to pan the brick façade of the building, Brad stepped toward Lydia and Charlie.

“Hey,” he called, somewhat smugly. “I hear there’s good news to report about you two these days.”

“Do you?” Charlie asked.

“Yes. I do.”

But Lydia didn’t say a word to him. She just held out the hand with the diamond engagement ring on it, her eyes reflecting
the same sparkle of gratitude that he could see in the stone.

“Congratulations,” Brad told her with a somber smile.

After one stretch of awkward silence, in which Charlie glared at Gritton as if he wasn’t sure whether he liked him being this
friendly with his new fiancée, Lydia couldn’t help smiling.

“So Brad,” she asked. “How are you doing these days?”

“Okay,” Brad said. “But, just okay. Taylor’s dad came to pick him up yesterday. So the house is a little quiet right now.
Takes some getting used to.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and she meant it. She wished Brad the best in the world. “I hope that kid comes back to visit again
soon.”

“He will, if I have anything to do with it.”

“Good.”

Brad turned to Charlie. “Say, I hear you applied for a grant to fund your English Lit project at Missouri a few years back.
You didn’t get it, huh?”

Charlie shrugged his shoulders. “No. One of those tough things. I have a tough time wearing a tie and sitting still in a meeting.
I don’t play coat-and-tie politics well. Never have. Never will, I guess.”

Brad turned back to Lydia. “So now you know. It really was college politics that made Charlie quit university life. It really
was college politics that made him come home.”

She couldn’t resist grinning. They all laughed. “And I am
so
glad that he did.”

As Charlie and Lydia’s eyes locked, they forgot all about Brad Gritton standing there or the video class that was in session
or the past that they had all struggled through.

The future held a lot of promise.

Charlie bent low and drew Lydia tightly against him. He lowered his lips to hers, claimed her with his kiss.

When he did, at least a dozen video cameras zoomed in.

And, all around the schoolyard, the trees seemed to sing.

Many times while I was writing
When You Believe,
I questioned God’s will.
Maybe nobody’s going to want to read about this, Lord,
I said.
Maybe mentioning the topic of sexual abuse is going to offend people.

But every time I questioned the Father’s will for this, He would answer by bringing yet another broken, beautiful, loving,
hurt young woman into my life, yet another person who had lived this story.

So many parts of
When You Believe
are true. The story about churchgoers separating into sides at the Sunday service. The story about the woman who said, “Kids
know how to tell when it’s a teacher or somebody like that. But when it’s somebody in your own family, there isn’t anything
you know how to say.” The story of a mother never believing a daughter because, if she admitted the truth, then she would
have to admit that abuse had happened to her, too.

Finding God in all of this was a struggle. Often, as I wrote, I felt like the Father was holding me back when I wanted to
write something about Him. I did a first rewrite, and a second, without knowing exactly where Lydia’s heart was going. Without
knowing where
my
heart was going. But then, as I began to discover where my own life ran in the same direction as Lydia’s, the pieces began
to fit together.

I began to see my own disbelief. Not my disbelief in Him, necessarily, but my disbelief in how God sees me.

For a long time in my life, I wrote Harlequin romance novels. One of my favorite things to do now is explain the course of
my career as I moved from writing secular mass-market paperbacks to writing books for the Lord. When I was a teenager, ready
to find my own Prince Charming around every corner, my parents teased me about being “in love with love.” And it’s true. Even
now, as I look back at my life, the times when I knew someone was standing beside me,
believing
me, loving me more than I thought I deserved to be loved, those were the times when I felt like my life was soaring with
purpose.

How can I give you up, Ephraim?
God cries to us.
It was I who taught you to walk, taking you by the arms; but you did not realize it was I who healed you. I led you with cords
of human kindness, with ties of love; I lifted the yoke from your neck and bent down to feed you.

And so, on this last page, I write tonight with much joy. I have discovered, during
When You Believe,
that I am writing books about the greatest romance of all. The Father
created
us to be in love with love. He created in us a need for romance, because that is exactly what He longs to give us. In spite
of what our minds tell us to believe, the crusty, hard layers of disbelief have been laying deep and heavy for decades in
many of our hearts. We need to let our own unbelief be hammered, chiseled out and assailed by the Word of God. The Father
calls us to look not into the mirror of the world, but into the mirror of how He feels about us.