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Authors: Deborah Bedford

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BOOK: When You Believe
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“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 with 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 voice 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.

Put your hand in the water, Lyddie.

Why?

Sh-hhh. Don’t ask. Quick, or you’ll miss.

Miss what?

Do you trust me? You’ll see.

Let me put my coffee mug down.

Slow. Don’t move anything you don’t have to move. I’ll help you. That’s a girl. Now.

His breathing warm on her ear, his chest full length and hard against her back. His arm curved around her as if they were
stepping off into a dance, as if he wanted to hold her and set her free all at the same time.

Now, your other hand.

Both of them? You’re going to make me fall in.

Sh-hhh.

What?

Here.

He took her second hand himself and placed it inches beside the first one. With his hands cupped around hers in the water,
they’d waited, motionless, his chin resting on her shoulder, until he said,
Now. NOW!
and they came up with a brilliant yellow fish, flipping and curling between her hands, as round and as small as her palm.
His chin, moving against her shoulder blade. The fish, so beautiful, its heaving yellow middle reflecting glimpses of opal.

It’s a sun perch. Brim.

She’d watched as he released it and it side-splashed, then curved its way deep into the water until she couldn’t see it anymore.
He had entranced her.

Do it again,
she breathed. Then, after a long silence, staring down into the lake,
Oh, do it again.

What do you want me to catch this time, Lyddie?

A bass. Try a big-mouthed bass.

You’re crazy. You know there’s some things that are easier to catch than others.

The Loch Ness monster, then. Try to catch that. We’d be rich. We’d be famous.
With wet fishy hands, she turned into him and grabbed his face. For one frightening moment they lost their balance and she
thought that, yes, they were both going to topple into the Brownbranch. But he captured her as they teetered and pulled her
against him, rocking his face against her wet palms as he engulfed her with his big arms, both of them laughing.

Then he had caught her wrists inside his hands and the laughter faded, replaced by a serious longing in his eyes that asked
much of her. A deep-seated kiss that she almost couldn’t bear.

Three mornings ago, and it had been the last time they had touched, the last time they had kissed.

In a loving impulse, Lydia wanted to touch him now. She hungered to remember the planes of his jaw beneath her fingers, wanted
the reassurance of his hauling her against his muscle and bone. She needed to hear him say, “It’s all right, all right now,
Lyddie.”

BOOK: When You Believe
10.14Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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