When You Believe (22 page)

She left her bag in a corner beside the bed. She ignored the stack of clean sheets already waiting from her mom. She would
get to those later, and help Shelby with hers, too.

On the way through the house, she checked her father’s office, snapped the bathroom light on then off again, made a pass through
the living room, which was as usual formal, cool, and dark.

She found Shelby settled at the piano. She was plinking out the first few bars to “Chopsticks” while she examined a row of
framed photographs lined up behind the music stand. She nodded toward a picture of cousins when they were very small. “Which
one are you?”

“That one. Right there. See. With all the crooked teeth.”

“How old were you?”

“Trying to remember. Seven, I guess.”

“Who are all these other people?”

“My cousins. That’s Laurie. And Amy. Oh, and Bill. Right there. This other picture is Mom and Dad in Hawaii. And there, that’s
college graduation.”

“Cool.”

She pointed to the last in the row. “This was Ben, the Border collie. We had him when I first got braces.”

“Good old Ben.” Her dad sloshed coffee out of his mug as he creaked down into his chair. The Christmas clock suddenly erupted
into song. “The First Noel.” They’d made it in good time; all that driving and they’d gotten in before five. “You like my
clock?” Jim asked.

Mention of the clock brought them back to thoughts about Christmas, only two months away. Nancy popped in from the kitchen,
drying her hands on a tea towel.

“We’re glad you’re home, honey,” she said, looking worried and ringing her hands into a knot. “And it’s very nice that you’ve
brought Shelby with you. I didn’t mean to react the way I did out there. It’s just that—”

Jim took the conversation from her. “It’s just about your trip home for Christmas. You’ve planned
that
so far ahead.”

“Here.” Lydia sat beside Shelby on the piano bench and encouraged her to move her hands down an octave. “You know ‘Heart and
Soul’?”

“Yeah.”

“If you’ll do the bottom part, I’ll do the top part.”

“Sure.” The playing began.

“We were so excited to hear you got reasonably priced tickets, honey,” Nancy said. “Especially since you had to buy
two.
You said that, Lydia. You said ‘I got
our
tickets.’ I wrote you about it, remember? You said you were bringing a friend.”

Lydia hit a wrong note.

She stared across at the music stand.

“Did I?”

Oh, Charlie. Charlie. It was meant to be so different from this.

“I’m sorry,” she fudged, her blood pounding. “I probably said something I didn’t mean.”

Nancy hung up the tea towel and dropped herself in the brown tweed swivel chair. Shelby asked if she could trade and do the
top half of “Heart and Soul.”

“Sure.” Lydia scooted over so Shelby could come around.

“Nancy.” Jim lifted his mug to his wife in a toast. He lifted his eyebrows, too. “More coffee? Please?”

“I wanted to hear all about these
plans
, Jim.” She took another bite out of the cookie and continued rather insistently, “Lydia, you don’t know how overjoyed we
are about this. We’re planning an open house sometime Christmas week so we can have everybody over. Aunt Ruby and Uncle Arthur
will want to stop by. And the Beamans. It will be the perfect time to have the Beamans. I want them all to have a chance to
meet your young man.”

Lydia’s hands slipped on the piano keys. A C-major chord turned into something much less pleasant.

Shelby frowned over at Lydia’s wrist.

“Mother. Stop.
Listen.”

Oh, why did I forget this? Why did I forget that it’s this way every time I come home?

“I
know
what I heard you say, Lydia. You
said
‘I got
our
tickets.’”

But it was Shelby who asked beneath her breath, touching Lydia’s wrist with her left pinkie. “Miss P?
What
young man?”

Lydia laid her right hand over Shelby’s left one. To anyone watching her fingers, she was very calm. But everything inside
her had turned to rough stone.

“Are you
never
going to get serious about anybody, Lydia? How old do you have to be before you settle down? Get a husband? Get yourself
some babies?”

“Some people decide just not to do that sort of thing.”

“Well.” Nancy Porter slapped her knees in frustration. “
I’ve
decided you need to do that sort of thing. And a mother’s heart ought to be worth something.”

“There is no one, Mama. I’m sorry. I’m not dating anybody. I’m not seeing anybody. I’m not bringing anybody here for the holidays.”
How bitter these words tasted. Not only because she’d wanted it to be different for her mother, but mostly because she’d wanted
it to be different for herself. What she’d felt for Charlie, what she still felt for him, had taken her somewhere deeper than
wanting these things. She had wanted to stand beside him. She had wanted to know him while he grew old. She had wanted to
nurse him through the flu and punch him when he snored and see his children grow to resemble him more each year. “There’s
just going to be me.”

With a disappointed
humph,
Nancy shoved off with her Naturalizer-clad toe on the carpet. “I was so
sure
that’s what you had planned.” The chair swiveled until she faced the North Pole instead of the equator. “And Marla Tompkins
with enough grandchildren, she’d like to give some away.”

Every step Lydia made along Plumb Hill Road brought her closer to Jolena Criggin’s rental cottage. Every step brought her
closer to the moment for which she had driven all these miles. And every step brought her closer to the place where she’d
been left alone by a heavenly Father when she’d cried out to Him, long ago, from her purest heart.

This was not anything that could have been swept away with a phone call or put to rest with a scribbled letter.

Not when someone like Mr. Buckholtz had left behind what he’d left behind.

With a false air of nonchalance, Lydia had made a jaunt to the Straddle Ridge rental office and asked the man to point out
the way. He’d drawn a squiggly line on a map.

“Nice lady,” he’d said when she told him who she was coming to see. “Such a shame about her ex-husband, though. Must be a
hard job going through someone’s things.”

“I imagine it would be.”

“Look. She gave me this.” He pulled a leather compass case out of his pocket, popped open the steel snap, and showed her the
compass inside, the unscratched glass, the vacillating needle. “Used to be his.” He shrugged. “Guess nobody wanted it.”

When he gave her the map, Lydia folded it into careful, tiny squares, pressing each crease hard twice. “Thank you.” And she
poked it inside the pocket of her sweater where she could touch its edges and feel that it was still there.

In her car, she unfolded the map and followed it. She parked at the curb, walked the width of three cottages because there
was no place closer to leave the car.

I was crazy, wasn’t I?

Thinking that fifteen years ago, God heard me. Thinking that any of this could make a difference now.

At that moment, trudging up the narrow fieldstone walk, Lydia came face to face with hope. Hope she hadn’t known could still
be there.

If God is going to do something, how many years does it take for Him to answer a prayer?

When Jolena answered the door, she was a surprise—much smaller than Lydia had pictured her, eyes the color of the Atlantic,
hair as shimmery as fresh snow.

“Yes?”

“Jolena Criggin?”

“Yes.”

Lydia pushed back her hair with her sunglasses. “Hello, I’m Lydia. Lydia Porter?”

“Yes?”

“You wrote me a letter?”

“Oh.” It took a moment for the woman to remember. “Oh, yes.
You’re
Lydia Porter. I… oh, yes. I
did
send you a letter.”

Even as Lydia’s hope plunged, something else took its place, a thought that ran unbidden through her mind.

Beloved.

As gentle as a nudge.

Beloved, I picked out the color of your eyes, the color of your hair. I sing over you with shouts of joy.

“About the envelope? With one of my old high school tests in it?”

Jolena Criggin narrowed her eyes. “Oh heavens, something Clive left behind.”

Lydia felt about fifteen years old. “Yes.”

“I have to say, I expected to hear from you via regular mail, Miss Porter. I didn’t expect you to arrive at my door.”

They were still standing there, and the woman still hadn’t invited her in. Well, that was okay. She could say what she had
come to say, and leave. “There may be several things about me that you didn’t expect.”

“I halfway expected not to hear a word from you. It’s just a test, after all. Something left over that year from his files.”

“I’m a high school counselor now,” she said. “My time in school made me want to help other kids. Do you know how it is with
teenagers”—she didn’t know whether to call her
Miss
or
Mrs
.—“Mrs.… I-I mean,
Miss
Criggin? Things that seem unimportant to adults can seem disastrous to adolescents.”

“Of course they can. Let me get you that envelope. Here. Make yourself comfortable. I’ll need to find it.” She gestured and
held the door.

“Thank you.”

The woman disappeared into the back room.

This is the thing, isn’t it, God? The reason you let me fall in love with Charlie, the reason everything’s in such a mess
in Shadrach.

I am still paying for this.

“Here you are.” The manila envelope smelled dusty and old. The brad had aged to a rusty green. “There isn’t any note in there,
Miss Porter. Just that test.”

“Thank you.”

Lydia sat down and unfastened the brad, half expecting it to break off where she bent it. She turned the envelope up and slid
out the pages.

A three-page essay about the motivation of Grendel and Hrothgar in
Beowulf,
written in script that had seemed more than grownup at the time. Each letter of her cursive had been neat and round, with
tiny balloon circles dotting each
i
. Beneath her name at the upper left corner of the page and the date, which students had always been required to fill in,
he had scribbled a large B+ with his red felt-tip pen.

Lydia held the test to the light. Even the staple had gone rusty. Then, as if she never wanted to touch these pages again,
she shoved them back inside. She laid the envelope across her lap and smacked it with two palms. “Thank you.”

“It’s
Mrs.
Criggin,” the woman said. “I remarried almost a dozen years ago.”

Their eyes met and held.

When Lydia didn’t speak, Mrs. Criggin filled in the silence. “Well,
I
never could figure out what it was for.”

I can’t do this, God. I absolutely can’t—

Oh, Father. Help me. If I walk away from this I’ll never have another chance.

She swallowed. Hard. “I think I know,” Lydia said, her voice barely audible.

“You do?”

Lydia nodded.

Jolena Criggin waited.

Something whispered in Lydia’s heart.
Say it, beloved. Let her see that your hurt is decades deep.

And the guilt she carried forced its way out.

“I think h-he wanted you and me to meet each other. Because he wanted you to know that everything was my fault.”

Silvery eyebrows narrowed. Gentle hands moved, unclasped and then clasped again. “
Your
fault?”

Lydia nodded. “About the d-divorce.”

“What divorce?”

“Y-yours.”

She rocked back. “Mine? Me and Mr. Buckholtz?”

Lydia bit her lower lip and nodded again. Then, “Yes.”

The little lady named Jolena Criggin had an odd expression on her face. For a moment, she studied the smooth wooden strips,
the pegs, on the floor. When she lifted her face again, Lydia expected to see anger. But instead she saw only regret in the
woman’s eyes, and a gentle glow.

“What did he say to you, child? I think you should tell me.” And in that moment, it might as well have been a decade and a
half ago for both of them.

“I-I can’t.”

“I think you can,” Mrs. Criggin said softly. “In fact, I think you’re here because you
want
to tell me.”

“I’m so sorry,” Lydia said instead, and knew she wasn’t going to make it.

But her voice stayed calm. She decided to take the envelope and go. She decided this entire day had been for naught. Until
something deep inside of her started to rattle loose, to cave in, and the first thing that erupted was tears.

“I’m
so
sorry,” she said again. “I am
so sorry
.” And each time she repeated that, her lips went a little thicker. She gave Mrs. Criggin one sane, measured look, said very
succinctly, “I’m going to lose it.” She pulled her sunglasses down over her eyes even though she was indoors.

And for the first time since Charlie Stains had asked her to marry him, Lydia Porter had a really good cry.

She had no idea exactly when the white linen hanky with the satin-stitch border appeared in her hand. She had no idea how
long she sobbed before she could get her mouth around words again. Lydia dabbed her eyes over and over again with the hanky.
She swabbed her nose. And finally, finally, the story flowed as fast as her tears.

“I asked him how I did on
this
test.” Here she bounced it once on her knee, that very test. “And he said he would tell me if I came to his room after school.
And when I did, he was cleaning off the blackboards and I said I would help with the blackboards if he would tell me about
my test and he said about my test, it ‘depended’ and I asked ‘Depended on what?’ and he said ‘
This . . .’”

“Child.”

“. . . and h-he ran the eraser down my face and shirt. It wasn’t the little kind but the big long rubber kind that the janitors
use. And he grabbed me and he kept laughing. I thought I’d better laugh, too, like there wasn’t anything more fun in the entire
world. And he said ‘Now there’s more chalk on you than on the board’ and he rubbed me against him and all I could think of
was how much chalk he had on his
nose…”