A Sister's Forgiveness (14 page)

Matt’s head bobbed in the affirmative, and Emma realized that she had grasped his shoulders and shaken him. She hugged him to her. “Sorry,” she murmured against his hair tousled by sleep. “So sorry. We need to talk about this together—all of us as a family. There’s a lot we’re going to have to work our way through, okay?” Emma’s assurances that they would get through this somehow rang hollow even as she thought the words.

“Yes ma’am.” Matt pulled the blanket a little closer, and Emma instinctively gave him some time to collect himself.

“Mom?” He did not look at her, just sat fingering the blanket. “I never really thought about somebody dying so young before—I never really thought it could happen to one of us.”

“Me neither,” she admitted.

Chapter 15

Lars

H
ow was a man supposed to protect his family? How could he turn back the clock to a time when his wife and daughter and son were happy and safe? When their house rang with laughter and was filled with extended family and friends sharing plans and dreams for the future?

Lars drew the blade of a handsaw across a thick board and began the rhythmic back-and-forth strokes that would change that board into something else—in this case something he sorely wished he were not called upon to craft. He was building a coffin. Tessa’s coffin. The large board would be changed by the cutting and sanding and finishing, much the way his family had been changed by the event that led to Tessa’s death.

It was Saturday, a day that Lars normally reserved for doing his paperwork and making trips to the lumberyard with Matt to choose the wood he would need for the coming week. But today was different. Today was the day that he would pour everything God had given him in the way of carpentry skill into making a coffin for Tessa.

Although Emma had awakened earlier with the same outward calm with which she had greeted every day of their lives together, she was not the same—none of them were. The morning before, she had tended to the housekeeping chores in Sadie’s hospital room, folding up the bedding the nurses had brought for them so the whole family could stay the night and wetting paper towels from the bathroom to wipe down all the surfaces in the room the same way she wiped the countertops and kitchen table and stove every morning at home.

The nursing and hospital housekeeping staff had tried to stop her, but Emma had continued her cleaning alongside them, using the time to get to know each one of them a little better. It occurred to Lars that she was nurturing those strangers the same way she nurtured their neighbors and friends. And when one large maintenance worker had pulled his wallet from his hip pocket and proudly showed Emma photographs of his grandchildren, Lars had thought that there might actually be a chance that Emma would see them all through this the same way she had shepherded their family and Jeannie’s through countless other lesser catastrophes in the past.

And yet there was something different about her. Something in her eyes. The kind of furtive wariness of an animal that fears it is about to be trapped. Before, her eyes had always been alive with curiosity in spite of her inclination toward worrying. Now they were clouded by dread and doubt.

Before…

All of time now seemed to be divided into before and since—before the accident, since Tessa’s death. No one spoke the actual words. Such sentences usually broke off abruptly, but the meaning was clear. Before the accident, his daughter had been a lively, outgoing girl who was enormously popular with her friends and classmates and much beloved by their large extended family. Before the accident, his son’s world had revolved around sports—games played, games watched, games analyzed at length usually with his uncle Geoff. Before the accident, there had not seemed to be enough hours in the day to do all that they needed or wanted to accomplish.

But since…

The accident had happened on Thursday—odd to begin a school year at the end of a week, but Geoff had explained that the school board had decided that the first three days of the week needed to be given to faculty and staff to do all the things necessary to assure a smooth start for the students. So Emma and Jeannie had set the family picnic for Wednesday afternoon, and on a rainy Thursday morning, their children had headed off to school.

Only one of them—Matt—had made it there.

By that evening, Tessa was dead and Sadie was confined to the hospital. On Friday Lars and Emma had split their time between the hospital and Jeannie and Geoff’s home, and they had been thankful when Dr. Booker had announced his intention to keep Sadie in the hospital for the weekend. But he had been overruled by hospital protocol, and late on Friday Sadie had been discharged, taken downtown to be charged and then taken—without them being allowed to go with her—to spend her first night in the juvenile detention center in Bradenton.

In this new and unfamiliar and frankly frightening realm of living, Sadie would be allowed limited visits and phone privileges. She would attend classes during the day and have chores to complete, just as she did at home. She would dress in the faded blue jumpsuit mandated by the county. She would not be allowed to wear the traditional prayer covering or keep her Bible close at hand. On Wednesday of the coming week, she was to appear in court for her arraignment, where she would plead guilty or not.

“Guilty of what?” Emma had protested. “It was an accident.”

How can today be only Saturday?
Lars wondered as he continued to plane the wood that would form the curved lid to Tessa’s coffin. The funeral was scheduled for Monday afternoon. Would the judge hear their pleas and allow Sadie to be there? Lars was not so sure. He was not certain of anything when it came to the ways of the outside world, a world that now held the fate of his beloved daughter in its grasp.

Matt’s response to everything happening around him was to become more talkative, filling any lengthy silence with reports on how things were going with the current football season—at his school, in the college ranks, and with the professionals. He continued to pepper his delivery of this information with such things as “Uncle Geoff thinks that…” or “Uncle Geoff told me…” And he needed only the slightest encouragement to keep talking, a nod of Lars’s head or a murmured but distracted “Really?” from Emma.

“I think when I get out of school I want to be a coach,” he had announced as the three of them shared their first meal since Sadie’s arrest.

“What sport?” Lars had asked, grateful for any distraction.

Matt had shrugged. “All of them.”

Lars had looked across the table at Emma and seen the fleeting lift of the corners of her mouth. And that almost-smile had been a lifeline for him. They would get through this somehow, and one day they would be able to do all the things they had done before—smile, laugh, plan a future.

The cut piece of lumber clattered to the concrete floor of the workshop, and Lars put down his saw and blew the excess sawdust off the edge of the board, examining it closely for any possible flaws. He was sanding the board when he heard Emma’s bike tires crunch the crushed shell driveway.

By the time he got to the screen door of his shop, she was already on her way into the house. With Sadie confined and their ability to see her limited, Emma filled her hours helping Jeannie prepare for the funeral. Normally this was Emma’s day to help out at the thrift shop, and she would come straight to his workshop full of news she’d heard from customers and other volunteers.

But since the accident, their family was the news. He watched as Emma went inside and returned a moment later with a broom and dustpan. “Emma?”

She paused but did not turn.

“Come on out here and give me a hand with this,” he said, holding the screen door open.

“I’ve got housework, Lars,” she replied.

“And plenty of time to attend to that.” For some reason he felt compelled to break the cycle of her need to be constantly busy—cleaning, cooking, doing laundry. “You can’t keep going on like this, Emma.” He knew by the way her shoulders tensed that she understood what he was saying.

She swept a small pile of dead leaves into the dustpan and set it with the broom on the back stoop as she started toward him. “Why?” she asked when she was almost there. “Why can’t I do what I want? Why do I ever have to do anything again?”

Amazingly her response gave Lars a flicker of hope. She sounded like Sadie, who had always leaned toward the dramatic. “You don’t have to do anything,” he said handing her a wood block wrapped in sandpaper and indicated the edge that needed work. “We have a choice, Emmie. We can shut out everything and everyone and hide behind chores. Or we can find some way to move forward. Shutting all this out may seem the easier path, but it seems to me that as time goes by, it might be a decision we’d regret.”

By the way she ran the sandpaper over the rough edge of the board, he could tell that she was listening, hesitating now and then as she considered his words.

“It’s so very hard.”

“Ja. Life’s like that.”

He set up a second board to cut, and the conversation between them was drowned out by the whoosh of the saw moving back and forth.

After they worked in silence for a while, Lars saw her pause and study the rough penciled drawing he’d made, noting the dimensions for the piece. She watched as he cut another board, and then she said, “I know you’ve made coffins for others in the community, Lars, but what is it like making a coffin for Tessa?”

The directness of the question startled him, and he had to wonder what other unspoken thoughts she might be entertaining. “I don’t know. I never really thought about it. Don’t misunderstand—I am taking special care—all of the special care that Tessa deserves.”

Emma nodded. “She would have liked that. She always thought your furniture pieces were the finest.” She actually smiled. “There was this one day when the girls and Jeannie and I were at Yoder’s and these women were in the next booth. They were snowbirds, we guessed, from the way they talked and were dressed and all. Anyway, they were going on and on about how they’d always heard that Amish furniture was the best made anywhere.”

She was sanding the edge of the board now with smooth regular strokes, as if for a moment everything was as it had been before and she was just relating this incident. Her voice was livelier than Lars had heard it since that moment at the hospital before they’d gotten the news—that moment when there had still been hope.

“…and Tessa just turned around and said, ‘Well, my uncle was raised Amish, and he makes the most beautiful furniture you’ve ever seen. You should give him a call—his name is Lars Keller.’ And remember? They did. That one woman came here with her husband and ordered that dining room set from you.”

Lars nodded and kept working, afraid to break the special moment of memory.

“Tessa said she might just have to ask you for a commission.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing, but your daughter told her good luck with that. She said that everybody knew that you’re cheap.”

“Thrifty,” Lars corrected with a smile.

It was so wonderfully normal—this conversation with his wife. This time together in his workshop. This banter. But as quickly as it came, it was gone. Emma sat staring at the sanding block she held in one hand for a long moment. Then she placed the block on Lars’s workbench and stood up.

“The kitchen floor needs washing,” she said.

Chapter 16