Words Unspoken (3 page)

“All right, then. Let’s get in.” He opened the door to the driver’s seat, and Lissa slid in.

The upholstery was dark blue, worn thin in several spots. Lissa noticed the single brake pedal on the instructor’s side. Mr. MacAllister got in and closed his door, and the noise made her jump, for no reason.

She pulled on her seat belt, turned the key in the ignition. As Ole Bessie gently rumbled to life, Lissa heard the voice.

Your fault.

She willed herself to block it out, released the brake, and pressed lightly on the accelerator, checking her mirrors. She drove slowly around the circular driveway in front of the big white clapboard house. Once Mr. MacAllister leaned over toward her and adjusted the steering wheel, just barely, when Ole Bessie’s tires veered slightly off the dirt driveway and onto the patch of green grass.

After the third lap, he said, “Okay. That’s great, Lissa. Just pull to a stop over by the hickory tree.”

As she braked she noticed, with another feeling of relief, that his pedal brake mashed in automatically with hers.

________

Well, I’ll be,
Ev thought to himself. In spite of her scared, anemic appearance, the girl handled the car with ease as she drove around the semicircular driveway.

“Lissa, you did just fine. Now let’s just go down the road a little ways, and that will be enough for today.”

She gave him a questioning look. “That’ll be all?”

“We don’t want to overdo it. Little by little, you’ll get your confidence back.”

She pulled out onto the wide road in front of the house and started slowly down the hill.

“I like to go easy the first lesson. But for your second lesson, would you be ready for a drive on a small road—not much traffic?”

“Yes, sir.”

“On Wednesday we’ll go over to the Chickamauga Military Park. It’s convenient, with wide roads that curve around easy, a low speed limit, great scenery, relaxing.” He glanced at Lissa. “Altogether a good place to practice.”

She nodded.

“My philosophy is to get you back on the road again as soon as possible. I don’t believe in spending hours driving around parking lots. Makes you feel like you’re on a merry-go-round.”

She nodded again as the road opened up before them.

“Just go straight on ahead for about a mile or two, and then we’ll turn around at the filling station and go back to the house.”

The clouds had evaporated; the sky was that intense autumn blue that Ev loved. Lookout Mountain towered in front of them. In fact, from their position miles away on the road it looked as if they might drive right into it.

“Do you mind telling me your driving history, Lissa? You say you’ve failed the test several times?”

One hand, the right, tightened on the steering wheel almost imperceptibly, but Ev saw it.

“Um, well, I had my license and I drove a lot. But …” Now the left hand clutched, the knuckles whitened. “But there was an accident and …”

“You’ve been afraid to drive ever since.”

She glanced at him. “Yeah, that’s pretty much it.”

“So what we need is to work on building up your confidence, young lady.”

Her hands relaxed, and she took a deep breath. “That would be great, sir. Yes, that would be great.”

Ev let the screen door slam as he came in from the porch. Six thirty-five. He needed a glass of lemonade. The weather had decided to turn muggy, and Ole Bessie did not have air-conditioning.

Something about that young woman irked him. Bothered him. No, scared him. Hurt him. There.

Back on the porch, he settled into the rocking chair with the glass of lemonade. He took a long sip, closed his eyes, tried to shake the image of the scared young woman, skinny with hollow eyes. Hollow, desperate eyes, begging him for something.

Begging him for life.

As quickly as he admitted it, he saw her. Tate. Little Tate as a round-faced baby, sparkling brown eyes. Tate at five, mischief written across her pudgy cheeks and in the crease of her brow. Tate at ten, stomping out of the room, furious with her older brother. Tate at fourteen, taking her first sip of alcohol …

Stop it!
he told himself. What good did it do to relive these things?

He stood up, said out loud to himself, “I’ll be glad to help her if I can.”

If I can?
He had helped so many others. Of course he could!

What about Tate?

Nothing he could do about Tate. Nothing he could have done, he corrected himself. He closed his eyes, took another sip of lemonade, walked to his little office, and sat down at the desk, where he scribbled a note to himself before going back outside. Time for his next client.

________

Lissa sank onto her bed with a groan.

You see, Caleb, I am trying. I swear I’ll come to see you soon.

She let her eyes travel around the room. Nothing had changed since the accident seventeen months ago. It would be good to move forward, make a few changes, as her therapist had suggested. But she could not. Every single item in her room, every pillow and book and photograph, every trophy and award, was stuck in place as if it had been glued down. Somehow it was simpler to let them stay there and taunt her, remind her of the other life, the
before
life. A constant reminder of what had been and what should have continued.

Lissa lifted her head from the pillow and forced her body out of inertia. She walked over to the desk, the clean white desk with its three drawers, the desk that the cleaning lady dusted twice a week so that no one would know the neglect. She looked at the photo of the gelding, his chestnut head held high, a blue ribbon attached to his bridle and floating out in the breeze. Lissa herself stood beside the horse, an elated smile on her lips, her black riding hat pulled down on her forehead, her hair swept into a bun underneath. She studied the picture in a way she had not allowed herself to do for so long.
Carefree.
Even then, what a rare emotion to be displayed on her face.

A surge of joy rushed through her before she could stop it, exactly like the feeling she had had at the moment the photographer flashed the picture. She remembered how the gelding shied, jerking her up, and how she laughed so easily.

Stop it!
the voice reprimanded.

With a stiff hand, Lissa turned the framed picture down on her desk, and that one simple gesture felt harder than lifting a fifty-pound bag of horse feed.

Glancing to the armoire on the other wall, she went across the spacious room, reached up with one hand, and touched the gold-framed photo. In this one Lissa wore a sparkling evening gown, pink taffeta on top, closely fitted, showing off an attractive bustline and small waist. The gown flowed out in soft pink petals to her ankles. A strand of pearls around her neck and a string of dangling smaller pearls from each ear completed her accessories. Her lips spread in a wide smile as she clutched the trophy. Beside her was Momma, beautiful gray-eyed Momma, her ash blond hair swept off her bare shoulders, her blue sequined dress sparkling. Momma laughing, looking like an older sister. Laughing and proud of her daughter.

With a swift gesture Lissa knocked the photo over so that it landed with a slap on the top of the armoire. There. She had done it.

She went back to her bed and lay down.

What good did it do? Tomorrow Helena would come to straighten and clean. She would right the fallen frames, dust them carefully. Unless Lissa could bring herself to say the words, pronounce them convincingly— “I don’t want these in my room anymore”—the pictures would be there tomorrow afternoon when she returned from the library, their golden frames shining, the smiling faces taunting, calling her back to when life made sense.

Lissa remembered holding on to Caleb and saying over and over, “It’s going to be all right. We are going to survive. I swear it. This will not destroy us, Caleb. We are going to survive.” Her arms were tight around his neck; she felt his warm breath and held him tighter.

Had she said those things? Did she still believe them? Now she was the one longing for arms to close tightly around her and swear to her, swear to her on everything under the sun that things were going to change. She was going to make it, and these terrible voices would stop. But there was no one around, only the bright, cheerful yellow walls and the bed with its yellow comforter and the desk and the armoire and the china cabinet with ribbons and trophies lining its shelves.

Why did she expect her father to walk into the room now and grab her in his all-engulfing bear hug and hold her there until she had wept on his shoulder, and say, “It’s okay, Lissa. You are safe with me”?

How she longed to hear him say that. She longed for his robust laughter, the way his dark eyes twinkled merrily, the sparkle of someone who knew how to appreciate life. But his eyes looked dull now and, if she let herself admit it, angry. Brooding.

She shuffled through the mail he had left on her desk. Three more college applications. A letter from one:
Dear Miss Randall, Based on your fine academic achievement as well as your impressive extracurricular activities, we are pleased to tell you that you have qualified for the scholarship to …

She picked up the framed high school diploma that sat on the desk and lifted it above her head.

Lies, lies! Failure!

She threw it forcefully across the room, where it hit the door to the bathroom. She heard the glass shatter and then tumble onto the soft blue bath mat.

Lissa formed the words in her mouth, repeated them out loud twice, the same words she had longed to pronounce to her father for the past seventeen months. “Stop trying to recreate my life, Dad. That life is over. Do you hear me? Over. Stop trying to make it okay again. It will never be okay again.”

She sank onto the bath mat beside the broken glass and took the little card out of her pocket.
MacAllister’s Driving School.
For some odd reason she smiled, seeing in her mind the tall, older man with an abundance of silver hair, dressed in a seersucker suit in spite of the muggy weather. She remembered his bright blue bow tie and his dirty blue and white tennis shoes.

So what we need is to work on building up your confidence, young lady.

“Yes, please,” Lissa said aloud.

CHAPTER TWO

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 21

The day began in typical fashion. Silvano Rossi arrived at the office early and clicked on the machine to start the coffee—the
real
Italian espresso. None of that weak muddy American stuff. He was ready to begin the day! The other offices at the publishing house were still dark. Silvano prided himself on arriving first; one day soon he’d get noticed. Eighteen months as a measly assistant editor at Youngblood Publishers was long enough. Hard work, long hours, and offering a steaming cup of perfect Italian espresso to the boss when he walked in were part of the recipe for him to be making a decent salary before he turned twenty-eight. He liked recipes!

Coffee in hand, he walked past the office door of Mr. Edmond Clouse, senior editor at Youngblood Publishers, and nearly tripped over a small, dark bundle sitting on the floor, smack in his way. The coffee sloshed onto his hand and then down onto the package.

“
Oh, la miseria
, Leah! When did you put this package here?” He cursed the absent secretary out loud in Italian as he set his cup of coffee down and hurriedly searched for a napkin.

Quickly Silvano blotted the drops of coffee from what turned out to be a small burlap sack. What? Why in the world would Leah—the world’s most meticulous secretary—leave a thick burlap sack in front of the boss’s office door? Did she think the company was in the animal feed business? Books, they dealt with books, not burlap! Good thing he had found the bag, and not the boss. He’d move it out of the way and let Leah know. A little leverage never hurt.

Silvano lifted the bag off the floor. That’s when he noticed the label marked
Special Delivery
with the address of Youngblood Publishers hanging from the thick twine that held the bag closed. It felt like a ream of paper inside … and then it hit him.

“Of course, you idiot.
Certo!
”

He took the burlap sack, carried it to his desk, and carefully unknotted the twine. He reached inside and pulled out a rectangular box. It too was bound with twine. With shaking hands, Silvano slid the twine off the box, opened the lid, took out a thick stack of papers, laid them on the desk, and began to chuckle. The chuckle turned to all-out laughter.

Silvano was thankful no one else was around to hear him.

“
Certo!
Of course.”

He stared at the first typed page.
Novel #6 by S. A. Green.

Essay Green, he’d thought the name was the first time he’d heard it mentioned.

An author who refused interviews and book signings, who never appeared in public—no picture available of her, no biography. Just an amazingly well-written novel every five or six or seven years. The woman was slow, but hey, no one was complaining. Her sales always leveled off around 400,000.

A round of champagne for all the staff when a burlap bag arrived! A new novel by S. A. Green meant big profits for Youngblood. The public loved her, and Silvano understood why. He had read her books, every one of them, as a young intern.