When You Believe (7 page)

“What?”

“This student told me that she has been sexually abused by someone.”

Carol laid down the college catalog she’d been riffling through.

“This someone, Carol. It’s… it’s somebody in the
school
.”

“Well, of course she is. The student—”

“No,” Lydia said pointedly. “That isn’t what I mean. Not only the student.”

“What?” And then, “Oh, my word.” The conversation stopped there, hung between them like a pendulum ready to swing.

“I need you to help me.”

“Well, of course I will. I’ll do anything. But—”

This idea had been growing in Lydia’s mind ever since she’d heard Tamara Olin speaking about her family. Like an animal caught
in a snare, it was impossible for her to move one way or another. “Will you do it for me, Carol?”

Carol stared at her. “What?”

“Will you make the report to Nibarger?”

Carol shook her head. “Don’t ask me to do that. You know how important it is for you to be there. You’re the one required
by the district to do it.”

“I could help you with the paperwork. I just… you could tell him that it’s somebody I don’t—”

“You remember what happened in the Richard Janke case. Those teachers were charged with negligence because they didn’t go
to the state. You’re the one they’ll want when the Department of Health and Human Services comes along. There will be plainclothesmen,
too, and they’re going to have all their questions.”

“Does it matter who reports it as long as it gets reported? You could do it, Carol. It would be so simple.”

“They’ll want specifics of what she said. Uncontaminated evidence from the
student.
There isn’t anybody who can do that now except for you.”

No, Father. I can’t do this. Please.

“You’re the one she trusted to talk to in the first place. You’ve done it before, and the police are going to expect it from
you again, Lydia. You’ve got to remind her that she’s safe. Encourage her.”

“Carol, if you’d consider it—”

“I won’t consider it. I don’t know why you’re even asking.”

Charlie pressing her against him, drawing her close until her spine curved against the shape of him like the curve of a barrel
stave.

Charlie, whose love polished her life the way his hands polished jack-oak and hickory—honing, refining, coaxing out the shine.

All this time, and Carol must have been studying the play of emotions on her face. “This person the girl is accusing, Lydia.
You’re acting as if it is one of our
friends.”

Lydia didn’t say anything else. Now
there
was a stupid statement, and they both knew it.

“It is, isn’t it?” Carol asked.

Everybody was friends with everybody else in the halls of Shadrach High, especially since they’d all settled down about Charlie
Stains moving home.

LYDIA WAS TRAPPED.
Caught fast. As obligated to care for Shelby as she was to care for Charlie. Add to that, she hadn’t found a way to get out
of driving with him to pick up his newly purchased boat.

It isn’t just any girl I would trust to drive my truck,
he’d said.

And so, with a heavy heart, she didn’t back out of her promise.

Big Tree Baptist Church, perhaps the most visible and noted landmark in St. Clair County, sat like a white wedding-cake top
along the ridge of Elbow Knob.

Out by the road, down the hill a little ways, the sign said
VICTORY BAPTIST CHURCH.
But the summer Addy Michael had gotten saved, she’d started bringing her three rambunctious boys along. Her youngest one—three-year-old
Henry—couldn’t say “Victory” very well.
Oh, big tree in Je-sus, my savior forever,
Henry would sing at the top of his lungs.
He sought me and bought me with his redeeming blo-oo-od.

“Well, that works,” the pastor’s wife, Emma, had said. “Jesus died on the cross, and it was a big tree.” That, plus all those
white oaks and old cedars, honey locusts and chestnuts that God made to blanket Shadrach’s hardwood slopes, had sealed it.
No matter what the sign said out front, the place had been known as Big Tree Baptist ever since.

When Lydia drove into the church parking lot in Charlie’s truck, they only had thirty minutes or so to pick up his auction
boat.

The slim craft sat on the lawn out front, gleaming like a missile in its trailer, tipped stern-down and prow-up. It looked
like a bullfrog ready to leap.

“I’ll go in and pay them,” he said, his voice grim after their earlier conversation. Then, pointedly: “I wouldn’t want anyone
to think I’m getting away with something.”

Lydia wasn’t listening to him. She sat with her fingers in a light curl around the wheel, touching the stitched leather as
if to remind herself that it was there, the same way she touched the possibility that Shelby could be telling the truth.

His truck door creaked as he threw it open.

She didn’t want to climb out and follow him. She wanted to stay inside his truck holding her breath. She wanted this precipice,
this falling-off place in her heart, to go away. She wanted everything to stay the same.

Charlie didn’t look back at her. He slid out and walked to the boat. He ran his hand along the resin, searching for scratches
and chips near the rivets. He found several. Every time he found one he stopped, rubbed hard with his thumb, trying to rub
away the damage.

“I had such big plans,” he said, his voice brimming with bitterness. “I was going to take your dad out, show him the way we
sail in Missouri. Forget the wind. I was going to let a big-mouthed bass take hold and pull us along.”

“My father already knows how to do that. Uncle Cy taught him.” Reluctantly, Lydia edged out of the seat and slid past the
running boards to the ground. “Charlie—”

“Was looking forward to getting the name painted on the boat.” He talked as if his whole life had ended, now that he understood
what Shelby was accusing him of. “Was going to get the lettering done in blue and gold, by a professional at Shadrach Signs.”

“Charlie—” She came up behind him, her arms at her sides, her mouth feeling like she’d swallowed a cotton boll. “What did
you do with your kids today?”

He was traipsing around the bow of the vessel he’d named
Charlie’s Pride
, his footsteps digging deep into the gravel. “I couldn’t wait to moor her at the new dock at Viney Creek. The new
Porter
dock.” He turned, stopped. It must have taken that long for her question to sink in. “What do you mean, what did I do with
my kids?”

“In class.”

He shrugged, furrowed his brows at her. “What we always do in class. Build things.”

She asked this next thing as lightly as a butterfly descends and settles, barely landing, fluttering away again. She hated
herself for checking up on him this way. She couldn’t stop thinking about the note to Shelby she’d caught a glimpse of. “Any
homework this week?”

“No.” A frown. “Why?

“Do you ever assign any homework when the kids miss class?”

Say yes, Charlie. Yes. Say that, just for Shelby, you sent something today.

“When we study joinery. I’ll assign homework for everybody then. They’ll go out to search for basic joints.”

“That’s the only time you’d send an assignment home? Joinery?”

“Tongue and groove joints. Bevel joints. Dovetails and miters and lap joints. They’ll drive everyone crazy, looking. We’re
doing finishes now. Smoothing with sandpaper and steel wool. Applying waxes, oils, stains—”

He broke off his train of thought suddenly and stared down at her. “What are you doing? Checking up on me or something? You
still want to know if I’ve had anything to do with that girl?”

“Did you send something home in Shelby Tatum’s homework packet today?”

He met her intent scrutiny head on, his face a shield. “No.”

She needed to escape. The afternoon sun tinted everything around her a translucent saffron—the tree limbs, the jagged rocks
along the sidewalk, the steeple that pierced the sky like a radiant awl. Uncle Cy had said once that he felt the golden presence
of something here, as real as when he watched the sun rise and the blue haze sink toward the water like a coverlet, down at
the Brownbranch.

“Lydia? Don’t you believe me?”

“I’ll take your check in, if you’d like. You can stay out here and fondle your new boat.”
Fondle.
Now why had she used such a word as that? “I need to get away.”

He said nothing to her. He reached for his blank checks and tore one across its perforation with an angry, brittle sound.

“You can’t act like what Shelby’s saying doesn’t matter.”

For a long moment he just stood with that bruised expression in his eyes. And she stared up, past him, as if directions for
what to do next were printed beside the steeple in the sky.

“I wanted to talk to her, Lydia,” he said in the mangled voice of someone having a nightmare. “I wrote her that note to see
if we could discuss this, if we could work out what’s going on. Please don’t judge me until I’ve had a chance to do that.”

She took Charlie’s check from him. “I’m not judging,” she whispered, closing her eyes because she couldn’t look at him anymore,
“but I can’t let you have access to her. I won’t let you talk to her or see her again.” In the silence between them, the contention
began to grow, something tense and sullen and explosive. “I told her I would protect her. I don’t know what else I’m supposed
to do.”

WHEN LYDIA STEPPED
through the heavy front door, the inside of Big Tree Baptist smelled faintly musty, like carnations and crisp paper and ginger
windmill cookies. As she entered the narrow foyer with Charlie’s check in hand, she entered the place where she had first
come to believe that she deserved to be loved. Aunt Donna, Uncle Cy’s wife-before-Jane, had brought her here every summer
when she’d come to visit. She remembered pie suppers and Layne Shanholtz standing behind the microphone and singing “When
We All Get to Heaven,” his voice turned up so loud on the speakers that it sounded like the woofers might burst. She wondered
sometimes, out of all the kids she had met loitering in the kitchen, if one of them—even then—might have been Charlie Stains.
There had never been time, during those visiting summers, to know everyone’s name.

Although her own parents had never taken her to church, Aunt Donna had brought her and, in this place, Lydia had come to believe
things always easy for a child to believe. And after she had graduated college, after she had accepted her teaching position
and had moved to Shadrach full time, Lydia still came.

She detoured now and stepped into the sanctuary. At the front of the little church, a hickory altar stood gleaming with furniture
oil. Light streamed upon it in rays of gold, red, and blue from the pattern in the stained-glass window above it. How strange
that, when Charlie had bought a boat, it would have to be picked up here.

At that moment she heard a noise down the hall. A scuffling on the carpet, as if someone might be dancing.

Then,
blam.
Something hard hit the wall.

She wasn’t alone in the building. Lydia’s first fear was that someone might have overheard her conversation with Charlie outside.
She stood listening, motionless, wondering if the sound would come again.

It did.

Charlie’s check for the boat was still crammed inside her pocket. Lydia began to make her way along the wall toward the sound.
She followed the noise until she came to a door that opened like the barn door on
Mr. Ed,
separated into halves, the bottom latched tight, the top swinging open an inch or two.

AGES 3 AND 4
read a metal placard that had been screwed into the drywall. Below that, in a red Magic Marker:
Please pick up your child immediately following the service. No child will be allowed to leave without a parent.

She tried the knob. Once upon a time, this had been where the smell of the cookies had come from. The hinges squeaked and
the rest of the door began to swing wide. Suddenly, in an odd moment of providence, even before the door opened far enough
for her to see, Lydia knew exactly who would be standing on the other side.

Shelby.

And sure enough, there she was, alone in the preschool Sunday school room, sidestepping her soccer ball, foot working it forward
and back, as if the ball, the way she shot it, the way it moved, absorbed all of her attention. Shelby zigzagged the ball
right, left, right, left, until she shot,
bam,
through a goal she’d set up through two miniature Sunday school chairs.

“So this is what you do when you skip school? You come here instead?”

The ball rebounded and Shelby grabbed it, tucked it against her right hipbone. She cocked her knee, a motion that belied the
unease in her eyes. “Sometimes,” she said, her voice more broody than Lydia had ever heard it before.

“What are you doing here?”

“I could ask the same question about you.”

Shelby balanced the ball—
HAND-SEWN BUTYL BLADDER
it said—then spun it back and forth between both hands. She surveyed Lydia with suspicion. “Who said I was skipping school?”

“A lucky guess, I suppose.” Lydia shrugged. “Your mother came to pick up your homework. Does she know where you’ve been all
day?”

A hard and fragile laugh, sounding as if she was about to break. “Why would she know where I am? I don’t fit into her perfect
little world.” Then, with gusto, “I don’t fit into anybody’s world but my own.”

Lydia looked around for a place to sit. She decided if she tried to fit into one of those nursery-school chairs, she might
never make it out again.

The resentment in Shelby’s voice eased, but only a little. “Were you trying to find me today?”

“Yes.” Lydia had no reason to lie.

“Why?”

“Why do you think? I was worried about you.”

“Well, you don’t have to worry about me anymore. I don’t need anything from anybody. Least of all
you.
” They sized each other up across the room. “You said you’d help me. But you didn’t do anything.”