A Sister's Forgiveness (7 page)

“What happened?” In a heartbeat, Hester’s voice went from chatty to professional.

“I don’t know. Jeannie and I were talking, and all of a sudden she stopped talking and there was a lot of shouting and crying in the background, and then I heard Geoff tell her to call 911.”

“On my way. Shall I swing by?”

“No, Lars and I are leaving now. We’ll meet you there.”

She hung up the phone and ran out to the car without bothering to stop for either an umbrella or her rain jacket. On the short drive to Jeannie’s large home less than a mile away, Emma repeated the content of the phone call to Lars.

“Maybe it’s a neighbor,” Lars said as he patted her knee to still it from shaking. “We don’t know that it’s one of them.”

“Sadie had just left with Dan Kline to pick up Tessa,” Emma murmured, “and Matt…”

“Is already at his school. I just took him there myself, remember?”

“Right,” Emma said. “I imagine that Geoff was on his way when…” She could not complete that sentence. What had her brother-in-law seen? Who was in need of emergency medical help? How bad was it? “Maybe it’s a fire and everyone got out safely,” she said, suddenly preferring that scenario to imagining one that involved people being hurt. “Geoff would tell Jeannie to call 911 for a fire.”

“A couple more blocks,” Lars assured her as he turned onto Jeannie’s street.

Emma leaned forward, willing the car to cover the distance, straining to see—what? Smoke? Flames shooting from a rooftop? Would the pouring rain have already doused a fire? But the fact was that everything looked deceptively ordinary except that there were people gathered in Jeannie’s front yard. Emma recognized neighbors that she and Lars had met before. Dan’s car was pulled into the driveway, although the driver’s side door was standing open. Someone was on the ground next to the car, but because the car was sitting diagonally across the driveway with its front tires resting on the lawn, she couldn’t see if it was Tessa or Sadie or someone else. An ambulance blocked the entrance to the driveway.

She broadened her view to encompass the entire yard and entrance to the house. Sadie’s bike was leaning against a cluster of palm trees. Sadie had left it there the day before—the day of the picnic—the day she had ridden it over there so that she and Jeannie could go get her learner’s permit.

Dan was standing at the foot of the driveway looking lost and scared. He was holding his side, and he had a cut on his cheek. The side door that led from the kitchen out to the driveway was open. Up near the garage door someone was holding a large black umbrella over a group of people kneeling next to someone else on the ground. Suddenly she was certain that one of the two people she couldn’t see had to be Sadie. Lars pulled to the curb, and Emma was out of the car before he could come to a full stop.

Sadie? Not Sadie. Please, dear God, not my daughter
.

“Where’s Sadie?” She shouted to no one and everyone. She was fighting her way through what suddenly seemed like throngs of people but was really only one man on his cell phone pacing back and forth as he talked and a woman peering anxiously down the street toward an oncoming car, waving to the driver as he made the turn onto their street. Emma registered that this was a police car, lights flashing, siren wailing. The car stopped behind the ambulance.

Instinctively, Emma made a wide berth past the back of Dan’s car, noticing again that the driver’s side door was open and that the quiet chirping of the warning to remove the keys was muffled by the unfurled airbag. And then she saw her daughter, soaked to the skin but alive. Sadie was huddled on the ground, pressed against the side of the car, her arms clasped tight around her knees and her head bowed low as she rocked back and forth. Just when Emma started toward her, the EMTs shouted for people to clear the way as they raised the gurney from ground level onto its rollers so they could get the lifeless form on it to the waiting ambulance. Emma glanced at the gurney and froze.

Tessa.

Everything that happened from the instant that Emma spotted Sadie seemed to happen in a blur. The team of emergency technical people sped past with Geoff and Jeannie running to keep up. Jeannie looked at her with eyes that seemed like those of a blind person—wide but unseeing—and Emma was momentarily torn between the call to tend to Sadie and the need to comfort her sister. Each of them needed her. Each of them was in such pain—maybe not physically but surely spiritually. She closed her eyes, praying for guidance, and that was when she heard the scream of more sirens arriving. She opened her eyes to find Dan Kline blocking her way.

“Oh Mrs. Keller, I shouldn’t have—I mean, we didn’t mean to…” His eyes were wide with fear, his blond hair plastered against his head. The boy was over six feet tall, but he was crying like a kid half his size, and he was dangerously close to a complete breakdown.

“Dan, calm down. Has someone called your parents?”

“I don’t know. I just… it was the rain and the streets and the…”

“Are you hurt?” She gently touched his cheek where the rain had thinned the blood. But she saw that it was no more than a scratch.

“No, ma’am. I don’t know… maybe a little. My side hurts.”

Then blessedly, Lars came loping toward them, kneeling next to Sadie, who remained completely incoherent in her babblings. She refused to look up when Lars called her name. “She doesn’t recognize me,” he whispered, his voice choked with panic.

Emma started to turn back to Sadie, but Dan grasped her arm. His eyes were unfocused and wild, and his grip tightened when she tried to move.

“Daniel,” she said firmly, and she was relieved when it had the desired effect of making him pay attention. “A second ambulance has just arrived. I need for you to go to them and tell them that Sadie is hurt then get yourself checked over and have them call your parents. Can you do that?”

“Yes, ma’am, but…”

“No time for explanations now, Dan. Do as I ask.”

She waited until the boy turned away, biting her lip to keep from shouting after him, “Stop. I need to know now. What happened here? What did you do?” Just then she spotted Hester crossing the street, pausing to speak with one of the medics. At the same time, Geoff was helping Jeannie into the back of the first ambulance.

“Go,” she heard one of the EMTs yell as he slammed the double doors and raced around to climb into the passenger side of the ambulance. The shriek of the siren drowned out everything else.

“Hester, over here,” Emma shouted above the growing noise as people filled the street and yard. In spite of the fact that one of the newly arrived EMTs was attending to Sadie, Emma wanted her friend to reassure them that their child was going to be all right.

“I’m a registered nurse,” Hester explained. The young woman nodded and accepted Hester’s presence without question. The two of them knelt to either side of Sadie while Lars and Emma stood by and waited.

After what seemed an eternity, Hester looked up at Emma and shook her head. But Emma didn’t know how to interpret that. Was Hester telling her that Sadie was not hurt? That she was hurt and it was bad?

“She’s most likely in shock,” Hester said, standing up so she could talk to both Lars and Emma. “There don’t seem to be any other injuries—a couple of bruises and a pretty nasty cut on her lip. She probably bit it on impact. It’s pretty deep. She’ll need stitches.”

The paramedic helped Sadie to her feet. She continued mumbling to herself. “I thought—we were just fooling around—Dan was laughing at me. I glanced away for just a second… not even a second…” Finally, Sadie looked directly at her parents for the first time, her eyes luminous with disbelief. Then she collapsed against Emma’s shoulder, and her words were obliterated by her sobs.

Emma held Sadie and tried to comfort her as she tried to make some sense of what had happened. As if studying a jigsaw puzzle—its pieces scattered across the dining room table, Emma slowly began picking up one piece and then the next as she put together a plausible picture. She replayed every detail of what she’d seen when she and Lars arrived. She remembered first being confused by the odd angle of the car. Sadie had been crouched by the driver’s side of the car. Dan stumbling around on the other side—the passenger side.

As the sound of the siren faded, she looked down the street and caught sight of the ambulance carrying her sister and niece as it turned a corner. She closed her eyes, envisioning Jeannie inside that ambulance with Tessa.

The sisters had not exchanged a word, and yet Emma knew everything that Jeannie must have been feeling in that moment. She had seen in her sister’s blank stare mirroring the utter disbelief, that her daughter—her only child—could be the person lying on that gurney. Emma tightened her hold on Sadie and rocked her as she had when she was a baby.

“Shhh,” she whispered. “One step at a time. Tessa needs all our strength right now, Sadie. She needs our prayers.” She stroked Sadie’s hair. “Come on now. You’ve lost your prayer covering, and if ever there was a time…”

“It’s in the car. In my backpack,” Sadie said setting off a fresh wave of tears. “I took it off. I… and now God has…”

“Shush,” Emma said, pulling Sadie closer. “You know better. We’ll find your covering, and then we’ll all go to the hospital.”

“I’ll get it for you,” Lars said, clearly relieved to have something concrete that he could do.

He went to Dan’s car—the passenger side. One of the police officers was standing by the car, and when Lars reached in to take the prayer covering and the backpack, the officer stopped him. The two men had a brief conversation, and finally the officer allowed Lars to take the prayer covering, but he followed him back to where Emma waited with Sadie.

“Evidence,” Lars said when Emma raised her eyebrows in silent question. “The car needs to be examined. And Sadie will need to answer some questions.”

Of course. It was an accident like any accident. There would be questions. Sadie would be questioned. And Dan. Emma’s heart went into overdrive as her instincts to protect her child from any further agony on this morning came to the fore. “She needs medical attention,” she told the officer.

Hester was sitting on the curb next to Dan. “They both do,” she added with a nod toward Dan.

“We’ll see that they get it,” the officer assured her. “For now…”

Emma took a step that positioned her between the officer and Sadie.

Lars touched her arm. “Emma, their ways may not—”

Without a word, Emma turned and led Sadie toward the second ambulance. She was speaking with the paramedic when the officer caught up with them. But before he could reach them, Geoff grabbed the man’s arm.

“I have to get to the hospital, and your partner says I can’t take my car because we can’t move this one until—”

“You can ride with me,” Lars said, indicating his car across the street. “Emma will go with Sadie. The paramedic says that she’s going to need stitches and to be completely checked over by a doctor,” he continued, addressing the police officer.

The officer glanced toward the second ambulance. Dan was being helped into the passenger seat. “Okay, your daughter can ride along in that ambulance—in the back. My partner will ride with them.”

“I want to—” Emma began.

“Ma’am, you and your husband can follow in your car, but your daughter and her boyfriend…”

“Let’s go,” Lars said, taking Emma’s arm and guiding her across the street before she could say anything that might further antagonize the police officer. Geoff was already in the car, his head resting against the window as he stared into space.

Chapter 8

Jeannie

A
t the emergency room, a team of medical personnel came running toward the ambulance as soon as it pulled into the circular drive. In a flurry of activity, the EMTs delivered information about Tessa’s status at the same time they lowered the gurney to the ground and started wheeling her inside. Just as they got past the automated doors, someone gently pulled Jeannie aside.

“Ma’am, please step over here,” the gray-haired woman said. “We need you to give us some information so the doctors can treat your daughter.”