Authors: Lurlene McDaniel
Briana's Gift
This book is dedicated to the memory of Noah Duble, age four, and to his family, who will always love and miss him.
I wish to thank Dr. Lizabeth Kennedy, neonatologist at T. C. Thompson Children’s Hospital in Chattanooga, for her excellent and invaluable input in helping me bring this story to life.
But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.
Luke 2:19 (NIV)
I
’m probably the only girl in the world who hates the month of December. I know Christmas comes in December, but so what? Every bad, awful thing that’s ever happened in my family has happened in December. Like when I was five and Daddy died in an accident at the steel mill just two weeks before Christmas and we had to move to Tennessee and live with Grandma. And when I was eight and Mom was told in the first week of December she had rheumatoid arthritis and so she couldn’t work and had to set up her own at-home business. And when I was almost fourteen, my sister, Briana, ran away from home on a cold December Saturday, just after school let out for the holiday break.
Mom said later, “I should have seen it coming.”
But neither of us had.
Our mother always said that Briana marched to the beat of a different drummer, which I totally got because I’m in the marching band at school and staying in step is a must. When she was just sixteen, Bree took off with Jerry Stevens, a nineteen-year-old guy Mom called “worthless, hateful and without a lick of sense,” but that Bree swore she loved more than anything. Bree and Mom had lots of fights about Bree dating Jerry, and then on a Saturday morning when Mom had driven into town to Pruitt’s Food Mart for groceries, Bree comes down the stairs with two suitcases and a duffel bag and drops them at the front door.
“Where you going?” I ask. I’m sprawled on the sofa watching a cartoon and eating Cheetos. I like the old cartoons; plus, it’s a good way to spend a Saturday until Mom makes me do my chores, which wasn’t going to happen until she came home from the store. My fingers are covered with orange Cheetos dust and I lick them.
Bree scowls. “That’s disgusting.” She looks out the high glass window of the door. “I’m leaving.”
“For where?”
“Los Angeles.”
“Why?”
“Me and Jerry are going to find jobs.”
“You don’t know anyone in Los Angeles,” I remind her. We live in farm country, in Duncanville, a small town in middle Tennessee, three hours from Nashville, only forty minutes from Chattanooga, which I guess Bree figures are both too close to home.
“We’re going clear across country, seeing everything there is to see on the way. When we get to Hollywood, we’ll get a place of our own and be happy forever.” Her green eyes sparkle.
“Mom’s not going to let you go.” Bree had taken off twice before and Mom had gotten the sheriff to fetch her home.
“It’s different this time.”
“How so?”
“I left a letter in my room. It explains everything.”
“What about school?”
“I’m finished with school. I can quit if I want to. You finish school.”
“But—”
A horn honks outside and Bree throws open the door and grabs her bags. “I’m out of here.”
I follow her onto the front porch, stop when I see Jerry’s pickup in our dirt driveway. He jumps out, hugs Bree and tosses her bags into the open bed. “What did you pack, girl? The kitchen sink?” He never looks my way.
Bree laughs and kisses him. She says to me, “Go inside, Sissy.”
I’m still wearing my sleep T-shirt and my legs and feet are bare. The cold has sliced right through me and frozen me to the porch.
Bree shoots Jerry an apologetic look, runs back and puts her arms around me. “It’ll be all right, Sissy. I know what I’m doing.”
I feel all hollow, scared too. I don’t want my sister to leave.
“I’ll send you postcards.”
I stand still, my arms glued to my sides, fighting hard not to cry. I’m careful not to touch her with my disgusting orange fingers. “Why do you want to leave?”
“I don’t want to be stuck in this place forever. This is my chance to go places with someone I love and who loves me.”
The truck’s horn beeps and I see Jerry scowling from behind the wheel. Bree breaks away. “I can’t keep Jerry waiting.” She bounds off the porch, runs to the truck, gets inside and rolls down the window. She calls out, “Tell Mom not to worry. I know what I want. I love you.”
My voice is stuck in my throat and I can’t say anything. I stand on the porch shivering and watch them drive away. And find another reason to hate December.
When Mom comes home, I tell her what’s happened and we go up to Bree’s room together. The usually messy bedroom is neat and clean. The bed’s made up with the old quilt Grandma sewed before she died and the closet holds only old summer T’s and empty hangers. Mom picks up the letter propped on Bree’s pillow. As I watch her stiffened fingers rip open the envelope, I cry. “Shush,” she says, her eyes darting over the page.
“Wh-what’s it say?”
“She and Jerry are getting married.”
“Call the sheriff, Mom. You can stop them.”
“Why? Once they’re married, I have no say in her life.”
“But school—”
“She’s sixteen, Susanna. You can’t stop a river from flowing downstream, and I can’t stop Bree from going her own way. I should have seen it coming.”
Shock waves roll over me. Briana is
gone.
Really and truly gone.
Mom gets to her feet and her orthopedic shoes shuffle on the wood floor. “Come on now and help me bring in the groceries.”
Bring in the groceries?
How can she think about groceries when her daughter, my only sister, has just run off to get married to a guy Mom hates? I swipe at my eyes. Mom puts her arm around my shoulder. “She’ll be back, Sissy.”
“When?”
“When he leaves her.”
“But if they’re married…”
“It’s a lot easier to break promises than to keep them,” Mom says. Her face looks sad. I still can’t believe she isn’t going to do anything to make Bree come back. “Come on now.”
Mom shuts Bree’s bedroom door behind us and we go downstairs.
I hardly remember living anyplace but Duncanville. We were in Indianapolis when Daddy fell to his death at the steel mill. Mom moved us to Grandma’s farmhouse in the country in Duncanville where she’d grown up and told us it would be a nice place for us to grow up too. Not that we do any farming. When the doctors told Mom she had this bad kind of arthritis, she started a little bookkeeping business in the old sunroom at the back of the house. Grandma kept some chickens and a garden almost until the day she died, when I was ten. I missed Grandma a lot, and I think Bree did too, but she was too busy arguing and fighting with Mom about coming and going as she pleased to let us know it.
Bree hated our small school—all the grades are in the same building. I’ve never known any other kind, so I like Robert E. Lee Elementary, Middle and High School all in one, but Bree always said it was dull as dishwater and that kids in real cities were cool and not hicks. She bought teen magazines about cool kids in cool places and read them for hours.
I have two best friends, Melody Wallace and Stuart Ableman. We’ve been all through school together, same grade, same classroom even. In middle school, there are two eighth-grade classes, so Stuart got split off from us, but we still all do band together. We have a football team—JV and varsity rolled together, and we only play the little schools like us. Sometimes we have to travel on one old school bus—the players, the band, the coaches and the chaperones too.
Once word gets around that Bree Scanland has run off with Jerry, I’m asked a lot of questions, none of which I can answer. Nobody acts real shocked either. Guess it was well known around Duncanville that Bree marched to the beat of that different drummer.
She does send me postcards like she promised. At first anyway. They’re postmarked Nashville, Oklahoma, Nevada and finally Los Angeles. They come often at first, then dribble down to a few, then none come at all. At first her postcards tell me about the fun she’s having. Her last one just says, “L.A. is big and crowded.” I stick it on my bulletin board with the others. I have a million questions for her. Does she have a job? Does she miss us? Does she like being married? I want her to call home, but she doesn’t, not even on my birthday.
“She ever coming back?” Melody often asks. She has three brothers and they give her fits, and she says she wouldn’t miss them if they left home.
“Maybe she’ll get discovered in Hollywood,” Stu says.
It’s August, and Bree’s been gone eight whole months. We’re all fourteen—I turned fourteen in March, Melody in May and Stu in July. School’s starting in another ten days, and we’ve just watched a TV movie at my house about girls getting murdered in L.A. “She’s not dead, Stu. No one’s
discovered
her body.”
“I meant
discovered
her in a good way and made her into a movie star. It happens, you know. I read about it. She’d make a good movie star. And because she’s your sister and we’re your friends, we could all go out to Hollywood and see her. Maybe she’ll introduce us around. Take us to her studio while she’s making a picture.”
He could make me crazy sometimes with his imagination. “Bree won’t become a movie star without telling me and Mom first thing.”
“If she gets to be a star and wins an Academy Award, will she thank all us little people?” Melody was getting into Stu’s stupid fantasy.
“Why should she? We didn’t do anything to help her get to Hollywood,” I say.
“Plus, Jerry might not let her talk to all of us ever again,” Melody adds.
“Jerry’s got no say. He was just a means to an end—getting her to Hollywood.”
“You think she’ll divorce him once she’s rich and famous?” Stu asks. “That’s not nice.”
“Stars don’t have to be nice. They just have to be stars.” I stand up from where I’ve been sitting on the floor in front of the TV. “Look, I’ve got to start supper.” Mom is working on a big project that came in this morning and it’s my job to get supper going.
“Well, don’t get all crabby,” Melody says.
I don’t like talking about my sister and making up stories about her. I miss her and only want to see her again. “I’m not crabby. I just need to start cooking.”
“At four?”
“Mom likes to eat early.”
I watch them leave, feeling deceitful, but also wanting to be by myself. At the end of our front yard, Stu turns. “See you in the morning?”
Like football practice, band practice has also started up. Mr. Mendoza insists that we march in the early morning before the day gets too hot. Stu’s mom drives us to the football field and Melody’s mom picks us up. “I’ll be ready and waiting.”
We’ve all gotten our driving permits, but we can’t get our licenses until we’re sixteen, so we get from place to place as best we can. Melody and Stu straddle their separate bikes for the half-mile ride into town, where they live. “You’re not mad, are you? About Briana, I mean. We were just speculating and making up stories,” Stu says. “Joking.”
“I’m not mad.”
I go inside and rattle around the kitchen. It really
is
too early to start supper, but I dig out pots and pans anyway. The house is quiet, and so when I hear a motor chugging up our long dirt driveway, I’m thinking it’s UPS or FedEx for Mom. I walk out to the porch and see the cab of an unfamiliar semitruck rumbling in our yard, belching diesel smoke. I’m about to yell for Mom when the door on the passenger side swings open and Briana snakes down from the seat.
My mouth drops open and I just stare, not believing my eyes. Did we somehow conjure her up with our crazy Hollywood story?
