When You Believe (20 page)

Lydia tried to yank open the jail door, but it wouldn’t budge. A second or two ticked by before she realized she needed to
press a bell and signal her presence. Behind a window inside, a uniformed lieutenant glanced up, checked her out.

She must have passed inspection. The door buzzed and a latch clicked open. It unnerved her when she stepped inside the crowded
waiting room.

The guard waited for her behind a glass partition that must have been at least five inches thick. “It clearing up out there?”
he asked, as if visiting somebody in the lock-up was something you did every day.

“Clear up to our eyeballs.” Of course, she had to say that. She was used to bantering with teenagers.

He shoved a clipboard through a small furrow. A pencil dangled from the clipboard with a length of soiled, ancient string.
“Need to fill this out. Your name. His name. Time signed in. Relationship to inmate.”

Lydia Porter,
she scribbled.
Charlie Stains.
7:46 p.m.
Friend.

“Thanks,” he said, looking it over. “It’ll be twenty minutes or so. There’s not room for him at the window right now. Take
any seat.”

“Thank you.”

“I mean, don’t
take
it. They might lock you up for stealing. Wouldn’t want to spend any time in the slammer. Ha ha ha.”

In the end, Lydia waited much longer than twenty minutes. She waited while a mother with young children went in, then a squatty
man who talked with his hands. She stopped thinking of it as waiting after a while. Seeing Charlie like this wasn’t the sort
of thing she knew how to wait for. She was just
there,
taking the next punch anybody wanted to throw at her. When at last the warden stepped out and gestured for her, it almost
felt like a surprise.

“You got fifteen minutes in there, Miss Porter. They’re bringing him in.”

Inside a cubicle that wasn’t much larger than a closet, three chairs sat like stools facing a soda fountain. With two of them
already taken, visitors sat elbow to elbow. Lydia wedged her way in beside them, scooting the third seat forward like she
was scooting up to the supper table.

Through this glass panel, she faced an empty chair.

Charlie rounded the corner with wardens at his elbows and wrists wrapped in chains. He saw her and his entire body went rigid.
A hollow knot appeared at the juncture of his jaw.

She couldn’t help flinching when she saw him. The outfit was dreadful. An orange jumpsuit with
ST. CLAIR COUNTY JAIL
emblazoned over his left pectoral.

No buttons, only snaps. And short sleeves. Charlie never wore short sleeves. Sleeveless, maybe, or torn-away T-shirts when
he worked on the dock in the sun. But never anything like this.

She focused on the jumpsuit to keep from focusing on his face.

The wardens unlocked his handcuffs and stood guard over him. He folded doggedly into the chair. Two phones hung on the wall
between them, one on his side, one on hers. She picked up the receiver. He didn’t.

They stared at each other for a good four minutes. When he finally got on line with her, there they sat. She listened to him
breathe. Even
that
sounded tinny and unreal, as if Charlie was breathing somewhere on the other side of the earth.

“You’re getting out tomorrow?” she whispered.

No answer.

“If they determine probable cause tomorrow, then they’ll set bail?”

His eyes, his breathing, pinned her. She felt herself teetering but gritted her teeth, forced her eyes to stay dry, her voice
to stay steady.

“Is there anything you need me to—?”

He jumped on that with copperhead speed. “There was only one thing I needed from you.” With his arm pressed against the counter,
his elbow bearing all his weight. “I needed you to believe me.”

And then, the breathing again.

Outside in the waiting room, a toddler shrieked. A chair scuffed the floor when the warden announced “Time’s up” for someone
else down the row. Rain drummed on the roof, a distant, mysterious sound. More melancholy and miraculous, that sound, because
some people in this place hadn’t seen rain for a very long time.

As minutes lumbered past, he sat with his forehead braced in his palm. She thought she should say something, but helplessness
kept her still. When he moved at last, he lifted his entire face through the grip of his fingers. “Look, Lydia,” he said as
he stretched out his chin. And something subtle had changed in his voice. “This is more difficult than I thought it would
be.”

“Yes.” It was all she could say.

Ridiculous, after all that waiting and breathing, that each of them jumped in with something at the same moment to say.

“I told them I would—” Charlie muttered.

“I came to tell you—” Lydia rushed.

“I hired Tuck Herrington as a lawyer.”

“I think you should know that I’m going away.”

Lydia waited for his response to that, to her going away.

So much in her heart right now that she couldn’t explain.

Using this odd letter to put distance between herself and Shadrach, to put distance between herself and Charlie.

Running toward something that she could never escape. And taking Shelby with her.

At the St. Clair County Jail, the second hand on the industrial clock moved with terse, short jerks.

“Harrington and I were in Scouts together. I told him I would take a lie-detector test. But he won’t let me do it.”

“I’m leaving early in the morning, Charlie. I wanted you to know that’s why I won’t be in the courtroom when they set your
bail and give you the arraignment date. If I was going to be here, I would be at the courthouse.”

She stopped rambling and stared at him as if she’d just heard him for the first time. “I don’t understand.” And her heart
dared to surge.
A lie-detector test? How simple was that?

“Lie-detector results aren’t admissible in court. But if I take it and something goes wrong and I don’t pass, Harrington thinks
it’ll give the prosecutors more to work with.” It had taken him this long to hear her, too. “Where are you going?”

“Home.” Hard to explain. Nobody had ever known anything about this. “There’s something in Lichen Bridge that I have to resolve.”

She waited for Charlie’s boiling questions, his accusations. Those didn’t come.

“I don’t know how long I’ll be gone. Maybe a week.”

“I’m sorry, Miss Porter. Your visiting time is over.”

Lydia jerked her face toward the clock. The wardens had appeared out of nowhere. They were standing over Charlie, waiting
with keys and chains. Another guard appeared at her side to usher her out.

“No,
wait.”

“I’m sorry, Miss Porter. You knew from the beginning how much time you had.”

No seconds wasted as they stood him up sideways. His ear was still cocked to the phone.

“Listen to me,” he said quietly. “Just listen to me.” The first thing he’d said for fifteen minutes that carried any urgency,
as if this one statement he wanted to make carried the weight of the world for him.

“You have to give us time to talk about one more thing,” she begged the guard while, with a frightening economy of motion,
the warden secured Charlie’s wrists in cuffs. “Please give us just a little more time.”

“I give you more time, lady, I have to give it to everybody.”

“I’m leaving town tomorrow,” she pleaded. “He’s telling me about a lie-detector test.”

“Honey, you don’t understand. Everybody in this place has important things to talk about. You don’t just take a turn at the
window and talk about the mashed potatoes or the weather. You’ve got to make it
count.
”

“Please.”

A deep sigh from the guard, shaking his head, a signal with raised fingers to the others through the glass. “One more minute,”
he said. “Just one more minute.” Then shook his head and shrugged as if to say,
We’ve got another one of
those.

The wardens pivoted Charlie back toward her, each of them taking one step aside. This had to be it. No words wasted. There
wasn’t time.

“That lie-detector test…” He bit his lips. His nose turned red. His brows narrowed, a man staring into the face of a
storm.

“What?”

He cleared his throat and started over.

“I couldn’t understand why you couldn’t just stand beside me and shake your fist at the world with me and say, ‘Yes Charlie,
I believe you.’ I couldn’t understand why you couldn’t say, ‘I believe
in
you.’ I wanted to risk that stupid lie-detector test for
you,
Lydia. Forget the courts. Forget what Tuck or anybody else said. Forget if it would hurt my case in the long run and send
me off to the Missouri Pen. I wanted to do it because the only thing that mattered to me was what you were thinking about
me.”

A numbing surge of adrenaline rushed through her head, her ears. She held up her left hand, palm out.
Stop.

“If I’ve asked too much of you, Lydia, just take it as a rough compliment.” Staring hard at her outstretched hand. “Take it
as a compliment that I thought you’d be able to give me that much. The next time I see you—”

The wardens moved in on him.

“Minute’s up, Mr. Stains. We’ll escort you to your cell.”

They tried to wrestle the receiver away from him. For this one more sentence, he lodged the receiver down under his chin and
wouldn’t let go.

“I want you to bring my ring back. I can’t make choices because of you anymore, Lydia.”

“Charlie.”

“It’s the wrong thing for you. It’s the wrong thing for me. Let’s just—”

“I don’t want you to make choices for me. I never asked you to—”

The wardens wrenched the phone away from him mid-sentence. They linked their arms through his elbows, jerking him away.

The chair stood empty and desolate on the other side of the glass.

The dead phone hung heavy in her hand.

No matter the astonishing day, the way the missing little girl had been found above the Brownbranch. Watching Charlie’s shoulders
roll forward away from her, carrying the weight of the chained cuffs, she felt as if she were the one who had just been slammed
in jail.

By the time the rain had stopped again sometime just after daybreak, Lydia and Shelby had already driven past the lake. This
stretch of road between Warsaw and Sedalia didn’t have much scenery. Just a distant mirage of harvest-land dipping like a
calm sea, the road edged by an old stake-and-rider fence, a pleasing smattering of trees, a small yellow arrow pointing east
that read
YOU HAVE JUST MISSED THE TURN-OFF TO KNOB NOSTER.

Shelby had fallen asleep with her mouth hanging open, her head tilted against the headrest at an angle that made Lydia’s neck
ache. In the air from the open window, feathery tendrils of the girl’s blonde hair lifted like living things, whirling around
her pale cheeks.

Lydia’s silent tears had dried in the soft morning, in the cool strong rush of dry wind. As the miles coursed past beneath
the tires, her thoughts rocketed between Jolena Criggin’s letter—
in-depth questions about Beowulf… if this holds any significance to you…
Buckholtz’s class… Advance Placement English—to Charlie.

As a Kansas City radio station played
Sweet Home, Alabama,
a great song that wouldn’t die, she stared out through the windshield and thought,
He’s gone, isn’t he, Lord? And all because you finally let him see what I couldn’t be.

When they hit the Interstate and turned east on I-70 toward St. Louis, she realized that something had shifted inside of her
about Charlie. Not the human nature shift, where the one who decides to break something finds himself broken instead. No,
this was something else entirely. Like a weathervane oiled and gently left turning, she felt like she was wavering into the
wind.

As St. Louis towered over their heads with its miles of skyscrapers and fashion billboards and roads dispersing in every direction
like tangled cables, Shelby moaned and lifted her head. She smacked her lips and swallowed, stared out through the windshield
with narrowed eyes. “Where are we?”

“Guess.”

“I don’t know.”

Thousands of trucks and cars shot past them, racing at what seemed like ridiculous speeds. “Ah!” Shelby jumped, twisting toward
the steering wheel even though she was belted in. An SUV merged halfway into their lane and then swerved back when Lydia wouldn’t
move over.

“How long have I been asleep?”

“A long time.”

“This isn’t St. Louis. It can’t be St. Louis already.”

“Time flies when you’re sound asleep.” Lydia rolled the window down again to greet the acrid rubber and carbon smells of heavy
traffic. “Ah, the smell of the city.” She felt they needed it—the pleasure of the music cranked up, their hair tugging in
the wind, strands tossed by the air in front of their faces.

Shelby pivoted sideways in the seat again and tried to give Lydia a high-five.

A grin. “You think I can do that while I’m driving in this city traffic, you’ve got more confidence than I do.” Her elbows
had unclenched a little bit, but Lydia was still driving with both hands.

“You saved that little girl, Miss P. We have to celebrate.”

“We aren’t going to celebrate while we’re moving sixty-five miles an hour.”

“But we’ve gotten away from Shadrach, Miss P.” Shelby picked up a package of wintergreen Lifesavers and sliced a seam in the
paper. She lifted the next candy with the flick of one peeling peach fingernail. “Here.”

Lydia opened her mouth sideways and Shelby slid it in.

“We’re just
us.
You and
me.”
Then, like a song. “
Me
and Miss
P.”

An hour later, they had stopped for a snack and were heading into Illinois. With sandwich foil blooming like lilies in their
laps, picking lettuce off their legs where it had fluttered free, arguing over who got the one cup holder in the Buick’s fold-out
armrest, they soared along the open road, searching new territory with no one to stop them. And Lydia did her best to concentrate
on Shelby, not on the stunning moments when she remembered that Charlie had been arrested, or that he wanted his ring back,
or that she’d found a lost little girl in the woods. She focused on the girl beside her, not on the sorrow that lay behind
her. She focused on someone she knew she needed to care for, not on the questions that lay before her. She didn’t think about
her life tilting. She didn’t think about there being nothing stable beneath her feet.