I Stand Before You (Judge Me Not #2)(102)

I swear and my mother frowns. “What?” I hiss, scooting farther away. “So, you think everything is okay now?”

She shakes her head. “No, no, I don’t. I know it will take time for us to heal. I know I reacted too harshly—”

“Harshly?” I interrupt, not wanting to hear her excuses.

I yell, “Fucking Doug kept what he did a secret for four years.” My mom winces but stays quiet. “He allowed me to believe it was my fault, he allowed you to believe it was my fault. I’ve thought for so long that I was the one who neglected to lock that door, and all this time…”

One desperate sob escapes me.

“Doug is a f*cking bastard,” I whisper.

I try to stand, but I can’t. My strength has abandoned me, I have no more fight. The truth should be setting me free, yet I feel no lighter.

I start to cry, and my mother closes the gap between us and enfolds me in her arms. “It’s nobody’s fault, Kay. It’s taken me a long time to accept this, but Sarah’s drowning was an accident.”

I cry harder as I cling to the back of her blouse. “You hated me for four years, Mom. How could you do that? You missed my graduation. You missed my first day as a teacher. I’m good at what I do, but you wouldn’t even know that—you know nothing of my life.”

“I never hated you, Kay—”

“Liar,” I weep. I try to pull away, but she’s so much stronger.

My mother expects me to be angry with her, she tells me this. But she also says she’s tired of holding on to her own anger, anger she’s taken out on me for far too long. I ask her if she plans to excommunicate Doug Wilson like she did to me, but she just shrugs her shoulders. And it’s then that I notice how much older my mother appears.

There’s gray streaked through her hair and deep lines on her face. Maybe being apart from me has hurt her too. She may be stubborn and hard, but I am bound to her. I don’t want to do the same thing to her that she did to me. I’ve tasted revenge, and it’s not always sweet. The time we have on this planet is too short for playing games. Anything can happen, at any time. I think of how suddenly I lost Sarah, how suddenly Chase lost his dad. Death makes permanent decisions without our consent all the time, why hasten the inevitable?

Besides, I’m tired of not being on speaking terms with my mother. Maybe she and I can start anew. Things will never be as they should—there’s too much water under the bridge—but surely we can scrape together something to make up for all this wasted time.

So I stay where I am.

I sit with my mother for a while, right there on the evening-dew-coated grass. I talk with her in a way we haven’t spoken in years. And she actually listens. I even tell her a little about Chase. My mom smiles and says he sounds like a special guy. She has no idea of what an understatement that is.

Eventually, my mom and I stand to stretch our legs. She gives me a look, a sad smile, and I know what she’s thinking. She wants us to go over to Sarah’s grave, together.

I nod, and we walk arm in arm to my sister’s granite marker. My mother and I kneel in the shadow of the old oak and hold tightly to one another as we reminisce about a little girl we both loved and lost.

My mother does most of the talking, and that’s fine with me. I listen as she shares some of her earliest memories of my sister—Sarah being born, her holding her new child for the first time, her handing Sarah to me so I could hold a baby sister for the first time.

“Remember that day at the hospital?” my mother asks, tears in her eyes.

How could I forget? I think of how tiny and pink my baby sister was. “I loved her already, then,” I croak out.

Mom squeezes me near. “I did, too,” she whispers as she kisses the top of my head. “I did, too.”

I share one memory of my own—that autumn day in the apple orchard—but I keep the rest to myself. I also don’t mention the journals I write in, nor do I share how I recite three precious memories to Sarah every week right here at this grave. These are pieces of my life I share with only one person, the man I love and trust—Chase.

I’ll give my mother a chance, sure. I mean, I can’t deny I still love her. But forgiving her completely for what she’s done to me may take a little longer.

My mother grabs up my hand and our eyes meet. She smiles at me, in a way I used to see her smile only at Sarah. Maybe she really does love me. I squeeze her hand a little, and it seems we reach an unspoken understanding, to take things one day at a time.

We’ve got a long haul ahead, but this is a start, a new beginning.




My mother leaves the cemetery before I do. I stay at Sarah’s grave, kneeling in the grass.

Ten minute pass, then fifteen. I think about leaving, heading home, but I can’t seem to move quite yet. Now that I’m alone, I am overwhelmed with emotion.

Tears stream down my cheeks. Out of sorrow, out of relief—I don’t know which. My guilt over Sarah’s death began to diminish when Chase heard my admission and didn’t turn away, but finding out it was Doug Wilson who unlocked that door—not that I had forgotten to lock it in the first place—has allowed the last remnants of guilt to lift and leave me forever. I feel freer than I ever felt before. However, I can’t stop crying.

Losing my guilt doesn’t make grief disappear. In some ways it heightens my sorrow, since sorrow is all I have left. I will always miss my Sarah—this is a fact—and nothing will ever lessen the ache that resides in the deepest recesses of my heart.