“All right,” Jon said. “Thank you.”
“It’s my job,” the nurse said. “A lousy one, but a job.”
It was a five-hour drive to Hilton, Tennessee, and by the time the bus got there, not even Coach seemed all that interested in the match.
Jon played the first half and scored three times. Sexton ended up winning 7–2, but there were no tirades on the drive back because of the low score. Instead all of them—Coach, the team, and the guards—got drunk on potka. Endless speeches were made about the complete and utter destruction the White Birch grubs were going to face on the Fourth of July.
“We’ll leave them drowning in their own blood!” Tyler shouted, and everyone laughed and cheered, Jon included.
Better that way than drugged and smothered, he thought. At least the grubs would have a chance. That’s more than Miranda had offered Julie.
“Hey, Evans,” Ryan said in the locker room after practice. “Looking forward to Saturday?”
“Sure,” Jon replied. “We’ll slaughter the grubs. Make them beg for mercy.”
Tyler laughed. “It’s the grubber girls that’ll be begging.”
“Show them no mercy,” Zachary said.
“The plan is to stay in White Birch after the match,” Ryan said. “Right, Tyler?”
“Right,” Tyler said. “Make the eighteenth look like a picnic. You with us, Evans?”
Jon knew there was only one way he could answer. “Can’t wait,” he said.
Tyler walked over to him and slapped him on the back. “That’s a good slip,” he said. “Now let’s get out of here before Coach makes us run more laps.”
The sound of a knock on the door startled all of them. Jon got up from the dinner table, walked to the hallway, and opened the door. There stood Sarah. Sarah?
“What are you doing here?” he whispered.
“I have to talk to you,” she said.
Jon checked. There was no one standing outside. “It’s not a good idea,” he said.
“I’m sick and tired of your good ideas,” she replied. “We’re going to get things straightened out once and for all.”
“Who is it?” Lisa called.
“It’s Sarah,” he replied.
“Invite her in,” Val said. “There’s plenty of food.”
“Some other time,” Sarah said. “Thank you anyway.” She gestured to Jon. “Come on,” she said.
Jon followed Sarah to the garage. There was a cot there now, one Lisa had found in the attic and had had Val carry in.
Sarah noticed it right away. “This is new,” she said, sitting down on it.
“Lisa’s getting a new domestic,” Jon said. “She’ll sleep in here.”
“Cozy,” Sarah said. “Oh, Jon, stop looking like that. You can sit down. I won’t bite.”
Jon made sure to sit at the other end of the cot.
“Your mother came to the clinic on Sunday,” Sarah said. “She told us about Miranda, and asked Daddy if he could check up on her. Last night Daddy decided he’d ask for Alex to drive him to the hospital. He’ll see if he can slip Alex in to see Miranda while he’s there.”
“Is that why you came here?” Jon asked. “To tell me that?”
“No,” Sarah said. “I wanted you to know, but that’s not why I’m here.” She took a deep breath. “I like Luke, but he can’t keep a secret. He told me all about you and Tyler, how you feel like you have to protect me. I wanted to slug him. No, I wanted to slug you and then him.”
“Tyler isn’t a joke, Sarah,” Jon said. “He could hurt you.”
“Tyler is an idiot,” Sarah replied. “Which I’d think you’d know by now. Anyway, I explained to Mr. Can’t Keep A Secret that my uncle is a United States senator and anyone who even breathes on me the wrong way is mine meat.”
“Mine meat?” Jon said.
“That’s what we called them in my old enclave,” she said. “I’m sure Luke ran off to tell Tyler right away.”
“I’m glad for you,” Jon said. “I’m glad there’s someone to protect you.”
“There’s something else,” she said. “Jon, I’ve thought about you and Julie, what you told me, what you didn’t tell me. I asked you outright if you’d raped her, but you didn’t admit it. You didn’t say anything. You wanted me to ask, didn’t you? You wanted me to hate you so Tyler couldn’t hurt me. Well, he can’t, so you can tell me the truth. You didn’t rape her, did you?”
Jon shook his head. “She thought I would,” he said. “She ran into the tornado to escape. For a long time I felt like I’d killed her.” He thought briefly of telling Sarah the truth, that Miranda had murdered Julie, but Sarah spoke before he’d decided what to say.
“I know what you feel like,” she said. “I feel like I killed my mother.”
“I don’t understand,” Jon said.
“My mother had kidney disease,” Sarah said. “They tested my sister first, but she wasn’t a match. Then they tested me and I was. Mother was on dialysis and that kept her going, but the sooner she had the transplant the better. Mother and I weren’t close, not like she was with Abby. When Abby found out she wasn’t a match, she cried. When I found out I was, I cried, too.”
“How old were you?” Jon asked.
“Thirteen,” Sarah replied. “You can’t just walk in and donate a kidney when you’re that young. It has to be approved. So they interviewed me away from my parents and asked if I was okay with it, and I burst into tears and said I didn’t want to do it and I felt like I was being forced to.”
“You were being honest,” Jon said.
“At the cost of my mother’s life,” Sarah said. “They told my parents I was too young and Mother would have to stay on dialysis until another donor could be found. Five weeks later Abby died. My parents were devastated. I thought I could make things better by agreeing to the surgery, but by then they’d stopped transplants. Nobody was manufacturing the drugs you need to keep your body from rejecting the organs, so everyone who ever had a transplant died. There were a lot of deaths you didn’t hear about, like the diabetics who couldn’t get insulin and the people with cancer whose chemo was stopped.”
“But your mother only died a few months ago,” Jon said.
“My uncle pulled strings and got us selected for an enclave where she could get dialysis,” Sarah replied. “Things were okay until they decided to close all the dialysis units. The people on dialysis weren’t doing enough to justify the resources. It took Mother thirteen days to die. Daddy didn’t leave her side the entire time, when he should have been working. The enclave board didn’t like that, so they held a hearing and decided to expel him. My uncle got Daddy the job here.”
“Even if you’d agreed to the transplant, your mother would have died,” Jon said. “She might have died sooner.”
“I know,” she replied. “The way you know things in your head but not in your heart. I kept thinking Mother would have been the only person who never needed drugs. Or they might have kept making the drugs, or we would have found a supply big enough to last until they started making them again. And Abby was so angry with me for not agreeing. We hardly spoke the month before she died. I hold that in my heart, also.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Jon persisted.
“It doesn’t matter,” Sarah declared. “In my heart I’m always going to feel guilty. Just the way you do about Julie. I don’t think there’s anyone else in this world who could understand how I feel.”
He could never tell her the truth. He could never say it was Miranda who killed Julie, who kept her from the kind of miracle Sarah dreamed of for her mother. She’d take it as a rejection, as his way of saying he was better than she was. She needed him to be guilty. It didn’t matter if it was a lie.