Coming Home Read online

  Ryan was sitting at the foot of her bed, Jessie cradled in his arms.

  “I think back on our story, the things we could’ve done differently.” They returned to the beach chairs. He stopped and faced her. “Ways we could’ve avoided missing out on each other the first time around.”

  “It’s one of those things I’ll ask God as soon as I get to heaven.” Kari touched her lips to his, and for a while they forgot about the past. Forgot everything but this single sweet moment, their feet in the sand and in all the world only the warmth of the summer day and the miracle of the love they shared.

  They talked about the years since their wedding day and when they finally ran out of memories, Ryan let himself get lost in her eyes. “I love you with all my heart, Kari.”

  “I love you, too.” She ran her fingers along his face, his jaw. “However many tomorrows we have left, they won’t be enough.”

  They stayed awhile longer, listening to the music and laughing about the recent past. The whole way back, Kari was quiet. Their story wasn’t an easy one, but it had led them to this and so it was worth remembering. Every detail. In addition, today reminded her of the role her dad had played in her life. Now that she’d spent the day remembering, the letter would come more easily. Kari could hardly wait to get started.

  She wondered if all of her siblings were spending a little time remembering today, in light of Ashley’s assignment. After all, some of their stories didn’t only involve heartache. They involved what could have been a permanent loss. The loss of a child. Certainly Ashley would have such a piece to her story — what with the baby she and Landon lost at birth. But even greater was the loss that nearly came one summer day ten years ago. That part of their family story was certain to appear in the letter written by their oldest sister, Brooke. Kari talked silently to God as they drove up at her dad’s house once more. Because if anyone would need strength remembering the time when their dad’s love mattered most it was Brooke.

  Whose story had, in some ways, affected them all.

  Four

  LIFE WAS BUSY FOR BROOKE BAXTER WEST, AND THAT THIRD Saturday in June was no exception. She and her husband, Peter, ran a successful medical practice and on the weekends they took turns making rounds at St. Anne’s Hospital. This was Peter’s weekend, which meant Brooke was in charge of getting Maddie to soccer practice and Hayley to her dance class across town.

  With everything else, Brooke still made time to drop in at the crisis pregnancy center she and Ashley opened several years ago. The schedule for all of them was so busy Brooke rarely took time to look back. It was all she could do to look ahead, both eyes on the road in front of them as they barreled through life.

  But ever since this morning and Brooke’s coffee date with Ashley, the past had been knocking at her heart. She’d put it off long enough. She needed to write the letter to her dad. Even so it wasn’t until she walked into the dance studio with Hayley and took her spot at the back of the room with the other mothers that Brooke let it hit her the way it hadn’t in far too long.

  The fact that Hayley shouldn’t even be here.

  Sure, she walked a little slower than the other girls and in school she struggled more than Maddie. But she kept up. And here, in a class full of dancers, Hayley had no trouble fitting in, no problem dipping and spinning and dancing to the music. Grace and strength in motion.

  It was the idea of writing a letter to her dad. That’s what had done this. And even now she could picture writing the letter and attaching it to a color copy of the greatest gift her dad had ever given her. A torn page from a magazine containing one very simple image.

  A pink bicycle.

  Yes, if she was going to write her father a letter thanking him for all he’d been and done and provided over the years, if she was going to put into words what his love and acceptance and hope and belief had done for her since she was a young girl, there would be no avoiding the terrible summer a decade ago.

  Until that year, everything about Brooke’s life had gone like clockwork. Whatever she dreamed of doing, she did. Hard work and good timing played into it, but as Brooke obtained her medical degree and as she fell in love with fellow intern Peter West, she didn’t give God credit for her success. The Lord had blessed her with intelligence and drive, but she’d found a way to make things happen on her own.

  While the rest of her family attended church, she and Peter bought vegetables at the farmer’s market and hung out with friends on Sundays. In the depths of her heart she actually felt sorry for her family, relying on an archaic faith.

  She and Peter might not have had a perfect marriage back then, but their fights were nothing other people didn’t go through.

  Brooke settled into the hard-back chair at the corner of the room. The music began.

  “Okay, everyone, this is hip-hop. It’ll be a little more up-tempo.”

  Hayley found her place in the front row and when the music started she bounced to the beat, watching the instructor. Brooke felt the memories gathering like so many storm clouds. Her father, of course, had suggested Brooke and Peter get counseling at Clear Creek Community Church, but Brooke had pulled herself through medical school. Certainly she could work things out with Peter.

  How ridiculous I was back then, Lord. She let the statement swing from the rafters of her mind for a few seconds. Prideful and arrogant. I’m so sorry … I’ll always be sorry for my heart the way it was. Before the accident.

  My daughter … your sins are forgiven. They are as far removed from Me as the east is from the west.

  Brooke breathed more deeply, the certainty of her restoration underlined once more with the reassuring whispers. Without the faith they’d found that long ago summer, the fear of letting her girls grow up, of watching them do something as simple as drive away for a trip to the mall — would practically paralyze Brooke. But after watching God work the miracle in their lives He’d worked back then, Brooke knew the truth.

  God was in control. She had nothing to fear. No matter what happened next or how the outcome played in their lives, whatever triumph or tragedy might take place, God loved them. Nothing could ever change that.

  “Okay, that’s how it’s done.” The dance instructor signaled for his assistant to stop the music. “Let’s break it down. We’ll take it in counts of eight.”

  The look of concentration on Hayley’s face was in itself a miracle. Even though she didn’t like to, Brooke could still remember when her younger daughter’s face was only blank and lifeless. As if the parts of her mind and brain that made her uniquely Hayley were gone forever.

  It happened at a children’s birthday party. A swim party.

  Maddie was six that summer and she could swim like a fish. But Hayley needed a life jacket. Brooke had put sunscreen on the girls that afternoon, and she’d fastened Hayley’s life jacket. But on the way inside the party, her pager went off. Brooke was on call and she was needed at the hospital. Her last words to Peter were the same ones that haunted her to this day. The words she had to put out of her mind often.

  “Keep her life jacket on, Peter. She has to wear it. Even if she complains.”

  Peter had nodded absently and taken the girls by their hands. Then the three of them jogged up the steps to the party and Brooke headed to St. Anne’s. The call that day turned out to be nothing serious, and every minute Brooke regretted not being with her family.

  The details of what happened next were pieced together by Peter and the moms at the party. Apparently, the first few hours went along without a hitch. But then the kids moved inside for cake and presents and Hayley demanded her life jacket be taken off. The group — around twenty kids and another ten siblings — along with half a dozen mothers filled the kitchen for the happy birthday song. When it was over, Peter told Maddie to keep an eye on Hayley while he and a few dads caught the end of a heated game between the Yankees and the Braves.

  Peter never could quite account for how much time passed, but after an inning or so Maddie appea
red at his side wondering where Hayley was. She and her little friends had looked but had not been able to find her. Brooke would regret till the day she died the fact that she hadn’t been there. When she rewrote the afternoon in her mind — the way she had done a thousand times — always she was there. And when the cake was finished, she would find Hayley’s life jacket and snap it back on the child. Never mind her fussing about it.

  Instead, while Brooke tended to her patient, Peter flew off the recliner and scrambled down the back stairs, racing out onto the patio only to see the most terrible sight, a sight he still said would never quite leave him. Three-year-old Hayley was lifeless at the bottom of the pool.

  Peter shouted for someone to call 9 – 1 – 1 and then he dove into the water, fully clothed, his shoes still on. The whole way down he could only picture every wonderful memory with his little girl, fighting through the brick wall of futility. With a strength fueled by crazy adrenaline, Peter propelled Hayley to the surface and pushed her up onto the cement deck.

  Not until the paramedics were rushing through the house and spilling onto the back patio did Hayley cough up even the slightest bit of water. She was still blue, still lifeless when they took over CPR from Peter and got her onto a stretcher.

  It was about that time Brooke rounded the corner and saw the emergency vehicles. With an instinct that was beyond maternal, Brooke slammed the car into park and raced for the front door, convinced beyond any doubt that the problem was Hayley, that somehow the unthinkable had happened.

  She hadn’t worn her life jacket.

  Brooke was halfway to the door when the paramedics hurried out carrying the stretcher. One of them held an oxygen mask over Hayley’s little face, her pale blonde hair matted around her cheeks, her body motionless and blue.

  “Five, six, seven, eight.” The music kicked into high gear and the girls responded with the moves they’d learned just minutes earlier. Hayley stayed right with the beat, her eyes bright with exhilaration.

  Remembering her accident was so much better at a moment like this, when proof of her miracle was so dramatically evident. It made breathing possible.

  Doctors declared Hayley blind and brain damaged. They said she’d never run or walk or maybe even feed herself. Brooke and her father had always been close. The fact that Brooke had grown up to be a doctor like him gave them a bond nothing could touch. But she never felt a heart connection with her father until after Hayley drowned.

  Up until then, her dad saw God in every patient and case, every aspect of his work as a doctor. After the accident, it wasn’t that her dad lost faith. Rather, he saw no room for miracles. Her prognosis was that severe.

  “When I pray,” he had told her a week after the accident, “I find myself asking God to maybe just take her home. So she can run and play and be free.” He had tears in his eyes. “I just hate seeing her like this.”

  As Brooke sat day and night at Hayley’s hospital bedside, running her hand over her daughter’s tan forehead, and stroking her beautiful hair, she had considered such a prayer also. If there was to be no healing — and medical wisdom said there wouldn’t be — then why pray for her survival? Heaven would be far gentler an outcome than living trapped in a body that no longer functioned, a brain that no longer responded to laughter and touch and the love of her family.

  Later, Brooke would learn that her father had already chosen the birthday present he wanted to get Hayley when she turned four. A bright pink bicycle with training wheels. He had found a picture of the bike in a magazine and ripped it out to show the rest of the family. The perfect gift for little Hayley. But again, after the accident her dad put the magazine page away in a drawer, his dreams for an active Hayley drowned right there beside her.

  Brooke brushed discretely at her tears. The other mothers were on their iPads or cell phones. She didn’t want to make a scene. It wasn’t normal to burst into tears during dance practice. But it was impossible not to feel the overwhelming joy at what happened next that summer.

  Gradually, Hayley began to come back to them. Against all odds, she regained her sight. Then over the next few days she could move her arms and legs. It took time, but eventually she could recognize Brooke and Peter and Maddie.

  One evening Brooke’s dad showed up at the hospital and hugged her for a long time. Then he gave her something he had only pulled from his dresser drawer that day.

  The magazine picture of the pretty pink bike.

  “The Bible says to pray believing. But after Hayley’s accident I didn’t believe. I doubted.” He hesitated. “I’ll never stop believing in miracles again.”

  Her dad went out that day and bought the pink bicycle. He kept it in his garage, praying and believing, and a few years later when Hayley was well enough he gave it to her.

  In the early months after Hayley’s accident, Peter couldn’t see past his guilt. It didn’t take long before Peter began taking pain pills. When Brooke found out about her husband’s addiction, it was almost too late. All of which found her father right in the middle of the situation — praying for Peter, counseling the two of them, and most of all doing what he hadn’t done at first in Hayley’s situation.

  Believing.

  Now she and Peter were happier than ever. Their girls were active and healthy and only longtime friends and family remembered the desperate condition Hayley had been in after her accident. And the miracle she’d been granted.

  Write a letter to her father? Her mentor and friend? The one she’d sought to be like since she was a little girl? Tears gathered in Brooke’s eyes again just thinking about the things she could say. And the things she would never find a way to put into words. Her father was everything to her. The best doctor in Bloomington, a pillar of faith in the community, and the only one who had given her exactly what she needed when all of life felt like it was ending.

  The picture of a pink two-wheeled bicycle.

  All things considered, her letter would be easy to write. The hardest part was admitting her dad was actually seventy years old, and that despite his great health and the active lifestyle he maintained, the calendar told them what they couldn’t ignore.

  He was getting older.

  Writing him a letter would be an exercise in joy, taking time to put onto paper her feelings for her father. She thought about her siblings, how some of their letters would be harder to write than others, and suddenly one face came to mind. Brooke cringed. There would be no way for her younger brother Luke to write the letter without covering the details of that horrible time in his life. A time when their dad chased after him and prayed for him and refused to give up on him. Hayley had taught them all to believe, and they did. But back then Luke tested their faith once again. During a time when they all referred to their younger brother as the son who had gone astray.

  Luke Baxter — the prodigal.

  Five

  MANDISA’S WHAT IF WE WERE REAL WAS PLAYING SO LOUD THE cupboards shook as Erin rushed around looking for the last suitcase. She’d tell the girls to turn it down, but she loved every song on the album and Sam was working late. Instead she sang along as she dashed down the stairs.

  “Clarissa!” She had to shout to be heard over the music. “Do you have the blue suitcase?”

  “What?” Clarissa stopped singing just long enough to stick her head out of the downstairs bedroom she shared with Chloe.

  “The blue suitcase!” Erin pushed her hair out of her eyes and stopped at the girls’ bedroom door, breathless. Chloe was standing in the middle of a pile of clothes, playing the air guitar and singing her heart out. “Chloe!” Erin laughed as she cupped her hand around her mouth. “The blue suitcase?”

  “Yes!” Chloe’s eyes lit up. She turned down the music in a hurry and laughed. “Sorry. It’s under my bed.” In a burst of motion she grabbed it and handed it to Erin. “Me and Clarissa are already packed.”

  “Perfect.” She looped her arm around Chloe’s neck and kissed her head. Then she did the same to Clarissa. “I’ll us
e this for the little girls.” She hesitated as she reached the door. “You can put the music back on. It makes the work go faster.”

  They all laughed and Clarissa grinned at her. “You’re the best kind of ‘cool mom.’“

  “Yeah,” Chloe giggled. “Not too cool. Like, you’re still a mom. But you take us for Starbucks every weekend.” She smiled big. “Plus you can sing and dance and you even let us play the music super loud.”

  “Of course.” Erin winked at them. “Especially when Dad’s gone.”

  Again their laughter filled the room and Clarissa resumed the music. Erin hurried upstairs with the blue suitcase and stopped at the laundry room. The house was a split level, with one bedroom on the main floor, and two upstairs along with the laundry room. It was smaller than any house they’d lived in before, but it was within their means. Something she and Sam felt strongly about after his time off work and the debt they needed to chisel away at.

  Erin surveyed the remaining laundry. She had two more loads before they could be fully packed. It was a little after eight and they were leaving at sunup tomorrow so she needed to make use of every hour. Even then she wouldn’t sleep easily, not when she was this excited. In just two days she’d be with her family again! The calendar days had turned slowly since Sam first agreed to make the drive to Bloomington, but Erin had long since stopped trying to will away time, not for any reason whatsoever.

  Even a Baxter family reunion.

  Especially since she was able to delay dealing with Candy Burns and the visitation process. Apparently Candy had a few unresolved issues related to her release, so they agreed with Naomi to put off the matter until after the trip to Bloomington. Erin had talked to her brother Luke, and though family law wasn’t his specialty, he promised to talk with her about the situation this week.

  And so June had been a lovely month, filled with trips to the community pool and the whole family helping out with a week of Vacation Bible School and early morning walks with her older girls — who were getting more into fitness. Erin had loved those times especially — before Sam left for work, at an hour when he could watch the younger girls. On their morning walks, the girls’ hearts were wide open, and conversation came easily. They talked about school and mission work and the beauty of adoption and the plans God had for them.