When You Come Back Read online

  When You Come Back

  Debra Webb

  Contents

  WHEN YOU COME BACK

  Acknowledgments

  1. Thursday, May 10

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  4. Friday, May 11

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  9. Saturday, May 12

  Chapter 10

  11. Sunday, May 13

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  16. Monday, May 14

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  19. Tuesday, May 15

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  24. Wednesday, May 16

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  29. Thursday, May 17

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  33. Friday, May 18

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  36. Monday, May 21

  About the Author

  WHEN YOU COME BACK

  A Novel

  Debra Webb

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 1st Edition 2019 Debra Webb

  Cover Design by Vicki Hinze

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  PINK HOUSE PRESS

  WebbWorks, LLC, Madison, Alabama

  First Edition June 2019

  Acknowledgments

  I grew up in Alabama. The community was a small one with a k-12 school and the same big old yellow school buses I describe in this story. Though Jackson Falls, Alabama, only exists in this story, it is very much based on the area in which I lived as a child. Like Emma, I loved nothing better than exploring the woods and digging up treasures. Also like Emma, I wasn’t exactly Miss Popular and I always sat right behind the driver on the school bus. I loved creating Emma’s world and this story. I hope you will love it as well!

  This book is dedicated to my precious baby girl, Melissa Bailey. Thank you for always being my sunshine, for the laughter and for always being you.

  1

  Thursday, May 10

  EMMA

  Why is it that some people disappear never to be seen again while others come back? Is it fate or karma or just plain old dumb luck?

  These two questions occur to me as I enter Madden County, Alabama. My destination is the small town of Jackson Falls shoehorned between Huntsville and Decatur. The Rocket City and the River City. RC. RC. Funny, I never noticed the initial thing before. It’s late, almost eleven. I’ve been driving since this time last night. Perhaps I am suffering from white line fever or I’m merely slaphappy. Either way, the questions nag at me as if the invisible umbilical cord of home is now force-feeding regret and nostalgia in equal measures to my brain.

  I don’t know why I came back and the others didn’t.

  I doubt I will ever know.

  It was early April, the year my world changed. I remember the fallow fields in the valley had gone from drab winter brown to a fresh spring green. Henbit and Purple Deadnettle blossoms had cut a swath of color through the lush sea of green. Pretty to look at but my dad explained that this was not such good news for the farmers. The mild winter had allowed what looked like flowers to me but were actually weeds a head start before planting time, making the intruders far harder to control once the crops were in the ground.

  At only eight years old I shouldn’t have been too concerned and yet somehow I was. I always had my head in one book or another. I learned to read by the time I was four. So after a bit of investigating at the school library, I promptly told Dad that those so-called weeds were an important food source for pollinators in early spring. My announcement earned me one of his deep belly laughs. When he’d caught his breath he gave me a nod and said, “You’ve got me there, Emma.”

  I loved my dad so very much. He was the kindest man in the world and he always had time for me. Unlike my mother. She was always far too busy with Natalie.

  Natalie.

  Despite the passing of a quarter century, an ache pierces my heart.

  Natalie was my sister—older by seven years. Dad always said Natalie and Mother were like two peas in a pod. Like us, he would assure me with a big grin and a wink. He was the reason it never really bothered me that the rest of the world—even my own mother—loved Natalie more than me. Natalie was prettier and far more talented. She was on the dance competition team, a cheerleader, straight A student. Natalie was perfect. And I…I was me.

  Emma Graves, the girl who came back.

  I still find it odd that even after my world changed so dramatically at the ripe old age of eight, I didn’t. I’m certain I didn’t know how or I’m sure I would have made an attempt at least to be a better daughter. To look prettier. Be smarter. More talented.

  Some small effort to fill the enormous void left by Natalie.

  It was only a day or two after the weed versus food source debate when it happened. It was a Tuesday and it started like any other ordinary day in third grade. At school and everywhere else I was the absolute opposite of my popular sister. She had the long blond hair and bright blue eyes while my hair is dark brown and my eyes are equally dark. To add insult to injury my nearsightedness kept me in overly large glasses until my teenage years when I discovered the convenience of contacts and then later the miracle of Lasik surgery.

  The other kids enjoyed many laughs at my expense. I was the homely sister, the four-eyed kid with Coke bottle lenses who loved digging in the dirt behind the old houses my dad restored. Sam, our big old Lab, was generally at my side. Digging for my treasures ensured my nails were perpetually chipped and in desperate need of a manicure. That part hasn’t changed either. The fact of the matter is a girl could find all sorts of relics exploring that way. Timeworn spoons. Vintage ink and apothecary bottles. Coins. And even the occasional pile of bones where the family dog or cat, maybe a bird, was buried. I loved it. Sadly, finding those bones really made me a freak in the other kids’ eyes.

  Never really bothered me…until that day.

  Like the rest of the kids in Jackson Falls, my sister and I rode a big yellow bus to school. Sam waited on the porch every day for us to come home. We lived on a farm Dad had inherited from his father and the place was several miles outside the town limits. Half a dozen other children lived along that route, including my only friend who was home sick that day, but Natalie and I were the final stop.

  Natalie and her best friend Stacy Yarbrough, older and far too sophisticated to sit near me, always claimed the very back seat on the bus. Stacy came home with us at least twice a week for dance or cheerleader practice. The two always giggled and acted silly, whispered about boys and all their other secrets I was too immature and unimportant to understand.

  As far as they were concerned I didn’t exist. Didn’t matter really. I sat behind the driver, Mr. Lincoln Russell. I liked watching him shift the gears and operate the door to let kids on and off the bus. Sometimes he even allowed me to control the door. In my eight-year-old experience no one else had ever been permitted to operate the door. Pulling that lever made me feel quite importa
nt.

  At the time I considered Mr. Russell pretty old, older than my parents for sure. Later, at his funeral, I heard someone say he was sixty-eight. Most folks whispered that it was his bad heart. It made him a ticking time bomb and finally the bomb exploded and his ticker gave out. Others nodded sagely and said it was just his time to go. Confused, I asked Dad and he explained that it was a heart attack that took him off to heaven to be with his wife.

  When the trouble began, on that long stretch of road where there was nothing save fields and mountains, I didn’t understand. I only knew that something was wrong with Mr. Russell. If the sky had fallen Natalie and Stacy would have been too busy twittering and whispering to notice. That day I didn’t have a lot of room to talk, my attention was totally transfixed on the purple “flowers” in the unplowed fields. I wondered if I picked a bunch and took them home to my mother would she like me better. Or at least as much as she did Natalie. In all probability she would have recognized they were weeds and scolded me for doing something so foolish. No doubt she would have broken out in hives and told Dad I tried to kill her. After all, she would say as she had so many times before that I very nearly killed her when I came into this world.

  That was always the way of things between my mother and me. We never saw eye to eye. She was busy with Natalie and I tagged along with Dad. When the three of us—Mother, Natalie and I—were together I appeared to get on their nerves more than anything else. I was too young to understand, I was too this or that. I actually heard my mother say once to some of her lunch lady friends that she frequently wondered if she brought the wrong baby home from the hospital because, God knew, I was nothing like her or my sister.

  As unfortunate as some parts of my childhood were the adult me is, thankfully, no longer the butt of jokes. And though I’m still nothing like my popular sister was, the prickly relationship with my mother has changed to some degree for the better.

  Frankly, I rarely allow myself to ponder life before the bus accident. It makes me feel far too guilty. Survivor’s guilt, that’s what the shrinks call it. Whatever it’s called, I would gladly trade any and all attention from my mother for the rest of my life if I could change what happened that day.

  We were still miles from our house when Mr. Russell started gasping and wheezing. The bus weaved and swayed on the road. My stomach churned with dread. He tried to control the bus. I watched him struggle with the steering wheel, but then he grabbed at his chest and the bus careened off the pavement, bumping along the shoulder like a bucking horse determined to throw its rider.

  Terrified, I scrambled under the seat to hide from whatever awful thing was about to happen. Natalie and Stacy screamed at the tops of their lungs, as if auditioning for a bit part in a bad slasher movie. I imagined them clinging to each other, eyes open wide in mind-boggling horror.

  The bus toppled into the ditch with a bone-jarring crash, landing on its side. I banged hard against the underside of the seat and ended up slung into the aisle between the two rows. For a minute after the bus stopped, I didn’t move. I felt rattled, like a bag of potatoes that had been shaken and then pitched across the produce department at the supermarket.

  A single moment of silence throbbed in the air before Natalie and Stacy began to wail and sob. Poor Mr. Russell lay motionless in the step well. His eyes still open, he continued to gasp for air, but not as hard or as often as before. A trickle of blood slid down his forehead. This was bad and I was really scared but I didn’t have a clue what to do.

  Natalie shouted at Stacy to hurry. I managed to sit up, right my glasses and peer back at them as they struggled with the emergency door’s release. Both carried on as if they were fatally injured. Judging by the way they looked I didn’t believe they were really hurt very badly at all.

  Probably only scared, like me.

  The door flew open and while Stacy jumped out, Natalie turned and ordered me to stay on the bus. They were going to find help. I remember her face—the fear and uncertainty there—as she caught and held my gaze for one endless second.

  In those days most kids didn’t have cell phones, at least none I knew anyway. They were far too expensive. My parents didn’t even have cell phones and there wasn’t a phone or a radio on the bus. The next term every school bus in the county had radios installed, but on that day there wasn’t one.

  My head hurt and I felt a little sick to my stomach but I couldn’t just sit there. I needed to do something besides wait. I scrambled over to where Mr. Russell lay crumpled in a sad heap. I asked him if he was okay but he only looked at me and made those wheezy, choking sounds. I held his hand and tried to smile, to reassure him. I swiped my face, thought I was bleeding, too, but it was only tears. I suppose some part of me comprehended that he was dying. I pushed my glasses up my nose and stretched my neck to see out the fractured windshield. Natalie and Stacy walked along the road, moving farther and farther from the bus. I’m pretty sure the next house was a couple of miles. Walking might take a while. Maybe they didn’t feel like running.

  I would have run.

  I held Mr. Russell’s hand for a very long time but no one came to help. I gazed out at the road in hope of spotting my dad’s truck, but the road was deserted for as far as I could see. It cut through the fields and flanked the trees like a long black snake slithering off into the mountains. “That’s the good thing about living outside town,” Dad always said. “You might go all day without a single car passing on the road.”

  That afternoon it was not a good thing.

  Mr. Russell had stopped gasping for breath and he wasn’t blinking anymore. Looking at him gave me a bad feeling in my chest and my head still hurt. I tried valiantly not to cry anymore but those awful hiccupping sobs got the better of me, and the tears wouldn’t stop flowing down my heated cheeks.

  Finally, I decided that maybe the girls had forgotten about Mr. Russell and me. I wouldn’t put it past them. So I promised him I would be right back and I made my way across the seats to the other end of the bus, then climbed out the emergency door and jumped into the knee deep grass. The sun had nested on the treetops sending shadows across the road, but I had some time before it got dark so I started to run. Running made my head hurt worse but I kept going.

  The wind whispered through the trees on my right and I could have sworn something moved in the tall weeds. Probably only a rabbit. Maybe a fox.

  Could be a coyote.

  Not scared, I told myself. Not scared.

  I shivered as the brisk air cut right through my pink sweater. Pink was not really my color but my mother loved it. She and Natalie always wore something pink. Even the little ballerina slippers on my sister’s silver necklace were pink.

  I decided that if I kept going as fast as I could I might catch up with Natalie and Stacy. Maybe I would even beat them to our house. Taking the shortcut I’d found once when I was walking in the woods seemed like the right thing to do. I did that a lot back then, walk in the woods with our dog Sam. Something else the other kids made fun of.

  Who walks in the creepy old woods? Emma Graves. The girl who digs up bones.

  Taking the shortcut might have actually been a reasonably good idea except I wasn’t mature enough to comprehend that I had a concussion and that I was merely a child who was rattled and not thinking clearly.

  Instead of finding my way home, I ended up lost. Night came and I was all alone and so very terrified. I walked in the darkness until I could walk no farther. Finally, I curled up under a tree. At some point that night I felt Sam’s nose nudge me but I was too cold and too exhausted to move. I couldn’t even open my eyes. Instinctively understanding the danger of the falling temperature, the big animal curled around me, warming my body like an electric blanket. Later, I learned the temperature dropped just below freezing that night. Dogwood winter, they called it.

  The whole community turned out to look for us, prowling the woods and fields all night. The first pale red streaks of dawn variegated the sky before one of the search tea
ms found me, but it was Sam’s barking that woke me. He heard their voices and their tromping around well before they reached us and began to bark, the sound booming through the woods like thunder. I was colder than I had ever been in my life and I hurt all over, especially my head. I will never forget how my mother cried and how tightly she held me when she drew me into her arms. My dad, too. Most of the people who had been looking for me were crying as well.

  On that cold, weary morning I represented a fragile thread of hope.

  That day, twenty-five years ago, they found me, alive if a little cold and banged up. But the others—my big sister and her friend who always sat in the very back seat of Madden County School bus number 9—were never seen or heard from again.

  Mother and Dad were so sad for so long that I worried they would never smile again. Nothing was the same. As much and as often as I resented Natalie’s perfectness and the way she drew all Mother’s love and attention like the moon drawing the tide, I missed her so much. Every night when I went to bed I cried and prayed it wasn’t my fault that she was gone. God knew I’d wished her away a million times.

  As the months and years marched on folks still mentioned the missing girls from time to time, especially at reunions, weddings and funerals. I became the little girl who was found while the others were lost. Stacy’s father wanted to know why I came back and not the others. The police, the reporters—they all wanted to know what really happened but I couldn’t tell them because I didn’t remember then any more than what I recall today. Natalie and Stacy walked away from the bus—just the two of them. I didn’t see anyone else. There was no other car or truck, just the school bus lying like a wounded animal in the ditch.