Healing Stones

by Nancy Rue

  I heard a rip and realized I was holding a torn piece of Section A between my thumb and index finger. So much for no publicity, St. Clair. Why didn’t he just say it: “The two of them are rejects from Sodom and Gomorrah, and you haven’t heard the last of it from me.”

  He was so careful not to lie, yet so deliberate in casting doubt. I fought the urge to shred the front page as if it were Kevin’s liver lips. Above me something creaked, unmistakably Christopher’s door, which had squeaked like a yawning puppy from the day we moved in. I riveted my eyes to the ceiling. He wasn’t trying to sneak now as his feet fell with purpose down the hall in the direction of our bedroom. I strained to listen.

  Was he waking Rich up with this? The urge to torture Mom must have overwhelmed the need to protect Dad.

  I thought of fleeing. Behind that came a vision of me catapulting myself up the stairs and pulling Christopher out of our room, arms clasped around his ankles. But I could only stare at the newsprint.

  There was more. Repelled by sickening anxiety and pulled by the need to do penance, I read on.

  Ethan Kaye, embattled CCC president, was present at the meeting but still refused to comment directly on the sudden faculty vacancies. He told the board he was saddened by the effect the suspicions were having on the students and expressed a desire to “get back to the business of educating them.”

  Kevin St. Clair responded, “No—let us now begin to educate them.”

  My head shook.

  Brandon Stires, theology major at CCC, told this reporter that rumors abound regarding the stability of Ethan Kaye’s job.

  “I don’t know if [the rumors are] true,” Stires said, “but if they boot him out, we lose the chance to understand what Christianity is about and move toward union with God. We’re not going to get that from Dr. St. Clair.”

  Ethan’s own words, quoted almost verbatim by Brandon, pressed down on my chest.

  I had done this. I’d jeopardized a dream that wasn’t mine to risk, and now its shards were trembling, waiting to fall from the crack I’d made. And they weren’t going to crash on me alone.

  Or had they already? My chest crushed me, so hard I could barely breathe. I gasped for air and felt my legs go numb.

  Purse still on my arm, I shot from the chair, clawing at the newspaper to get it off me. The back pages paved the floor, and I slid across them as I careened to the front door. The pain was so suffocating I wheezed. My hands were almost too numb to find the knob.

  Finally damp, cold air blasted in my face, and I all but collapsed on the porch. Dear God—was I having a heart attack? I shoved my head between my knees and tried to slow down my heart, or I was sure it would physically break. I didn’t know how long I sat there, groping back from the edge of terror, when someone said, “Are you all right?”

  I shook my forehead against my knees.

  “Should I call 911?”

  I didn’t recognize the voice, and since my chest no longer threatened to rip open, I looked up. A stocky man stood before me on the front walk. Thirtyish, with a receding hairline that ended cleanly at a Chia-pet crop of perfectly rounded dark brown hair. The small blue eyes behind the rimless glasses showed real concern.

  “How ya doin’?” he said.

  “I don’t need an ambulance.”

  He nodded so sagely, I expected him to pull out a paramedic’s card and a stethoscope. “Heart condition?”

  I smeared away the tears that pooled below my eyes. “Not that kind.”

  “You want me to help you inside?”

  That was the last place I wanted to go.

  “No,” I said. “I need to leave.”

  “Like, drive?”

  I nodded and stared at my Jeep. If it would only fling open its doors, pull me in, and take me away.

  “You might want to sit here a minute before you do that,” Chia Man said. “I’m not a doctor, but I think you might have had an anxiety attack. Try taking a couple of deep breaths.”

  I did, and felt a few nerves release their death grip on my shoulders.

  “Take a few more. Concentrate on the exhale.”

  “You ought to be a doctor.” My voice came back from far away.

  “That would be a trip. How are you feeling now?”

  “Better.”

  “Couple more breaths. Give your pulse a chance to slow down.”

  Slowly my heartbeat stopped pounding in my ears. I tried to smile at Chia Man, who watched me carefully.

  “If you’re not a doctor, what are you?” I rubbed my forehead. “That was probably rude—who are you? Are you a friend of Rich’s?”

  “Actually,” he said, “I was looking for Demitria.”

  Even in my still-shaken state, I felt my eyes narrow. Nobody called me Demitria except Rich and people who were reading my name off a telemarketing list.

  Or maybe someone trying to serve me with divorce papers. My pulse picked up.

  “Would that be you?” he said.

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Fletcher Basset. Reporter for the Independent—”

  “Go away,” I said.

  I stood up and steadied myself, one tall pole of anger.

  “So you are Demitria Costanas?”

  “Get away from my house and leave my family alone. They are not part of this.”

  He peered at me calmly. “Part of what?”

  I took the first step down, and he backed up, face still serene.

  “Part of whatever it is you think you came here to find out. Now get off my property before I call the police.”

  “Hey—” He put up a hand. “It’s cool. I’m gone.”

  He kept his eyes on me as he took a few more steps back and then turned to go. I watched him fumble in his jacket pocket and pull out something he muttered into as he made his way casually to his car.

  I stayed until he was gone, though I could almost see a report of my near nervous breakdown on the front page of the Port Orchard Independent. Could it possibly get any worse?

  Evidently it could, because the front door opened and Christopher stepped out.

  “What are you doing?” He folded his arms, feet spread like a club bouncer.

  “Leaving,” I said. “But I want you to listen to me.”

  His shoulders jerked.

  “There was a reporter here just now. His name is Fletcher Something— some dog name.” Dear Lord, I sounded like an idiot. “Do not talk to him—and under no circumstances let him in the house or near Jayne or your father.”

  “Why, Mom?” Christopher said. “Are you afraid we’ll tell him the truth?”

  He might as well have hit me, right across the face.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll make sure your mess doesn’t drag the rest of us down.”

  He clicked my front door shut, and I stood there as outside as it was possible to feel. I balled my hands into fists, which is how I discovered that I still clung to the scrap I’d torn from the newspaper. I looked at it now.

  My sweaty fingers had smeared the ink, but the image was clear— Zach’s face, unchanged, unaffected. I peeled it off and wadded it into a tiny ball, but my hands were black with newsprint. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t get it off me.

  I found my cell phone and called Ethan for Dr. Sullivan Crisp’s number.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I stood back and surveyed my decorating project: refurbishing the dining alcove. “Dining” was too rich a word to describe the kind of eating I would do at the rickety faux-maple table anyway, so I disbursed all the equally-as-unstable chairs but one, filled a Daily Bread coffee mug with pens and pencils, and set up my laptop facing Puget Sound. It was now my office.

  I tapped the touch pad on the computer and brought my “work” to light: The List. It was all I had to do—and that fact sank onto me like the mist hanging stubbornly over the sound.

  I jittered my fingers on the surfaces of the keys and missed the clacky sound my nails used to make. I’d gnawed them down to the tip
s of my fingers. I’d also taken to hauling on the same pair of sweat-pants every day and skipping the eyebrow tweezing and the teeth whitening. In three weeks I had become someone I hardly recognized in the mirror. I woke up every day on the window seat, faced with nothing.

  Except The List.

  I drew myself up in the chair and took on my professorial posture and created a new page. GET RICH BACK went at the top. Under it, I typed

  a. SEE DR. SULLIVAN CRISP

  b. DO WHAT HE SAYS

  I read the list again, and my eyes swam. Getting Rich back was the most important work I would ever do.

  All right. Next page. I typed FOCUS ON KIDS.

  CALL JAYNE

  CALL CHRISTOPHER

  Good grief. Here was a woman who wrote a doctoral dissertation on the role of story in spiritual growth, and yet the sight of those four words left me limp in the chair. All I had to do was pick up the phone. And all they had to do was—what? Hang up?

  I reached for my cell phone, set in its charger, perfectly parallel to the laptop. I had to take this step, no matter what I might hear on the other end. At least it would be a voice I loved—even if it didn’t love me back.

  As the line rang I rehearsed. Hey, Jay. It’s still early—how ’bout I take you to school and we can get caught up—

  “Hello?”

  For a shocked second I thought the voice belonged to Rich. It was quick and brusque and sounded as if it were in charge of the house. But it was Christopher.

  “Hi!” I said.

  Ugh. Too bright. Too rise-and-shine.

  “Look, Demitria,” he said, “I don’t have anything to say to you.”

  Demitria? Had my son called me Demitria?

  “What about Jayne?” I said.

  “She doesn’t want to talk to you either.”

  “No, I mean is she there?”

  “She already left. Did you forget her schedule—or did you ever know it?”

  My throat tightened. “I know her schedule, Christopher,” I said. “She has dress rehearsal tonight, and I’d like to pick her up afterwards, so tell your dad—”

  “I’m picking her up,” he said. “It would be too weird for her anyway.”

  “Weird?” I said.

  “Look, do you want to make her tell you to your face that she doesn’t want you around?”

  I squeezed the cell phone and charged across the apartment, the other hand clamped to the back of my neck.

  “What are you talking about, Christopher? Come right out and say it.”

  “Okay. She doesn’t want you coming to her play.”

  My neck muscles hardened beneath my fingers.

  “After all this stuff that’s been in the papers, she thinks everybody knows about your ‘thing,’ and she doesn’t want a bunch of people gossiping about it when they see you there. Seriously—it would be weird for her to have to tell you to your face.”

  So you’re more than happy to do it for her. I wanted to say that, and I would have, if my throat hadn’t closed over the words.

  “I need to go,” Christopher said. “Anything else?”

  Yes, I wanted to cry out when we hung up. Everything else.

  Panic rose as I looked at the list again.

  FOCUS ON KIDS

  How was I supposed to focus on my daughter when I couldn’t even see her? When Christopher was sheilding her from me like a firewall? I realized I was still holding the phone—covered in my palm sweat.

  I wanted to throw it across the room. It was an alien feeling, yet not as foreign as the one that came behind it: that if my son walked into the path of the flying phone, it wouldn’t bother me a bit.

  Yeah. It was time to get out of there. And there was really only one place to go.

  Christopher worked part time at The Good Word, a Christian bookstore in Bremerton, one of the myriad small towns that fit together into the puzzle of Kitsap County. The store, shaped like a castle turret, beckoned largely female buyers looking for the latest in Christian romance or a nice plaque for the Sunday school teacher. Christopher’s job, as I’d witnessed myself with mouth twitching, was to make them feel as if they were making such wise choices they might possibly want to expand their horizons even further.

  He was in that very act when I pulled into a parking space at the gingerbread-trimmed window and watched through the drizzle on my windshield. He smiled over the top of the cash register at a middle-aged woman with a flattened perm who gazed at him as if her faith in the younger generation had been restored by his just-washed hair and the sincere nodding of his head.

  My heart pounded again with the sickening urge to run from something I couldn’t escape. I fumbled feverishly with the door handle, launched myself out of the Jeep, and tore unseeingly across the parking lot.

  By the time I got onto the porch of the Victorian Teahouse, across from the bookstore, I could breathe again. In came the smells of strawberry-rhubarb pie and scent-saturated candles and the perfume of women who could sit calmly sipping tea and chatting about things that only a few weeks of my lifetime ago I had cared about too. Normal things.

  I longed for a little bit of normal. So with a cup of chamomile and a finely chiseled slice of raspberry cheesecake, I sat at a table in a corner and fingered the lace on the tablecloth and watched. Watched until my son emerged from The Good Word, shrugging into his Northface jacket and slinging his backpack across slim shoulders that had not yet formed into manhood. He still had that walk—stalky and forward lurching, just as it had been at ten when he’d worked so hard not to be a little boy.

  He stopped abruptly, and I realized as I followed his gaze that he’d spotted the Jeep. He lurched toward it and peered inside, hands on the hood, and then straightened to scan the parking lot.

  Who was this bristling slice of man-child who searched for me as if I were invading his life?

  I shrank from the window. I had no idea. And I didn’t know when I’d stopped knowing who he was.

  I didn’t leave the apartment for the next two days. The List was still on the computer, though it went into hibernation just like I did. The only time I emerged was Sunday morning, when I went out to empty the trash that overflowed with Mickey’s take-out containers from the refrigerator. Almost the minute I cracked the door open, she pounced as if she’d been staked out at the bottom of the steps leading up to her porch for hours. She was almost lost in a huge sweatshirt with a stand-up collar that reached her cheeks.

  “I said I wasn’t going to bug you—but that doesn’t rule out checking to see if my tenant has died in her apartment.”

  Her eyes slid over me, and I surprised myself with a rusty laugh. “I guess you can’t rule that out, can you?”

  Mickey smiled like a wise elf, so that her eyes were sad. “Look, I don’t know what you’ve got going on—and you don’t have to tell me—”

  She paused slightly, and I knew she hoped I would anyway. It made me laugh again. I sagged against the wall and folded my arms across the sweatshirt I hadn’t taken off in three days.

  She peered at me intently, between two strands of the mushroom cap that separated over her eyebrows. “I’m going to go ahead and get this out,” she said. “Are you unemployed? Seriously, is that why you’re holed up in the basement?”

  Hers was not a face you lied to.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Saying it was surprisingly like chipping off a piece of plaque from my brain. It left a breathing piece of freedom. So I added, “I had to resign.”

  “Meaning you would have been canned if you hadn’t quit first,” she said. “I hate that for you.”

  “I brought it on myself.” Another chunk came loose. “I had to do the right thing.”

  “Which doesn’t pay the bills or get you off the couch.” She drew her neck up from the stand-up collar. “Here’s the deal. Oscar and I have been talking, and we want to offer you a job at the restaurant.”

  What I did then gave new meaning to the phrase “burst into tears.”

/>   Her smile wavered. “Is that a yes?”

  “I don’t know what it is,” I said.

  “It’s a step out that door. You can try it for a day or two, and if you hate it, no hard feelings. After I put you on a guilt trip, of course.”

  A mischievous laugh lurked in her throat, making me nod.

  “Cool,” she said, and picked up a handled bag from the step and offered it to me. “We’ll see you at seven tomorrow morning. And, uh, charming as that outfit is, we’d rather you wore the uniform. This ought to be about your size.”

  She surveyed me in her open, hang-lipped, kid-staring-at-you-in-a-restaurant way. “Although I think you’ve gone down a size already since you’ve lived here. You’re required to eat whatever lunch I fix you on the job. Otherwise you’re fired.”

  “Yes, Boss,” I said. Another chunk loosened itself from the hard place, and I actually felt myself smile. “This isn’t a pair of micro-shorts, is it?”

  “We don’t do hooker wear,” she said.

  I’d passed the Daily Bread on Main Street in Port Orchard probably a hundred times, but I had only an inkling of what it was about. The fact that it still showed a certain degree of class in spite of the paint job on Main was a point in its favor.

  In the nineties, during a downtown renovation project, the design-challenged city council hadn’t been able to make up its mind how to redecorate Main Street. One night, after the petty infighting had gone on for months, a dentist and his son had painted all the balconies and storefronts the most hideous shade of bilious blue known to man.

  Nothing could erase the graceful loveliness of the hill that streamed straight down to the water, but the juxtaposition of every-one-its-own-character buildings and the decorating-gone-wrong color scheme was jarring—if not a little bit embarrassing to the 8,650 of us who lived there.

  But according to the city council, it was clean and done—and they were once again speaking to each other.

  The Daily Bread rose above. The neat, simply penned signs that hung by hemp ropes from the main one proclaimed it to be Beyond Probiotic and Foods Prepared As Our Maker Intended. The only visions I had previously conjured up were ones of lava lamps and endlessly chanted tunes and too many wind chimes. So I wasn’t prepared for the exquisitely real simplicity that waited inside.