by Nancy Rue
“So—” Sully picked his way. “If you fix yourself, that will automatically make things all right?”
The look she gave him almost made him laugh. The word duh was not far away.
“It makes sense to me,” she said. “I’m the one who screwed up.”
“Okay,” Sully said. “So let me ask you this, then—just something to think about for a minute.”
She jerked a nod.
“Can you think of anybody in your past—somebody important to you—who distanced himself or herself from you—so it hurt?”
Demi thrust her head forward so abruptly, Sully was sure there was a Don’t you get it? in his near future.
“Why dig up my past?” she asked. She huffed out a breath. Frustration practically smoked from her ears. “I was a great kid growing up. I didn’t lose it and mess up my entire life until six months ago.”
Sully squeezed through the space he’d been prying open. “You say you want to know what’s ‘wrong’ with you now. Well—your past is your present, and if we don’t dig it up, it could also be your future.”
She looked at him, and Sully could see the wavering that must be tormenting her every waking moment—and probably most of the sleeping ones too.
“I can’t help you figure out why you’ve done what you’ve done unless I know more about you,” he said. “That’s all.”
She didn’t answer.
“And even then, you’ll be the one figuring it out—”
“If I could do that, don’t you think I would have by now?”
“No—because you need somebody to give you multiple choice selections. You game?”
She pushed two hunks of hair behind her ears and showed the first sign of letting go of the purse and its backup, the P-coat. That was good, since what he was going to try next could make her want to clobber him.
He leaned forward. “Are you ready to play Deal or No Deal?”
Her brow went awry. “Excuse me?”
“A little Game Show Theology.” He tilted his head at her. “Look, Demi—I’m not trying to make light of what you’re going through. But I have the feeling that you’re worn out from working this thing—taking it apart and wringing it out and trying to fit it back together—and right now it’s in pieces all around you. I’m not sure we can get them into a new picture unless we play with them some. That’s what I’d like to do.”
“Play?” she said.
“Just play,” he said.
He was sure the corners of her mouth wanted to turn up, but there wasn’t a smile left in her anywhere.
“Sit tight,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
He dashed into the garage and did a quick scan. Two tool cases and—what else? He snatched both of those up and tucked a metal bucket under one arm. When he set them next to his chair in the office, Demi eyed the collection incredulously.
Sully sank into his chair and picked up the empty toolbox.
“In case number one,” he said, “is the possibility that you were born with a defective gene that makes you adultery material.”
“Hello!” she said.
“I see we’re not choosing case number one.”
“How ’bout no!”
“In case number two—” He picked up a ratchet case. “The possibility that you don’t believe any of the things in the Bible that you profess to believe. You’ve been a fraud all this time.”
She blinked, hard. That was one she’d obviously considered. He was relieved when she discarded it.
“So much for case number two,” Sully said, before she could reconsider. She was breaking his heart.
“Then how about case number three?” he said. “Which is, by the way, the only case left.”
Demi looked at it, a wisp of wistfulness in her eyes. Good.
“In case number three”—Sully picked up the metal bucket—“lies the possibility that your husband distancing himself from you may have made it easier for you to justify your affair. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have been able to do it.”
She clenched the coat.
Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding, Sully said softy in his head. The right answer—because it was the one she resisted. Even now she was kneading the purse too. She would throw it at him without so much as a by-your-leave if he pushed even an inch further—although, in his opinion, the best work got done in therapy when projectiles were thrown.
When she reached over and picked up the river rock from the desk, he did prepare to duck.
“Please just throw this at me,” she said.
Sully guffawed out an “Excuse me?”
“Let’s get it over with. You know—like they used to do to adulteresses in the Bible.” Her voice warbled with weak humor. It was the closest she was going to get to crying in this session.
“Maybe I don’t want to know why I did it,” she said. “Maybe I just need counseling for how to fix me.” She looked ruefully at the rock. “Or maybe I need somebody to knock me in the head and tell me I’m an idiot for even trying.”
“Which would help how?” Sully said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know anything.”
Ding-ding-ding, Sully thought again. A place to start.
She was still looking at the rock, and Sully grinned.
“Just so you know,” he said, “I haven’t thrown that at anybody yet.”
She gave a soft grunt. “Almost everybody else in my life has thrown one at me. Maybe you haven’t met anybody as bad as me yet.”
“How bad do you think you are?”
“Think about it. I’m a Christian. A professor at a Christian college. A mother. A wife—I thought. And by the way”—she cocked her head. “Ethan told me you’re a Christian counselor. I’m not exactly getting a sense of that here.”
“Because I’m not quoting Scripture?”
“Well, yeah. We didn’t even start with a prayer.”
“Do you want to pray?”
“No,” she said, before he even got out his last syllable. So—she was straight-arming God right now.
Sully recrossed his legs. “I can give you chapter and verse, and that’s what some of my colleagues would do. But as you just mentioned, you’re a professor at a Christian college. You have a doctorate in theology.” He smiled at her. “You could probably tell me what verses to apply to this situation.”
“We could start with the Ten Commandments,” she said dryly. “Number eight, to be exact.”
“Which you knew before you broke it. So me parading that in front of you would help how?”
“Exactly my point. If I’m this Christian, and I could commit a sin like this, maybe I’m basically a tramp.”
“Do you really think you’re a tramp?”
“No.”
“Then you were right to begin with.” He shrugged. “You did this for a reason, but it doesn’t make sense to you now.”
“Ya think?”
“At the time it did though, because it was based on a premise you believed then. You follow?”
“Go on.”
“Maybe together we can find out what that premise was and how you got to it in the first place.”
She lowered her voice in imitation. “And that helps how?”
“Because—when you had the affair, you were reacting accurately to what you believed. It was what you believed—the premise—that wasn’t accurate.”
“Give me an example.”
Sully resituated himself in the chair. “If I believe it’s every man for himself, I’m probably not going to show up at the soup kitchen to serve the homeless.”
Her eyes took on the intelligent gleam he’d seen in the picture. “So if I didn’t believe I was capable of being unfaithful to my husband, why did I act like I was? That’s what we’re looking for, right?”
“There you go. Now, I warn you, it might take time to figure out your premise. And then if you’re still interested in change, we can help you develop one that’s actually true. That’s where God comes in a
nd starts shaping.”
“And that will help me get my family back?” she said.
He scooted to the edge of the chair.
“You’re going to get yourself back. You didn’t just cheat on your husband, Demi. You cheated on you.”
She looked at him helplessly, as if she’d grown ten years younger since she walked in. Maybe a little of God’s light was peeking through the cracks.
“Ever watch Family Feud?” Sully asked.
“What is with the game shows?” She finally let the corners of her mouth turn up. “Okay—yeah—years ago.”
“On that show, within thirty minutes there’s a winner and a loser, and everybody immediately starts to adjust to the new shift. You see what I’m saying?”
“Yeah . . .”
“You have your own family feud going on, as I see it—only it’s going to take more than half an hour to determine who wins.” He leaned so far toward her, his own chair almost tipped. “I hope everybody does, Demi.”
And then he waited.
She pulled into herself as if she were gathering everything he’d dropped into her lap so she could take it away for examination.
“So I have to come back, then?” she said. Her tentative smile was bemused. “I’m not going away fixed today?”
“If you want to come back, I’ll be here.”
“How about tomorrow?”
“You might need a little more time to process what we’ve talked about.”
“Process how?” She planted her fingers on the sides of her head. “Tell me what to do.”
“Ding! Ding! Ding!”
“What?”
“That’s what happens when you ask the right question.”
“Do you have the right answer?”
“No—but you do. We’ll take Childhood for $500. Will you find a picture of yourself as a little girl before age ten?”
She pulled in her chin. “That’s it?”
“Put her where you can see her and talk to her often.”
She didn’t give him the incredulous What? this time. In fact, she seemed resigned to his inanity. “What do you want me to talk to her about?” she said.
Sully looked into the brown eyes he could imagine as dark pools of fudge on a child-face.
“Ask what she believes about herself,” he said.
She straightened her shoulders and stood up, hand outstretched again. The college professor slid back into place.
“Thank you. I’ll think about it.”
“You want to come back a week from now? Tell me what you’ve thought?”
“Tentatively,” she said. “I’ll call you if I’m not coming.”
Sully nodded. “Fair enough.”
He walked her halfway through the garage, until she picked up the pace and went the rest of the way alone.
No little girl showed herself in the woman who drove away in the toy she came in. Sully leaned against Isabella. Little Demi had the answers. He hoped he’d have the chance to find out what they were.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Hi, Jay,
I just had the most bizarre experience on the planet. As you yourself would say, it totally weirded me out.
I went to see a therapist. Counselor, shrink—I bet you’d have a funky word for it. That would have been strange enough—just going to someone I don’t even know and telling him my deepest desire—to get you back, Jay. You and Dad and Christopher. That’s all I want in this world—and that’s why I went to him, because I hope he can help me.
But it was so not-what-I-expected, and I’m not sure even you would have a word for it. Less like what you see on TV and in the movies, and way more like being on a game show—you know, Wheel of Fortune meets Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. There I was with Regis, Vanna, and Bob Barker all rolled into one.
Are you getting a sense of how desperate I am to figure out what it was that made me betray you as I did—so we can be together again? Jay, please—
Mom
I put down the pen, folded the letter in half, and stuck it into my bag with the ten others I’d written to my daughter. Letters to Christopher had their own folder. So did the ones to Rich. I hadn’t sent any of them. Every text message and e-mail I had sent to each of them—every day—had been ignored. If I didn’t send the letters, I didn’t run the risk of having them returned.
“Demi—meet my kid.”
I straightened up from the bag and turned to greet the college daughter Mickey told me would be coming back in to help out at the Daily Bread now that her spring break was over. I expected a younger elf from the gnome-like clan. I didn’t expect a former student.
“Dr. Costanas!”
“Audrey?”
She was that little wisp of a thing who’d transferred in at the start of the semester. Of course she was Mickey’s daughter, with a marvelous mouth that took up the entire bottom half of her face and fudge-colored hair that capped her head, probably no matter what else she tried to do with it.
“What are you doing here?” Her eyes were bigger and rounder than Mickey’s, especially now.
Mickey squinted at us. “You two know each other?”
“This is Dr. C.!” Audrey dove at me and, to my surprise, put her arms around my neck. “I’ve missed you—everybody has missed you!”
“Okay—can I play?” Mickey said. She pulled a head of garlic from the bunch dangling near her head, but she kept her eyes on the two of us.
“This is Dr. Costanas, Mom,” Audrey said. “She is—was—one of my teachers at CCC.” Audrey stepped back from me, arms dangling as if she didn’t know what to do with them now. “And the only one who was worth fifty cents for a box of Twinkies. I don’t even know where they dug up the guy they replaced you with.”
I must actually have looked as if I’d just had my nose hairs yanked out, because she prayed her hands at her lips and drooped. “I’m sorry—I guess you don’t want to talk about that, huh?”
She had no idea how much I didn’t want to talk about it. It was one thing to have Mickey now know where I was unemployed from. But if the why came out, there would be one more person I couldn’t look in the eye. They were stacking up so high I could take a body count.
“But how cool is it that you ended up here?” Audrey said.
“Oh—pretty cool,” I said.
“I mean, this is great for me. Like I said, we miss you. It just bites without you and Dr. Archer. But now we can, like, hang out—”
“Right now you’re going to go ahead and hang out with the customers,” Mickey said.
“We’ll talk later,” Audrey half whispered over her shoulder as Mickey ushered her toward the door.
That’s what I was afraid of.
I reached for the celery and turned to the juicer. Mickey got herself in front of it, arms folded.
“Don’t go getting that I’m-such-a-loser look on your face,” she said. She nodded toward the dining area, where Audrey’s voice lifted like the song it was. “You want me to get her off you? She can ask more questions than a civil litigator.”
I didn’t know what to say. I felt like my brain had gone through the juicer.
“Done,” she said. “Do the apple-celery combination—and use the Granny Smiths.”
As she started for the door, I leaned on the counter, looking down at the pile of stalks, struck with an aching loneliness. “I don’t want her to not talk to me,” I said. “I didn’t get a chance to know her before I left.”
“Feel free to get to know all you want,” Mickey said, pushing the swinging door to the kitchen open with her back. “There’re a few things I’d like to know myself. She just doesn’t need to get to know you any better at this point. Am I right?”
“Thank you,” I said to my celery.
“Don’t mention it,” Mickey said.
I didn’t know what Mickey said to Audrey. Audrey and I worked side by side for the next few days, but she didn’t ask me anything about why I left, what happened to Zach, or whether I was comin
g back.
She did talk though. While she grated lemons—over the washing of kale—between the words of the orders she called through the opening to Oscar, who, I figured out early on, was her stepfather.
“She can talk longer than you can listen to her,” Mickey told me.
The first day I learned all about her roommate in the dorm, who listened to Kelly Clarkson and left her toenail clippings on the floor—and for Pete’s sake, who needed to clip their toenails that much anyway?
I had to wait for the next day’s lull to hear about Boy, the new guy Audrey was dating.
“Boy is so cute,” she told me over the sink full of soapy muffin tins we were wallowing in. “I have never dated a guy so cute—no, he’s hot. I mean it.”
“Does Boy have a name?” I said.
“He does. But I’m not referring to him by it yet—you know, to my family, friends like you. I just call him Boy.”
I stopped, hand suspended and full of soap. “And that would be because . . .”
“Because until I know a relationship is actually going somewhere, I like to keep it impersonal. If I say, ‘It didn’t work out with Boy,’ people go, ‘Oh, that’s too bad. Next?’”
“But if you call him by name . . .”
“Then it says we have a relationship, and if it doesn’t happen, it’s a bigger deal to say, ‘Percival and I broke up.’” She gave a sigh.
I took that to mean she’d had her share of Percivals. And what was she? Nineteen?
“So—tell me about Boy,” I said. As if she needed an invitation.
I listened with deeper and deeper interest. There was something comfortingly familiar about that feminine, still-teenaged voice that tripped up and down its melodic ladder, making sounds and forming words that could only come from a girl-child trying to figure herself out.
We were well into an analysis of how Boy could be so, like, ridiculously intelligent and yet so—well, hot, at the same time, when I realized tears were backing up in my throat. She made me miss my daughter. Jayne was quieter, more serious, and less concerned with “hot,” as far as I knew. She could have been Jayne nonetheless—but she wasn’t. I was brewing jasmine tea with someone else’s daughter, not mine.
“You okay, Dr. C.?” Audrey said.
“Does this jasmine scent affect your sinuses?”