Healing Stones

by Nancy Rue

  From that moment, you sat apart from me and strained with every cell in your awkward adolescent body to take in what we were being told on CNN. If the phone rang, you answered it. If it was for me, you listened in. I held the receiver out for you, because that seemed the only way to hold you together.

  You finally surrendered to sleep at two AM. You didn’t wake up when the police officer came to the door. I remember stepping out onto the porch and fighting to keep the whole thing from blurring. That’s what happened to me the day I opened the door at age fourteen to a policeman who told us my father had been killed in an accident. Everything smeared into the surreal, and cut off my grief. I couldn’t let that happen this time. The poor officer was gray—both from the ashes and the shock he was obviously in. He knew your dad and Uncle Eddie, and his face worked against overwhelming pain.

  “Tell me straight out,” I said to him. “Is it Rich?”

  “Rich is okay,” he said. “It’s his brother.”

  He told me Dad got out and Uncle Eddie didn’t. He said he watched Rich fight everyone off and go back in and drag his brother’s charred and broken body out of the rubble.

  I wanted to go numb, Christopher. It was almost more than I could stand. But all I could think of was your father. I had a clear vision of that precious man holding onto his twin brother and feeling no life. Do you hear me, Christopher? All I could think of was getting to him, because no one can bear that kind of agony alone.

  That’s why I called Lydia Reardon back and asked for someone to come over and be with you kids. That’s why I left with the police officer without waking you up to tell you. I wasn’t trying to cut you out, son. I am your mother, but I am also your father’s wife. I had to be with him, just him—and he needed me, just me.

  I’ve never told you this, but they put me in an emergency vehicle so I could get to the workers’ staging area. I cannot even describe the scene. It was every film clip of a third world country under attack I’d ever seen—superimposed on indomitable American soil. That bright, blue-sky day was a smothering gray night, and there were my beloved Yorkies, their faces blackened with ash and smoke, striped with rivulets of sweat and tears.

  I found your dad sitting on a cot, a blanket around his shoulders, head in hands. He was so covered in ash I wouldn’t have recognized him except for the shoulders. Several firefighters I didn’t know were hanging out close by, but I could tell from the wary looks they were casting at him that they’d already figured out his was a solitary space. But I pushed into his circle of silence and I sat beside him and I put my arm across his back. It was like that with us, back then. I was never afraid to go to him and say, “What’s the deal? What’s going on?” Not the way I have been since.

  At first his body was a knot. All he said was, “They won’t let me go back in.”

  “You shouldn’t,” I said.

  He looked at me and said, “Eddie’s dead, Demitria.”

  And, then, Christopher, he cried. He sobbed—he wrenched himself to the very depths of his soul. I knew as I wept with him that when he pulled his identical twin brother out of what was left of the World Trade Center, it was like recovering his own body. How would he be able to live with that?

  You never saw that kind of grief in him. Even I never saw it after that. Maybe that was the beginning of what has come to be for our family.

  I stayed with him the rest of the night—got him to lie down on the cot while I sat on the floor. They let him return to the scene at daybreak, and I came home to you kids. Jayne was curled up on the couch in a fetal position. You’d just awakened, and I guess I don’t have to remind you that you were livid because I hadn’t taken you with me. I tried to get you to sit with me while I broke the news about Uncle Eddie, but you stood with your back against the fireplace while I gathered Jayne into my lap. When it was said, you went into the backyard and slammed your baseball against the fence, over and over and over. You were in so much pain, and I didn’t know what to do except let you feel it all the way through. That was all I knew to do, Christopher. If I was wrong, son, I’m sorry.

  I want you to know I believe I was drowning in that pain with you, and your father, and Sissy. With everyone, Christopher. All pain, all the time—that was all I knew for so long. If I made mistakes in that place, I am so sorry.

  Mom

  Sully folded the letter and tucked it into the folder. But its realness stayed in his hands and his gut. Was there no bottom to the pain this woman and her family had lived with the past six years? He choked and then let tears form.

  “You okay?”

  Sully looked up at a slightly misshapen version of Tatum.

  “Actually, no,” he said. “There is nothing okay about the tragedies of people’s lives.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that.”

  Sully tilted his head in surprise as she turned the chair across from him around and straddled it, forearms on the back.

  “The difference between you and me,” she said, “is you get emotional. I get bitter.”

  Sully slid the folder aside. “Bitter about—?”

  “Men in general.”

  “And Van in particular.”

  She gave a faux shudder. “I don’t know what I was thinking with him. Actually I do—he was a rebound boyfriend. That’s always a mistake.”

  “He obviously hoped for something more.” Sully leaned back ultra-casually. “I wonder what he’s going to do with that beautiful picture of you.”

  She paused in mid earring-fiddle. Spider monkeys today.

  “He dropped one,” Sully said.

  “I hope he burns the whole stack of them. He must have, like, hundreds. He thinks he’s this photographer. It was like dating the paparazzi.”

  There was no way. No way.

  “Does Van have a studio?” Sully said.

  Tatum’s face twisted. “Are you kidding? No—he’s still in college— if you can call it a college. He’s at CCC.”

  No way in heaven.

  Tatum took Sully’s plate and got up. “I don’t know why I rattle on to you every time you come in here. Must be because you actually listen.”

  Sully scooped up the folder. “You’re easy to listen to. Hey, thanks for the cake.”

  “Someday you have to tell me why you keep eating this stuff,” she said.

  “I’m hooked on it.”

  “Liar,” she said, and disappeared behind the counter.

  CHAPTER TWENTY - TWO

  I called South Kitsap Middle School that morning to have the office get a message to Jayne, saying I would meet her out front after classes. Then I spent the entire day at the Daily Bread torturing myself with all the reasons that was a mistake.

  What if she left school because she’d rather be suspended for truancy than have to face me?

  What if Christopher told Rich, and Rich had the school ban me from seeing her?

  What if Child Protective Services swept her away out a back door before I could get to her because Rich had reported I was an unfit mother?

  “And what if monkeys fly out of my nostrils?” I said to the lentils I was pouring into a pot.

  “That would be something to see.” Oscar paused on his way to the gas range. “I hope you’re winning that fight you’ve been having with yourself.”

  I looked into his whiskery-cherub face. Could there be any more compassion in this place?

  “I’m going to try to see my daughter today,” I told him. “And frankly, I’m freaking out.”

  He nodded his head of curls. “I get that. Mickey flopped around like a flounder all night worrying about Audrey.”

  I shifted—gratefully—to the dropping corners of his eyes. “She still having man trouble?”

  “Who knows?” Oscar said. “She’s in a funk, but she won’t talk to either of us about it.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. I covered the beans and headed for the door.

  “The only person she’ll talk to is you,” he said.

  I stopp
ed in the doorway. “Is that a hint?”

  “No.” He didn’t look up from a pot of steam. “It’s a straight-out request. Mickey won’t ask you, but I hate to see that kid suffering.”

  I was an expert on suffering, but that didn’t make me an expert on fixing it. I was beginning to think there were no fixers. Only listeners.

  But I went in search of Audrey and found her staring at a pot of oolong tea that had long since finished steeping. “Who does this go to?” I said.

  She jumped.

  “Pour a cup of chamomile for yourself,” I said. “And meet me back here. I’ll take this out.”

  Once I got the couple in the corner settled with their couscous and zucchini bread and their pot of oolong, I whispered to Mickey that Audrey needed a break.

  She whispered back, “You are an angel from heaven.”

  By the time I got to Audrey and the chamomile, she was crying, big hunky sobs that shook her whole body. I folded her into me and rocked her back and forth. For a moment all I could think of was whether anybody was doing this for Jayne.

  “It’s official,” she cried into my chest. “Boy dumped me.”

  “The cad.”

  “Oh, please don’t, Dr. C.” She shook her head against me. “I love him. He can’t be a jerk if I love him.”

  Sure he could. My mouth tasted bitter, but I kept it shut.

  “What did I do wrong?”

  I held her tighter—as much to keep from going out and finding the Boy so I could smack him as to comfort her down to the bone marrow.

  “I asked him,” she said. “But he said it just wasn’t working for him.”

  “Sometimes it isn’t the right fit,” I said through my teeth.

  “But I tried everything! I was the perfect girlfriend!”

  I pulled her out to arm’s length and held her by the shoulders. “You shouldn’t have to be perfect to please a guy, my friend. Either he loves you for who you are, or he doesn’t.”

  She searched my face with her raw, streaming eyes, as if she were waiting for more.

  “I know this hurts so bad you feel like you’re going to split in two,” I said.

  “It so does.”

  I cupped her face in my hands before it could crumple again. “But when it stops, you are going to be so thankful to be rid of this person, Audrey.”

  She tried to shake her head, but I held on. “I know his kind. He probably thought he loved you, but he doesn’t even know himself, so how can he possibly know you? He’s a user.”

  “Then I’m an idiot!”

  “No. He made you believe he was Mr. Wonderful. Nobody is savvy enough to see through that.”

  She nodded finally, and her face relaxed—but only for as long as it took for a new thought to crash in. She pulled away and buried her face in her hands.

  “What?” I said.

  “I can’t tell you.”

  I watched her shoulders crunch together so that they almost met in front of her, and I knew what I was seeing. She was headed into a cave I had frequented myself, and I couldn’t let her go there. I led her through the kitchen and out the back door. I once again held her face close to mine.

  “You don’t have to tell me this,” I whispered to her. “But if you do, you have my word that I will not judge you.”

  “You would never do anything like this, Dr. C. How can you help thinking I’m a tramp?”

  “Stop,” I said. “I don’t care what you did, you are not a tramp. Do you hear me?”

  She nodded miserably. “I slept with him. I knew it was wrong, but I wanted to give him everything—and I wanted all of him.” She crumbled, and I held onto her until she could catch herself again. “But now I feel so . . . dirty.”

  I let her sob. We stood there for a while—long enough for Oscar to poke his head out the back door, question me with Okay? fingers, and disappear back inside at my nod. Mickey, too, appeared and put praying hands up to her lips. This thing wasn’t bigger than the love that surrounded Audrey.

  When she was down to shudders, I looked into her face, blotchy with her inner mishmash.

  “Let the shame go,” I said to her. “You made a mistake, but it’s done. Let it go.”

  “How do I do that?”

  I bit my lip. Did I know? Enough to keep this child from losing herself in the pit I was only too well acquainted with? What did I know?

  That I loved. Remember. I could love.

  “Here’s what you do,” I said to her. “And it isn’t going to be easy.”

  “Tell me.” Her eyes welled again.

  “Go straight to God,” I said. “And dump it right at His feet. You go down with it if you have to.” I squeezed her shoulders. “Then leave it there and go on and do what you know is right now. That other is done. It doesn’t make you who you are. It just teaches you who to be.”

  She threw her arms around my neck, and the tears flowed again. If I weren’t a veritable crying fountain myself in those days, I would have wondered where they all came from. But I knew.

  “There’s not a chance on earth Wyatt Estes would risk using a student for this,” Ethan Kaye said. “I know Van Dillon. Estes would be out of his mind to trust that kid. Or any kid enrolled here, for that matter.”

  Sully turned halfway from the window in Ethan’s office and tapped the glass. “Somebody’s using students down there.”

  Ethan pulled himself from his desk chair with obvious effort and joined Sully at the full-length window. Below them a trickle of underclassmen stood, curved like question marks, propping up signs they seemed tired of carrying—as least as far as Sully could tell.

  “What’s on that one?” he said, pointing to a placard held by a coed with a cell phone in her other hand.

  Ethan squinted. The crevices around his eyes deepened. “Feed your faith and your doubts will starve,” Ethan read. He shrugged. “You can’t argue with that.”

  “Who says you want your doubts to die?” Sully said. “The questions make you think, make you dig.”

  “You know that because you’re not driven by fear.”

  “That’s what this is about, isn’t it?” Sully said. “Fear.”

  Ethan pushed his hands into his pockets. Sully watched his face— solid, sure, yet every line deepened with the gathering of thoughts. He’d seen it before in his mentor, but never with this kind of sorrow. Ethan Kaye had the look of a grieving man.

  “I can’t blame people for being afraid. We’re living in chaos.”

  Sully glanced out the window. “Or on automatic pilot.”

  “They go into automatic pilot because they’re afraid.” Ethan sighed. “We were moving in the right direction before Kevin St. Clair came on board. I’m not blaming him entirely—he has supporters.”

  “Not the least of whom is Wyatt Estes.”

  “On the faculty too. But I was making progress there.” He ran a tanned hand over his hair. “The students were speaking up about their concerns—over the war in Iraq, about environmental injustice, about the sickness of our economic standards. They were waking up to the fact that we can’t cling to the myth of American innocence anymore, that we have to be self-critical and look at our systems— the assumptions that have shaped our values.”

  Sully grew still—reverent. This was the Ethan Kaye who had influenced him as a young man. This was the wisdom Sully had learned to live by in his early twenties—that he still embraced.

  “We were getting the students to look at Jesus in the Gospels to answer their questions—grave, courageous questions.”

  “We being—”

  “Several of the faculty, including Demi. And Zach Archer, I thought.”

  “He was a poser,” Sully said.

  Ethan chuckled. “You sound like the kids.”

  “Sometimes the kids can nail it.”

  “I think you’ve nailed it.” Ethan’s face darkened. “I should have fired Archer the first time I suspected him of an affair.”

  Sully felt his chin pull in. “He h
ad an affair before Demi?”

  “Probably. Last spring. St. Clair was all over it then, but I had no evidence. I should have gone with my instincts.”

  “And had a lawsuit on your hands.” Sully tilted his head at Ethan. “You’re thinking none of this would be happening to Demi if you’d gotten rid of him then.”

  “Yeah, that is what I’m thinking. But then, none of us is entirely responsible for anyone else’s decisions, ultimately.”

  Ethan moved closer to the window and looked down. The thin sunlight slanted across his face, etching the lines of sadness more sharply. “I don’t like the way this is panning out. But I have to believe God’s in it—that there’s a purpose.”

  He closed his eyes, and Sully let his own drift shut.

  “We have to look at our own doctrine of sin in the church and be critical. There is nothing in the Gospels, coming from the mouth of Jesus, that says there are people who can’t be forgiven.” His voice dropped so low Sully had to strain to be included in the conversation Ethan was apparently having with God Himself. “I don’t want my students to be blinded by a toxic faith that sees anyone as being outside God’s concern—that justifies violence and sexism and racism and greed.”

  Sully opened his eyes to see Ethan pour his gaze over the scant line of students below.

  “They can live authentic lives, but not by simply buying into doctrines they’re not allowed to examine and experience.”

  He turned his eyes to Sully, though Sully was sure he was still seeing the fragility beneath his window. “Our striving with them is to be more like Jesus—who has grace for all.”

  Sully waited in the stillness that followed, but he couldn’t rest. Not until he cleared the way for Ethan Kaye.

  I wasn’t in the line of moms-in-cars in front of Cedar Heights Junior High School for two minutes before Jayne emerged like a wisp of smoke from the press of students and moved toward me. I gasped when I saw her.