Healing Stones

by Nancy Rue

  I couldn’t stop.

  “You proposed to me two months after we met. It was so right, Rich. And it still is.”

  I grasped at the silence.

  “It was a huge risk—as all the important things in life are, I’m learning. No, we didn’t know each other well when we got married. I learned only after the ceremony that you snored. That you burped. That you wouldn’t wear a tie ever again once that tuxedo came off and fell onto our hotel room floor. But none of that could overshadow your tenderness. Your appreciation of my jokes. Your calling out “Hey, Hon!” whenever you walked in the door at the end of your shift.”

  I paused, not for an answer, but for the courage to move into the next paragraph—the one that might bring him off the windowsill he leaned on.

  “The only dark discovery I made was that when you were upset about something, you brooded. Whether it was work issues, a worry over Eddie, something I said to hurt your feelings, you closed yourself off and stewed, often for an entire day. Drove me crazy. I got the same feeling of dread that came over me in my childhood when my mother meted out the silent treatment. I took it from her because I had no choice, but I couldn’t take it from you.”

  I drew in a rough breath.

  “I cried. I pleaded. I slammed cabinet doors. All the things I never dared do with my mother. I don’t think anyone had ever challenged your cavelike way of dealing with things, and over time, you began to at least tell me that you weren’t upset with me and you just needed to think things through on your own. It wasn’t my favorite compromise, but I learned to live with it. Until 9/11.”

  “Stop,” Rich said.

  “I’m almost through. Rich—please.”

  “I can’t—”

  “I didn’t know how to help you. You wouldn’t let me find a way, and that cut into the core of who I think I’m supposed to be.”

  I let the letter fall to the floor and took a step forward.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  “Just hear me then. I have this—this premise, they call it—that I live by. It tells me I’m supposed to be everything to everyone, and if I’m not, I’m a failure. Only you know me, Rich. You know I can’t do failure—I have to find a way to make it right. And here’s the screwy part.” I was close to tears. “When someone told me I was right, I believed him—and that started my downfall.”

  Rich didn’t move.

  “I know I can’t erase the past,” I said. “But I’m learning from it, Rich. That has to count for something, doesn’t it?”

  He sank to the edge of the windowsill and parked his wrists on his knees as he stared down at his feet.

  Did that sound too desperate? Dear Father in Heaven, I was desperate. This was my life—

  “You think we could make it work?”

  Rich’s voice was small. So small I wasn’t sure I’d heard it at all.

  “What?” I said.

  “You think we could make it work?”

  Oh, dear God.

  “Because, Demitria, I can never go through this again.”

  He looked up at me, eyes mapped with the pain I’d put there.

  “You won’t have to. It was the most horrible thing I have ever done in my life, and it will never, ever happen again.” My voice begged, and I didn’t care. He was saying yes.

  “It can’t be like before,” he said.

  “No—absolutely not.”

  “I don’t know what we’ll do about the house and the bills—but you can’t go back to work—not if we’re going to make it.”

  I blinked, hard and fast.

  He fisted his hands, stretched his arms, gathered up control before my eyes. “I gotta believe that’s what did it,” he said. “You working all the time—you said it yourself—you wanted to feel needed, and that’s where you did.”

  I studied his face. Tears had formed at the corners of his eyes, and the jaw muscles worked against them. I thought my chest would rip in half. He was asking me to give up a piece of my being. But I had said I’d do anything.

  “If you stay home, we can do this. Maybe.” His voice caught on a lurking sob. “I don’t know, Demitria. This scares me to death.”

  I pressed both hands against my mouth as I sank gingerly to the sill, not touching him. “Me too, Rich,” I said. “But we can do it. I know we can.” And then I heard myself add, “If you want me to stay home, I’ll stay home. We’ll figure out the money.”

  Rich didn’t take his gaze from me. “I want to believe you. Honest to God, I do.”

  We hunted for each other, eyes everywhere, my hands risking a reach for him. We almost found it—when I felt a presence in the doorway.

  “There is no way,” a voice said.

  With my fingers still straining toward Rich, I whirled around. Christopher stood there, face white and angular, like a jagged piece that didn’t fit what we were putting together. He inserted himself into the room, his eyes on Rich.

  “You’re not actually considering letting her come back,” he said. “I thought you decided—”

  Rich looked at me, face splotched, and said, “Your mother and I have been talking.”

  “So I see.” Christopher lowered his eyes to me. “What lies did she tell you this time?”

  Rich said nothing. Did nothing.

  “Please send him away,” I said between my teeth.

  “Christopher, you’re over the line, son,” Rich said. “Go on—we’ll talk later.”

  Christopher gave one long, disdainful hiss and left. I counted the steps until his bedroom door slammed.

  Rich stood up and disappeared into the bathroom.

  I sat, frozen.

  He came back into the doorway in a T-shirt that smelled like exhaust.

  “My career is not the only thing that’s going to have to change if I come back,” I said.

  He stayed in the bathroom doorway, put his hand up on the frame.

  I jutted my head forward. “Were you just going to sit there and let him talk to me like that?”

  “I sent him away.”

  “After I asked you to. Rich, he doesn’t run our lives. I don’t know what we did with him that made him think he could take over, but that has to change.”

  Rich shook out the bedspread, smoothed it out, and sat on it. “I’ll handle it my own way.”

  My face burned. “I need you to stand up for me with him, Rich,” I said. “We both have to look at the way we handle him.”

  He snapped his head toward me. “I don’t need you telling me how to deal with my son. It’s been the two of us through this thing—”

  “By your choice!”

  “He’s been a godsend,” he said. “I couldn’t do it without him.”

  “And now it’s time you did it with me. And he can’t be part of it— this is between us.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Rich put his hand up. “Let me get this straight, all right? You were the one who went out and slept with somebody else—now you’re begging me to take you back, only you want to make the rules about how it’s going to be.”

  I stared at him, hard.

  “Christopher is not what’s wrong with us. You—what you did— is what’s wrong with us.”

  “Then when do I get to be right again? When are you going to forgive me, Rich—so we can be equals again?” My voice was shrill and shaken. “I want to come home more than anything in this world— but only if you forgive me, because you know what? I am not going to live in shame for the rest of my life. If you—and our son—are going to hold this over my head forever, then you can forget it.”

  I watched Rich recoil into himself, watched him plant his hands on his hips, heard him say, “Then I guess you can forget it.”

  I got hold of Mickey and asked her to check on Jayne, who was home alone. Then I got there too and made it to the window seat before I collapsed into myself.

  But there were no tears. I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t claw at the cushions and call myself an idiot. I couldn’t even wish I could take it all ba
ck.

  Because I’d done the only thing there was to do. And now it was over.

  I laid my cheek on my knees, head to the side so I could watch the last of the houses perched on the hill across the street blend in blackness into the sound. I’d expected to be devastated should this ever happen, but it didn’t feel real. That “if ” still lurked. I could go back—if I did it on Rich’s terms. I’d thought I would do that no matter what they were. Sullivan Crisp had said I couldn’t.

  A curse on him and his game shows. He was right.

  I looked at my reflection, now clear in the window. I looked like a woman who’d just had a bout with destiny and barely come out with her life. But she’d come out—hair in hunks, eyes sagging into carry-on luggage, lips chewed to a feathery red—but she’d come out, and here she was. With nothing left to do but figure herself out, or she was lost for sure.

  I dug my face into my knees. I had to find my way—for Jayne— for what was left of my Christopher—for myself.

  For God. Because if I let go of where I was going before—my direction, my call—where did that leave me with God? I grabbed my knees and held on and groped for my breath.

  “Mom? Are you okay?”

  I snapped my head up. Jayne stood halfway between me and the kitchen. She clicked on the lamp and flooded herself in strawberry blonde light.

  “No,” I said. “But I will be.”

  “Okay.”

  She padded toward me. She nestled onto the window seat facing me with something in her hands.

  “Whatcha got?” I said.

  “I made this for you.”

  She held it out to me, requiring two hands. It was the Sullivan Crisp rock—now shiny with a coat of pink paint and bright yellow stripes with blue dots.

  “It was an ugly rock,” she said. “So I turned it into an Easter egg.”

  I put my hand sideways over my mouth, and for the first time in days—weeks—maybe months—I laughed. It bubbled up from a spring I’d forgotten I even had, and it didn’t stop.

  She wrinkled her fragile brow. “Is it funny looking?”

  “No—it’s absolutely delightful.”

  “It’s funny looking,” she said. “But that’s okay. You like it, right?”

  “I love it. It is the most precious thing I have ever seen.”

  She set it down between us and surveyed it—dispassionately, I thought. Which made me giggle even harder.

  “I might have an idea, actually,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s like transformation.”

  My laughter faded. “What do you mean, honey?”

  “You said you were supposed to make it into something besides a weapon to use on yourself. Easter eggs are like new birth and all that. So it’s transformed—and maybe we are too.”

  I looked at the girl who for an instant gave me a glimmer of a woman. Perhaps a woman wiser than I. And then she tilted her head at me.

  “Do you think I could have an Easter outfit?” she said.

  “Well—yeah—when’s Easter?”

  “Okay—you’ve been holed up in here too long, Mom. It’s this Sunday. Hello!”

  I laughed again.

  “We’ll go shopping,” I said. “Only—I mean, you’ll want to go to church.”

  “Not our church.” She rolled her eyes. “Christopher’s been making me go, and I feel like a beta fish.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “In a bowl. All these people are looking at us like, What’s wrong with your family? It feels weird because if somebody asks, I’m not allowed to tell them. So—no—can we find someplace else to go on Easter?”

  “We will do whatever you want,” I said.

  She got up and put the Easter egg on our coffee table. “There,” she said.

  Now in full display, the rock showed itself lopsided and garish, with paint hardened into a drip on one side. If that symbolized my transformation, I had a long way to go.

  But now I had a reason to go there.

  CHAPTER TWENTY - SIX

  You win.”

  Demi was barely inside the garage when she said it. Sully was still putting the intake manifold on, and he glanced at his watch.

  “I know I’m early.” She paused in her charge across the floor and drew her shoulders up to her ears. “Is that okay?”

  “If you don’t mind a little grease under my fingernails.” Something seemed different about her today, something that sent his antennae up. He followed her into the office, where she was already pulling off her jacket. He couldn’t name it yet, but a more vulnerable Demi sighed her body into the chair. He’d have to let this newness unfold. The prospect was delicious.

  “So what do I win?” he said.

  She looked at him blankly.

  “You said I won.” He sat lightly in his chair. “What’s my prize?”

  “Me saying you were right and I was wrong.” She looked into her lap, and her face struggled against tears.

  “I’ve told you, it’s okay to cry here,” he said.

  “I can’t. I’m all cried out.”

  “You want to tell me what’s happening?”

  “It’s over.” Even without tears, the pain streamed down her face. “I did what you said not to. I told Rich about my ‘faulty premise.’” She made quotation marks with her fingers. “And I asked him to take me back.” She let her head fall backward.

  “It didn’t go well?”

  “You know it didn’t. I mean, at first he said yes—if I’d agree to give up working.”

  Sully tried not to flinch. “And you said?”

  “I said I would. It felt like we were so close to—” She pressed her fingertips into her forehead. “And then our son came in, and Rich backpedaled. He let Christopher just—take over. When I told him that had to change, he did an about-face, and I yelled at him. Yelled.”

  She closed her eyes, clearly seeing the scene for the thousandth time.

  “I’m going to be the shrink for a second, okay?” Sully said.

  She nodded.

  “How did it feel to yell at him?”

  She opened her eyes, and they flickered slightly. “When I was doing it? Kind of good. It’s like he wants to hold this over my head forever—and I told him I can’t live like that.”

  “Good.”

  “He told me if that was the case, I could forget about getting back together. I guess I got myself in a corner with no way out.”

  “You were right out in the open with him.”

  “Where you told me not to go.”

  “Only because Rich isn’t ready.” Sully pulled forward again and waited until she met his eyes. “But I’m not in charge here. I can guide you, but the choices are yours.”

  “I must have made the wrong one. It didn’t work.”

  “It could have been a step.”

  “I want you to tell me what the next one is, Sullivan,” she said. “I want you to.”

  The difference was there, in her voice.

  Surrender.

  Ding-ding-ding.

  Sully kept his own voice soft. “I’m not going to tell you what to do. You know that.”

  “Yes, and I hate it.”

  “But I will take you to the next step, and if you want to make it—”

  “I do.” Demi straightened her shoulders.

  “I warn you, it has more to do with you than with directly getting Rich back.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you swear to me that you know that?”

  She put up a hand. “Give me a Bible.”

  “I trust you.” He pulled a foot up under him. “Now—”

  “What did you say?”

  “When?”

  “Just now—about trusting me?”

  “I trust you,” Sully said.

  “Are you kidding—or do you really think you can count on my word?”

  Her voice was the thickness of honey. Sully could taste the importance of the question, and he shaped his mouth carefully aro
und his answer. “I’m seeing a different Demi today,” he said. “This is the real Demi, I think. She’s willing to look at the questions, the way she asks her students to do. And she’s going to accept the answers. So, yes—I do trust you.”

  He watched that seep in, saw her face soften, witnessed the first tears in his office.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Dear God—thank you.”

  Sully wasn’t sure which one of them she was grateful to. But he closed his eyes and said, “Amen.”

  “I can’t believe I thought he was a goofball at first,” I told Mickey the next morning.

  “I still think he is.” She gave her elfin smile over the shipment of supplies we were moving around. “But who cares? You’re smiling.”

  “Am I?”

  She stopped to regard me, a tub of coconut oil perched on her hip. “It’s not an I-just-won-the-lottery smile, but it’s hopeful. What did Bob Barker say to you?”

  I did feel myself smile as I pushed the jars onto the shelf, labels out the way she liked them. “He said it’s like starting a new game.”

  “Of course.”

  “All the mistakes you made in the last one are wiped clean. You get to start over, fresh and clear. I can’t play Rich’s game—or Christopher’s —or anybody else’s. I can’t change them. I can only change me.”

  As I reached for a bottle of organic tamari, Mickey put her hand on my arm. “What if the rest of us don’t want you to change? I’m kind of liking you the way you are.”

  I patted her hand. “It’s the way I think about myself that needs to change. I think this is right. I don’t totally get it yet, but I think I’m forgiven by God—my slate is clean—and now I have to live like a person who’s been given a second chance.”

  “Is Dr. Barker telling you how to do this?” Mickey put up her hand. “I’m sure he knows what he’s doing, but personally, I think you ought to get yourself a lawyer, drop-kick your son through a couple of goalposts—”

  She stopped when I put my arms around her neck, tamari bottle in hand.

  “You’re such a trip,” I said.

  “Oh, baby girl, I’m a whole journey. I’m sorry. Oscar and I, and Audrey, we want you to be happy and come out of this with some dignity left. Enough with the shame already.”

  I stepped back. “I think the shame’s going away. That’s just—I think I have to fight to be allowed to hold my head up again.”