Healing Stones

by Nancy Rue

  “Thanks for returning my call,” he said.

  Once again a pause.

  “So—we have an elephant in our living room, don’t we?” Sully said.

  “A what?”

  “A big ol’ animal that everybody wants to step around and pretend isn’t there.”

  He could hear her sucking in a breath.

  “You’re talking about me hugging you.”

  “And feeling like you committed a major crime of therapy.”

  “Of therapy? Crime, period. Sullivan . . .” Her voice chipped off.

  Sully stopped on a landing, one hip against a tattered sofa.

  “It feels so good to have somebody listen to me,” she said. “That’s why I hugged you.”

  “I know that.”

  “Do you? I mean, really?”

  “I do,” he said. “Does that make you feel better?”

  “No.”

  “Because—”

  “I hate when you do this. Because I’m afraid that in my head it’s going to turn into something else for me. This is how it started with Zach.”

  “Ding!” Sully’s voice echoed in the stairwell.

  A pimpled kid passing him on his way down the steps looked at him twice before continuing under a bulging backpack.

  “I’m not Zach,” Sully said when he was gone.

  Demi gave him a soft grunt. “That doesn’t help.”

  “But here’s what will.” He paused and planted his hand on the chipped plaster wall. “You, Demi, are not the same person you were when Zach came into your life.”

  “You’re saying I could resist the temptation now?”

  “I’m saying you would see it coming and run like you had a pack of rabid coyotes after you.”

  “Isn’t that what I did when I skipped my appointment?”

  Sully grinned and started down the next set of steps. “That’s exactly what you did. But I want you to come back, and let’s keep working.”

  He stopped again, hand on the door to the front hall.

  “I have to come back,” she said.

  “You have to?”

  “It’s going to sound crazy, okay—but I think it’s God.”

  Sully pressed his forehead against the door. “Ding-ding and amen, Dr. Costanas,” he said. “What do you say we talk about you and God tomorrow—usual time?”

  “Okay,” she said. “Ding-ding.”

  Sully closed the phone with his chest. Yeah. He heard the hope. He pushed the door open into the hall, still grinning, and plowed into the kid with the hunchback knapsack.

  “You don’t want to head that way, man,” he said to Sully. “Dude— somethin’s goin’ down.”

  Sully followed the jerk of the kid’s head toward the front doors. A cacophony of shouts blasted through them—straight into the face of Ethan Kaye, who apparently had taken the elevator down and now stood in the doorway.

  “They’re about to riot,” the kid said.

  Sully jammed his phone into his pocket and tore down the hall, heart already pounding in his ears.

  When Sully reached him, Ethan was facing the students with both palms and the full light of his gaze. The crowd was only about fifty strong, but they weren’t taking orders from Dr. Kaye. Not one was older than nineteen, Sully guessed. Their mouths were wide, undulating, and spitting out anger.

  “You’re misinterpreting Matthew 6:14!”

  “Jesus Christ wants sexual purity!”

  “What’s gonna be okay next, Dr. Kaye?”

  The throng of young faces blurred together and twisted by rage was surreal, spewing words meant to be spoken in love. They were all distorted versions of Kevin St. Clair.

  A ragged chant of “Resign, Dr. Kaye!” began on the fringe and gathered voices. Sully saw two passing students pause, shift their backpacks, filter in. Their lips were moving before they knew the words.

  Sully curled his fingers around Ethan’s shoulder. “Leave it alone,” he shouted over them.

  Ethan shook his head and stepped away, hands still up like futile flags over the rising drone.

  “All right, folks, listen.”

  “No—you listen!”

  “Resign, Dr. Kaye!”

  “No resignation without conversation!”

  A whistle blast tore through Sully, and he grabbed Ethan’s arm. A bulky-shouldered student in the center of the chant held up one hand, his other one still poised at his lips post-whistle. The crowd settled into reluctant silence.

  “You’ll talk about resigning, then?” the kid said.

  Sully focused on the face, pulled taut across the cheekbones, rigid with conviction.

  Ethan lowered his hands and moved firmly forward.

  “I’ll talk about why you want me to resign,” he said. “But not here, Travis. You know that.”

  Kaye calling him by name seemed to irritate the kid.

  “What are you afraid of, Dr. Kaye?” Travis called out.

  “I’m afraid of fear,” Ethan said. “And that’s what this is about.”

  A crack of silence went through the crowd.

  Travis jerked his head, eyes darting. “We are not afraid to confess the truth of Christ crucified!” he shouted.

  Only a few murmurs joined him.

  “I’m not either,” Ethan said. “But I am concerned about how that truth is lived out.”

  “As the Word says!”

  Travis shot his arm up. A few Bibles rose in the air—though obviously not as many as he wanted.

  “In the one true Word of God!” he shouted.

  More arms raised, waving Bibles like picket signs.

  “Then let’s sit down and study the Word together.”

  Sully heard an edge in the sonorous tenor as he watched Ethan’s back stiffen.

  “I’m calling for an open forum.”

  “You have a forum right here!” Travis said.

  “You say you want to confess the name of Christ—you want to live as He did.”

  A few of the Bibles paused.

  “Did Jesus have shouting matches with His disciples?” Ethan said. “Even with the Pharisees?”

  Travis took a step forward, face cemented. “Are you claiming to be Jesus now?”

  Another crack went through the crowd. Sully watched a few of them shift where they stood.

  “I’m claiming to try to live as our Lord did, Travis,” Ethan said. “And what He did was to sit with those who had ears to hear.”

  “Yeah—well, we’re tired of what you have to say.”

  Travis turned on the group, hardened eyes expectant.

  “True enough,” someone said.

  A few others followed with halfhearted renditions of “Resign!” But most of them looked up at Ethan, and Sully watched faces emerge from the blur. An uncertain movement of eyes here. An irresolute sag in the cheeks there.

  Travis alone remained hard, like a cardboard figure against the backdrop of reconsidered emotions. One perfect word from Ethan, Sully thought, and he’d topple forward and drift to the ground on his own air.

  Ethan still stood with his arms at his sides, and Sully could almost see the energy moving up his backbone. The crowd watched him, faces now half open.

  “You say you’re tired of what I have to say.” Ethan nodded. “Then perhaps I haven’t fully responded to your current concerns.”

  “Like your lowering the moral standards!” Travis said, his voice like glass. He snatched a Bible from the hands of the shaken girl beside him and displayed it over his head with both hands. “Everything’s here, Dr. Kaye. There’s nothing to talk about.”

  “Except the fear behind your interpretation, Travis.”

  “This is not about me! It’s about all of us!”

  He looked around him. “All of us” kept their eyes on Ethan Kaye. This time the crack went through Travis. The thinned, hardened face shattered.

  “You’re the one who’s afraid, Dr. Kaye!”

  Before Sully could even register the movement, Travis charg
ed the steps, Bible still exalted in upstretched arms, and hurled himself at Ethan. Amid the startled voices of the crowd, he planted the book against Ethan’s forehead, knocking him backward. Ethan’s shoulder blades thudded into Sully’s chest.

  “This is what you’re afraid of, Dr. Kaye!” he screamed. “This!”

  The crowd splintered, sending several bodies up the steps to pull Travis off. Sully wrapped both arms around Ethan’s chest from behind and propelled him through the front doors.

  “It’s okay, Sully,” Ethan said.

  Sully let him go, and Ethan put his hand to his forehead, eyes closed.

  “I cannot believe it’s come to this,” he said.

  Sully planted his hands on the sides of Ethan’s face and tilted his head back. An already fading red blotch wrinkled with his brow.

  “I’m not hurt,” Ethan said.

  “Man, are you sure?”

  He nodded and opened his eyes. In them, Sully saw he was lying. A deeper hurt shot through them.

  CHAPTER THIRTY - ONE

  Sully stayed in Ethan’s office for the rest of the day. Through the interviews with security. The decision not to press charges or bring disciplinary action against Travis Michaels. The putting off of faculty members and administrative staff and curious community members who all wanted the story straight from his mouth.

  As the day wore on without a glimpse of Kevin St. Clair, Sully’s visions of wringing the man’s neck grew more vivid. The lack of anger in Ethan was even more disturbing. For the most part his friend sat in a mulling silence that produced no visible signs of resolution— no straightened back, no determined shoulders. His face remained uncharacteristically cluttered, which created no small measure of uneasiness in Sully.

  Darkness had crept in when Ethan declined Sully’s offer to buy him dinner and suggested they both go home.

  “You have to take care of yourself, my friend,” Sully told him when they parted ways in the parking lot.

  Ethan attempted a smile. “You think somebody else is going to come after me with a Bible?”

  “I’m talking about in here.” Sully rubbed his hand across his own chest. “I’ve watched this eat at you all day, and I’m not seeing you bite back.”

  Ethan swept his gaze across the darkening lawn that ran beside the Huntington Building and down the slope to the chapel.

  “I don’t know what God wants me to do.” Ethan drew his brows together and stared long at the chapel. “For the first time in years, I don’t know.”

  “In therapy we always advise,” Sully said, “in situations where you don’t know exactly what to do, don’t do anything until you do know.”

  Ethan pulled his gaze from down the hill and let it rest in the middle of Sully’s chest. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll call you.”

  As Sully climbed into his car, he couldn’t decide which hurt worse—seeing Ethan as a target, or not being able to help. The frustration burned in him.

  He was still steaming when he turned down Callow Avenue. Eyes drilled to the windshield in yet another mental confrontation with Kevin St. Clair, he only peripherally caught movement in front of the bakery. When he turned toward it, the silhouette of two bodies pulled into a struggling knot, and Sully heard a scream.

  He slammed into the curb, already wrenching the door open, and abandoned the car with the engine whining.

  “Get your hands off me!” said an unmistakable female voice.

  “Tatum!” Sully called to her.

  Both bodies twisted toward him. The bigger, masculine one froze. Tatum raised her leg and landed a foot in his gut. The man moaned and curled over himself.

  “I got him—I got him,” Sully said. Although there wasn’t much to it. Van Dillon was a sack of mush as Sully pinned his arms around him from behind and pulled him away from Tatum’s poised foot.

  “Let him go so he can get out of here,” he heard Tatum say. “I can’t stand to look at him.”

  As she watched Sully give Van a shove, her eyes dug into him with a fury that, Sully realized, mirrored his.

  “What are you doin’, dude?” Sully said. “You think this is the way to get the girl back?”

  “In his dreams. I wouldn’t have him.”

  “You had me when you needed me—to use me!”

  Sully lunged for Van again, barely getting his fingers around a clump of the back of his shirt before Van could reach Tatum. Sully managed to get his arm pinned behind him and got him to the ground.

  “Get in your car and go home, Tatum,” Sully said.

  “No way—I am so not letting him—”

  “Slut!”

  “Hey!” Sully tightened his grip on Van’s arm.

  “It’s your fault too. You’re the one who took—”

  “Shut up!” Sully wrenched back on the kid’s arm, and he let out a yell.

  “Did you kill him?” Tatum said.

  Van lifted his face.

  “Go, Tatum,” Sully said, “before this gets any worse. Call the police—do whatever you have to do, but get out of here.”

  Tatum’s Volkswagen squealed from the curb, barely missing Sully’s car, which still hung halfway in the street with the motor running. Van slumped again, and Sully let him go. The kid backed against the trellis pole that held up the bakery awning, his heaving bulk jarring against a backdrop of pink cakes.

  Sully looked down at his fists and forced them open. “You have a lot of finesse, boy, you know that?”

  Van grunted.

  Sully nodded toward his belly. “You okay?”

  “Fine.” He lifted a face as blotchy as his voice. “Are you calling the police?”

  “Me? No,” Sully said.

  “Then I’m going.”

  Van launched himself from the pole, but Sully held up his hand.

  “Only if you swear you’ll stay away from Tatum.”

  The kid flipped his head back, sending a mop of hair off his eyes. “What’s it to you? You her new lover?”

  “Excuse me?” Sully said.

  “Wouldn’t surprise me.” Van’s lip curled. “Like I said, she’s a sl—”

  “All right—enough. Stay away from her, and I won’t tell Wyatt Estes you tried to beat up on his niece.”

  Van blinked. “Who’s Wyatt Estes?”

  Sully looked at him closely. Even without a clear view of his eyes, the hanging lip proclaimed ignorance. He didn’t know.

  “Somebody you don’t want to cross,” Sully said. “Let me hear you say it.”

  “Say what?”

  “That you’ll stay away from Tatum. Say it.”

  “All right, all right—dude. I wouldn’t go near her again anyway. She’s not worth it.”

  “Good attitude,” Sully said.

  The kid started off, and then stopped. With one more fling of his head, he got the hair out of the way long enough to direct a knowing look at Sully.

  “You should stay away from her too,” he said. “She’ll sleep with any guy, no matter how old he is.”

  Sully watched Van make his surly way down the sidewalk toward the battered pickup truck. Lyin’ sack of cow manure.

  He was suddenly exhausted. But one thought did get through before he drained completely: no way did that kid ever have anything to do with Wyatt Estes. But now, more than ever, Sully had to find out who did.

  I realized as I got into the Jeep the next morning—after making sure Audrey was vertical and was actually going to drop Jayne at school— that I was thinking about the list, about Jayne, about getting myself strong enough to help Ethan Kaye. About other things besides how wretched I felt about myself. It was that kind of freedom you feel the first time you put on a pair of shorts when you’ve been clad in trousers all winter.

  Washington spring was peeking out of the hideous blue window boxes, and Mickey was positioning a pair of chairs at a cozy table on the sidewalk in front of the Bread. Her head tilted as she surveyed them, cap of fudge-brown hair cupping her face, a satisfied elfin smile curving her c
heeks. I considered going down the alley to the back door when she saw me. Though she dropped the smile, she didn’t glare or, worse, fold those arms like a wall across her chest.

  “Morning,” I said.

  She pushed a chair a quarter inch further into place.

  “I hope I didn’t mess you up yesterday,” she said.

  I blinked. “Yesterday?”

  “That reporter was sniffing around here.”

  “He said you told him where I lived.”

  “I wasn’t going to.” She repositioned the chair unnecessarily again. “Well, at first I was. I thought you deserved having somebody digging into your business.”

  I couldn’t conceal a complete gape.

  “I never said I wasn’t blunt,” she said.

  “No, I guess you didn’t.”

  She put both hands on the back of the chair and leaned into her wrists. “But that’s not why I sent him over to your new place—Audrey told me where she was living, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “He said you needed to know what was going over at the school— said it would help you. Look, I’m not some witch.”

  “I know that, Mickey.”

  “And this doesn’t mean I’ve gotten over your undermining my influence with Audrey.”

  I felt my eyes widen. “Is that what you think I’m doing? Like we’re in competition?”

  Her hand flew up. “I still want to see you get your life together.” She shrugged as she turned from the chair. “I don’t know why.”

  “Because you’re a good person,” I said.

  She gave me a long look. “You are too. Too bad we’re not good in the same ways, huh?”

  The Jeep would whine up to the curb any minute, and Sully was still trying to pray—trying being the operative word.

  The light was the problem. The sun had been spring-bright all day, drawing the denizens of Callow out of their dim bars and smeary-windowed Laundromats and onto the sidewalks, blinking in the glare.

  Sunshine seeped into every crack of the garage and cast an unaccustomed cheerfulness, giving Isabella her first chance to gleam under the buffing he was giving her. This was the kind of post-winter light that brought clients to the clinics in anxious bursts. People who’d been depressed all winter and blamed it on the wallpaper-paste skies now expected to feel better. When that didn’t happen, they came in to find out why the promise of new life wasn’t coming true for them.