Healing Stones

by Nancy Rue

  That evening in early May, Sully hurried home after a late class. A torrential spring rain had left lakes in the streets, and he fishtailed twice between Vanderbilt and their rental house in east Nashville. Whether the storm kept her from hearing him, Sully never knew, but he was able to slip into the kitchen and listen from the doorway. He could only catch a few words between Hannah’s cries.

  “Remember how . . . Mama loved you . . . if I can’t, Hannah . . . always remember . . .”

  Sully blew into the living room. Lynn clutched the baby to her neck as they both sobbed. His wife’s eyes were so swollen, her voice so raw, he knew she’d been at it since he’d left that morning.

  Sully went straight to her and pulled Hannah—hot, moist, and smelling of urine—from her startled arms. He picked up a half-empty bottle from the coffee table and put it in her mouth. Her sobs quieted as she gulped at it.

  Lynn’s did not. “Give her to me, Sully,” she said.

  “No. I want you to focus on me for a minute—please.”

  Sully propped Hannah up with pillows and the bottle on the couch and went to his knees in front of Lynn.

  “You promised we would revisit this medication thing if I saw signs of depression,” he said. He grabbed her hands so she couldn’t use them to hoist herself out of the chair. “I’m seeing it, baby, and it’s scaring me.”

  “I don’t want to depend on pills.”

  “It’s only temporary. This happens to a lot of women—it isn’t your fault.”

  “It is—it’s my sin.”

  She tried to wriggle past him. Sully pressed her back by the shoulders.

  “Lynn—stop this. It’s clinical depression. You have to take the medication until your hormones—”

  “Don’t, Sully—don’t get between me and God.” Her face was scarlet, her eyes stormy and unfocused. “I have to repent. I have to rebuild my faith.”

  Again she tried to break free, but Sully held on, with his hands, with his eyes.

  “That’s Belinda talking, Lynn, and she’s wrong. I know you think she’s your friend . . .”

  “She is my friend! She loves me—she understands me—and nobody else does!”

  Sully went cold. Hannah coughed and let out a scream, and Lynn squirmed away from him and snatched the baby into her arms.

  “I can’t listen to you when you talk like this, Sullivan!” she screamed at him. “Belinda says I can’t let you change my mind.”

  “You don’t think I understand you?” He had to shout to be heard over her hysteria, over the baby screaming. “I’m watching you disappear right before my eyes, Lynn.”

  “I won’t disappear! She says I won’t disappear. I just have to believe.”

  “Believe me. You have to take the medication—and we’ll get you some real help.”

  “She’s helping me.”

  “Let me help you.”

  “You can’t help me, Sully. She says you can’t help me, and I have to listen to her.”

  “No, you do not!”

  “Stop!”

  Hannah rose to a new level of screaming. Lynn pulled her tiny face into her chest and ran with her into the kitchen.

  “Okay,” Sully called after her. “Okay—calm down. Let’s get the baby calmed down.”

  He dashed to the kitchen in time to see Lynn disappear through the back door, the baby in her arms, keys jangling in her hand.

  “Lynn—do not get in that car!”

  He shrieked now as he tore through the back door and down the steps, slipping on the bottom one and careening toward the mud. By the time he righted himself she was already halfway into the Impala, and in the overhead light Sully could see her wrestling to get Hannah into the car seat.

  “Wait!” he shouted at her.

  She twisted toward him, one leg still connected to the ground. Her swollen eyes widened, and in them he watched her slide into herself, to a place he couldn’t reach. He had the one instant that she froze there to get to her, and he lunged forward.

  “Lynn, stop, baby, please—”

  If he had walked to her instead of throwing himself, would things have turned out differently? If he’d gone for her hand instead of the car door. If he’d done anything else—

  But the sight of her once-shimmering face stiffening to a mask stayed forever behind his closed eyes. She wrenched herself into the car, yanking the door out of his hand with a force he couldn’t control, and roared the Impala’s engine into a rage. On the tuck and roll beside her, Hannah screamed—and slid down in the car seat she wasn’t buckled into. Her tiny red face contorting in terror was the last image of her Sully had.

  “I can’t do this, Porphyria—”

  “Looks to me like you’re doing it, son.”

  A cool cloth pressed against his forehead. A cooler hand rested on his arm.

  “You’re brave, Sully,” Porphyria said. “This takes courage, which you have.”

  Eyes still closed, he pawed for her hand. She turned her palm up and curled her fingers around his.

  “Don’t let go,” he said. “If I go too far, pull me back.”

  “We have our hands on you.”

  “You and God?” He heard the fear in his voice—a boylike terror that made him cry.

  “Father, Son, Holy Spirit—and me. You can’t ask for more than that.”

  Sully nodded—nodded himself onto a dark road with only a pair of taillights in front of him.

  “I have to go,” Lynn said to him through the window.

  “Let me go with you.”

  His cry was cut off by the spray of mud and gravel as she burned the tires into the driveway and shot backwards all the way to the street. The Impala swerved into it in a momentum arc that nearly landed it in the ditch. Sully wished in his tormented nights that it had. He could have saved her then.

  He spent one crazed moment running after her on foot, until he watched the car sway through a sheet of water and surge on toward traffic-mad Gallatin Road. His keys were still in his pocket, and he fumbled for them on the way to the pickup.

  Lynn was at a stoplight when he spotted her. He cut around a van and jammed his foot on the accelerator to catch up. He was within six yards when the Impala leapt forward on a still-red signal.

  Sully shot after her, screaming for her to stop. A horn blared and Sully mashed the brake, stopping inches from another car. Eyes still straining for the Impala, he wheeled around the car and jerked in and out of the horn-blowing blur of vehicles. Ahead, through the drizzle, he saw her again. The taillights zigzagged as she took an abrupt turn onto a side street. Her shortcut to the Shelby Street Bridge.

  The street was dark, cars parked along the sidewalks, owners tucked inside their houses, out of the rain. Veritable ponds flooded the roadway, and Sully had to slow down to keep from spinning out.

  Lynn didn’t. The Impala hurtled ahead, sending up a wake of frenzied water. Sully watched it swim sideways, the taillights flashing in alarm—a panicked pounding of red through the dark.

  “Don’t hit the brakes, baby!” he cried out to her. “Turn into the slide!”

  The taillights blurred into a circle they shouldn’t be in, and Sully knew she was going to hit one of the parked cars head-on. Horrified thoughts of Hannah clawed at him. Where was she now? On the floor? Sliding under the same feet that were shoving down the brakes?

  The Impala spun in a three-sixty and hesitated only slightly before Lynn had her pouring through the puddles again. Sully followed the taillights, which still flashed on and off in spasms of panic. He screamed with every one—“Don’t hit the brakes, baby!”

  As heedless of his words as she’d been for the past two months, Lynn hurled herself on, making the last jog before she squealed left onto Shelby Street, into an inky blackness.

  Power outage.

  That was all Sully could put together before he heard the Impala scream. Her tires took an abrupt turn as she lunged for the bridge railing.

  Turn into the slide, he would have screamed
at her—if she were in another frenzied swerve. But the car went for the side in a path straight as a sword. The lights flashed one more alarm before they took flight out into the black, into a long and awful silence.

  Sully pumped his brakes and lurched forward, slamming his chest against the steering wheel. His cry was lost in a deafening splash, gulped away with the taillights as the Cumberland River swallowed them. Swallowed Lynn and Hannah—and his life.

  From somewhere else a horn blared, needlessly urgent in this place where there was nothing left to save. Only darkness remained, and the screaming that went on and on . . . silently in his head . . . through the plunge into psychology to save the world from the Belinda Coxes . . . through the adventures to peel his mind from a horror that haunted him. Straight through to now, when the screams cut through the gentleness of Porphyria’s lodge and burned his throat, his heart, his soul, until he couldn’t cry anymore.

  May on Puget Sound can look as if the world has been set free, and it did that year. God, I told the girls, was showing off—presenting us with splendid sunshine-drenched days, clear, soft air, and a profusion of blackberry blossoms that made our mouths water in anticipation.

  People who appeared to have been hiding in the grave of winter climbed out, blinking, and felt their way to the shore and onto their boats and out to the farmers market to finger the organic cherries and gaze at the tomatoes and garlic and Walla Walla sweet onions, all bursting ripeness. Everyone and everything basked in the healing tonic of light.

  I missed Mickey’s daylight apartment, and just imagining myself on the window seat drinking in the sound didn’t do it for me. I settled for the brook that ran through Sherman Heights, and the day I talked to Sully in Tennessee, I followed up our phone call with a late afternoon trip to a flat rock I’d discovered that was perfect for sitting and stewing.

  I was halfway into a dragging up of scenes when I realized no hum of anxiety accompanied them. I went over the dialogue and reviewed the faces, but I didn’t fall into a pit. I was actually trying to figure out what I could—and what I couldn’t—do.

  Sully would be proud of me.

  I dug an oval rock out of the dirt beside me, a miniature of the one I perched on, and tossed it into the water amid the cheerful ripples. I breathed in my own courage. And I thought of Ethan.

  Where was he in the mess Fletcher Basett said was going on at CCC? Who was left to bolster him?

  “Hey, Mom.”

  I twisted to watch Jayne dance toward me, her creamy legs white as chick flesh gliding out of last year’s shorts. We had to go shopping. As soon as I found a new job.

  She floated down beside me and spread a newspaper before us.

  “Did you know about this?” she said.

  A pang of anxiety rippled through me. Every time I’d looked at a newspaper in the past two months, I’d seen an ugly piece of my own life displayed there for all to see. But the photo she pointed to was of the charred skeleton of a building.

  “Metzel’s burned down last night.” She looked at me, sad-eyed. “Can you stand that we’ll never eat triple berry cobbler again?”

  I searched the picture for signs of a firefighter, the text for a mention of Rich’s name. “Did you read it?” I said. “Was anybody hurt?”

  “Nobody was even there—it happened in the middle of the night.” She stopped and slid her pale hand over mine. “You’re thinking about Dad, huh?”

  “I probably always will.”

  “Does that mean you guys are getting a divorce?”

  I looked up from the paper to see her eyes filling.

  “I don’t know, sweetie. It doesn’t look good right now.”

  “Do you want me to call him? I could tell him he’s being stupid again.”

  The laugh was out before I could stop it. “I don’t think that would do it. But I did tell him what I needed to say. Now it’s up to him.”

  She folded her arms and laid them across her propped-up knees. “I’m never getting involved with men.”

  “Not any time soon, anyway.”

  “I mean never. Dad and Christopher treat you like dirt, and you don’t deserve it. Audrey’s boyfriend is a total jerk—and she’s like the best person ever.” She shrugged the white shoulders sloping from the sleeveless blouse she’d unearthed. “I don’t even want to go there.”

  I crooked my arm around her neck and pulled her to me. “They aren’t all like that. Even your dad isn’t like that. He’s just hurting, and he doesn’t know how to change.”

  I didn’t know that until it passed through her eyes and left them in doubt. I couldn’t let my daughter give up—on anything. And that meant I couldn’t either.

  “I’m going with Audrey to Wal-Mart, okay?” she said. The grave male dilemma was obviously over as she got to her feet and brushed her fanny with her hands.

  “You two be careful—don’t stay out past dark.”

  She pointed at the newspaper still spread across my lap. “I forgot— Audrey showed me another one of those letters, you know, about the college thing.” Her face clouded. “I think it’s about you.”

  I stared at the Port Orchard Independent long after Audrey’s Nissan pulled out of Sherman Heights. Did I want to stir myself up again, reading somebody’s opinion of what they thought was my life?

  But the uncertain shadow I’d seen on Jayne’s face made me turn to the editorial page. The letter was tucked down at the bottom. That was progress—it was no longer the main topic of editorial conversation.

  Is anybody else tired of all this speculation about the resignations of those two faculty members from CCC?

  I grunted.

  I’d like to put it to rest, so hear me: their sudden exits had nothing— nothing—to do with the current problems plaguing CCC president Ethan Kaye. The controversy that is still bringing students and faculty alike into conflict is a separate matter, which, in my opinion, should be left for the college to sort out without the unwanted intrusion of public opinion. Whatever transpired between the two professors in question has no bearing on college issues.

  I reached up a hand to flatten the prickles that rose on the back of my neck. Why didn’t this person come right out and say my name and Zach’s? And “whatever transpired between” us? Where did that come from?

  I am not at liberty to divulge my source of this information, but I am asking the residents of South Kitsap County to trust me. Let’s close the book on this thing and turn our attention to more important matters. Like—what can we do about that heinous shade of blue on our Main Street buildings?

  I poked my index finger at the last line. Heinous shade of blue. The only person I knew who had ever described Main Street that way was Zachary Archer.

  “You gravy-sucking pig,” I said—out loud—my own voice as hard as the stone I picked up and hurled into the brook.

  So now what? He had to make innuendoes about me in the newspaper, so there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that we had “transpired”? And why the big separation from the CCC issues? Wasn’t that too much of a protest—one he didn’t even need to bother himself with?

  I stopped, another stone in my hand. He’d told me he had no idea how Kevin St. Clair and Wyatt Estes got the pictures. How did he even know they had ? Who would have told him? The only ones who knew besides Rich and me were Ethan and the two of them.

  I let the stone fly. Zach had the pictures taken for Rich—but what was to stop him from taking money from St. Clair and Estes so they could use me to take Ethan down? Certainly not his integrity. I wanted to throw up in the blackberry hedge. I fished my cell phone out of my pocket and dialed Ethan’s number.

  Sully awoke in a bed on the second floor, between two yellow-curtained windows that drenched him in sunlight. A crow nagged him out of the four-poster onto his bare feet on the wood floor.

  How he’d gotten down to boxers and T-shirt he didn’t want to know. Not that it mattered. Porphyria was an angel before whom there was no need for male modesty.

&nbs
p; Below he saw the angel in question waving to him, and he opened the window.

  “I’ve got lunch coming!” she called up to him. “Your favorites. Out here on the veranda.”

  “I’m hungry,” he said, “but I don’t know if I can eat.”

  “You’ll eat turnip greens and biscuits and redeye gravy.”

  Even from here he could see Porphyria’s face draw the lines of a mother in charge, another layer of her complexity.

  “No lamb tagine with spinach lentil something?” he said.

  “Comfort food. Now get down here.”

  He found his clothes and reported to the veranda, where Porphyria waved him into a cushioned wicker chair. She picked up the conversation where they’d left off at the window.

  “You’ve tormented yourself and you’ve blamed yourself and you’ve pushed yourself beyond the limits of helpfulness,” she said. “And now you’re going to eat.”

  And so they ate, Sully devouring Deep South cuisine until it did, indeed, settle his standing-on-end nerves. But he refused the cobbler, even soaked as it was in blackberry syrup, and felt the anxiety rising again.

  “I still don’t think I can handle this, Porphyria,” he said.

  She looked straight at him. “You can’t. And that’s the smartest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

  He tried to grin. “That’s depressing.”

  “Don’t you start trying to hide under your humor again, Sully.” She searched his face, eyes tear-shiny. “Whoever said anybody could handle watching his wife commit suicide and take his child with her?”

  Sully met her eyes squarely. “You know that’s what happened. They reported it as an accident, but you know . . .” He swallowed, retasting the turnip greens, now soured in his mouth.

  “That isn’t what’s still in there eating at you.”

  “Isn’t that enough?”