Healing Stones

by Nancy Rue

  He had almost reached them when he realized that the kid—who had to be Christopher Costanas—stood in the middle of a doorway that Demi clearly wanted to pass through.

  “Get out of my way, Christopher,” Sully heard her say.

  “What part of this don’t you get? You don’t have any right to go in there.”

  Sully stopped and backed against the opposite wall. Demi could need him. From the sound of his voice, this kid stood on a thin place.

  “He doesn’t want to see you. He said that.”

  “He hasn’t said anything to anybody, son. He isn’t even conscious.”

  “I know him—you don’t. He never wants to see you again.” His voice teetered.

  Sully saw Demi plant her hands on her son’s shoulders and hold on in spite of his furious, adolescent attempt to twist himself free. Even from where he stood, Sully could tell from the startled look in the boy’s eyes that her face, not her hands, held him there.

  “I’m not going to leave you out this time, Christopher,” she said. “You and I can walk your father through this together. You will know everything that’s going on—you’ll be a part of it.”

  The boy jerked his head back and glared down his nose at her, and Sully could hear him breathing—but he didn’t pull away.

  “You may think you know him,” Demi said, “and maybe you do—but you don’t know me. I take my share of the responsibility for that—but now is not the time for me to go into it.”

  Christopher jerked his head to the side this time, and a halfhearted hiss came out of his mouth.

  “I love that man, and I am going to go in there as often as they will let me, and I am going to sit by his side until he himself tells me he doesn’t want me there.” Demi let her hands slide down to Christopher’s elbows. “You can either come with me or not, that’s up to you. Jayne will have the same choice when she gets here. Jayne will, not you for her. Am I clear?”

  The boy’s shaggy head made its final move, forward, as if he couldn’t hold it up any longer. Demi pulled her hands away. He stepped aside and turned his back to her.

  As Demi turned with him, her eyes met Sully’s. “Sullivan,” she said.

  For the first time since he’d arrived, her voice broke. He went to her, hands extended to envelope hers. Her eyes were a mass of painfully red lines, and her face was gray with soot except for the space around her mouth and nose where an oxygen mask had obviously rested. But despite her rush to grab onto his hands, there was nothing fragile about Demitria Costanas at that moment.

  “Thank you so much for coming,” she said. “I didn’t want to ask you—”

  “You didn’t have to. I came as a friend.”

  She nodded. “It’s bad, Sullivan. They were afraid of internal burns to his lungs—there are none. But he has third degree burns on his back, his neck, the back of his head—40 percent of his body.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “He crawled me out with no protection on, no gear at all.” She trailed a hand down the side of her face. “He covered me with his body so I wouldn’t be burned.”

  “Demi,” Sully said. “No guilt. He did what he had to do.”

  “You know something—I get that.” She looked at her fingers and seemed to realize for the first time that she was wearing a mask of ashes. “He did it because that’s who he is. And you know—being here with him—this isn’t guilt, Sullivan. It’s who I am.”

  “Mrs. Costanas?”

  Sully motioned over Demi’s shoulder at a towheaded male nurse in a gown and mask who poked his head out the door.

  “I have to go,” she said. “You want to come?”

  Sully shook his head. “No—no, I think you’re going to be fine.”

  Demi nodded and reached out to touch his arm. “Don’t leave for good without saying good-bye.”

  And then she walked toward the nurse, with the stride of a wife who knew exactly what her husband needed.

  Christopher finally dozed off in the recliner in the ICU family waiting room around 2:00 AM. I waited until he was breathing with little-boy evenness before I took the nurse up on his offer to let me sit with Rich for five minutes.

  Dressed in full regalia—long paper gown, mask, gloves, and covers for my shoes—I sat back from the rocking bed that cradled Rich facedown and moved him constantly so fluid wouldn’t collect anywhere. Rearranging him physically would be so excruciating it made me want to throw up at the mere thought of it.

  We’d both known burned firefighters before, visited them in acute care wards and in rehab centers, listened to the stories of their agonizing recoveries . . . but to smell my own husband’s scalded flesh . . .

  He actually could have been anyone in that tangle of tubes and bags and wires and bandages. But I knew who he was, just as I always had. He was my hero—my burping, channel flipping, obstinate hero who had suffered so much and didn’t have any more idea how to deal with that than I did. That was how he’d ended up here in a room where the inner workings of his heart were registered in stubborn beeps.

  I stared at the screen and wished it could tell me how strong his pride was—whether it was going to forever keep us apart, even after I stayed with him and nursed him through the predicted months-long hospital stay and the myriad of corrective surgeries and the physical therapy I’d already been told he’d have to endure.

  I was going to do that—feed him and bathe him and apply the pressure garments and listen to him curse through gritted teeth. I couldn’t think beyond that—beyond Rich’s pain. It wasn’t only what he had to bear, it was what I had to suffer with him because I was the woman who loved him.

  What I’d told Sullivan was true, though I hadn’t known that until it crossed my lips. Ding-ding-ding, Dr. Costanas. It was me—the real me—who loved so deep and so hard that she would do all of that and more, with no hope that there would ever be anything else.

  I bent my head, chin to my chest, and listened to the whisper.

  You had to, Demi. Well done.

  Sometime before dawn I fell into an exhausted sleep in the recliner next to Christopher’s. When I woke to the sound of voices, I saw someone had covered me with a blanket.

  “They said they were in here,” somebody said in the hall.

  My Jayne, voice fragile as lace. I scrambled out of the chair without lowering the footrest and stumbled across the room with the blanket trailing after me. She flung herself into my arms and clung to me.

  “Mom, is he—”

  “He’s not going to die, sweetie,” I said. “He’s hurt really badly, but he’s not going to die.”

  “Audrey—what are you doing here?”

  Christopher’s voice wrapped incongruently around a name he shouldn’t have known. I pulled away from Jayne and looked at him. His face was bloodless down to his lips, which parted, shock-stiff, as if a gun were being held to his back.

  “You know Audrey?” Jayne said.

  I looked over my shoulder. Audrey stood in the doorway, in front of Mickey, whose brow was furrowed like a plowed field. Audrey’s cheeks had no more color than Christopher’s. I thought I had seen all the terror in that face the girl could possibly feel—until now.

  Jayne looked from her brother to her “adopted sister” and back again. “I don’t get it,” she said.

  I shifted back to Christopher, who looked like my son at twelve, ready to cave to a hidden misdeed.

  And then from behind me I heard Audrey whisper, “C.J.”

  Five people attempted to restart their brains in silence.

  Audrey’s voice screamed in my head: He goes, “So if it looks like a tramp and it acts like a tramp, it must be a tramp.”

  Christopher was C.J.? He was Boy? The elusive, using, wretched Boy who had said that to Audrey was my son? The father of her baby?

  “You?” Jayne said. “You’re the jerk?”

  I folded my arm around Jayne’s neck and pulled her back before she could launch herself into Christopher’s unnerved face.
>
  “Who is this, Audrey?” Mickey said. I could hear her winding up. “Is this the kid that got you pregnant?”

  Audrey gave a slow nod.

  “This is apparently the kid,” I said. I turned to Mickey. “I know I’m taking my life in my hands telling you this—but he’s also my son.”

  All eyes went to Christopher, who shriveled like a raisin. I waited for the anger to rise in me. I was due, heaven knew. All the insults my son had hissed at me should have been more than ready to turn themselves around into the tirade the little hypocrite so richly deserved.

  But then there was Mickey, watching me, expecting with her unblinking eyes what she herself had done to her child. What I had done to Zach, and to Christopher. What Rich had done to me.

  When all any of us wanted was forgiveness.

  I pushed my hands through my hair and shook it out with my fingers. Then I held out both arms, one to Christopher, one to Audrey.

  “Well,” I said, “it looks like there’s some sorting out to be done.”

  “You think?” Mickey said.

  I looked at Christopher. “And you will do it, son—you’ll take responsibility for what you’ve done.”

  He blinked at me from beneath the shag of blonde hair that hung down over his eyebrows like shame-covering fingers.

  “None of us can throw stones.” I looked at Mickey. “None of us.”

  Jayne tapped me timidly on the arm. “Uh, you know what? I’m gonna go get a Coke or something.” She started for the door, but she stopped when she got to Audrey. “Oh, my gosh,” she whispered. “We really are like sisters.”

  With a hand clapped over the happiness only she was feeling at the moment, she scampered out, brushing past a still-stunned Mickey.

  “What do you two need right now?” I glanced back and forth between the ashen-faced kids who had just collided with their future. “Alone time, or a couple of mediators?”

  “Alone time,” Audrey said quickly.

  Christopher looked as if he would have leaped from the window if any of us had asked him to. Mickey followed me out into the hall, and I steeled myself for the verbal onslaught.

  “I’m sure you haven’t eaten since you’ve been here.”

  I turned and stared.

  She held out an insulated bag. “I know how you get when you’re stressed out. There’s split pea soup in a thermos, sprouted bread— bunch of stuff. You need carbs and fat, and I know your electrolytes are a mess.”

  “Mick,” I said. “I apologize for my son.”

  “Like we have any control over our kids.” She lowered the bag and her eyes. “You handled it a whole lot better than I did—you handle everything better than I do.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “How’s your—how is he?”

  “I’m about to find out.” I held out my arm. “Walk with me to the nurses’ station. I could use the support.”

  She fell into step beside me, eyes still shifting from the floor to the side of my face. “Have you cried yet?” she said. “You know you’re going to have to cry sooner or later.”

  At noon Rich was still too groggy to talk. Twice they’d put him in a metallic bed with hoses that kept him wet while they scrubbed off the dead skin under water to stave off infection. This was among the most painful procedures a patient could go through, Ike, the towheaded nurse, told me, and they sedated him afterwards. When Ike began to describe to me that it was like being jabbed with hot needles, Mickey told him to “go ahead and take his poetry down the hall.”

  She was less hard on the reconstructive surgeon who explained that in a week they would embed Rich’s left hand, where the most severe burns had occurred, beneath the skin of his lower abdomen to protect it and encourage skin healing around the fingers. There would, he told us, be approximately eight other surgeries after that, including the insertion of pins into his fingers so he would be able to use his hand again, and possible amputation of his pinkie.

  “We have a 96 percent survival rate here,” he assured me.

  “Is that patients?” I said. “Or their wives?”

  A social worker and a psychologist came to talk with us too.

  “It’s a whole team thing,” Ike told me. “We have everything covered.”

  Still, I wished more than once that Sullivan were there, to assure me that the certainty I felt was real.

  Several guys from the station came, gazed at Rich through the window to his room, and turned to me with eyes red-rimmed and wet. I finally told them I’d call when he was doing better.

  I sat by Rich for five minutes every hour and let the kids have the other ten between them. After Christopher nearly passed out during his eleven o’clock stint, he gave his five to me.

  It was a huge day for my son.

  In true Mickey fashion, she practically spoon-fed me the thermos of soup and the herbal tea she commandeered. I was nibbling the edges of a hunk of flaxseed bread when she produced a copy of the Port Orchard newspaper.

  “I didn’t know if you’d want to see this or not,” she said. “The fire made the front page.”

  I sat up and stared at it, waiting for it to take out another piece of my life. There was a half-page, full color photo of what was left of Huntington Hall—a black cadaver of a place, the smoke still curling up from the rubble piled shin-deep on the ground.

  I felt nothing. Huntington Hall had never been the life of Covenant Christian College as far as I was concerned. My CCC was never about the ordeals Ethan Kaye suffered in his office with people like Kevin St. Clair, so nothing was lost for me in the lingering smoke and the oddly spared bits of office life scattered on the ground. I wondered vaguely if the Easter egg rock survived, or would be forever buried as it deserved.

  I was about to fold the paper when I noticed something else in the picture—white and almost in flight behind the wreckage. I brought the paper close to my face and smiled.

  “What?” Mickey said.

  I lay it on my lap and smoothed it with my hand. “You can see the chapel now. With that big ugly thing out of the way, you can see Freedom Chapel.”

  I would have to share that with Ethan.

  I was beginning to cave after my 3:00 PM vigil with Rich, and Mickey had run low on comfort food. She was out in search of a Central Market, Jayne in tow, and Audrey and Christopher sat in an awkward, painful silence on the other side of the waiting room. I was too frayed to do anything for them, which was the state Ethan Kaye found me in.

  “You look like you’re holding up,” he said to me, hands covering mine as he sat next to me.

  “Liar,” I said.

  “You never cease to amaze me with your strength, Demi. I missed it when you weren’t there.”

  I filled Ethan in on Rich’s condition. He told me about Wyatt Estes.

  “Apparently he suffered a heart attack when he was trying to get out,” Ethan said. “They’ve determined that he died before he was overcome by smoke.”

  “And what about you?” I said.

  “I’m fine.”

  I squeezed his hand. “No, I mean the board’s decision. I guess they haven’t had time to reach one.”

  “They met this morning.”

  “And?”

  He let out a long, slow breath from his noble nose. “I’m still president of CCC.”

  “It was unanimous, wasn’t it?”

  He nodded. “Thanks to you.”

  “And that little blonde thing. How on earth did you find her, Ethan?”

  Ethan smiled, which I hadn’t seen him do in a long time. “That was Sully’s doing. Oh, I have something for you from him.”

  I watched him take a folded sheet of paper out of his jacket pocket.

  “I still have your sport coat,” I said. “I’ll have it dry cleaned, but I’m not sure the smoke smell will ever come out.”

  Ethan waved me off and tucked the paper into my hand. “I don’t think I would ever wear it again anyway. The fewer reminders I have of that time in my life, the bett
er.”

  “I hear you.” I curled my fingers around the paper.

  “I’m going to leave you to read that.” Ethan stood up, still holding on to one of my hands. “Demi—I’d love to have you back when you’re ready. Kevin St. Clair has resigned, and I’ve called a faculty meeting to discuss where to go from here. I want you involved.”

  I closed my eyes and let that rise in my chest.

  “Thank you,” I said, “but Rich is my priority right now. Once he’s recovered, then we’ll see.” I let go of his hand. “I know I can’t ask you to wait that long—and it could be a while.”

  “As long as it takes, Demi,” he said.

  Sullivan’s letter was short.

  Demi,

  You’re on your way now, and I have to be on mine. If you and Rich want counseling, please call me and I’ll set you up with someone to walk you through this next part of your journey together. I’m praying that happens, but Demi, if it doesn’t, you know you have found you—God’s you. It has been my honor and my joy to watch that happen.

  Blessings,

  Sullivan Crisp

  I folded the letter in precise squares and held it between my palms. I was homesick for the buzzzz and the ding-ding-dings and the grins that couldn’t be translated into words.

  But as I pressed it, I felt something mournful and yearning ooze from it.

  He had to do it, Demi.

  Whatever it was, I didn’t know. I only knew it would take more than Game Show Theology to get him through it. I hoped his mentor was someone who would shove him and coax him and be gentle with him. I hoped it was someone like him.

  I was pushing couscous around on a paper plate when Ike the nurse came to the waiting room door with a new expression on his face.

  “He’s awake,” he said to me. “You can have five minutes.”

  I looked at the kids. Christopher spoke the first words he’d said to me since Audrey walked in that morning: “You go, Mom.”

  I half ran down the hall, botching up the strings to the mask as I attempted to tie it on and letting Ike stick my arms into a paper gown and trying to listen to instructions on what topics to steer away from.