Healing Waters

by Nancy Rue

  “Did you miss dancing?”

  “I danced when they were gone—just in my room to my tapes.”

  Her voice grew thin, and Sully wondered if she had ever opened up even this much to anyone since Grandma Broc died thirty years ago. What he wouldn’t give for the luxury of spending six months just sifting through all this . . .

  “You did great with your list, Lucia,” he said.

  “All it tells me is that I had to give up my childhood for Sonia, which I basically already knew. How does that help me with Bethany?”

  Her eyes locked with his.

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” she said. “Bethany has had to give up her childhood for Sonia too.” She sat up in the chair, and her face came alive under the torch flicker. “Then what I’m doing is right—I’m giving her a childhood.” She held up both palms. “That’s why I’m here—so you can help me not mess it up.”

  Sully closed his eyes. Dang. This was the part he didn’t like— where he had to burst that first bubble.

  “What?” she said. “No ding-ding-ding?”

  “How about a ding and a half?” Sully said. “You’re absolutely right that both you and Bethany had to give up too much for Sonia. And you’re halfway there when you say you need to provide whatever you can to make sure Bethany gets to be a happy little girl.”

  “I know it’s only until Sonia is well enough to be a mother to her again. I know that.” Lucia shook her head. “But isn’t it going to be awhile before she’s emotionally ready?”

  “Could be, yes.” He wondered what had happened to the twenty-three-day countdown. “But that’s not exactly what I’m talking about.”

  “Then what the Sam Hill are you talking about?”

  He didn’t stop to savor the anger. “I’m talking about the fact that if you replace giving yourself up for Sonia with giving yourself up for Bethany, she’s going to end up just like her mother.”

  Lucia searched his face so hard, Sully could almost feel her yearning digging through him. He’d never seen a client try so hard to understand.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re going to have to explain that to me.”

  “Here’s the deal,” he said. “I haven’t heard your whole story, but from what little I know, I’m convinced you have lived your life for ‘them.’ Your mother. Your father. Your sister. Now for Bethany.” He gave her half a grin. “I recall from a conversation we had one evening that you are into pronouns.”

  “Pronouns?” she said. But her face colored. She remembered.

  “You liked the sound of we, and so far we—you and I—have been a pretty good team dealing with Sonia. But I sense that you aren’t used to we. You’ve always lived for them, and it’s hard to be part of we without caring a whole lot more about I.”

  “What game show is this?” she said.

  “This would be Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, where we set you up with a whole different life.” Sully grinned all the way. “Only it’s not a house, it’s a new way of looking at yourself—as I, a valuable, significant person created by God—not just as someone who can do a whole lot for them.”

  Before she even seemed able to begin to absorb that, Sully heard the door to the deck open and slam into the side of the house. Right on cue.

  He looked up in disgust and saw Marnie hanging halfway over the deck railing.

  “Lucia!” she screamed. “It’s Sonia—you have to come here!”

  Sully would have turned to Lucia and named it Exhibit A—if he hadn’t heard the glass shatter.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  We both tore to the deck at full tilt, where Sullivan pushed past me and disappeared inside the house through the French door. I didn’t even get to it before I heard the shattering again, closer and more alarming. By the time I crossed the living room, crashes were cascading like an avalanche.

  Everything turned surreal as I took the last corner into the foyer and plowed into Sullivan’s arm held out as a barrier. My sister stood in the center of the entryway in a gold silk dress that hung haphazardly off one shoulder, with the copper cross from over her bed clutched like a sword in her raw hands. All around her lay shards of the mammoth mirror, their shattered edges pointing accusingly at her walls and her treasures and herself.

  Behind me, Marnie screamed.

  Sonia didn’t look up, but she said to the wreckage around her, “Yes, I’m hideous, aren’t I? I’m hideous.”

  Sullivan leaned his head down until his lips were next to my ear.

  “Dr. Ukwu’s number is in my cell phone. Text him and tell him to meet me at Vanderbilt emergency. Then I might need you to call 911. We’ll see.”

  He pressed his phone into my hand and took a small step toward her. Glass crackled under his sandal.

  “Sonia,” Sullivan said. “Honey, it’s Sully.”

  He used a Southern accent I’d never detected in his voice before. “I want you to let me carry you out of there before you cut your feet, okay?”

  “It doesn’t matter, Sully,” she said. Her accent was gone.

  “It matters to me,” he said. “It matters to God.”

  “I hate God!”

  She swung the cross, barely missing the side of Sully’s head. He caught it in one hand as she tried to swing it back, and he grabbed her wrists with the other.

  “Lucia!” he shouted over her screams. “Make that call!”

  As he lifted my thrashing, cursing sister out of her ruins, I dialed 911.

  Sully remembered why he hadn’t gone into inpatient psychiatric care. He hated hospitals.

  He crossed and uncrossed his legs, checked seven times to make sure he’d turned off his cell phone, picked slivers of mirror out of the soles of his sandals. It would have to be this ER. They’d expanded Vanderbilt Medical Center in recent years, but it was still the same place he’d brought Lynn to one night with chest pains, before she got pregnant with Hannah. Was there nothing in this town that didn’t have some memory of her lurking in it?

  He turned to Lucia next to him, still as a fear-paralyzed rabbit. Actually, she’d remained supernaturally calm through the entire ordeal so far. She’d kept her voice low and flat as she gave Marnie instructions to make sure Bethany didn’t come downstairs and see the broken glass in the foyer and the bedroom and bathroom. Sonia had been systematically smashing every mirror in the house.

  On the way to the hospital behind the ambulance in Porphyria’s Buick, Lucia had been on the phone to a cleaning business, getting them to come in and remove the debris. Here at the hospital, she’d gone straight to the business office to tell them Sonia had no insurance, but that she’d pay with Sonia’s American Express card, which Lucia had remembered to bring.

  Twice he’d heard her leave messages for Chip, who, he recalled from the FBI’s visit, was her husband. Both times when she hung up, she withdrew deeper into the folds of her flesh. It was hard to hold back the urge to counsel her right here in the waiting room.

  “Isn’t that your guy?” Lucia said.

  Dr. Ukwu crossed the waiting room and motioned for them to follow him to a small room off the waiting area. Sully heard Lucia suck in air as they trailed him in.

  “You sure you want me here?” he said.

  She gave him the full-on blue-eyed look. “Just try to leave and see what happens,” she said.

  Ukwu was elegant but straightforward as he explained what Sully had guessed: that Sonia’s defenses for dealing with the horror of her disfigurement had been overwhelmed, and the floodgates of her held-back rage had opened. Because she had lost her grip on reality, at least temporarily, and couldn’t guarantee her own safety, he would have to admit her for at least seventy-two hours, probably longer.

  Sully was as relieved as he knew how to be.

  While Ukwu ran through a list of medications and possible therapies, Sully watched Lucia take notes in perfect cursive, practically sucking Dr. Ukwu’s brain out with her eyes. When the doctor reached for her hand to say good-bye, she shook his
with the poise of a diplomat, and then tripped over Sully’s feet as she lunged for the door.

  He found her outside the ER entrance, biting into a Snickers bar. When she saw him, she shrank as if he’d caught her ripping off a homeless person.

  “I’ll pay you to give me half of that,” he said. “Better yet, let’s go to the cafeteria and grab a bite while you’re waiting to see Sonia. My treat.”

  “Isn’t that against the rules?” she said.

  “Let’s just call it a bonus round,” he said.

  He almost got a smile out of her, almost had her turning toward the door with him, when her phone rang. When she looked at it, she handed him the candy bar.

  “Sorry, I need to take this,” she said, and walked several paces away.

  As Sully watched her, he knew something new about Lucia. She was ripe with some kind of grief ready to burst through her skin. Seeing Sonia border on psychosis, even watching her suffer physically wasn’t everything that Lucia had buried inside her. A trip to the ER with her sister was a trigger, but the pain he saw was all hers. And it lay at the bottom of everything.

  There was a lot of that going around. His gaze went to the ER sign above his head. He’d carried Lynn under it the night he’d brought her here gasping for air. He’d carried her through the door right there, reassuring her that she wouldn’t die, while he told himself she had some rare lung disease that would take her away from him.

  Sully swallowed. The first doctor they saw put that to rest when he diagnosed an anxiety attack. Was she under a great deal of stress? Would she like to talk to someone from psych?

  They’d both rejected that idea. They were newly married, happy as a pair of otters, Lynn always said. She’d promised to cut back on her work hours, get more rest. Sully silently vowed to spend more “quality time” with her. How easy it had all been to solve.

  The thought rankled like a chain. It must have been easy. He couldn’t even remember doing it. Lynn had never said another word about it. They’d just gone on from there.

  On to an end that didn’t have to happen, that still tore him apart because he didn’t know why it did. And if he ever hoped to get himself back together, he had to find out. He had to keep trying.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  I went straight to Bethany’s room when we got back to the house.

  She was sprawled across the cream print sheets, head hanging over one side, feet pudgy as biscuits poking out from the other. She breathed with effort, as if a dream were making her work very hard. In the pale moonlight that illuminated the room from the rounded, curtainless part of her window, I could see her red bow of a mouth forming words. I longed to know what they were.

  The usual rag was wrapped around her neck. How it stayed on with all the flailing around she did in her sleep, I hadn’t figured out. I loosened it with careful hands and moved it next to her cheek. She turned to it and sighed.

  “God love you,” I whispered.

  For a magic second I sounded like Grandma Brocacini. How many times had she said that to us when she tucked us in?

  “God love you, Lucia.”

  I wondered now if she had been assuring me that He did, or asking Him if He would. Sullivan Crisp would have a field day with that.

  Back in my room, I climbed into the too-white bed, under the 400-thread-count sheets and the down comforter that could have been the bedclothes for angels, but I couldn’t sleep. All the nights I’d spent in that recliner in Lounge A, and the ones I’d passed here with one ear cocked in case Sonia called for me, I’d been able to succumb to slumber, sometimes even lapsing into a veritable coma of exhaustion. Now that I had no patient to worry about, the prospect of an uninterrupted night on a decent mattress stretched before me, and I couldn’t even keep my eyes closed.

  Part of that, I knew, was because of my conversation with Chip on the phone outside the emergency room.

  “Sonia’s right where she’s supposed to be, babe,” he’d said to me. “She should have stayed in the hospital in the first place, and this never would have happened.”

  I tried not to sound defensive with my “I know.”

  “The good news is, twenty-two more days just got cut down to one.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You can come home now.”

  So far that thought hadn’t crossed my mind, and I tripped on it.

  “Sonia’s being taken care of. You said the doc told you she shouldn’t have visitors until he gets her stabilized.” Chip offered his sandpaper laugh. “You’re mine again. Let’s get you on a flight tomorrow.”

  I flung the covers back now and padded to the window. The water was dark and thick as maple syrup except for the silver path the moon made, straight at me.

  “You know I can’t leave Bethany,” I’d said to him. “She doesn’t even have a nanny, for one thing.”

  “A nanny isn’t what she needs. What she needs is a new mother.”

  His voice took a sharp turn. I’d only heard it sound that way when he denounced the judicial system or the medical profession or the unknown snitch who had turned him in and ruined his life. Hearing it tonight, and cringing before it again now in my memory, I felt every bit as nauseated as I had in any courtroom or U.S. attorney’s office or prison visitors’ room.

  “If you’re going to make arrangements for Bethany,” he said, “don’t get her a nanny. Get her into foster care.”

  “You know I’m not going to do that.”

  “All right—forget I said that.” His pause had been chilly. “I’m being selfish. Do what you have to do. A lot can happen in twenty-three days, right?”

  Dear God, I prayed now, I sure hope so.

  An attempt at sleep was pointless, and hunger gnawed at me. I wrapped up in a robe that hung on the back of the bathroom door and went down to the kitchen. White terry cloth was not a good look for me, but Bethany was asleep and Didi was long gone and Sullivan had left for the guesthouse.

  The one person I hadn’t accounted for was Marnie. She sat at the counter, polishing off a glass of iced tea. Could this day get any worse? The only saving grace: she was dressed to go out, and her purse was perched on the seat next to her.

  “Who made the sweet tea?” she said.

  “Sullivan,” I said.

  “He makes it like my grandma. Get you a glass, and I’ll pour you some.”

  Heaven knew I wanted some. It couldn’t hurt to drink something in front of her, and I was almost past caring. Almost.

  “My grammy always put in an extra half a scoop of sugar before she boiled it with the water,” Marnie said.

  “So it makes a syrup,” I said, more to myself than to her.

  “Well, yeah. That’s how you make real sweet tea.”

  No wonder it tasted so doggone good. Most things that fattening were delicious.

  Marnie giggled as she filled my glass.

  “What?” I said.

  “That look you just got on your face. Most of the time you look so serious and then you’ll—I don’t know, you’re so hilarious sometimes, and you don’t even have to say anything.”

  So glad I’ve been a source of amusement for you.

  She slid the glass toward me and went back to a piece of carrot cake she was working on. “I’m leaving tomorrow. I was ready to quit anyway—I tried once, remember? And Lucia, that thing tonight was so . . .”

  She closed her eyes and pressed her fork into the cake. “I’m just confused. I’m going to go to my parents’ and spend time with the Lord so I’ll know what to do next.”

  I nodded. That actually did make some sense.

  “Will you be going home now?” she said.

  “I can’t leave Bethany.”

  “That poor kid.” Her voice was genuinely sad. “You know what—I don’t have to be careful about what I say anymore, so I’m going to be totally honest with you.”

  In that case, there were a number of things I wanted to ask her, but I pushed them aside.

  “Here’s the de
al with Sonia,” she said. “She actually feels like because the Lord’s given her such a big thing to do for Him, He’ll see that Bethany is taken care of.”

  I didn’t care what kind of look I got on my face. “You’re not serious,” I said.

  “Yeah, only . . .” She drew her hand to her chest. “I don’t think the Lord did take care of her. Do you know that nobody has ever spent as much time with her as you do? Yeah, Yvonne made her meals. Got her dressed. Stuck her in front of the TV. She had the easiest job in the whole house. There were days I wanted to sit around and watch videos all the time too.” She pointed to the half cake on its pedestal. “You want some?”

  “No,” I lied, and watched her cut herself another piece. “Bethany watched that much TV when she had a nanny?”

  “Except when Chip wasn’t busy doing stuff for Sonia or working with Bryson in the yard.”

  As much as it galled me, I said, “Chip?”

  Marnie took another bite of cake and pulled her long legs up under her on the counter stool. “He did more to entertain Bethany than Yvonne ever did. He was so good with her.” Marnie smiled as she eased the fork out of her mouth. “He was good with me too.”

  She did not just say that.

  “Yeah, I could talk to him about anything. He’d be a great father—which is probably why I hung around him so much. I have so been missing my dad. I can’t wait to get home.” She looked at me as if she’d suddenly remembered something. “Are you and Chip ever gonna have kids? I mean, ya’ll are such a great couple.”

  Only because there is a God in heaven did her phone jingle. She looked at her text message, smiled at it, and slipped out of the chair.

  “My friends are out front,” she said. “I’m so glad we finally got to talk. Too bad we waited until right when I’m leaving.”

  Before I could stop her, she flung her arms around my neck.

  “Thank you so, so much for being here. I would have ended up in a bed right next to Sonia on the psych ward if you hadn’t been.” She pulled away and looked at me tearfully. “Give Daddy Chip a big ol’ hug for me.”