by Nancy Rue
To be certain of that, I went to the headmaster’s office to inform her that Bethany would need to be watched closely on the playground—that no one else but me was authorized to pick her up—that Miss Richardson and I were to make contact before Bethany got into the car with me when I collected her in the afternoon— that I was to be notified if anyone from the UPS man on up took an unusual interest in her.
“A Deidre Schmacker from the FBI was here first thing this morning,” the headmaster told me. “Your Bethany is safe with us.”
If I could have cried, I would have, all the way out to the car, just like any other mother who took her baby to her first day of school—her baby who was in danger of giving up more than just her childhood for her mother.
And fear wasn’t the only thing that nagged at me. By the time I walked into the empty kitchen that still smelled like the blueberry waffles and sausage patties I’d fixed Bethany for breakfast, loneliness had descended on me.
I hadn’t felt lonely in that pointed a way for a long time. Maybe, I decided as I threw myself into doing the dishes, because lonely had become a way of being.
“Your life may be a pile of crap,” my father had said when he got out of rehab, “but if it’s a familiar pile of crap, you’ll live with it before you’ll risk exchanging it for something else that might be worse.”
Sonia had instructed him to turn the pile of filth—she would never utter the word crap—over to the Lord, and He would transform it.
That had always been about as helpful to me as “Don’t worry. Be happy.” All I knew was that loneliness dulled the longer you just lived with it. Now that Bethany had filled my hours with her rare giggle and her emerging chatter and her enchantment with every ordinary childhood thing I introduced her to, I had gotten a taste of living without that loneliness. Her absence now was painful.
Made all the more so by the additional ragging from my mother’s voice as I nearly scrubbed the Teflon off the waffle grill.
Don’t get attached to her like you did before, Lucia Marie. I know you have a tender heart, but Bethany doesn’t belong to you. She’s Sonia’s. You’re the strong one. You’ll go back and fix your own life sooner or later.
My own life.
What the Sam Hill was that anymore? Right now I was suspended in a strange place, hauled out of Sonia’s healing, but only beginning to poke my toe into my own. I didn’t know whether to plunge in or run. I wanted a Hershey bar.
I went to the pantry and unearthed one and pulled the wrapper half off. There was no one there to stop me.
But there was also no one there to make me want to consume it so I could get through the next hour with him or her. Or without them.
I buried the bar back in the stash and escaped from the kitchen, out onto the deck. Harry the Heron looked up from his distant stance in the river as if he, too, were missing Bethany and James-Lawson and Wesley—who, I remembered, I needed to call to tell her we wouldn’t be needing her, at least not for a while. That made me feel worse.
I looked back at the serene Harry. He just stood. His stillness wasn’t the kind I always tried to accomplish. He seemed so sure of his place there in the shallows at the bank. He didn’t try to make himself invisible. He didn’t hate his life. Not like I hated what mine had become before I came here. That’s what I’d told Sullivan.
Dear God, do I really feel that?
This time, I was sure God answered me, because my soul cried out a resounding yes. It burned and it scraped and it clawed and it wouldn’t be pushed down. It was too real.
When I heard a car pull in, I jerked out of my reverie, heart slamming. Sullivan was still at the guesthouse.
I got myself back inside the house and locked the French door behind me. Someone was already knocking at the front door, and only by sheer force of will did I go to it, fingers curled in my pocket around the phone I’d keyed Deidre Schmacker’s number into.
“Who’s there?” I said.
“The cleaning lady,” a familiar voice said. “Lucia, it’s Wesley.”
I was a puddle of pure relief when I got the door open.
She greeted me with her magnificent smile and a handled shopping bag.
“Swimming suits,” she said. “You and me and the children, this afternoon.”
My heart took a dive. “Come on in,” I said. “But Sonia isn’t here.”
“She isn’t here?” Wesley stepped in and scanned the foyer as if Sonia might be hiding in the umbrella stand. The search stopped at the blank wall.
“She got you to take down the mirrors,” she said.
“No, she did it herself,” I said. “The hard way. You want some coffee?”
“Try and stop me.”
While I brewed another pot and brought out the banana nut muffins Bethany and I had made the day before—with raw instead of refined sugar—I brought her up to date. Even as I told the weekend’s story, including a rendition of me fending off a few local reporters who’d gotten wind of the FBI’s presence, I had a hard time believing all of that had happened in just three days.
Wesley listened with her warm-oil eyes, giving the occasional nod and stirring her coffee in a meditative fashion. I sank onto a stool beside her when I was finished, spent but somehow calm, as if merely saying it all took some of its bite away.
I hesitated to say it, but I had to. “I’m glad you came by,” I said.
Wesley pulled in her chin in that way she had. “I didn’t just come by. Sonia told me Friday she wanted to work with me twice a day. I’m here for my morning shift.”
“She said that?” I shook my head. “That was before the FBI showed up and triggered the whole mirror-smashing thing, I guess.”
“Miss Sonia was ready to smash things long before that. She’s right where she needs to be.”
“Absolutely.”
“And where does that leave you?”
I shrugged. “Here with Bethany. I’m definitely not leaving her now, with all this going on . . .”
I let that trail off. Wesley lowered her head to look at me.
“What?” she said.
What was the thing Sullivan and I talked about—how I needed to become I. Why that came to me at that moment I didn’t have a clue, but I reached for the wisp and pulled it in.
“I know what I’m doing for Bethany,” I said. “But I don’t know what I’m doing for me.”
A smile rose on Wesley’s face. “Well, I know a good place to start. Pick you a bathing suit, girl. We are goin’ swimmin’.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Well, ho-lee crow.
Sully clicked Stop and put the microphone down so he could move closer to the glass door. His eyes hadn’t lied—Wesley and Lucia were in the river, upper bodies propped side by side on a raft, feet kicking out behind them. As he watched, grinning, Wesley scooped a handful of water onto Lucia’s shoulders.
When his cell phone rang, Sully answered without checking caller ID. “Sullivan Crisp,” he said.
“Cyril and Una Eremenko.”
“Anna?”
“Yeah, and by the way, you sound way too professional when you answer the phone. It makes me feel inept. Cyril and Una—that was the other couple with us at Fall Creek Falls. I don’t know why I couldn’t remember before. I’m blaming menopause.”
Sully looked at the ceiling. “That’s way more than I need to know, Anna.”
“You know you can always count on me for that. Anyway, I thought I’d call and tell you, since you’re on a quest.”
“You don’t happen to have any contact information for them?” “You underestimate me, which is another reason we wouldn’t be good together. Got a pencil?”
He unearthed one. “Go,” he said.
“You won’t believe this. They ended up in Lebanon.”
Sully’s heart sank. “Are they doing mission work?”
“Not Lebanon the country. Lebanon, Tennessee. You know, Leb-nun.”
“You mean, out east of Nashville?”
&
nbsp; “Yeah, which I think is even weirder than if they’d gone to the Middle East, but, hey, none of us wound up where we thought we’d be, right?”
Not by a long shot.
She said, “If you really want to know anything about Lynn that you didn’t already know, Una’s your girl. She was the pastoral type, unlike me. I know Lynn talked to her a lot, even after Hannah was born. I didn’t know from babies, but Una was freakin’ Mother Earth. She’s probably got six of her own by now—”
“Listen, thanks a lot, Anna. I owe you.”
“No, you don’t. But what I’d love to see is you getting this out of your system and moving on. Some woman out there is looking for a guy like you that she can pamper.”
He heard the gravel-laugh.
“She’s nuts, but she’s out there.”
When he said good-bye and hung up, she was still talking.
Just when he’d been about to resign himself to being forever ignorant, here was a chance, a mere twenty-five miles away, to finally know. It was a little like being flung back and forth on an amusement park ride. With none of the amusement.
He flipped his cell phone open and closed it again on his chin. First he had to get his mind around the fact that Una Eremenko had been Lynn’s confidante. He thought Lynn only talked to that quack Belinda Cox—the so-called Christian counselor—after Hannah came. But this was all about what he didn’t know. What perhaps he’d never paid enough attention to find out when he could have done something about it.
Sully jammed the cell phone into his pocket and picked up the microphone. What would he be able to do about it now, anyway, except suffer more guilt? He tapped the touch pad and meant to click Record. His finger slid to Play.
“What I Know to Be True: Part Four,” his own voice said.
Sully closed his eyes. He sounded older than he did in his head.
“When I look Suffering in the face, trying to see what it wants me to know, I find that it’s like confronting a felon who’s done hard time and asking him to tell me about his feelings. He spits in my face. Kicks me in the gut. Grabs me by the neck and shoves my head against the wall. Call me slow, but I’m getting the impression that he doesn’t want to tell me what it would take to change him. He’s miserable, but his misery is familiar and in some twisted way, comfortable. It isn’t easy to push him. What’s easy, at least on the face of it, is to refuse to accept that he has power, and walk away. I brush the dirt from my feet and say, ‘I think I’ll just avoid him in the future.’”
Sully heard his voice shift. “But it can’t be done. And so I nudge and coax and plead with the felon until he breaks. Because even the hardest of criminals has a soft-belly place where, when palpated, he will cry out, ‘I’ll tell you what I am! I’ll show you how we can live together!’ What he tells me may be different from what he confesses to you. The truth is in the asking.”
Sully clicked Stop and fished for his phone.
“Baby girl,” Wesley said, “when are you going to get in the water with us?”
It was our fourth afternoon of hide-and-seek on the lawn and watermelon-seed-spitting in the gazebo and—at least for Wesley, James-Lawson, and me—splash contests in the river. After our first dip together, followed by lunch at Swett’s, Wesley said there was no reason why she and James-Lawson couldn’t come for a visit in the afternoons until she acquired another patient to fill Sonia’s opening. I suspected she wasn’t trying all that hard.
Bethany, of course, loved coming home from school to find Wesley and James-Lawson waiting with their swimsuits on. She kept hers in a downstairs bathroom so she didn’t have to waste time going upstairs to change. But once she got to the bank, she always skidded to a halt on her bottom, and while the rest of us bobbed
and shrieked in the water, she patted it with her feet and watched us with undisguised envy.
Today, as usual, I paddled around for a few minutes, then headed for the shore to join her.
“You don’t have to know how to swim,” Wesley said to her. “James-Lawson didn’t know how the first time I put him in the water.”
“You know what? It’s easy,” James-Lawson said, and proved it by wriggling under the water and bobbing to the surface, spitting and grinning.
Bethany giggled, but she shook her head. “I’m fine,” she said.
I leaned my arms on the rock she sat on and let my legs float out behind me like a frog’s. Bethany patted my hand.
“Your swimsuit is pretty,” she said.
“It’s Miss Wesley’s. She’s letting me wear it.”
“That’s because she’s your BFF.”
“My what?” My Aunt Lucia Mom antennae went up. Was this some elementary-school profanity I needed to be brought up to speed on?
“Best Friend Forever,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “Where did you learn that?”
“At school. I have three BFFs. James-Lawson.” She held up a finger.
“Right.”
“Louisa at school.” Another finger. “And you.”
I stopped pushing my hair back from my face. “I’m one of your best friends?” I said.
She nodded solemnly. Obviously BFFs were serious business.
“Who are yours?” she said.
I brushed my hand across her perfect white knee. “Well, you, of course.”
She dimpled.
“And James-Lawson.”
“And Miss Wesley?”
I turned to Wesley, who stood waist-deep in the Cumberland River, holding her son’s hands. In the past three days we had walked together down a path of topics that grew deeper with each cup of coffee, each feet-up-on-the-deck-railing, each promise to go shopping together when we thought we could safely leave the kids with someone else. We had passed from the comfortable distance of medical colleagues discussing the state of the health-care system to the intimate whispers of sisters sharing the funnies and fears of approaching middle age.
In our whole lives Sonia and I had never talked about the things Wesley and I had told each other in the two short weeks since we’d met.
“Yes,” I told Bethany. “Miss Wesley is one of my best friends.”
Bethany leaned in until her heart-lips were close to my ear. “Then will you tell her I don’t want to go in the water?”
I stayed still. “I will,” I said, “but will you tell me why?”
“Do I have to?”
“No. Only if you want to.” I looked into her eyes. They were round with yearning. “But I’ve learned something, Bethie.”
“Like I learn stuff in school.”
“Right. I’ve learned that if you talk about something that scares you, sometimes it goes away.”
She looked doubtfully at the water.
“Is it because of that day you went in where it’s deep, when Judson and them were here?”
She shook her head hard. “I was scared before that.”
“Did you fall in some other time? Did you hit your head or something?”
Her eyes became two limpid-blue pools of tears. “It’s because I’m too fat,” she said. “I’m so fat I’ll sink to the bottom and never come up.”
The pink hands went to her face, and she cried as if the heart inside her small self had broken.
I was sure it had.
I hoisted myself out of the water and sank down beside her, pulling her sweet softness against me.
“Listen to me, Bethie,” I said, “and listen hard like you do in school. First of all, you are not fat. You are beautiful and wonderful. And second of all, people who are fat don’t sink to the bottom.”
Her head came up, and she looked at me with streaming eyes. “How do you know?” she said.
“Because I float like a beach ball, and I’m—”
I choked on the word. Bethany watched me, waited for me to shape her view of herself. I couldn’t give her mine.
“And I’m thinking I could teach you to float with me,” I said. “I would never let anything happen to you. I’m your BFF,
remember?”
She searched my face until I saw the baby I had held in my arms. I was the first person she had ever trusted. And as she squeezed her arms around my neck and said, “Okay—teach me,” I knew I was probably the only one.
So with James-Lawson demonstrating and Miss Wesley cheering and Aunt-Lucia-Mom-BFF holding her, Bethany Cabot let herself be carried into the water and laid on her back, like a fairy princess on the cloud bed she was entitled to. I never let my hands leave her, nor did I correct her when she declared that she was “swimming.”
“You know what?” James-Lawson said when we were doling out the towels. “You’re almost as good of a swimmer as me.”
“Now if she could only be as humble, son,” Wesley said.
She put her arm around my shoulders, and we followed the two Olympic hopefuls toward the house.
“This is a huge thing. You want to celebrate at Chuck E. Cheese? One night of junk food isn’t going to hurt them.” She winked. “I know how Bethany is about processed products.”
I laughed. “I would love to do that kind of damage, but I have a therapy session tonight. With Dr. Crisp.”
She stopped and stared at me. “Well, no wonder you’re not beating down the door at PHV trying to take care of your sister.”
“That is the last thing I want to be doing.” I lowered my voice. “I think about her, and I worry. But I feel guilty because things are so much better without her.”
Wesley sniffed. “Then you keep seeing Dr. Crisp until you get over that.” She tucked her arms around mine. “I can’t believe I’ve only known you for such a little while and I’m already talking to you like this.”
“Come on, Wesley. I bet you talk straight to everybody.”
“Unh-uh. I don’t spend my straight talk on people who can’t hear what I have to say. Only my sisters get that.”
I closed my eyes to savor the words and the warmth and the rare contentment that touched me tentatively on the cheek.
But Wesley nudged me. “Look at that,” she whispered.
I opened my eyes to see Bethany and James-Lawson on the deck above us, towels wrapped around negligible hips that bounced against each other. Bethany’s hands were raised above her head. James-Lawson clapped out a beat with his.