by Nancy Rue
“What are they doing?” I said.
“Baby, they’re dancing.”
“To what?”
Wesley moved her shoulders and with them her head. “To the music of their souls,” she said. “Only I think we ought to show them how it’s done.”
I couldn’t argue with Wesley Kane. Or with a long-ago rhythm that teased at my feet and set my arms afloat and turned my body like a feather. Like a fawn who didn’t disturb a leaf.
“You can move, girlfriend,” Wesley said.
Yes. By a miracle I decided to call God, I still could.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Sully prayed before the session as always. After the amen, he added an unashamed thanks that Lucia had requested they meet in the breakfast nook instead of by the river so Bethany wouldn’t be in the house alone.
God knew he was basically a coward anyway. He appreciated the break.
The nook actually provided a good place for a session, situated cozily into a bay window, cushioned benches forming a booth at the table. It was one of the few rooms in Sonia’s McMansion conducive to easy conversation. Too bad he didn’t feel especially at ease.
Sully pulled out his phone and checked for messages for the tenth time. He hadn’t let the phone out of his sight for the three days since he’d left the message for Cyril and Una. Still no return call, and the possible reasons for that had finally taken over his attempts to stay focused on something else. Cyril and Una didn’t remember him. They thought he was cavalier with Lynn and hated him for it. They had recently been abducted by aliens and taken Lynn’s secret to an unknown planet with them.
All right. One more try before Lucia got there, just so he wouldn’t go completely nuts. He dialed the number, but he hung up when it switched to voice mail. He could be tenacious—or just plain pathetic.
“Would you like some coffee or anything?”
Sully stuck the phone back into his pocket. Time to shift, Dr. Crisp.
“If I drink any now,” he said, “I’ll be prowling the grounds at 2:00 AM, and we both know where that gets you.”
She nodded at his lip. “How’s it doing?”
“I don’t look as much like Mick Jagger now, so there’s that.”
Lucia smiled, and so did Sully. If nothing else, she shared more of her face now. Time to celebrate the progress.
“You seem good,” he said. “Are you?”
She looked at the bay window as if the answer might be out there. “There haven’t been any more weird things happening, so I guess the FBI was wrong about Bethany being the target. She loves school, which is huge. And we got her to go in the water. I personally felt like I’d walked on it, as much of a miracle as that was.”
She turned to Sully with a tender ache in her eyes. “The only sad thing about all of that is that she is so much better when Sonia isn’t here.”
“And what about you?” Sully said. “You’ve just told me how Bethany is doing. How are you doing?” He propped his chin on his hand, ready for the resistance.
She redirected herself to the window again before she looked back at him. “I played Dancing with the Stars,” she said.
Sully was surprised he didn’t fall out of the booth. “You did?”
“I think Bethany and James-Lawson won, though.”
“There are no losers in Game Show Theology. You play, you win.” He felt his grin go past his ears. “Ding-ding-ding, Mrs. Coffey. How did it feel?”
“Good.” Her voice went dry. “So I’m cured. Your work is done here, right?”
“You don’t need to be ‘cured,’ because you aren’t sick. Healed is more what we’re going for. You ready to work on that?”
Again he steeled himself for the poker face and the folded arms and the bristling voice. Again she surprised him.
“I know what I want to be healed from,” she said.
“And that is?”
“I want to be healed from hate.”
Sully didn’t attempt to keep his mouth from dropping open.
“Do I get a buzz for that?” she said.
“Absolutely not. Tell me more. And, Lucia—” He leaned into the table. “I want you to know that whatever you say, I’m not going to judge you. I won’t think you’re a horrible person or ask what you were thinking when you did such a stupid thing.”
“You say that now. You haven’t heard it yet.”
“Try me.”
She nodded, but studied the window for another moment before she went on. “I figured out that I hate a lot of things. And I hate that about myself.”
“Tell me what you hate.”
She folded her hands precisely on the table. “You know about my husband—that he basically became a drug addict.”
“Yes, I do. Drug abuse in the family can make anybody hate.”
“He was arrested and went to federal prison for two years. They took away his license to practice medicine, which means now he’s working for some company that sells medical equipment instead of healing people, the only thing he ever wanted to do. I hate it, and what I really hate is that if it weren’t for me, it never would have happened.”
Sully put a foot up on the bench. “Can you tell me why?”
Lucia didn’t want to, that was clear. She grew as still as he’d ever seen her. As much as he wanted to save her the pain, he let her wrestle with it.
“We had a great marriage at first,” she said finally. “I thought we did, anyway. Sonia didn’t think I should marry Chip because he wasn’t a Christian. He went to church—we both did—but she said it wasn’t real with him and I was risking eternity in hell if I took him as my husband.”
“And your mother?”
She gave him a look.
“Sided with Sonia,” Sully said.
“She didn’t even want to give me a wedding, but my father liked Chip, and he said I deserved as good as Sonia had.” She rubbed her palms on her sleeves. “There is a point to all this.”
“Take as long as you want.”
“We had a nice wedding,” she said, “and we bought a house in Havertown, and Chip tried to build up his practice. He was an internist.”
“And what were you doing?”
“I went back to work at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital in obstetrics.”
“Back to work. What were you doing before that?”
“I was in a nurse practitioner program, but we needed for me to work more hours while Chip got things going.”
“Did you enjoy obstetrics?”
She almost smiled. “Most of the time everybody’s happy in a newborn nursery. Except when something goes wrong. Anyway, things were hard for Chip—it’s that way in any new practice—and I said we should go on a little vacation for our anniversary.” She rushed the words like she was trying to outrun a train. “We were trying to have a baby, and nothing was happening, and I thought it was probably because of the stress.”
“How long had you been married by then?”
“Just a year. We went to Cape May, New Jersey, and it was good. We got away from everything, and it felt like when we were first married.”
She had lost her stillness, and she couldn’t seem to get it back, even as she locked her hands together more tightly and stared at them.
“So we were on the beach one day, and I was acting stupid—”
Sully buzzed her.
“What?”
“If I don’t get to judge you, neither do you. What were you doing that you think was stupid?”
“I was trying to get him to dance with me in the water.”
Sully gave her a half grin. “That doesn’t sound like stupid. That sounds like flirting.”
“Well, in the first place, Chip can’t swim. He’s afraid of the water. And when he tried to pick me up and twirl me around, he fell and ruptured two discs in his back.”
“Ouch,” Sully said. “I guess that put a damper on the second honeymoon.”
“It put a damper on our whole life.” Lucia’s voice took
on an edge. “He couldn’t afford to take the time off to have surgery, and they weren’t sure it would help anyway, but he was in too much pain to work unless he took medication. I thought it was okay. The practice picked up—we weren’t worrying about money anymore— but I didn’t know he was addicted to OxyContin until long after I should have. And I didn’t know he was selling it illegally until the FBI came to our home and took us both out in handcuffs.”
Sully lowered his foot. “You were arrested?”
“They never charged me. Chip told them I wasn’t involved, which they didn’t believe at first. How could a wife not know her husband was abusing prescription medication when she was a nurse? They didn’t have any evidence against me for dealing or any of the rest of the charges, so they let me go after twenty-four hours.”
“Still—that had to be traumatic.”
Lucia didn’t seem to hear him. The story evidently had to come out in one piece, or not at all. “It was all over the news. One of our pictures was in the paper almost every day. The FBI came to my work so many times to ask me more and more questions, the hospital administration finally told me to take a leave of absence. They took me back after Chip went to prison, which was the only thing that kept the guilt from driving me crazy.”
She stopped. Sully poured her a glass of water, which she took without protest, and he poured himself one too. He’d heard a lot of stories; few had made him as angry as this one. He wouldn’t ask her another question until he could do it without threatening to shoot the man she was married to.
“You doing okay?” he said.
“No,” she said. “I hate this. I guess that’s my new favorite word.”
“I think it’s the right word for now. Lucia, tell me something. Which part of this whole thing do you think is your fault?”
“It boils down to what it always boils down to. If I hadn’t been so disgustingly fat, Chip never would have hurt his back trying to carry me. He wouldn’t have needed pain meds. He wouldn’t have gotten hooked on them.”
“Did your weight make him use pain meds to deal with stress? Was it because you were carrying a few extra pounds that he helped other people feed their addictions? Sold drugs illegally?”
“Don’t,” she said, lips barely moving.
“Why? Is there some reason why you want to take responsibility for something that is clearly not your fault?”
Sully could see her clamming up. Time to back off some. “So what happened while Chip was in prison?”
“I worked. Gained thirty pounds the first six months. I lost a lot during the trial and all that, but I gained it back and then some.”
“Did your family help you?”
To his surprise, she gave a hard laugh.
“My mother had died just before Chip was arrested. My father basically went on the lam. I don’t hear from him much.”
“What about Sonia?”
“She refuses to have anything to do with our father.”
“I mean, did she help you?”
Her eyes clouded. “I stayed as far away from Sonia as I could. I didn’t want to hear ‘I told you so’ and ‘This is what happens when you don’t take everything to the foot of the cross and walk away free.’ ”
The bitterness spewed like venom.
“Do you know what she did? When she saw us on the national news, do you know what she did?”
Sully shook his head.
“She sent me a package—her video and book and workbook.” She pulled a ragged breath through her nose. “Faithless and Fat was the title. She said she hoped it would help me prepare myself physically and spiritually for a new life now that I had been cleansed of Chip.”
If Sully had been a swearing man, he would have done it then. “I watched part of the video. It said something like, ‘What would you think of our Lord Jesus Christ if you saw Him with a stomach that looked like He was nine months pregnant and jowls hanging down from His face?’ ”
Sully winced.
“I wasn’t always this fat, but I’ve never been skinny like Sonia. And it never bothered me that much until after I heard how my excess fat was Satan robbing me of my life.” Lucia licked at her mouth as if she’d just tasted something foul. “Since then, all I see when I look in the mirror is a hundred extra pounds of sin that God hates, because blubber means you’re ‘disobedient to His will.’ ”
Sully shook his head. “I hope you didn’t believe that stuff. Salvation doesn’t depend on your dress size.”
“I told myself I didn’t—while I was dumping the whole package in the garbage.”
“Good.”
“I didn’t know it at the time, but I hated Sonia for that. I think it’s one of the reasons I didn’t divorce Chip when he was in prison: because she assumed that I would.”
“It’s interesting,” Sully said. “In Sonia’s ‘Recapturing Marriage’ program, or whatever it’s called, she denounces divorce in almost every circumstance. I’m a little surprised she didn’t tell you to stand by your man.”
“She got around that,” Lucia said. “We were never married in God’s eyes anyway, because Chip had never really been saved. That’s what she told me.”
Sully bit his tongue. Literally.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “At the time, I convinced myself I stayed married to him because I’d promised for better or for worse, and it could have been worse.”
Sully wasn’t sure how, but he let her go on.
“I decided I was being noble and loyal to stand by him, and after the first year, I made up my mind that I was going to be a better wife when he got out so he wouldn’t get into trouble again. I kept going over and over how many of the signs I’d missed when he was using. I just thought his withdrawing and snapping at me and forgetting our plans with each other was because of his getting sick of me.”
Sully felt his heart shift. Some wise person once said being a therapist wasn’t as much about what to say to a hurting person as it was about how much of her pain you could bear to hear.
“Would you tell me what happened when he got out?” he said.
She folded her fingers around the water glass. “When they said he’d be out in six months, I stopped going to see him, because I wanted to surprise him when he got home with how much weight I lost. I went on the South Beach Diet and took off forty pounds.”
“In six months.”
“Right. I had the house perfect, myself perfect, everything just right when he came home.”
“How did he respond?”
“He didn’t even seem to notice that I’d lost weight. He was just happy to be out—well, I guess happy isn’t the word. It was like he’d forgotten how to be that.”
“Prison has a way of doing that to a person.”
“I think he tried to be who he was before, but sometimes I’d see this hardness around his mouth and in his eyes. Or he’d just have no expression at all. He couldn’t get a job, not just in medicine but anywhere, because he was a convicted felon. He got depressed, and I became a wreck watching for signs that he’d gone back to drugs.”
“That’s understandable.”
“Not to him. He said I was the one who drove him to them in the first place, and I would do it again if I didn’t lay off him.” She shook her head. “It was the pressure. I didn’t blame him.”
Why not? Sully wanted to say.
She rearranged her grip on the glass. Sully could see her fingers shaking.
“I know he broke the law, but he wasn’t a serial killer. He didn’t mean to hurt anyone, and yet he came out of the penitentiary as hard and cold as any of those men I saw in the visitors’ room. That place sucked everything out of him that I’d loved.”
“But you didn’t leave him then, either,” Sully said.
“No.”
He waited and watched her. She stopped gripping, stopped breathing. He knew she was trying to stop feeling. This was the part he didn’t like. The part when he had to push her to feel the pain all the way to its scathing
center.
“What about after that?”
“I don’t know if I can talk about this.”
“It’s all right. Just take a minute.”
“I don’t care how long I take, I can’t do this! Don’t you get that?”
Lucia stared at him, and Sully watched the horror come into her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She struggled to stand up in the narrow space between the bench and the table, and dropped onto the seat again.
Sully spread his hand on the tabletop. “Don’t be, Lucia. This is exactly what you need to be doing.”
“I shouldn’t take it out on you.”
“Take it out on me all you want. It’s better than taking it out on you, and that’s what you’ve been doing probably your whole life. You’re making everything your fault, and it isn’t.”
She closed her eyes. “You don’t know all of it,” she said.
“I don’t know what you haven’t told me, Lucia.”
Her eyes opened, but she didn’t quite look at him.
“If whatever this is was somehow your ‘fault,’” Sully said, “we’ll deal with that. Therapy isn’t about making everything okay. It’s about helping you come to terms with what is. No matter what it is.”
He waited, the interminable wait that always happened at the crossroad—where there was no more room for coaxing or presenting arguments. There could be no pushing or tugging. There could only be holding his breath while she decided whether to keep feeding that Thing to keep it quiet—or rip it out and find out at last what it had to say.
“I got pregnant,” she said.
Sully let out the breath. “This was after Chip got out of prison.”
“He didn’t want to try then, not with things the way they were, but I thought maybe if we had a family he wouldn’t give up on himself and us.”
She pushed her hands into her lap and rocked for a moment. Sully waited.
“I’m trying not to say that was stupid, because I know you’ll buzz me.”
“No buzzing right now,” he said softly.
“Then how dumb was that? It never works to use a baby to put things back together, but I just wanted a child so much—and he always said he did, before.”