Healing Waters

by Nancy Rue

  Wesley didn’t ask her what she was talking about, for which Sully was grateful. That explanation could take more time than anybody had.

  “Was it the guy you saw at the airport?” Sully said.

  Marnie shuddered. “Yes. It was so horrible looking at him and trying to understand how anybody that knew Sonia would ever have anything to do with someone like him. I mean, when I worked for her, I got so disillusioned with her that I quit, but even then I, like, stayed four more days. I should have stuck with her instead of going to work for Roxanne.”

  Sully left his mixture on the stove and leaned on the counter across from her. “You went to work for Roxanne? At ALM?”

  Marnie ducked her head. “She called me after I got to my parents’ and asked me to come. I worked there for all of a week, but she was . . . Well, let me just put it this way.” She lowered her voice. “Sonia was hard to work for after she got hurt, but Roxanne made her look like my fairy godmother. By the way, Dr. Crisp”—she widened her eyes at Sully—“I’ve been listening to your podcasts and, yeah, they make more sense than anything Roxanne has to say.”

  “I never trusted that woman when I saw her on the TV,” Wesley said.

  Sully smothered another tired grin.

  “I shouldn’t have either, when she was just, like, right there to step into Sonia’s place after they were best friends.” Marnie took a much-needed breath.

  If she hadn’t, Sully would have taken one for her.

  “But it didn’t take me that long”—she snapped her fingers—“to see that she doesn’t have Sonia’s integrity, or her compassion— hel-lo-o. The second day I was there, Roxanne fired this girl because she found out she used drugs, like, four years ago. She didn’t care that the girl—who is so sold-out for Jesus, by the way—hasn’t touched anything all that time. She just said she couldn’t let her be associated with ALM.” Marnie pressed a hand to her chest. “Then there’s Sonia, who hired Chip because he was a recovering addict so she could help him. And that wasn’t just out of guilt, either.”

  “Guilt?” Wesley said. “Why would Sonia feel guilty because her brother-in-law was a former junkie?”

  “Because Sonia was the one who turned him in.”

  Sully’s eyes clinked with Wesley’s. Hers widened before she turned back to Marnie.

  “Sonia turned him in to whom?”

  “The medical board, I think. She did it anonymously—I was the only one who knew about it—and she only did it because she didn’t want him hurting anybody else. That’s just Sonia.”

  Sully switched the stove off. He wished he could turn off his rising anxiety as easily.

  “Did Chip know she blew the whistle on him?” he said.

  Marnie twisted a strand of hair around her finger. “I accidentally told him one night when we were talking. I thought Sonia had told him herself by then, so I was just talking about it, and then he acted all surprised and I felt bad. But he said it was okay—she’d done the right thing, and now he was on his way to healing.” Marnie’s eyes filled. “That’s what she did for people, and even though sometimes she was hard on us and it just seemed like anything you did wrong or that went wrong was because you weren’t right with God—and I’m not so sure about that anymore—but besides all that, she helped so many people who were so screwed up—”

  Sully stopped listening. This could not have been there all along, right under the nostrils of everyone from the FBI to Sonia herself.

  “Marnie,” he said.

  She put her hand to her mouth. “I’m sorry. I’m talking about all this stuff, and poor little Bethany—”

  “Did you ever tell Sonia that Chip knew she was the informer?”

  “Oh, gosh no! He and I made a pact not to, because he said it was all behind him and he didn’t want her to ever feel bad. We bonded over that. In fact, right after that was when he started talking about how I was too talented to just be working for Sonia, and I should come to Philadelphia with him when he went home to Lucia, and he’d help me find a better job up there.” She smeared aside the tears that pooled under her eyes. “What freaks me out is that I could have been burned or even killed on that plane too. I wouldn’t have even been as hurt as I was if I’d gotten off with him. I still don’t know what God was doing.”

  Sully didn’t know what God was doing either. But with a sick heart, he knew what Chip Coffey was doing.

  Marnie took the Kleenex Wesley pressed into her hand and blew her nose.

  Wesley made what Sully knew was a pretense of joining him at the stove to check on the progress of the sweet tea. “I wish I didn’t know that, Dr. Crisp,” she said.

  “Me too,” he said.

  “What are you gon’ do about it?”

  “The only thing I can do.”

  “Oh, Lord, Lord, Lord,” she said.

  He couldn’t have said it better himself.

  “Does this have any significance?”

  I looked up from the Cinderella box I held on my lap on the floor and let out a cry.

  “What, Lucia?” Sonia said.

  I snatched Bethany’s rag from the young FBI agent and pushed it into my face. “That’s hers.” I ached anew at the thought of Bethany trying to sleep without it. Of finding out that the “friend” she trusted enough to climb into a car with was not going to bring her home to get it.

  “She loves this thing,” I said. “She wrapped it around her neck when she slept, and I was always afraid she’d be strangled.”

  I felt a hand on my back as I sobbed into it.

  “Do you know what that is?” Sonia said.

  “It’s one of her BFFs,” I said.

  “It’s the baby blanket you brought to her when you came to take care of her for me. What’s left of it. Every nanny tried to get rid of it, and she would just have a fit.”

  I felt Sonia lay her face against my spine.

  “It was the one thing I stood behind her on. I have been the worst mother.”

  I pulled a program, still faintly sticky with some child-treat, from the box in my lap and twisted toward Sonia. “Do you know what this is?”

  “That’s from the circus,” she said. “I took her in the spring when it came here.” She ran a finger across a shriveled balloon and a paper rosebud whose pink had run onto the bottom of the box and left a stain.

  “I took her to a little tea room for her birthday and we had a tea party, just Bethany and I, and Chip. She wanted Uncle Chip to come.” Sonia worked to swallow. “He brought her home, and I went to the airport to fly off someplace. I was always flying off, Lucia.”

  I watched the spasm of grief go through her as she stared down at the few and tiny pieces of herself that her daughter had kept like precious stones. It was a grief I couldn’t share with her.

  “Could you please leave us alone for a minute?” she said to the agent.

  He looked more than happy to get away from the estrogen.

  When he was gone, Sonia seemed afraid to look at me. “Lucia, I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Whatever it is,” I said, “we don’t need to look at it right now.” “No—we do. I watched you on CNN this morning.”

  “Oh.”

  “I was so wrong about them—about me. Mostly about you.”

  I tried to pretend she was making sense, but I was worn too thin to pull it off. She sighed fretfully.

  “You have always been smarter than me, sorella,” she said. “And I have resented that all my life. But right now, I want you to be right. I think you are.” Her voice teetered on a narrow ledge. “I have to learn to pray all over again. I have to learn to be a mother—if I even get the chance. I have to learn to let go of my feelings, like you did right on TV.”

  I pressed my fingers to my throbbing temples.

  “You’ve already given up so much for me—don’t think I don’t know that,” she said. “And I can’t ask you to give up any more, but sorella . . .” She breathed so hard she could hardly get the words out. “The only person who can te
ach me to do that is you.”

  “Sonia. Lucia.”

  The tone of Deidre Schmacker’s voice brought my head up, and Sonia’s with it. She stood in the bedroom doorway, arms folded, rubbing one now-rumpled sleeve with the other hand. Her face was grave.

  Sonia pulled the box to her chest. “Please don’t tell us—”

  “We haven’t found her,” Agent Schmacker said. “But I have something to tell you.”

  “It’s not good, is it?”

  “Not for Lucia,” she said.

  She put out her hand to help me up from the floor, but I got to my feet myself. I felt a sickening dread.

  Deidre unfolded her arms, slowly, as if she would rather cut them off than say what she had to say. “Agent Ingram just called me,” she said. “Derrick Garrison gave us the name of the person he was working for.” She looked straight into me. “It’s a man he knows as Kent Mussen.”

  The floor gave way beneath me.

  “You know the name, yes?” she said.

  I had to nod.

  “You do?” Sonia said. “Lucia, who is that?”

  Deidre shook her head at Sonia and turned back to me. “In addition to being the owner of a money-laundering operation disguised as a medical equipment company, Kent Mussen is an ex-con whose real name is immaterial now. The point is, Ingram has been interrogating Mussen for the last four hours, and he has given up the man who hired him to sabotage the plane.”

  I grabbed for the bedpost to stop the slide. Please. Please, God, no.

  “It’s Halsey, Lucia,” Deidre said. “It’s Chip.”

  The air left the room. In its place a suffocating fear closed over me.

  “That makes no sense.” Sonia was on her feet, hands groping for mine on the bedpost. “Why would Chip do that?”

  Deidre Schmacker gave her a long, sad look. “Because you turned him in for dealing illegal prescription drugs, Sonia.”

  She could not have cut me more deeply if she had slit my throat. I sank to the bed and doubled over onto myself. Schmacker’s words stabbed me, over and over, in places I’d covered with my blindness.

  Chip vowing to take down the person who wrecked his life.

  Chip pleading with Marnie to change her mind—to get off the plane.

  Chip handing the pilot a cup of coffee.

  Chip staying far away from the hospital.

  They pierced me, those words, in my heart, in my gut, in my soul. Only one word pierced its way through my mind.

  “Bethany,” I said. “Then Chip has Bethany.”

  “That is possible,” Deidre said. “Do you have any idea at all where he might be?”

  “He told Dad he was in Oregon—but he told me he was going to Memphis.”

  My mind reeled. When I stood up to right myself, Deidre put her hands on my shoulders.

  “I know this is too much to take in,” she said, “but you have to try to think.”

  “I’m thinking! I have to call him.”

  “His mobile phone has been disconnected. The number he called your father from was a disposable cell. Is there any other way you know of to reach him?”

  I pulled away from her and searched for my sister. She stood across the room from me, Bethany’s rag clutched to her neck. Horror and hope cried out from her eyes.

  For the first time in our lives, I could feel my sister’s pain—for it was mine too.

  I pulled the number from my pocket and handed it to Deidre Schmacker.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  I hated every word that came out of my mouth,” Lucia said.

  Sully only nodded. He couldn’t trust himself to speak yet. Anger fired at will in his gut.

  “It was all lies.”

  Sully had heard. Lucia’s only argument to Agent Ingram’s hardcore control of the phone call was that everyone be there with her when she made it. Under his steely, disapproving glare, Sonia, Tony Brocacini, Wesley, and Sully had surrounded her in the dining room as she dialed the number.

  Sully got that. Only human contact could make a cold, bloodless task bearable. Lucia had carried it out with a poise Sully knew he himself wasn’t capable of.

  Chip hadn’t answered, which was divine intervention in Sully’s view, and Lucia had left the message Deidre Schmacker helped her craft. It was laden, as she said, with lies.

  “Dad gave me your new number,” she’d said. “He said to call you when I was ready for our new life—and I am.”

  Sully had watched her close her eyes and swallow.

  “I need you. Bethany is gone—I’m sure you’ve heard that. I can’t get through this without you. Sonia has her own people. You and I need to do this together.”

  When she hung up, Lucia had shoved the phone down the length of the table and careened out of the dining room. They’d all tried awkwardly not to listen as she retched in the nearby powder room.

  She looked down now at the offensive cell phone in her lap. Agent Ingram had instructed her to keep it on her person at all times. He himself was a scant ten yards from their Adirondack chairs, should Chip return her call while she and Sully were trying to speak of the unspeakable.

  “They want me to wear a wire if he agrees to meet me.” Lucia clamped her folded arms to her ribs. “I feel like I’m on some bad TV show.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “I didn’t marry a monster. How did this happen?”

  “Drugs can turn anybody into a monster. If that doesn’t do it, prison will.”

  “It still doesn’t feel real.”

  “That might be the only way to get through this part,” Sully said. “It’s all right to go through the motions until it’s done.”

  Lucia looked him full in the face, eyes still their unyielding blue even through the swollen remnants of her tears. “And then what? What happens after I turn my husband over to the FBI—or after I find out he’s done something horrible to Bethany—or after my sister shuts me out of her life forever? What do I do with all this pain after that?”

  Sully rubbed the Adirondack arm. A year ago—even a day ago—he would have told her the only way out was through. That God would help her navigate this dark, dripping tunnel, and she could emerge scarred but healed. He still believed that, but as he stood here outside the tunnel at its other end, alone, he knew that wasn’t all of it. Maybe it wasn’t enough to build the rest of a life on.

  “You don’t know, do you?” Lucia said.

  Sully looked up at her, ready for the disappointment in her eyes. There was instead a subtle melting of relief. “I don’t know all of what I need to tell you, no,” he said.

  She began to weep, softly, with no fight in her face. “Do you know how glad I am to hear you say that?”

  “You’re glad?”

  “If you gave me an answer you said was absolutely true, I’d have to try to believe it. I don’t know if I can work that hard at this point.”

  “I hear you,” Sully said. He leaned his arms on his knees. “Things could get a lot worse if you have to face Chip. We know that. But they’re pretty bad right now. What’s holding you up?”

  She didn’t hesitate. “You. Wesley. My dad, ironically enough. Francesca and her fruit platters—how weird is that? She said, ‘Bless your heart’ to me this morning, and I think I finally knew what it meant.”

  Sully gave her half a grin. “Dang. You want to tell me?”

  “I think it means ‘Your pain is so bad I don’t know what to say to make it better.’ ”

  “Does that help?”

  This time she did pause. Sully waited—and hoped she had an answer for both of them.

  “It makes me cry,” she said. “It makes me touch people and sit with them and talk about how much this all hurts.” She gazed at Sully in tearful surprise. “I haven’t gone numb one time.”

  “Do you want to?”

  Lucia slowly shook her head. “I used to think it kept things from hurting, but it was its own kind of pain.”

  “A pain you can’t heal,” Sully said. “But I don’t think you cou
ld have taken the risk of feeling it before. You didn’t have then what you have now.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You said it yourself. Wesley, your dad, the whole crowd.”

  A pang went through him, and left him with an answer that wasn’t there before.

  “You’re finding something that a lot of us have forgotten we need,” he said. “You’re building community. You’re not alone anymore, so now you can suffer without being afraid that it’s going to take you down.”

  Lucia picked up the cell phone and squeezed it before her face. “Chip’s trying to take that away,” she said. “Dear God, please don’t let him take that away.”

  “There’s your final piece,” Sully said. He had barely enough control left to get the last words out. “Keep saying, ‘Dear God, dear God.’ There may still be suffering—but keep touching those people, Lucia, and He won’t let you suffer alone anymore.”

  Lucia nodded and turned her face toward the river.

  Sully watched her cry silently to the water and the heron and the sunlight that embraced them both.

  The same goes for you, Sullivan Crisp, it said to him. Go back to touching God’s people, so they won’t have to suffer alone.

  And neither will you.

  “He knows it’s a trap,” I said. “That’s why he hasn’t called me back.”

  In spite of the momentary, relative calm I’d felt after my talk with Sullivan, I beat back panic at the kitchen counter with a chef’s knife and an onion.

  “Girl, you are going to cut your finger off, and then you’re gon’ be no good to anybody.” Wesley shook her head. “It’s only been a few hours. Don’t you be losing hope.”

  I kept chopping. I had no idea what these onions were going into, but I kept thrusting the knife into them, dicing them finer and finer.

  “This isn’t unusual,” Deidre Schmacker said. She refilled Sonia’s teacup.

  Sonia looked up absently from the foot massage Francesca was giving her, and nodded.

  “He thinks his plan is coming together,” Deidre said, “and he’s making sure every i is dotted, every t is crossed.”