Healing Waters (14 page)

I let my head fall against the window. Why shouldn't they? Gutwrenching things had happened to my family, but I hadn't changed at all. If I had, I wouldn't be dropping everything to keep Sonia's life afloat again.

Actually, my mother did the asking the first time. How, she'd wanted to know, could I
not
abandon my nurse practitioner studies at the University of Pennsylvania and move to Hershey and take care of that baby while Sonia kept a vigil beside her husband? I could always go back to it, Mother said. Blake could never go back to a normal life—think about that, she said.

Of course I thought about that. Sonia and Blake had been married only a few months when she called to tell me she was pregnant. That night I ate an entire package of Oreo cookies and threw them all up. I had never hated my sister in all the years I'd taken my place outside her spotlight, but I despised her then. She was starting the family I dreamed of.

I had given up my childhood so she could star in life, and now she was stealing the one thing I could do. I'd never known her to give a flip about kids, and I vowed I wasn't going to go to a half dozen baby showers or be her Lamaze coach or whatever else was asked of me. I dug into my nurse practitioner program and felt my mother's anger and my sister's disappointment and thought of myself for a change.

Just six weeks before Bethany was born, Blake suffered a spinal injury in a snow skiing accident in Vermont. While Sonia gave birth on January 1, 2003, Blake lay in a coma at a Montpelier hospital three hundred miles away.

To say that I almost suffocated in guilt was an understatement. On January 8, I left the NP program, put my career in obstetric nursing on hold, and moved to Hershey into the restored Victorian that Blake's parents had given them as a wedding present. That afternoon, before my mother and sister left to fly to Blake's bedside, Sonia put her newborn in my arms and said, “Take care of her,
sorella.
I don't trust anyone else.”

Within a week I was completely in love with that baby girl. I lived for the contented murmurs she made during her feedings . . . for the warmth of her cheek next to mine when I rocked her back to sleep at 2:00
AM
. . . for the tiny smiles, at first tentative, then purposeful, as if she, too, were living for smiles, my smiles.

Sonia was afraid to come home, afraid Blake would wake up in her absence. Mother was afraid to leave Sonia, who, she said, was like a piece of fragile glass at her husband's side. So it was just me caring for Bethany for the three months before Blake died, and for two more while my sister nearly suffocated in her grief and my mother became her air supply. I almost died of a broken heart myself when Sonia said she was finally ready to take over parenting the baby, the tiny girl I considered mine.

Sonia said Bethany cried a lot after I went back to Philadelphia. So did I.

The cabbie pulled into my driveway and looked over his shoulder at me. “This it?” he said.

One way or another, yes, this was it.

Chip's Saab wasn't there. The yard was mowed, the boxwoods trimmed, the mailbox empty. Chip had said he'd take care of things. My mind leapt to the conclusion that he'd done it all to get affairs in order before he left me for good . . .

Lucia Marie.

Okay. No. I wouldn't mention the Marnie thing.

In the dining room the mail was arranged in tidy piles on the table, and the morning sun splashed cheerily onto the Oriental rug. The fringe looked combed.

I finally made it to the kitchen and set my purse on the counter next to a pad filled with jottings in Chip's unreadable handwriting. He might not be a doctor anymore, but he still wrote like one.

On a piece of paper next to the pad, something was written in my cursive.

paint bathroom

put last layer on torte

redo makeup

call modeling agency—say NO

shave legs
    tell Sonia I want my husband back

The list I'd made the day of the crash. It had been smoothed out and weighted down at each corner with a coaster, as if someone had tried to preserve the normal life I couldn't return to.

“What modeling agency?”

I jumped. Chip was suddenly beside me, smelling of musk and spearmint.

“I'm sorry, babe,” Chip said. “I didn't mean to scare you.”

I shook that away. “I didn't know you were home,” I said.

“I didn't know you were
coming
home.”

I picked up a sponge and went after the counter. “Where's your car?”

“Loaned it to a buddy of mine.”

Since when did Chip have “buddies”?

He took the sponge from me and held my face in his hands. “Babe, why didn't you tell me? I would have come to get you.”

“I didn't know myself.”

“So how long are you here for?”

I felt color flood my face.

“I guess we're even,” he said. “I didn't tell you I quit working for Sonia. You didn't tell me you were starting.”

I folded my arms awkwardly. “How did you know?”

“Marnie told me. She thought you'd already said something to me, so I didn't act surprised. I didn't want to make her feel bad.”

My chest began to tear. “You've been talking to Marnie?”

He shrugged. “I still care about those people, some of them. I wanted to keep up.”

Don't go there. Don't get into this.
But I said, “When did you see Marnie?”

My voice shook, and I hated it—hated everything about my fat, pathetic self at the moment, but I couldn't stop.

“Did she come here?” I said.

“Here? No. Babe, what are you talking about?”

“Don't play stupid with me!”

Dear God, don't let me do this.

I headed for the living room and tried to press it back down. When I threw myself into my overstuffed paisley chair, Chip was over me, face taut.

“It's not what you think with Marnie,” he said. “And no, she didn't come here. I went there.”

“To her hotel?”

“No! I met her in the cafeteria at the hospital when I brought your clothes. We talked on the phone until the day the board met. She was so upset, I went over there and bought her a cup of coffee.”

“That sure sounds like what I think. When I see you with her, it looks like what I think. When you talk to her it sounds like what I think.”

“It isn't.”

“Then what is it?”

I didn't want to hear his answer. But the tiny rip in my container of rancid stuff let it spurt out.
Dear God, make me stop this.
I wanted my blessed numbness back.

“What? Lucia,
what
?” Chip said
.
“Talk to me.”

I dug my fingernails into the arms of the chair.

“Can you even answer a yes-or-no question?” He leaned over and pressed his hands onto mine, penning me in. “Just tell me—do you want us to work out, or don't you?”

I turned my face away from him. “Do you?”

“That's what I came back here for. That's all I thought about the whole time in Nashville.”

“Really?” I said. “What about Marnie?”

“Would you forget that!”

I tried to heave myself out of the chair, but he pushed me back. I looked up at him, stunned, heart slamming.

“I said it's not what you think with Marnie. It's not even worth going there. Let's talk about the real issue—which is that Sonia wants you to become her twenty-four-hour nurse because she's leaving here AMA.”

“She doesn't trust anybody else.”

He hissed. “She can't push anybody else around.”

“Don't.”

“You're going to end up like everybody else that works for her.”

“I'm her sister.”

“Is she going to pay you?”

“Yes.”

Chip looked down at me as if I were pitiful.

“Let me up,” I said.

I struggled to get to my feet and wrenched away when he went for my arm. He followed me into the kitchen, where I hurled open the refrigerator door and pulled out cheese and black olives.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“I'm cooking.”

“You're cooking.”