Healing Waters (40 page)

“You don't like it?” she said.

“It's not my favorite,” I said.

“That's a shame. Tea is so good at taking the edge off the uglies.” She looked at me with grandmother sadness. “And I'm afraid we will still have more of those to deal with.”

Monday I drove Bethany to school myself, as Agent Schmacker suggested. If she'd told me to dress her in a suit of armor, I would have.
Normal, normal,
she'd drilled into me. Warn her about strangers, of course. I'd told her there was no need. Bethany already had a suspicion of unknown people that made her a good candidate for the FBI.

By the time I walked Bethany inside the school, the sweat matted my hair to my forehead and soaked through my top. Why did these Southerners send their children to school when it was still ninety degrees? The anxiety alone emptied my sweat glands.

When I saw Bethany's teacher, Miss Richardson, in the classroom doorway, it occurred to me only briefly to hate her. She was a rail-thin blonde in her late twenties, wearing horizontal stripes that would have made me look like Tweedledee or Tweedledum. Or both. But she squatted down to greet Bethany and asked her name in a voice that made me want to stay and be in first grade.

Bethany looked up at me.

“This is Bethany Cabot,” I said.

“Can you introduce me to your mom?” Miss Richardson said.

Bethany nodded, bouncing her curls. “This is my mom, Aunt Lucia.”

“How lucky are you?” the teacher said. She stood up and smiled at me. “We're going to be just fine, Aunt Lucia Mom.”

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

W
ell, 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?”

“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.