Healing Waters (42 page)

“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.”

“So he did agree.”

“No. I just went off birth control without telling him. That was the idiotic part.”

“Let's call it the last-resort part.”

“Not that it mattered that much. Most of the time Chip wasn't that interested in me—you know—”

“Sexually,” Sully said.

“It was mostly the drugs he was on for so long—that's what I told myself.”

“And you were probably right. I take it you two didn't discuss your sexual problems.”

“We didn't even discuss what to have for dinner.” Lucia pressed against the back of the booth. “Anyway, one night things came together, and then I found out I was pregnant.”

Sully tried to do some quick math, but he didn't have all the numbers. How long ago was all this?

“Again, stupidly, I thought once it was a fact, Chip would be happy. But like I said, he had forgotten how. My being pregnant just made things worse. All he could talk about was how we couldn't afford a child—and who wanted to grow up with an ex-con for a father? He was already so bitter about the insurance companies and the FBI and the courts and the prison system, and he couldn't figure out why I wanted to put more and more pressure on him.”

Lucia looked at Sully, and her agony cut through him.

“He told me to have an abortion.”

Sully's heart crashed. This—this was a thing he could hardly bear to hear. Only her desperate need to say it made him nod her on.

“It was the first time I ever said no to my husband. I couldn't terminate the pregnancy. That was what she was to him: a pregnancy. To me, she was our child, and I couldn't.”

Her face worked, and Sully tilted toward her.

“It's all right to cry, Lucia,” he said. “You have every reason to.”

“I can't. Just let me finish.” She flattened her fingertips to her temples. “I went to all the doctor's appointments by myself. The only time Chip even acknowledged that I was still pregnant was when I brought home the ultrasound picture that showed our baby was a girl. He said, ‘At least that's one way she won't take after me.' ”

“Was that his concern about having a child?” Sully said. “That his offspring would turn out like him?”

“I don't know. He wouldn't talk about it. He wouldn't talk about any of it, and I just kept working.”

“You were still in obstetrics.”

“Yeah, and I tried to keep things going at home and tried to suggest job possibilities for him . . .”

“What happened, Lucia?” he said. “What happened to the baby?”

“At twenty-four weeks, I started bleeding.”

Her voice was so low and flat, Sully had to strain to hear.