Healing Stones

by Nancy Rue

  At the other end of the room, the pellet stove sat cold and silent, giving the place an unusual dreariness. As soon as I changed into something sloppy and comforting, I’d get it going. Some cheer might help me think. I headed for the staircase.

  “Demitria.”

  Rich’s voice boomed from somewhere in the cavernous room.

  I stopped, hand on the banister. “Where are you?” I said.

  His head rose from one of the recliners, and he stood, his back to me, broad shoulders so stiff they tortured the stretch of the navy blue South Kitsap Fire and Rescue T-shirt. Circles of sweat had formed under the sleeves. With a straight steel band of an arm, he lifted a brown envelope and held it above him.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  Instead of answering, he came out from behind the chair and opened the mailer as he crossed to me. By the time he reached the bottom of the stairs, he’d pulled out the contents. The room tilted, and I sank to the steps.

  “Oh, Rich, no,” I said.

  He still didn’t speak as he dropped the photographs one by one, face up, on the floor below me. For the second time that day, my body and Zach Archer’s were exposed to eyes that were never meant to see them that way.

  “Where did you get these?” I said, in someone else’s stricken voice.

  “They were in my box at the station today,” Rich said. He sounded dead. “I don’t know who put them there. I don’t care. I just want to know—”

  He stopped, and in the space I could almost hear his blood pounding.

  “I want to know—why, Demitria?”

  I’d given myself a hundred reasons that had until this moment made sense to me. Right now I couldn’t think of one. All I knew was the twist of my husband’s face as he looked at the images of what I’d done to us.

  “I was wrong, Rich,” I said.

  A hiss escaped between his teeth. A New Yorker can imply a paragraph of swearing in one long Brooklyn S. I cringed as if he’d slapped me.

  “Where did this happen?” he said, his gaze still riveted to the pictures, voice low. “Here, in my house? In my bed?”

  “Of course not. We were on his boat—”

  Rich snatched up a picture. BBs of sweat glittered on the dark stubble of his upper lip. “Who is this?”

  It hadn’t occurred to me that Zach’s face never showed in the photos.

  His voice rose for the first time. “Who is it?”

  “Zach Archer.”

  Rich pulled the picture closer to his face, his heavy brows wrenched together. I felt a stab. All he’d seen in those photographs until now was me.

  He flung the photo from him and stared at me. Stared as if I were a stranger who’d appeared to tear his life apart.

  “I’ve been on that boat—he took us all fishing.”

  “I know.”

  “Was that before or after he got you in bed?”

  I clapped my hand over my mouth.

  He put up his hand, its glistening palm facing me and shaking. The 9/11 hero was trembling.

  “This wasn’t no one-time thing,” he said. He shoved the first photo with the toe of his boot. “How long?”

  “Five months,” I said. “But last night—when these were taken— I went there to break it off, because it was wrong.”

  Rich looked at me. “Took you five months to figure that out? Took me five seconds.”

  From stone stillness he thrust out his leg and kicked, so hard I felt the vicious air at my face. Images of my infidelity scattered to the corners of our home. Rich caught his balance and turned his back to me, his shoulders heaving, hands clenched on his hips.

  “It’s over,” I said.

  “How many people know?”

  “Ethan Kaye. Kevin St. Clair. A man named Wyatt Estes—he’s a donor. That’s all.”

  “Oh, that’s all?” Rich scraped his hand down the back of his head, making a salt-and-pepper path that ended with his nails digging at his neck skin. “That’s half your college.”

  I drew in what air I could find. “It’s not ‘my’ college anymore. I had to resign. It was either me or Ethan,” I said. “I couldn’t let him take the fall for me.”

  “You have a conscience for Ethan, but not for me.”

  I didn’t say anything. The gutsy belligerence I’d mustered so easily for Kevin St. Clair no longer existed.

  “So,” Rich said. “You’re fired. These bigwigs know. How long before this makes the news?”

  “It won’t.” I sounded like a ten-year-old. “Ethan made them promise there would be no publicity. They’re giving him the negatives.”

  He did swear then. “Other men have seen you half naked?” Rich poked up fingers. “One—two—three—oh, and—him.”

  He pulled in his breath and his hands and the gaze he pierced me with.

  “Don’t, Rich,” I said. “We have to talk about this.”

  “There’s nothing I want to say and nothing I want to hear.” He took a step backward, but then he drew his hands to his hips again. “No, I do want to know one thing.”

  “Anything.”

  “I want to know how you could get up every morning of your life and read the Bible and go over there to that school and teach kids how to live, and do—this—at the same time. Tell me how you could do that.”

  I steepled my fingers to my forehead and closed my eyes. It was the one question I didn’t know the answer to.

  He went so quiet, so still, I was sure he’d simply dissolved from my life. Until he said, “I don’t even know who you are.”

  The front door slammed—and I wanted to die.

  I’m not sure, during the time I sat there paralyzed on the steps, when the questions began to batter me. Would it have been different if I’d called him and told him right after the meeting in Kaye’s office—if he hadn’t seen the pictures?

  And who on earth had delivered them to Rich? Estes had promised no publicity, and he didn’t seem to want my family hurt. My focus narrowed on Kevin St. Clair. The slimy blowfish was capable, but his wasn’t a vendetta against me—it was about Ethan.

  Finally, in the midst of that tangle, I sagged against the steps. Why did it matter? Rich knew now, and in the worst possible way. We were scraped down to the bone—naked and raw. He’d summed it all up, as he always could. Time and time again in our marriage, I waxed eloquent on an issue for thirty minutes, only to have him pack the essence into one neat irrefutable sentence.

  I don’t even know who you are.

  That made two of us.

  I probably would have sat there, frozen, through the night, if I hadn’t heard the school bus lumber to the curb.

  Jayne was home.

  Nerves sizzled to life as I half-crawled, half-ran around the room, gathering up the photos, dropping them, seizing them again. Frantically I looked for a place to stash them, suddenly unfamiliar with my own house. I’d never needed a place to hide shame before. As the mudroom door opened, I flung open the stove and thrust the pictures inside. I was shoveling in pellets when Jayne passed through.

  “Why is it so cold in here, Mom?”

  I didn’t even know where to start.

  That night I didn’t say anything to either of the kids. I managed to conjure up an image of Rich coming home from work at midnight, ready to talk things out, and I hung onto that while Christopher and Jayne and I ate pizza in front of the TV, and I took Jayne to play rehearsal and picked her up.

  Christopher, mercifully, spent the rest of the evening at the library at Olympia U. He gave no indication that he saw me curled up on the couch in front of the stove when he came home at eleven-thirty and went up to his room. I watched him disappear up the steps, his thin frame so unlike Rich’s shorter, solid powerhouse self in every way. Except his temperament. Like his father, the boy could hold a grudge longer than most people lived.

  That thought shattered my fragile hope of Rich being open to a reconciliation so soon. Still, I ran to the kitchen to meet him when I heard the Harley pull into th
e garage. His swarthy skin was chapped and his dark eyes swam in a stinging mist. He didn’t even look at me.

  “Rich, we have to talk about this,” I said.

  “Nothing to say.”

  He started through the kitchen. When I dove to grab his arm, he yanked it away as if I’d come after him with a branding iron.

  “Don’t, Demitria,” he said. “Let me be.”

  “Let you be what? Miserable?”

  “What do you expect me to be?”

  I opened my mouth, but he swore.

  “We’ll talk tomorrow then,” I said.

  I stayed put while he pounded up the steps, prayed the noise wouldn’t wake Jayne up. Prayed is actually the wrong word. I had yet to crawl to my God with any of it.

  Working deliberately, trying to stay focused on every step, I made coffee for the next morning. Not that I expected to need anything to wake me up, since sleep was out of the question. I loaded the dishwasher. Emptied the trash. Crossed the notation about a faculty meeting off the calendar. Tried not to wonder if Zach was in a burn unit in Seattle.

  When I was sure Rich would be in bed, I went upstairs, planning out the first sentence I would try when I climbed in beside him. I stopped at the top.

  He was leaned over outside the bedroom door, stacking items on the floor in the hall.

  “What are you doing?” I said. “What’s wrong with my shampoo?”

  He set the bottle on top of what I now realized was my makeup bag and my blow-dryer.

  “It was in my bathroom,” Rich said.

  “Your bathroom?”

  “Find another place for it. And another place to sleep. I’ll get your pajamas.”

  “Rich, stop! This is absurd—”

  Across from our room, light slipped out from under Jayne’s door. I went to it and pressed my face to the doorjamb.

  “It’s okay, honey,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”

  “Whatever,” came the sleepy reply.

  I turned back to Rich, who was in our doorway with a pair of my sweats and a bathrobe.

  “You can get the rest tomorrow.”

  I went close to him and whispered, “You’re kicking me out of our bedroom?”

  “I can’t sleep with you.” He nodded at the pile on the floor. “You need anything else?”

  “I need you to listen to me!”

  “Good night,” Rich said. And he shut the door in my face. I heard the lock click into place.

  The next day was the first of March, a Saturday, without a hectic morning schedule to hide the fact that my toiletries were living in the downstairs bathroom, or that Rich and I weren’t speaking to each other. The kids were used to that part, in a sense.

  They were accustomed to his sleeping past noon, even on his days off, and giving one-syllable answers to their questions, and watching re-runs on television until even their eyes glazed over. It had happened so gradually since we’d moved from New York, neither of them ever asked me, “What’s wrong with Dad?” Maybe they were so wrapped up in adjusting to the culture shock, they didn’t see it happening.

  But I wondered at times if from ages ten and fifteen to their current thirteen and eighteen they’d forgotten what their father was like before 9/11. “He’s depressed” seemed so obvious; surely they’d figured that out. Who wouldn’t be after what he’d been through?

  But who wouldn’t have gone for the counseling offered to him in New York in the aftermath of the attacks? All his buddies did.

  Who wouldn’t have at least tried to accept help when he was ordered to take a leave of absence? His refusal cost him his job.

  Who wouldn’t have appreciated the welcome he received here from Orchard Heights, Station 8, the arms open in near-worship to a World Trade Center hero?

  I was the one who had suggested the move to my home state, yes, yet he’d shown a glimmer of hope that it would distance him from bitter memories and give him a new start.

  But who else would have pushed away the one person who ached in every fiber of her being to help him?

  After surprising him with a boat and a motorcycle, bringing on the candles and the massage oil to try to please him in bed, and begging him in tears to open up to me, I would have had no answers for my children if they had asked me why their father was disappearing into himself.

  Maybe that’s why they never asked.

  But Rich’s customary distance had an edge to it that morning that even a thirteen-year-old in her own world couldn’t miss.

  “Turn that thing off,” he barked at Jayne when she settled in front of the TV with a piece of toast.

  “We always watch—”

  “I said turn it off ! I can’t stand that noise.”

  Jayne retreated to the kitchen where I was cleaning out the refrigerator and parked herself at the snack bar. Her hair dipped over her plate.

  “It’s not you, Jay,” I said. “He’s dealing with some things.”

  “Does it have anything to do with you sleeping on the couch?”

  I looked up at my son, who had materialized next to the coffeepot. He was still in the boxers and Olympia University T-shirt he used as default sleepwear, and his sandy blonde case of bed head matched the puffy eyes. But from the way his gaze poked at me, I knew his mind was wide awake.

  “I was restless,” I said. “I didn’t want to disturb him.”

  “Looks like you disturbed him anyway,” Christopher said. “I heard him cussing in the garage.”

  Jayne’s head came up. She looked at me briefly and went back to tearing her toast into confetti.

  “We’re having issues,” I said. “You two don’t need to worry about it.”

  Christopher arched an eyebrow and picked up the coffee carafe. “‘Issues’ is he doesn’t take out the trash and you leave your pantyhose soaking in the sink.”

  I dumped a lump of pink mashed potatoes into the garbage disposal and concentrated on scrubbing out the Tupperware it had been growing in.

  “I also know Dad throwing tools isn’t about ‘issues.’”

  I stopped scrubbing. “He threw something?”

  “Have you looked in the garage this morning? Looks like Mr. Goodwrench went ballistic in there.”

  I nearly scoured the logo off the bottom of the container. Rich didn’t hurl screwdrivers and yell at his kids. He’d never even spanked one of them.

  “So, yeah, Mom,” Christopher said. “What’s going on?”

  “Maybe it’s none of our business,” Jayne said.

  Christopher held his coffee mug halfway to his lips and looked at her through the steam. “Is it my business if they sleep together?”

  “No,” she and I said in unison.

  “Does it become my business when my father turns into Attila the Hun? Yes. Do I have a right to know what’s going on when I’m afraid to walk around in my own house? No doubt.” He took a noisy sip from the mug and surveyed me. “So what gives, Mom?”

  Jayne pushed her plate across the counter and slid off the stool.

  “Don’t go anywhere, Sissy,” Christopher said. “We need to hear this.”

  Only Christopher’s use of his childhood name for his sister pushed me toward telling them something to ease their minds. “Okay, listen,” I said.

  Jayne slid one bun-cheek back onto the stool and examined her split ends. Christopher took another drag from his coffee.

  “I did something that upset your dad,” I said. “So he asked me to sleep downstairs until we can sort it out.”

  “Geez, Mom, what did you do?” Christopher said. “Cheat on him?”

  The flicker of shock I registered lasted only until I saw in his crooked smile that he was kidding. But it was long enough. Christopher set his mug on the stove and stared at me.

  “Dude, that’s it, isn’t it?” he said. “You slept with some other guy.”

  “You told them?”

  Rich was there, out of nowhere, the way everything suddenly seemed to be. His eyes bit into me.

  “No,” I
said lamely. “He guessed.”

  Rich hissed. “He grabbed it out of thin air—”

  “So that’s why you’re never here,” Christopher said. “That’s why Jayne has to call me to pick her up—”

  “It’s over, Christopher,” I said.

  That didn’t seem to make any more difference to him than it had to anyone else I’d said it to. He drew his mouth up to his nose. “How could you do that to Dad? You’re a hypocrite.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’ve hurt your father—now I’ve hurt you kids— and I’m so sorry.”

  “Like that’s supposed to change anything.” For a horrified moment I thought Christopher was going to spit at me. Instead, he turned to his father, but Rich was honed in on me, wearing an expression identical to his son’s.

  “Come on, Sissy,” Christopher said. “Let’s go for a ride.”

  Jayne looked at me. There wasn’t an eye roll within a hundred miles. Only heartbreaking confusion splashed across her face.

  “Go with your brother,” I said. “We’ll talk later.”

  Christopher nodded Jayne toward the mudroom door. His last look before his exit was for Rich. “Anything you need, Dad,” he said. “I’m here for you.”

  Both Rich and I stood there, not moving, not speaking, until Christopher’s pickup roared out of the driveway.

  “Why did you have to let them find out?”

  “Did you think they weren’t going to notice the tension? I tried not to—”

  “Look—stop trying, would you? Just stop.”

  He said no more.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  They avoided me the rest of the weekend. Christopher kept Jayne out of my sight with such apparent disdain that by Monday morning I was nearly convinced I was as toxic for my daughter as his twisted lip made me out to be.

  I wanted to talk to her, but I couldn’t even explain anything to myself yet. How could I make her understand?

  Rich stayed home, but his marked escape from any room I entered shot fear through me. When I’d dogged him to the TV area, the mud-room, the kitchen, the garage, he finally holed up in the bedroom. From the sound of his stocky self heaving back and forth across the floor, I knew he wasn’t sleeping any more than I was.