Healing Stones

by Nancy Rue

  But I didn’t actually think so.

  I’d barely stepped out of the shower when the phone rang again. Sullivan this time. I’d already decided to ask what he knew about Ethan, but an un-Sullivan-like awkwardness in his voice stopped me.

  “You okay?”

  “No,” he said. “But I will be.”

  I heard a labored breath.

  “I have to go out of town, Demi. It isn’t the best time, I know, but I have to take care of something.”

  That something was clearly himself. His voice sounded ready to break in half.

  “I’ll be back in a few days. You have my cell number.”

  “Sullivan.” I put my hand to my forehead. How much could you ask the person whose job it was to do the asking? “Is there anything I can do?”

  “You can pray,” he said.

  “You’re scaring me.”

  “No. It’s okay.” The Sullivan voice I could count on crept in at the edges. “If you need anything, anything, I want you to call me. You okay?”

  “Yes,” I lied.

  When we hung up, I did try to pray. But all I could think was, You have to, Demi. You have to.

  Have to what? I was directionless in more ways than one. I didn’t have any place to go this morning. No reason to get dressed. Nothing to do but finish a cup of bad coffee. Nothing to do except whatever it was I “had to” do.

  Look at myself. That’s what I’d been doing—and it was the only thing that had held me together this far.

  Maybe that was the first thing I had to do.

  The Victorian Teahouse didn’t open until eleven, which gave me plenty of time to unearth the picture of me at ten with my mother and brothers and stop at Papyrus to pick out the right stationery for that pixie-haired girl who always wanted a ponytail. My cell phone rang when I was still two blocks from the tea house, and I didn’t try to dig it out from the bottom of my purse while I maneuvered through traffic. I checked the missed calls list when I was settled at my usual table with a cranberry scone and an Earl Grey on the way.

  I didn’t recognize the number. Who did I know with a 650 area code?

  At least it wasn’t Rich or Mickey or Fletcher Bassett. I shook all of them off like a wet dog and turned to the scallop-edged stationery to complete the assignment I’d never done.

  Dear Little Demi,

  I’ve been looking at this picture of you—of us—well, you get the idea—and I think I owe you an apology. I was such a little rule follower, you know? I hated for Mom to give me that look with her eyes all slitted down into hyphens, because it meant her voice was going to get all tight and she was going to tell me I was being difficult. I was too much of a weenie to push her any further, into The Silence. I could NOT handle that. It was so cold and so dark in The Silence, and it scared me.

  So—that’s why I never even argued with her when she said it was time for a haircut, why I never told her I wanted a ponytail like every other girl in America. That’s why, poor baby, if you weren’t wearing a little skirt in this picture, it would be hard to tell you from Liam and Nathan. Now I know The Silence wouldn’t have killed me—us—and now I know that maybe if I had “bothered” Daddy, like we weren’t supposed to, and asked him about it, you might have gotten that ponytail, with a bow to match a dress with ruffles instead of a skirt with pleats . . .

  But I didn’t know. I was too scared to ask. And I’m sorry.

  I stopped as I felt the server approaching with my scone, and I wished I’d ordered a chocolate chip muffin instead. With hot chocolate— and whipped cream.

  “You know what?” I said, lifting my face.

  “What, Prof?” he said, in a voice that put its velvet hands on me—and choked me.

  For a fossilized moment I stared at Zach. The dark thicket of eye- brows tangled like brambles above the bridge of his nose. The liquid blue eyes swam in a network of thin red lines. His almost-gray hair shagged over the tips of his ears and the top of the collar of a wrinkled shirt.

  He wrapped his long fingers around my arm, and I smelled his musk, melded with stale sweat. I broke out of emotional stone and looked down at his hand, but he didn’t move it, and I couldn’t peel it away. That would have required touching him back.

  “Let go,” I said. My own voice was hard.

  The rayed lines at the corners of his eyes squeezed, but beyond that he looked unfazed. Nodding as if he’d expected me to say that, he took his time loosening his grip and let his fingers trail down my arm as he withdrew them. I forced myself not to shudder.

  “I’m sorry, Prof,” he said. “I know I’ve caught you off guard. I tried to call.”

  The voice was the only thing that was the same. Clear, bottomless, and, I heard now, practiced. Dear God, I found myself praying, was it always that way? Had he always been this dog-eared version of an image I’d dreamed up?

  Zach slid himself into the chair across from me. I sat straight back in mine, my hands rigid in my lap. He smiled at me, head cocked— still “appreciating my assets.”

  The server arrived, scone in hand, and I waved her off. “I won’t be eating,” I said. “Bring me the check, please.”

  Zach looked up at her and shook his head. “Give me the check,” he said. “I’m afraid I’m responsible for her loss of appetite.”

  “What do you think you’re doing?” I said when she was gone. “You think you can just blow back in here and pick up where you left off?”

  Zach’s face went soft, making flaps on either side of his lips. The whole encounter became unreal.

  “I should have waited until I could talk to you first before I showed up,” he said. “But I couldn’t. I had to see you.”

  Something cold and clammy crawled up my backbone. How had he found me? Had he followed me? Was everyone following me?

  “You look wonderful,” he said.

  “I look heinous—because I have been through several circles of hell—thanks to you. Thanks to us.”

  He shook his head again, still smiling the appreciation smile, still trying to drown me in his Puget Sound eyes.

  “I don’t know where you’ve been all this time,” I said, “and I don’t care. But—”

  “You care, Demi. The kind of thing we have doesn’t die because we’re apart.”

  “I cannot believe you said that to me.”

  I pushed back from the table and got to my feet. Zach grabbed my wrist, hard enough to stop me but not hard enough to shut me up.

  “Let go, or so help me I will scream,” I said through my teeth.

  “Then promise me you’ll sit down and hear me out. Please.”

  Nearby a woman gasped. Only in deference to her did I whisper, “You have five minutes. Now get your hand off of me.”

  Zach squeezed before he released my wrist. I thrust it into my lap as I sat down, and rubbed it the way a child tries to erase an unwanted kiss. “Say whatever it is you think you have to say to me, but don’t touch me again.”

  “You can’t leave until you hear me out—and when you do, you won’t go.”

  I pulled my left arm from my lap and presented my watch. “Four and a half minutes,” I said—though the four red finger marks on my wrist all but shot me from the chair. My skin throbbed.

  “You have to understand why I left,” he said. “If I’d stayed and confronted St. Clair and Estes with you, I wouldn’t have been as strong as I knew you were. I would have confessed the whole thing—in detail.”

  He crumpled his mouth, into that look. I felt nauseated.

  “I would have had to tell them that I felt absolutely no remorse for what we found together, in each other. Even Ethan wouldn’t have understood that.”

  “And what about now?” I said. “You don’t see it as wrong?”

  “When is love like that wrong?” He leaned forward, fingers spread like fans on the tabletop. “They wouldn’t understand that. They would only understand what I knew you would do—which was give them the legalistic response they wanted and free yourself.
I knew you’d do that for us.”

  My jaw unhinged. “Are you serious? You think that’s what I did?”

  “I know you, Prof—which is why I waited until I was sure it was over with Rich. I knew you’d try to fix it.” He pulled his palms together, for all the world as if he were praying. “I gave you space because you couldn’t be certain as long as I was still here.”

  I couldn’t even speak.

  “I get why you’re angry, Prof—but you see now, don’t you?” He softened his face again. “You forgive me?”

  Words found me, and I thrust them at him like javelins. “If you actually believe any of that, Zach Archer,” I said, “you are sick.”

  His palms dropped from prayer to the tablecloth, which he squeezed up in his fingers until the saltshaker toppled over and the ice swayed in my water glass. The Puget-blue eyes narrowed and darkened as he jutted his head toward me like a promontory rock. His mouth broke into a jagged line.

  I’d never witnessed an unveiling like that one.

  “Don’t ever call me sick,” he said. “My ex-wife did that—don’t you do it.”

  I tried fleetingly to connect with that. I never knew he’d been married.

  “I did what I had to do—for you,” he said. “Because I love you.”

  I shook my head.

  “What?” he said. “What is that?”

  “You did it for nothing. I don’t love you, and I never did.”

  “Uh-uh—no—you can’t say that.” He smoothed out the tablecloth, righted the saltshaker, widened his eyes. “Nobody fakes that, okay?”

  He tried to force the jagged line into a smile, but the transformation had been too complete. His lips teetered between desperation and barely concealed anger. I was frightened.

  “I know I hurt you,” Zach said. “You probably thought I abandoned you. But, Prof, don’t let your pride come between us. We’ve come too far.”

  “Yeah. All the way to nowhere.” I swept my unfinished letter into my purse and once again tried to get to my feet.

  “Sit down,” he said.

  His voice was low, but his tone was menacing enough to freeze me there.

  “Enough with the integrity act,” he said. “None of this would have gone down if you’d gotten out of that marriage when I told you to. We could have left here and started over, but you forced my hand.”

  “To do what?” I sank back into the seat, a sickening sense of foreboding rising to my throat.

  “To make Rich see it was over between you two. Come on, Demi—where did you think that photographer came from? You think I wouldn’t know somebody was aboard my own boat?”

  I shook my head.

  “I got that kid—what the heck was his name—the shutterbug that took pictures for F&D.”

  “Van Dillon?”

  “I paid him enough, you’d think he would have kept his mouth shut. Nobody was supposed to see those pictures except Rich.”

  “You?” I said. “You set me up?”

  “What choice did I have? You were never going to leave him— sometimes you were as legalistic as Kevin St. Clair. And I swear to you, I never planned for Ethan or Estes to know. I don’t know how they got the pictures. That wasn’t my doing.”

  I scraped the chair back and snatched up my purse. “Your ex-wife is right,” I said. “You are sick.”

  I marched, unseeing, to the front door. Zach was so hard on my heels I could feel his breath raising the hairs on the back of my neck until we both erupted onto the porch. He had me by the arm, pulled to the railing, before I could get to the steps.

  “I told you not to touch me,” I said.

  “You never said that back then—not when you made me believe you loved me.”

  He had me by both arms now, and he shook me. My head lurched back and my teeth slammed together.

  “I gave up everything for you,” he said. “You think I wanted to lose my job—my boat—my reputation?” He shook me again. “Yeah, I did want to, because I thought it would get me you. Look at me.”

  I did, but I didn’t recognize the twisted face that forced itself at mine.

  “You think you don’t love me now—I get that,” he said. “But tell me you loved me then. Tell me I didn’t sacrifice my whole life for nothing.”

  The unnatural gleam in those eyes told me I should give him what he wanted and walk away, safely. But the whisper in my head curled above the words being growled into my face.

  You have to, Demi. You have to.

  I wrenched myself away. “You gave it all up for nothing, Zach,” I said. “And so did I. I never loved you—ever.”

  Before the slap of my words could register, before he could grab me again, I bolted from the porch and down the steps toward the parking lot. When I got to the Jeep, I turned around to see him at the bottom of the steps, his arms outstretched as he shouted at me.

  “Only a whore would do what you did for me in bed if she didn’t love me. A cheap—”

  I blocked out the rest as I dove into my car and squealed from the parking lot, leaving a sick man to proclaim my guilt to the Victorian Teahouse and the Good Word Christian Bookstore.

  CHAPTER THIRTY - FOUR

  Sully could almost smell Porphyria’s lodge as he nosed the rental car up the road that snaked around the Smokies to her door. Always lit fireplaces, paths of wet leaves, maples and oaks in new leaf. It all pulled him forward until he was suddenly, magically there, on the washed-out gravel driveway. The sun spattered his windshield and soaked his face, and he waited for the comfort of being steps away from her wisdom.

  But his veins still raced with the fear that any minute he would once again see flashing taillights and follow them over the precipice of his sanity.

  His cell phone rang. Demi’s number.

  “Hey, there,” he said. “You okay?”

  “I have no idea.” Her voice was like wire.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Zach. He found me, Sullivan—at the tearoom. I don’t know how. It’s like he was stalking me.” She huffed. “Do I sound paranoid?”

  “Tell me some more.”

  She did—a breathless story of Zach Archer hiring the photographer and setting her up to get her away from Rich. Sully struggled to keep up, especially when she mentioned Van Dillon. Setting that aside for later rumination, he followed her to the tearful conclusion, when Zach shouted obscenities at her in front of a place that had been her refuge.

  “I’m so sorry, Demi,” he said. “You’re not thinking for a second he was right about that.”

  She paused an instant too long.

  ”Don’t go there. Don’t even drive by.”

  “How can I not? I did prostitute myself.”

  “Why?”

  “Excuse me?”

  Sully turned sideways in the seat. “Why did you have sex with Zach even though you didn’t love him?”

  “I thought I loved him—which doesn’t make it right.”

  “We’ve established that. But what did you get in return? What was worth doing something you knew was wrong?”

  She breathed, long and sadly. “The way it made me feel. Not just sexually, but—needed, wanted.”

  “Ding-ding,” he said softly. “And you’ve already given all that to God, who has now wiped it away.”

  “As if it never happened.” Demi’s voice wavered. “I was starting to believe that.”

  “What’s stopping you?”

  “Hello! He dredged it up and screamed it at me across a parking lot for half of Bremerton to hear!”

  “You believe some guy with a borderline personality disorder over Jesus Christ?”

  “What kind of disorder?”

  “I can’t be sure without observing him myself, but this whole thing of arranging your life for you, and his outburst when you said he was sick—it smacks of borderline.”

  “It was creepy the way his whole face, his whole body, changed when I said that.”

  “Yeah—if you see him or talk to him ag
ain, I wouldn’t use that word.”

  “I have no intention of talking to him again, ever. In fact, if he tries to get near me, I’m getting a restraining order. I’m going to have bruises on my arms from where he grabbed me.”

  Sully sat up and leaned against the steering wheel. “I want you to document that—have somebody take pictures. And do not, under any circumstances, open the door to him.”

  “He doesn’t know where I live . . . I don’t think.” She seemed to trip over it.

  “I’m not trying to scare you,” Sully said. “Just don’t take any chances. He’s at the very least unstable.”

  “Was I a complete idiot to ever trust this man?”

  “No. He’s very good at what he does, which is, obviously, manipulating people. You’re apparently not the only one he’s fooled.”

  “He never mentioned an ex-wife. Way back when, he gave me this whole story about how he’d never found what he was looking for until me. And I bought that, like a moron.”

  “Buzzz!” Sully said.

  “I have to admit I was gullible.”

  “Which gets you where? I think you ought to focus on how strong you were to walk away from him. You want to know how I see it?”

  “Do I have a choice?” Wryness crept into her voice.

  “I think you not only took away his future—this whole idea he had that the two of you were going to run away and live in bliss for the rest of your lives—you took away his past too. With you he thought he could actually love, unselfishly. But it was all about him, all the time, because that’s the way with these people.” Sully shrugged. “You snuffed out his illusion about himself, and he can’t take that.”

  “He had to make it my fault.”

  “Ding.”

  After a heavy pause, she said, “Every door is closing, Sullivan. I haven’t even told you about my last conversation with Rich—or what went down with Mickey.” She hesitated again. “I’ll fill you in on all that when you get back. You have things to take care of. Go do it. I’m okay now.”

  He curled his fingers around the phone. As soon as they hung up, he’d be treading emotional water again. There would be nothing to stall him from going inside and confronting himself with Porphyria. The thought enervated him to the tips of his toes.