by Nancy Rue
That was the last responsibility I wanted.
CHAPTER SIX
Dr. Sullivan Crisp didn’t know what he was doing. But then, that was his basic MO these days.
He gave the video camera his Serious Therapist Look, the one where his eyebrows twisted together and his mouth formed an in-half smile. In his best we’re-in-this-together voice, he said, “As a result of my most recent study of dealing with your messed-up past and your burned-out present and your black-hole future, my best advice for making the Healing Choice I’ve become famous for is: fake it till you make it.” He pulled his hands in a circle. “Fake it till you make it— uh-huh—uh-huh—forsake it, don’t take it—uh-huh—uh-huh—fake it, make it—uh—forsake it.”
That was enough to set Christian counseling back a hundred years.
Sully reached out to the tripod and turned off the camera.
An hour, and all he’d gotten on film was fifteen seconds of himself making faces and waxing sarcastic. He lifted his face to the squirrel that had been chittering from the top of a Georgia pine for the last hour.
“Do you have any suggestions, or are you just critiquing?”
A pinecone fell from the tree and popped off Sully’s left foot. He was almost convinced the animal had pelted it at him.
“Cut me some slack,” he said. “I’m a little off my game.”
Actually, he wasn’t sure he even had any game anymore.
“Dr. Crisp, have you taken to talking to your sweet self?”
Sully twisted to look at the tall, ebony figure emerging into the clearing. The sun dappled her face, but not enough to hide the all-knowing eyes.
“Talking to oneself is a common way to reduce anxiety, Dr. Ghent,” Sully said.
“It’s when you talk back that it becomes a problem.”
“It’s come to that.”
“Do I need to call a mobile unit?”
“I’m not sure.” Sully nodded up the tree. “I need a consult: if I think that squirrel is out to get me, does that qualify as paranoia?”
Porphyria shook her close-cropped head, frosted white like a cupcake. “No, I think it probably is out to get you. You’re sitting under her nest talking to yourself. She doesn’t want her young’uns exposed to that.”
Sully grinned and stood up to give Porphyria the stump. She took it with the grace of a queen, letting the caftan puddle around her feet, mixing its brilliant shades of Africa with the woody greens of the forest. Porphyria was eighty, and he still thought she rivaled Halle Berry for beauty. The sight of her made him want to weep. But then, what didn’t these days?
As he parked his lankiness on a nearby log, Porphyria nodded at the camera. “Any progress?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Oh, but I do.”
Sully gave a soft grunt. She already did. She knew everything about him, or she ought to. He’d crawled in here on his last emotional legs and spent the last sixty days—from May until now—doing a psychic dump with her. Her mind must be like a Sullivan Crisp landfill by now.
She closed her eyes in that way that made her face one smooth plane except for the two fine lines chiseled on either side of her mouth. Anyone who didn’t know her would think she had drifted off into the doze common to octogenarians. He knew she was merely expecting, with an acuteness he could only dream of at forty-five. Clearly, what she waited for was the truth.
“I don’t know about this idea of Rusty’s,” Sully said.
“Making a DVD.”
“I don’t know whether he actually wants Everything Sullivan Crisp Knows in Ninety Minutes, or he’s just trying to ‘build my confidence.’ ”
Porphyria watched him.
“Come on, Dr. Ghent,” Sully said. “Where’s that therapeutic response?”
“The part where I say, ‘What do you think, Sullivan?’”
“That’s the one.”
Porphyria let her lips part in a smile. “I’m glad to hear that sideways humor again.”
“Uh-huh. There’s a however in there.”
“However, I wonder if it’s up to its old tricks.”
“Tricks?” Sully made his eyes bulge. “Moi?”
“Oui, vous.” Porphyria’s java-colored fingers floated up, pointed at Sully, drifted back to her lap.
“I admit, sometimes it’s a coping mechanism,” he said.
“And what are we coping with at the moment?”
Sully let his grin collapse, and with it his bony shoulders and his bravado. “I know I need to get back to work, do something besides dwell on my stuff.”
“Mm-mmm.”
“Okay, completely on my stuff.”
“I like that better.”
“I just don’t know what work I’m ready for.”
“You’ve been working,” Porphyria said.
“I’ve been recycling.”
“There’s nothing wrong with rerunning your shows. I like that young man who’s doing the commentary on them.”
“There’s only about another month’s worth left before they start having to run them for the second time.” Sully gave his half grin. “It’s going to be like Law and Order on TNT. People will be able to recite the words with me, if they’re still listening.”
“I don’t think anybody has stopped. Your work bears repeating.”
Sully got up and unscrewed the camera from the tripod. “Tell that to my agent,” he said. “She says Thomas Nelson still wants another book proposal, but I can hear in her voice she doesn’t know how much longer they’re going to wait.”
“That’s the price you pay for being so perceptive.”
Sully set the camera on a rock and propped his foot on the log. He stared down at a pad of moss, thick as his thoughts. “I don’t know what I have to bring to the table at this point. I know I’m healing . . .” He glanced up at her.
Porphyria let her still-black eyebrows rise and fall. “Don’t look at me. Look at you. You know what’s going on in there.”
“I do. But I’m afraid if I open it up as the next great Healing Choice . . .” Sully shrugged.
Porphyria lifted her own majestic shoulders toward her ears. “What is this?”
“It’s plain ol’ fear, Porphyria. I’ve cried and talked and prayed my way back together, but the way the pieces are fitting now—it’s not the old Sullivan Crisp.”
“Do you want it to be?”
“He worked for me. He built things—cars, ministries. He helped people reframe and reclaim. Find God.”
The tissue paper skin around Porphyria’s eyes crinkled. “Now who’s hiding a however?”
“I did all of that to lose myself, and I can’t anymore.” Sully pulled his foot from the log and folded the tripod. “Anxiety’s always lurking, Porphyria. And ripples of pain. The old poster child for a life well lived is gone. What—was I the quintessential fraud?”
“Do you think you were?”
Sully set the folded tripod next to the camera. “I wasn’t consciously faking it. I did think I had it all under control.”
Porphyria closed her eyes into a smile. “In a lopsided way, I suppose you did. That was your signature.” She nodded, still looking into herself. “You were who you were then, Sully. A little wacky. Definitely unconventional. But you were as authentic as you could be under the circumstances.”
Sully scrubbed at his face with his hand. “But now the circumstances have changed, and I don’t know what to do with that.”
She nodded at the camera. “Are you making any progress?”
“I think I’ve found the right questions.”
“Which are?”
“Can I actually tell people how to make godly choices after what I’ve discovered about myself? I’m not talking about whether I can write another book or record another radio show or make a DVD.” Sully flung a hand toward the camera. “I’m questioning whether I can even sit down one-on-one with a client and do therapy. We both know I went into psychology to put off my own grief work. I mean, w
as that where God even wanted me in the first place?”
The woods went quiet. The air ceased its singing through the pines, and the squirrel seemed to wait in respectful silence for Porphyria Ghent to speak what waited on her lips.
“I heard some news today,” she said. “On CNN.”
The puddle jump to another topic didn’t faze him. She’d find her way back to this one via some wily path.
“You’re a news junkie,” Sully said.
“I can’t pray for the world if I don’t know what’s happening in it.” “So what’s happening today?”
“Sonia Cabot was in a plane crash.”
Sully felt his heart plunge. “Is she—”
“She survived. She was badly burned, though.” Porphyria’s eyes closed again. “That beautiful face.”
“No.”
“They didn’t give much detail. Just an interview with her spokesman.”
“Egan Ladd? Guy too young to have white hair?”
“That would be the one. He said her injuries were serious but not life-threatening. They cut him off before he got too far into Abundant Living’s hopes for a miraculous healing.”
Sully smeared his hand across his mouth. Sonia Cabot was a gorgeous woman, as gracious and generous as she was physically attractive. He and she could never agree theologically, and though she wanted to debate with him at every possible opportunity, he’d coaxed her into a pact to avoid doing battle over matters of faith. Still, their friendship was something of a mutual admiration society. Hers was a charisma as rare as the success she’d enjoyed in ministry. A success they’d both known.
And possibly both lost.
“She’s based in Nashville, isn’t she?” Porphyria said.
“She is.”
“A place you know well.”
“Too well.”
“You think so?”
Sully felt a stab in the place already sore from the opening and reopening of the wound. “You think there’s more I need to know, don’t you?” Sully put a hand up. “I know we’ve been through this.”
“And what did you tell me? You said in your soul God is saying there is still more that you don’t want to know. Now, you can heap dirt on that again—but that’s going to mean the death of the Sullivan Crisp you were made to be.”
“I could keep digging it up here,” Sully said. “You’re the best gravedigger there is.”
“Mm-hmm. And is that what you’d tell a client?”
Sully gave her the full grin. “I’d tell a client to get off his duff and hit the rapids. In my case, that would be the Cumberland River— and my Class 3 guilt.” He straddled the log. “The answers are in Nashville, aren’t they, Porphyria?”
She joined him on the log. “They’re in here,” she said. She pressed a hand to his chest.
It burned into him, the way her wisdom always did.
“You don’t have to go to Nashville to find out the rest of what you need to know about what happened to your wife and your baby girl. But I don’t think we can ignore an opportunity that God may be laying out right in front of you.”
“You’re not saying I should go try to counsel Sonia Cabot? She’s a friend—I don’t do therapy with friends.”
“I didn’t say you should do anything. But Sonia Cabot may need a friend in Nashville.” Porphyria pressed the hand harder into his chest. “Only God knows whether Sullivan Crisp is ready to do therapy again. But Porphyria Ghent knows if she needed a friend, he’d be the one she’d want right there.” She drew back her hand, but not her gaze. “Only someone who has been through hell can help someone else find their way through the smoke, Sullivan. You don’t have to be a doctor to do that.”
That was a good thing, he thought, as she gathered her caftan and her wisdom about her and moved soundlessly out of the clearing. Because a doctor of psychology was still the last thing he felt like. And Nashville was the last place he wanted to go.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Although the unit allowed only one visitor at a time, no one shooed me out when Egan came to see Sonia Monday morning. They probably hoped I’d be willing to catch him when he passed out.
His face went as pale as the prematurely white hair tucked under his required cap. For a long moment he stood eerily still, staring at Sonia above his mask as if he didn’t want to see her but couldn’t take his eyes away. In her ICU cubicle we were all somehow on a par with Sonia, faces covered, expressions muted.
“Does she know I’m here?” he whispered.
I leaned over the bed. “You awake, Sonia?”
Her eyes turned slowly to look at me.
“You have a visitor. You up for it?”
Without the wrinkling of a forehead or the pursing of a mouth, I couldn’t tell what she meant when she widened her eyes. I took it as a yes and nodded to Egan.
He took an imperceptible step toward the bed.
“Hey, pretty lady,” he said.
He looked as if he wanted to smack himself, though I would have gladly done it for him.
“Did she hear me?” he said.
I watched Sonia. Her eyes were darting, searching for the face to match the voice.
“You might want to come closer so she can see you,” I said.
I might as well have asked him to throw himself from the fourthstory window. His hands twitched and clung to the gown, drawing its paper into his fists.
“We’re praying for you,” he whispered. “You know that. We pray without ceasing, right?”
His answer was the frantic beeping of an IV bag that needed to be changed out.
“I think I should go,” he said, and did, gown swirling out behind him.
I wanted to grab him by the back of his Brooks Brothers belt and yank him back into that room Sonia couldn’t escape and make him look at her, make him tell her to what face she had left that she was a living miracle. But I felt something nudge my hand.
Sonia poked me with her bandaged paw.
“What do you need?” I said. “Are you in pain? I can get you—”
I stopped, because what I saw in her eyes was not pain but confusion. I would have been befuddled, too, by what her staunch supporter had just done. Or hadn’t done.
“He’s not used to this look on you,” I said. “It’s different.”
She gave me another nudge and drifted out again.
As much as I abhorred confrontation, I ripped off the sterile regalia and was on my way out to Lounge A to tell those people that unless they were ready to suck it up and talk to my sister like she was a human being, they weren’t going to talk to her at all.
That ended when I heard Nurse Kim’s voice raised on the other side of the glass doors. Did the woman never take a day off?
I stayed put until I heard her say, “We do not give out medical information to anyone except family members.”
I went for the doors. Could those people be any more pushy?
But it wasn’t the Designing Women or the Board of Directors that Nurse Kim held off in the hallway. I didn’t recognize any of the three who faced her, apparently unfazed by her tiny firmness.
“We understand,” said a woman who no doubt had applied Cover Girl with a spatula. “But can you just make a general statement about her condition?”
How many vultures did Sonia know, for Pete’s sake?
“Are you with ALM?” I said. “Because they’re all in Lounge A.”
Heads swiveled to me.
“We’d like to hear from some medical personnel,” the guy said. He pushed his glasses up his nose. “We’re not trying to invade her privacy—we just want to be accurate.”
“We’re with the religion desk at the Philadelphia Inquirer,” the woman said. “I’m not sure if you know this, but Sonia Cabot is well-known among—”
“I know,” I said. “Go talk to her people. They’re in Lounge A.”
Nurse Kim gave me a small push back toward the doors and said over her shoulder, “We appreciate your sensitivity. Perhaps her manager wil
l give you the statement.”
The two chatty ones looked only slightly put off as they headed for the lounge. The other one, a square-faced woman, reached into the pocket of a periwinkle-blue blazer and pulled out what appeared to be her wallet.
“Are you Lucia Coffey?” she said. “Mrs. Cabot’s sister?”
Honestly.
“Yes, I am,” I said, “but like I told them, I’m not talking.”
“I hope you will.” She flipped open the wallet. “I’m Special Agent Deidre Schmacker with the FBI. I need to ask you a few questions.”
I’d talked to a number of FBI agents in my recent past. They’d all worn black and gray and left no question that they could ruin my life. All of them had been men.
Special Agent Deidre Schmacker had fooled me with the periwinkle jacket and the heavy silver earrings and the understated manner.
Still, my mouth went dry as I followed her obediently to a lounge I didn’t know about—Lounge C, the sign read. I barely waited until the door closed behind us to say, “I hadn’t seen my husband in three months before yesterday. If he’s in trouble again, I know nothing about it.”
The agent gave me a long look, which, again, was nothing like the scrutinizing gazes I’d squirmed under three and a half years ago. Her eyes drooped at the outer corners and her mouth went toward a smile and stopped just short of it. She looked like a grandmother accepting an apology.
“Why don’t we sit down?” she said.
As I edged onto a chair, I realized that she’d set up shop in Lounge C. A BlackBerry, a laptop, and a legal pad were arranged on the table. She opened a Thermos and drew her pale brows in. “Tea?”
“No, thank you.”
She poured herself a cup, and the sound reverberated in the room. Already sucking in air, I wished she’d get on with it. I’d answer the questions and come apart later.
“Do you have a reason to think your husband is in trouble again?” she said finally.
“None at all.”
She waited. When I didn’t volunteer anything, she took a sip, waited some more, cupped her hands around the mug.
“I’m not here to talk about Halsey,” she said. “Chip is what you call him, right?”
Of course right. You people know everything about us.
