Early Saturday morning, while Marnie checked Sonia out, Nurse Kim plowed me into Lounge A.
It was empty again. The flowers and the pinkness and the heaps of fruit and bagels were gone, though I could almost hear the echoes of Southern female voices blessing each other’s hearts.
Nurse Kim tucked a slip of paper into my hand. “The name of an excellent physical therapist in Nashville,” she said.
And then she sank into the recliner, the first defeated thing I had ever seen her do.
“I do not like this,” she said.
I sat gingerly on the edge of another chair. “Sonia leaving?”
“Sonia leaving when she has not even begun to deal with the emotional trauma. She will not look at herself in a mirror. She will not talk about her pain.” Kim’s almond-eyes narrowed even further. “She will not admit she has pain.”
I nodded. Sonia wouldn’t go to physical therapy. She’d barely eat. She’d been occupying herself with plans for her return to Nashville. And, watching Marnie skitter to and fro, phone in her ear, BlackBerry in her hand, two wrinkles resembling an eleven permanently etched between her eyebrows, I was at least glad I didn’t have her job.
“And you will not either,” Kim said.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“You will not look at your own pain.”
“I’m fine.”
“No, you are not. And now you will go far away to take care of her, away from any support you have here.”
She looked around as if she were trying to find it, since it certainly hadn’t manifested itself since I’d been there.
“You must find someone you can talk with about this.”
And that would help how? Would whining to somebody change any of the circumstances that had me chasing myself around in a circle?
Nurse Kim gave a sigh that put my mother’s legendary martyred breathing to shame. She put a tiny finger to my forehead and closed her eyes. “Take care,” she said. “Take care of what is deep inside.” When she was gone, I was hit with a wave of homesickness I couldn’t afford to feel.
The air-conditioning in Porphyria’s Buick wasn’t fully operational, and Sully was sweating like a prizefighter when he pulled up behind the line of TV station vans. Their occupants, and the clumps of people gathered on the street side of a line of police tape, were all in various states of heat prostration, as far as Sully could tell. Clothes clung to clammy backs, and perspiration flattened hair to foreheads. Nobody, not even the group holding up a banner that read WE ARE PRAYING FOR AN ABUNDANT MIRACLE, was without a water bottle.
But the lawn that stretched from the street to the circular driveway like endless galaxy-to-galaxy carpeting looked dewy and fresh, as if it didn’t dare succumb to the humidity that threatened to suffocate Sully. The house, too, looked cool and oblivious to their suffering.
Sully took off his ball cap so he could see it more clearly. Holy crow. The place was enormous. It cascaded down a terrace in three stories that had to comprise ten thousand square feet. Screaming white in the sunlight, its even whiter shutters framed countless sparkling windows, and its flower boxes spilled over with vivid blossoms that should have been withering in the heat.
A covered breezeway led from one end of the house to another building, a long one with matching paint and shutters and individual balconies at each window that taunted Sully with their shade. That must be the “guesthouse” Sonia constantly invited him to. Sure beat the Motel 6 he’d tried to sleep in the night before.
He elbowed his way gently through a knot of reporters and camera people to get to a higher spot on the street. From there he could see the back lawn sweeping past a patio and tennis courts. Straight down to the river.
He turned abruptly. Dang. He’d forgotten that the Cumberland cropped up everywhere in this town.
“Here she comes!”
Sully shaded his eyes and watched a silver Cadillac Escalade make its way down the hill from the main road of what the dramatic entranceway had announced as Fairvue Plantation. It was so new, Sully hadn’t been able to locate it on MapQuest. The original plantation house, if there had actually been one, couldn’t compare to Sonia’s mansionette.
Two annoyed-looking cops held back the spectators as the Escalade eased up the driveway and stopped in front of the house. Sully half-expected to see a SWAT team stationed on the balconies, or at the very least a muscled bodyguard emerging from the front seat. But besides the police officers, the only person who looked the least bit interested in security was a squarish-looking woman in a pearl gray suit, who stepped down from the veranda and surveyed the crowd from behind sensible sunglasses. She had to be somebody official. She didn’t even appear to be sweating.
The driver finally opened the back door of the SUV, and a young woman, who virtually disappeared when she turned sideways, got out first. Sully didn’t recognize her as part of Sonia’s staff, but then, he hadn’t seen Sonia in a year. This child was probably still in high school then. She had the ubiquitous Bluetooth in her ear and chattered away as she stood back to let somebody else out of the car. The crowd gave an audible mutter of disappointment when it turned out to be a plumpish, dark-haired woman in black who immediately turned her back to the cameras.
The woman leaned into the car as if she were pulling something out and then stepped abruptly aside, swaying unsteadily and grabbing for the side to keep from tumbling to the driveway. No one seemed too concerned about her as two long legs stretched from the vehicle and brought with them Sonia Cabot.
Or, at least, Sully thought it might be Sonia. The woman wore a large, floppy-brimmed hat that reminded him of something out of an old Katharine Hepburn movie. It covered most of her face, which had a decided tilt downward and didn’t seem to move. That wasn’t typical of the Sonia Cabot he knew.
But it was Sonia. The willowy figure, the flowing, gauzy-looking white thing she wore, the graceful way her hand floated up to greet the crowd even with her face pointed toward the ground.
One group behind the tape called out greetings: “Sonia, we love you!” “We’re praying for you!” “Welcome home!”
But sharper voices prevailed: “Ms. Cabot! Ms. Cabot—will you answer a few questions?”
Sully looked down at those who were straining cameras and microphones past the police officers. Unlike her well-wishers, they wanted to see something they could broadcast on the six o’clock news with the warning, “The images we are about to show may be disturbing to some viewers.”
Sonia stopped at the bottom of the front steps, and for a horrified moment, Sully thought she was going to give them that chance. Sonia, don’t do it. Don’t let them have a field day with your pain, not before you even know it’s there.
She didn’t go to the crowd that beckoned to her, however. She spoke to a man who’d come out of the house with the unmistakable Roxanne and pointed him toward the reporters. Sully recognized him as Egan Ladd, Sonia’s manager. He couldn’t mistake the prematurely white hair and the smooth get-up.
With obvious reluctance Ladd approached the crowd, while the dark-haired woman tried to get Sonia up the steps. Sonia didn’t move.
It was so much like watching a made-for-TV movie, Sully would have been amused if he hadn’t known the players.
The reporters jockeyed forward, and the police looked back over their shoulders.
“I can answer any questions you have,” Egan called to them.
They had plenty.
“Does she plan to keep her commitment in Indianapolis?”
Not if Sully had anything to do with it.
“Has support for her ministry dwindled since the crash?”
Vultures.
“How does she feel . . .”
Why did they always go there?
“. . . about the investigation being conducted by the FBI?”
Sully jerked his head toward the voice. What investigation?
“What can you tell us about that?”
So far Egan Ladd hadn’t been able to get a complete sentence out. Sully craned his neck and heard him say, “That is a routine investigation required since 9/11,” just as another voice, unprofessional in pitch, yelled, “Hey—what’s under that mask?”
The other reporters whipped their heads in the direction of the shout, and Egan took a visible step back.
“Why don’t you take it off and let us see the ‘miracle’?”
The voice came from a guy in a ball cap and a sleeveless T-shirt. He probably weighed about a hundred and twenty, and most of that appeared to be tattoo ink. Sully hadn’t seen a bona fide redneck in a long time.
The kid tried to push his way past one of the policemen, who grabbed him by both scrawny shoulders.
“You’re a fraud, Cabot!” he shouted in a raucous voice that grated across Sully’s eardrum. “My mama died ’cause of you. You’re a fraud—and now you’re a freak! Serves you right!”
Most of the cameras were now on him, their microphones picking up the guy’s swearing. Sully heard Sonia’s voice coming from the porch, rich even in a shout of, “We’ll pray for you.” No microphones turned her way.
Egan marched away from the police line and the reporters. The dark-haired woman and the young Miss Thing turned Sonia toward the house. Her head came around awkwardly, and the floppy hat toppled off. The crowd gasped as, in the instant before the darkhaired woman retrieved it and stuck it back on, a half-bald head, puzzled in raw-red pieces, was revealed. The formerly proud-maned Sonia Cabot looked as if she’d been scalped, and a hundred people had just seen it.
And not only them.
“Who is that?” someone in the crowd yelled. “Is that her daughter?”
Sully squinted at the open front door. A child stood there, a round little girl of about six, with hair the fudgy brown Sonia’s had been. She appeared to be frozen, as was Sully himself, until a scream came out of her that silenced even the worst of the stalkers below.
Sonia’s entourage swept her and the child through the front doorway. Below Sully, reporters scrambled, and the handful of people who had called out their support searched each other’s faces in horror. Redneck Boy spit out one more projectile expletive and was pushed by the two officers straight into the path of the woman in the gray suit. She flashed a badge.
Sully stood still. That’s only a taste of it, Sonia, my friend. Don’t bite off any more. You have enough to deal with inside your own house.
He let the crowd begin to disperse before he ventured down the street. He’d come back in an hour or two, give her a chance to settle in and calm down.
He was halfway to the car, mind reeling, heart breaking for Sonia, when someone touched his elbow. He looked down at a red head.
“I think Sonia could use a friend right now,” Roxanne said. “Come on with me.”