We both tore to the deck at full tilt, where Sullivan pushed past me and disappeared inside the house through the French door. I didn’t even get to it before I heard the shattering again, closer and more alarming. By the time I crossed the living room, crashes were cascading like an avalanche.
Everything turned surreal as I took the last corner into the foyer and plowed into Sullivan’s arm held out as a barrier. My sister stood in the center of the entryway in a gold silk dress that hung haphazardly off one shoulder, with the copper cross from over her bed clutched like a sword in her raw hands. All around her lay shards of the mammoth mirror, their shattered edges pointing accusingly at her walls and her treasures and herself.
Behind me, Marnie screamed.
Sonia didn’t look up, but she said to the wreckage around her, “Yes, I’m hideous, aren’t I? I’m hideous.”
Sullivan leaned his head down until his lips were next to my ear.
“Dr. Ukwu’s number is in my cell phone. Text him and tell him to meet me at Vanderbilt emergency. Then I might need you to call 911. We’ll see.”
He pressed his phone into my hand and took a small step toward her. Glass crackled under his sandal.
“Sonia,” Sullivan said. “Honey, it’s Sully.”
He used a Southern accent I’d never detected in his voice before. “I want you to let me carry you out of there before you cut your feet, okay?”
“It doesn’t matter, Sully,” she said. Her accent was gone.
“It matters to me,” he said. “It matters to God.”
“I hate God!”
She swung the cross, barely missing the side of Sully’s head. He caught it in one hand as she tried to swing it back, and he grabbed her wrists with the other.
“Lucia!” he shouted over her screams. “Make that call!”
As he lifted my thrashing, cursing sister out of her ruins, I dialed 911.
Sully remembered why he hadn’t gone into inpatient psychiatric care. He hated hospitals.
He crossed and uncrossed his legs, checked seven times to make sure he’d turned off his cell phone, picked slivers of mirror out of the soles of his sandals. It would have to be this ER. They’d expanded Vanderbilt Medical Center in recent years, but it was still the same place he’d brought Lynn to one night with chest pains, before she got pregnant with Hannah. Was there nothing in this town that didn’t have some memory of her lurking in it?
He turned to Lucia next to him, still as a fear-paralyzed rabbit. Actually, she’d remained supernaturally calm through the entire ordeal so far. She’d kept her voice low and flat as she gave Marnie instructions to make sure Bethany didn’t come downstairs and see the broken glass in the foyer and the bedroom and bathroom. Sonia had been systematically smashing every mirror in the house.
On the way to the hospital behind the ambulance in Porphyria’s Buick, Lucia had been on the phone to a cleaning business, getting them to come in and remove the debris. Here at the hospital, she’d gone straight to the business office to tell them Sonia had no insurance, but that she’d pay with Sonia’s American Express card, which Lucia had remembered to bring.
Twice he’d heard her leave messages for Chip, who, he recalled from the FBI’s visit, was her husband. Both times when she hung up, she withdrew deeper into the folds of her flesh. It was hard to hold back the urge to counsel her right here in the waiting room.
“Isn’t that your guy?” Lucia said.
Dr. Ukwu crossed the waiting room and motioned for them to follow him to a small room off the waiting area. Sully heard Lucia suck in air as they trailed him in.
“You sure you want me here?” he said.
She gave him the full-on blue-eyed look. “Just try to leave and see what happens,” she said.
Ukwu was elegant but straightforward as he explained what Sully had guessed: that Sonia’s defenses for dealing with the horror of her disfigurement had been overwhelmed, and the floodgates of her held-back rage had opened. Because she had lost her grip on reality, at least temporarily, and couldn’t guarantee her own safety, he would have to admit her for at least seventy-two hours, probably longer.
Sully was as relieved as he knew how to be.
While Ukwu ran through a list of medications and possible therapies, Sully watched Lucia take notes in perfect cursive, practically sucking Dr. Ukwu’s brain out with her eyes. When the doctor reached for her hand to say good-bye, she shook his with the poise of a diplomat, and then tripped over Sully’s feet as she lunged for the door.
He found her outside the ER entrance, biting into a Snickers bar. When she saw him, she shrank as if he’d caught her ripping off a homeless person.
“I’ll pay you to give me half of that,” he said. “Better yet, let’s go to the cafeteria and grab a bite while you’re waiting to see Sonia. My treat.”
“Isn’t that against the rules?” she said.
“Let’s just call it a bonus round,” he said.
He almost got a smile out of her, almost had her turning toward the door with him, when her phone rang. When she looked at it, she handed him the candy bar.
“Sorry, I need to take this,” she said, and walked several paces away.
As Sully watched her, he knew something new about Lucia. She was ripe with some kind of grief ready to burst through her skin. Seeing Sonia border on psychosis, even watching her suffer physically wasn’t everything that Lucia had buried inside her. A trip to the ER with her sister was a trigger, but the pain he saw was all hers. And it lay at the bottom of everything.
There was a lot of that going around. His gaze went to the ER sign above his head. He’d carried Lynn under it the night he’d brought her here gasping for air. He’d carried her through the door right there, reassuring her that she wouldn’t die, while he told himself she had some rare lung disease that would take her away from him.
Sully swallowed. The first doctor they saw put that to rest when he diagnosed an anxiety attack. Was she under a great deal of stress? Would she like to talk to someone from psych?
They’d both rejected that idea. They were newly married, happy as a pair of otters, Lynn always said. She’d promised to cut back on her work hours, get more rest. Sully silently vowed to spend more “quality time” with her. How easy it had all been to solve.
The thought rankled like a chain. It must have been easy. He couldn’t even remember doing it. Lynn had never said another word about it. They’d just gone on from there.
On to an end that didn’t have to happen, that still tore him apart because he didn’t know why it did. And if he ever hoped to get himself back together, he had to find out. He had to keep trying.