Wesley arrived with James-Lawson before I left to pick up Bethany from school on Monday. She had news all over her face.
“If it’s all right with you, I’m going to break my own rule and plug him into a movie for a minute,” she said. “I need to talk to you.”
With a sense of dread, I turned on a DVD in the backseat for James-Lawson, while Wesley climbed into the front. He gazed at the screen in rapture before Shrek even started.
“He thinks he’s died and gone to heaven,” she said.
“Am I going to hate what you want to tell me?”
“That depends. Your sister called me today.”
I slammed on the brakes at the end of the driveway. “Why?”
“Because she was afraid to call you. She said you probably”—she glanced over her shoulder and mouthed the word hate—“her right now.”
“Do you have any more bombs to drop on me before I pull out into traffic?” I said.
“Yes. She’s ready to come home.”
I let out all my air and steered the Escalade onto the road. “When Sonia’s ready to come home and when her doctor says she’s ready are two different things, trust me.”
“You’re not going to rear-end that Lexus if I say this?”
“Say what?”
“Dr. Ukwu is the one who told her to call someone and let them know. He said she had to do it herself. It’s part of her therapy evidently.”
I pulled up to the stoplight at Gallatin Road. “Don’t take this the wrong way.”
“Don’t mean it the wrong way, and I won’t.”
“Why did she call you?”
“Because she wants me to come back and work with her when she comes home. She didn’t come right out and say it, but I think she wanted to know if you were going to be here.”
“I don’t understand any of this.”
“I would call Dr. Ukwu if I were you.”
I swung into the school driveway. “I basically hung up on his nurse when she called to ask me to bring Sonia her pillow.”
“She’s probably afraid of you too. We all are.” Wesley smiled her magnificent smile, but I couldn’t manage as much as a lip curl.
“Now don’t start feeling guilty because you don’t want her to come home.”
“Bethany is just starting to make progress.”
“Mm-hmm. And so are you. The only person who can keep that from going away when Sonia walks in is you.”
I jockeyed the car into my place in the school pickup line and turned off the ignition. “You don’t know my sister.”
“I don’t know if you do either. She sounded like a different person from the queen that used to order everybody around like they were bees in her hive.”
I leaned against the headrest. “You think she could have changed that much in two weeks?”
“Why not?” Wesley said. “You have. But I don’t think it’s so much changing as it is discovering what was already there.” Her eyes shifted to look past me, over my shoulder. “Now, who’s this coming up here?”
I turned to my window to see a blonde woman, Louis Vuitton bag hanging from her shoulder, jeweled fingers pulling off her Dior sunglasses. Georgia. Or was it Francesca? I never had been able to tell them apart.
Whichever one it was started to talk even before I opened the window.
“Lucia, honey,” she said.
Francesca. Georgia called every woman girl.
“You look great,” she oozed on. “Have you lost weight? Not that you needed to. Lose any more and you’ll be too thin.”
Give it up, Francesca. Your foot is too far down your throat as it is.
She pushed the sunglasses to the top of her head. Her eyes grew serious. “How is Sonia?”
How was I supposed to answer that?
“I don’t have a right to ask,” Francesca said. “We sort of abandoned her after that day with the boys and all.”
When I didn’t say anything, she went on, words tumbling out as if she’d been keeping them in a space too small for them.
“I can’t speak for Georgia, but I just didn’t know what to say to Sonia after a while. It was like she wasn’t doing anything to help herself, and that didn’t seem like what I always thought she believed in. I guess I had it wrong, you know, but I just couldn’t sit there and agree that the doctors and the physical therapists and everybody was wrong, and she was the only one who knew anything.”
She put her hand briefly to her mouth, nails shiny in the sun.
“I don’t know if I should be saying this to you. I thought you’d get it, because it didn’t seem to me like you supported that from the beginning.” She put her hand on my arm. “I would just love to sit down with you sometime and hear about your faith walk. After this thing with Sonia, I’m so confused about God right now, and you just seem to have it together.”
“Are you serious?” I wanted to clap my hand over my mouth, but it was no use. I couldn’t un-ring the bell.
“I am serious,” she said. “I’m so glad you’re still here for Sonia. If there is anything, anything at all that I can do, you’ll call me, won’t you? And, again, I can’t speak for Georgia.”
She gave me a deep look, as if I were supposed to get something she wasn’t saying. I was too stunned to absorb any of it.
“Thank you,” I said.
She leaned in and kissed me on the cheek and saw Wesley at the same time. Her arm reached past me.
“Francesca Christie. I’m sorry to interrupt—ya’ll looked like you were having a good girl talk.” Her hand slid back to my arm. “I miss that. Please call me, Lucia.”
I watched in a trance as her kitten heels tapped across the parking lot.
“You never told me about her,” Wesley said.
“Yes, I did. She was one of the Designing Women who came to the hospital in Philly.”
“Huh.”
“What ‘huh’?”
“She seemed pretty real to me—not the package—I’m talking about what she said.”
I turned to face her. “Do you think she was genuine?”
“What do you think?”
“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I want to believe she meant that. She seems more sincere.”
“She seems mixed-up.” Wesley sniffed. “I’ll take that over plastic any day.”
“I see Bethany!” James-Lawson cried. “She’s right there!”
“He is so in love with her,” Wesley said. “We might as well just start planning the wedding right now.”
I smiled at that, and at the sight of my niece bounding toward the Escalade with her Beauty and the Beast backpack flying out behind her. Miss Richardson caught my eye and waved, the signal that we’d made the handover safely. I felt a sharp pang as Bethany climbed into the backseat with James-Lawson. Handing her over to Sonia wouldn’t be this easy.
GH
I prepared as if we were marshaling troops for Gettysburg.
I contacted Dr. Ukwu, who assured me Sonia was ready for her outpatient treatment, of which her work with Wesley would be an important part. She’d done well with physical therapy in the hospital and was able to take care of herself “rather nicely.” I was glad to live in a world where someone still said “rather nicely,” but I couldn’t quite apply it to my sister yet.
The rental company came and picked up the hospital bed, and the cleaning folks gave the house a sprucing up. The landscape people mowed the lawn, but they said someone else had already done a great job with the weeding and the edging. It seemed that Dr. Crisp had more than one talent.
I hit him up for his other one the night before Sonia came home. We had our session in the breakfast nook, even though I longed to be out by my river. Agent Schmacker called me daily to assure me they were doing everything they could to track down Pencil Whiskers Garrison, but I wasn’t taking a chance by leaving Bethany in the house alone.
Sullivan propped one foot up on the booth seat, and I knew we were going straight for the hard questions.
“So what do we need to talk about before Sonia comes home tomorrow?” he said.
“You could be collecting Social Security before we cover all that,” I said.
He grinned his one-corner-at-a-time grin. “Just hit the high points.”
Wishing I’d written out a list, I studied the window.
“For one thing, Dr. Ukwu and Wesley are both saying Sonia’s supposed to take care of herself, but I’m having a hard time believing she won’t expect me to just fall right back into being her life-waitress.”
“What if she does?”
“I won’t do it.”
“Ding-ding.”
“But I don’t think she’ll know what to do with that.”
“There’s only one way to find out.”
“But if I cross her, she’s liable to kick me out, and then what happens to Bethany? Which is another thing. I tell her that her mom is coming home, and she doesn’t even respond.”
“That is pretty unusual. Most children adore their parents, even if they abuse them. From what you’ve told me, Bethany doesn’t even seem to acknowledge that Sonia exists.”
“I think Bethany’s afraid of her,” I said. My mouth went dry, the way it did every time I let myself visit this.
“That wouldn’t surprise me.” Sullivan put his other foot up on the bench.
We were going in.
“Let’s try this,” he said. “What do you do when you’re afraid?”
“Run.”
“Run how?”
I studied the tabletop, the window, the palms of my hands. Sullivan hummed the Jeopardy theme.
“Okay—I bury whatever I’m afraid of. Pretend it isn’t there.”
“Exactly. You think Bethany could be doing the same thing?”
“I do. So what do I do with that?”
“What are you doing with yourself now?”
“I’m not going to sit her down and try to get her to dig into her past with a little shovel.”
“No—but you could give her permission to feel whatever she’s feeling. That’s what you did for yourself in our last session.”
I closed my eyes. “You were wrong about one thing.”
“Only one?”
“You said I was going to stop crying, but I haven’t. Every morning after I take Bethany to school I’m down by the river, bawling my eyes out to Harry the Heron.”
“It hurts, doesn’t it?” he said.
“Like I’m being turned inside out, actually.” Even now my throat ached.
Sullivan tilted his head. “I’m sorry life has brought you this much pain. But looking at it, talking to it—can you see what that’s doing for you?”
I shook my head.
“You said it yourself. When Sonia comes home, you aren’t going to be able to be her handmaiden. That isn’t just a rational decision. That comes from learning to honor your own feelings and seeing yourself as a deserving person.”
He seemed to consider something in my face before he went on.
“How do you think that might play out in your marriage? Have you given any thought to that?”
Only every waking moment when I wasn’t gnawing on everything else.
“Care to share?” he said.
“I don’t have it figured out yet,” I said.
I got a buzz for that.
“What?” I said.
“You don’t have to come here with everything figured out,” he said. “I’d feel pretty useless.” He spread his hands on the table. “This is the place where we put it out there and discover the answers together, remember?”
“I’m not used to that,” I said.
“None of us sorts it all out alone.”
“I thought I had to.”
He let his smile dawn slowly. “I have a great game show for that, but let’s get back to you and Chip. Any thoughts you want to put on the table?”
“He’s promising me the moon, and at first I thought I didn’t want it. But then I saw him with Bethany, and he was so—I don’t know. He was like a real father.” I could feel my throat thickening. “Part of me hates him even more because I see what could have been, and part of me wants to give him a chance and try to adopt— only who’s going to give a child to a convicted felon?”
I shook my head. “There’s still so much baggage. Can you ever get around that? I mean, should I just go ahead and divorce him?”
“You don’t want me to tell you whether to do that or not.”
“I have my moments,” I said. “I don’t know. Now that it doesn’t seem like it’s all my fault anymore, I have a choice. I didn’t think I did before.”
Sullivan nodded. “I will tell you this much: if you don’t know exactly what to do, don’t do anything yet.”
“I don’t think I can wait.”
“Why? Is Chip pushing you to make a decision?”
I grunted. “He thinks he’s already made it for both of us. Maybe that’s what’s holding me back. It might be different if we did it together—but he just wants to go out and make this life for us and then stick me into it. Just like always.”
I could feel my face flushing as the words shoved their way out on their own. “I do want a relationship—a family—but I don’t want it that way.”
Sullivan leaned across the table, eyes shining into me. “That’s because you’ve stopped thinking they and started thinking I—and not just I, but we.”
“We,” I said.
“You and Bethany, for starters. And the community you’re forming with Wesley and James-Lawson. Sonia could be part of that. Maybe Chip. The point is”—he danced his finger toward me—“you can decide that. You can determine who your we is going to be.”
He sat back and watched me. At first I’d hated when he did that. What the Sam Hill was I supposed to say? But now—now I had at least the faint shimmer of an idea.
“Ding-ding-ding, Dr. Crisp,” I said. “Ding-ding.”
That—and Wesley’s phone call the next morning telling me that I could do this thing—got me to the front door when the hospital transport service brought Sonia home. She insisted on arriving that way, Dr. Ukwu told me, and he wanted to encourage her self-care.
She opened the door before I could even get my hand to the knob.
“Hi, sorella,” she said.
Standing there in the rain, her voice was the same, creamy and rich as a mousse, but everything else was jarringly different. I had reminded myself with every toss and turn of the night that she would still be marred, but she had been transformed again, as if the first ravaging had not been enough.
The scars had set up like thick red yarn in some places. In others her skin was so flat and translucent I was sure if I touched it, it would dissolve on my fingertips. The ruins seemed less angry, and her eyes were brighter in the midst of them. With the rust-colored bandana wrapped around her head, she might have been a war-torn refugee arriving in a land she hoped would take her in.
“Welcome home,” I said.
She nodded. She could nod now, and although her neck was still as gnarled as cypress bark, her chin lifted at least two inches higher than it had before she left. Yet as she gazed around the foyer, it seemed to sag from within.
I could not begin to imagine what she must be thinking, revisiting the scene of her madness—the mirrorless wall, the chipped marble floor, the echoing screams of “I hate God!” But I knew the pain that came with digging through that rubble, and it rose in my throat.
“Can I get you—”
“I want—”
We spoke over each other and choked on our words. Sonia was the first to try to smile, slowly, stiffly around her prosthesis, but surely.
“I have a long way to go, sorella,” she said.
“No,” I said. “We do. We.”
Sully sat on the front porch with a glass of sweet tea and watched Lucia drive off through the rain to pick Bethany up from school.
“So far so good,” she’d told him. “Sonia’s asleep right now. She says the meds still knock her out.”
“That’s a common side effect,” Sully said. “It should wear off after a while.”
“I’m glad she’s resting. I think this is all wearing her out—it’s like she’s trying so hard not to backslide.”
Sully nodded to himself now. The kinds of transformations therapists and psychiatrists and counselors led their patients through were exhausting. He could use some decent sleep himself. He was lucky to get five straight hours on any given night, with Porphyria’s words wrestling with his dreams: It’s going to find you, Sully, just get yourself ready.
When the phone rang, he jolted so hard the tea slopped out of the glass and over his hand. What a waste. He pried the phone open on his chin while he swiped his palm on the back of his shorts.
“Sullivan Crisp,” he said.
“You owe me.”
“Anna?”
Sully tried not to sigh.
“You are going to be so glad that I can’t keep my nose out of other people’s business.”
Sully doubted that, but he said, “Why am I glad?”
“After I gave you Cyril and Una’s contact information, I couldn’t stop thinking about them. All the old times, yada yada. I attribute it to being almost fifty.”
“Uh-huh. Look, Anna—”
“No—wait. You want to hear this. I decided to call Una myself. I mean, who knew she was just down the road? I was like you: I thought they’d gone back to the Old Country years ago.”
Sully shifted the phone to his other ear and took a long pull of sweet tea. He could be here for days. Decades. She was going to feel ridiculous when he finally had a chance to tell her that Cyril and Una had been a dead end.
“So I called and I said, ‘Hey, Una, Sully Crisp looked you up, and I thought I would too’—blah, blah, blah—and imagine my surprise when she said she didn’t know what I was talking about.” “I could have told you that,” Sully said. “Cyril said he didn’t want her to know I was trying to get in touch with her.”
He waited for her to deflate, but she pumped up anew.
“She came to that conclusion like that.” Sully heard Anna snap her fingers. “I guess when you’ve been married to somebody that long, you know that kind of thing. Not having had that experience myself—”
“Anna.” Sully set the tea glass on the table and stood up. “What did she say?”
“You mean once she stopped crying? I had no idea she was still that torn up over Lynn’s death. It was like it happened yesterday. She said she would have talked to you if you’d gotten her first, but—”
“Why are you telling me all this?”
“Cut me some slack; I’m going there. I said to her, what is the deal with the husband making this decision for you? Is that some kind of Eastern European tradition? Sully needs your help, and you’re playing 1 Corinthians wife. Or was that Colossians? Anyway, I guess she got the message.”
Sully put a stranglehold on the phone. “What do you mean, she got the message?”
“She just called me back and said she talked to Cyril, and he said she should do what she thought was right—hello!—and she wants to meet with you. She asked me to set it up.”
Sully closed his eyes against the rain, the grate of her voice, the onslaught of doubt. The light was in there somewhere.
“Where and when?” he said.
“Forty-five minutes at Benton Chapel. She’s at the divinity school for some church conference thing.”
“Forty-five minutes from now.”
“Yeah. Hey—Sully.” Her pause was surprisingly tender. “Now that I’ve set this whole thing up—are you sure you want to go there? As upset as she is—this can’t be good news for you.”
“I have to,” Sully said. “And, Anna? Thanks.”
She gave him the gravel-filled laugh. “Like I said, Crisp—you owe me.”