Healing Waters (38 page)

“Lucia, do you mind?” Sullivan said.

“Go for it,” I said.

He folded his arms as if he and Patrick were about to discuss the upcoming NFL season. “Exactly what do you want Lucia to do? It's not like she has a whole lot of influence with the FBI.”

“She has influence with her sister, doesn't she?” Patrick bulleted his eyes into me. “I want you to tell her to back off on the accusations.”

“O-oh. I see where you're coming from. But Lucia can tell you that's not what's going on.”

I shook my head. “Sonia told them Hudson had no reason to hurt her. She said she—” I pawed through my memory. “She said she accepted him when no one else did.”

Patrick hissed. “Accepted him my backside. She fired him because he was gay.”

I blinked at him.

“She hates homosexuals. She says it on her CDs. No, wait, she doesn't hate them, she hates their ‘sin.' ” The quotation mark fingers came out again. “You'll never convince me she didn't find out and fire him because of it. How would that make her look, having a chef who was a sinner?”

Patrick jabbed a finger toward me, and Sullivan edged forward.

“She ruined my brother's life,” he said. “He lives to cook, and now, because of this whole investigation thing, he can't get a job flipping burgers at Hardee's in this town.” He drove his index finger through the air again. “She'll pay for this. Everything she ever preached about is gonna come right back in her face.” He gave the hard laugh again. “What's left of it.”

“You need to leave,” I said.

“Going. Like I said, I got everything up-to-date, all the bills paid and the accounts balanced.” He laughed harshly. “Except for the $350,000 that's missing. As of today, I quit. I've turned everything over to her lawyer—if you want to know more, contact him.”

“No,” I said. “I want nothing to do with it.”

But as he made his bristly way out the door, I felt deeper into it than ever.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

D
o you need a minute?” Sully said. “That was pretty disturbing.”

Lucia gripped the arms of the Adirondack like it was about to take flight with her in it. “It's just so surreal. It's like something you see on CNN.”

“It
is
something you see on CNN. But I know what you mean. I'm starting to feel like Cato Kaelin.”

“Who? Oh—you mean O. J. Simpson's houseguest?” She shook her head. “I don't know what that makes me.”

“It makes you somebody who has a right to be pretty shaken up by this whole thing. You want to process it a little?”

“No.” Lucia pressed the ever-present folder to her chest. “I want to talk about what you saw last night, in the kitchen, before I chicken out.”

A lump for her formed in Sully's throat.

“What you saw . . .” she said. “I go for weeks without doing it, and then something happens, and I have to eat until I don't feel anything but sick and gross and disgusting. Which is why I look the way I do, but I don't care about that—what I care about is that when I look at Bethany, I see me, and I don't want her to live this way.”

Lucia breathed hard, and Sully let her catch up to herself while he assembled his next words like the precise instruments they had to be. She was so close to getting it, but the part she didn't want to see could cut her open if he weren't careful.

“Do you want
you
to live this way?” he said.

She didn't look at him. “I said I didn't care about the way I look.”

“It's not about how you look; it's about how you live. Do you want to live this way, Lucia?”

He waited, chest aching. It was up to her, and to watch her decide was excruciating. If she couldn't go there, they were done.

“I hate it,” she said.

“You hate what?”

“I hate my life.”

Sully hardly dared to breathe. “Ding-ding-ding, Lucia,” he whispered.

She looked at him, blue eyes startled.

“Now we can begin.”

Lucia gave a tiny, frightened nod. She'd taken a huge step into a land where she couldn't yet trust the ground, Sully knew. He had to make it safe for her.

“Usually I try to let a person I'm working with find all the answers for herself,” he said, “but I'm going to tell you one thing that I think is true, and you can tell me if you agree.”

“Okay,” she said. She looked away.

“You have buried some things, some very hard things, deep inside you where you won't have to feel them. How am I doing so far?”

She nodded again.

“But they aren't dead things. They're still alive, and because you've buried them alive, you have to feed them.”

“Because if I don't, they come out and scream at me.”

“Ding-ding again,” Sully said softly. “That screaming, what does it feel like for you?”

“Like I'm going to explode. Like if I don't get myself numb, I'm going to burst open and land like confetti all over the place.”

“And how do you get numb?”

She finally looked at him. “I eat,” she said.

Sully let himself grin. “If I ding you any more, I'm going to wear out my bell.”

“I don't feel like much of a winner.”

“Why not? These are great insights. You're wonderful at this.”

“Because I know you're going to tell me I need to dig up what's buried in there, and I don't want to do that.”

“Nobody
wants
to do it, any more than they
want
to have an appendectomy. It's painful.”

“That's comforting.”

“But I'll promise you something.” Sully put his hand on his chest. “I will try my hardest to keep it from hurting any more than it has to. We're not going to just dig things up and let them scream at you. We're going to find out what they have to say, and then we'll know what to do with them so you don't have to keep stuffing them down and feeding them.”

Sully leaned back and let her sit with that. She didn't sit for long.

“Okay,” she said. “Let's get started.”

She had the first flicker of hope in her eyes, and Sully hated to chance snuffing it out. But one more thing had to be said.

He tilted forward again. “I want
you
to promise yourself something, too, Lucia.”

“What?” she said.

“I want you to promise yourself that you will do this for yourself— not just for Bethany, but for Lucia. Whatever you do for the
I
we talked about last time will become part of the
we—
you and Bethany and whoever else you love in your life. Can you promise yourself that?”

She didn't answer. Instead she opened the folder she hadn't let go of since she sat down and pulled out a wrinkled sheet of paper, which she looked at with the kind of tenderness reserved for precious objects.

“This is a drawing Bethany did of me,” she said.

“Can I have a look?”

She handed it to him, and Sully grinned at it.

“It looks just like you. Really.”

“It took me five minutes to figure out it was me.”

“Why?” Sully said.

“Because . . .” She sucked in air. “This person isn't fat.”

“I think I know why that is.”

“Why?”

“Because when Bethany looks at you, she doesn't see fat. She sees beauty.”

“I need to have her eyes checked.”

“Aw—your first
buzzzzz
of the session!” Sully said.

She put her hand up. “Okay—if that's what she sees, it must be in there somewhere. So I'll
try
to do this for me. I'll try—that's all I can promise myself.”

“Ding-ding,” he said.

“So how do I start digging?”

“We'll do that in our next session. Before then I want you to explore a little Game Show Theology.”

She groaned. “I knew it. More
Family Feud
.”

“No,” he said. “
Dancing with the Stars
.”

She stopped digging in her pocket for her pen.

“How long has it been since you really danced?” Sully said.

“High school.”

He was surprised it had been that recently. “What did it feel like? Do you remember?”

“I was the only freshman to make the dance team. Of course, I went on a Tab diet that summer—do you remember Tab?”

“Wasn't that a diet soda? A gross one?”

“Yeah, and I practiced blisters onto my feet, but I made it. Rehearsals and performances kept me out of the house, except when I was doing my housework.”

“Were your mother and Sonia still on the road?”

“No. My mother had to have Sonia tested because she homeschooled her, and they found out she was two grade levels behind. That was the one time my father put his foot down and made her enroll Sonia in school.” Lucia rolled her eyes. “Of course, Mother became the most involved parent in PTA history, so she barely noticed I wasn't around that much.”

“And since it was a school activity, nobody had to pay for lessons.”

“Oh, it was expensive.” She looked a little sheepish.

“What?” Sully said.

“Well—I figured out that whenever I needed money for costumes or a field trip or something, I could get it out of my dad if I went down to Shenanigans Bar when he was only two beers in.”

Sully only let her stew in that for a moment. “So why didn't you continue dance after high school?”

Her face clouded. “At the end of my junior year, I made dance captain for senior year.” She looked at him. “This all sounds so high school.”

“It was high school! Besides, it's amazing how often the rest of life looks like it.”

She glared mildly and went on. “The coach offered to give me free private lessons over the summer if I would help her with her junior dance camps. And then my father got fired for being drunk on the job, right before junior year ended, and my mother had to go to work full-time, which meant I had to stay home with Sonia all summer because she was only twelve.”

Lucia shrugged as if that explained everything. Sully shook his head.

“Nothing could be worked out?”

“My dance coach said Sonia could come to dance camp for free, but my mother said no. It would interfere with her voice lessons and her piano lessons and her drama classes, which I had to drive her to.”

Sully curled toward her. “Weren't you angry?”

“Sure—but what was I supposed to do about it?” Lucia smiled without mirth. “I'll tell you what I did about it. I ate. All summer. I couldn't even fit into my uniform in the fall, so I just quit the dance team.” She dropped her hands into her lap. “I don't want to keep whining about this. It was what it was.”

“Then let's go back to our original question: when you were dancing, how did it feel to you?”

She pulled in her chin again. “How did it feel?”

He nodded.

“I don't know. I can't even remember.”

“Then before we meet again, Lucia,” he said, “I want you to dance.”

I couldn't sleep again that night.

I could have attributed it to the futon I'd dragged down from the garret above the playroom to put next to Bethany's bed. It was like sleeping on a cement slab. Or to the fact that my niece had an adenoidal snore that was loud enough to wake my mother from her grave.

Not that Mother was really that dead. And if she were, Sullivan and I had done plenty to rouse her that evening. She yelled in my head, the way only an Italian mother can. Something along the lines of:
Lucia Marie, I cannot believe you aired our family laundry to
that stranger. And now you're going to tell him more?

Actually, I probably hadn't told him enough. I'd lied when I said I didn't remember what it felt like to dance. I did, but how ridiculous would it sound to say, “When I danced, I never felt like Clifford the Big Red Dog, which I did all the rest of the time. I was a fawn, prancing through the forest with my tail up, able to leave the ground and land without disturbing a leaf.”

Sullivan Crisp would do more than grin if I came out with that.

I gave up on the futon and went to the window seat Bethany and I had peopled with stuffed bears and rag dolls in princess costumes of our own creation. It was a motley crew, but she loved it.

Even at this hour I could hear a boat out on the water. They busied the Cumberland all the time—wakeboard boats in the late afternoons, sending out tsunamis with their speakers blaring hip-hop— pontoons traveling at sipping speed in the early evening—the occasional houseboat at night, still bursting with laughter. This one sounded like one of the fishing boats I'd spotted near our bank just after dawn, deceptively quiet until the fishermen decided there were better prospects elsewhere and took off like some kind of marine NASCAR, hulls barely cutting the surface.