Healing Waters (7 page)

I turned just enough to look at Georgia. “I don't think you get how serious this situation is.”

“What we get,” Egan said, “is how hard we have to pray and how large a work the Lord is going to do here.”

The two new women sprang to action, as if Egan had just given them their cue. Their nods and amens brought the room back to nodding and Lord-praising and blessing people's hearts.

“I'd like to see her first,” Egan said. “I want her to hear that from me.”

“Fine,” I said. “Excuse me.” I didn't wait for them to step back, farther than they needed to, to let me through.

The silence behind me, I knew, was calculated to last until I was out of earshot, but someone didn't do the math. I heard Francesca— or was it Georgia?—say, “You know those medical people always think the worst.”

“Is she a believer?” Egan said.

At that point—or at some other time in the blur of hours that ran one into the other—I asked the ubiquitous Nurse Kim if I needed to tell them other people might want to use the lounge.

She angled her head at me. “I take care of those things,” she said. “You just take care of you.”

That was the last responsibility I wanted.

CHAPTER SIX

D
r. 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, was 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

A
lthough 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.