Healing Stones (24 page)

“So afterwards, she comes up to us in the lobby and asks Dad if she can go to a cast party.” Christopher gave the Rich-hiss. “She didn't notice he was already having a hernia. He said no, and she freaked.”

“And he grounded her for that?”

“No, he grounded her for e-mailing her boyfriend about what a jerk Dad was.”

“Her boyfriend?” I said.

“Oh, it gets worse,” Christopher said.

He was nearly licking his chops, dispensing, at a maddening pace, information he obviously knew would shred my heart.

“What boyfriend?” I said evenly.

“The kid who played John Proctor. Josh somebody.”

“Josh Elliston?” I said. “They've been friends since sixth grade.”

“They're more than friends now. She told this kid everything about our current family ‘issues' in an e-mail—so who knows who else has found out by now.”

“Wait.” I smeared my hand across my eyes. “How did your father find out what she wrote online? He can barely turn the computer on.”

Christopher didn't have to answer.

“
You
told him,” I said. “You got into her account—”

“Somebody's got to—”

“Not
you
!”

“Then who? Dad's barely functioning. He wouldn't eat if I didn't cook. He wouldn't shower if I didn't hose him off—”

“But you are not Jayne's father. She has another parent.” I drove my thumb into my chest. “I am still her mother, Christopher. Now you tell me—” I got closer still, until I could feel his breath catch against my chin. “What have you told her about herself? Tell me you have not used the word
whore
with your sister.”

“What do you think I am?”

“I don't know,” I said. “At this point I do not know. Now you tell me.”

He pulled back, far enough for me to see that some of the arrogance had seeped from his eyes. “I haven't said anything to her. She holes up in her room all the time.”

“Are you feeding
her
?” I said. “Hosing
her
down?”

“It's not that bad.”

“I can't see how it could not be.”

I squeezed the steering wheel to keep from screaming. Christopher closed in on himself, the way Rich did.

“Listen to me,” I said. “I am going to pick Jayne up from school today. Do not try to intercept me, and do not call the school and tell them not to let her go with me. You have no right to interfere with my seeing your sister. Am I clear?”

“Whatever.”

“Christopher. Am. I. Clear?”

He gave his head another jerk, this time away from me. “Yeah,” he said.

He wrenched himself out of the car and bent over to glare in at me. “I don't see where you get off being so self-righteous,” he said. And then he walked away.

I didn't see it either. I only knew what I felt—what I heard—what I knew—because I loved.

“It's on the house today,” Tatum said to Sully when he ambled into the bakery that Friday afternoon.

That wasn't the bad news it might have been if he hadn't chewed a half dozen Tums on the way over. “What's the occasion?” he said.

“A thank-you for helping me with Van.”

“The ex-boyfriend?”

“The freak show.” She slid the knife cleanly into the quarter of a pink champagne she'd removed from under a glass dome. “With you here, he didn't get all dramatic. You want your usual sugar and milk with a shot of coffee?”

Sully grinned. He settled at a table and pulled one of Demi's letters out of his jacket pocket. Who said men couldn't multi-task? Tatum disappeared into the kitchen and emerged carrying a stack of cookie sheets dotted with Easter-egg shaped cookies. While she fanned them out on the display racks, Sully read.

Dear Christopher,

I don't know why—with everything that's going on, you'd think
this would be the last thing on my mind—but I've been thinking
a lot lately about you and me on 9/11. I've been wondering if you
remember the way I do, like every detail is etched into the glass of
my brain.

When I heard the first tower had been hit, I canceled classes
and went to your school. You remember? I picked you and Jayne
up, and we were on our way home when the second tower came
down, and we'd hardly gone through the front door when the
Pentagon was struck. A flawless, blue-sky day, and yet the world
was coming to an end.

I will always have the picture of your face in my mind, son. You'd led a life full of love and safety and security, with your Mama and Papa Costanas and your Uncle Eddie whom you loved
almost as much as you did your dad. I'd never seen panic in you
before. You went deathly white and your eyes were absolutely wild,
and I couldn't hold you. Jayne crawled into my lap and rubbed
my arm over and over, as if she were more afraid for me than for
herself and her dad. But you—you kept saying, “Dad's in there. Uncle Eddie's in there. We have to do something!”

A phone call from the ombudsman confirmed that. Everybody
had been called in. I could hardly keep you from running out the
front door and all the way to the World Trade Center. The three
of us huddled in front of the TV in that bright little living room
in our row house in Queens. I tried to keep my voice low and level
as I interpreted what was happening to the two of you. I thought
it pointless to try to distract you. You were firefighter's children. You'd always known the dangers. You'd always known what the
sirens could mean for us. Your bloodline told you to keep a vigil
until everyone returned safely to the station.

Would you agree it was the longest day either of us could
remember? Every siren call made me want to scream. My neck was
strained from trying to catch a glimpse of your father on the TV
screen. I gave up trying to keep you on the couch. You wanted to
sit directly in front of the television, and every few minutes you'd
touch it, as if you could feel your father's life there. You were only
twelve, son. You were still such a boy, and yet your face started to
take man-shape that day. The angles of fear cut away the softness,
and I knew you would never be completely innocent again. That
broke my heart as much as anything else.

When the phone rang, you got to it before I did. I could hear
Captain Reardon's wife's voice, and I grabbed the phone from you. I know you remember this—you screamed at me, “I wanna know
what's going on, Mom!” It was a voice I didn't even know. We had
turned into versions of ourselves neither of us recognized.

Lydia Reardon didn't have any news, except that both your dad
and Uncle Eddie were on the scene. She invited us to her house to
watch with all the other wives, where there would be plenty of sleeping room for the kids. I wanted to go—we needed to be with
the others who were suffering as we were. But I knew if I tried to
move you from that house—where you had to be when your father
came home—it wasn't going to happen.

From that moment, you sat apart from me and strained with
every cell in your awkward adolescent body to take in what we
were being told on CNN. If the phone rang, you answered it. If it
was for me, you listened in. I held the receiver out for you, because
that seemed the only way to hold you together.

You finally surrendered to sleep at two
AM
. You didn't wake up
when the police officer came to the door. I remember stepping out
onto the porch and fighting to keep the whole thing from blurring. That's what happened to me the day I opened the door at age fourteen
to a policeman who told us my father had been killed in an
accident. Everything smeared into the surreal, and cut off my grief. I couldn't let that happen this time. The poor officer was gray—both
from the ashes and the shock he was obviously in. He knew your dad
and Uncle Eddie, and his face worked against overwhelming pain.

“Tell me straight out,” I said to him. “Is it Rich?”

“Rich is okay,” he said. “It's his brother.”

He told me Dad got out and Uncle Eddie didn't. He said he
watched Rich fight everyone off and go back in and drag his
brother's charred and broken body out of the rubble.

I wanted to go numb, Christopher. It was almost more than I
could stand. But all I could think of was your father. I had a clear
vision of that precious man holding onto his twin brother and feeling
no life. Do you hear me, Christopher? All I could think of was
getting to him, because no one can bear that kind of agony alone.

That's why I called Lydia Reardon back and asked for someone
to come over and be with you kids. That's why I left with the police
officer without waking you up to tell you. I wasn't trying to cut
you out, son. I am your mother, but I am also your father's wife. I had to be with him, just him—and he needed me, just me.

I've never told you this, but they put me in an emergency vehicle
so I could get to the workers' staging area. I cannot even describe the scene. It was every film clip of a third world country under
attack I'd ever seen—superimposed on indomitable American soil. That bright, blue-sky day was a smothering gray night, and there
were my beloved Yorkies, their faces blackened with ash and smoke,
striped with rivulets of sweat and tears.

I found your dad sitting on a cot, a blanket around his shoulders,
head in hands. He was so covered in ash I wouldn't have recognized
him except for the shoulders. Several firefighters I didn't
know were hanging out close by, but I could tell from the wary
looks they were casting at him that they'd already figured out his
was a solitary space. But I pushed into his circle of silence and I
sat beside him and I put my arm across his back. It was like that
with us, back then. I was never afraid to go to him and say,
“What's the deal? What's going on?” Not the way I have been since.

At first his body was a knot. All he said was, “They won't let
me go back in.”

“You shouldn't,” I said.

He looked at me and said, “Eddie's dead, Demitria.”

And, then, Christopher, he cried. He sobbed—he wrenched
himself to the very depths of his soul. I knew as I wept with him
that when he pulled his identical twin brother out of what was
left of the World Trade Center, it was like recovering his own body. How would he be able to live with that?

You never saw that kind of grief in him. Even I never saw it
after that. Maybe that was the beginning of what has come to be
for our family.

I stayed with him the rest of the night—got him to lie down
on the cot while I sat on the floor. They let him return to the scene
at daybreak, and I came home to you kids. Jayne was curled up
on the couch in a fetal position. You'd just awakened, and I guess
I don't have to remind you that you were livid because I hadn't
taken you with me. I tried to get you to sit with me while I broke
the news about Uncle Eddie, but you stood with your back
against the fireplace while I gathered Jayne into my lap. When it
was said, you went into the backyard and slammed your baseball against the fence, over and over and over. You were in so much
pain, and I didn't know what to do except let you feel it all the
way through. That was all I knew to do, Christopher. If I was
wrong, son, I'm sorry.

I want you to know I believe I was drowning in that pain with
you, and your father, and Sissy. With everyone, Christopher. All
pain, all the time—that was all I knew for so long. If I made mistakes
in that place, I am so sorry.

Mom

Sully folded the letter and tucked it into the folder. But its realness stayed in his hands and his gut. Was there no bottom to the pain this woman and her family had lived with the past six years? He choked and then let tears form.

“You okay?”

Sully looked up at a slightly misshapen version of Tatum.

“Actually, no,” he said. “There is nothing okay
about the tragedies of people's lives.”

“You don't have to tell me that.”

Sully tilted his head in surprise as she turned the chair across from him around and straddled it, forearms on the back.

“The difference between you and me,” she said, “is you get emotional. I get bitter.”

Sully slid the folder aside. “Bitter about—?”

“Men in general.”

“And Van in particular.”

She gave a faux shudder. “I don't know what I was thinking with him. Actually I do—he was a rebound boyfriend. That's always a mistake.”

“He obviously hoped for something more.” Sully leaned back ultra-casually. “I wonder what he's going to do with that beautiful picture of you.”

She paused in mid earring-fiddle. Spider monkeys today.

“He dropped one,” Sully said.

“I hope he burns the whole stack of them. He must have, like, hundreds. He thinks he's this photographer. It was like dating the paparazzi.”

There was no way. No
way.

“Does Van have a studio?” Sully said.

Tatum's face twisted. “Are you kidding? No—he's still in college— if you can call it a college. He's at CCC.”