Healing Stones (36 page)

St. Clair didn't bother to look behind him. He brought himself up to standing, wobbling off balance in the process.

“I see it as an emergency,” he said. “This college is in a state of crisis.”

His shoulders jerked as he reached into his jacket and pulled out a piece of paper. He was showing the restless, unfocused movements of a man on an emotional precipice.

Sully looked again at Ethan.

“All right,” Ethan said. “I can see there's no getting you out of here until I let you have your say.” He motioned to the chair across from Sully. “Why don't you sit down?”

“I can't sit. I can't eat. I can't sleep.” St. Clair stuck up a random hand. “How can you stand by and let this school go down the liberal drain?”

“Spare me the metaphors,” Ethan said, his voice still even. “What is it?”

“It”—Kevin said—“would be this.” He planted the paper on the desk with a flourish. “A recent memo from you.”

Sully resisted the urge to crane his neck.

“Am I misreading it—or does it state that you intend to change the ruling concerning unmarried pregnant students on campus?”

Ethan lowered his eyes to the paper. “Not only pregnant students,” he said, “but students who have gone through drug or alcohol rehab successfully—anyone who's repentant, Kevin, and who is willing to live a new life.” He looked up and lit his eyes across St. Clair's face. “Does this sound familiar, sir?”

“It doesn't sound like bleeding heart liberalism to you?”

It struck Sully that St. Clair never seemed to have answers—only questions.

Ethan shook his head and held up the paper, finger on the bottom paragraph.

“Sounds like Jesus to me. ‘For if you forgive men when they sin, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.'”

St. Clair was once again heaving breaths as he snatched up the memo and crushed it in his hand.

Sully inched, tensed, to the edge of the seat.

“You don't think I'll
fight you on this, Kaye?” St. Clair said.

“I had no doubt of that when I wrote it.” Ethan came out from behind the desk, grimness in his frame. “And, Kevin, if you and I had the kind of working relationship where we could sit down and discuss our differences, you would have been the first to know about this.”

“What is there to discuss?”

“You tell me.”

Before Sully saw it coming, St. Clair landed a fist on the desk. It came down on the edge, and Kevin moaned and pulled it back into his ribs.

Sully came to his feet, arms already out. But Ethan put up a hand and shook his head. Sully took a step back, but he couldn't sit.

St. Clair furtively cradled his hand. “Are you aware that this memo has gotten out among the students?”

Sully wanted to spit. Three guesses how.

“The solid ones are forming a protest out front,” St. Clair said. “They're fed up with this liberal—”

“I find that interesting,” Ethan said. “Usually it's the left-leaning students who do the protesting.” He looked hard at St. Clair. “Now, I wonder who gave those kids out front the idea to start waving placards.”

Sully's phone rang, and St. Clair whipped around, eyes startled. His lips pulled into an immediate accusation.

“Dr. St. Clair,” Ethan said. “Dr. Sullivan Crisp.”

St. Clair scowled, bringing his eyes into drawstring bags.

The phone rang again. It was Demi.

He left Ethan to make the explanation.

“Hey, there,” Sully said.

He could feel Gina calculating his exit across the outer office.

A spidery pause filled the line, followed by a thin
hi
.

Sully let himself out into the hall and passed up the elevator in favor of the steps. He talked as he took them down two at a time.

“Thanks for returning my call,” he said.

Once again a pause.

“So—we have an elephant in our living room, don't we?” Sully said.

“A what?”

“A big ol' animal that everybody wants to step around and pretend isn't there.”

He could hear her sucking in a breath.

“You're talking about me hugging you.”

“And feeling like you committed a major crime of therapy.”

“Of therapy? Crime, period. Sullivan . . .” Her voice chipped off.

Sully stopped on a landing, one hip against a tattered sofa.

“It feels so good to have somebody listen to me,” she said. “That's why I hugged you.”

“I know that.”

“Do you? I mean, really?”

“I do,” he said. “Does that make you feel better?”

“No.”

“Because—”

“I hate when you do this. Because I'm afraid that in my head it's going to turn into something else for me. This is how it started with Zach.”

“Ding!” Sully's voice echoed in the stairwell.

A pimpled kid passing him on his way down the steps looked at him twice before continuing under a bulging backpack.

“I'm not Zach,” Sully said when he was gone.

Demi gave him a soft grunt. “That doesn't help.”

“But here's what will.” He paused and planted his hand on the chipped plaster wall. “You, Demi, are not the same person you were when Zach came into your life.”

“You're saying I could resist the temptation now?”

“I'm saying you would see it coming and run like you had a pack of rabid coyotes after you.”

“Isn't that what I did when I skipped my appointment?”

Sully grinned and started down the next set of steps. “That's exactly what you did. But I want you to come back, and let's keep working.”

He stopped again, hand on the door to the front hall.

“I have to come back,” she said.

“You have to?”

“It's going to sound crazy, okay—but I think it's God.”

Sully pressed his forehead against the door. “Ding-ding and amen, Dr. Costanas,” he said. “What do you say we talk about you and God tomorrow—usual time?”

“Okay,” she said. “Ding-ding.”

Sully closed the phone with his chest. Yeah. He heard the hope. He pushed the door open into the hall, still grinning, and plowed into the kid with the hunchback knapsack.

“You don't want to head that way, man,” he said to Sully. “Dude— somethin's goin' down.”

Sully followed the jerk of the kid's head toward the front doors. A cacophony of shouts blasted through them—straight into the face of Ethan Kaye, who apparently had taken the elevator down and now stood in the doorway.

“They're about to riot,” the kid said.

Sully jammed his phone into his pocket and tore down the hall, heart already pounding in his ears.

When Sully reached him, Ethan was facing the students with both palms and the full light of his gaze. The crowd was only about fifty strong, but they weren't taking orders from Dr. Kaye. Not one was older than nineteen, Sully guessed. Their mouths were wide, undulating, and spitting out anger.

“You're misinterpreting Matthew 6:14!”

“Jesus Christ wants sexual purity!”

“What's gonna be okay next, Dr. Kaye?”

The throng of young faces blurred together and twisted by rage was surreal, spewing words meant to be spoken in love. They were all distorted versions of Kevin St. Clair.

A ragged chant of “Resign, Dr. Kaye!” began on the fringe and gathered voices. Sully saw two passing students pause, shift their backpacks, filter in. Their lips were moving before they knew the words.

Sully curled his fingers around Ethan's shoulder. “Leave it alone,” he shouted over them.

Ethan shook his head and stepped away, hands still up like futile flags over the rising drone.

“All right, folks, listen.”

“No—you listen!”

“Resign, Dr. Kaye!”

“No resignation without conversation!”

A whistle blast tore through Sully, and he grabbed Ethan's arm. A bulky-shouldered student in the center of the chant held up one hand, his other one still poised at his lips post-whistle. The crowd settled into reluctant silence.

“You'll talk about resigning, then?” the kid said.

Sully focused on the face, pulled taut across the cheekbones, rigid with conviction.

Ethan lowered his hands and moved firmly forward.

“I'll talk about why you want me to resign,” he said. “But not here, Travis. You know that.”

Kaye calling him by name seemed to irritate the kid.

“What are you afraid of, Dr. Kaye?”
Travis called out.

“I'm afraid of fear,” Ethan said. “And that's what this is about.”

A crack of silence went through the crowd.

Travis jerked his head, eyes darting. “We are not afraid to confess the truth of Christ crucified!” he shouted.

Only a few murmurs joined him.

“I'm not either,” Ethan said. “But I am concerned about how that truth is lived out.”

“As the Word says!”

Travis shot his arm up. A few Bibles rose in the air—though obviously not as many as he wanted.

“In the one true Word of God!” he shouted.

More arms raised, waving Bibles like picket signs.

“Then let's sit down and study the Word together.”

Sully heard an edge in the sonorous tenor as he watched Ethan's back stiffen.

“I'm calling for an open forum.”

“You have a forum right here!” Travis said.

“You say you want to confess the name of Christ—you want to live as He did.”

A few of the Bibles paused.

“Did Jesus have shouting matches with His disciples?” Ethan said. “Even with the Pharisees?”

Travis took a step forward, face cemented. “Are you claiming to be Jesus now?”

Another crack went through the crowd. Sully watched a few of them shift where they stood.

“I'm claiming to try to live as our Lord did, Travis,” Ethan said. “And what He did was to sit with those who had ears to hear.”

“Yeah—well, we're tired of what you have to say.”

Travis turned on the group, hardened eyes expectant.

“True enough,” someone said.

A few others followed with halfhearted renditions of “Resign!” But most of them looked up at Ethan, and Sully watched faces emerge from the blur. An uncertain movement of eyes here. An irresolute sag in the cheeks there.

Travis alone remained hard, like a cardboard figure against the backdrop of reconsidered emotions. One perfect word from Ethan, Sully thought, and he'd topple forward and drift to the ground on his own air.

Ethan still stood with his arms at his sides, and Sully could almost see the energy moving up his backbone. The crowd watched him, faces now half open.

“You say you're tired of what I have to say.” Ethan nodded. “Then perhaps I haven't fully responded to your current concerns.”

“Like your lowering the moral standards!” Travis said, his voice like glass. He snatched a Bible from the hands of the shaken girl beside him and displayed it over his head with both hands. “Everything's here, Dr. Kaye. There's nothing to talk about.”

“Except the fear behind your interpretation, Travis.”

“This is not about me! It's about all of us!”

He looked around him. “All of us” kept their eyes on Ethan Kaye. This time the crack went through Travis. The thinned, hardened face shattered.

“You're the one who's afraid, Dr. Kaye!”

Before Sully could even register the movement, Travis charged the steps, Bible still exalted in upstretched arms, and hurled himself at Ethan. Amid the startled voices of the crowd, he planted the book against Ethan's forehead, knocking him backward. Ethan's shoulder blades thudded into Sully's chest.

“This is what you're afraid of, Dr. Kaye!” he screamed.
“This!”

The crowd splintered, sending several bodies up the steps to pull Travis off. Sully wrapped both arms around Ethan's chest from behind and propelled him through the front doors.

“It's okay, Sully,” Ethan said.

Sully let him go, and Ethan put his hand to his forehead, eyes closed.

“I cannot believe it's come to this,” he said.

Sully planted his hands on the sides of Ethan's face and tilted his head back. An already fading red blotch wrinkled with his brow.

“I'm not hurt,” Ethan said.

“Man, are you sure?”

He nodded and opened his eyes. In them, Sully saw he was lying. A deeper hurt shot through them.

CHAPTER THIRTY - ONE

S
ully stayed in Ethan's office for the rest of the day. Through the interviews with security. The decision not to press charges or bring disciplinary action against Travis Michaels. The putting off of faculty members and administrative staff and curious community members who all wanted the story straight from his mouth.

As the day wore on without a glimpse of Kevin St. Clair, Sully's visions of wringing the man's neck grew more vivid. The lack of anger in Ethan was even more disturbing. For the most part his friend sat in a mulling silence that produced no visible signs of resolution— no straightened back, no determined shoulders. His face remained uncharacteristically cluttered, which created no small measure of uneasiness in Sully.

Darkness had crept in when Ethan declined Sully's offer to buy him dinner and suggested they both go home.

“You have to take care of yourself, my friend,” Sully told him when they parted ways in the parking lot.

Ethan attempted a smile. “You think somebody else is going to come after me with a Bible?”

“I'm talking about in here.” Sully rubbed his hand across his own chest. “I've watched this eat at you all day, and I'm not seeing you bite back.”

Ethan swept his gaze across the darkening lawn that ran beside the Huntington Building and down the slope to the chapel.