Live to Tell - Lisa Gardner [106]
“There’s an old saying that doctors make the worst patients. Same with psych nurses. I have known Danielle since starting to work at the unit. I would like to help her. Unfortunately, her skepticism mirrors your own.”
“She won’t work with you?”
He shrugged. “It’s why I am willing to speak with you. She’s not a client and, in her own mind, not even a friend. But I worry about her.”
“Why?”
“She’s an old soul,” Lightfoot said immediately, his expression more distant now, seeing something only he could see. “For centuries she has returned to this plane, always seeking, never finding. She has honed her hatred, when only love can set her free.”
“Sounds like a song I once heard,” D.D. said. She couldn’t help herself. “Are you talking reincarnation?”
“I’m talking experiential lessons. Her soul is drawn to this plane to learn what it needs to learn. But she hasn’t mastered the lesson. Until she does, she’s doomed to repeat. Unfortunately, there are other souls also involved. Their experiences are intertwined with her own, her inability to move forward sentencing them all to a spin cycle of ever-repeating violence. I’ve tried to explain this to her, but …”
“Her father?” D.D. filled in.
“That would make sense,” Lightfoot said.
D.D. narrowed her eyes. Interesting answer, she thought, and she was beginning to realize that for all his woo-woo, Lightfoot was very careful with his replies.
She got it, suddenly: “You mean Gym Coach Greg. You’re worried about his and Danielle’s relationship.”
“He asks. She refuses. He needs. She rejects. He still searches for love. She still chooses hate. And they spin and they spin and they spin.”
“Greg seems like a nice guy,” D.D. countered mildly.
“They spin and they spin and they spin,” Lightfoot repeated, sounding both tired and sorrowful.
D.D. regarded him for a bit. The healer made no attempt to break the silence, and after several minutes, she declared defeat.
“You ever miss it?” she asked finally.
“What?”
“The money, the fast car, the trappings of your former life?”
“Never.”
“Had to have been an adrenaline rush, picking up pretty women, making fistfuls of cash, screwing over your rivals. From all that, to this?”
“Wall Street is nothing but a playground. There are no meaningful rewards, there are no significant consequences. Whereas in there …” Lightfoot pointed toward Lucy’s open doorway. “In there is where I fight to win.”
As if to prove his point, the healer marched back down the hall.
He paused outside Lucy’s room. D.D. saw the man shiver before he headed in.
With Lightfoot back to the business of spiritual cleansing, D.D. wandered the unit until she found the nurse manager, Karen Rober, sitting in the common area with a little boy who was resiliently mashing fruit in a bowl. The boy looked up when D.D. approached and she recognized him from the first day. One of the three amigos into Matchbox cars and running laps. D.D. searched her mental files for a name but came up blank; she’d never been great with kids.
“Do you want a fruit smoothie?” the boy asked her, feet swinging, shoulders rocking. He stated in one breathless rush: “I can do banana strawberry raspberry blueberry maybe grape but not oranges they’re too hard to mash.”
He went back to pounding fruit with his plastic spoon, rocking, rocking, rocking. D.D. started to cue in on a few things. First, while the boy remained seated at the table, he was agitated. Very agitated. A hand grenade, just waiting for someone to pull the pin.
Second, he wasn’t the only one. Two kids were rollerblading down the hallway, pushing and shoving at each other as they went, while another kid sat under a table, banging his head against the wall.
What was it they called the environment of the unit—the “milieu”? D.D. was no expert, but even to her, the milieu was wiggy today.
Karen had spotted the head-banger. “Jamal,” she said sharply. “Enough of that. Why don’t you join Benny and me? Come on, Jamal. Benny will