Healing Sands

by Nancy Rue

  “Yeah, well, it’s not what it sounds like in the paper.”

  “It never is. No offense.”

  “None taken. Working for the Sun-News is not my lifetime goal, trust me. I’m just doing it so I can be near my boys.”

  I took a long drink from the water bottle. Why was I telling her all this? I didn’t normally open a vein for perfect strangers, or anyone else.

  “Jake’s fortunate you’re here right now,” Poco said.

  “He doesn’t think so.”

  “He would be pretty upset. Alex too.”

  I looked out on the field, where Dan had the boys gathered around him. Alex was standing a little apart from the group, ball parked on his not-there hip. He looked small and lonely.

  “I’m sure you and Dan will do a great job walking them through this,” Poco said. “But in case they—or you—need another ear, I can totally recommend the Healing Choice Clinic.”

  I pulled in my chin. “You’re talking about therapy.”

  “It’s not like you think. When I was going through a bad time, I saw a woman there—Carla Korman—and she was amazing. I think I would have become an alcoholic or something if it weren’t for her.”

  To avoid any further disclosure, I said, “If it’s warranted, I’ll give her a call. Thanks.”

  Poco formed a fine frown line between her brows. “She left, unfortunately, but I can guarantee you anyone you see there will be wonderful. Are you familiar with Sullivan Crisp?”

  “I’ve heard his radio show once or twice.”

  “He’s the founder of the clinics, and the therapists all use his principles.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Really, if I see a need, I’m there.” I craned my neck toward the field, where the group was setting up a howl. Even as I watched, Dan quelled it and pulled the team in tighter. Even Alex pressed into the knot.

  “What’s that about?” I said.

  Whatever it was, J.P. was already taking the steps two at a time, with Victoria sailing behind her. By the time Poco and I reached them, J.P. was practically on the phone to her attorney.

  “You’d better be right,” she said, looking straight at me. “Dan better not be making cuts.”

  As if I had anything to do with what Dan decided.

  “What about it, team?” I heard Dan say.

  Some kind of tribal shout went up, and this time the players looked a little less hostile. Dan gazed over their heads at the mothers.

  “I’ve chosen a team captain. J.P., you ought to be real proud of your boy.”

  Of course. Make the worst kid on the team the captain, or watch his mother file a lawsuit. A typical Dan choice.

  As the boys diverted their allegiance to the moms with the snacks, Dan came over to us.

  “You know,” J.P. said, “Cade doesn’t need to be patronized.”

  Could this woman not make up her mind?

  “If he’s going to be captain, I want him to deserve it, and right now he’s playing horribly. What he needs is some help with his skills.”

  “He’s just suffering from a little lapse in confidence,” Dan said. “I think making him captain is going to give him a boost. Besides . . .” He smiled his slow, crooked smile. “Just because he isn’t David Beckham doesn’t mean he isn’t a leader. I gave him the opportunity. He’ll make himself a captain.”

  No, his mother will. If it kills him.

  Dan went off to join the boys, and I turned in search of my purse. Somebody touched my arm. I looked back at J.P.

  “I have to ask,” she said. “Why did you let that man get away?”

  “He didn’t get away,” I said. “I did.”

  I chewed on that all the way to Dan’s, while pretending to listen to Alex go on about how cool it was of Dad to make Cade captain and how Dad wouldn’t let the other guys boo when he announced it and how all the guys were saying he was the most awesome coach ever, except the ones that thought they should be captain but they would get over it because Dad was going to figure out a way to make them feel like they were something big, too, because that was what Dad did. I felt like Alex was filling out a profile on Match.com.

  When we arrived, Jake and a boy I didn’t know were kicking a soccer ball around in one of what Dan called his “sculpture parks.” Could I not get away from this game to save my soul? But at least Jake was outside rather than in self-imposed exile in his room. Out where I could get to him.

  At least that was my plan. He took one look at my car and headed straight for the backyard. I left my door hanging open and went after him.

  “Jake,” I said. “Just stop.”

  He’d gotten as far as the gate that led to the yard off the back patio. He did stop, hand on the latch, but he didn’t turn around.

  “I know you think I’m going to ask you all these questions,” I said to his back, “but I just have one. I promise.”

  He turned with all the enthusiasm of a root canal patient.

  “Just tell me why you won’t talk to me about what happened. That’s all I want to know.”

  His reply was swift, as if he’d been expecting me to ask. “Because Dad says I don’t have to.”

  Without waiting for me to go back on my word, he slipped through the gate almost without opening it. I felt every blood vessel pump as I stomped back to the front of the house where Alex was still pulling his gear out of my car. Dan’s 4-Runner was now parked beside it.

  “Where’s your father?” I asked.

  “I think he went out to the studio.”

  Why had I even bothered to ask?

  I hadn’t been to his studio here, but it was obviously the long, low adobe building toward the back of the property, and to get there I had to make my way through another sculpture park. It had always been a dream of Dan’s to build his pieces as massively as he wanted and then simply plant them where they would be “discovered” by anyone who happened by. That dream had obviously come to fruition.

  I charged past giant banjo players welded together from hubcaps and bicycle pedals and less easily identified scraps of metal. Around baseball players fashioned from railroad ties and hunks of stone. Between two stoneware masks that were taller than I was. Every piece fed my fury, until by the time I reached Dan’s doorway I could have disassembled his kiln brick by brick with my teeth.

  Dan was already in baggy jeans and the same white muslin too-big shirt he’d worn to work in ever since I’d known him—back when I thought what he did was romantic. I had grown to despise it, just as I had every bucket filled with broken pieces of tile and every stack of unpaid bills. He stood back from a tall swirl of metal, hands on his narrow hips, as if he were waiting for it to speak. I spoke first.

  “Why did you tell Jake he doesn’t have to talk to me about this?” His eyes traveled up the metal structure that nearly reached the ceiling. “Because there’s nothing to talk about.”

  “There is everything to talk about. He’s going to go to prison if we don’t find out what happened.”

  “How do you know that what happened isn’t exactly what it looks like happened?”

  “What?” My voice screeched higher than the structure he was still looking at.

  “What if he did run over that boy? For some reason we can’t even fathom?”

  “Are you serious ?”

  “If he did, Ryan,” he said, tears brimming in his voice, “don’t you think he needs help, instead of a lawyer or a private investigator or whatever else you have going?”

  I was stung by the piece of that which was right, the piece I hadn’t thought of. I sucked in air. “Okay, we’ll get him help, too, somebody that can get him to talk. Poco just told me about a clinic here in town we can take him to. It’s Christian, supposedly the best.”

  “I wasn’t talking about professional help.” Dan ran his hand along the metal. “I was talking about family. He needs the people who love him to guide him.”

  I spewed out all the air I’d just sucked in. “No, Dan—you just don’t want to fight i
t. It’s easier to let Uriel Cohen try to get him probation than go after this thing.”

  “It isn’t that.”

  “Then you actually think he’s guilty! What could possibly make our sweet son capable of something that heinous?”

  “I think I’m looking at it.”

  I could only stare at him as he turned back to his metal— thing—and picked up a square of sandpaper.

  “You were wrong when you said it was my fault Jake got into trouble,” he said. “I think it was you. You and your anger made him ‘capable.’” He pressed the paper to the metal, rubbed with it, let it drop to the floor. The tears had reached his face. “I think that’s why you can’t allow him to be guilty—because if he is, you’ll never recover from your own guilt.”

  “You are out of your mind!”

  “Am I, Ryan? Or would that be you?”

  He jerked his chin toward my hand. My fingers were clenched around a shard of metal that teetered atop a pile of pieces waiting to be chosen. My arm was drawn back to hurl it.

  “I have supper ready.”

  The late afternoon sun formed a halo on Ginger’s curls before she stepped in and sparkled her eyes and her teeth and her skin at Dan. She was absolutely carbonated until she took in the scene.

  “Baby, are you all right?”

  She cast me an accusing glance. I let go of the metal and listened to it smack against the rest of the pile on its way to the floor.

  “He doesn’t need to be upset,” she said in a voice higher than anything I could aspire to. “He has an important project to complete.”

  “I’m sure the world is waiting with bated breath,” I said.

  “New Mexico State is.” Ginger wafted an arm toward the towering hunk of metal. “They commissioned this and five other pieces. They’re going up all over the campus.” Her eyes narrowed to well-calculated slits. “Or didn’t you know?”

  “That’s just wonderful.” I dug my fingers into my temples. “But I’m a little more concerned with my son right now.”

  “It seems to me that you should have thought of that before.”

  “Ginger.”

  Dan put his hands on her shoulders from behind. She grabbed onto both of them, chest heaving as if she and I had just gone at it with the boxing gloves.

  “How about we continue this conversation at another time?” Dan said to me.

  “Like in about ten minutes—alone,” I said. “I’ll wait at the house.”

  I stormed out of the studio and stepped almost straight into the arms of the boy I’d seen playing soccer with Jake. He seemed larger than he had among the lumps and humps of adobe forms. A shock of rich hair fell over his forehead like an ad for Abercrombie and Fitch.

  “Is everything all right out here?” he said in a voice that was deep and take-charge. He looked over my shoulder into the doorway to the studio and then back at me, eyes concerned. “Jake thought he heard somebody arguing.”

  “You stay out of it.” I snapped myself past him.

  Jake was there, arms folded across his chest.

  “Listen to me, son.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m sick of listening to you. You have nothing to say that I want to hear, so just . . . just . . . shut up.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Just leave me alone. That’s what you’re good at, isn’t it? Leaving?”

  For once I was too stunned to speak.

  “Jake, dude, you might want to lighten up,” said the boy behind me.

  “It’s okay, buddy.”

  The kid fell silent at the sound of Dan’s voice. I found mine.

  “Dan,” I said through my teeth, “this is out of control.”

  “I think you’re the one who’s out of control,” Ginger said. “You come in here all—”

  “Bag it. I’m going.” I turned and stabbed a finger toward Dan. “But we’re not done.”

  My heart slammed as I made my way through the ranks of the all-metal band, and so did the voice in my head. When did Jake go from monosyllabic grunts to a stream of obnoxia? How did that Ginger person insinuate herself into my boys’ lives? And when did I get kicked to the curb as the one to blame for it all? I was almost to my car and halfway to a stroke when an outside voice overtook me.

  “You just stay away from him—are we clear?”

  I turned around in time to see Ginger snatch a piece of irrigation hose from the base of a soaptree.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  She brandished the hose at me. “I want you to stay away.”

  My anger teetered toward laughter. “I don’t know what you’re going to do with that—wait, let me get a garbage can lid so I can defend myself.”

  She looked at the hose as if she’d just realized it was there. She let her arm drop to her side. “I just can’t stand to see them all hurting like that. I get a little crazy.”

  “Ya think? Does Dan know his girlfriend is a nutbar?”

  “They’re so upset anyway, and then you come in here and stir everything up.”

  “It needs to be stirred up,” I said. But I put up my hand. “I’m not going to discuss this with you, of all people.”

  “All right, then, I’ll talk.” She took a step toward me, out of the shade, where despite her lowering her weapon, I could still see a trace of wildness in her eyes. “Don’t ever talk to my son again the way you just did back there.”

  My urge to guffaw disappeared, and a fire went up my backbone. “Jake is not your son.”

  “I’m talking about Ian.”

  “I don’t even know who Ian is.”

  “You told him to stay out of it!”

  “Oh—that Ian. He doesn’t have any part in this.”

  She took another step. “No, see, you are so wrong there. Ian is the only one who’s going to get Jake through this. He’s the only one Jake talks to—because he cares about him.”

  “What is he, seventeen?”

  “Sixteen—and more mature than most grown men I know.”

  “I don’t care if he’s a child prodigy, lady—he’s not part of this family.”

  “And you are?”

  “Oh, please.” I turned and clawed for the car door handle.

  “No, see, you’re done here,” she said. “You’re never going to have a relationship with any of them, so why don’t you just let us handle Jake, the way we’ve been doing for the last—”

  “Forget about it.” I yanked the door open. “I’ll be back.”

  “Didn’t you just hear a single thing I said?” With a heave she hurled the hose across the sculpture park, barely missing a metal monster strumming his ukulele.

  I slammed the door and fishtailed the car out of the driveway.

  I was shaking so badly I only drove around the bend in the dirt road, out of sight of the house, before I stopped to put my forehead on the steering wheel.

  Five minutes ago I’d been almost amused by the woman waving a piece of garden hose. Now all I could see was myself, with a shard of metal in my own hand. Her mad-woman tirade couldn’t out-shout the words Dan had put on me.

  You and your anger made him capable of this.

  Was he right?

  What if he was? What if I had?

  The only thing I knew was that I didn’t want Jake to look at me—or himself—and see a woman throwing pieces of art in uncontrollable rage.

  I dug in my purse for Poco’s phone number.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Sully was passing the break room late Monday morning when an aroma pulled him in.

  “When did we start a gourmet restaurant in here?” he said.

  Martha looked up from the table where she was parked with a salad and a magazine and pointed wordlessly to the microwave. Kyle pulled out a plate of something bubbly and expensive-smelling and wafted it onto the table across from her.

  “Seriously,” Sully said as he strolled to the table. “What is that incredible smell?”

  “Veal Florentine,” Kyle said. “Get yourself
a plate.”

  Sully shook his head. “There’s too much green in there for me.” “And nothing in it is fried.” The corners of Kyle’s mouth twitched. “Don’t you people from Alabama like everything breaded and boiled in grease?”

  “You’re not that kind of Southerner, are you?” Martha said.

  Sully eased into a chair, still studying Kyle’s lunch. “I’m the kind of Southerner who likes to know the ingredients in what he’s eating.”

  “But if it smells this good, who cares?” Kyle took a forkful and smiled, close-mouthed, as he chewed. Martha looked expectantly at Sully.

  “How’s it going so far, Kyle?” Sully said.

  “I’m settled in, ready to work. Now all I need are some clients.” Kyle looked at Martha, who looked at Sully, who had never seen such smooth triangulation.

  “I’ve given Kyle two clients to start with,” Martha said.

  “A seventy-two-year-old man grieving for his wife who died two weeks ago. He’ll need me for about three sessions before every widow at the senior center starts baking him pies.”

  “Or you start baking them,” Sully said, eyeing the dessert Kyle was unwrapping.

  “I don’t cook,” Kyle said. “I just order out.”

  Martha folded her hands neatly on the tabletop. “The other client is an unhappy woman who I think will respond to Kyle.”

  “She’s a schoolteacher. Of course she’s unhappy. Look—” Kyle chipped at a flake of tissue-thin pastry with a tine of his fork. “I know every client deserves full attention no matter how small the problem may seem to us . . .”

  “And that small problem may only be the tip of a much larger iceberg that has been forming for years,” Martha said.

  “I just want something a little more intense. That’s the way I like to work, you know? Get in there and make a difference.”

  “You’ll get your chance, tiger,” Sully said.

  “When you’ve shown what you can do with the less-intense cases.” Martha glanced quickly at Sully. “I hope I’m not stepping on your toes.”

  “Listen, we’re a team—and since I’m not going to be here more than a couple of months, you two are the core of it.” Sully looked from one of them to the other. “So I think your first session ought to be with each other. See if you can work this thing out.”