by Nancy Rue
Instead I said, “What?”
“That’s why you’re an exception,” he said. “Because nothing gets past you. We’ll keep each other on our proverbial toes. That is, if you—”
“All right,” I said. “So how does this work? I can’t start now—I have to get to my son’s soccer practice.”
“How about tomorrow?” he said. “Is this a good time for you?”
“I get off work at three, so I’ll come straight here. But I have to leave by four.”
“Not a problem.” He grinned again. “I think an hour is about as long as you’re going to put up with me at a time.”
It was the last thing I expected a therapist to say, especially Mr. Man, King of Christian Counseling. But then, what did I know?
About, it seemed, anything?
All the way to Burn Lake, I said out loud all the things I wished I’d said to Sullivan Crisp’s face. I am not going down a bunch of bunny trails with you. And that includes my ex-husband, our divorce, my potty training . . .
When I pulled into the shade of a cottonwood in the parking lot, I was still asking myself why I had agreed to see the man. I was hoping I could give myself a different answer than the only one I could settle on: it had to be somebody, so it might as well be him.
And it did have to be somebody, because if Jake was not acquitted, there probably wasn’t enough metal in that studio for me to throw.
I hiked the zippered bag full of bananas and granola bars and juice boxes over my shoulder and headed for the knot of mothers on the bleachers. All I wanted were some coping skills. I was an intelligent woman. A few sessions with Sullivan Crisp should do it. He was right about one thing: I wasn’t going to be able to put up with him for much more than that.
It was after four, and practice was already under way when I joined Poco midway up the bleachers. J.P. and Victoria were sitting behind her, and I got the distinct impression I’d just happened on a conversation I wasn’t supposed to hear.
“Ladies,” I said. To Poco I said, “I brought the snacks. All healthy.”
“I knew you’d catch on.” The signature giggle was even more nervously frayed than usual.
“Did I interrupt something?” I asked.
“No, no.”
“You know what?” J.P. said. “I’m not good at dicky-doing around. I think we should just get it out in the open.”
“Dicky-doing?” Victoria said faintly.
Poco put her hand on J.P.’s knee. If that was the signal to back off, J.P. didn’t get it.
“We were talking about your son Jake and his situation.”
I whipped my face toward her so hard my neck crunched.
“I know,” she said. “But I want to make sure our kids don’t find out about it.”
“Why would they, unless you tell them?” I said.
J.P. lowered her sunglasses and peered over them down onto the field. “Alex knows, doesn’t he?”
It hadn’t even occurred to me to ask Alex not to share this whole thing with anyone outside the family, but I still bristled.
“You think he’s going to make an announcement to the soccer team?” I said.
“Of course not.” Poco still had her tiny hand on J.P.’s knee, and it still wasn’t working.
J.P. sighed impatiently. “Something could slip out, and I don’t want Cade or any of the other boys upset.”
“So what’s your point?” I said.
“I just wanted to make sure you’ve spoken to Alex about not discussing this thing with the other kids.”
I looked down at the field.
“You have, haven’t you?”
“Look, how I handle this with my boys is my business and mine alone.”
“Not when it affects my boy, and Victoria’s and Poco’s and everyone else’s.” J.P.’s blue eyes drew together like a snake’s. I had an image of her tongue forking out at me next. She all but hissed, “I would no more handle it that way if it were me—”
“It’s not you, though, is it?” I said.
She stood up, capris bunched into wrinkles at the bend in her legs, and huffed off down the steps. I waited for Victoria to follow her.
She just gazed after her, however, eyes in their usual trance.
“I think you made her mad,” she said.
“Ya think?” I ran a hand through my hair, which I knew was already standing up in spikes from the raking I’d been giving it all afternoon.
“You have a lot on your mind,” Poco said. “If Alex lets something slip, so be it. We’ll deal with it.” The faint line appeared between her brows. “But if he does, how do you want us to handle it with our boys?”
I looked at Victoria, who was nodding vaguely.
“Tell them that we don’t know exactly what happened,” I said, “but that Jake is innocent until—” I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t even let myself think anything that involved the word guilty. “Just tell them we’re working on finding out the truth.”
“And that Alex needs their support.”
Our heads swiveled to Victoria. Her face was still so unfocused I wasn’t sure she’d actually said it, until Poco breathed, “Right.”
What had just happened? Whatever it was, I was confused. I chalked it up to the fact that I had no experience with groups of women. I’d always avoided them the same way I eschewed sales and fad diets and department store makeup counters.
And intended to continue doing so.
The temperature had dropped to the low sixties by the time Sully stretched out on his back deck on a chaise lounge that left his feet hanging over the end. God had just treated him to a psychedelic sunset, and the sun was now sizzling on the top of the thick adobe wall that surrounded his backyard, preparing to reduce the two gnarled Mexican elder trees to mere silhouettes.
Sully liked the wild tangle that overtook not only the backyard but the front of his rented house as well. It gave the place a funky look that matched the chipped tile on the porch overhang and the patinaed pink stucco. Every faded blue window frame and gap between the floorboards reminded him of himself at this point. Put together in the past in pieces and trying to come together as a comfortable whole in the present.
Sully propped his laptop on his knees and turned it on. While it loaded, he sipped at a Frappuccino and studied the long bunch of brick-red chiles hanging from an open beam over the nearby table piled with his files. What was it about them that he got such a kick out of? Maybe because they were so deceptively cheerful looking, and then you bit into one and got the spicy surprise of your life.
The computer announced that it was ready, but now that he stared at it, he had no idea what to Google. Zahira’s Devil Renouncement / New Mexico? Some kind of Internet 411 for Zahira Cox? What did that mean, anyway . . . Zahira?
For lack of a better direction, Sully Googled the word. He skipped Zahira’s School of Belly Dance and the Zahira Primary School in Hambantota and went to a list of baby name meanings. He snorted out loud. Zahira was Arabic for “brilliant and shining.”
He went back to Zahira’s School of Belly Dance and searched the faces for anyone even remotely resembling Belinda Cox, but the photographs were such poor quality, everyone in them looked as if they’d been blurred for a reality cop show. Sully clicked the site off and dug in the pile for a folder. He opened it and pulled out a photograph whose subject was all too clear, even from fourteen years ago.
She had too-blonde hair, bleached of any natural color and shine, and it lay in thin, flat layers around a face flecked with freckles. There was nothing ingenuous about Belinda Cox. Her eyebrows were too tweezed, her lips too glossy. She wore a practiced expression, as if she’d worked in front of a mirror to align her features to say, “I’m only trying to help you.”
Help? She hadn’t helped Lynn do anything but lose her beautiful mind. And she was going down for that if he had to tear Las Cruces apart . . .
Sully stared at his fist, now crumpling the picture into a ball. He let it bounce to the table whe
re it rolled against the laptop and waited.
Sully closed his eyes. God, don’t let me do this. Don’t let me turn this into revenge.
He’d had himself convinced this was about ethics, about protecting other innocent people. But there was no denying now that it was intensely personal. Porphyria was right. He had to get this done so he could put it to bed and get on with his life. If he didn’t, it was going to take over.
He looked at the crushed ball on the table. If it hadn’t already.
CHAPTER NINE
Sully always prayed before a session. That was the one thing that still came naturally. The rest might not, seeing how it had been a year since Nashville and his last one-on-one client. He hadn’t even intended to work with this one, but he didn’t think Kyle was ready for Ryan Alexander-Coe, and Martha already had a full load. Besides—Ms. Coe was something of a time bomb, and even Olivia had spotted her as a potential lawsuit.
He pretzeled his legs into a bow in the butterscotch corduroy chair-and-a-half. Face resting in his hands, he breathed in God. And Light. And Christ, Light from that Light. Light on the only path he’d found he could follow.
God-in-Christ . . . shine through me . . . help me to lead her to make some sense of herself . . .
Sully breathed into the prayer until he came to a level place where perhaps Ryan Coe’s new path could start. Then he opened his eyes and reached for the folder on the trunk between his chair and the identical one Ryan would sit in.
He grinned as he glanced over the paperwork she’d filled out the day before. To use a psychological term—she was a pistol. Small woman with a big mind. Gunned you down with her shotgun eyes. Wasn’t going to put up with—how did she say it?—having Ephesians thrown in her face.
She also said—both in yesterday’s interview and on her form— that she wanted help controlling her anger. I need coping skills, she’d written. There was no doubt that she had a short fuse, but Sully didn’t think just anything lit it. Whatever got her going came from someplace deep. The trick was going to be letting her find the God-path, but getting her to let him lead for a while. She must be something on the dance floor.
He perused the form for her occupation. Photojournalist. Formerly employed by the Associated Press, but currently working for the Las Cruces Sun-News. He salivated mentally. That might be a road worth going down.
A tap on the door was followed by Olivia’s head. He’d heard her staccato laugh in the reception area earlier, punctuating Kyle’s urging her to go back to school and get her degree. Martha was going to have to assign Kyle more clients before he started having sessions with the receptionist.
“She’s here,” Olivia whispered.
“Who?” Sully whispered back.
“Mrs. Coe.”
“Okay. Why are we whispering?”
“Because she scares me.”
Sully stood up and strode to the door. “Is she armed?”
Olivia’s eyes popped, and Sully smiled at her.
“You’re teasing me,” she said.
Sully followed her out to meet Ryan noticing on the way that Olivia looked less like she’d caught the latest sale at the Goodwill than she had previously. Her hair was up in one of those messy bun-ish things, but at least it wasn’t dangling in her face like leftover goat food. He wondered if Kyle had counseled her on that too.
“Here he is,” Olivia said to Ryan and then skittered to her desk.
Ryan’s bright eyes were focused completely on Sully, as if she expected him to begin the session right there. He ushered her back to the counseling room before she could start firing questions at him.
As it was, she was barely seated in the oversize chair, which held her like a big hand, before she had the first one out. “Do you do cognitive therapy?”
They were obviously dispensing with the pleasantries. He’d go with that for now.
“You’re familiar with it?” he said.
“It’s where you give the patient alternative ways of thinking and reacting—in my case, to anger.”
If he had to guess, Sully would say she’d looked up anger management on the Internet the night before.
“That’s basically it,” he said.
“Good. That’s what I want. I already tried watching football and screaming at the ref and throwing pillows at the television. That only makes me want to tear the rest of the living room apart.”
Sully was impressed. Innumerable expensive studies had shown that angry people who already knew they were ticked off didn’t feel better after they punched something out. That only worked for people who weren’t in touch with their anger—and that didn’t describe Ryan Coe.
“And I don’t want the relaxation training, which I know is another method.” Ryan squinted as she shook her head. “That sounds too woo-woo to me.”
“Woo-woo,” Sully said, grinning.
Ryan gave him a hard look. “Look, can we get something straight, Dr. Crisp?”
“Absolutely.”
“If you find me amusing, this isn’t going to work out. At all.”
Sully settled back in his chair, hands folded at his waist to keep from rubbing them together in anticipation.
“I think you have an intelligent sense of humor,” he said. “I appreciate that. If you say something funny, I’m probably going to at least smile.” He did. “You’ll have to cut me some slack here.”
“Fine. Sorry.”
Sully let out a buzz. As he expected, her face went deadpan.
“What was that ?” she said.
“That’s my signal that you’ve broken one of the few rules I have. No need for apologies. We’re just getting to know each other here.”
The small pointed chin lifted. “What are the rest of the rules, then?”
“We’ll discover those as we go along.”
“No,” she said.
Sully felt his eyebrows rise.
“I don’t want to hear that obnoxious buzzing sound again, so give them all to me now, and I won’t break them.”
Sully considered arguing the point and thought better of it. If she was going to come out of this session still speaking to him, he’d better not antagonize her in the first five minutes. Although from the right-angle way she was sitting in a curl-up chair, he judged it might already be too late. Game Show Theology was going to be a hard sell with her.
“Fair enough,” Sully said. He spread a hand and ticked off his fingers. “The rules of the game, as it were. One, what we just discussed. Two, I won’t judge you, and you won’t judge yourself. Three—”
“Define judge. ”
Sully let his hand drop. “Example. You came in with anger issues. I’m not going to tell you that you’re an evil person because you break a plate or scream obscenities. By the same token, you don’t get to say that about yourself either.”
“So you’re saying it’s okay to smash crockery and cuss.”
“No. I’m saying doing that doesn’t make you a monster. Our job is to find out why you do that—or whatever it is you do when you’re angry—and figure out a way to use that knowledge to give you the control you’re looking for.”
She nodded, eyes still on him as if she were trying to soak him in. There was no doubt she wanted to fix this. He just wasn’t sure how patient she was going to be with the process.
“Back to the rules,” she said. “And then I have another question.”
With the strange sensation that he was the one being led down a path, Sully put up three fingers. “Number three, if we get to the end of a session and one of us is angry, we don’t leave without at least talking about it. We may not come to an agreement, but we don’t walk out muttering under our breath, either one of us.”
“I didn’t think therapists got angry at their patients,” she said.
“Yeah, we get our hackles up, same as the next person.”
She gave him another blank look.
“What?” he said.
“You’re just not what I expected,” she
said.
“What did you expect?”
She opened her mouth, then shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. What are the rest of the rules?”
“That’s it,” Sully said. That was, in fact, more than it. He’d made up the last one on the spot, just for her. “But you know, your expectations of me do matter. This isn’t just going to be about me giving you tools and you going out and using them, although we’ll do some of that. That’s the cognitive therapy you were talking about.” He recrossed his legs as he warmed up. “This is going to be more about a relationship—you getting to know me so that hopefully you’ll come to trust me, and me getting to know you so I can decide how best to help you.”
Sully waited. If his instincts were right, this lady was in touch with her anger. What she wasn’t in touch with was the hurt that made it happen. Getting her to talk about that might be a feat right up there with the loaves and fishes.
Finally she said, “All right. What do you need to know about me?”
“Let’s start with your current situation,” Sully said.
Ryan squinted again before she began. “My current situation is that I’ve been divorced for two years because my husband—ex-husband— was great at sculpture and terrible at marriage.” She pointed her eyes at him. “And we won’t be getting into that.”
Sully nodded her on. They would get into that. But not today. “I have two sons, ten and fifteen. When Dan and I got divorced, I assumed the boys would live with me, but they surprised me in court by announcing to the judge that they would prefer to live with their father.” She smiled without humor. “He was terrible at fatherhood, too, but they didn’t see it that way.” She took in some air. “Anyway, I took an assignment in Chad— Africa—and when I came back, Dan had moved them from Chicago, where they’d always lived, to New Mexico. He was in some artist-in-residence program in Roswell, and then he just migrated with the boys to Las Cruces. If I wanted to be near them, I had to come here, too, so I resigned from the AP and got a job with the Las Cruces paper.”