Healing Sands

by Nancy Rue

  She stopped for another breath. Some of the bravado had gone out of her eyes, but she plunged back in with let’s-get-this-over-with energy.

  “I’ve tried to let my boys know that I love them and I want to be part of their lives, and my younger son, Alex, is coming around. But the older one, Jake, basically won’t have anything to do with me. And now he’s been arrested for allegedly backing over a Mexican boy with a pickup truck, on purpose. Which, although Jake was found at the wheel of the vehicle, I know he did not do.”

  She stopped and looked hard at Sully, as if she were daring him to disagree. He wasn’t about to.

  “But his father thinks he did,” she said. “The police aren’t investigating further, because for them this is a slam dunk. The lawyer is talking about getting Jake off with probation. And my son won’t tell me what happened so I can help him. Which all frustrates me to no end, and then I get . . . furious. And on Sunday I picked up a piece of scrap metal in my husband’s studio and almost threw it at him.” Ryan’s face had grown ashen. “I’m afraid that if something doesn’t change and my son is sent to prison, I’ll do worse than pitch a piece of sculpture. That’s my current situation, Dr. Crisp.”

  Sully wanted to fall back into his Southern instincts and say, Ryan, bless your heart. But her eyes almost dared him to try sympathy on her.

  “That’s a lot to deal with,” he said.

  “Well, I have to deal with it. And I have to do it without hurling art supplies. So—what have you got?”

  “At the moment, another question. Bear with me.”

  She snapped a nod.

  “Would you say you were an angry person before your son’s arrest?”

  She straightened her small self in the chair again, head barely coming to the top of the back, feet dangling just off the floor. “I got angry when people did stupid things, if that’s what you mean. I’ve never been one to hold back when I think somebody’s in the wrong.”

  Sully had no doubt about that. “Was it ever a problem before?” “I don’t see how that matters.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t,” Sully said. “But it’s always a good idea to check out all the possibilities.”

  Her eyes moved away again, and she frowned at the picture on the wall—a painting of White Sands in a folk-art frame he’d just hung there that morning.

  “When my boys—Jake, mainly, because Alex just wanted to be like his big brother—when they told the judge they wanted Dan to have custody of them, yeah, I saw red.”

  Sully watched her swallow, but beyond that she scarcely moved, as if the memory had frozen her.

  “I stood up and yelled something at my ex-husband. I don’t even remember what it was. The judge told me to either sit down or leave the courtroom. I apologized, but I know I made his decision for him. He said his reason for awarding custody to Dan was that my job took me out of town too often to be the more effective parent, even though I had all of that covered and in writing. I knew he based his call solely on my outburst.”

  She was obviously using every thread of willpower she had to keep from reenacting the scene right there.

  “You were blindsided,” he said. “I wouldn’t call that an out-of-control reaction.”

  Ryan put up a hand and gave him the squint he was already starting to expect when he was about to be called on the carpet. “Look, don’t do that,” she said.

  “What did I do?”

  “You’re trying to make me feel okay about myself. I don’t need that.”

  “I’ll consider myself buzzed.” Sully slanted toward her. “But just so we’re clear, what I’m actually doing is making sure you have perspective. The kinds of things you’ve had to deal with are not just the normal stuff of life. I don’t know anyone who could handle those situations with perfect aplomb.” He put up his own hand before she could protest. “I’m not saying your actions have been okay, but I don’t want you to think we’re going to turn you into Mr. Spock. We wouldn’t want to turn off your feelings. That’s where the signals are that alert us to what we need to pay attention to.”

  She pressed her lips together, revealing a pair of lines on either side of her mouth, the only real sign of wear on an otherwise ageless face.

  “So what did you do then?” Sully asked.

  “Like I said, I had an opportunity to go to Chad, and I couldn’t pass it up.”

  “Was it just the opportunity that compelled you to go?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did you leave the States angry?”

  Back to the painting. Sully waited her out.

  When she looked back at him, her eyes glittered. “Yes, I was angry. I knew my boys chose their father because it was Disneyland when they were with him. He was going to let them do whatever they wanted, and I couldn’t stand to watch it.”

  “Anything else?”

  “What else do you want?”

  “Just giving you a chance to say everything you need to say. You don’t have to worry about how it comes out in here.”

  “It was obvious that throwing a tantrum wasn’t going to bring my boys back to me. There was nothing I could do, so . . .” Ryan shrugged and leveled her eyes at him.

  You left because you couldn’t stand the pain, Sully wanted to say to her. But it was too soon.

  He leaned back. “How did it go in Chad?”

  “I was only supposed to be there for a few weeks, but it turned into a six-month project.”

  “Sounds intense.”

  “I was at a center in N’Djamena run by the Christian Children’s Fund. They’re trying to rehabilitate child soldiers demobilized from the FUC in Darfur.”

  “More fuel for anger.”

  “Beyond. But I never felt like I was going to lose it.”

  “What made the difference?”

  Once more she became still, as if she were trying to avoid being seen. For someone who called herself out of control, she was in almost complete charge of her body language.

  “When I was taking pictures, telling the story,” she said finally, “I felt like I was doing something about it. I kept thinking that if I could capture the images that were tearing at my heart, someone might be compelled to try to stop what was happening to the kids who are still out there fighting on all sides in that mess.” She cupped her hands in front of her, as if she held the images she spoke of. “Some of those boys were still hard as nuts. Or they tried to be. They were as young as ten years old. I just kept shooting and shooting, hoping they would show me what was under all the hate somebody else had drilled into them.”

  She let her hands drop and looked at Sully as if she’d all but forgotten he was there. The soft layer she’d begun to reveal slid back toward its hiding place behind her eyes.

  “And did they ever show you?” Sully asked.

  “One did. He was twelve. Thin as a pole, like my boys.” She balled her hand into a fist and looked at it. “He was the toughest of all of them—he would even spit on the ground when he saw me with my equipment. And then one night I found him out on the volleyball court, crying his eyes out.” Ryan shook her head. “It was the moment I’d been waiting six months for, and I couldn’t even raise my camera.”

  “What did you do?” Sully asked.

  “I sat down with him, and he put his head in my lap and cried himself to sleep.” She swallowed again as the layer disappeared once more. “The next day I packed up and came back to the States. Okay—so I have a question.”

  Sully wanted to back that truck up, but he said, “Ask away.”

  “Where is the Christian part of this counseling?”

  He took his time refolding his legs. The wrong answer would send her straight for the door, after she took him out at the knees. “You warned me that you didn’t want me beating you up with Ephesians,” he said.

  “I meant don’t just quote Scripture to me and expect me to change. If I could do that, I would have already. I read the Bible. I pray.” She gave him her squinted look. “It isn’t working ri
ght now.”

  “But you do want faith-based counseling,” Sully said.

  “Okay.” She brought up her hands parallel to her face as if she were forming goalposts and spoke between them. “Before I went to Africa, I was the tithing, pew-sitting kind of Christian. I went to Bible study, I sang the praise songs. I was there every time the doors opened. And don’t get me wrong—”

  Sully was sure that wasn’t going to happen. She was leaving no room for error between those goal post hands.

  “All of that is important,” she said, “if it leads you to a real experience with God. I think a lot of the people in my congregation in Chicago had that. I didn’t.”

  “So what changed in Africa?”

  “What didn’t? I never darkened the door of a church while I was there, but I talked to God more than I ever had in my life. Maybe not talked. Yelled. Ranted.”

  Her eyes blazed. Sully had a moment of pity for God.

  “I wanted to know how he could let those children be used to kill people.”

  “Did you get any answers?” Sully asked.

  “No. I got—” Ryan glanced at her watch. “Look, our time’s almost up, and I don’t feel like we’ve gotten anywhere.”

  “Actually, I think we might have just arrived. Tell me what you got.”

  She gave him a doubtful look. “I got images. And not like—like woo-woo.”

  Yes, she’d already established that there would be no woo-woo. “It isn’t like I purposely imagined what I wanted something to look like, the same way I don’t set up a shot when I’m making pictures. I just take what’s there.”

  “Tell me some more,” Sully said.

  She resituated in the chair. “I would be in a situation, maybe praying, maybe shooting, and I’d get a clear picture in my mind of something that might not have anything to do with what I was thinking about. And I would know it didn’t come from me.” For the first time, she looked at him without a challenge in her eyes. “Does that make sense?”

  “I’m getting there,” Sully said. “Give me an example.”

  She directed her gaze to the painting again. “The night Khalid cried himself to sleep in my lap, I didn’t want to move, so I sat there for hours, with mosquitoes the size of garbage trucks feasting on me, and I got a clear picture in my mind of Jake.” She glanced at Sully. “My older son.”

  “Right.”

  “He was curled up in his bed at home, in a fetal position, staring at the wall and crying without tears. It was like a shot God framed for me, which is why I know it isn’t just me thinking it up.” Her voice went dry. “That and the fact that the images aren’t what I would set up. Believe me.”

  “I know you want to leave here with something,” Sully said. “And I don’t blame you. You’ve struggled with this for a long time.” He slanted forward again, arms resting on his knees, shaping his words with his hands. “I want to talk more about your relationship with God next time. It’s the key to all of this—that’s where the Christian part comes in. But in the meantime—and I just want you to hear me out on this—I think you can start to use your ability to visualize—”

  “I told you I don’t set it up—it just comes to me.” She, too, slid forward, so that her feet finally hit the floor. “I know where you’re going with this, and I’m sorry, but when some detective tells me my son is a racist, I can’t see me stopping to calm myself with a vision of”—she chopped her hand toward the painting—“White Sands. By the time I do that, I’ll probably already have clawed his face.”

  Sully watched her wrap herself back up and pondered his options. He had to be quick, or this could be the shortest relationship in therapeutic history.

  “Let’s try this, then,” he said. He dug into his pocket and found the miniature hourglass he’d swiped from his Would You Rather . . . ? game and set it on the trunk. Sand began its slow trickle down.

  “This is just a temporary tool,” Sully said.

  “Let me guess. Every time I start to blow, you want me to turn this over and not do anything until it runs out, and by then I should be cooled off.” She gave him the squint and shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  “No,” Sully said. “I suggest you just keep it in your pocket as a reminder that the control we have lasts about that long. If we don’t bring God in, we got nothin’.”

  She gave him a long look. “All right,” she said and snatched the plastic hourglass from the trunk and curled her fingers around it. “So—next week? Same time?”

  As he saw her out, Sully watched her stuff the hourglass into the pocket of her cargo pants. It wasn’t going to work, and he knew it. But Ryan Alexander-Coe would have to figure that out for herself. As he pulled out the voice recorder to make his notes, that was the only thing he knew about her for sure.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I walked out of the Healing Choice Clinic ready to throw the hourglass into the cactus garden.

  I stopped at the car, hand still in my pocket fingering the plastic thing, and breathed in the breeze. I watched a few cars lazily turn the corner of Union and University, probably on their way to New Mexico State a block down.

  Where Dan had a contract for six sculptures.

  According to Ginger.

  I yanked my hand out of my pocket before I could crunch Sullivan Crisp’s little device. That would give him way too much satisfaction. I slid into the driver’s seat, tossed it onto the dashboard, and squeezed the steering wheel instead. I was more ticked off now than I was when I walked in there.

  I started the engine and got the air conditioner going, but I didn’t pull out of the parking lot. Maybe I should go back in and tell him to give his three o’clock Tuesday appointment to somebody who wanted to talk about herself for an hour. I wanted him to talk, to give me some answers. And since that obviously wasn’t the way it worked, he could have his little temporary tool and his buzzing and his chair that swallowed me up like Alice in Wonderland. Not to mention that wretched painting of White Sands. If the clients weren’t nuts when they went in there, they were sure to be when they came out.

  I turned up the fan and let the cold air blow my hair into spikes that I knew made me look even more like a maniac. One thing the crazy doctor and I did agree on: “letting it all out,” at least that way, was as worthless as breasts on a boar—as my New Jersey–born mother used to say. If I went back and threw his hourglass in his face, I’d want to squeal out of this parking lot and go finish off the job I’d almost started in Dan’s studio.

  So what was I going to do?

  Drive to Alex’s soccer practice. Put the hourglass in my purse. Turn it over before J.P. or Dan or my own thoughts about Jake had a chance to transform me into Attila the Hun. That was what I was going to do.

  Because I couldn’t think of anything else.

  I tried over the next three days.

  I wrapped my hand around the hourglass when J.P. stood in front of me and read, out loud, the nutrition information on the Goldfish crackers I brought for snacks.

  I stared at it every time I listened to Uriel Cohen’s voice mail tell me she wasn’t available and would get back to me as soon as possible. Obviously she didn’t have her ducks in a row yet. Besides, I didn’t have anything more to tell her. That required more staring at the hourglass.

  I actually turned it over and watched its sand trail merrily to the bottom when Dan informed me that Jake still didn’t want to talk to me, that the mere mention of it only drove him further into his cave. At that point I wanted to call Dr. Crisp and tell him that the sand had run its course and God wasn’t taking over. At all.

  If anything, I felt further from God than I had since before Africa. No images came to me—no clear pictures of Jake’s heart opening up and letting me in, no flashes of other hands reaching out to help him. I asked for them. I begged for them, until I heard the echoes of my own voice taunting me. I was more strung out than I ever dreamed of being.

  But if one thing ruled me more than anger, it was flat-out
stubbornness. “You don’t take after anybody strange,” my mother would say to me under her breath and cast a furtive glance at my father. It was that paternally inherited trait that made me keep on with the hourglass and the prayers—at least until Tuesday, when I could storm into Sullivan Crisp’s office and tell him to stop playing games and help me.

  I just had to get through Saturday first.

  Alex’s team had their first game that day in Alamogordo. I didn’t ask why we had to travel an hour when there must be other teams they could play right in Las Cruces. Poco invited Alex and me to ride with her and Felipe in her van, and when I saw that Victoria and J.P. were also piling in with their boys, I vowed not to even bring it up. That, or the fact that none of the boys’ dads seemed to support their sons’ soccer, which made it impossible to hang out with anyone but women. I was glad I’d decided to carry my camera. That would give me something to fool around with en route, so I wouldn’t be so likely to let them get to me.

  The vehicle was a nine-passenger van, which required tiny Poco’s full attention to drive. I was surprised she could see over the steering wheel. J.P. sat up front with her, not surprisingly, so that she could co-pilot.

  How does Poco get anywhere without you acting as her GPS? I wanted to ask. Only fear that I would upset Poco and have us all plunging off San Augustin Pass kept me quiet. Victoria sat beside me, gazing out at the toasted desert as if there were actually something to see, and humming to herself. J.P. saved me the trouble of telling her she was driving us nuts.

  “Was I humming?” Victoria looked straight at me with her pale blue eyes.

  I so wanted to say no, just to tick J.P. off. I twisted in my seat and pointed the camera at the four boys in the back two rows. Tongues immediately came out. Eyes were crossed. Alex made devil horns with his fingers at the back of Bryan’s head. I took a few shots, which incited more misshapen mouths and thumbs in ears.

  “Do something original,” I said.

  They hesitated only slightly before Alex hooked his arm around Felipe’s neck and pulled him into a half nelson. I shot that.

  “What are you trying to do, Ryan?” J.P. said. “Start a brawl?”