Healing Sands

by Nancy Rue

  Alex gave a quick nod and stood up. “Can we practice some more? You gotta work on your passing, Mom.”

  “Just one more question. You said Jake and Miguel and Ian all played soccer together—”

  “I knew it. I knew you were trying to drag Ian into this.”

  I looked up at the back porch in time to see Ginger slap the screen door behind her—and burst into tears. She came to the railing, leaned on the pole, and openly cried.

  I had lain awake nights with the images of starving African children rattling in my brain, their ladder-ribs and rickety femurs knocking at my memory and making sleep itself a mere dream. But when Ginger started to cry, I stifled a yawn. One more tear and I would doze off. A few more sobs and I might lapse into a coma.

  “I am not dragging your precious Ian into anything,” I said. “I’m talking to my son about his friends.”

  I turned back to Alex, who was watching Ginger with just about as much concern as I was feeling.

  “I guess we better talk about this later,” I said to him with a wink.

  “Yeah.” He attempted to wink back and looked as if he had a bug in his eye.

  “No! Don’t you talk about my son, ever!”

  I only looked at Ginger to make sure she wasn’t going to throw a flowerpot at me, but she wasn’t in rage mode. She was just bawling, mouth open, howling out of her throat. It was enough to bring Ian and Jake from around the side of the house, and Dan up the walkway from the studio. Was that all it took to get this group’s attention? You just brought out the crocodile tears, and they all came running?

  Ian went straight to his mother and put his arm around her. He looked at me, face puzzled.

  “Is there a problem?” he asked.

  “Nothing you need to worry about,” I said.

  “I kind of do.” He pulled Ginger to arm’s length. “Mom, go get a Kleenex or something, will ya?”

  She nodded and melted into the house. I stared as Ian joined Alex and me at the table. Jake was still standing just beyond the patio.

  “She flips out easy,” Ian said to me. “Right, Alex?”

  Alex rolled his eyes.

  “But seriously, did something go down here? If I know what it is, I can calm her down.”

  In spite of my agitation, I had to stop and study this kid. While most teenage boys weren’t as sullen with their mothers as Jake was, they weren’t usually this solicitous with them either. Even now, he glanced at the door like he was totally responsible for the woman. “Look,” I said, “I was just sitting here having a conversation with Alex. It didn’t have anything to do with her.”

  “What’s up, buddy?” Dan said behind me.

  “Mom’s upset, and Jake’s mom and I were just trying to deal with it.”

  “Actually, no,” I said. “I was just trying to spend some time with my sons.”

  “Not this son.” Jake stepped onto the patio, arms jammed into the pouch of his sweatshirt, eyes bulleted at me. “I’m over it, okay? I’m not talking to you again, about anything, I don’t care what it is.” He glanced at his brother. “You shouldn’t either, Alex. She doesn’t care about you. She’s just trying to get to me—”

  “Stop!” I said. “Jake—you just stop.”

  I stormed across the bricks at him. Ian stepped between us.

  “Come on, guys,” he said.

  “Step aside.”

  “Danny, do something!” Ginger cried from the doorway.

  “Ryan—”

  “All of you, just stop !” I had both hands up, and I could feel them shaking. My breath heaved in and out of my nose as I jabbed a finger at Ian. “You do not come between me and my son. And you”—I jockeyed around him and pointed at Jake—“do not misrepresent me to your brother. And you”—I whirled on Dan, who was now mere steps behind me—“need to ask the nymphette over there to stand clear when I’m spending time with my boys.”

  I took a step into Dan’s space. He looked down at me with the first faint stirrings of anger in his eyes. “Don’t fight me on this, Dan. We have enough problems as it is.”

  I stopped counting the number of doors that slammed after that. Jake’s bedroom. Ginger’s screen door. Dan’s studio. When Ian had taken off after his mother, only Alex was left, and I advised him to scoot on and get his homework done, which he did without a murmur.

  By the time I got to my car, I was too drained to slam anything myself, and I didn’t feel any better having opened up on my ex-husband’s new family like a submachine gun. As I started the engine, I looked at the hourglass on the dashboard. God, where were you? Why didn’t you stop me? Where are those images?

  The sun had already dropped behind the hills when I made my way slowly down Dan’s driveway, and the artsy forms I passed were mere blobs in the fading light. I had gotten child soldiers, hard as cast-iron skillets, to sob their stories into my lap. And yet I couldn’t make my own son tell me what he was so obviously hiding. Either one of my sons.

  I stopped at the end of the driveway and squared my shoulders in the darkness. All right, then. If they wouldn’t tell me, I was going to have to find out from someplace else. And in the first God-image I’d had in days, I knew where that might be.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Sully had just finished praying before his session Tuesday afternoon when his cell phone rang, which was a good thing. He’d forgotten all about it, and all he needed was for it to go off while he was talking to Ryan.

  He did answer it now, though, in case Porphyria was calling. It was Tess Lightfoot.

  “I have your age progression ready,” she said.

  “You do?”

  “Well—yeah. Isn’t that why you’re paying me the big bucks?”

  Sully laughed. “I’m just surprised. That was quick.”

  “That’s the other reason you’re paying me the big bucks.”

  Her voice was as smooth as he remembered it.

  “You might want to come by my office so we can look at it on the computer. I have a few questions that could mean some changes.”

  “So you were able to scan it with the computer.”

  “Still another reason why—”

  “I’m paying you the big bucks.” Sully felt himself grinning. “I’m starting to worry about my bill.”

  “You should.”

  She gave him an address, and he agreed to meet her at six. Then he turned off his phone and tapped it on the desk.

  His conversation with Porphyria had reassured him for a few days, but now that he was about to see the face he’d been looking for, anxiety crept along his nerve endings again. Saying he could discern the difference between normal anger and bloody-stump revenge was one thing. Knowing he could do it when Belinda Cox was looking back at him was another. And if he was this worried about just seeing her picture, what was going to happen when he confronted her in person?

  Sully wiped the sudden beads of sweat from his upper lip and stood up to go out and meet Ryan. One God-thing at a time, Dr. Crisp, he could hear Porphyria saying. One God-thing at a time.

  Ryan was literally pacing the reception room when Sully got there. This was either going to be productive—or it was going to be a disaster.

  Once again she eschewed the polite greetings and small talk and went straight for the chair. She dropped the hourglass onto the trunk between them. “Did you expect this to work?”

  “I assume it didn’t,” Sully said.

  “Not at all.”

  “You want to tell me about it?”

  “Is that like ‘How did it make you feel?’”

  Sully shook his head, still watching her try to look bigger in the chair as he settled in his own. “No, it’s just ‘You want to tell me about it.’ Although I guess journalists misuse the ‘How did it make you feel’ line as much as therapists.”

  “I think it’s a cheap shot,” she said. “I don’t ask that many questions anyway. I just make pictures.”

  “Speaking of which, I saw some of your work in the paper. I
was impressed.”

  Ryan put a hand on top of her head and closed her eyes. “Look, don’t try to get me to loosen up. I need help here.”

  “That’s exactly where we’re going, Ryan,” Sully said. “Nobody can look at this stuff wound up like a spring.”

  He saw her swallow, but otherwise she didn’t respond.

  “What I see in your pictures is that you share in the emotion of what’s going on in front of the camera. Doesn’t matter that it’s kindergartners in tutus, there’s heart and soul in there.” He tilted his head at her. “I don’t see a tough, no-nonsense person behind that camera.”

  “I don’t try to be tough,” she said. “I just do what I have to do. Only right now I don’t know what to do, and that’s what I want you to tell me.”

  Holy crow. They were at a crossroads already, and she was still trying to figure out how to get her feet to touch the floor. He felt like he was entering a minefield.

  “I can tell you,” he said, “but it will be a whole lot more effective if I help you figure out how to tell yourself.” He refolded his legs. “How do you see things when you get ready to make a picture? That’s how you say it, right? Make a picture?”

  She gave him a doubtful look before the goalpost hands went up and she focused between them. “I see it in layers in a frame,” she said. “I find all the compositional elements that are going to make the reader look at the photograph and think about it a little while longer. What’s in the foreground? What’s in the background? Where is the light?”

  “Why do you do all that?”

  “Well, because . . .” She shrugged. “The longer I can capture the viewers and make them think about what they’re seeing, the better chance I have of them understanding what I’m trying to say with the photograph.”

  “Bingo.”

  She gave Sully a blank look.

  “You just described what we’re about here,” he said. “Only I’m the photographer, and you’re the reader. I have to bring out all the layers, all the elements that are going to get you to look at your life and think about it. And the longer and deeper I can get you to do that, the better chance you have of understanding it all.”

  Ryan studied his face as if she were looking for traces of a clandestine plot. The only thing missing was the bare lightbulb.

  And yet there was something desperate in her eyes, something that tugged at Sully’s heart. This was no high-strung woman trying to get the best of her road rage.

  “All right,” she said. “What is it you want me to look at?”

  Sully took another step into the minefield. “I want you to look at the thing you want the most right now.”

  No pause. “I want my son to be acquitted.”

  “What if he weren’t? What would be the next thing you would want?”

  “You’re not going for ‘To get him out on an appeal.’”

  “I’m not going for anything. Let’s say he did get out, but he still wouldn’t talk to you?”

  “I’d be back where I was before this happened.”

  “And what did you want then?”

  “I wanted my sons to love me again. I still do. I just want to be their mother.” She brought herself up abruptly in the chair. “Where are we going with this?”

  “To another layer,” Sully said. “You’re having to work pretty hard at being a mother right now, yeah?”

  “Thanks to my ex-husband, yes. Look, if you’re saying my anger stems from him, that is not a news flash.”

  “Did you get angry before you were married to Dan?”

  “You mean like when I was a kid?”

  “Sure.”

  She actually smiled—ruefully, Sully thought.

  “I wasn’t allowed to. You didn’t pitch fits in our house.”

  “What happened if you did?”

  “I never tested it out.”

  Sully found that hard to believe. He waited until she squinted. “I never tested it out personally,” she said. “I just saw what happened when somebody else did.”

  “For instance?”

  Ryan pulled her knees toward her chest, then caught herself. “When I was five, my mother got me a boxer, from the pound. I wanted to call him Slobber.”

  “‘Wanted’ to . . . ?”

  “He didn’t stay long enough to call him anything. My father came home from work and said okay, fine, you got a dog. You have to take care of him.”

  “You were how old?”

  “Five.”

  Holy crow, Sully thought, but he nodded her on.

  “I was feeding him, and a couple of kibbles fell on the floor. Slobber and I went for them at the same time, and my father picked me up and screamed at my mother to get that blankity-blank dog out of our blankity-blank house and take him back where he blankity-blank came from.”

  “How did your mother react?”

  “She said he was being unreasonable, that the dog wasn’t going to bite me.”

  “Did she yell back at him when she said it?”

  Ryan’s eyebrows twisted. “My mother never said anything worse than ‘good gravy’ to anybody.”

  “So what happened?”

  Ryan shrugged. “Slobber went back to the pound.”

  “And you?”

  Once again she raised her knees and forced them down again. She wasn’t going into that fetal position the little girl in her longed for.

  “I don’t think I did anything. What would be the point?”

  “So you weren’t allowed to express anger. But did you feel it?”

  “You mean like I do now? I guess not, no.”

  Sully waited.

  “Maybe when I was younger than that. I probably got so used to controlling it I didn’t even feel it anymore.”

  “So you didn’t start consciously feeling anger until after you were married,” he said.

  “A few years after.” Ryan’s voice sharpened. “Right after I got pregnant with Jake. I wanted Dan to get a real job so we’d have health insurance when I quit work to stay home with the baby. He said he would—and he didn’t. That was probably when it started.” She shook her head. “I wasn’t violent. I just yelled, and he blamed it on hormones. It went downhill from there. What’s the point?”

  “That resentment could be what fuels your anger. That might be one layer, anyway.”

  “Like I said, that is not breaking news.”

  “So when Dan flaked out on the job thing, what did you do?”

  She scowled. “I worked until I had Jake, took the minimum six-week maternity leave, and went back to my job. Obviously Dan wasn’t going to take any responsibility. Somebody had to.”

  “And that continued.”

  “For the most part. There was a period before I got pregnant with Alex when he was teaching at the Art Institute in Chicago, and I thought he was finally growing up. That’s the only reason I agreed to have another baby.”

  “But that didn’t last.”

  “Of course not.”

  “So once again you had to be in charge.”

  She folded her arms across her chest. “I wasn’t trying to be the Gestapo—but if somebody didn’t take control of our lives, we were going to end up on the street with two kids. It’s not like I tried to make him into a nine-to-fiver. I helped him start a business where he could have a venue for selling his stuff, and he just ran it into the ground while he was telling me it was doing great. When that went under and we lost all our savings, that was it.”

  Sully leaned forward, straight into the minefield. “I want to put something to you, and I just want you to look at it as a possible layer. If it doesn’t ring true, we’ll move on, okay?”

  Her eyes squinted. “I can already tell I’m not going to like this.” She didn’t have to like it. All he wanted her to do was consider it—before she headed for the door.

  “Let’s just explore the idea that you have a basic conflict going here.” Sully held out one palm. “On the one hand, you want things to go a certain way, and yo
u’ve learned to put yourself in a position where they go that way—because if you don’t, the consequences could be pretty disastrous.”

  She formed the lines on either side of her mouth, but she nodded.

  “But at the same time, you resent having to be in that position in the first place, where it’s up to you to take all the responsibility. And it’s that conflict that makes you so mad you want to throw things.” Sully cocked his head. “How does that sound?”

  “It sounds like psychological bilge water.” Her feet hit the floor as she jerked to the edge of the chair. “I did not lose it at my ex-husband’s last night because I was ‘conflicted.’ I blew up because his girlfriend accused me of putting down her son when I barely looked at the kid. That woman is in worse shape than I am.”

  “What did she do?” Sully asked.

  Ryan rolled her eyes. “She cried. I have nothing against shedding a few tears when the situation calls for it, but she was sobbing like I’d tried to castrate the boy. She was hanging on to the porch pole with mascara running down her face like Tammy Faye. I mean, get a grip.”

  Sully had a hard time reining in a grin.

  “And that’s the reason I’m here,” Ryan went on. “I don’t want to turn into a version of her. I mean, I don’t see myself boo-hooing like that, but for every trail of snot coming out of her nose, I could throw some kind of projectile, do you know what I’m saying?”

  Once again the desperation quickened in her eyes.

  Sully steepled his fingers under his chin. “I can’t say for sure without seeing—what’s her name?”

  “Ginger.” Ryan licked her lips as if she were trying to get a bad taste out of her mouth.

  “I’m not making an official diagnosis here, but she could be histrionic.”

  “Is that an actual mental illness?”

  “It’s a personality disorder,” Sully said. “And again, I wouldn’t go to Dan and tell him his girlfriend has HPD.”

  He waited for her to nod, which she finally did with obvious reluctance.

  “My point is, you don’t fit that profile. You don’t go off randomly or deliberately for the sake of drama. When histrionic people seek help, it’s usually just to have an audience. They think the problem is with everyone else, and they want to tell you about it in graphic detail so you’ll sympathize and enable and everything else they thrive on. That isn’t you.”