Healing Sands

by Nancy Rue

  “Not here. Not in any of the other thirty-seven colonias in the county.”

  “There’s more of these?” I erased that with my hand. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to put down your home here.”

  “No. Feel free to put down the living conditions. We didn’t create them. We hate them too. Just don’t put down the people.”

  “That’s why I’m here. To show who you are.”

  I didn’t know it until it came out of my mouth, but I was sure of it.

  He told me his name was Paolo Velasquez, but I could call him Paul. I wanted to call him Saint Paul after he squired me around the colonia like a visiting dignitary. Anyone who could not only survive in the squalor I saw, but live there with such compassion, was right up there with Mother Teresa.

  His heart seemed to break anew as mine did when I shot the children playing merrily in the watery runoff from an upstream dairy farm. He, too, chewed at his lip when I photographed the old man picking through the ruins of his burned-out, uninsured mobile home, destroyed when dodgy wiring set it on fire.

  And Paul gave a sigh identical to mine when we came across two small girls who couldn’t have been more than four, curled up together like a pair of left-behind kittens asleep in the back of a car. He said their mother was at work in a nearby pecan orchard and had no child care for them. They were safer in the car than in the house.

  There were smiles in some of my shots—the pregnant girl who had just come from the free clinic in Las Cruces with the news that her unborn baby had a heartbeat. Paul said many of them were not so lucky. And the teenage boy who stopped shooting a basketball at the netless hoop on the weedy court and posed like Michael Jordan. I wanted to ask him if he knew Miguel, but my heart wouldn’t let me.

  In fact, I said nothing about the Sanchez family as I made my pictures and gathered my audio. I felt enough like an intruder.

  Paul walked me to my car when I said I thought I had enough for now. His eyes were still kind, but his voice when he said goodbye was firm.

  “Don’t romanticize us in the newspaper,” he said. “We’re not noble savages. We’re just poor people who believed in el milagro and were given chaos by unscrupulous land developers. We don’t want anyone to fix it for us. We just want them to show us how.”

  “May I come back?” I said.

  He raised his chin. “Bring the pictures. Then we’ll see.”

  I drove away slowly, determined not to leave him in the dust.

  I was late to soccer practice and, having missed the day before completely, I wanted to make it up to Alex somehow. Not that he said anything to me about it. The child seemed to have the resilience of a Slinky. Maybe it was myself I was making it up to. Or maybe I just wanted to give him everything after what I’d seen that day.

  I was watching him, alone, when J.P. came down to the bench behind me in the bleachers.

  “Are you free at seven tomorrow morning?” she said.

  “I start work at seven,” I said.

  She frowned.

  “Why?” I said. “You need help with something?”

  She looked a little startled. “No, we just need to have a planning meeting about our trip this weekend.”

  I had completely forgotten about it, although I wasn’t admitting that to her.

  “I can squeeze it in,” I said. “Where?”

  “You know where Milagro is?”

  “I’m sorry—what?”

  “Milagro. It’s a coffee shop on University Avenue. The only one worth going to as far as I’m concerned.”

  Still reeling, I nodded. “I’ll be there,” I said.

  After practice I asked Dan if I could have Alex for a while. Alex inserted himself between us, brown eyes dancing.

  “I want Mexican food,” he said. “You could come too, Dad.”

  Dan ruffled Alex’s hair and inspected a speck on his cheek and basically did everything but look at me.

  “I need to get home to Jake, buddy,” he said. “Ginger has things to do.”

  Undoubtedly a manicure, a massage, a face-lift. Maybe a trip to the doctor for some Valium. How about a side of strychnine with that, Ginger? I hated it so much that she was spending more time with my sons than I was, I couldn’t even think about her without images of homicide. And I was sure those weren’t coming from God.

  “You guys have fun,” Dan was saying to Alex. “I know Mom will have you back in time to do your homework.”

  Alex parked his ball cap backwards on his head as Dan moved away. “So, can we?”

  “Can we what?”

  “Can we do Mexican? I’ll take you to our fave place.”

  Whose fave? I wondered. What constituted our?

  “Whatever you want, pal,” I said.

  Alex’s fave Mexican restaurant was less authentic than the one I’d been in the night before, but the ambience made up for that, and the salsa was measurably milder. The inside of Arriba! was cool and rich with a smooth tile floor and thick furniture with parrots carved into the chair backs. Fans turned overhead, and the Hispanic woman who waited on us had a content way about her. I wondered if she knew how rich she was.

  Alex and I ordered fajitas to share, and he munched happily on chips while we waited. He was so engrossed in telling me about this cool trick he and Felipe pulled on the computer teacher—no, seriously, Mom, the teacher thought it was funny too—that I was completely flabbergasted when he abruptly came out with, “So how come you and Dad got divorced?”

  I feigned choking on a chip and drank half a glass of water while I tried to find an answer I could give that didn’t make his father sound like a deadbeat. When I put the glass down, I was no closer, and Alex was waiting, hands jittering on the tabletop.

  “We have different ways of approaching life,” I said. “And those two ways just didn’t fit together anymore.”

  “What’s your way?” he asked.

  “Um—I like to plan and figure out how things can work and then try to help them work that way.” How could this possibly be making any sense?

  “So Dad’s way’s the opposite.”

  “I guess you could say that.”

  Alex narrowed the big brown eyes as he poked the straw up and down in the Coke I wasn’t supposed to buy him after a soccer game. I wanted to let it go if he would, but I couldn’t, not and live with myself.

  “What?” I said.

  “Nothin’—except that’s not what Jake said.”

  “Oh? What did Jake say?”

  Alex was suddenly still, and his gaze drifted guiltily to his lap.

  “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” I said.

  “Whew.” He brightened his face and drew a hand dramatically across his forehead as if he were sloughing off sweat. “I’m not supposed to tell, but I forgot for a minute, so thanks, Mom.”

  He raised his glass to toast mine and then greeted our arriving food with more enthusiasm than it warranted. He was done with that conversation. I, of course, could think of nothing else until I drove him home.

  “Are we late?” he said when we pulled up to Dan’s place.

  “Maybe a little. Can you still get your homework done?”

  “Piece of cake.” He looked at me sideways. “But will you go out to the studio and tell Dad I’m here? That way I can definitely get it done.”

  I wanted to settle the thing right there, tell him his father and I were not getting back together no matter how many times he shoved us in that direction. But his eyes were so hopeful. And he did throw his arms around my neck and tell me I was the best. I needed to ride on that for a while.

  It wasn’t quite dark as I picked my way through the sculpture park to Dan’s studio. The metal musicians were turning to velvet silhouettes, their instruments catching the last orange glint of the sun. New Mexico quiet settled over them, so still that I wasn’t sure Dan was actually out there.

  But I found him standing at the base of his swirling sculpture, working at a small space on its metal finish wit
h a square of sandpaper. As gently as he smoothed it, he could have been rubbing powder on a baby’s bottom. A faint image of him changing Jake’s diaper, his own face freckled with powder, passed through my mind.

  “Excuse me?” I whispered.

  He kept sanding. “I saw you. What’s up?”

  “Alex wanted me to tell you he’s back. Said it would give him more time to finish his homework if I did it.”

  A smile twitched around Dan’s eyes. “Uh-huh.”

  “You know he’s playing Cupid with us,” I said.

  “All kids think their divorced parents are going to get back together. It’ll pass.”

  “He asked me tonight why we split up.”

  The sanding slowed. “What did you tell him?”

  “Whatever it was, it isn’t what Jake told him. Do you know anything about that?”

  Dan pulled the paper back, inspected the metal, blew on it. “My guess is that Jake gave him some version of what I told him.”

  “Which was?”

  “That things change.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s what I told him then, and he seemed satisfied with that. He hasn’t asked me lately.”

  “Would you give him a different answer now?”

  I wasn’t sure why I asked it. Maybe because I wasn’t ready to scream at him—or throw the discarded chunk of aluminum that was next to my foot.

  Dan wasn’t going to answer anyway. He went back to sanding in small, even circles, and I turned to go.

  “I might,” he said. “I’ve given myself a different answer.” He stepped away from the sculpture and looked up at it. “What do you think of it?”

  “What do I think of it?” I said.

  “Do you still think I’m fooling around with artistic monstrosities in a world that needs hard work to change it?”

  I was stunned by the words I’d hurled at him in the last fight we’d had before I asked for a divorce. The last fight I had had, while Dan stood with his arms crossed over his chest, X-ing me out.

  “Why are you asking me that now?” I said. “What difference does it make?”

  “I’m answering your question.” He turned to me. “I took all the anger you heaped on me about my work because I wanted to keep the peace. I thought that was honoring God.” His gaze traveled up the sculpture and held there. “Since you left, I’ve learned that God doesn’t want peacekeepers. He wants peacemakers. And sometimes you have to disturb the peace to make real peace.” Dan shrugged and refolded the square of sandpaper. “That’s a huge change for me. If Jake asked me now, I would say I can’t be married to his mother because I won’t keep the peace with her anymore. And I’m not sure she and I know how to make it.”

  I stared at him for a long moment, even after he returned to the twisting tower and resumed the steady, abrasive work of smoothing just one tiny corner. I don’t know how long I would have remained there without anger and without answers if a shadow hadn’t fallen across the doorway.

  “Dad,” said an adolescent voice that squeaked at the end. “I need to talk to you.”

  Dan’s entire demeanor changed. He tossed the sandpaper aside and wiped his hands on his muslin smock and smiled at Jake as he stepped into a shaft of light.

  “Sure, buddy,” he said. “What’s up?”

  I didn’t move. I couldn’t have gone far anyway, with Jake between me and the doorway. He didn’t seem to see me—there was no stiffening as he moved closer to Dan and stood with his back to me, arms dangling awkwardly at his sides. It struck me once again how small he was. And how uncertain.

  “Ian’s got a meet Saturday, and I want to go,” he said.

  “Where is it?”

  “At the school.”

  I held my breath. If Dan let him do that, so help me . . .

  “You know you can’t, Jake.” Dan’s tone was apologetic. “That’s against the rules the judge set. You’re not allowed on school property.”

  “It’s not during school.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “But I wanna see Ian compete. This is a big deal. He’s been there for me, y’know?”

  My heart ached. This was the most I’d heard Jake talk in weeks. He sounded like a normal teenager, making a case for something a normal teenager should be allowed to do. It was the abnormal that squeezed at my chest.

  “I hate this,” Jake said. “It’s like you have to be some jailer. Dude, I’m not gonna do anything at that stupid school.”

  “I know that.” Dan put his foot on a gas can and leaned on his knee with his forearms. “Look, I believe in you, Jake. But the court says I have to treat you like I can’t. I hate it, too, but we just have to deal with that until this thing is over.”

  “So—I can’t go.”

  “No, son. You can’t.”

  Jake jerked around and stalked out of the studio without ever seeing me. Dan watched him go, his mouth drawn into a concerned line, his eyes resolute.

  It was a Dan I’d never seen.

  “I think I’d better go after him,” he said. “Can you see yourself out?”

  I nodded, but I couldn’t leave. The sunset was casting its last pink light through the studio windows and turning the detritus on the floor to fairy dust. It was as magical as what I’d just witnessed— Dan defusing what could have been a volatile disaster, and would have been in my hands. Just as any piece of metal in the room would be if I tried to make art with it.

  I stepped to the winding sculpture and rested my hand on its coolness. I’d stopped going into Dan’s studio the last six months of our marriage. Back when I thought Dan needed a real job and a cause if he was going to make a difference in the world the way I did. Back when I thought I couldn’t love him anymore.

  I let my hand fall from the metal. Too much mystical New Mexico light. Too much clean air that hid nothing. Too much exposure to things that broke my heart.

  Pushing back an unfamiliar wall of sadness, I hurried out of the studio and across the park to my car. I was just pulling out of the driveway when my cell phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number, but I answered it anyway, just to get away from the despair pressing on me.

  “This is Ryan Coe,” I said.

  “I know it is,” said a shrill voice. “We have to talk.”

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s Ginger Tassert,” she said, as if I should have recognized her at the first syllable.

  “I don’t know what we have to say to each other,” I said, though I did pull off to the side of Dan’s dirt road in case she came up with something.

  “No, I have things to say to you. Meet me tomorrow on the patio at the Milagro Coffee House at one thirty.”

  “Uh, some of us work for a living.”

  She’d already hung up. I stared at the phone and recalled the image of Dan watching our son with wisdom in his eyes. It didn’t match the memory of Ginger pitching a rubber hose into the sculpture garden. I couldn’t get them to mesh.

  But it didn’t matter. It was too late for any other image.

  Way too late.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The air had a fallish nip the next morning at seven thirty when I pulled up to the Milagro Coffee House—the only place in Las Cruces anybody wanted to go to, apparently. I’d always loved Midwestern autumns, but New Mexico was different, with only the gold of the occasional aspen and the burnt red of the ubiquitous chile peppers to break up the monotonous brown. I hugged my tweedy jacket around me as I hurried across the parking lot.

  Victoria and J.P. were already at a heavy wooden table in the middle of the café, Victoria looking sleepy-eyed but otherwise no more dazed than usual. J.P. appeared to be on her second sixteen-ounce cup of caffeine. Either that or she was the ultimate morning person. For once her hair was scooped tidily into its ponytail, and she wore fresh lipstick that hadn’t even bled onto the rim of her cup. It probably wouldn’t dare.

  I waved to them and joined Poco at the counter, where she almost had to stand o
n her tiptoes to be seen over it.

  “I’ll have a café mocha vodka Valium latte, please,” she said to the bespectacled twentysomething male at the register.

  He didn’t even blink. “Rough morning?”

  “I think I have too many children, Ben,” she said.

  “You only have two, Poco. That’ll be $3.99.”

  Poco smiled her enigmatic smile at me as she pulled out a five and slid it across the counter.

  “And for you?” the guy named Ben said to me.

  “I’ll have what she’s having,” I said.

  “It’s a decaf, sugar-free, nonfat café mocha.”

  I looked at Poco. “That’s dessert, for Pete’s sake. No—I need a black coffee, extra hot.”

  “There’s your trouble, Poco,” Ben said. “You start drinking it like she does, and you’ll have those kids whipped into shape in no time.”

  Poco took her change and shook her head, as always setting her bangs into a small frenzy.

  “$2.95 for you,” Ben said to me.

  I handed him my debit card and studied Poco, who simply stood smiling beside me. It struck me that I knew little about her. About any of them. Far less than they knew about me, unfortunately.

  Poco and I took our cups to the table, where J.P. was waiting with legal pad and pen. She’d already made four columns on it, with one of our names at the top of each. I could already feel my neck hairs bristling. Was I about to get an assignment from her?

  “I assume everybody is still in for tomorrow night,” she said before my buns even touched the seat.

  Poco and Victoria nodded. I sipped. My jury was still out until I heard the whole plan.

  “We need to leave my place no later than five. Sunset is at six thirty, so that should give us plenty of time.”

  “Everybody go potty before we leave,” Poco said. “J.P. doesn’t make bathroom stops.”

  “It’s only a one-hour trip,” J.P. said.

  She looked at each of us as if to make sure nobody was going to dispute that. I just kept sipping. They did make good coffee there at Milagro. At least that part wouldn’t be a bust.

  “We’ll do the sunset/moonrise thing in the park,” she went on briskly. “You’ll enjoy it.”