Healing Sands

by Nancy Rue

  Or else.

  “Then we’ll sign in at the camping check-in.”

  “Did you reserve a campsite?” Poco asked.

  J.P. shook her head. Tendrils were already making their escape from her ponytail and hanging fretfully on either side of her face.

  “It’s first come, first serve,” she said. “But this isn’t their busy time of year.”

  I wondered if they had a busy time of year. It still mystified me that people traveled for miles to see that endless expanse of nothing but white sand. It actually still somewhat mystified me that I’d agreed to this trip myself.

  I looked up from draining my coffee cup to see J.P. surveying me over the top of her glasses.

  “You know we have to backpack in, right?” she said.

  “You mentioned that,” I said.

  “We have to carry everything we’re going to need.”

  “You mentioned that too.”

  “Including water.”

  I scratched a nonexistent itch on the side of my face. “When are we going to get to the part I don’t know? I have to be somewhere at nine.”

  “I just wanted to make sure you understood that this is not a glamour gig, in case you want to change your mind.”

  Now I remembered why I’d agreed to this. No way was I walking away from the dare in her eyes.

  J.P. broke the stare first and wrote something in Victoria’s column. “I’m putting you down for that picnic set you have with the plastic plates and mugs.”

  “If there’s no water, why don’t we use paper?” I said.

  “Because we care about the environment.” She tossed me a glance that excluded me from the we. “We’ll wash our dishes with sand.”

  “You’re going to show us how to do that, right?” Poco gave her signature nervous laugh.

  J.P. jotted in Poco’s column. “You can bring hand sanitizer and toilet paper.”

  Victoria pulled her nose up from her coffee mug. “They have toilets?”

  “No,” J.P. said.

  Victoria blinked behind her round glasses and went back to the cup. J.P. continued to dole out the duties—including food preparation —until she came to me. She poised the pen over my column.

  “Well?” I said.

  “I don’t know what you can do.” Her shrug clearly indicated that she didn’t think I could do much of anything that mattered. She put down the pen and bobbed a tea bag up and down in her cup. All this edge, and she was drinking Earl Grey?

  A silence fell, awkward as an adolescent. “Ryan could be our official photographer for the trip,” Poco said into it, voice straining toward chipper.

  “We have yet to see the ones she took of the Alamogordo game,” J.P. said.

  “She doesn’t appreciate being talked about in the third person when she is sitting right in the room,” I said. “But I have your pictures right here if you want to see them.”

  I pulled out my laptop, turned it on, and pulled up the photos. The screen filled with the El Milagro woman sitting on her sagging front porch with her splashing children in the foreground.

  Victoria shook her hair away from her face and craned her neck to see. “Whose mother is that?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I took these yesterday for an assignment. Let me find—”

  “What’s the assignment?” Poco said.

  It was another valiant attempt to make me look good for J.P., which I had no desire to do. Still, Poco was the most decent one in the group, and I didn’t want to be snitty with her. “It’s on the lives of the people up at El Milagro,” I said, still clicking forward and coming up with nothing but the faces that had smiled so bravely for me.

  “I don’t get it,” J.P. said.

  Now, her I could be snitty to all day and it wouldn’t bother me a bit.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Let me just find those soccer shots.”

  “Wait.” Poco put her hand on my arm and pointed to the picture on the screen, of a woman who had come by to check on the little girls sleeping in the back of a car. “I know her. That’s—” She stopped. Her top teeth clamped on her lower lip.

  “She looks familiar to me too,” J.P. said.

  As she slanted forward for a better look, Poco gave a starched laugh. “You know what they say. All us Hispanics look alike.” She squeezed my arm again, in much the same way she was squeezing out her words. “You need to watch your time—we should let you get to the soccer pictures.”

  I did a double take. She shook her head at me so slightly her bangs didn’t move.

  “Okay,” I said.

  I set up a quick slide show and sat back while the three of them bent their heads over my laptop. There is something about viewing photos of people you adore that evens out the playing field. Even J.P. made motherly noises and nudged Victoria over the midkick shot of Bryan with his blond hair flying about his face. The nut never falls far from the tree.

  Poco insisted that I give them a second showing, slower this time, and J.P. wrote the numbers on a clean sheet of the pad so they could place orders with me.

  “How much will you charge per print?” she asked. She produced a calculator from her purse.

  “I won’t charge anything,” I said. “Just tell me what you want and what size and I’ll print them at home.”

  “Yes, but we’ll want them on photo paper. That’s expensive.”

  “I have plenty.” I patted the pad with my hand and gave her my best squint. “It’s what I do.”

  I left right after they all placed their orders and J.P. wrote out another copy, for her records. I got the feeling if I didn’t come through, she wanted evidence for a civil suit.

  Halfway to my car, Poco caught up with me and tugged at the strap on my computer bag.

  “I hope you didn’t think I was being rude in there,” she said.

  I laughed out loud. “You would have to take some serious lessons to come close to rude.”

  “I know a lot of those people in the pictures you were showing us from the colonia.”

  I stopped at the driver’s door to my Saab and leaned against it. She was talking fast and glancing back toward the café.

  “I don’t talk about my volunteer work in front of J.P.,” she said. “She’s always asking me to help out at the church, and I tell her I don’t have time, which I don’t because I’m doing other things, but she thinks stuffing envelopes for the capital funds campaign should take priority, and I think I’m more useful elsewhere. I’m not going to win that argument with her, you know what I mean?”

  Before I could even formulate an answer, she shook her head, and this time the bangs did fly. “No, you don’t know what I mean because you aren’t afraid of what anybody thinks. I wish I could be more like that.”

  I shifted my bag to my other shoulder. Hopefully there was a point to all this.

  “Anyway—two days a week I volunteer at the CDC.”

  “Which is?”

  “The Colonias Development Council. It’s a nonprofit. They do, well, everything to try to get environmental justice, farmworker rights—it’s huge. But what I wanted to tell you is that I know the woman in that one picture—the last one you showed us.”

  “By the car?” I said. “With the two little girls?”

  “Yeah.” Poco took a step closer to me. “That’s Elena Sanchez.”

  I formed the name soundlessly with my lips.

  Poco nodded. “Miguel’s mother. I’ve known her for a long time.”

  I felt the strap to my bag slide down my arm, and I almost let it dump to the ground. Poco and I grabbed for it at the same time, and in the process our foreheads nearly touched.

  She didn’t move away when she said, “She’s upset and confused. She doesn’t know why someone would do this to her boy. But—”

  “Not just someone,” I said. “She thinks it was my son—just like everyone else does.” I pressed my thumbs against my temples. “And there I was taking her picture.”

  “Isn’t that why yo
u’re up there?” Poco said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I don’t know how these things work, but why did you pick that story unless you wanted to know about Miguel’s family?”

  I could only stare at her, mouth hanging open, so that I not only sounded like a lunatic, I probably looked like one as well.

  She gave a tiny shrug. “If I were in your situation, I would want to know who they were, what they were like.” She squeezed my arm a final time. “If I can do anything to help, say the word. But just so you know, I won’t say anything to anyone else about it.”

  I mouthed a thank-you and watched her start to walk away. But I couldn’t let her go. “Poco,” I said.

  She turned without missing a beat, as if she’d known I’d call her back.

  “Elena Sanchez,” I said. “How is she holding up?”

  “She’s strong.”

  “What about Miguel?”

  Poco came back toward me. “He’s still in a coma. The longer that goes on, the less likely it is he’ll make a full recovery. But they’re praying for a miracle. They haven’t lost hope.” She pressed her palms together as if she herself were praying. “You shouldn’t lose hope either, Ryan.”

  I nodded. Not because I had any hope. Because I didn’t trust myself to speak.

  Poco took a few steps backward. Just as she swung around to go, she added, “She works in the coffee shop at the Ocotillo Bookstore on the mall at lunchtime. It’s in the back.”

  Sully set the phone down and put a check mark next to the last item on his list: Call Better Business Bureau and lodge a complaint against Zahira.

  “What is the nature of the complaint?” the woman had said in brisk formalese.

  “Bad psychology,” Sully told her.

  “Pardon me?”

  “She’s a bad psychologist,” Sully said. He’d already had his finger on the End Call button by that time. He was pretty sure she did too.

  “I think you want the PCMFT board for that. Let me give you their number . . .”

  “She doesn’t have a license with them.”

  “They can handle that for you too.”

  She’d rattled off the number and hung up, leaving Sully licking a bad taste out of his mouth. He reached for his cell phone and dialed Porphyria’s number. It was the only way he could think of at the moment to get rid of it.

  The voice that answered was faint, almost fragile. Sully hesitated and was about to apologize for a wrong number.

  “Are you waiting for me to start this conversation, Dr. Crisp?” the voice said.

  It was stronger now, and Sully grinned into the phone.

  “It didn’t sound like you, Dr. Ghent,” he said.

  “Who did it sound like?”

  Actually, it still sounded like a weaker version of the voice he depended on to shoot sense into his craziness. The verve was still at the center, but the edges were frayed.

  “It sounded like somebody who isn’t feeling up to par,” Sully said. “What’s going on?”

  There was no queenly comeback. Sully felt his grin fade. “Porphyria?” he said.

  “I’m here. I’m just trying to decide how to put this so you won’t think you have to get on the next plane and come on back here.”

  “Don’t decide,” Sully said. “Just say it.”

  “We’re discussing the possibility of replacing the old pacemaker with a new one.”

  “What’s to discuss? If it needs to be done, let’s do it.” Sully clicked back onto the Internet. “I can get a flight out tonight.”

  “And you would do that for what reason, Sully? This is not major surgery.”

  He heard the rich chuckle.

  “And I am not a delicate patient. I’ll come through it just fine. You are not the only doctor who knows anything.”

  Sully wasn’t buying the jocularity. Porphyria never forced anything, but there was something lurking behind the laughter, and she wasn’t about to tell him what it was. He got up and paced behind the desk. “You’re going to keep me posted every step of the way, right? And if you can’t, then Winnie will.”

  “Mm-hmm. Just like you’re telling me everything.”

  Even without her old-soul eyes looking into him, Sully felt himself color up. “Do you have my phone tapped?” he said.

  “No, just your mind. Where are you with Belinda Cox?”

  It was a clear ploy to change the subject, but Sully followed her anyway. To do anything else was futile. And it was, after all, why he’d called.

  “I’m at a dead end at the moment. Maybe I’ll give it a rest for a while.”

  “Don’t you use me as an excuse to walk away from what you know you’ve got to do, Sully. I’ll be here when you’re done. Don’t you worry about that.”

  There was no point in arguing with her. If he showed up at her hospital room tonight, she’d order him out before he got in the door. Besides, she was right. As always.

  “I’ll tell you what I do want from you,” she said.

  “Anything,” Sully said.

  “I want you to find that woman, and I want you to have a come-to-Jesus with her until she is on her knees, and then I want you to call me and give me every delicious detail. That’s what I want you to do.”

  “Done,” Sully said.

  Only he knew as he hung up that the account he gave Porphyria wasn’t going to happen over the phone. He was going to deliver it in person, the minute he was finished with Belinda Cox. If he ever found her.

  He knew it was finality that lurked behind Porphyria’s laughter, and it frightened him to the core.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Ocotillo Coffee Shop was definitely not the upscale Milagro. It was a mishmash of local art on alternating red and purple cinder-block walls, and boxes of teas on top of a Pepsi cooler, and a female customer yelling at her eight-year-old daughter that she was not going to let her read vampire books so she might as well put them back. I saw it all with my photographer eyes, but my mother eyes were on the woman behind the counter.

  Elena Sanchez looked different to me than she had the day before when I’d shot her picture. The harsh fluorescent light from the fixture overhead showed the skin beneath her eyes to be dark and sunken, and exposed a finely sharpened vertical line just above and between her eyebrows. She wasn’t smiling for the world today or exchanging trills off her tongue with Paul.

  Today she wiped the counter as if she were polishing a Chippendale table, hands moving in an almost hypnotic rhythm. Unless I missed my guess, she was merely trying to keep going, pretending if she did all the right things everything would work out. But the image in my head was of her lying awake at night, unable to sleep until she knew how her son’s story would end. Just like me.

  I set the equipment bag on a table close to the counter. She looked up and gave me a smile, on cue, yet not without warmth. Her face had perfect, square symmetry, and her skin was a flawless caramel.

  “What I can get for you?” she said. Her English was blocky and accented and sounded correct even though it wasn’t.

  “Black coffee,” I said.

  “You will like something to eat?”

  I looked down through the glass countertop at a display of oversized muffins juxtaposed with seeping breakfast burritos and sugary sopaipillas. It all blurred into the background when I saw the can on the counter above them.

  It may have once contained pineapple juice. Now it had a slot in its top and a photocopied photo wrapped around it. A handsome, wide-faced Hispanic teenager in a soccer uniform smiled his mother’s smile. Miguel Sanchez is in a coma, said the sign taped to the counter. Your donations for his medical bills are appreciated.

  “Anything look good for you?”

  My head jerked up, and I found myself meeting Elena’s eyes. The hospitable glow faded from them, and for an awful moment I was sure she knew who I was. But she only nodded at the can.

  “Do you think maybe that make the people too sad when they come for the coffee?” she said.


  I had no idea how to answer.

  “It has make you sad.” She reached over as if she was going to remove it, but I put my hand on top of it.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I’ll just have the French roast.”

  She gave the can one more doubtful look and turned to the pyramid of mismatched mugs on a tray behind her.

  “Personally, I think people should be sad about it.”

  I looked up at another Hispanic woman with a long braid, wearing black sweats with a flowered scarf thrown around her shoulders like an afterthought. She pushed two dollar bills and her mug across the glass. “I’ll have a refill, Elena, when you have a chance.”

  Elena nodded with her back still to us.

  “That’s her boy,” the woman said to me. “Sweetest thing you’ve ever met. Some bully ran him down like an animal in an alley.”

  “I know,” I said.

  My voice was sharp, but she didn’t recoil.

  “Are you doing a story on it?” she said.

  I followed her gaze to my chest and saw she was staring at the press pass dangling on its lanyard.

  “I might be.” I glanced warily at Elena, who was coming our way with two steaming mugs and a quiet smile. Uneasiness niggled at the edges of my plan.

  “I’d certainly be willing to talk to you,” the woman said, “and I won’t be as modest as Elena.” She took her mug with one hand and squeezed Elena’s arm with the other. “You doing okay?”

  “Much better today. I think Miguel is better too.” The smile grew real. “When I kiss him good night last night, I see the moving under his eyelids. He never did that before.”

  I turned to the table and unzipped my bag and fumbled around in it, anything to keep from looking at the fragile hope that shone like tears in Elena Sanchez’s eyes.

  “Let’s talk over here,” said the woman with the scarf.

  I hadn’t offered to interview her, but I followed her to the corner with my bag and set up the recorder while she retrieved her glasses from the turquoise beaded chain that tethered them around her neck. She nodded at the microphone I’d propped on the table.

  “Are we ready?” she said.

  In spite of the aging quiver in her voice, she had a purposeful way about her, like her sole mission was to inform me about Miguel Sanchez. This was what I’d come for, but the coffee in my stomach felt like it was being stirred with a stick.