Healing Sands

by Nancy Rue

  “Ritz-Carlton?” I said. “This isn’t even the Motel 6.”

  “Motel One and a Half.” Even as small as Poco was, she had to squeeze between us to get into the room. She wrinkled her nose. “Somebody has smoked in here.”

  “Ya think?” J.P. said. “We could get cancer just breathing.”

  Victoria gasped from the doorway. “Seriously?”

  Somehow we all managed to cram ourselves into the room, backpacks and all. J.P. arranged the food on the dresser, Poco stacked the packs in the corner, and Victoria set about unfolding her tent.

  “Where do you think you’re going to put that?” J.P. said.

  “On the bed.”

  “You’re going to pitch your tent on the bed?” I said.

  Victoria tossed her hair back and looked at me with actual gumption. “I’m sure not sleeping on that floor,” she said and continued to spread the tent across the mattress.

  Where she intended to drive the stakes in I had no idea.

  As Poco handed J.P. a can of Lysol, they exchanged a look that held a hundred previous shared conversations. I felt as if I were outside a scene looking in, and I wished, just for that moment, I could be part of the picture.

  Victoria finally got the tent up with the stakes tied to the headboard, in time to share the motley feast J.P. and Poco put together while I shot photos.

  “I don’t know who you plan to show those to,” J.P. said as we downed Cheetos and uncooked hot dogs and the Hershey bars and marshmallows meant for s’mores. “But if I see one in the paper . . .”

  “I have a question,” I said. “How come we get to eat all this junk and our kids don’t?”

  “Because we’re the mothers,” J.P. said simply. “What did you want, filet mignon?”

  “I’m not complaining,” I said, mouth full. “I’ve eaten a whole lot worse on assignment.”

  I winced. I hadn’t meant to say that. But Poco pounced on it like a kitten.

  “Like where?” she said.

  “Oh, just around.”

  “Alex told Cade you’ve been to Africa.” J.P. looked at a Cheeto and then at me. “Is that true?”

  “That was my last assignment, yeah.”

  “What did you eat?” Poco asked.

  “Meat of questionable origin.”

  “Oh my gosh,” Victoria said.

  I couldn’t tell if she was grossed out or impressed. I was starting to squirm, especially when J.P. licked the orangey gunk off of her fingers and looked at me dead-on. Here we go with why-did-you-leave-your-children-and-go-to-Africa.

  “Okay, so we talk about ourselves all the time,” she said. “And we don’t know a thing about you.”

  “Not that much to know,” I said.

  “Well, now, that’s a lie.” J.P. counted on her still-cheesy fingers. “You’ve traveled all over the world. You have your work in the paper. And you haven’t told us what happened between you and Dan.”

  “And I’m not going to.”

  “And you don’t have to,” Poco said, minus the arm pat because she had a marshmallow poked onto the end of each finger.

  “Yes, she does,” J.P. said. “We’re stuck in a green hole for the night and none of us has anything interesting to say about ourselves, so it’s up to her.”

  “Forget about it,” I said, but I didn’t feel like decking her. She had a twinkle in her eye I hadn’t seen before.

  “All right, then,” she said. “I’ll tell you what I’m seeing.”

  Poco giggled. “This ought to be good.”

  “Give it your best shot,” I said. “I’ll tell you if you’re right.”

  J.P. pushed the usual tendrils of hair away from her face. “I’m looking at you and Dan—and at first I’m wondering, What did he ever see in her? She’s a snob.”

  “J.P.!” Poco looked at me nervously, but I waved J.P. on.

  “And then I started to spend time with you, and I knew I was right. You are a snob.”

  For some unknown reason, another laugh burst out of me. Poco and Victoria looked at each other as if they were making an unspoken plan to procure a straitjacket.

  “But then I notice him looking at you when you don’t know he’s looking at you, and I see something.”

  “How about, ‘I’m sure glad I’m not married to her anymore,’” I said.

  “You’d think that, but no.”

  “J.P., you are just rude!” Poco said.

  She was, but it was growing on me.

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “It’s like he’s seeing something he didn’t expect. And then there’s the respect, which I totally don’t get, but see, we don’t know you.”

  I abandoned the rest of my Hershey bar and propped a foot up on the dresser. “I think you’re totally wrong about Dan. But what do you want to know about me? I’m warning you, it isn’t that fascinating.”

  J.P. looked at Victoria and Poco. “Girls?”

  “Go for it.” Poco had obviously given up on reining J.P. in. She pulled open a bag of Peanut M&M’s and offered it to Victoria, who selected a yellow one.

  “I want to know where you stand on God,” J.P. said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “We’re all Christians, which is part of why we hang out together. I’m assuming you are?”

  “I am,” I said. “I haven’t found a church here yet.”

  “I’m not talking about whether you go to church—although I don’t see how you can practice Christianity without the body of Christ.” She shrugged. “That’s a whole other conversation. What I mean is, do you have a relationship with the Lord?”

  I bristled.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “I hate it when people talk churchese.”

  “Then how would you put it?”

  I hesitated. This could be the end of what was taking the shape of a genuine conversation among women. An hour before, I’d longed for it. But it if meant skirting the issue that was central to my being, it was going to be over before it started, and I’d be back where I’d always been: outside looking in.

  “All right,” I said. “I don’t just believe in Christ and all that he stands for. I know it’s the truth. But that looks different for me than it does for a lot of people.”

  “What does it look like?” J.P. asked.

  “It looks like I pray and study the Bible, and then I get out in the world and it all falls apart. I get ticked off and I act like a snob and I do stupid things like leave my husband.”

  Eyes widened. I rushed on before anyone could hook onto any of that.

  “But what saves me are these images that God gives me, like pictures I might take, only they don’t come from me. I know that sounds kind of woo-woo . . .”

  “No,” Victoria said. “It sounds wonderful to me.”

  “It would,” J.P said drily, but she leaned toward me. “So go on. What happens when you get these images?”

  “Sometimes nothing, because I don’t know what they mean right then. Sometimes they tell me that I’m being an idiot. It’s different every time.”

  “That is beautiful.” Victoria shook her head at me, pale eyes wide and shining.

  “That’s not too different from what I experience with God,” Poco said. “Only I don’t see, I hear. Sort of. It’s my thought, only it’s not, if that makes any sense.”

  J.P. nodded, but there were still questions in her eyes. “I have to read it and then do it. That’s my relationship with the Lord or however it is you want to say it. That works for me.”

  “So you do it and Poco hears it and I see it.”

  We all turned to Victoria. Her eyes were closed, long lashes resting in the hollows beneath them.

  “She’s asleep,” J.P said.

  “No, I’m not. I’m feeling it.”

  J.P. nudged my foot with hers. “Now that’s woo-woo,” she whispered.

  And then she smiled, and I almost grabbed the camera. A smile made J.P. Winslow a handsome woman.

  CH
APTER EIGHTEEN

  I woke up before the sun the next morning. That will happen when you sleep in a chair that’s uncomfortable just to sit on, let alone spend the night in. I pulled the forest green drape open enough so I could see my watch by the crack of light from the outside fixture. Victoria stirred on the bed and resettled.

  Her hand had fallen out of the confines of the tent and rested like a lady’s white glove on the sheet she’d sworn was crawling with cooties. Poco was curled into her sleeping bag on the sliver of floor between the bed and the swollen bathroom door that didn’t close all the way, and both of them snored, responsively, as if they were chanting a psalm.

  I couldn’t find J.P. until I picked my way into the bathroom and discovered her ensconced, fully clothed, in the empty tub, face pink and mushy with sleep like a three-year-old’s. I sat on the toilet seat lid and watched her, half expecting her to sting me with a zinger from the depths of slumber.

  She opened her eyes and closed them again.

  “Breathe a word of this to anyone and I’ll cut your heart out,” she said. “Forget it. You’re heartless anyway.”

  No, I thought as I tucked a towel around her bare shoulder, I had a heart. And right now, it ached with a longing that was foreign to me.

  “What time is it?” J.P. said.

  “Six o’clock.”

  “We were supposed to be watching the sunrise on the sands right now.”

  “So why can’t we?”

  J.P., who had conducted the entire conversation from behind her eyelids, opened them and squinted at me. “You hate it out there.”

  “I did. Until last night.”

  She came up on one elbow. “So you do admit when you’re wrong.”

  “On the rare occasion when I am.”

  “Doggone it.”

  I watched her climb stiffly from the tub, hair in the worst disarray yet.

  “What?” I said.

  “That means now I’m going to have to admit I was wrong too.”

  “To bring us on this trip?”

  She winced at herself in the mirror. “No. That I was wrong about you.”

  I squirmed. Just when I’d started to feel a little comfortable, I was going to be expected to “open up.” I’d already done more of that the night before—and on into the wee hours—than I ever had in my life.

  “You’re not as much of a snob as I thought you were,” J.P. said.

  “Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

  “Yeah, and thanks for throwing it back in my face.”

  She left the bathroom. I sat there, still on the toilet seat, confronted with a faint image of myself shrinking down to nothing, shouting insults until I disappeared completely. When J.P. came back in, carrying a hairbrush, a toothbrush, and a tube of toothpaste, I was surprised she could still see me.

  She pulled the pointless scrunchie out of her hair and went after the tangled mess with the hairbrush like she was raking the lawn. “I only know one person who’s harder to get along with than you are,” she said.

  The scrunchie went back on the ponytail, and she squeezed an inch of paste onto the toothbrush with the precision of a scientist.

  I wasn’t sure why I was still sitting atop the toilet, watching her attend to her hygiene. But I said, “Who would that be?”

  “Me,” she said and started in savagely on her enamel.

  I waited until she spit and rinsed before I said, “Well, for once you’ll get no argument from me.”

  “I’m better than I used to be.” She stopped soaping up her hands and gave me a look. “Don’t say it.”

  I put up my hands, feigning innocence. She went back to lathering.

  “I was a real witch when I was going through my divorce,” she said.

  I felt my chin drop.

  “We have more in common than we want to have. My ex left me for a younger woman. And I use the term woman loosely. She was all of twenty-five. Mike’s enjoying raising her.”

  J.P. ducked her head to the sink and scrubbed at her face, while I got my mouth closed and organized the thoughts chattering in my own head like a group of gossiping women.

  So—J.P. was angry. She needed control of everything she did have left or it might get away from her. She was fighting to be in charge of her life, because she hadn’t succeeded in being in charge of someone else’s.

  J.P. was me.

  She finished rinsing and, eyes still screwed shut, felt around for a towel. I handed her one, but when she tried to pull it away, I held on.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She didn’t ask for what. I didn’t explain. She just stopped pulling on the towel, and I let go. When I got up to leave the bathroom, she straightened and looked at me in the mirror.

  “I’ve seen Dan’s little chippy,” she said.

  “Chippy?” I said. “Now there’s a new one.”

  “Just so you know, she can’t hold a candle to you.”

  I nodded in the mirror.

  “Now, do you mind if I pee in private?” she said. “You’re as bad as my kid.”

  We reached the gate at White Sands just as a sleepy-eyed park ranger was opening it.

  “Next to sunset,” he said before he waved us through, “this is the best time of day to be here.”

  Evidently not many people knew that, because as J.P. drove the Suburban beyond the last yucca stem and clump of Indian rice grass, we remained the only vehicle on the road. As far as I could tell, we might be the only people left on earth—it was that still. Even we four women kept silent as we climbed out of the car and by unspoken agreement made our separate ways up the dunes.

  I climbed at once to the top of one with my camera, padding through sand that was both soft and firm, treading carefully so I wouldn’t disturb a world that was allowing me to share its secrets. From there I could see the Sacramento Mountains to the east, smooth and pink, and the San Andres still hiding in the shadows to the west. When I looked up, I was tented by a blue-topaz sky. Gazing down, I saw my own shadow, distinct on the pristine sand. I found myself surrounded by a majesty I didn’t even try to photograph, that I could hardly look at without a startling sense of my own insignificance. It occurred to me that the shadow of an ancient Native American in this place may have been his only mirror, the only way he could see who he was.

  I wished I could see that myself.

  That startled me, too, that thought. It wasn’t a wish, or even a scrap of thinking that came from me. It was a prayer—to have a vision of myself that I didn’t have to create. Because the one I’d constructed was quickly falling apart.

  I raised the camera, more to drive myself away from that path than to capture anything on disk. But I lowered it again. It was clearly a God-path. If I stepped off of it, it would be at my peril.

  I closed my eyes—and there was the image I’d been waiting days for. My own footprints in the sand on the slope below. You know where you’ve been, the silence whispered to me. Now—will that lead you someplace you need to go? Or will you let time blow over your tracks before you find your way?

  I squatted and pulled the camera before my face. That couldn’t be God. It was too maudlin. Too iffy. I gave a J.P. grunt. Too woo-woo.

  Beside my foot was a set of tiny pronged prints that crossed the dune and disappeared over the other side. I shot some close-ups. I started to stand and realized there were other prints I hadn’t seen before. Small soft human ones, left by playing children perhaps. Another larger set, probably made by boots. Maybe a lone hiker seeking solitude. Still more from tiny animals skittering through the night, looking for food.

  I shot them all, why, I didn’t know, except that they told a story, and I was trained to make pictures of stories. Even if I didn’t know what they meant.

  Before I stood up, I trailed my fingers through the sand. It was tender, and it sparkled even without much sunlight. What had the guide said about that last night? That the scratching together of the grains as they were blown across the basin gave the san
d its brilliant, sparkling white. The wind seemed to have created all of this— marching the dunes across the desert one avalanche at a time, blowing it smooth and round with no sharp edges, whispering it into delicate ripples, rubbing each individual grain until it dazzled.

  I tried to capture that now with my camera—the amazing things the wind could do, what it could create, without ever being seen . . . And then I turned away from the lens.

  “All right,” I said out loud to God. “I get it.”

  When I made my way down the dune, Victoria lay against the bottom, arms and legs spread as if she were about to make a sand angel.

  “It’s like being in on a secret, isn’t it?” she whispered.

  I sat beside her. “I was thinking something like that, yeah.”

  She nodded, indenting the sand with her hooded head. “I knew you’d like it. I’m not a morning person, but this is one of the few things I’ll get up for.” She closed her eyes, and I thought she was finished. But in a whisper she added, “You have to get up early if you want to hear God.”

  I didn’t close my own eyes this time. Maybe I didn’t always have to. God had given me an image right here that I could see with my eyes wide open.

  When J.P. and Poco joined us, both as quieted by the dunes as Victoria and I, we decided to seek out breakfast. The easy silence only lasted until we were at a table in a truck stop on the eastern outskirts of Las Cruces, warming our hands around mugs of coffee, or in J.P.’s case, tea. Victoria dipped her napkin in her water glass and scrubbed the rim of hers before she’d take a sip.

  The moment the server went off with our order, J.P. looked at me.

  “Poco has something to tell you.”

  I looked at Poco in surprise, but I had nothing on her. She appeared to be stunned.

  J.P. rolled her eyes. “What we were talking about when Ryan was packing the car. I thought we agreed we were going to bring it up.”

  “We,” Poco said. “Not me.” The nervous giggle was conspicuous by its absence. “If you want to talk about it, go ahead.”

  J.P. gave her a long, silent chance to reconsider and then turned to me. “We were discussing this thing with your Jake and Miguel Sanchez.”