Healing Sands

by Nancy Rue

  “I’m not going to tell you to sit,” Sully said, “but I do suggest you get to a room where it’s soft. Pillows, stuffed animals.”

  For an instant, he had a life-sized picture of Ryan Coe with a teddy bear.

  “You’re getting the idea.” Her voice had already come down several decibels, but it was still shrill and serrated. It could have cut a loaf of bread.

  “Okay, now, talk to me. What set you off?”

  He could hear her draw in a ragged breath, and he took the opportunity to look up at Martha. She was already halfway out of the chair, pointing to the door.

  “We’ll talk later,” she mouthed to him and slipped out.

  “I don’t know if I can even tell you this without flipping out again,” Ryan said.

  “If you feel yourself heading into dangerous territory, we’ll stop,” Sully said. “Fair enough?”

  “Yeah, whatever.” She hauled in another jagged lungful of air and launched into her story. She ended with, “My son picked jail over me.”

  Sully smeared his hand across his chest. The hurt wasn’t buried far beneath her anger. He could feel it in his own soul.

  “I’m sorry, Ryan,” he said.

  “There is nothing I can do, and I can’t stand it. I want to go down there and shake that sanctimonious broad at the front desk and work my way in from there—but I know it isn’t going to do any good.”

  Sully didn’t point out that she’d be locked up, too, either there or in the psych ward.

  “I also want to go scream at my ex-husband,” she said. “But that would only make him think he’s right.”

  “About what?”

  “He says my anger is what made Jake commit this crime, and it’s my anger that made him choose to go to a stinking jail cell instead of with me.” Her pause was full. “Is he right? Is it me?”

  Sully rubbed the back of his head with his free hand. “We haven’t sorted all of that out yet. But I do know this: even if your rage is a factor, it isn’t the whole reason. I don’t think Jake’s actions are just a way to get back at you for being angry. There’s probably something else going on.”

  “Then I’m not nuts. Before this part went down, I learned some things that make me even more sure Jake didn’t hurt that boy.”

  “Really. Tell me your theory.”

  She didn’t seem to catch on that getting her to talk some more was an attempt to calm her down.

  “Jake and Miguel Sanchez, the boy who was hurt, were soccer buddies. Jake even talked Miguel into trying out for a select team even though he wasn’t in the league, and he made it. They both did. But Ginger—do you remember me talking about her?”

  “The Spice Girl,” Sully said. “Your ex-husband’s—”

  “His whatever. She has a son—Ian. Nice kid, considering she gave birth to him. He’s like a big brother to Jake, who worships the ground he walks on. Jake even broke the rules of his bail to go to some meet the kid was in. Anyway, Ian tried out, too, and didn’t make it. That could have put Jake between a rock and a hard place.”

  “How so?”

  “What if Ian wanted to mess Miguel up for beating him out, and Jake was sucked in enough by whatever power Ian has over him to take care of that for him?”

  Sully didn’t say anything.

  “That’s pretty thin, isn’t it?” she said. “I don’t have any reason to think Ian would even be upset. I’m told soccer isn’t his thing.”

  “You’re just looking at possibilities,” Sully said. “Have you mentioned this to anybody?”

  “I was just putting it together when Dan called me. I didn’t have a chance to tell him—not that he would believe me. He’d say I’m just trying to slime Ginger and her kid.”

  Sully heard something fall—or be flung.

  “He probably wouldn’t believe anything bad about Ian—but he’s perfectly willing to let Jake go down for it without batting an eye. I do not understand that!”

  “No, you don’t,” Sully said quickly, before anything else could be thrown. “Because it doesn’t make sense. No wonder you want to throw things. I would want to throw things if it were my kid.”

  “Great. You want to come over here, and we’ll throw things together?”

  He could imagine her shoving her hand through her hair.

  “Okay, not funny. Are you going to give me some suggestions or what?”

  “I can. There are things you can do to get through the weekend— and you can call me anytime. I’ll give you my cell phone number. And then, Ryan, I think you need to pursue this with a therapist, because you’re in it for the long haul. It doesn’t have to be me—”

  “Who else am I going to go to? I don’t want to start all over and tell this whole thing to somebody else. Besides—” There was another rush of air. “At least you’re not telling me I’m nuts.”

  “The people who are ‘nuts’ don’t call me. They just blow up the police station.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” she said.

  “Then you’re definitely not nuts. Can you come in Monday?”

  “I can wait until Tuesday, unless you gave my appointment away.”

  “Not yet. You sure?”

  “Yeah.” Her voice had wound down.

  He didn’t hear any more objects crashing. “You wanted some suggestions for the interim?” he said.

  “Yeah, or I know I’ll do something I’ll regret.”

  Sully mentally ran through the options. She wouldn’t like any of them; he hoped she was desperate enough to try one.

  “How about this? Start with one set of muscles, tighten them up, and then consciously release them—”

  “Have we met? Can you actually see me doing that?”

  “Maybe not at the moment,” Sully said. “But it might help you before you go to bed.”

  “What else have you got?”

  “Anything you do is going to mean getting quiet and making an intentional effort to slow yourself down and stop beating up on things you can’t lick right now.” Sully shook his head. “So sit down.”

  “How do you know I’m not?”

  “Just a hunch. Are you sitting?”

  “Now I am,” she said.

  “Now think of the last place you went to that gave you a sense of calm.” He hoped she even knew what that was.

  “This is getting freaky,” Ryan said. “I was just at White Sands this morning, and I think it was the first time I felt calm in my life.”

  “Great. So it’s fresh in your mind. Now close your eyes—and yes, it’s going to be woo-woo. Can you deal with that?”

  “I guess I’m going to have to. All right, they’re closed.”

  “Go to the place. And try to not only see it, but experience it with all your senses. Listen for whatever sounds you remember.”

  “That was the beauty of it. There were none.”

  “Then savor the silence. Feel the air on your skin or the sand between your toes—whatever you experienced tactilely.”

  “Okay. Go on.”

  Sully frowned slightly. She was obviously doing a checklist, but at least the edge in her voice was rounding off.

  “Do the same with taste and smell. Just be there in every physical way you can.”

  She was quiet for all of ten seconds before she said, “Okay, then what?”

  “Do you still want to tear up the police station?”

  “Actually . . . no.”

  “Then it’s working.”

  “Yeah, but for how long?”

  “Until the next time you get that feeling, and then you do it again.”

  “I’m going to be spending a lot of mental time at White Sands.” “Good.”

  Ryan let another long pause form, and Sully waited her out.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll take that cell phone number you offered. As long as you’re sure you don’t mind having your ear chewed off at two in the morning.”

  Sully grinned. “It’s what I do.”

  When she hung up, Sul
ly went out to the patio and gazed over the top of the adobe wall where the sun was turning the aspen leaves to copper coins. It was barely noon, and both he and Ryan had already found themselves at their respective crossroads. He was sure she would go to White Sands in her mind.

  He just wasn’t sure where to go in his.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I woke up Sunday with my pillow over my face and my cell phone ringing in my hand. Too groggy to check the ID, I fumbled the cell to my ear and mumbled a hello before my eyes were even open. I was instantly awake when I heard Dan’s voice.

  “Ryan, can you get over to county?”

  I came off the bed, already scrambling for my jeans. “What’s going on? Did something happen to Jake?”

  “He’s okay physically . . .”

  “Dan—what?” I clamped my hand to my forehead and closed my eyes. “I’m sorry. Tell me.”

  “Evidently he had a rough night. I don’t know any of the details, but they called and said he wants you to come get him.”

  I froze with one leg in my jeans and one bent at the knee.

  “Can you go?” he said.

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes. Are you coming?”

  “No. I’ll drop by your place later and leave his clothes. We’ll have to decide what to do about his school.”

  Right. Ginger was not coming to my home to tutor my son.

  “We’ll work that out.” I shoved one arm into the sleeve of my leather jacket, still wearing the T-shirt I’d spent the night in. “Do you know what happened? Did someone hurt him?”

  “No.” Dan was clearly on the edge of tears. “They just said he told the guard this morning he changed his mind and he’d go with his mother. The guy who called me said he was pretty shaken up.” I could hear him barely holding on.

  “Listen, you go, and please—”

  “I’m not going to yell at him,” I said.

  “I wasn’t going to say that. Just tell him I love him.”

  “You can tell him yourself when you come to bring his stuff.”

  “I can’t see him, Ryan. I can’t see him and not bring him home.”

  “I know the feeling,” I said.

  I wasn’t prepared for what I saw when they released Jake to me. He’d looked thin and vulnerable the day before, but that couldn’t compare to the almost transparent boy who seemed to have lost all muscle mass in the night and shook like a wet Chihuahua. The fear in his eyes was so deep I wasn’t sure he would ever emerge from it.

  He said nothing all the way home, and I didn’t press him. I was afraid one word, even a kind one, would shatter him. When we got into the house, he glanced around briefly and said, “Where’s the bathroom? I want to take a shower.” It hit me like a kick in the stomach that he hadn’t been there before.

  While he stood under the water until I was sure it had long since turned cold, I built a fire in the kiva and heated a bowl of canned soup and set a cup of hot chocolate with whipped cream on the table next to the couch. Despite my lack of domesticity, I did everything short of producing a cat curled up on the hearth to make it homey.

  Still, when he emerged from the bathroom, face scrubbed until his skin was raw, dressed in the black shirt and jeans he’d worn the day before, he sat on the edge of the sofa with his knees together and his shoulders curved inward until they nearly met at his sternum.

  “I have a T-shirt you can change into if you want,” I said. “I bought it for you at one of the festivals I was shooting, but I never got to give it to you.”

  “I’m okay in this,” he said.

  “It doesn’t smell like jail?”

  “They made me wear those orange things.”

  He retreated back into himself. I retreated to the kitchen so I wouldn’t howl in horror. I poured the soup into a bowl and turned to take it back to the living room and nearly ran into him, right behind me.

  “Do you want to eat in here?” I said.

  “I’m not hungry,” Jake said, but he sat on the edge of one of the metal Harley-Davidson stools at the snack bar.

  I’d bought the set because it looked very boy. That was what I had in mind when I picked out everything for the house. The indestructible leather couch and chairs in the living room. The Chicago Bears towels in the bathroom. The Xbox and plasma screen in the den. None of it suited the airy Southwestern feel of the house, but I wanted it to be home for my sons.

  But to Jake it was probably just another interrogation room, only this one had curtains and a closer who shared the same gene pool. I bit back all the questions I wanted to ask. He took two spoonfuls of the soup, but I could see he was forcing it down.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “You might be hungry later. Did you get any sleep last night?”

  He shook his head.

  “Was it too noisy?”

  “They left the lights on all night.”

  “Oh, and you hate that. You couldn’t even stand a night-light when you were a kid. Alex had to practically have a hundred-watt bulb in his face, but you wanted it totally dark.”

  I was rambling to fill up the silence.

  But maybe silence was what he needed after all. I didn’t know.

  And neither, it seemed, did he.

  When I suggested he take a nap, he said he wasn’t tired. When I offered to turn on football, he shrugged, and I took that as a yes. He finally dozed on the couch under a Bears blanket, and I muted the TV and watched him.

  He looked even younger and smaller when he was asleep, without the stoic, I-can-handle-this mask he’d worked so hard to wear. With his hair back from his face, I could see how chiseled and fine-tuned his bone structure was, how he was growing into a sensitive young man who, if he were true to himself, wouldn’t be able to hide what stirred inside.

  I wasn’t aware that I was trying to cry again until I heard my own hard sobs. An image came to me unbidden, unwelcome . . . my son withering under a brutal light that never went out. I knew in that moment that he wouldn’t survive in prison. And even if he never loved me as his mother again, I had to keep him out.

  That conviction grew stronger as the day wore into the night. Jake didn’t eat. He slept only fitfully and spent most of his time staring at his hands as if he didn’t know what to do with them. Most telling was the way he shadowed me every time I left the room he was in. He tried to make it look like it was merely a coincidence that we wound up in the kitchen at the same time, when moments before he seemed to be conked out on the couch. After three or four times, I knew he was afraid to be alone. Before, that was all he had wanted.

  When it was time to call it a night, I suggested he sleep on the couch, and I curled up in the recliner and pretended to drift off. I was awake for every leather-crackling toss and turn he made, every trip to the bathroom, every sigh that came from some sad place in his soul.

  “Can I get you anything?” I said around three.

  “A new life,” he said.

  “A new life?”

  He didn’t answer. His breathing became shallow and even, and I wasn’t sure he hadn’t been half-asleep already when he said it.

  But it still made my decision for me about the next day. In the morning, after I’d brought in the paper—and discovered a bag of Jake’s clothes on the front porch—and made the coffee and taken a shower, I sat on the edge of the coffee table and put my hand on his arm. He came awake with terror in his eyes.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s time to get up.”

  “Why?” he said. “I’m not going back, am I?”

  “No. But you do have a job.”

  He licked at dry lips and squinted at me.

  “Get up,” I said. “You’re working for me now.”

  He didn’t argue, and I was glad. I didn’t want to tell him I wasn’t leaving him alone, not for a minute, for a number of reasons. Not the least of which was that if he wanted a “new life,” what did he intend to do with the old one?

  We spent the morning at a ribbon cutting for a new pre
school and a post-robbery scene at a liquor store. Jake carried equipment I usually lugged myself and held lights I didn’t need and gave me directions I could have gotten from Perdita. He did it all without complaint. He was quiet, though not sullen, and it took every scrap of self-restraint—and a few mental visits to White Sands—not to try to coax him out. At least he’d stopped trembling, and when I asked him where he wanted to go for lunch, he chose Arby’s.

  I called Frances while he took a bite of roast beef and chewed it endlessly, as if he couldn’t quite make himself swallow it. I’d already told her he’d be with me today.

  “What else do you have for me?” I said to her.

  “Nothing at the moment. I’m going to free you up to work on your colonias piece.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m thinking you should go to that area off the mall and get the food, the crafts, the smiles for the tourists—you know, the stuff that lets us believe they’re happy being poor and oppressed. That’ll be jarring next to the rest of it.”

  My heart took a dive. She was sending me with Jake right into the neighborhood where his life had fallen apart.

  “Keep your cell phone on, of course,” Frances said. “How’s your son doing?”

  “Uh, fine.”

  “Is this some kind of take-your-kid-to-work thing?”

  I could hear her typing, so I didn’t have to answer.

  “I’ll call you if I need you for anything,” she said. “Go for the home run.”

  I closed the phone and tossed it onto the table. Jake winced.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Did I startle you?”

  “I just get freaked out,” he said.

  I took a bite and waited to see if there would be more, but he continued to tear up the sandwich he wasn’t eating.

  “Look, I don’t want to freak you out more,” I said, “but I have to go over by, like, Second and Third Streets and shoot some stuff for a piece I’m doing. On Mexican legals.”

  I waited again. He stopped ripping at the bread.

  “Are you okay with that?” I asked.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” His old defensiveness crept back into his voice.

  “Look, Jake, I’m not trying to bring something up here. I just need to know if you can handle going down there right now.”