by Nancy Rue
He shrugged. Frustration needled at me, but I took a deep breath.
“All right, I’m going to ask you some questions, and all you have to do is nod or shake your head. I think we can pull that off without getting into a shouting match, don’t you?”
He sat back in the chair and nodded.
“Did you spend much time down there by where Miguel got hurt before that day?”
“That’s the only time I ever went.”
“Did you ever meet any of Miguel’s family?”
“No.”
“Did you see his mother at the select team tryouts?”
His face jerked up. “How did you know about that?”
“Diego’s mother,” I said. “She was just telling me how good you were to Miguel,” I said. “Did you see Miguel’s mom?”
“Why do you want to know that?”
“I just need to know if you think she or anybody else in their family would recognize you if we saw them this afternoon.”
“Only his mom came to the tryouts,” he said in a voice I could barely hear. “I didn’t even meet her.”
I tried to envision the afternoon ahead. I could do all long shots and avoid the Ocotillo and the other restaurant where Elena Sanchez had worked. If Jake wore his ball cap and I kept him busy, it might work. With one exception.
I swallowed. “I need to ask you one more question, and it’s only to protect you from somebody wanting to attack you or something.”
He squinted at me, the way I knew I did at people when they were making no sense. But he shrugged.
“The day Miguel was hit by the truck,” I said. “Did anybody see you sitting there in it before the police came?”
“There wasn’t anybody else around.”
“Nobody? Then who called 911?”
“I did.”
I stared at him. “You did? Jake, I don’t understand. Did you have a cell phone?”
“You said just one more question.”
My head spun like a bicycle wheel, and I stuck the first stick I could find into its spokes. “Okay. That’s all I need to know. I think we’ll be all right down there. But if you see anybody you recognize, who might know who you are, just—tug on your earlobe.”
“Do what?”
“Like a signal. I’ll see that, and we’ll split. Deal?”
A long breath came out of his nose, the relief I knew he was trying to disguise.
I was glad that afternoon that he didn’t talk much. I needed the mind space to mull over what he’d told me. He’d been in the alley alone, in a truck he didn’t know how to drive. And after he ran over his friend with it, he magically pulled a cell phone from somewhere and called 911. It was a good thing I did have work to do, because otherwise I couldn’t have kept from shaking Jake until he gave me answers.
There was a little activity in front of a dark-looking coffee shop at one end of the mall, so we stopped there first. A group of older Hispanic men were having a good-natured argument, and they mugged enthusiastically for me before I could even raise the camera. I wasn’t happy with the busyness of the scene—it would look cluttered online—so I switched to a 400 lens to get a long view of the empty mall.
All the while, I tried not to let Jake see me glancing at him to make sure he wasn’t about to go into posttraumatic shock. We were nowhere close to the alley, but I had come to think of it all as Miguel’s stomping ground.
I was shooting the last series for the day when Jake gave a stifled cry. When I looked up, he was fumbling for his earlobe.
“What?” I whispered. “Who did you see?”
I looked where he was looking. Detective Levi Baranovic approached us from no more than five feet away. How long he’d been standing there, I didn’t know.
“Mrs. Coe,” he said. “Jacob.”
I didn’t correct him, though I did want to throw Jake behind me and shield him with my body.
“Is there a problem?” I said. “Jake was released into my custody. I was told I could bring him out in public if I kept him with me.”
He cast his green-eyed gaze over Jake. “Would you just step over there while I talk to your mother?”
Jake’s eyes went wild.
“Why don’t you pack up my camera,” I said, handing it to him. And with a hard look at Baranovic I added, “I won’t be long.”
The detective lowered his voice to a growl. “You’re taking pictures of these people for the paper?”
“Yes.”
“What are you trying to do?”
“I’m trying to tell their story.”
“What story? Don’t you think Elena Sanchez and her family have been through enough without you trying to make them look like what happened to Miguel was his fault? Their fault?”
I had to talk with my teeth clamped together to keep from screaming. “You have no idea what I’m trying to do. They’re suffering from injustices most people don’t know about. That’s what this story is—”
His gaze sharpened. “So you’re going to tell their pitiful tale and make it look like you’re on their side, so your son couldn’t possibly have—”
“Are you going to charge me with something, or can I take Jake home? Because I don’t think you have the authority to insult me.” I started off, but I turned back. “No, wait. How about if I ask you a question, Detective? Have you people traced the 911 call? From the day of the shooting?”
He parked his hands on his hips. “It was a disposable cell phone. There’s no way to trace who made the call.”
“I’ll tell you who made it—Jake himself.”
“And you know this how?”
“Because he told me.”
“Did he tell you anything else?”
“No.”
“Look, I’m going to tell you something, Mrs. Coe: leave this to us. Meanwhile, if you raise sympathy for the Sanchez family, which I agree they deserve, you’re going to make things worse for Jacob when he goes to trial.”
“I don’t see that.”
“You should. You’re part of the media—you’ve seen it happen. You’ve probably made it happen.”
“What?”
“Do you want your son tried in the newspaper? Because that’s what will happen if you do this.” He jerked his thumb toward Jake. “Why don’t you put your camera away and prepare your son for what’s about to happen to him?”
I didn’t watch him go. Jake did, and I knew he’d heard every word.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
All right, I hate to admit it,” Ryan said the moment she climbed into the chair. “You win.”
Although Sully could see the telltale puffs of sleeplessness under her eyes and the tension in the muscles of her neck, she wasn’t as tightly wound as he’d seen her before. She was, he guessed, too exhausted for a fight.
“I didn’t know we were in a competition,” he said, grinning. “You wanted no part of my Game Show Theology. I couldn’t get you past the buzzes. We didn’t even make it to the ding-ding-dings.”
He could have predicted the squint.
“I’m too tired to tell you that you’re a freak.”
“So how did I win?”
“I tried what you gave me, and it worked.”
“Then it sounds like you won.”
Her smile was wan. “Does that mean I’m cured?”
“What do you think?”
“I think it got me through the weekend and yesterday without destroying any more property. That and the fact that I have my son with me now.”
Sully felt his eyes widen.
Ryan filled him in on all that had transpired since their conversation Saturday, complete with her success at not grilling her son until he broke, which, she said, she might have done if she hadn’t had White Sands to escape to.
“That’s taken everything I’ve got,” she said. “I’m grateful for the advice you gave me, but seriously, I don’t know how much longer I can keep from blowing.” She put her hands to her throat. “I can feel it right here, just
waiting to explode.”
“You’re free to explode in here if you need to.”
“But I don’t want to. Isn’t that the point of therapy?”
“The point is for you to identify what you feel and express it in a way that’s true to you but doesn’t ultimately make things worse than they are, for you or anybody else.”
She squinted again, and new lines fanned out from the corners of her eyes. “I know what I feel.”
“And that is?”
“Anger.”
Sully resituated himself in his chair. Time to go in. “My guess is that anger is the way you’re expressing how you feel. But what you feel is something else.”
“And you know what I feel how?” Before Sully could answer, she put her hand up, eyes closed. “Forget I said that. I come to you for help, and then I keep throwing it back in your face. It’s my default reaction when I’m frustrated.”
“That may be one of the most astute things I’ve ever had a client tell me.”
Ryan grunted. “I bet you say that to all the girls.”
“Do you think that?”
“No.” She did her signature hand-through-the-hair thing. “That’s my other default reaction. Sarcasm.”
“And I have to tell you, it’s pretty funny sometimes.”
“I’m glad you’re amused.”
Sully leaned forward. “Listen, Ryan, we’re not trying to change your defaults. Sometimes they serve you well. What we’re trying to do is give you other options.”
“Then bring them on.”
“I want to try something.” He grinned at her again. “You’re going to think this is woo-woo, but I want you to trust me.”
“Trust is not one of my default reactions,” she said drily.
“I don’t know. You walked out of here angry last week, but when you were in trouble, you called me.” He tilted his head at her. “So—you want to try trusting me again?”
She cocked an eyebrow. “Depends what it is.”
Sully went to the table in the corner where he’d set the two-by-two wooden sandbox he’d made Sunday, complete with the finest-grade sand he could find at Home Depot. When he carried it to her, Ryan’s mouth went up on one side.
“You’re right,” she said. “This is woo-woo.”
“You haven’t seen anything yet.” Sully held it on one palm like a waiter’s tray. “Where shall I put this so you can play in it while we talk?”
“Excuse me?”
“Just with your hands—unless you’d like some toy trucks or a bucket.”
She was shaking her head, but she made a lap for the sandbox. It was a perfect fit.
“You’re going to explain this to me, right?” she said.
Sully crouched beside the chair and put a hand in the sand. He lifted up a palmful, let it slide between his fingers, made an S in the pile and smoothed it over.
“Is this supposed to be calming?” Ryan said.
“It can be. Or it can keep you busy physically while we pursue things that might make you want to go into your default.”
She looked doubtful.
“How often do you ‘flip out’ when you’re on an assignment?” Sully asked.
“Never.”
“Besides the fact that you have a tremendous amount of integrity, I think a lot of that is that you’re physically busy.” He shrugged. “That’s why some people work out, punch a bag, that kind of thing.”
Ryan tapped a finger on top of the sand. “You aren’t afraid I’m going to throw this at you?”
“Are you afraid of that?”
She put a whole hand in and let the sand cover her fingers. “Weirdly, I’m not. I just want to help my son so bad I’ll do whatever it takes.”
“Then here’s what I think it’s going to take.” Sully nodded at the sandbox. “You’re doing fine, by the way.”
“Uh-huh.”
Sully sat down. “I think what we need to do is go back to when you first learned that anger could cover up hurt.”
Her fingers stopped. “Did I learn that?”
“Let’s find out. You told me your father would blow up over trivial things.”
“He had to have control. When he didn’t, he basically pitched a fit until he got it back.” Ryan poked a hard finger into the sand. “Are you going to say that’s where I got it?”
“He modeled behavior for you, but I don’t think you ‘got it’ like a disease.”
“I think I inherited a lot of his personality traits—most of which are not my favorite things about myself.” The lines beside her mouth deepened as she poked more holes in the sand. “I tried to be a nice person for years, but I always felt like a fake because all this stuff was just seething under my skin. When I was married to Dan, I couldn’t do it anymore. I wasn’t a fake then, but I wasn’t a nice person.”
“Which is why you’re here.” Sully shrugged. “Ultimately, who we are can’t be hidden. But here’s the deal: when we face the worst that’s in us, somehow we become better than we are—better than we ever thought we could be.”
“So I face the fact that basically I’m not a nice person.”
“Was your father a nice person?”
She considered that with a sift of sand through her fingers. “Sometimes. He wasn’t always popping his cork about something. In fact, he was usually decent to me. It was my mother he took things out on.”
“We’ll get to her later. Tell me about your relationship with your father.”
Ryan paused in the sifting. “This is going to take us someplace, right? I mean, at the moment, I feel like I’m in a Woody Allen movie.”
Sully was liking this woman. “This isn’t analysis. There is a point.”
“My mother stayed out of my father’s way, for obvious reasons, which left me alone with him a lot of the time.”
Sully saw a red flag, but he let her go on.
“Once the dinner dishes were done, she’d go up to her craft room to make whatever new thing there was to make—decoupage, mac-ramé, teddy bears. My father spent the evening supervising my homework, and then we would discuss, I don’t know, current events or religion.”
“How old were you?” Sully asked.
Ryan looked up from the sandbox where she had begun a pyramid. “I could tell you all of Jimmy Carter’s screw-ups at age eight. When I was ten, Father was taking me to a different religious ceremony every weekend so I could decide for myself whether I was going to become Greek Orthodox or Unitarian or whatever.”
“You’re not exaggerating.”
“Not at all. By then my parents were living completely separate lives—she was teaching Sunday school, and he was on the lecture circuit for the ACLU. It’s a wonder I’m not schizophrenic.” She looked sideways at Sully. “Am I?”
He shook his head. “What was your relationship with your mother like while your father was on the road?”
“I was on the road with him. He tutored me in hotels during the day, and I sat through his lectures at night. I saw most of the United States before I was fifteen and asked if I could please go to high school and be a normal kid.”
“What was his reaction to that?”
Sully watched her hands in the sand as she continued to stack the structure she was building.
“It was one of the few times he did yell at me. Told me I was giving up a real education to become a cheerleader.” She gave Sully a wry look. “Can you see me with a pair of pom-poms? I mean, seriously.”
“Definitely not your style. But he didn’t refuse to let you go to public school?”
“No. He couldn’t raise me to make my own decisions and then not let me make one. I had to do all the research and present him with a dossier on every school in the county, mind you, but I got to choose.” She pushed the pyramid over with the side of her hand. “He gave up the lecture tour, though, and worked from home, which was the end of my parents’ marriage. My mother was way too independent by then to put up with his domination.”
“And you
stayed with your father?”
“Only for as long as I had to. He bought a house and started entertaining all these big-name liberals and expecting me to play hostess. That’s why I got on the school newspaper staff and joined the photography club—so I’d have an excuse not to be there for every soiree.” She dusted her hands off and frowned at Sully. “Is this taking us where we’re supposed to go?”
“I think so.” Sully rubbed his mouth. Asking what he had to ask could land that sandbox right in his lap. “Let me ask you a question,” he said. “I’m not trying to put ideas in your head.”
“You want to know if he sexually abused me.”
Sully blinked.
“My roommate in college asked me that.” Ryan rolled her eyes. “She was an overenthusiastic psych major. She said my relationship with my father sounded incestuous to her.”
“And?”
“I told her she was a fruitcake. I mean, I admit it was a weird set-up and my father was way too—something—with me, but as for anything sexual, no. Quite frankly, I think the old man might have been gay.”
Sully was having a hard time keeping his chin from dropping.
“He never looked at another woman the whole time we were traveling. He barely looked at my mother. And after they were divorced, he didn’t date—even though he wasn’t a bad-looking man. He was actually kind of charismatic from behind the podium.”
“You’re saying was.”
“He died a year after I got out of college. Sudden heart attack at one of his own dinner parties.” Ryan started on another pyramid. “One of the reasons I know I’m not a nice person is that I’ve thought more than once how glad I am he died that way instead of suffering from a long illness. He would have expected me to take care of him.” She pulled her hands from the sand and looked at Sully. “So what does all this tell you?”
He didn’t even know where to begin. She’d given him more information in twenty minutes than most clients did in four sessions. And he was certain there was more.
“I have to agree with your roommate about one thing,” he said. “Your relationship with your father was incestuous—but maybe only emotionally so. He depended on you to fill his life the way a wife usually does. It looked like love, but it was an egotistical using of you. That’s what incest is.”