Healing Sands

by Nancy Rue

  “So you’re saying that’s why I’m angry.” She was motionless, watching him.

  “It could be part of it. Your father’s love seemed to depend on what you could do for him. Didn’t you start getting tired of the whole set-up when you were in high school?”

  “I wouldn’t use the word tired,” she said. “Ticked off works. But everybody was ticked off at their parents for something.”

  “This whole thing with your father is interesting.” Sully pulled one leg up into the chair and folded it under him. “He was angry and controlling, but he didn’t take it out on you in ways that are typically seen as harmful.”

  “No,” Ryan said. “He just smothered me.” She sat back stiffly from the sandbox.

  “Can you talk about that?” Sully said.

  “I don’t think it means anything. It happened long before I came along.”

  “What did?”

  “They had another baby before me, but he died. SIDS. They called it ‘crib death’ then. I didn’t even know about it until I was twelve. Father and I were sitting in a restaurant in Boston, and he just spun out this tale about how I would have had a brother, but he only lived to be six months old. The baby died in his sleep. Father said if they’d had a baby monitor, they would have heard him struggling for air and they could have saved him.”

  “That must have been hard to hear.”

  “I don’t know. I spent a lot of time after that wondering what it would have been like to have a big brother. That stopped when I brought it up another time and asked what his name was.”

  “What was it?”

  “Ryan.”

  Sully tried not to wince openly.

  “Yeah, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out. Even at twelve I knew I was the replacement child.” She shrugged and went back to the sand, though she didn’t seem to know what to do with it now.

  “That may explain a few things, though,” Sully said, before she could dive any further behind the sarcasm.

  “Such as?”

  “Your father’s pain. His guilt. His fury with your mother. I’d be willing to bet it all came out as anger—but he couldn’t direct it at you. He had to protect you the way he didn’t protect the baby.”

  “Which was why he never wanted me out of his sight.” Ryan studied her quiet hands. “So you’re saying that’s what I do?”

  “It’s a possibility. It would be worth uncovering the hurts to find out if it is.”

  “I don’t want to do that.” Ryan picked up the sandbox and set it on the trunk. She ran a hand through her hair, leaving several grains of sand on her forehead, which she smacked away.

  “Are you afraid to?” Sully asked.

  “No!” She scowled at him. “Yes—and I deal worse with fear than I do with anger, so let’s not go there.”

  “Really. What do you do when you’re afraid?”

  “I lash out at people, cabinet doors, mirrors. You name it.”

  “So it all gets expressed as anger.” Sully unfolded his leg and tilted toward her again. “Ryan, that’s what we’re here to deal with. My job is to help you navigate the fear and the hurt and whatever else comes up, so you’ll know how to do it on your own. Isn’t that what you want?”

  “I want you to tell me how to do it, and I’ll do it. I don’t want to experience the past again.” She put both hands to her temples. “That’s absurd, I know. I am a complete mess!”

  “It’s good when it gets messy,” Sully said. “Hard, but good, because that’s when the stuff we need to see comes to the surface. That’s where God is.” He gave her a slow smile. “We’ve started to see what hurts, Ryan. And that is a very good mess to be in.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  By Wednesday, I suspected Jake’s memory of his night in jail had paled enough that he was ready to reconsider his decision to stay with me.

  I wasn’t pushing him to talk, though I had to practically bury myself in mental sand not to. I didn’t even hover over his schoolwork or nag him about his lack of food intake or mention that he might consider combing his hair more than once a day.

  But the kind of togetherness we were forced into didn’t fit either of our personalities. He went to work with me all day. Did his homework in another therapy room while I was with Dr. Crisp. Sat on the top row of bleachers with me while we watched Alex’s soccer practices. And spent the evenings in my home office doing the schoolwork I picked up from the district while I worked on the colonias story on my computer. I was a prime candidate for Mother of the Year—but he still had to be sick of me.

  I couldn’t deny the whole thing put a crimp in my routine too. Though I made sure I took snacks to soccer practice when I was supposed to and told Alex every day that he was awesome, I didn’t go to Dan’s to “work on my dribbling” with him, and not spending time with Alex was ripping me apart.

  To my surprise I missed the soccer moms too. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to talk to them about what was happening. I just wanted to be with them. We waved to each other at practice, and Poco folded her hands to her chest to show me they were praying for us, but according to his restrictions, Jake wasn’t supposed to be involved in any school or community activities with other kids, and I wasn’t taking the slightest chance. Ever since my run-in with Detective Baranovic, I felt like I was under surveillance.

  Jake’s and my only time of separation was during the night. After Sunday he slept in the room I’d fixed up for him, though I woke up several times in the wee hours to see him standing in my doorway. I sensed he just wanted to make sure I was still there—or that he was.

  I would then lie awake for an hour or two, though I didn’t mind that so much. It was then that I started to get the God-images again.

  They were faint and out of focus, but there nevertheless. An image of sand motionless in an hourglass. And of Jake alone in the alley, picking up a cell phone, checking Miguel for a pulse. They were comforting on the one hand, though I couldn’t have said why.

  Yet they tormented me too. Time was not standing still. I had to do something with the new information I had—that maybe Ian had a motive for wanting Miguel hurt, however far-fetched—and that Jake was the one who called 911 on an unexplained cell phone. But the scene with Detective Baranovic had done more than just make me paranoid. It convinced me he’d be more interested in an investigative report from a crazy psychic than from me. I’d have to put this together myself.

  When I told Uriel Cohen about Jake’s call to 911, she was more impressed with my detective skills.

  “So what do we do with this information?” I said. Although I wanted to, I didn’t add, Why aren’t you doing some investigative work? What are you doing, anyway?

  “It might help show that Jake tried to help Miguel Sanchez after he hit him,” she said. “A jury likes remorse.”

  I didn’t tell her anything else.

  In the crazy small hours of wakefulness Wednesday morning, I began to process what I’d talked to Sullivan Crisp about. I expected to be mad at myself for opening a vein like that. I even tried to be annoyed with Crisp for handing me the scalpel. But I didn’t have the energy. I knew it wouldn’t have felt good anyway, not the way anger usually did when I first let it go. All I could do was lie there and ache and think of those dunes on the desert.

  And pray. I realized I hadn’t prayed in weeks. I had only expected God to give me visual answers to questions I didn’t ask.

  As a result of all that nighttime activity, even two cups of coffee didn’t fully wake me up when the day dawned. Jake and I went to the downtown mall to shoot the Farmers and Crafts Market, with me still trying to get the dust bunnies out of my head.

  I did have enough wherewithal to steer clear of the Ocotillo Coffee Shop, but I had absolutely no edge as Jake and I wandered up the mall, shooting a box full of scrawny kittens and a woman holding two runny-nosed toddlers on her lap while she sold sandwich bags full of chili powder.

  “Mom.”

  It had been so
long since I’d heard Jake say that, I didn’t realize it was him until he said it again. He was so close I could feel his breath on my cheek. When I looked at him, he was yanking on his earlobe, eyes frantic.

  I let the camera fall against my chest and looked where he darted his gaze. Elena Sanchez was no more than three feet from us, deep in Spanish conversation with a half-blind woman crocheting booties.

  “We should get out of here,” Jake whispered. But adolescent boys can’t whisper, and the upward shot of his voice drew the attention of more than one person.

  I shook my head, still groping wildly for a sane thought.

  “Mom?” he said again.

  “Okay—here.” I pulled the strap over my head and pressed the camera into his hands. With my lips near his ear, I said, “Stay close, and just take pictures. Keep the camera in front of your face. I’ll make sure she doesn’t see you, and we’ll just move away. Okay?”

  He stared at the camera.

  “Okay, son?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”

  He turned from me and did as I said. I glanced over my shoulder just as Elena looked up from the blind woman. Her face broke into a smile.

  “Grafa!” She came to me, hands outstretched, and clasped mine between them.

  “Are you well?” I said.

  My voice was shrill and unnatural, but she didn’t seem to notice. Behind me I could hear the camera clicking.

  “I am well,” she said. “Miguel, he left the hospital.”

  “Really?” I said. I wasn’t sure how that could be, but I nodded with her as she beamed.

  “He is now in—what is called? Long-term care.”

  She pronounced each word with pride, as if Miguel had graduated to a higher level. My heart sank.

  “Is he still . . . the same?” I said.

  “In a coma still, yes.” Elena blinked rapidly. “But he is no in intense care, and this is good.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  Then we locked gazes, and I saw the same truth in hers that I tried to keep out of mine. Long-term care was not graduation.

  She gave my hands a squeeze and let go. “You will pray?”

  “Every day,” I said.

  “Then God, he will take care of Miguel.”

  With a sad smile, she melted back into the crowd. I turned to find Jake, who was only a step behind me, the camera swaying on its strap around his neck.

  “Can we go?” he asked.

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  He said nothing as we wove through the shoppers and crafters, and he was still quiet in the car until we pulled into the drive-through at Starbucks.

  “Do you want a hot chocolate?” I said.

  He shook his head. His face was gray.

  “Son—please, talk to me.”

  “What does it mean that Miguel’s in long-term care?”

  “May I take your order, please?” the box squawked at me.

  “No,” I said and pulled out of the line and into a parking space. I turned to Jake.

  I selected my tone carefully. “It means they can’t do anything else for him in the hospital. But it also means he’s stable.”

  “What’s stable?”

  “He’s not in danger of dying.” I didn’t add that he wasn’t in danger of living, either.

  I waited. He curved over until his hair covered his face.

  “Jake.”

  “Let’s just go back to work,” he said.

  I looked at my watch. I didn’t have another assignment at the moment. It was ten, which meant the morning crowd would have thinned out at Milagro Coffee.

  “We need food,” I said.

  I took El Paseo Road, stealing glances at Jake as I drove and wishing he would just cry. I had just turned left onto University Avenue when he sat up straight and pointed.

  “It’s up,” he said.

  “What?”

  “His piece.”

  I made a fast turn into the New Mexico State campus.

  “There?” Jake pointed. “See it?”

  I pulled into the parking lot of a large adobe building. Before us on the lawn was an enormous stand of slender poles, cantilevered to hold themselves together like a molecule. The impression was that if you took one away, it would all fall apart.

  “It’s part of his gravitational series,” Jake said, awe in his voice.

  “Your dad’s?”

  He nodded. “That is sick.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I actually think it’s kind of amazing.”

  “Mom,” he said. “That’s what sick means.”

  “Oh.”

  “Thanks for stopping. I just wanted to see it.”

  He seemed to be calmed by it, which made my own unsettled feeling worth it.

  Milagro Coffee was nearly deserted when we got there. Jake and I took a table near the back, and I told him to put the reader card from the camera into the laptop while I ordered us some drinks.

  “Hot chocolate?” I offered again.

  “Mocha,” he said.

  When I came back to the table, he was already looking at the laptop screen. I sat beside him and put his mocha in his hand and sipped at my coffee as he clicked through the shots I’d taken of kittens and old women. I stopped him when a close shot of a pair of large, soulful black-brown eyes came up.

  “Wait,” I said. “When did I take that?”

  “You didn’t,” Jake said. “I did. You don’t want to see these.”

  “Yes, I do. Let me look.”

  I put my cup down and peered more closely. The light wasn’t quite right, but the composition was compelling. And there was something else.

  “Jake, do you see that?” I pointed to the reflection in the child’s eyes. “Is that a ball—what is that?”

  “It’s a balloon she was looking at. I was just trying something. It didn’t work.”

  “It almost did. Let me see what else you got.”

  He clicked again and brought into view a tiny Hispanic girl, the owner of the dreaming eyes, with a kitten curled into the curve of her neck. This time he’d gotten good contrast, no shadows. He’d captured the softness and the innocence, but he hadn’t lost the too-old sadness of a scene in which both the child and the kitten would have to grow up too fast.

  “This is good, Jake,” I said.

  “It’s okay.”

  “I’m serious. I wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true.”

  His face flushed, a blotch of pink here, a splash of red there. “That’s why I do bad in school.”

  “You’re going to have to explain that one to me.”

  Jake shrugged. “They always make you write everything, and I can’t write—not like I can show things in pictures. Dad says he had the same problem in school.”

  “Until he went to college. The professors at Northwestern said he was the most gifted student they’d had in twenty years.”

  Jake flipped his hair back to look at me. “You knew Dad in college?”

  “That’s how we met.”

  He nodded at me, as if he wanted me to go on. It wasn’t a subject I wanted to pursue, but it at least had Jake out from behind his hair.

  “There was a rash of student suicides on campus that semester,” I said. “People were having a hard time dealing with it, so the art department put out a table in the commons with clay on it and offered ‘art catharsis.’”

  I’d found it sort of lame at the time, but Jake seemed to be digging it now, so I continued.

  “I was taking an art class that semester, so I went, and I was sort of poking some holes in a wad of clay when this guy comes up with hair down to here.” I pointed to my shoulder. “And he grabbed a hunk and stuck it on a Coke bottle and made this English bobby. You know what that is?”

  “Yeah—cop in London.”

  “Right. He made it like a cartoon in three dimensions. Big belly and clown shoes and suspenders. I just stood there watching him—I mean, not just because I thought he was hot—”


  “Was it Dad?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Then I don’t want to hear about him being hot, okay?”

  “Right. Anyway, after he gave it a billy club behind its back and this huge moustache, like a walrus, he gave it to them to fire it. I said, ‘So you must be an art major,’ and he said no. And he just walked away.” I pondered the memory for a second. “He obviously did not find me hot.”

  “Dude.”

  “Sorry. So about two weeks later, I’m in class and he comes marching in and goes up to the professor, wanting to know where his sculpture is—you know, like the art department had stolen it or something. I tuned in to the conversation because I still thought—” Jake put his hand up.

  “Anyway, the art professor said he wouldn’t give it back to him until he promised to sign up for sculpting the next semester.” I couldn’t hold back a smile. “So I signed up for it too. I was horrible at it, but your father was obviously so gifted. And then after the first week he stopped coming to class, and the prof asked if anybody knew what was going on with him because he was going to fail the course if he didn’t start showing up. I volunteered to find out.”

  “You were, like, stalking him,” Jake said.

  The correct response to that was that I always went after what I wanted. But I couldn’t say it. I could barely go on with the story, actually. Only the light in Jake’s eyes, the light I hadn’t seen in him for so long, made me willing to tell anything to keep it there.

  “I went to his dorm, and there was all this stuff he’d made. I didn’t get most of it, but I knew the art people would go nuts over it. I helped him take all of it to the department and, like I thought, they were gaga over it. After that, I just stayed on him to keep doing it, keep taking classes, and he finally changed his major.”

  I took a long drink of my now-cold coffee, which did nothing for the lump growing in my throat. How long had it been since I’d thought of my supporting Dan in the beginning, when he was a reluctant artist?

  I cleared my throat and pointed to the laptop. “So show me the rest.”

  Jake licked at his lips and turned to the screen. He had taken several more shots, all of which showed a feel for his subjects that made up for the lack of technical skill. Most of that could be fixed. The more I studied them, the bigger the lump grew, until I couldn’t swallow.