Healing Sands

by Nancy Rue

  Sully waited.

  “She was checking his background with somebody on the phone,” she whispered. “It’s like she thinks he lied on his résumé or something.”

  Sully gave her a closer look. Tears sparkled on her lower lashes. “I think she’s looking for a reason to fire him. Only you can do that, right?”

  “Nobody’s firing anybody,” Sully said. “And you’re right, stuff is confidential. You haven’t mentioned this to Kyle?”

  She shook her head, sending her dream catcher earrings into a frenzy.

  “Good job,” Sully said. He strode back across the reception area to the door. He now had eight minutes to get himself ready for Ryan.

  But he was no sooner through the door than he saw Kyle strolling toward him, one hand in his pocket, the other swinging as if all the two of them had to do was make plans to spend a Sunday watching football. Sully felt a pang of guilt. He’d just made a date with Tess for what Kyle had suggested the two of them do. That suddenly mattered.

  “Hey,” Sully said. “You have a minute?”

  “Sure, what’s up?”

  Sully glanced at Martha’s door, which was opening even then, and nodded Kyle into his office. He’d have to talk fast.

  “Look, I just wanted to thank you for offering to go to Mesilla with me,” he said with the door closed.

  “No problem. When do you want to go?”

  “Well, here’s the thing—a woman I’ve been working with on this has offered to help me out.”

  “Got it,” Kyle said. “I can’t compete with a beautiful woman.”

  “Who said she was beautiful?”

  “Isn’t she?”

  “Drop-dead gorgeous.”

  “Then there you go.” Kyle grinned. “Now who’s going to get extra caramel sauce on his flan?”

  Kyle left, and the door opened again before it even shut behind him. It was starting to look like a turnstile.

  “Five minutes, Sullivan,” Martha said. “That’s all I need.”

  “If I had five, they’d be all yours.”

  “Then I’ll take one.” She backed the door closed. “I have to talk to you about Kyle.”

  Her arms folded. Her jaw set. She wasn’t going anywhere.

  Which left Sully no choice but to glance at his watch. “I have one client, Martha, and wouldn’t you know she’d be coming in right now?”

  “Yes,” Martha said, “wouldn’t you know?”

  It was the first time Sully had seen anger in Martha Fitzgerald’s eyes. It matched the subtle tremor in the skin around her mouth, as if she were barely holding back. “So when can we have a conversation about this?”

  “Mrs. Coe is here, Dr. Crisp,” Olivia said too loudly outside the door.

  Martha jerked it open, and Olivia stumbled into the room. Martha seared her with a look that Olivia openly returned before she whirled with a jangle of jewelry and left.

  “I know you don’t want to hear what I have to say, Dr. Crisp.” Martha’s voice shook. “But if you don’t, I’m afraid you are going to be sorry.”

  Sully listened to her march down the hall. Maybe tomorrow he would have his confrontation with Belinda Cox and get that behind him. Then he could focus on Olivia and this thing Martha had against Kyle. Right now he had a client who was barely holding it together, and he was about to go in there with his hackles up. He ran his hand down the back of his neck. One God-thing at a time, Dr. Crisp.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  It’s seventy-five degrees outside,” Ryan said. She perched on the edge of the chair-and-a-half like a small de-nested bird. “But I can’t get warm.”

  Sully opened the trunk and pulled out a Navajo blanket he’d picked up at the Farmers and Crafts Market.

  “Will this help?” he said.

  She nodded and took it from him. He watched her drape it, crooked, around her shoulders and resisted the urge to help.

  “Good?” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said—and burst into tears.

  For the next fifteen minutes she sobbed like someone who was unfamiliar with weeping, and brought herself under control, and called herself a wimp, only to start all over. Sully put a Kleenex box in her lap and waited. When she’d blown her nose with finality, she shivered back into the blanket and shook her head.

  “How much of my fifty-minute hour did I just waste?”

  “Not a second.”

  She spread her fingers and dragged them through her hair, leaving the top standing up in dark, weary canes. “I’ve heard people say a good cry makes them feel better. That must have been a bad cry, because I don’t.”

  “Actually, therapy isn’t just about feeling better—it’s about getting better, which usually involves feeling worse for a while.”

  She gave him a look.

  “Speaking of which, Ryan, are you eating?”

  “I forget to.”

  “Sleeping?”

  “When I get exhausted enough.”

  “How’s your concentration?”

  She entwined her fingers around the blanket fringe. “When I’m working, I’m fine. It’s when I don’t have something else to focus on that I start obsessing.”

  “How about Humpty Dumpty’s shell?”

  “I brought it with me. In pieces. At least I still have all of them. I think.”

  Sully studied her for a moment. She might think the cry had done no good, but despite the red swelling around her eyes, her face once again had that alert look that always made her seem bigger than she was.

  “By the way,” she said. “If you tell anybody about me going off the deep end like that, I’m going to have to hurt you.”

  Sully grinned. “You’re protected by doctor/client confidentiality. Or I am.” He tilted his head at her. “Do you really think you ‘went off the deep end’?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Didn’t look like it to me. I thought it was a very real response to what you’re dealing with. And like you said, all Humpty’s pieces are still here.”

  She focused straight ahead, and Sully wondered if this was the way to go. Sometimes a bunny trail was a God-thing. Sometimes it was just a bunny trail.

  “I just remembered what I’ve been trying to figure out all day,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “When I was in college, I took a literary criticism class, and we spent one whole session talking about whether there’s anything in the Humpty Dumpty poem that indicates he’s actually an egg.”

  Sully recited it in his head. “There isn’t.”

  “But we think of him as this giant ovum because that’s what’s always in the picture. I think that’s one of the things that sealed my decision to become a photographer. Pictures have an even more powerful influence than words.”

  “And you wanted to have a powerful influence,” Sully said.

  She shrugged. “Doesn’t everybody? But I wanted it to be real. I found out early on, when I took a job with a magazine that I won’t name, that some people aren’t above manipulating images.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “This particular publication routinely altered pictures or even created them from parts of several pictures. That’s why I went with AP. Newspapers usually try to hold the line on manipulation.”

  Sully saw the purpose of the bunny trail. Besides, this was pulling her together. “Do they do that because they have an agenda?”

  “That—or they just want this perfect picture. True photojournalists care more about accuracy and integrity than they do about ‘mood.’”

  “What’s it about for you?”

  “It’s about living with what’s there. You can’t blur the edges of what’s real and what isn’t. I consider myself to be an artist, but I think art can be straight and honest and to the point. Dan and I had some heated discussions about that.”

  Sully nodded for her to go on, though she hesitated.

  “He’d say that as a sculptor he just felt led to make whatever it was he was working on.
Instead of seeing something and then shaping it, he just let it unfold to him. I said art required structure and he said art was fluid, that there was only an implied sense of structure beneath it that he went with.”

  She sat up straight and glared at him. “How did we get off on this?”

  “I think it’s a good place to be,” Sully said. “You’ve just uncovered something important about you and Dan.”

  “A lot of difference that makes now. He’s obviously ‘been led’ far away from me.”

  “It could make a difference in how you deal with Jake together —maybe eliminate some conflict that you don’t need in the midst of everything else.”

  “You’re going to explain that to me, right?”

  “I think you already did. You and Dan have different approaches, but you’re both looking for what’s real, and you’re both reporting that honestly.”

  “We’re talking about our art, though.”

  “Not something more?”

  “You think this is like some metaphor about my life?” Her swollen eyes flashed. “I don’t see how understanding what I should have seen when we were married makes any difference now. Dan and I don’t have a life together anymore, and we never will. End of story.”

  “Is it?”

  “I was the one who wanted the divorce. And yes, I see now that it wasn’t his lack of responsibility alone that broke us up. He said it himself—he couldn’t deal with my anger with him for not being something he never claimed to be in the first place. I was so busy being angry over what he didn’t do, I never appreciated what he did offer.” She flung out her hands. “He and I just had this conversation two days ago, and I told him I was sorry, but it was obviously too late because he’s engaged to somebody else. There—are you happy now?”

  “Are you happy—that’s the question.”

  “It is what it is,” she said, but she was crying again, with the blanket bunched up and wrapped around her neck, and her knees drawn into her chest. “I hate you for making me do this.”

  “I’m not making you—”

  “I know, okay? But I have to blame somebody.”

  She cut herself off and stared at him. Sully waited, holding his breath.

  “That’s what I do, isn’t it?” she said. “I have to blame someone else, when it’s all my fault.”

  “It’s not all your fault—”

  “No, let me finish.” She threw off the blanket and made the goal- posts with her hands. “I screwed up with Dan, but I couldn’t stand to take the blame, so I made it his fault and left him. And I’m still making it his fault, this whole thing with Jake, when if I had stayed and fought for my kids instead of running away to Africa, Jake wouldn’t have gotten into trouble—or he would fight for himself, instead of just letting this happen to him. I’m running around being outraged at everybody else when it’s me I should be screaming at!”

  “Okay,” Sully said, “before you start doing that, let’s just back that truck up for a minute.”

  She turned her head toward him, hands still in position, as if she couldn’t let those conclusions get away. “Are you going to tell me I’m wrong?”

  “No, because I don’t think you are, totally. But if we’re going to put Humpty back together again, we need to do it piece by piece.” Ryan gave him another long look before she sank against the back of the chair and wadded the blanket into a ball in her lap.

  “You’ve made some decisions that you regret,” he said. “Choices you made when you were angry. But we’ve already talked about the fact that anger is your default response for anything dark you might be feeling. You were hurt by Dan’s withdrawal and Jake’s decision not to live with you. And you were frustrated—you had no control—so again you fell back on your automatic response, which is to get mad. Making sense so far?”

  “It sounds like you’re trying to let me off the hook.”

  “What hook? I’m doing what you do when you come on a scene you have to photograph. I’m seeing what’s there and I’m reporting it back. Can you bear with me?”

  She squinted.

  “You could have gotten angry with yourself,” he said, “but that’s not what was modeled for you by your father.”

  “Uh, no.”

  “You tend to point the anger outward, because that’s what you know how to do. You didn’t know how to play in the sand or use your gift for visualization. Until today, you didn’t even know how to cry.” Sully leaned onto his thighs with his forearms and shaped his words with his hands. “Usually it’s the mother who teaches the child those skills. Yours wasn’t around to do that, or she wasn’t allowed to by your father.”

  Ryan opened her mouth, but Sully moved on.

  “I’m not trying to set you up to blame your parents. This isn’t about blame. It’s about understanding what’s gone on, what’s still going on, and finding a different way.”

  “A different way than blaming and screaming.”

  “Right.”

  “But where does that leave me?” She was shivering again, and her voice was thick from the holding back.

  “In a good place,” Sully said. “Because you have no control. You can’t fall back on your old shtick. You can only surrender to what God is giving you—and that’s answers.”

  “I’m not hearing them.”

  “Then see them.” He sat back. “What would you do differently now if you were still married to Dan?”

  She looked as if she were about to protest, but she closed her eyes. “I’d support his art. I’d let him be who he was.”

  “And what about Jake? What would you do if you were in that courtroom and he’d just told the judge he wanted to live with his father?”

  Ryan swallowed so hard Sully could hear it. “I would put my arms around him, even though he would hate it, and I would tell him how much I loved him, and that I would still be there for him.” She let go of a sob. “But I don’t know if it would have changed anything.”

  “But it would have changed you,” Sully said. “And it still can.”

  Ryan put both hands behind her neck and pulled her head into the blanket still bunched in her knees-up lap. “Why did I ever think anything else mattered but love?”

  “Now’s the time to stop asking ‘why didn’t I,’” Sully said, “and start asking ‘why don’t I?’”

  She nodded and sobbed, far past her fifty-minute hour.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  I went to Miguel Sanchez’s funeral on Tuesday afternoon. The Catholic church was packed with Hispanic people, and it would have been hard for me to blend if they hadn’t all been focused on the funeral mass, said in Spanish, and on their mourning.

  The only person who didn’t appear to be stricken almost to paralysis by grief was Elena Sanchez. She was sober and regal as she passed up the aisle, a black lace scarf draped from her head to her shoulders. Perhaps the loss hadn’t hit her yet, but I doubted that was it. She’d known that day at the market that Miguel was already gone. I just wanted to know what was holding her up now and moving her forward.

  One thing I did know: it was not revenge. Not from her or anyone else in that church. The sense of deep resignation I felt there was not behind the bomb and the note. The family and friends of Miguel Sanchez were devastated, maybe even confused. But they weren’t angry.

  Except Cecilia Benitez, who, with the well-dressed man beside her I assumed was Bob Benitez the blogger, looked ready to organize a demonstration.

  I left before the service was over, specifically to avoid her. But I was only halfway down the steps when she called to me. I didn’t stop moving as I glanced over my shoulder at her.

  “I have someplace to be,” I said. Which was true. Dan was meeting me at the jail to see Jake before soccer practice.

  “You know you’re the reason for all that, don’t you?”

  I stopped on the bottom step and dragged my hand through my hair. Dear God, please, not today.

  Cecilia caught up to me, tossing the ubiquitous scarf ov
er her shoulder. “They had to put the overflow crowd in the parish hall and show the service on closed-circuit TV,” she said. “And we have you to thank for that.”

  I didn’t even try to pretend I knew what she was talking about. “Your online article about the colonia,” she said. “It was spot-on, Ms. Alexander. Bob thought so too—he blogged about it—everyone read it.” She stretched her arm up toward the church. “And that’s the kind of crowd we’re going to see at the courthouse when this goes to trial.”

  I put my hand to my mouth. She nodded at my tears.

  “You don’t have to say anything. I just wanted to thank you—for the whole community. We’ll see justice done.”

  She returned to the church before I had to answer.

  When I arrived at the jail, Dan was already standing at the check-in counter talking to the officer behind the glass window.

  “I can’t get an appointment,” he said.

  “You gotta call ahead,” said the officer, whose face hung over his collar like a muffin top. He punched the button of his ballpoint pen several times. “You want the one I have for Thursday or not?”

  “Take mine for today, Dan,” I said.

  He stared at me. If I could have, I would have stared at myself. I had counted every minute that had stood between me and my son so I could see for myself that he hadn’t been devoured by the monsters behind these walls, and now I was giving away the chance to see him.

  The officer clicked his pen again. “Y’can’t do that. It’s—” He glanced at a sheet on his side of the counter. “It’s Ryan Coe or nobody. Who’s it gonna be?”

  “Go,” Dan said. “You’re what he needs.” He pointed to the tears starting to flow from his eyes. “He doesn’t need this.”

  The officer stood up and jerked his head toward a steel door. As the door buzzed and clanked open, I looked back to say, “Don’t leave. Please,” but Dan was already nodding.

  I was handed a visitor’s badge, which I dropped as I tried to walk and clip it on at the same time. The floor was gray and smelled like sour Clorox, and we had to pass through two sliding steel doors before I was finally told to sit on a long bench that ran the length of a fluorescent-lit room. Another bench faced it, and between them was a narrow table with a foot-high divider.