Healing Sands (10 page)

“So it would be just you working on a family problem,” he said.

“Yes. That's what I said, wasn't it? I can't see my—any of them joining me. This is something I need to deal with.” Oh, Ryan, shut up. You're babbling like an idiot.

He let me seethe at myself for a minute before he said, “Am I hearing you say that you want us to show you how to go back to your family and fix the problem?”

That was exactly what I was saying, but coming out of his mouth, especially in that Southern drawl, it sounded ridiculous. I hated to sound stupid, no matter whose mouth my words were coming out of.

“Let me ask you this,” he said. “Just to clarify.”

I nodded.

“Did something specific happen that made you decide to come see us?”

My breath caught in my throat. He waited and watched. Must be nice to make $150 an hour saying nothing.

“I almost lost my temper,” I said. “I mean, really lost it. I can get mad and speak my piece, but this time I felt like I was going to lose control. I can't afford to do that.” I stopped and tried not to shift my eyes away from his, which were so obviously seeing what I wasn't saying.

“Are you under a lot of stress?” He bumped his forehead lightly with the heel of his hand. “Of course you are. You said you had some difficult things going on at home.” He tilted his head at me, looking again like a boy with an old soul. “You're thinking being on the brink of losing control was more than just a normal reaction to an abnormal situation?”

I was tempted to say,
Sure, that's it,
then run from this man-child who was quoting my thoughts. But then he leaned forward and rested his forearms on his thighs like a catcher waiting for my fastball. “If someone else reacted the way you did when you lost your temper,” he said, “would you recommend that she seek help?”

All I could see was Ginger, hurling that hose across the sculpture garden. Ginger's body, my face . . .

“In a heartbeat,” I said.

He nodded. “That's something I may be able to help you with if you'd like to work with me.”

“You? I thought you didn't see patients yourself. Aren't you the Mac Daddy in this outfit?”

“I don't usually see clients myself,” he said. “But there are exceptions.”

“Why am I an exception?”

His face broke into the grin I knew he'd been holding back the entire time I'd sat there. I was prepared to lash out at it, accuse him of making fun of me. But once it made its full way from one earlobe to the other, the thing was so big, so easy, I would have looked like Kate-the-Shrew if I'd attacked him for it.

Instead I said, “What?”

“That's why you're an exception,” he said. “Because nothing gets past you. We'll keep each other on our proverbial toes. That is, if you—”

“All right,” I said. “So how does this work? I can't start now—I have to get to my son's soccer practice.”

“How about tomorrow?” he said. “Is this a good time for you?”

“I get off work at three, so I'll come straight here. But I have to leave by four.”

“Not a problem.” He grinned again. “I think an hour is about as long as you're going to put up with me at a time.”

It was the last thing I expected a therapist to say, especially Mr. Man, King of Christian Counseling. But then, what did I know?

About, it seemed, anything?

All the way to Burn Lake, I said out loud all the things I wished I'd said to Sullivan Crisp's face.
I am not going down a bunch of bunny trails with you. And that includes my ex-husband, our divorce, my potty training . . .

When I pulled into the shade of a cottonwood in the parking lot, I was still asking myself why I had agreed to see the man. I was hoping I could give myself a different answer than the only one I could settle on: it had to be somebody, so it might as well be him.

And it did have to be somebody, because if Jake was not acquitted, there probably wasn't enough metal in that studio for me to throw.

I hiked the zippered bag full of bananas and granola bars and juice boxes over my shoulder and headed for the knot of mothers on the bleachers. All I wanted were some coping skills. I was an intelligent woman. A few sessions with Sullivan Crisp should do it. He was right about one thing: I wasn't going to be able to put up with him for much more than that.

It was after four, and practice was already under way when I joined Poco midway up the bleachers. J.P. and Victoria were sitting behind her, and I got the distinct impression I'd just happened on a conversation I wasn't supposed to hear.

“Ladies,” I said. To Poco I said, “I brought the snacks. All healthy.”

“I knew you'd catch on.” The signature giggle was even more nervously frayed than usual.

“Did I interrupt something?” I asked.

“No, no.”

“You know what?” J.P. said. “I'm not good at dicky-doing around. I think we should just get it out in the open.”

“Dicky-doing?” Victoria said faintly.

Poco put her hand on J.P.'s knee. If that was the signal to back off, J.P. didn't get it.

“We were talking about your son Jake and his situation.”

I whipped my face toward her so hard my neck crunched.

“I know,” she said. “But I want to make sure our kids don't find out about it.”

“Why would they, unless you tell them?” I said.

J.P. lowered her sunglasses and peered over them down onto the field. “Alex knows, doesn't he?”

It hadn't even occurred to me to ask Alex not to share this whole thing with anyone outside the family, but I still bristled.

“You think he's going to make an announcement to the soccer team?” I said.

“Of course not.” Poco still had her tiny hand on J.P.'s knee, and it still wasn't working.

J.P. sighed impatiently. “Something could slip out, and I don't want Cade or any of the other boys upset.”

“So what's your point?” I said.

“I just wanted to make sure you've spoken to Alex about not discussing this thing with the other kids.”

I looked down at the field.

“You have, haven't you?”

“Look, how I handle this with my boys is my business and mine alone.”

“Not when it affects
my
boy, and Victoria's and Poco's and everyone else's.” J.P.'s blue eyes drew together like a snake's. I had an image of her tongue forking out at me next. She all but hissed, “I would no more handle it that way if it were me—”

“It's not you, though, is it?” I said.

She stood up, capris bunched into wrinkles at the bend in her legs, and huffed off down the steps. I waited for Victoria to follow her.

She just gazed after her, however, eyes in their usual trance.

“I think you made her mad,” she said.

“Ya think?” I ran a hand through my hair, which I knew was already standing up in spikes from the raking I'd been giving it all afternoon.

“You have a lot on your mind,” Poco said. “If Alex lets something slip, so be it. We'll deal with it.” The faint line appeared between her brows. “But if he does, how do you want us to handle it with our boys?”

I looked at Victoria, who was nodding vaguely.

“Tell them that we don't know exactly what happened,” I said, “but that Jake is innocent until—” I couldn't say it. I couldn't even let myself think anything that involved the word
guilty
. “Just tell them we're working on finding out the truth.”

“And that Alex needs their support.”

Our heads swiveled to Victoria. Her face was still so unfocused I wasn't sure she'd actually said it, until Poco breathed, “Right.”

What had just happened? Whatever it was, I was confused. I chalked it up to the fact that I had no experience with groups of women. I'd always avoided them the same way I eschewed sales and fad diets and department store makeup counters.

And intended to continue doing so.

The temperature had dropped to the low sixties by the time Sully stretched out on his back deck on a chaise lounge that left his feet hanging over the end. God had just treated him to a psychedelic sunset, and the sun was now sizzling on the top of the thick adobe wall that surrounded his backyard, preparing to reduce the two gnarled Mexican elder trees to mere silhouettes.

Sully liked the wild tangle that overtook not only the backyard but the front of his rented house as well. It gave the place a funky look that matched the chipped tile on the porch overhang and the patinaed pink stucco. Every faded blue window frame and gap between the floorboards reminded him of himself at this point. Put together in the past in pieces and trying to come together as a comfortable whole in the present.

Sully propped his laptop on his knees and turned it on. While it loaded, he sipped at a Frappuccino and studied the long bunch of brick-red chiles hanging from an open beam over the nearby table piled with his files. What was it about them that he got such a kick out of? Maybe because they were so deceptively cheerful looking, and then you bit into one and got the spicy surprise of your life.

The computer announced that it was ready, but now that he stared at it, he had no idea what to Google. Zahira's Devil Renouncement / New Mexico? Some kind of Internet 411 for Zahira Cox? What did that mean, anyway . . . Zahira?

For lack of a better direction, Sully Googled the word. He skipped Zahira's School of Belly Dance and the Zahira Primary School in Hambantota and went to a list of baby name meanings. He snorted out loud. Zahira was Arabic for “brilliant and shining.”

He went back to Zahira's School of Belly Dance and searched the faces for anyone even remotely resembling Belinda Cox, but the photographs were such poor quality, everyone in them looked as if they'd been blurred for a reality cop show. Sully clicked the site off and dug in the pile for a folder. He opened it and pulled out a photograph whose subject was all too clear, even from fourteen years ago.

She had too-blonde hair, bleached of any natural color and shine, and it lay in thin, flat layers around a face flecked with freckles. There was nothing ingenuous about Belinda Cox. Her eyebrows were too tweezed, her lips too glossy. She wore a practiced expression, as if she'd worked in front of a mirror to align her features to say, “I'm only trying to help you.”

Help? She hadn't helped Lynn do anything but lose her beautiful mind. And she was going down for that if he had to tear Las Cruces apart . . .

Sully stared at his fist, now crumpling the picture into a ball. He let it bounce to the table where it rolled against the laptop and waited.

Sully closed his eyes.
God, don't let me do this. Don't let me turn this into revenge.

He'd had himself convinced this was about ethics, about protecting other innocent people. But there was no denying now that it was intensely personal. Porphyria was right. He had to get this done so he could put it to bed and get on with his life. If he didn't, it was going to take over.

He looked at the crushed ball on the table. If it hadn't already.

CHAPTER NINE

S
ully always prayed before a session. That was the one thing that still came naturally. The rest might not, seeing how it had been a year since Nashville and his last one-on-one client. He hadn't even intended to work with this one, but he didn't think Kyle was ready for Ryan Alexander-Coe, and Martha already had a full load. Besides—Ms. Coe was something of a time bomb, and even Olivia had spotted her as a potential lawsuit.

He pretzeled his legs into a bow in the butterscotch corduroy chair-and-a-half. Face resting in his hands, he breathed in God. And Light. And Christ, Light from that Light. Light on the only path he'd found he could follow.

God-in-Christ . . . shine through me . . . help me to lead her to make some sense of herself . . .

Sully breathed into the prayer until he came to a level place where perhaps Ryan Coe's new path could start. Then he opened his eyes and reached for the folder on the trunk between his chair and the identical one Ryan would sit in.

He grinned as he glanced over the paperwork she'd filled out the day before. To use a psychological term—she was a pistol. Small woman with a big mind. Gunned you down with her shotgun eyes. Wasn't going to put up with—how did she say it?—having Ephesians thrown in her face.

She also said—both in yesterday's interview and on her form— that she wanted help controlling her anger.
I need coping skills,
she'd written. There was no doubt that she had a short fuse, but Sully didn't think just anything lit it. Whatever got her going came from someplace deep. The trick was going to be letting
her
find the God-path, but getting her to let
him
lead for a while. She must be something on the dance floor.

He perused the form for her occupation. Photojournalist. Formerly employed by the Associated Press, but currently working for the
Las Cruces Sun-News.
He salivated mentally. That might be a road worth going down.

A tap on the door was followed by Olivia's head. He'd heard her staccato laugh in the reception area earlier, punctuating Kyle's urging her to go back to school and get her degree. Martha was going to have to assign Kyle more clients before he started having sessions with the receptionist.

“She's here,” Olivia whispered.

“Who?” Sully whispered back.

“Mrs. Coe.”

“Okay. Why are we whispering?”

“Because she scares me.”

Sully stood up and strode to the door. “Is she armed?”

Olivia's eyes popped, and Sully smiled at her.

“You're teasing me,” she said.

Sully followed her out to meet Ryan noticing on the way that Olivia looked less like she'd caught the latest sale at the Goodwill than she had previously. Her hair was up in one of those messy bun-ish things, but at least it wasn't dangling in her face like leftover goat food. He wondered if Kyle had counseled her on that too.