Healing Sands (36 page)

That was what tore the pieces right out of God's hand and scattered them all over the front seat of my car. I wasn't sure how we ended the conversation. I drove to Sullivan Crisp surrounded by shards of myself.

It was 2:45 when Sully got back to the clinic, and he headed straight toward the therapy room to prepare for Ryan.

“Dr. Crisp,” Olivia said from her desk as he crossed the reception area.

“How's it going, Liv?” he said, still moving.

“Dr. Martha wants to see you.”

“I have a client coming in.”

“Lucky for you.” Olivia immediately clapped her hand to her mouth.

Sully sighed inwardly and abandoned the door to go over to her.

“Sorry,” she said between her fingers. She lowered her hand. “It's just—she's all grouchy today, and I know she wants to talk to you about Kyle, and I wish she'd leave him alone.” She flounced her arms into a fold across her chest. “There. I said it.”

“What does that mean, Liv?”

Olivia squeezed her arms in tighter. “I know stuff is confidential, but she had her door open when she was talking.”

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

I
t'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
some
body.”

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.”