Healing Sands
Authors: Nancy Rue,Stephen Arterburn
Tags: #Fiction, #Christian, #General, #ebook
HEALING SANDS
HEALING SANDS
A Sullivan Crisp Novel
Nancy Rue
and
Stephen Arterburn
© 2009 by Nancy Rue and Stephen Arterburn
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meansâelectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or otherâexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published in Nashville, Tennessee. by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.
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Page design by Mandi Cofer.
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Publisher's Note: This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. All characters are fictional, and any similarity to people living or dead is purely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rue, Nancy N.
  Healing sands / Nancy Rue and Stephen Arterburn.
    p. cm. â (A Sullivan Crisp novel ; no. 3)
  ISBN 978-1-59554-428-5 (pbk.)
  I. Arterburn, Stephen, 1953â II. Title.
  PS3568.U3595H4 2009
  813'.54âdc22
2009036772
Printed in the United States of America
09 10 11 12 13 RRD 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Dale McElhinney, who has the heart of Sullivan Crisp
Contents
I
did not, as my ten-year-old son described it, “freak out over everything” back then. It took something big. The problem was, something big happened daily. At times hourly.
That particular hour it was a waste-of-time photo shoot. I told my editor at the
Sun-News
that before I even pulled away from the movie set at White Sands. I was still ranting about it into my Bluetooth as I pulled out onto Highway 70 and headed across the Chihuahuan Desert toward Las Cruces, straight into the eyeball-searing sun.
“Why anybody wants to make a film in the middle of a gypsum dune field is beyond me,” I said. “Two hundred and seventy-five miles of nothing but white.”
“I know shooting there in the middle of the day is a nightmare,” Frances said. “I thought they were going to let you take inside shots of rehearsal.”
“Evidently, âthey' didn't know what they were talking about. Or they just said that to get us there, with no intention of giving me access to the set.”
I took a long drag out of my water bottle and attempted to stick it back into its holder on the console. I missed and the thing tipped over, still open, onto the floor on the passenger side. Right into my unzipped camera bag.
“Soâwhat happened?”
“After they discussed it to death,” I said, “they finally decided I could interview Darnell Pellington.”
“Who?”
“Exactly.” I kept my eyes on the highway and groped on the floor to retrieve the bottle. “He's one of the co-stars.”
“You were supposed to getâ”
“I know, okay? I wasn't going to break out the 400 and do the paparazzi thing.”
The typing stopped, and Frances sighed into the phone. “So what did you get?”
“Ten minutes in Darnell's trailer while Ken interviewed him. In light so low all the people tromping through needed miners' helmets to see where they were going.”
“So you're telling me it was a bust.”
I finally got my hand on the water bottle and fished it out of my bag, empty. “Look, I'll send you what I got as soon as I can get Internet access. There's probably something salvageable.”
Frances gave me the short grunt she delivered when she could take the time to laugh. “I'm sure it's more than just salvageable. Anyway, no big deal. It's just a secondary story.”
Oh. That made me feel infinitely better. I abandoned my attempt to assess the damage to my camera and focused ahead on San Augustin Pass, rendered invisible by the afternoon sun on my Saab's dirty windshield.
“At least you got to see White Sands,” Frances said. “That your first time?”
“Yeah,” I said. And hopefully my last. Everyone had raved to me about the mile upon mile of pure white sand in the middle of a New Mexico desert, its unique beauty, blah blah blah. Personally, if you've seen one sand dune devoid of vegetation, you've seen them all. I'd been too busy crawling around with a light meter on the floor of what could have passed as a FEMA trailer; I couldn't exactly appreciate the splendor. Besides, the silence out there made me nuts.
“Well, sorry about the assignment,” Frances said. “You're on till three?”
“Yeah. I'm headed back to the paper now.”
“I'll see what else I can come up with.”
That was Frances Taylor's version of good-bye. I climbed the pass and fumed.
If she gave me another city official's daughter's wedding or the fiftieth fiesta of the year, I was going to have an embolism. I'd lost count of how many times in the last six weeks I had questioned the wisdom of taking this job instead of . . .
There was no
instead of
. Photography was all I knew, and I was lucky to get a position when most newspapers were downsizing. It wasn't the kind of photojournalism I was used to, but it served my only purpose: to be close to my boys.
The Saab chugged over the pass that cut through the gargoyle peaks of the Organ Mountains. As I began the drop into the Mesilla Valley, I punched in Dan's number. I was in a borderline foul frame of mind already. What better time to call my ex-husband?
“What's up?” he said, in lieu of hello.
The hair on the back of my neck
, I wanted to say.
“I thought I'd come by and see the boys when I get off work at three.”
His silence was long and, in my view, calculated to set my teeth on edge.
“Alex will be here,” he said finally. “He'd probably like to see you.”
“Which means you don't think Jake would.”
“Did I say that?”
“You didn't have to.”
I could imagine Dan running the back of his hand across his forehead to wipe out me as much as the dust of whatever thing he was creating. I knew he wasn't smearing off sweat, despite the eighty-five-degree September heat. Dan Coe never got worked up enough to perspire.
“Look,” I said, “how is Jake going to get past this thing he has about me if we don't spend any time together?”
“I can't force him.”
“He's fifteenâyou're thirty-nine. Who's the grown-up here?”
“So I make him see you. You think that guarantees he's going to talk to you?”
“If he doesn't see me, that's going to guarantee that he
won't.
”
“I wish you'd just give him some time. Wait him out.”
I squeezed the steering wheel. That was Dan's solution to everything. You're going broke? Give it time. You see that your marriage is disintegrating? Wait and see.
“I think it's a good idea for you to see Alex today, though,” Dan said. “He starts soccer practice after school tomorrow, so a lot of his free time'll be taken up after today.”
“He's playing soccer?” I tried to imagine my sprite of a ten-year-old doing anything athletic. All I could conjure up were his wiry arms and legs and his enormous brown eyes. And the charm-your-Nikes-off smile I missed. So much.
“He played last year too,” Dan said. “He's good. So is Jake.”
The message was clear: if I had been around for the last twelve months, I would have known my boys played soccer, and now loved tamales, and . . .
“Look, I've got to get back to work,” Dan said. “You want me to tell Alex you'll be by?”
“Tell him I'll take him out for Chinese. Jake too.”
“They hate Chinese,” Dan said.
I bit back a
Since when?
I knew the answer. Since I'd left their father and they'd chosen to live with him. Since I had become
mama non grata
.
My phone beeped. “I have another call coming in,” I said. “I'll be there around three thirty.”
It was Frances.
“Okayâget over to Third Street,” she said. Her tone brought me up in my seat. “It's in about the worst zip code in the city, butâ”
“What's going on?”
“A Hispanic kid was mowed down by a white guy in a pickup truckâlooks like it might have been a hate crime. If that's the case, it could be A-1, three-column, possibly four, so shoot looser than you would otherwise.”
“I'm on it,” I said.
“You know where it is?”
“Yeah,” I lied and veered into the parking lot of an abandoned pottery shop. “I can get there in ten.”
When she hung up, I punched the address into the GPS I'd dubbed Perdita, which means “lost.” Frances had a tendency to make assignments sound bigger than they were, probably because nothing much happened in a city whose marketing hook was “One of America's Top 100 Retirement Towns.” My six months in Africa had made me something of a cynic about what we Americans consider picture-worthy.
With a map on Perdita's screen, I pulled back out onto 70 and pushed the speed limit toward town. This could be a chance to do what I loved, which was to make pictures that moved people to think, got them to feel unexpectedly. Or at least wake up from a siesta long enough to see that life was not all about prizewinning jalapeños.
“God,” I said, “give me the story I'm supposed to tell.” It was what I prayed en route to every assignment. I wasn't always sure God particularly wanted me to tell the story of the Chile Festival or the mayor's son's confirmation, but it worked often enough to keep me showing up.
Frances had exaggerated about the zip code, I decided, as I pulled in behind a Las Cruces Police Department cruiser. What qualified as a bad part of town here would have been upscale to some of the people I'd photographed. The address was a few blocks over from the Downtown Mall, a six-block interruption in Main Street, which, except on Wednesdays and Saturdays when the Farmers and Crafts Market convened, was little more than a ghost town. This was Thursday.
The area that surrounded me as I climbed out of the Saab was just as ghostly and a little more run-down. Every other storefront stared vacantly onto the street, while the rest listlessly advertised shoe repair and beer/cigarettes and homemade Mexican food. The only one with clean windows and a freshly painted sign was an establishment that promised to cash paychecks.