Healing Sands (20 page)

I stared at him for a long moment, even after he returned to the twisting tower and resumed the steady, abrasive work of smoothing just one tiny corner. I don't know how long I would have remained there without anger and without answers if a shadow hadn't fallen across the doorway.

“Dad,” said an adolescent voice that squeaked at the end. “I need to talk to you.”

Dan's entire demeanor changed. He tossed the sandpaper aside and wiped his hands on his muslin smock and smiled at Jake as he stepped into a shaft of light.

“Sure, buddy,” he said. “What's up?”

I didn't move. I couldn't have gone far anyway, with Jake between me and the doorway. He didn't seem to see me—there was no stiffening as he moved closer to Dan and stood with his back to me, arms dangling awkwardly at his sides. It struck me once again how small he was. And how uncertain.

“Ian's got a meet Saturday, and I want to go,” he said.

“Where is it?”

“At the school.”

I held my breath. If Dan let him do that, so help me . . .

“You know you can't, Jake.” Dan's tone was apologetic. “That's against the rules the judge set. You're not allowed on school property.”

“It's not during school.”

“Doesn't matter.”

“But I wanna see Ian compete. This is a big deal. He's been there for me, y'know?”

My heart ached. This was the most I'd heard Jake talk in weeks. He sounded like a normal teenager, making a case for something a normal teenager should be allowed to do. It was the abnormal that squeezed at my chest.

“I hate this,” Jake said. “It's like you have to be some jailer. Dude, I'm not gonna do anything at that stupid school.”

“I know that.” Dan put his foot on a gas can and leaned on his knee with his forearms. “Look, I believe in you, Jake. But the court says I have to treat you like I can't. I hate it, too, but we just have to deal with that until this thing is over.”

“So—I can't go.”

“No, son. You can't.”

Jake jerked around and stalked out of the studio without ever seeing me. Dan watched him go, his mouth drawn into a concerned line, his eyes resolute.

It was a Dan I'd never seen.

“I think I'd better go after him,” he said. “Can you see yourself out?”

I nodded, but I couldn't leave. The sunset was casting its last pink light through the studio windows and turning the detritus on the floor to fairy dust. It was as magical as what I'd just witnessed— Dan defusing what could have been a volatile disaster, and would have been in
my
hands. Just as any piece of metal in the room would be if I tried to make art with it.

I stepped to the winding sculpture and rested my hand on its coolness. I'd stopped going into Dan's studio the last six months of our marriage. Back when I thought Dan needed a real job and a cause if he was going to make a difference in the world the way I did. Back when I thought I couldn't love him anymore.

I let my hand fall from the metal. Too much mystical New Mexico light. Too much clean air that hid nothing. Too much exposure to things that broke my heart.

Pushing back an unfamiliar wall of sadness, I hurried out of the studio and across the park to my car. I was just pulling out of the driveway when my cell phone rang. I didn't recognize the number, but I answered it anyway, just to get away from the despair pressing on me.

“This is Ryan Coe,” I said.

“I know it is,” said a shrill voice. “We have to talk.”

“Who is this?”

“It's Ginger Tassert,” she said, as if I should have recognized her at the first syllable.

“I don't know what we have to say to each other,” I said, though I did pull off to the side of Dan's dirt road in case she came up with something.

“No,
I
have things to say to
you.
Meet me tomorrow on the patio at the Milagro Coffee House at one thirty.”

“Uh, some of us work for a living.”

She'd already hung up. I stared at the phone and recalled the image of Dan watching our son with wisdom in his eyes. It didn't match the memory of Ginger pitching a rubber hose into the sculpture garden. I couldn't get them to mesh.

But it didn't matter. It was too late for any other image.

Way too late.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

T
he air had a fallish nip the next morning at seven thirty when I pulled up to the Milagro Coffee House—the only place in Las Cruces anybody wanted to go to, apparently. I'd always loved Midwestern autumns, but New Mexico was different, with only the gold of the occasional aspen and the burnt red of the ubiquitous chile peppers to break up the monotonous brown. I hugged my tweedy jacket around me as I hurried across the parking lot.

Victoria and J.P. were already at a heavy wooden table in the middle of the café, Victoria looking sleepy-eyed but otherwise no more dazed than usual. J.P. appeared to be on her second sixteen-ounce cup of caffeine. Either that or she was the ultimate morning person. For once her hair was scooped tidily into its ponytail, and she wore fresh lipstick that hadn't even bled onto the rim of her cup. It probably wouldn't dare.

I waved to them and joined Poco at the counter, where she almost had to stand on her tiptoes to be seen over it.

“I'll have a café mocha vodka Valium latte, please,” she said to the bespectacled twentysomething male at the register.

He didn't even blink. “Rough morning?”

“I think I have too many children, Ben,” she said.

“You only have two, Poco. That'll be $3.99.”

Poco smiled her enigmatic smile at me as she pulled out a five and slid it across the counter.

“And for you?” the guy named Ben said to me.

“I'll have what she's having,” I said.

“It's a decaf, sugar-free, nonfat café mocha.”

I looked at Poco. “That's dessert, for Pete's sake. No—I need a black coffee, extra hot.”

“There's your trouble, Poco,” Ben said. “You start drinking it like she does, and you'll have those kids whipped into shape in no time.”

Poco took her change and shook her head, as always setting her bangs into a small frenzy.

“$2.95 for you,” Ben said to me.

I handed him my debit card and studied Poco, who simply stood smiling beside me. It struck me that I knew little about her. About any of them. Far less than they knew about me, unfortunately.

Poco and I took our cups to the table, where J.P. was waiting with legal pad and pen. She'd already made four columns on it, with one of our names at the top of each. I could already feel my neck hairs bristling. Was I about to get an
assignment
from her?

“I assume everybody is still in for tomorrow night,” she said before my buns even touched the seat.

Poco and Victoria nodded. I sipped. My jury was still out until I heard the whole plan.

“We need to leave my place no later than five. Sunset is at six thirty, so that should give us plenty of time.”

“Everybody go potty before we leave,” Poco said. “J.P. doesn't make bathroom stops.”

“It's only a one-hour trip,” J.P. said.

She looked at each of us as if to make sure nobody was going to dispute that. I just kept sipping. They did make good coffee there at Milagro. At least that part wouldn't be a bust.

“We'll do the sunset/moonrise thing in the park,” she went on briskly. “You'll enjoy it.”

Or else.

“Then we'll sign in at the camping check-in.”

“Did you reserve a campsite?” Poco asked.

J.P. shook her head. Tendrils were already making their escape from her ponytail and hanging fretfully on either side of her face.

“It's first come, first serve,” she said. “But this isn't their busy time of year.”

I wondered if they
had
a busy time of year. It still mystified me that people traveled for miles to see that endless expanse of nothing but white sand. It actually still somewhat mystified me that I'd agreed to this trip myself.

I looked up from draining my coffee cup to see J.P. surveying me over the top of her glasses.

“You know we have to backpack in, right?” she said.

“You mentioned that,” I said.

“We have to carry everything we're going to need.”

“You mentioned that too.”

“Including water.”

I scratched a nonexistent itch on the side of my face. “When are we going to get to the part I don't know? I have to be somewhere at nine.”

“I just wanted to make sure you understood that this is not a glamour gig, in case you want to change your mind.”

Now I remembered why I'd agreed to this. No way was I walking away from the dare in her eyes.

J.P. broke the stare first and wrote something in Victoria's column. “I'm putting you down for that picnic set you have with the plastic plates and mugs.”

“If there's no water, why don't we use paper?” I said.

“Because we care about the environment.” She tossed me a glance that excluded me from the
we
. “We'll wash our dishes with sand.”

“You're going to show us how to do that, right?” Poco gave her signature nervous laugh.

J.P. jotted in Poco's column. “You can bring hand sanitizer and toilet paper.”

Victoria pulled her nose up from her coffee mug. “They have toilets?”

“No,” J.P. said.

Victoria blinked behind her round glasses and went back to the cup. J.P. continued to dole out the duties—including food preparation —until she came to me. She poised the pen over my column.

“Well?” I said.

“I don't know what you can do.” Her shrug clearly indicated that she didn't think I could do much of anything that mattered. She put down the pen and bobbed a tea bag up and down in her cup. All this edge, and she was drinking Earl Grey?

A silence fell, awkward as an adolescent. “Ryan could be our official photographer for the trip,” Poco said into it, voice straining toward chipper.

“We have yet to see the ones she took of the Alamogordo game,” J.P. said.

“
She
doesn't appreciate being talked about in the third person when
she
is sitting right in the room,” I said. “But
I
have your pictures right here if you want to see them.”

I pulled out my laptop, turned it on, and pulled up the photos. The screen filled with the El Milagro woman sitting on her sagging front porch with her splashing children in the foreground.

Victoria shook her hair away from her face and craned her neck to see. “Whose mother is that?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I took these yesterday for an assignment. Let me find—”

“What's the assignment?” Poco said.

It was another valiant attempt to make me look good for J.P., which I had no desire to do. Still, Poco was the most decent one in the group, and I didn't want to be snitty with her. “It's on the lives of the people up at El Milagro,” I said, still clicking forward and coming up with nothing but the faces that had smiled so bravely for me.

“I don't get it,” J.P. said.

Now,
her
I could be snitty to all day and it wouldn't bother me a bit.

“Doesn't matter,” I said. “Let me just find those soccer shots.”

“Wait.” Poco put her hand on my arm and pointed to the picture on the screen, of a woman who had come by to check on the little girls sleeping in the back of a car. “I know her. That's—” She stopped. Her top teeth clamped on her lower lip.

“She looks familiar to me too,” J.P. said.

As she slanted forward for a better look, Poco gave a starched laugh. “You know what they say. All us Hispanics look alike.” She squeezed my arm again, in much the same way she was squeezing out her words. “You need to watch your time—we should let you get to the soccer pictures.”

I did a double take. She shook her head at me so slightly her bangs didn't move.

“Okay,” I said.

I set up a quick slide show and sat back while the three of them bent their heads over my laptop. There is something about viewing photos of people you adore that evens out the playing field. Even J.P. made motherly noises and nudged Victoria over the midkick shot of Bryan with his blond hair flying about his face. The nut never falls far from the tree.

Poco insisted that I give them a second showing, slower this time, and J.P. wrote the numbers on a clean sheet of the pad so they could place orders with me.

“How much will you charge per print?” she asked. She produced a calculator from her purse.

“I won't charge anything,” I said. “Just tell me what you want and what size and I'll print them at home.”

“Yes, but we'll want them on photo paper. That's expensive.”

“I have plenty.” I patted the pad with my hand and gave her my best squint. “It's what I do.”

I left right after they all placed their orders and J.P. wrote out another copy, for her records. I got the feeling if I didn't come through, she wanted evidence for a civil suit.

Halfway to my car, Poco caught up with me and tugged at the strap on my computer bag.

“I hope you didn't think I was being rude in there,” she said.

I laughed out loud. “You would have to take some serious lessons to come close to rude.”

“I know a lot of those people in the pictures you were showing us from the colonia.”

I stopped at the driver's door to my Saab and leaned against it. She was talking fast and glancing back toward the café.

“I don't talk about my volunteer work in front of J.P.,” she said. “She's always asking me to help out at the church, and I tell her I don't have time, which I don't because I'm doing other things, but she thinks stuffing envelopes for the capital funds campaign should take priority, and I think I'm more useful elsewhere. I'm not going to win that argument with her, you know what I mean?”