Healing Sands (28 page)

I wasn't aware that I was trying to cry again until I heard my own hard sobs. An image came to me unbidden, unwelcome . . . my son withering under a brutal light that never went out. I knew in that moment that he wouldn't survive in prison. And even if he never loved me as his mother again, I had to keep him out.

That conviction grew stronger as the day wore into the night. Jake didn't eat. He slept only fitfully and spent most of his time staring at his hands as if he didn't know what to do with them. Most telling was the way he shadowed me every time I left the room he was in. He tried to make it look like it was merely a coincidence that we wound up in the kitchen at the same time, when moments before he seemed to be conked out on the couch. After three or four times, I knew he was afraid to be alone. Before, that was all he had wanted.

When it was time to call it a night, I suggested he sleep on the couch, and I curled up in the recliner and pretended to drift off. I was awake for every leather-crackling toss and turn he made, every trip to the bathroom, every sigh that came from some sad place in his soul.

“Can I get you anything?” I said around three.

“A new life,” he said.

“A new life?”

He didn't answer. His breathing became shallow and even, and I wasn't sure he hadn't been half-asleep already when he said it.

But it still made my decision for me about the next day. In the morning, after I'd brought in the paper—and discovered a bag of Jake's clothes on the front porch—and made the coffee and taken a shower, I sat on the edge of the coffee table and put my hand on his arm. He came awake with terror in his eyes.

“It's okay,” I said. “It's time to get up.”

“Why?” he said. “I'm not going back, am I?”

“No. But you do have a job.”

He licked at dry lips and squinted at me.

“Get up,” I said. “You're working for me now.”

He didn't argue, and I was glad. I didn't want to tell him I wasn't leaving him alone, not for a minute, for a number of reasons. Not the least of which was that if he wanted a “new life,” what did he intend to do with the old one?

We spent the morning at a ribbon cutting for a new preschool and a post-robbery scene at a liquor store. Jake carried equipment I usually lugged myself and held lights I didn't need and gave me directions I could have gotten from Perdita. He did it all without complaint. He was quiet, though not sullen, and it took every scrap of self-restraint—and a few mental visits to White Sands—not to try to coax him out. At least he'd stopped trembling, and when I asked him where he wanted to go for lunch, he chose Arby's.

I called Frances while he took a bite of roast beef and chewed it endlessly, as if he couldn't quite make himself swallow it. I'd already told her he'd be with me today.

“What else do you have for me?” I said to her.

“Nothing at the moment. I'm going to free you up to work on your colonias piece.”

“Oh.”

“I'm thinking you should go to that area off the mall and get the food, the crafts, the smiles for the tourists—you know, the stuff that lets us believe they're happy being poor and oppressed. That'll be jarring next to the rest of it.”

My heart took a dive. She was sending me with Jake right into the neighborhood where his life had fallen apart.

“Keep your cell phone on, of course,” Frances said. “How's your son doing?”

“Uh, fine.”

“Is this some kind of take-your-kid-to-work thing?”

I could hear her typing, so I didn't have to answer.

“I'll call you if I need you for anything,” she said. “Go for the home run.”

I closed the phone and tossed it onto the table. Jake winced.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “Did I startle you?”

“I just get freaked out,” he said.

I took a bite and waited to see if there would be more, but he continued to tear up the sandwich he wasn't eating.

“Look, I don't want to freak you out more,” I said, “but I have to go over by, like, Second and Third Streets and shoot some stuff for a piece I'm doing. On Mexican legals.”

I waited again. He stopped ripping at the bread.

“Are you okay with that?” I asked.

“Why wouldn't I be?” His old defensiveness crept back into his voice.

“Look, Jake, I'm not trying to bring something up here. I just need to know if you can handle going down there right now.”

He shrugged. Frustration needled at me, but I took a deep breath.

“All right, I'm going to ask you some questions, and all you have to do is nod or shake your head. I think we can pull that off without getting into a shouting match, don't you?”

He sat back in the chair and nodded.

“Did you spend much time down there by where Miguel got hurt before that day?”

“That's the only time I ever went.”

“Did you ever meet any of Miguel's family?”

“No.”

“Did you see his mother at the select team tryouts?”

His face jerked up. “How did you know about that?”

“Diego's mother,” I said. “She was just telling me how good you were to Miguel,” I said. “Did you see Miguel's mom?”

“Why do you want to know that?”

“I just need to know if you think she or anybody else in their family would recognize you if we saw them this afternoon.”

“Only his mom came to the tryouts,” he said in a voice I could barely hear. “I didn't even meet her.”

I tried to envision the afternoon ahead. I could do all long shots and avoid the Ocotillo and the other restaurant where Elena Sanchez had worked. If Jake wore his ball cap and I kept him busy, it might work. With one exception.

I swallowed. “I need to ask you one more question, and it's only to protect you from somebody wanting to attack you or something.”

He squinted at me, the way I knew I did at people when they were making no sense. But he shrugged.

“The day Miguel was hit by the truck,” I said. “Did anybody see you sitting there in it before the police came?”

“There wasn't anybody else around.”

“Nobody? Then who called 911?”

“I did.”

I stared at him. “
You
did? Jake, I don't understand. Did you have a cell phone?”

“You said just one more question.”

My head spun like a bicycle wheel, and I stuck the first stick I could find into its spokes. “Okay. That's all I need to know. I think we'll be all right down there. But if you see anybody you recognize, who might know who you are, just—tug on your earlobe.”

“Do what?”

“Like a signal. I'll see that, and we'll split. Deal?”

A long breath came out of his nose, the relief I knew he was trying to disguise.

I was glad that afternoon that he didn't talk much. I needed the mind space to mull over what he'd told me. He'd been in the alley alone, in a truck he didn't know how to drive. And after he ran over his friend with it, he magically pulled a cell phone from somewhere and called 911. It was a good thing I did have work to do, because otherwise I couldn't have kept from shaking Jake until he gave me answers.

There was a little activity in front of a dark-looking coffee shop at one end of the mall, so we stopped there first. A group of older Hispanic men were having a good-natured argument, and they mugged enthusiastically for me before I could even raise the camera. I wasn't happy with the busyness of the scene—it would look cluttered online—so I switched to a 400 lens to get a long view of the empty mall.

All the while, I tried not to let Jake see me glancing at him to make sure he wasn't about to go into posttraumatic shock. We were nowhere close to the alley, but I had come to think of it all as Miguel's stomping ground.

I was shooting the last series for the day when Jake gave a stifled cry. When I looked up, he was fumbling for his earlobe.

“What?” I whispered. “Who did you see?”

I looked where he was looking. Detective Levi Baranovic approached us from no more than five feet away. How long he'd been standing there, I didn't know.

“Mrs. Coe,” he said. “Jacob.”

I didn't correct him, though I did want to throw Jake behind me and shield him with my body.

“Is there a problem?” I said. “Jake was released into my custody. I was told I could bring him out in public if I kept him with me.”

He cast his green-eyed gaze over Jake. “Would you just step over there while I talk to your mother?”

Jake's eyes went wild.

“Why don't you pack up my camera,” I said, handing it to him. And with a hard look at Baranovic I added, “I won't be long.”

The detective lowered his voice to a growl. “You're taking pictures of these people for the paper?”

“Yes.”

“What are you trying to do?”

“I'm trying to tell their story.”

“What story? Don't you think Elena Sanchez and her family have been through enough without you trying to make them look like what happened to Miguel was his fault? Their fault?”

I had to talk with my teeth clamped together to keep from screaming. “You have no idea what I'm trying to do. They're suffering from injustices most people don't know about. That's what this story is—”

His gaze sharpened. “So you're going to tell their pitiful tale and make it look like you're on their side, so your son couldn't possibly have—”

“Are you going to charge me with something, or can I take Jake home? Because I don't think you have the authority to insult me.” I started off, but I turned back. “No, wait. How about if I ask you a question, Detective? Have you people traced the 911 call? From the day of the shooting?”

He parked his hands on his hips. “It was a disposable cell phone. There's no way to trace who made the call.”

“I'll tell you who made it—Jake himself.”

“And you know this how?”

“Because he told me.”

“Did he tell you anything else?”

“No.”

“Look, I'm going to tell
you
something, Mrs. Coe: leave this to us. Meanwhile, if you raise sympathy for the Sanchez family, which I agree they deserve, you're going to make things worse for Jacob when he goes to trial.”

“I don't see that.”

“You should. You're part of the media—you've seen it happen. You've probably
made
it happen.”

“What?”

“Do you want your son tried in the newspaper? Because that's what will happen if you do this.” He jerked his thumb toward Jake. “Why don't you put your camera away and prepare your son for what's about to happen to
him
?”

I didn't watch him go. Jake did, and I knew he'd heard every word.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

A
ll right, I hate to admit it,” Ryan said the moment she climbed into the chair. “You win.”

Although Sully could see the telltale puffs of sleeplessness under her eyes and the tension in the muscles of her neck, she wasn't as tightly wound as he'd seen her before. She was, he guessed, too exhausted for a fight.

“I didn't know we were in a competition,” he said, grinning. “You wanted no part of my Game Show Theology. I couldn't get you past the buzzes. We didn't even make it to the ding-ding-dings.”

He could have predicted the squint.

“I'm too tired to tell you that you're a freak.”

“So how did I win?”

“I tried what you gave me, and it worked.”

“Then it sounds like
you
won.”

Her smile was wan. “Does that mean I'm cured?”

“What do you think?”

“I think it got me through the weekend and yesterday without destroying any more property. That and the fact that I have my son with me now.”

Sully felt his eyes widen.

Ryan filled him in on all that had transpired since their conversation Saturday, complete with her success at not grilling her son until he broke, which, she said, she might have done if she hadn't had White Sands to escape to.

“That's taken everything I've got,” she said. “I'm grateful for the advice you gave me, but seriously, I don't know how much longer I can keep from blowing.” She put her hands to her throat. “I can feel it right here, just waiting to explode.”

“You're free to explode in here if you need to.”

“But I don't want to. Isn't that the point of therapy?”

“The point is for you to identify what you feel and express it in a way that's true to you but doesn't ultimately make things worse than they are, for you or anybody else.”

She squinted again, and new lines fanned out from the corners of her eyes. “I know what I feel.”

“And that is?”

“Anger.”

Sully resituated himself in his chair. Time to go in. “My guess is that anger is the way you're
expressing
how you feel. But
what
you feel is something else.”

“And you know what I feel how?” Before Sully could answer, she put her hand up, eyes closed. “Forget I said that. I come to you for help, and then I keep throwing it back in your face. It's my default reaction when I'm frustrated.”

“That may be one of the most astute things I've ever had a client tell me.”

Ryan grunted. “I bet you say that to all the girls.”

“Do you think that?”

“No.” She did her signature hand-through-the-hair thing. “That's my other default reaction. Sarcasm.”

“And I have to tell you, it's pretty funny sometimes.”

“I'm glad you're amused.”

Sully leaned forward. “Listen, Ryan, we're not trying to change your defaults. Sometimes they serve you well. What we're trying to do is give you other options.”

“Then bring them on.”

“I want to try something.” He grinned at her again. “You're going to think this is woo-woo, but I want you to trust me.”