Healing Sands (11 page)

“Here he is,” Olivia said to Ryan and then skittered to her desk.

Ryan's bright eyes were focused completely on Sully, as if she expected him to begin the session right there. He ushered her back to the counseling room before she could start firing questions at him.

As it was, she was barely seated in the oversize chair, which held her like a big hand, before she had the first one out. “Do you do cognitive therapy?”

They were obviously dispensing with the pleasantries. He'd go with that for now.

“You're familiar with it?” he said.

“It's where you give the patient alternative ways of thinking and reacting—in my case, to anger.”

If he had to guess, Sully would say she'd looked up anger management on the Internet the night before.

“That's basically it,” he said.

“Good. That's what I want. I already tried watching football and screaming at the ref and throwing pillows at the television. That only makes me want to tear the rest of the living room apart.”

Sully was impressed. Innumerable expensive studies had shown that angry people who already knew they were ticked off didn't feel better after they punched something out. That only worked for people who weren't in touch with their anger—and that didn't describe Ryan Coe.

“And I don't want the relaxation training, which I know is another method.” Ryan squinted as she shook her head. “That sounds too woo-woo to me.”

“Woo-woo,” Sully said, grinning.

Ryan gave him a hard look. “Look, can we get something straight, Dr. Crisp?”

“Absolutely.”

“If you find me amusing, this isn't going to work out. At all.”

Sully settled back in his chair, hands folded at his waist to keep from rubbing them together in anticipation.

“I think you have an intelligent sense of humor,” he said. “I appreciate that. If you say something funny, I'm probably going to at least smile.” He did. “You'll have to cut me some slack here.”

“Fine. Sorry.”

Sully let out a
buzz
. As he expected, her face went deadpan.

“What was
that
?” she said.

“That's my signal that you've broken one of the few rules I have. No need for apologies. We're just getting to know each other here.”

The small pointed chin lifted. “What are the rest of the rules, then?”

“We'll discover those as we go along.”

“No,” she said.

Sully felt his eyebrows rise.

“I don't want to hear that obnoxious buzzing sound again, so give them all to me now, and I won't break them.”

Sully considered arguing the point and thought better of it. If she was going to come out of this session still speaking to him, he'd better not antagonize her in the first five minutes. Although from the right-angle way she was sitting in a curl-up chair, he judged it might already be too late. Game Show Theology was going to be a hard sell with her.

“Fair enough,” Sully said. He spread a hand and ticked off his fingers. “The rules of the game, as it were. One, what we just discussed. Two, I won't judge you, and you won't judge yourself. Three—”

“Define
judge.
”

Sully let his hand drop. “Example. You came in with anger issues. I'm not going to tell you that you're an evil person because you break a plate or scream obscenities. By the same token, you don't get to say that about yourself either.”

“So you're saying it's okay to smash crockery and cuss.”

“No. I'm saying doing that doesn't make you a monster. Our job is to find out
why
you do that—or whatever it is you do when you're angry—and figure out a way to use that knowledge to give you the control you're looking for.”

She nodded, eyes still on him as if she were trying to soak him in. There was no doubt she wanted to fix this. He just wasn't sure how patient she was going to be with the process.

“Back to the rules,” she said. “And then I have another question.”

With the strange sensation that he was the one being led down a path, Sully put up three fingers. “Number three, if we get to the end of a session and one of us is angry, we don't leave without at least talking about it. We may not come to an agreement, but we don't walk out muttering under our breath, either one of us.”

“I didn't think therapists got angry at their patients,” she said.

“Yeah, we get our hackles up, same as the next person.”

She gave him another blank look.

“What?” he said.

“You're just not what I expected,” she said.

“What did you expect?”

She opened her mouth, then shook her head. “It doesn't matter. What are the rest of the rules?”

“That's it,” Sully said. That was, in fact, more than it. He'd made up the last one on the spot, just for her. “But you know, your expectations of me do matter. This isn't just going to be about me giving you tools and you going out and using them, although we'll do some of that. That's the cognitive therapy you were talking about.” He recrossed his legs as he warmed up. “This is going to be more about a relationship—you getting to know me so that hopefully you'll come to trust me, and me getting to know you so I can decide how best to help you.”

Sully waited. If his instincts were right, this lady
was
in touch with her anger. What she wasn't in touch with was the hurt that made it happen. Getting her to talk about that might be a feat right up there with the loaves and fishes.

Finally she said, “All right. What do you need to know about me?”

“Let's start with your current situation,” Sully said.

Ryan squinted again before she began. “My current situation is that I've been divorced for two years because my husband—ex-husband— was great at sculpture and terrible at marriage.” She pointed her eyes at him. “And we won't be getting into that.”

Sully nodded her on. They
would
get into that. But not today. “I have two sons, ten and fifteen. When Dan and I got divorced, I assumed the boys would live with me, but they surprised me in court by announcing to the judge that they would prefer to live with their father.” She smiled without humor. “He was terrible at fatherhood, too, but they didn't see it that way.” She took in some air. “Anyway, I took an assignment in Chad— Africa—and when I came back, Dan had moved them from Chicago, where they'd always lived, to New Mexico. He was in some artist-in-residence program in Roswell, and then he just migrated with the boys to Las Cruces. If I wanted to be near them, I had to come here, too, so I resigned from the AP and got a job with the Las Cruces paper.”

She stopped for another breath. Some of the bravado had gone out of her eyes, but she plunged back in with let's-get-this-over-with energy.

“I've tried to let my boys know that I love them and I want to be part of their lives, and my younger son, Alex, is coming around. But the older one, Jake, basically won't have anything to do with me. And now he's been arrested for allegedly backing over a Mexican boy with a pickup truck, on purpose. Which, although Jake was found at the wheel of the vehicle, I know he did not do.”

She stopped and looked hard at Sully, as if she were daring him to disagree. He wasn't about to.

“But his father thinks he did,” she said. “The police aren't investigating further, because for them this is a slam dunk. The lawyer is talking about getting Jake off with probation. And my son won't tell me what happened so I can help him. Which all frustrates me to no end, and then I get . . . furious. And on Sunday I picked up a piece of scrap metal in my husband's studio and almost threw it at him.” Ryan's face had grown ashen. “I'm afraid that if something doesn't change and my son is sent to prison, I'll do worse than pitch a piece of sculpture. That's my current situation, Dr. Crisp.”

Sully wanted to fall back into his Southern instincts and say,
Ryan, bless your heart.
But her eyes almost dared him to try sympathy on her.

“That's a lot to deal with,” he said.

“Well, I
have
to deal with it. And I have to do it without hurling art supplies. So—what have you got?”

“At the moment, another question. Bear with me.”

She snapped a nod.

“Would you say you were an angry person before your son's arrest?”

She straightened her small self in the chair again, head barely coming to the top of the back, feet dangling just off the floor. “I got angry when people did stupid things, if that's what you mean. I've never been one to hold back when I think somebody's in the wrong.”

Sully had no doubt about that. “Was it ever a problem before?” “I don't see how that matters.”

“Maybe it doesn't,” Sully said. “But it's always a good idea to check out all the possibilities.”

Her eyes moved away again, and she frowned at the picture on the wall—a painting of White Sands in a folk-art frame he'd just hung there that morning.

“When my boys—Jake, mainly, because Alex just wanted to be like his big brother—when they told the judge they wanted Dan to have custody of them, yeah, I saw red.”

Sully watched her swallow, but beyond that she scarcely moved, as if the memory had frozen her.

“I stood up and yelled something at my ex-husband. I don't even remember what it was. The judge told me to either sit down or leave the courtroom. I apologized, but I know I made his decision for him. He said his reason for awarding custody to Dan was that my job took me out of town too often to be the more effective parent, even though I had all of that covered and in writing. I knew he based his call solely on my outburst.”

She was obviously using every thread of willpower she had to keep from reenacting the scene right there.

“You were blindsided,” he said. “I wouldn't call that an out-of-control reaction.”

Ryan put up a hand and gave him the squint he was already starting to expect when he was about to be called on the carpet. “Look, don't do that,” she said.

“What did I do?”

“You're trying to make me feel okay about myself. I don't need that.”

“I'll consider myself buzzed.” Sully slanted toward her. “But just so we're clear, what I'm actually doing is making sure you have perspective. The kinds of things you've had to deal with are not just the normal stuff of life. I don't know anyone who could handle those situations with perfect aplomb.” He put up his own hand before she could protest. “I'm not saying your actions have been okay, but I don't want you to think we're going to turn you into Mr. Spock. We wouldn't want to turn off your feelings. That's where the signals are that alert us to what we need to pay attention to.”

She pressed her lips together, revealing a pair of lines on either side of her mouth, the only real sign of wear on an otherwise ageless face.

“So what did you do then?” Sully asked.

“Like I said, I had an opportunity to go to Chad, and I couldn't pass it up.”

“Was it just the opportunity that compelled you to go?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did you leave the States angry?”

Back to the painting. Sully waited her out.

When she looked back at him, her eyes glittered. “Yes, I was angry. I knew my boys chose their father because it was Disneyland when they were with him. He was going to let them do whatever they wanted, and I couldn't stand to watch it.”

“Anything else?”

“What else do you want?”

“Just giving you a chance to say everything you need to say. You don't have to worry about how it comes out in here.”

“It was obvious that throwing a tantrum wasn't going to bring my boys back to me. There was nothing I could do, so . . .” Ryan shrugged and leveled her eyes at him.

You left because you couldn't stand the pain,
Sully wanted to say to her. But it was too soon.

He leaned back. “How did it go in Chad?”

“I was only supposed to be there for a few weeks, but it turned into a six-month project.”

“Sounds intense.”

“I was at a center in N'Djamena run by the Christian Children's Fund. They're trying to rehabilitate child soldiers demobilized from the FUC in Darfur.”

“More fuel for anger.”

“Beyond. But I never felt like I was going to lose it.”

“What made the difference?”

Once more she became still, as if she were trying to avoid being seen. For someone who called herself out of control, she was in almost complete charge of her body language.

“When I was taking pictures, telling the story,” she said finally, “I felt like I was doing something about it. I kept thinking that if I could capture the images that were tearing at
my
heart, someone might be compelled to try to stop what was happening to the kids who are still out there fighting on
all
sides in that mess.” She cupped her hands in front of her, as if she held the images she spoke of. “Some of those boys were still hard as nuts. Or they tried to be. They were as young as ten years old. I just kept shooting and shooting, hoping they would show me what was under all the hate somebody else had drilled into them.”

She let her hands drop and looked at Sully as if she'd all but forgotten he was there. The soft layer she'd begun to reveal slid back toward its hiding place behind her eyes.

“And did they ever show you?” Sully asked.

“One did. He was twelve. Thin as a pole, like my boys.” She balled her hand into a fist and looked at it. “He was the toughest of all of them—he would even spit on the ground when he saw me with my equipment. And then one night I found him out on the volleyball court, crying his eyes out.” Ryan shook her head. “It was the moment I'd been waiting six months for, and I couldn't even raise my camera.”