Healing Sands (33 page)

“It doesn't surprise me,” he said. “He fools around with some stuff when he's out in the studio with me, but it's hard for him to admit it's good. I guess I was like that.” He gave a small shrug. “Until you came along.”

The food came along, too, and I only half listened as the señora and Dan exchanged a concoction of Spanish and English while the huevos and hot sauce were distributed. My mind flipped back to my conversation with Jake and further to what I'd told Sullivan Crisp. Now God was dangling it in front of me with a vague image of me pushing and pulling at a wad of clay.

Dan motioned his fork toward my plate. “Is your breakfast okay?”

“It's fine.” I took a breath. “I was just thinking how ironic it is.”

“What is?”

“That I was the one who pushed you to pursue your art, and I was the one who made you miserable when you did.”

Dan stared down into his plate. “We don't need to get into that.” “
We
don't.
I
do. Just call it part of my therapy work.”

He looked up at me, eyes startled.

“Jake and I drove past your work on the campus, and I saw what it was you were always trying to do. Only, I think you couldn't do it because you couldn't be all that you were with me.”

“Look, Ryan . . .”

“Just hear me out—I'm on a roll.”

He put his fork down.

“I'm not trying to pass the buck,” I said, “but I think when I tried to get you to be who I thought I wanted you to be, I was taking out on you what my father did to me. And I just want to say—I'm sorry.”

I pushed a hunk of egg around in a puddle of salsa and wished Dan would say something and hoped he would say nothing. Whichever he did, I couldn't respond with anger anymore, but I didn't know what else to do.

“It wasn't all you, Ryan.” Dan's voice was husky. “I let you and the boys down. I can't make it up to you, but I'm trying to make it up to them.”

I nodded at my breakfast. He breathed a sigh so long and so full, it was as if he hadn't breathed in a long time. I'd set him free. I was left wrapped up in sadness.

“They're no good cold.” He tapped his fork on my plate.

“So—is Ginger moving in today?” I said.

“I'm sorry—what?”

“Ginger,” I said. “I assumed she'd be moving into your place now.”

Dan looked genuinely offended. “In the first place, I'm not going to have any woman I'm not married to live in my house with me. Especially not with two boys under my roof.”

“She just said some things to me that led me to believe . . .” I trailed off and wished I hadn't said it.

Dan frowned. “What she led you to believe is what she wants to believe,” he said. “Let's just say she's more liberal in her interpretation of the term
extramarital
.”

“That's way too much information,” I said.

“I want you to know I'm not setting a bad example for Jake and Alex. Ginger never spends the night at my place, and I don't sleep over at hers. We haven't even—”

“Okay, Dan, got it.” I was seeing images I
knew
weren't coming from God. I took a bite of egg.

Dan's phone rang. When he looked at it, his face colored at the tops of both cheeks. That was Dan for
I'm in an awkward position right now, and I wish somebody would get me out of it.

As he put his hand over the mouthpiece, I pushed my chair back and held up the check. “You want me to take care of this?” I whispered.

Dan shook his head, looking absolutely adolescent. The warm fuzzies I'd started to feel bristled like porcupine quills at the back of my neck. Ginger might not be able to get the man into bed, but she still had him in every other place.

I was halfway home and still chastising myself for whatever it was I'd started to feel when my own cell phone rang. A garbled voice said, “Mom?”

I swerved involuntarily. “Jake? Are you okay?”

“No.”

At least, that was what I thought he said. It was less a word than a sob, which turned into two and three, raspy and young and terrified.

“Son—what's wrong?” I was already speeding up and jerking my head over my shoulder to get into the fast lane.

“Miguel's dead!” he said. “Mom, he's dead!”

I jammed my foot on the accelerator and cut in front of an SUV.

“Jake—did you have a bad dream?”

“It's real! That lawyer called. She said Miguel's dead!”

After that I understood nothing else that he said. He sobbed into the phone while I took every turn on two squealing wheels and left the door hanging open as I jumped out in my driveway and tore into the house.

Jake was on the couch in a fetal position, rocking himself and still clutching the phone. I peeled it out of his hand, threw both it and mine to the floor, and took him in my arms.

“He's dead!” he wailed over and over. “He's dead!”

“I have to call the lawyer, Jake,” I said. “I have to find out what's going on. Can you hold on just for a minute?”

I pulled my cell phone to me with my foot, and with angry, twitching fingers I fumbled for Uriel Cohen's number. She picked up on the first ring.

“Ryan,” she said. “I am so sorry. When Jake answered I thought he was you, and I just started talking.”

“Then you did call.”

“I thought it was your cell phone.”

“What did you tell him?” I was gritting my teeth, but I could hear my rage slipping between them.

“It's not good,” she said.

“Did you tell him Miguel Sanchez is dead?”

“Like I said, Jake didn't say hello, so I just started talking.”

“I don't care about that! Tell me!”

Uriel sighed heavily. “Miguel died a few hours ago. Detective Baranovic called me.”

“Why you?”

“He has to re-arrest Jake, and he wanted to give you the opportunity to bring him in. It's customary to do that through the attorney.”

I slipped out from under Jake and somehow got myself into the kitchen before I exploded into the phone with a violent whisper. “Re-arrest him?”

“They have to book him for murder. And, just so you can be prepared, the judge isn't going to release him to you or his father this time. He may set bail.”

“You didn't tell Jake
that,
did you
?
”

“No, I didn't tell him that. I wouldn't have told him anything if I'd known it was him and not you.”

I sucked in air and couldn't seem to get enough. I grabbed onto the sink to keep myself from hurling the phone through the window. “All right,” I said. “What do I do?”

“I'll meet you both at the precinct. Tell Jake not to say a word to them until I get there—he might want to start talking now, and he shouldn't. Speak to your ex about what kind of money you can pull together.” She hesitated. “And, Ryan, get yourself calmed down. I know it's hard, but if you go down there raving—”

“Mom!”

I hung up and ran for the living room. Jake was at the front window, his face in a spasm of horror.

I followed his terror through the glass to the white car at the curb whose door had just opened. Detective Baranovic climbed out and nodded to two uniformed officers in a patrol car behind him.

Jake threw himself at me, hands groping at my sleeves, my collar, my hair. “Don't let them take me back to jail! I can't go there!”

“Okay, listen—Jake, listen.” I clamped my hands to the sides of his face. “Just be quiet one minute.”

My voice was harder than I wanted it to be, but it was the only way I could keep from becoming hysterical myself. His screams subsided into sobs.

“I'm going too. The lawyer'll meet us there, and I'll call your dad and we'll get you back here as soon as we can. We'll pay whatever bail we have to.”

“I can't go in there alone, Mom!”

His arms went over his head, and I watched panic seize his face. I grabbed his wrists in my hands and pulled him to me.

“You're not going to be alone, Jake,” I said. “God's going to be there.”

He gave his head a wild shake.

“Listen to me! I've been in some scary places, and God was always there. If he doesn't make a picture in your head, then you make one.” I shook his wrists. “Just like you did in the mall, okay? Just frame it in your head like I showed you and focus on it. Swear to me that you'll do that.”

I took his face in my hands once more and shook his head up and down until he was nodding on his own. The sobs dissolved into ragged breaths I knew he was barely controlling. At the knock on the door, I kissed his forehead and let go of his face.

When I peered out the window again, Detective Baranovic was standing on the porch, just to one side of the door as if he expected me to open up on him with an assault rifle. Or my mouth. His body looked steeled for what Uriel Cohen had warned me was coming. What she couldn't have prepared me for were his eyes. They had the same fighting-it-back look I could feel in my own. This wasn't about Jake for him.

I'm the only chance for closure Miguel has,
he had told me.

And I knew with terror in my heart that he had come here to have it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

T
hings began to pass in a series of images that were all too real.

Uniformed officers with guns on their belts handcuffing Jake and reading him his rights while he silently wept.

Me sitting on a bench in court, chilled to a place in me that couldn't be warmed by the jacket Uriel Cohen wrapped around my shoulders.

Hearing a judge with a voice like barbed wire arraign Jacob Daniel Coe on murder in the second degree. Listening as he announced that there would be no bail, that he was remanded to the Dona Ana County Jail—announced it in the same tone he used for the jaded drug dealers who came before him, as if Jake, too, were a criminal beyond hope of rehabilitation.

In another image I watched my son let himself be led away without saying a word. He didn't have to. The curve in his back spoke of a shame that wasn't his to feel.

In still another I sat with Uriel Cohen in a corridor of the courthouse while she talked to me about options. Until I told her to shut up and leave me alone because I hated her options and I wasn't so crazy about her, either. Before she heaved her body down the hall, she patted my shoulder. I hated that too.

All of those images were punctuated with me trying to find Dan. I called his cell and his house phone. I even crunched my teeth and found Ginger's number on my call history and dialed it. No one answered anywhere. When Uriel left me in the courthouse, I was pulled so tightly between panic and wrath I knew I was going to snap—and that wasn't one of the options. Not for me, not for Jake, not for—

Alex.

If they say he has to go to jail, will you tell me?
he'd said.
I just want to know right away.

I didn't know whether I was going to tell him or not. But I snapped the phone open once more.

“Poco,” I said when she answered. “Do you still have Alex?”

“He left before lunch. Dan picked him up.”

“Where did they go? I can't find anybody!”

My voice echoed in the empty hall, taunting me with its helplessness.

“I don't know,” Poco said. “Ginger was in the car. Alex told Felipe he didn't want to go.”

“Go where? Did he say?”

“No. Ryan, what's going on? You're scaring me.”

I strode down the hall, one hand with a death grip on the phone, the other one shoving its way through my hair. “Keep talking to me, Poco,” I said, “or I am going to blow—so help me, I'm going to blow.”

“Okay, where are you?”

“I'm at the courthouse.”

“Tell me what's happened.”

I knew she was forcing her voice into calm, counselor mode, and I clung to it as I went through it all for her. The more I talked, the less like an image everything became. By the time I got to my car, I was almost blinded by its stark reality, and I began to shake. Head to toe, in spasms I couldn't control.

“Ryan,” Poco said, “do not drive. Do you hear me? Just sit in your car, and I'll come get you.”

“You don't have to do that.”

“If I hear the motor start, I'm calling the police. Stay there.”

Her firmness surprised me, but I folded into it.

“Okay,” I said and crawled into the front seat of the Saab, where I sat, phone still clutched to my chest, until she pulled up beside me ten minutes later. Victoria got out of the passenger side, pulled me out, and wrapped me in a blanket that smelled like the inside of a Catholic church I'd once photographed—a strange detail from the past flashing into the present darkness. I was pretty sure I was losing my mind.

“J.P.'s going to meet us at your house,” Poco said when they had me tucked into the backseat with a covered mug of tea.

“What about your kids?” I said.

“They're all at my house. You just worry about you, Ryan.”

“I can't worry about me. I have to worry about Jake.”

I saw them exchange glances.

“Drink that,” Victoria said.

“I don't drink tea,” I said. And then I took a sip and it tasted like arms around you and the promise of cookies. By the time we got to my place, I had finished it.

J.P. was waiting on the front porch, the insulated bag she used for soccer snacks over her shoulder. I told her I wasn't hungry and then proceeded to drink the cup of tomato soup she put in my hands after Poco pointed me to the couch. My insides slowly warmed and stopped shaking, and my mind gathered itself away from flashes and images and back into the clear, steely situation I was faced with.

“I hate this,” I said.

J.P. grunted.

“I hate that there is absolutely nothing I can do. I can
always
do something.”