Healing Sands (25 page)

I
woke up before the sun the next morning. That will happen when you sleep in a chair that's uncomfortable just to sit on, let alone spend the night in. I pulled the forest green drape open enough so I could see my watch by the crack of light from the outside fixture. Victoria stirred on the bed and resettled.

Her hand had fallen out of the confines of the tent and rested like a lady's white glove on the sheet she'd sworn was crawling with cooties. Poco was curled into her sleeping bag on the sliver of floor between the bed and the swollen bathroom door that didn't close all the way, and both of them snored, responsively, as if they were chanting a psalm.

I couldn't find J.P. until I picked my way into the bathroom and discovered her ensconced, fully clothed, in the empty tub, face pink and mushy with sleep like a three-year-old's. I sat on the toilet seat lid and watched her, half expecting her to sting me with a zinger from the depths of slumber.

She opened her eyes and closed them again.

“Breathe a word of this to anyone and I'll cut your heart out,” she said. “Forget it. You're heartless anyway.”

No, I thought as I tucked a towel around her bare shoulder, I had a heart. And right now, it ached with a longing that was foreign to me.

“What time is it?” J.P. said.

“Six o'clock.”

“We were supposed to be watching the sunrise on the sands right now.”

“So why can't we?”

J.P., who had conducted the entire conversation from behind her eyelids, opened them and squinted at me. “You hate it out there.”

“I did. Until last night.”

She came up on one elbow. “So you do admit when you're wrong.”

“On the rare occasion when I am.”

“Doggone it.”

I watched her climb stiffly from the tub, hair in the worst disarray yet.

“What?” I said.

“That means now I'm going to have to admit I was wrong too.”

“To bring us on this trip?”

She winced at herself in the mirror. “No. That I was wrong about you.”

I squirmed. Just when I'd started to feel a little comfortable, I was going to be expected to “open up.” I'd already done more of that the night before—and on into the wee hours—than I ever had in my life.

“You're not as much of a snob as I thought you were,” J.P. said.

“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

“Yeah, and thanks for throwing it back in my face.”

She left the bathroom. I sat there, still on the toilet seat, confronted with a faint image of myself shrinking down to nothing, shouting insults until I disappeared completely. When J.P. came back in, carrying a hairbrush, a toothbrush, and a tube of toothpaste, I was surprised she could still see me.

She pulled the pointless scrunchie out of her hair and went after the tangled mess with the hairbrush like she was raking the lawn. “I only know one person who's harder to get along with than you are,” she said.

The scrunchie went back on the ponytail, and she squeezed an inch of paste onto the toothbrush with the precision of a scientist.

I wasn't sure why I was still sitting atop the toilet, watching her attend to her hygiene. But I said, “Who would that be?”

“Me,” she said and started in savagely on her enamel.

I waited until she spit and rinsed before I said, “Well, for once you'll get no argument from me.”

“I'm better than I used to be.” She stopped soaping up her hands and gave me a look. “Don't say it.”

I put up my hands, feigning innocence. She went back to lathering.

“I was a real witch when I was going through my divorce,” she said.

I felt my chin drop.

“We have more in common than we want to have. My ex left me for a younger woman. And I use the term
woman
loosely. She was all of twenty-five. Mike's enjoying raising her.”

J.P. ducked her head to the sink and scrubbed at her face, while I got my mouth closed and organized the thoughts chattering in my own head like a group of gossiping women.

So—J.P. was angry. She needed control of everything she did have left or it might get away from her. She was fighting to be in charge of her life, because she hadn't succeeded in being in charge of someone else's.

J.P. was me.

She finished rinsing and, eyes still screwed shut, felt around for a towel. I handed her one, but when she tried to pull it away, I held on.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

She didn't ask for what. I didn't explain. She just stopped pulling on the towel, and I let go. When I got up to leave the bathroom, she straightened and looked at me in the mirror.

“I've seen Dan's little chippy,” she said.

“Chippy?” I said. “Now there's a new one.”

“Just so you know, she can't hold a candle to you.”

I nodded in the mirror.

“Now, do you mind if I pee in private?” she said. “You're as bad as my kid.”

We reached the gate at White Sands just as a sleepy-eyed park ranger was opening it.

“Next to sunset,” he said before he waved us through, “this is the best time of day to be here.”

Evidently not many people knew that, because as J.P. drove the Suburban beyond the last yucca stem and clump of Indian rice grass, we remained the only vehicle on the road. As far as I could tell, we might be the only people left on earth—it was that still. Even we four women kept silent as we climbed out of the car and by unspoken agreement made our separate ways up the dunes.

I climbed at once to the top of one with my camera, padding through sand that was both soft and firm, treading carefully so I wouldn't disturb a world that was allowing me to share its secrets. From there I could see the Sacramento Mountains to the east, smooth and pink, and the San Andres still hiding in the shadows to the west. When I looked up, I was tented by a blue-topaz sky. Gazing down, I saw my own shadow, distinct on the pristine sand. I found myself surrounded by a majesty I didn't even try to photograph, that I could hardly look at without a startling sense of my own insignificance. It occurred to me that the shadow of an ancient Native American in this place may have been his only mirror, the only way he could see who he was.

I wished I could see that myself.

That startled me, too, that thought. It wasn't a wish, or even a scrap of thinking that came from me. It was a prayer—to have a vision of myself that I didn't have to create. Because the one I'd constructed was quickly falling apart.

I raised the camera, more to drive myself away from that path than to capture anything on disk. But I lowered it again. It was clearly a God-path. If I stepped off of it, it would be at my peril.

I closed my eyes—and there was the image I'd been waiting days for. My own footprints in the sand on the slope below.
You know where you've been,
the silence whispered to me.
Now—will that lead you someplace you need to go? Or will you let time blow over your tracks before you find your way?

I squatted and pulled the camera before my face. That couldn't be God. It was too maudlin. Too iffy. I gave a J.P. grunt. Too woo-woo.

Beside my foot was a set of tiny pronged prints that crossed the dune and disappeared over the other side. I shot some close-ups. I started to stand and realized there were other prints I hadn't seen before. Small soft human ones, left by playing children perhaps. Another larger set, probably made by boots. Maybe a lone hiker seeking solitude. Still more from tiny animals skittering through the night, looking for food.

I shot them all, why, I didn't know, except that they told a story, and I was trained to make pictures of stories. Even if I didn't know what they meant.

Before I stood up, I trailed my fingers through the sand. It was tender, and it sparkled even without much sunlight. What had the guide said about that last night? That the scratching together of the grains as they were blown across the basin gave the sand its brilliant, sparkling white. The wind seemed to have created all of this— marching the dunes across the desert one avalanche at a time, blowing it smooth and round with no sharp edges, whispering it into delicate ripples, rubbing each individual grain until it dazzled.

I tried to capture that now with my camera—the amazing things the wind could do, what it could create, without ever being seen . . . And then I turned away from the lens.

“All right,” I said out loud to God. “I get it.”

When I made my way down the dune, Victoria lay against the bottom, arms and legs spread as if she were about to make a sand angel.

“It's like being in on a secret, isn't it?” she whispered.

I sat beside her. “I was thinking something like that, yeah.”

She nodded, indenting the sand with her hooded head. “I knew you'd like it. I'm not a morning person, but this is one of the few things I'll get up for.” She closed her eyes, and I thought she was finished. But in a whisper she added, “You have to get up early if you want to hear God.”

I didn't close my own eyes this time. Maybe I didn't always have to. God had given me an image right here that I could see with my eyes wide open.

When J.P. and Poco joined us, both as quieted by the dunes as Victoria and I, we decided to seek out breakfast. The easy silence only lasted until we were at a table in a truck stop on the eastern outskirts of Las Cruces, warming our hands around mugs of coffee, or in J.P.'s case, tea. Victoria dipped her napkin in her water glass and scrubbed the rim of hers before she'd take a sip.

The moment the server went off with our order, J.P. looked at me.

“Poco has something to tell you.”

I looked at Poco in surprise, but I had nothing on her. She appeared to be stunned.

J.P. rolled her eyes. “What we were talking about when Ryan was packing the car. I thought we agreed we were going to bring it up.”

“
We
,” Poco said. “Not me.” The nervous giggle was conspicuous by its absence. “If you want to talk about it, go ahead.”

J.P. gave her a long, silent chance to reconsider and then turned to me. “We were discussing this thing with your Jake and Miguel Sanchez.”

I gripped my coffee mug. Once again, the moment I started to feel comfortable, J.P. had to poke me in the eye.

“You don't think he did it, do you?” she said.

The only reason I shook my head was because she didn't make it sound as if I were completely out of my mind. Still, irritation crept up my backbone.

“Nobody wants to think their kid is capable of that,” J.P. said, “so I guess I don't blame you.”

“J.P., this is not at all how I remember our conversation,” Poco said, voice stiff.

J.P. sat back in the booth. “I wanted you to tell it in the first place.”

“Tell
what
?” I said.

“Jake and Miguel were friends, Ryan,” Poco said. “Did you know that?”

“I know they played soccer together—and Jake talked him into trying out for some special team.”

“The select team,” J.P. said. “It's hugely competitive. Jake made it.” “I know,” I said.

“And so did Miguel Sanchez,” Poco said.

“I know that too.”

J.P. brushed the ever-present tendrils impatiently off of her forehead. “Which is why it makes no sense that Jake would want to hurt him. They're friends. He's not a threat. Neither one of them was named captain—Poco's Diego got that.”

I felt my eyes widen at Poco. “Your son is on that team too?”

Poco nodded. “I was at the tryouts. Jake and Miguel were hugging when the announcement was made, and punching each other the way boys do. Then the other boy Jake hangs around with, who also—”

“He's your ex-husband's girlfriend's kid,” J.P. said, nudging me. “Ian Tassert?”

“Huh?” Victoria said.

Poco shook her head. “No, his last name's Iverton. He hiked Jake up on his shoulders and was parading all around with him.”

“Anyway,” J.P. said, “we just didn't know if you were aware that Jake and Miguel were friends.”

“I was. But Dan—was he at the tryouts?”

“No,” Poco said. “He had tryouts of his own going on. I guess that's why he sent Ginger to watch Jake and Ian.”

J.P. grunted. “It's like, not only can you not believe Jake did it, you don't know why he would have done it if he did do it.”

“Huh?” Victoria said.

J.P. started to explain, but Victoria shook her head. “Ginger Tassert?”

J.P. bobbed her tea bag up and down. “Yeah, what about her?”

“She lives in one of the apartment complexes we own.” She gave me a half smile. “I have some good news for you there. She's about to be evicted because she hasn't paid her rent in three months.”

I didn't tell her that was not good news at all. I could still hear Ginger saying she didn't live at Dan's—yet. And why hadn't Alex told me Ian had also tried out for the team?

“Ryan, are you okay?” Poco said.

I was saved from answering by the ringing of my cell phone. Dan's name came up on the screen, and only because I wanted to get away from the table did I excuse myself to take it. I could always hang up when I got outside.

“Ryan?” Dan said.

I froze, hand on the doorknob. “What's wrong? Dan—what is it?”

“It's Jake. He wasn't in his bed when I went to his room this morning.”

“What?”

“They found him.”

“Who is
they?”

“The police.”

“The
police? What
is going on?”

“I'm trying to tell you. He sneaked out and went to the high school for Ian's meet. A teacher knew he wasn't supposed to be there, so she called the cops.”

I made my way out the door and sagged against the front wall of the café.

“So he's back home with you, then,” I said. “And he's okay?”