Healing Sands (29 page)

“Trust is
not
one of my default reactions,” she said drily.

“I don't know. You walked out of here angry last week, but when you were in trouble, you called me.” He tilted his head at her. “So—you want to try trusting me again?”

She cocked an eyebrow. “Depends what it is.”

Sully went to the table in the corner where he'd set the two-by-two wooden sandbox he'd made Sunday, complete with the finest-grade sand he could find at Home Depot. When he carried it to her, Ryan's mouth went up on one side.

“You're right,” she said. “This
is
woo-woo.”

“You haven't seen anything yet.” Sully held it on one palm like a waiter's tray. “Where shall I put this so you can play in it while we talk?”

“Excuse me?”

“Just with your hands—unless you'd like some toy trucks or a bucket.”

She was shaking her head, but she made a lap for the sandbox. It was a perfect fit.

“You're going to explain this to me, right?” she said.

Sully crouched beside the chair and put a hand in the sand. He lifted up a palmful, let it slide between his fingers, made an S in the pile and smoothed it over.

“Is this supposed to be calming?” Ryan said.

“It can be. Or it can keep you busy physically while we pursue things that might make you want to go into your default.”

She looked doubtful.

“How often do you ‘flip out' when you're on an assignment?” Sully asked.

“Never.”

“Besides the fact that you have a tremendous amount of integrity, I think a lot of that is that you're physically busy.” He shrugged. “That's why some people work out, punch a bag, that kind of thing.”

Ryan tapped a finger on top of the sand. “You aren't afraid I'm going to throw this at you?”

“Are
you
afraid of that?”

She put a whole hand in and let the sand cover her fingers. “Weirdly, I'm not. I just want to help my son so bad I'll do whatever it takes.”

“Then here's what I think it's going to take.” Sully nodded at the sandbox. “You're doing fine, by the way.”

“Uh-huh.”

Sully sat down. “I think what we need to do is go back to when you first learned that anger could cover up hurt.”

Her fingers stopped. “Did I learn that?”

“Let's find out. You told me your father would blow up over trivial things.”

“He had to have control. When he didn't, he basically pitched a fit until he got it back.” Ryan poked a hard finger into the sand. “Are you going to say that's where I got it?”

“He modeled behavior for you, but I don't think you ‘got it' like a disease.”

“I think I inherited a lot of his personality traits—most of which are not my favorite things about myself.” The lines beside her mouth deepened as she poked more holes in the sand. “I tried to be a nice person for years, but I always felt like a fake because all this stuff was just seething under my skin. When I was married to Dan, I couldn't do it anymore. I wasn't a fake then, but I wasn't a nice person.”

“Which is why you're here.” Sully shrugged. “Ultimately, who we are can't be hidden. But here's the deal: when we face the worst that's in us, somehow we become better than we are—better than we ever thought we could be.”

“So I face the fact that basically I'm not a nice person.”

“Was your father a nice person?”

She considered that with a sift of sand through her fingers. “Sometimes. He wasn't
always
popping his cork about something. In fact, he was usually decent to me. It was my mother he took things out on.”

“We'll get to her later. Tell me about your relationship with your father.”

Ryan paused in the sifting. “This is going to take us someplace, right? I mean, at the moment, I feel like I'm in a Woody Allen movie.”

Sully was liking this woman. “This isn't analysis. There is a point.”

“My mother stayed out of my father's way, for obvious reasons, which left me alone with him a lot of the time.”

Sully saw a red flag, but he let her go on.

“Once the dinner dishes were done, she'd go up to her craft room to make whatever new thing there was to make—decoupage, mac-ramé, teddy bears. My father spent the evening supervising my homework, and then we would discuss, I don't know, current events or religion.”

“How old were you?” Sully asked.

Ryan looked up from the sandbox where she had begun a pyramid. “I could tell you all of Jimmy Carter's screw-ups at age eight. When I was ten, Father was taking me to a different religious ceremony every weekend so I could decide for myself whether I was going to become Greek Orthodox or Unitarian or whatever.”

“You're not exaggerating.”

“Not at all. By then my parents were living completely separate lives—she was teaching Sunday school, and he was on the lecture circuit for the ACLU. It's a wonder I'm not schizophrenic.” She looked sideways at Sully. “Am I?”

He shook his head. “What was your relationship with your mother like while your father was on the road?”

“I was on the road with him. He tutored me in hotels during the day, and I sat through his lectures at night. I saw most of the United States before I was fifteen and asked if I could please go to high school and be a normal kid.”

“What was his reaction to that?”

Sully watched her hands in the sand as she continued to stack the structure she was building.

“It was one of the few times he did yell at me. Told me I was giving up a real education to become a cheerleader.” She gave Sully a wry look. “Can you see me with a pair of pom-poms? I mean, seriously.”

“Definitely not your style. But he didn't refuse to let you go to public school?”

“No. He couldn't raise me to make my own decisions and then not let me make one. I had to do all the research and present him with a dossier on every school in the county, mind you, but I got to choose.” She pushed the pyramid over with the side of her hand. “He gave up the lecture tour, though, and worked from home, which was the end of my parents' marriage. My mother was way too independent by then to put up with his domination.”

“And you stayed with your father?”

“Only for as long as I had to. He bought a house and started entertaining all these big-name liberals and expecting me to play hostess. That's why I got on the school newspaper staff and joined the photography club—so I'd have an excuse not to be there for every soiree.” She dusted her hands off and frowned at Sully. “Is this taking us where we're supposed to go?”

“I think so.” Sully rubbed his mouth. Asking what he had to ask could land that sandbox right in his lap. “Let me ask you a question,” he said. “I'm not trying to put ideas in your head.”

“You want to know if he sexually abused me.”

Sully blinked.

“My roommate in college asked me that.” Ryan rolled her eyes. “She was an overenthusiastic psych major. She said my relationship with my father sounded incestuous to her.”

“And?”

“I told her she was a fruitcake. I mean, I admit it was a weird set-up and my father was way too—something—with me, but as for anything sexual, no. Quite frankly, I think the old man might have been gay.”

Sully was having a hard time keeping his chin from dropping.

“He never looked at another woman the whole time we were traveling. He barely looked at my mother. And after they were divorced, he didn't date—even though he wasn't a bad-looking man. He was actually kind of charismatic from behind the podium.”

“You're saying
was
.”

“He died a year after I got out of college. Sudden heart attack at one of his own dinner parties.” Ryan started on another pyramid. “One of the reasons I know I'm not a nice person is that I've thought more than once how glad I am he died that way instead of suffering from a long illness. He would have expected me to take care of him.” She pulled her hands from the sand and looked at Sully. “So what does all this tell you?”

He didn't even know where to begin. She'd given him more information in twenty minutes than most clients did in four sessions. And he was certain there was more.

“I have to agree with your roommate about one thing,” he said. “Your relationship with your father
was
incestuous—but maybe only emotionally so. He depended on you to fill his life the way a wife usually does. It looked like love, but it was an egotistical using of you. That's what incest is.”

“So you're saying that's why I'm angry.” She was motionless, watching him.

“It could be part of it. Your father's love seemed to depend on what you could do for him. Didn't you start getting tired of the whole set-up when you were in high school?”

“I wouldn't use the word
tired
,” she said. “
Ticked off
works. But everybody was ticked off at their parents for something.”

“This whole thing with your father is interesting.” Sully pulled one leg up into the chair and folded it under him. “He was angry and controlling, but he didn't take it out on you in ways that are typically seen as harmful.”

“No,” Ryan said. “He just smothered me.” She sat back stiffly from the sandbox.

“Can you talk about that?” Sully said.

“I don't think it means anything. It happened long before I came along.”

“What did?”

“They had another baby before me, but he died. SIDS. They called it ‘crib death' then. I didn't even know about it until I was twelve. Father and I were sitting in a restaurant in Boston, and he just spun out this tale about how I would have had a brother, but he only lived to be six months old. The baby died in his sleep. Father said if they'd had a baby monitor, they would have heard him struggling for air and they could have saved him.”

“That must have been hard to hear.”

“I don't know. I spent a lot of time after that wondering what it would have been like to have a big brother. That stopped when I brought it up another time and asked what his name was.”

“What was it?”

“Ryan.”

Sully tried not to wince openly.

“Yeah, it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure that one out. Even at twelve I knew I was the replacement child.” She shrugged and went back to the sand, though she didn't seem to know what to do with it now.

“That may explain a few things, though,” Sully said, before she could dive any further behind the sarcasm.

“Such as?”

“Your father's pain. His guilt. His fury with your mother. I'd be willing to bet it all came out as anger—but he couldn't direct it at you. He had to protect you the way he didn't protect the baby.”

“Which was why he never wanted me out of his sight.” Ryan studied her quiet hands. “So you're saying that's what
I
do?”

“It's a possibility. It would be worth uncovering the hurts to find out if it is.”

“I don't want to do that.” Ryan picked up the sandbox and set it on the trunk. She ran a hand through her hair, leaving several grains of sand on her forehead, which she smacked away.

“Are you afraid to?” Sully asked.

“No!” She scowled at him. “Yes—and I deal worse with fear than I do with anger, so let's not go there.”

“Really. What do you do when you're afraid?”

“I lash out at people, cabinet doors, mirrors. You name it.”

“So it all gets expressed as anger.” Sully unfolded his leg and tilted toward her again. “Ryan, that's what we're here to deal with. My job is to help you navigate the fear and the hurt and whatever else comes up, so you'll know how to do it on your own. Isn't that what you want?”

“I want you to tell me how to do it, and I'll do it. I don't want to experience the past again.” She put both hands to her temples. “That's absurd, I know. I am a complete mess!”

“It's good when it gets messy,” Sully said. “Hard, but good, because that's when the stuff we need to see comes to the surface. That's where God is.” He gave her a slow smile. “We've started to see what hurts, Ryan. And that is a very good mess to be in.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

B
y Wednesday, I suspected Jake's memory of his night in jail had paled enough that he was ready to reconsider his decision to stay with me.

I wasn't pushing him to talk, though I had to practically bury myself in mental sand not to. I didn't even hover over his schoolwork or nag him about his lack of food intake or mention that he might consider combing his hair more than once a day.

But the kind of togetherness we were forced into didn't fit either of our personalities. He went to work with me all day. Did his homework in another therapy room while I was with Dr. Crisp. Sat on the top row of bleachers with me while we watched Alex's soccer practices. And spent the evenings in my home office doing the schoolwork I picked up from the district while I worked on the colonias story on my computer. I was a prime candidate for Mother of the Year—but he still had to be sick of me.

I couldn't deny the whole thing put a crimp in my routine too. Though I made sure I took snacks to soccer practice when I was supposed to and told Alex every day that he was awesome, I didn't go to Dan's to “work on my dribbling” with him, and not spending time with Alex was ripping me apart.

To my surprise I missed the soccer moms too. I wasn't even sure I wanted to talk to them about what was happening. I just wanted to be with them. We waved to each other at practice, and Poco folded her hands to her chest to show me they were praying for us, but according to his restrictions, Jake wasn't supposed to be involved in any school or community activities with other kids, and I wasn't taking the slightest chance. Ever since my run-in with Detective Baranovic, I felt like I was under surveillance.