Healing Sands Read online

  A cry from one of the women jerked us all back to the doorway. I crowded in behind them and looked over their heads. Even at five-two I was tall enough to see that the door on the driver’s side of the truck was open and someone was being encouraged to climb out. I raised the camera again and made a guess about where to focus.

  One of the officers pushed the door closed with his foot. Two others pulled the driver clear of the truck. Below me, the praying woman cried out again, “Solo es un nino!”

  Was that “only a boy”?

  The arms being handcuffed had the lanky, awkward look of a young teenager. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen years old, and although I watched through my lens, I debated whether to take the shot even if they turned him to face us.

  But when the officer put his hands to the narrow adolescent shoulders and twisted him around, I let the camera fall against my chest. Already screaming, I shoved through the huddle in the doorway and tore across the alley.

  “Get back!” one of the officers yelled back at me.

  “No—”

  “Come on, lady,” said another, who thrust his arm out to block me. “No press.”

  I knocked the arm aside and pointed at the boy in the handcuffs. “I’m not the press! I’m his mother!”

  CHAPTER TWO

  White walls. Gray metal table. Glaring fluorescent light. And a police detective who probably hadn’t smiled since his swearing in as a cop in 1987.

  It was exactly the way it looks on those real crime shows. Only when you watch it on television, you can’t feel the anxiety coursing through you like barbed wire in your veins. Especially when the accused is your fifteen-year-old son, slumped like a comma in the chair between you and his father, hiding behind his hair, grinding his terror with his teeth.

  Detective Levi Baranovic sat across from us, boring his greenish eyes into Jake as if he were trying to drill out his thoughts. It hadn’t worked in the forty-five minutes we’d been sitting there, and I had to grind my own teeth to keep from screaming.

  He leaned back in the chair, and the light glared on the high forehead created by his neatly receding line of otherwise thick, coffee-colored hair. “Let’s go over this step-by-step, son,” the detective said, “because I don’t think you understand the position you’re in.”

  He leaned on the table again, long face close to the top of Jake’s bowed head.

  “You were found behind the wheel of the vehicle that backed over a sixteen-year-old Hispanic boy. That vehicle belongs to the boy’s mother, and we found both it and you behind the restaurant where she works. From our first examination of the scene, we’ve determined that the truck backed over this boy with excessive force for reverse.” He cocked his head at Jake. “Of course, since you don’t have a driver’s license or a learner’s permit, you aren’t familiar with how a motor vehicle operates. Am I right?”

  Jake’s dark, chin-length hair remained in motionless panels on either side of his face. He didn’t appear to be breathing—until Detective Baranovic slapped his hand on the table. We all jittered on our seats, including Dan, who pulled his fingers through his shorter version of Jake’s hair and let out a long, slow sigh. I wanted to slap him. Sighing—hand-slapping—reviewing the same information until I could have recited it myself. Why didn’t somebody try something that worked? I would have voiced that, but I’d already been threatened with exclusion from the room if I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.

  “We only need one parent present,” Baranovic had informed me when I told Jake five minutes into this to sit up and look at the detective and explain what had gone down out there in that alley. Since then, I’d sat silently wearing down my molars and tracking the sweat that rolled straight down my back.

  “Have you ever driven a vehicle before today?” the detective asked.

  Jake shook his head and kept his gaze on the table. With his hands in his lap, he began to pick at a mole he’d always had on his wrist.

  “The truck struck Miguel Sanchez and then pulled forward and stopped. Did you just sit there while he was unconscious on the ground?” Detective Baranovic reached his fist across the table, and for a mother-bear instant I thought he was going to punch my son, but he used it to lift Jake’s chin.

  Jake’s dark blue eyes were blurred with fear, and moisture had gathered beneath them, though from sweat or tears I couldn’t tell. Otherwise, he was as pale and still as one of his father’s statues. So was Dan.

  Jake tried to pull away, but the detective’s fingers held his jaw.

  “I just want to look at you, son.” He dropped his hand. “You don’t strike me as racist. But you see, we have a pigmentation situation here. Miguel Sanchez is a U.S. citizen. When a white boy comes in and deliberately runs him down, people start making noises about something racially motivated. Now—” He gave a tight shrug. “I can’t do much about the fact that all the evidence points to you as the perpetrator of this crime, which I see as attempted homicide—”

  He put his hand up to me before I could get my mouth open, but I grabbed Jake’s arm anyway. Jake pulled away, leaving me with a vise grip on the sleeve of his black sweatshirt.

  “Talk to him, Jacob!” I said. “You’re being accused of murder!” Jake shrugged.

  Baranovic stood up, hands on the table, and loomed over Jake. He wasn’t big, but his presence was. “So you’re telling me you don’t give a flip about this kid, is that it?”

  Jake shook his head.

  “That’s not it, or you don’t care?”

  “That’s not it.” Jake’s voice shot up into the hormonal, adolescent atmosphere and disappeared. He was so frightened I could hardly stand it.

  “Jake, please,” I said.

  “Mrs. Coe—”

  “He’s terrified! I’m terrified! Why don’t you let me talk to him alone—”

  “No.” Dan put his hand on the back of Jake’s neck as if he were retracting him from a brood of vipers.

  “Am I going to have to ask you both to leave?” Baranovic didn’t raise his voice, but his tone had an edge that could have sliced a rock.

  I put my hand over my mouth and waved him on.

  “If this was somehow an accident,” he said to Jake, “or Miguel provoked you in some way, you need to tell me. That will make it a lot easier on you when I take this to the juvenile prosecutor. She’s going to decide whether to file formal charges, and if she does, then a fitness hearing will determine whether they try you as an adult in regular court. If you go in there like this—showing no remorse, with no explanation . . .” He pulled up from the table. The muscles on the forearms below his rolled-up sleeves were taut. “It’s going to go as badly as it can possibly go.”

  Jake said nothing.

  “So what happens now?” Dan said.

  “We have the option of sending him to county juvenile detention until his hearing, but normally we only do that with youth who are at risk for re-offending or for nonappearance in court. I can release him into parental custody.” He looked back and forth between us. “You folks decide who I’m releasing him to. I’m going to need some paperwork filled out.”

  I stared at Dan until he let go of Jake and got to his feet. “I’ll take care of that,” he said.

  He patted Jake’s shoulder. “You okay, buddy?” Was he okay? Who was okay when they were being charged with attempted homicide in a hate crime? Did he look okay? The boy was sweating so hard he was about to evaporate, and probably wished he could.

  At least Jake didn’t assure him he was just fine, which was what Dan always wanted. Say you’re okay, and then I can go on making art and making nice and making believe all’s right with the world. Say you’re not, and I will still go on making art and— “

  I’ll be right here if you need me,” he said to Jake and followed Detective Baranovic out.

  Silence frosted the room that had moments before been a sauna. Jake didn’t look at me until he suddenly seemed to realize we were alone. His face came up, ashen and twitc
hing and no longer able to hide the fear that obviously raked at him.

  “I’m taking you home with me,” I said, “so we can talk this thing through.”

  “I’d rather go to detention,” he said.

  His words kicked me in the gut. “You’re in serious trouble, son.”

  “I know!” He dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, and I watched his bony shoulders shake, sure they’d grown smaller and more gaunt in the last two hours.

  “All right—we won’t go there right now. Let’s just go home where it’s quiet and try to sort this out.”

  “I’ll go home.” He turned the stormy eyes on me. “With Dad. That’s my home.”

  “You bet, buddy,” Dan said from the doorway. “Hey, it’s going to be okay.”

  Jake collapsed onto his arms on the table, and I stormed out the door. In the hall, Dan stopped beside a drinking fountain and assumed the position: back against the wall, arms folded across his chest, crossing me out as his brown eyes surveyed the floor tiles. Jake had learned it from the master.

  “‘It’s going to be okay, Jake’?” I said. “What’s going to be okay, Dan? The food in detention? Those cool shackles he gets to wear around his ankles when they drag him into court? What are you thinking?”

  Dan dragged his eyes up to me and held them there. “I’m thinking you hate to lose, Ryan. But for once, it isn’t about you.”

  I was stunned, and I must have shown it. Why did he choose now to grow a spinal column?

  “I know it isn’t about me,” I said. “It’s about what’s best for Jake. If I can get him away from here, I can get him to talk—”

  “Since when? He won’t even have a pizza with you and tell you about his day.”

  I didn’t notice until then that Dan was covered in white dust up to his elbows, and the front of his jeans was streaked in it as well, as if he had been rubbing his hands up and down his thighs. He’d obviously torn out of his studio without even stopping to wash off the plaster.

  Something dawned on me. “Where’s Alex?” I said.

  “He’s with Ginger.”

  “Oh.”

  Ginger was Dan’s “significant other,” Alex had informed me. If my ten-year-old had used that term for anybody else, I would have been amused. I’d only seen her once, from afar, when I’d dropped Alex off one evening. She’d struck me as a candidate for Deal or No Deal, one of those women who stood around with suitcases.

  I shoved my hair off my face, though it tumbled back immediately onto my forehead and left several chopped-off, dark strands in my right eye. “Look, you have Alex to be concerned with, and this is going to be huge for him too. You can’t deal with both of them, so—”

  “Why not? I’ve been doing it for a year.”

  “Right,” I said. “And now one of them has been arrested for attempted homicide.”

  “You’re saying this is my fault?”

  I could only stare at the man whose voice teetered on the edge of anger. Dan usually left the anger to me.

  “Jake wants to come home with me, so I’m taking him,” he said. “Otherwise he’s going to detention, and I don’t want that, and I don’t think you do either. I already signed the papers.”

  I charged across the hall to the interview room and looked through the wire mesh glass in the narrow window. Jake still had his head on his arms, almost as if he’d fallen asleep.

  It was impossible to fathom that my son had tried to kill someone, even in light of the sullen wall he’d built between us. He was angry with me, but in that maddeningly passive way that had driven me away from his father. Surely not angry enough to take it out on—whom? Who was Miguel Sanchez?

  I pressed my forehead to the glass. Did it mean something that he was Hispanic? We had never been racist. The boys had been growing up in Chicago before Dan moved them here. Their birthday parties had looked like junior United Nations summits.

  And yet Jake didn’t deny it, no matter how menacing Detective Baranovic made it all sound. He didn’t try to pin it on someone else. He wouldn’t even confess that he’d done it.

  And I knew why.

  I watched him now as he pulled himself up from the tabletop and once again dug into his eyes with his fists while his mouth contorted. He didn’t confess, because Jake Coe had never been able to lie. Alex could get away with a fib until he was caught dead to rights, and even then I usually had a hard time believing his little prevarication hadn’t been the gospel truth. But Jake had never even tried it. When I broke up brother fights that rivaled WWE, Jake clammed up and let the chips fall where they may. And that’s what he was doing now.

  He wouldn’t confess, because he hadn’t done it.

  I tried to turn the door handle, but it didn’t budge. When I whirled around to go for the detective, I saw a petite woman with impossible breasts running down the hall, mahogany curls bouncing as she half stumbled in kitten heels toward Dan. When she reached him, he bent over to allow her bronzed arms to fold around his shoulders. She pushed his face into her neck, where I was certain he’d be bruised by the barrage of necklaces that dipped heavily into her cleavage.

  “Are you all right?” she said into his hair.

  This was Ginger. She pulled back and cupped Dan’s face in her hands, which I was surprised she could lift with the number of rings she was wearing.

  “It’s bad, isn’t it?” she said.

  “It’ll be okay. Where’s Alex?”

  “He’s with Ian. It’s bad. You’re just so strong about stuff like this.”

  Stuff like this? She’d seen Dan faced with his son’s possible incarceration before?

  I turned back to the window to see that Jake had gotten up from the table and was standing in the corner with his back to me. A mental picture formed, what I had come to know as a God-image because it emerged whole and unbidden. It was Jake at five, putting himself into time-out before I even knew the balloons had been tied to the cat’s tail, before I’d even pinned the deed on him. He was now a lopey five-foot-ten, but he was the same little boy who would take a punishment he didn’t deserve if it meant he could avoid a confrontation.

  I slapped my hands against the door on both sides of the window— but that was as far as I let my anger go. I had to have a plan, and as I stood there absorbing my son’s pain through the glass, I arranged it, shot by shot, in my mind. I would get to the bottom of this for him.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The juvenile prosecutor did indeed file formal charges against Jake that afternoon. Although the fitness hearing wasn’t until one o’clock Friday, I took the day off so I could find a lawyer. I didn’t even have a dentist or a hairstylist yet in Las Cruces, much less an attorney. Locating someone in criminal law had not been on my to-do list.

  The only people I knew to ask were my colleagues at the paper, and I didn’t want them to know about this. Because Jake was still a juvenile, at least for the moment his name wasn’t released. I turned to the Internet, where a Uriel Cohen sounded good on her Web site and even better on the phone—sharp and intelligent. She promised to meet Dan, Jake, and me at the courthouse at twelve thirty.

  “I wish you’d lawyered up before they interviewed him,” she’d said.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “He didn’t say a word.”

  Until noon, I poured coffee I didn’t drink and made the bed I hadn’t slept in and studiously avoided the front page of the Sun-News. I’d told Frances I didn’t have anything worth sending her. In truth, when I looked at my shots on the laptop the night before, they told a clear story of a vicious attack on a young man that left his family and friends seized with horror.

  I finally relented around eleven that morning and skimmed the text of the front-page article. Miguel Sanchez was in serious but stable condition at Memorial Medical Center.

  Señora Sanchez probably hadn’t slept any more than I had. I could see her in my mind, where God put her—pressed to her son’s bedside, trying to push life into his forehead with her hand, whispering t
he will to survive into his ear. It was everything I wanted to be doing with my own son.

  But I didn’t see Jake until he and Dan slipped into the courtroom at the Third Judicial District Courthouse a mere fifteen seconds before the bailiff called our case. It might have been by design, so I wouldn’t have a chance to speak to him, but then, Dan was always late and, like today, always seemed surprised that it made any difference.

  “Didn’t you get my message?” I hissed to him. “We were supposed to meet with the attorney first.”

  I jerked my head toward the fiftyish woman with limp white hair I’d just spent thirty minutes stalling with.

  She gave Dan a quick assessment through black-framed rectangular glasses and said, “We’ll talk later. This is only a fitness hearing.”

  Only a fitness hearing? I wanted to scream. They’re going to decide whether to handle our son like the young boy he is or treat him like a career criminal.

  I looked past Dan and drank Jake in. He evidently wasn’t that long out of the shower. The dark hair was only now starting to curl out of his apparent attempt to slick it back, and his face looked raw, as if he’d tried to scrub off any visible signs of fear. But he’d had no success with his eyes, which had the same frightened sheen I’d seen the day before. Except for the manly Adam’s apple that moved painfully with every swallow, he could have been twelve.

  He sat so that I was left next to Dan, who smelled vaguely of Irish Spring soap and gasoline and had tried the same approach with his hair that Jake had. Except for their eyes—Jake’s were blue, like mine—they were so alike, I used to joke that I’d merely been an incubator for the child. I didn’t find it that amusing anymore.

  The judge, the Honorable John Hightower, was a boxy, humorless man with more eyebrows than hair. He cocked one of them at us from the bench.