Sully always prayed before a session. That was the one thing that still came naturally. The rest might not, seeing how it had been a year since Nashville and his last one-on-one client. He hadn’t even intended to work with this one, but he didn’t think Kyle was ready for Ryan Alexander-Coe, and Martha already had a full load. Besides—Ms. Coe was something of a time bomb, and even Olivia had spotted her as a potential lawsuit.
He pretzeled his legs into a bow in the butterscotch corduroy chair-and-a-half. Face resting in his hands, he breathed in God. And Light. And Christ, Light from that Light. Light on the only path he’d found he could follow.
God-in-Christ . . . shine through me . . . help me to lead her to make some sense of herself . . .
Sully breathed into the prayer until he came to a level place where perhaps Ryan Coe’s new path could start. Then he opened his eyes and reached for the folder on the trunk between his chair and the identical one Ryan would sit in.
He grinned as he glanced over the paperwork she’d filled out the day before. To use a psychological term—she was a pistol. Small woman with a big mind. Gunned you down with her shotgun eyes. Wasn’t going to put up with—how did she say it?—having Ephesians thrown in her face.
She also said—both in yesterday’s interview and on her form— that she wanted help controlling her anger. I need coping skills, she’d written. There was no doubt that she had a short fuse, but Sully didn’t think just anything lit it. Whatever got her going came from someplace deep. The trick was going to be letting her find the God-path, but getting her to let him lead for a while. She must be something on the dance floor.
He perused the form for her occupation. Photojournalist. Formerly employed by the Associated Press, but currently working for the Las Cruces Sun-News. He salivated mentally. That might be a road worth going down.
A tap on the door was followed by Olivia’s head. He’d heard her staccato laugh in the reception area earlier, punctuating Kyle’s urging her to go back to school and get her degree. Martha was going to have to assign Kyle more clients before he started having sessions with the receptionist.
“She’s here,” Olivia whispered.
“Who?” Sully whispered back.
“Mrs. Coe.”
“Okay. Why are we whispering?”
“Because she scares me.”
Sully stood up and strode to the door. “Is she armed?”
Olivia’s eyes popped, and Sully smiled at her.
“You’re teasing me,” she said.
Sully followed her out to meet Ryan noticing on the way that Olivia looked less like she’d caught the latest sale at the Goodwill than she had previously. Her hair was up in one of those messy bun-ish things, but at least it wasn’t dangling in her face like leftover goat food. He wondered if Kyle had counseled her on that too.
“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.”
“What did you do?” Sully asked.
“I sat down with him, and he put his head in my lap and cried himself to sleep.” She swallowed again as the layer disappeared once more. “The next day I packed up and came back to the States. Okay—so I have a question.”
Sully wanted to back that truck up, but he said, “Ask away.”
“Where is the Christian part of this counseling?”
He took his time refolding his legs. The wrong answer would send her straight for the door, after she took him out at the knees. “You warned me that you didn’t want me beating you up with Ephesians,” he said.
“I meant don’t just quote Scripture to me and expect me to change. If I could do that, I would have already. I read the Bible. I pray.” She gave him her squinted look. “It isn’t working right now.”
“But you do want faith-based counseling,” Sully said.
“Okay.” She brought up her hands parallel to her face as if she were forming goalposts and spoke between them. “Before I went to Africa, I was the tithing, pew-sitting kind of Christian. I went to Bible study, I sang the praise songs. I was there every time the doors opened. And don’t get me wrong—”
Sully was sure that wasn’t going to happen. She was leaving no room for error between those goal post hands.
“All of that is important,” she said, “if it leads you to a real experience with God. I think a lot of the people in my congregation in Chicago had that. I didn’t.”
“So what changed in Africa?”
“What didn’t? I never darkened the door of a church while I was there, but I talked to God more than I ever had in my life. Maybe not talked. Yelled. Ranted.”
Her eyes blazed. Sully had a moment of pity for God.
“I wanted to know how he could let those children be used to kill people.”
“Did you get any answers?” Sully asked.
“No. I got—” Ryan glanced at her watch. “Look, our time’s almost up, and I don’t feel like we’ve gotten anywhere.”
“Actually, I think we might have just arrived. Tell me what you got.”
She gave him a doubtful look. “I got images. And not like—like woo-woo.”
Yes, she’d already established that there would be no woo-woo. “It isn’t like I purposely imagined what I wanted something to look like, the same way I don’t set up a shot when I’m making pictures. I just take what’s there.”
“Tell me some more,” Sully said.
She resituated in the chair. “I would be in a situation, maybe praying, maybe shooting, and I’d get a clear picture in my mind of something that might not have anything to do with what I was thinking about. And I would know it didn’t come from me.” For the first time, she looked at him without a challenge in her eyes. “Does that make sense?”
“I’m getting there,” Sully said. “Give me an example.”
She directed her gaze to the painting again. “The night Khalid cried himself to sleep in my lap, I didn’t want to move, so I sat there for hours, with mosquitoes the size of garbage trucks feasting on me, and I got a clear picture in my mind of Jake.” She glanced at Sully. “My older son.”
“Right.”
“He was curled up in his bed at home, in a fetal position, staring at the wall and crying without tears. It was like a shot God framed for me, which is why I know it isn’t just me thinking it up.” Her voice went dry. “That and the fact that the images aren’t what I would set up. Believe me.”
“I know you want to leave here with something,” Sully said. “And I don’t blame you. You’ve struggled with this for a long time.” He slanted forward again, arms resting on his knees, shaping his words with his hands. “I want to talk more about your relationship with God next time. It’s the key to all of this—that’s where the Christian part comes in. But in the meantime—and I just want you to hear me out on this—I think you can start to use your ability to visualize—”
“I told you I don’t set it up—it just comes to me.” She, too, slid forward, so that her feet finally hit the floor. “I know where you’re going with this, and I’m sorry, but when some detective tells me my son is a racist, I can’t see me stopping to calm myself with a vision of”—she chopped her hand toward the painting—“White Sands. By the time I do that, I’ll probably already have clawed his face.”
Sully watched her wrap herself back up and pondered his options. He had to be quick, or this could be the shortest relationship in therapeutic history.
“Let’s try this, then,” he said. He dug into his pocket and found the miniature hourglass he’d swiped from his Would You Rather . . . ? game and set it on the trunk. Sand began its slow trickle down.
“This is just a temporary tool,” Sully said.
“Let me guess. Every time I start to blow, you want me to turn this over and not do anything until it runs out, and by then I should be cooled off.” She gave him the squint and shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“No,” Sully said. “I suggest you just keep it in your pocket as a reminder that the control we have lasts about that long. If we don’t bring God in, we got nothin’.”
She gave him a long look. “All right,” she said and snatched the plastic hourglass from the trunk and curled her fingers around it. “So—next week? Same time?”
As he saw her out, Sully watched her stuff the hourglass into the pocket of her cargo pants. It wasn’t going to work, and he knew it. But Ryan Alexander-Coe would have to figure that out for herself. As he pulled out the voice recorder to make his notes, that was the only thing he knew about her for sure.