Sully had just finished praying before his session Tuesday afternoon when his cell phone rang, which was a good thing. He’d forgotten all about it, and all he needed was for it to go off while he was talking to Ryan.
He did answer it now, though, in case Porphyria was calling. It was Tess Lightfoot.
“I have your age progression ready,” she said.
“You do?”
“Well—yeah. Isn’t that why you’re paying me the big bucks?”
Sully laughed. “I’m just surprised. That was quick.”
“That’s the other reason you’re paying me the big bucks.”
Her voice was as smooth as he remembered it.
“You might want to come by my office so we can look at it on the computer. I have a few questions that could mean some changes.”
“So you were able to scan it with the computer.”
“Still another reason why—”
“I’m paying you the big bucks.” Sully felt himself grinning. “I’m starting to worry about my bill.”
“You should.”
She gave him an address, and he agreed to meet her at six. Then he turned off his phone and tapped it on the desk.
His conversation with Porphyria had reassured him for a few days, but now that he was about to see the face he’d been looking for, anxiety crept along his nerve endings again. Saying he could discern the difference between normal anger and bloody-stump revenge was one thing. Knowing he could do it when Belinda Cox was looking back at him was another. And if he was this worried about just seeing her picture, what was going to happen when he confronted her in person?
Sully wiped the sudden beads of sweat from his upper lip and stood up to go out and meet Ryan. One God-thing at a time, Dr. Crisp, he could hear Porphyria saying. One God-thing at a time.
Ryan was literally pacing the reception room when Sully got there. This was either going to be productive—or it was going to be a disaster.
Once again she eschewed the polite greetings and small talk and went straight for the chair. She dropped the hourglass onto the trunk between them. “Did you expect this to work?”
“I assume it didn’t,” Sully said.
“Not at all.”
“You want to tell me about it?”
“Is that like ‘How did it make you feel?’”
Sully shook his head, still watching her try to look bigger in the chair as he settled in his own. “No, it’s just ‘You want to tell me about it.’ Although I guess journalists misuse the ‘How did it make you feel’ line as much as therapists.”
“I think it’s a cheap shot,” she said. “I don’t ask that many questions anyway. I just make pictures.”
“Speaking of which, I saw some of your work in the paper. I was impressed.”
Ryan put a hand on top of her head and closed her eyes. “Look, don’t try to get me to loosen up. I need help here.”
“That’s exactly where we’re going, Ryan,” Sully said. “Nobody can look at this stuff wound up like a spring.”
He saw her swallow, but otherwise she didn’t respond.
“What I see in your pictures is that you share in the emotion of what’s going on in front of the camera. Doesn’t matter that it’s kindergartners in tutus, there’s heart and soul in there.” He tilted his head at her. “I don’t see a tough, no-nonsense person behind that camera.”
“I don’t try to be tough,” she said. “I just do what I have to do. Only right now I don’t know what to do, and that’s what I want you to tell me.”
Holy crow. They were at a crossroads already, and she was still trying to figure out how to get her feet to touch the floor. He felt like he was entering a minefield.
“I can tell you,” he said, “but it will be a whole lot more effective if I help you figure out how to tell yourself.” He refolded his legs. “How do you see things when you get ready to make a picture? That’s how you say it, right? Make a picture?”
She gave him a doubtful look before the goalpost hands went up and she focused between them. “I see it in layers in a frame,” she said. “I find all the compositional elements that are going to make the reader look at the photograph and think about it a little while longer. What’s in the foreground? What’s in the background? Where is the light?”
“Why do you do all that?”
“Well, because . . .” She shrugged. “The longer I can capture the viewers and make them think about what they’re seeing, the better chance I have of them understanding what I’m trying to say with the photograph.”
“Bingo.”
She gave Sully a blank look.
“You just described what we’re about here,” he said. “Only I’m the photographer, and you’re the reader. I have to bring out all the layers, all the elements that are going to get you to look at your life and think about it. And the longer and deeper I can get you to do that, the better chance you have of understanding it all.”
Ryan studied his face as if she were looking for traces of a clandestine plot. The only thing missing was the bare lightbulb.
And yet there was something desperate in her eyes, something that tugged at Sully’s heart. This was no high-strung woman trying to get the best of her road rage.
“All right,” she said. “What is it you want me to look at?”
Sully took another step into the minefield. “I want you to look at the thing you want the most right now.”
No pause. “I want my son to be acquitted.”
“What if he weren’t? What would be the next thing you would want?”
“You’re not going for ‘To get him out on an appeal.’”
“I’m not going for anything. Let’s say he did get out, but he still wouldn’t talk to you?”
“I’d be back where I was before this happened.”
“And what did you want then?”
“I wanted my sons to love me again. I still do. I just want to be their mother.” She brought herself up abruptly in the chair. “Where are we going with this?”
“To another layer,” Sully said. “You’re having to work pretty hard at being a mother right now, yeah?”
“Thanks to my ex-husband, yes. Look, if you’re saying my anger stems from him, that is not a news flash.”
“Did you get angry before you were married to Dan?”
“You mean like when I was a kid?”
“Sure.”
She actually smiled—ruefully, Sully thought.
“I wasn’t allowed to. You didn’t pitch fits in our house.”
“What happened if you did?”
“I never tested it out.”
Sully found that hard to believe. He waited until she squinted. “I never tested it out personally,” she said. “I just saw what happened when somebody else did.”
“For instance?”
Ryan pulled her knees toward her chest, then caught herself. “When I was five, my mother got me a boxer, from the pound. I wanted to call him Slobber.”
“‘Wanted’ to . . . ?”
“He didn’t stay long enough to call him anything. My father came home from work and said okay, fine, you got a dog. You have to take care of him.”
“You were how old?”
“Five.”
Holy crow, Sully thought, but he nodded her on.
“I was feeding him, and a couple of kibbles fell on the floor. Slobber and I went for them at the same time, and my father picked me up and screamed at my mother to get that blankity-blank dog out of our blankity-blank house and take him back where he blankity-blank came from.”
“How did your mother react?”
“She said he was being unreasonable, that the dog wasn’t going to bite me.”
“Did she yell back at him when she said it?”
Ryan’s eyebrows twisted. “My mother never said anything worse than ‘good gravy’ to anybody.”
“So what happened?”
Ryan shrugged. “Slobber went back to the pound.”
“And you?”
Once again she raised her knees and forced them down again. She wasn’t going into that fetal position the little girl in her longed for.
“I don’t think I did anything. What would be the point?”
“So you weren’t allowed to express anger. But did you feel it?”
“You mean like I do now? I guess not, no.”
Sully waited.
“Maybe when I was younger than that. I probably got so used to controlling it I didn’t even feel it anymore.”
“So you didn’t start consciously feeling anger until after you were married,” he said.
“A few years after.” Ryan’s voice sharpened. “Right after I got pregnant with Jake. I wanted Dan to get a real job so we’d have health insurance when I quit work to stay home with the baby. He said he would—and he didn’t. That was probably when it started.” She shook her head. “I wasn’t violent. I just yelled, and he blamed it on hormones. It went downhill from there. What’s the point?”
“That resentment could be what fuels your anger. That might be one layer, anyway.”
“Like I said, that is not breaking news.”
“So when Dan flaked out on the job thing, what did you do?”
She scowled. “I worked until I had Jake, took the minimum six-week maternity leave, and went back to my job. Obviously Dan wasn’t going to take any responsibility. Somebody had to.”
“And that continued.”
“For the most part. There was a period before I got pregnant with Alex when he was teaching at the Art Institute in Chicago, and I thought he was finally growing up. That’s the only reason I agreed to have another baby.”
“But that didn’t last.”
“Of course not.”
“So once again you had to be in charge.”
She folded her arms across her chest. “I wasn’t trying to be the Gestapo—but if somebody didn’t take control of our lives, we were going to end up on the street with two kids. It’s not like I tried to make him into a nine-to-fiver. I helped him start a business where he could have a venue for selling his stuff, and he just ran it into the ground while he was telling me it was doing great. When that went under and we lost all our savings, that was it.”
Sully leaned forward, straight into the minefield. “I want to put something to you, and I just want you to look at it as a possible layer. If it doesn’t ring true, we’ll move on, okay?”
Her eyes squinted. “I can already tell I’m not going to like this.” She didn’t have to like it. All he wanted her to do was consider it—before she headed for the door.
“Let’s just explore the idea that you have a basic conflict going here.” Sully held out one palm. “On the one hand, you want things to go a certain way, and you’ve learned to put yourself in a position where they go that way—because if you don’t, the consequences could be pretty disastrous.”
She formed the lines on either side of her mouth, but she nodded.
“But at the same time, you resent having to be in that position in the first place, where it’s up to you to take all the responsibility. And it’s that conflict that makes you so mad you want to throw things.” Sully cocked his head. “How does that sound?”
“It sounds like psychological bilge water.” Her feet hit the floor as she jerked to the edge of the chair. “I did not lose it at my ex-husband’s last night because I was ‘conflicted.’ I blew up because his girlfriend accused me of putting down her son when I barely looked at the kid. That woman is in worse shape than I am.”
“What did she do?” Sully asked.
Ryan rolled her eyes. “She cried. I have nothing against shedding a few tears when the situation calls for it, but she was sobbing like I’d tried to castrate the boy. She was hanging on to the porch pole with mascara running down her face like Tammy Faye. I mean, get a grip.”
Sully had a hard time reining in a grin.
“And that’s the reason I’m here,” Ryan went on. “I don’t want to turn into a version of her. I mean, I don’t see myself boo-hooing like that, but for every trail of snot coming out of her nose, I could throw some kind of projectile, do you know what I’m saying?”
Once again the desperation quickened in her eyes.
Sully steepled his fingers under his chin. “I can’t say for sure without seeing—what’s her name?”
“Ginger.” Ryan licked her lips as if she were trying to get a bad taste out of her mouth.
“I’m not making an official diagnosis here, but she could be histrionic.”
“Is that an actual mental illness?”
“It’s a personality disorder,” Sully said. “And again, I wouldn’t go to Dan and tell him his girlfriend has HPD.”
He waited for her to nod, which she finally did with obvious reluctance.
“My point is, you don’t fit that profile. You don’t go off randomly or deliberately for the sake of drama. When histrionic people seek help, it’s usually just to have an audience. They think the problem is with everyone else, and they want to tell you about it in graphic detail so you’ll sympathize and enable and everything else they thrive on. That isn’t you.”
“Great,” Ryan said. “So I’m not like the Spice Girl. How does this help me?”
There was none of the relief the average client would have felt. But then, Ryan wasn’t the average client. Back to the minefield.
“It helps you rule out certain things,” Sully said. “It’s like going to a medical doctor with headaches. They immediately try to determine that you don’t have a brain tumor. Once they do, they can move on—”
“To what?”
“In our case, to looking at another layer—while we’re giving you come coping mechanisms to use in the meantime.”
“Such as.”
She seldom seemed to put anything to him as a question. It was always as a challenge. An I-bet-you-don’t-know-the-answer. He wasn’t sure he did.
“The usual approach would be things like trying to stay away from the situations that trigger your anger.”
“When the situation is right in my face all the time? Look, I know you probably think I’m just trying to be difficult. I’ve been accused of that before.”
“No, I don’t think that at all,” Sully said. “What I think is that you’re smart enough to know what doesn’t work for you. Most of the time.”
“Most of the time. What’s the exception?” She turned her head to look at him from the corner of her eye. “I’m not going to like this, am I?”
“You’re probably going to hate it,” Sully said. “But in therapy, often the thing you resist is the thing you need the most. Do you know anything about quicksand?”
“Quicksand. No.”
“When somebody gets stuck in quicksand, what do you think is their first instinct for getting out?”
She gave her hand an impatient flick. “They probably panic and start thrashing around.”
“Which is the worst thing they can do, because the more they agitate the quicksand, the more it will liquefy and the faster they’ll sink. The best thing they can do is relax, take a few deep breaths, spread out their arms and legs, and just let their body’s natural buoyancy bring them to the top.” Sully tilted his head at her. “If anybody’s in quicksand right now, Ryan, it’s you. You’re trying everything you know to do, and yet the more you struggle, the deeper you go. That isn’t wrong. It’s just an instinct that isn’t serving you well in this situation.”
“You’re telling me I need to surrender and just let my son go to prison?”
“I’m not saying stop trying to prove Jake’s innocence,” Sully said. “I’m saying let’s work on letting go of the conviction that you can control not only the outcome, but everyone else’s actions along the way.” He smiled at her. “The good news is, if you expect to come across quicksand, which I think you can in the weeks to come, you can carry a pole to support yourself when you start to sink. That, I think, would be God.”
Ryan put up both hands, palms toward Sully as if he were trying to push her against a wall. “I don’t think about God as somebody who rescues me when I and everybody else have screwed up.”
“How do you think of God?”
“No, let’s get back to you telling me that if I’m going to be healed of anger, I have to totally give up control.” Her voice rose to the pitch he was certain was reserved for the ex-husband and the Spice Girl. “What—is the matter with you? If I give up control, I’m going to lose my son—maybe both of my sons. You can’t make me do that. I’d rather stay angry.”
“I’m not trying to make you do anything, Ryan,” Sully said.
But she was already on her feet, fumbling to get her purse strap over her shoulder.
“This is not what I need,” she said. “Matter of fact, I don’t think you can give me what I need.”
She charged for the door, and although Sully followed her down the hall, he didn’t try to stop her.
“Bill me,” she barked at Olivia. To Sully she said, “I’m sure what you do works for most people. I guess I’m just not most people.”
She could say that again. Sully watched her slam out the door and break into a virtual run across the parking lot. She was arguably the most challenging client he’d ever had. And yet a sad ache wrapped itself around his gut. She was like a stray cat. He wanted to pick up her soul and hug it until she gave in to her hurt so she could heal. But he knew if he tried it, he’d be shredded to ribbons.
He hoped she’d come back, though. Because unlike “most people,” Ryan Coe risked losing everything if she didn’t.
He turned to Olivia and Kyle, who was sitting in a client chair at Olivia’s desk. Each of them seemed to be struggling for an appropriate facial expression. Sully parked his hands in his pockets and went over to them.
“So,” he said, “I know I don’t have to remind you two that confidentiality applies to things that happen in the lobby.”
Olivia’s eyes grew to saucers. “I’m not going to tell anybody. But can I just say I’m glad she won’t be coming in here anymore? She’s, like, not that nice.”
“Let’s not write her off yet,” Sully said. “We’ll give her a chance to calm down.”
Kyle was nodding. “I don’t think she’s done.”
Sully moved toward the hall. “I’m headed out in a few minutes, unless you need me for anything.”
“I’ll walk you back,” Kyle said. He leaped from the chair and followed Sully across the lobby. “Do you have dinner plans?” he said. “I found this great place where they serve Ethiopian food.”
“Ethiopian food?” Sully said. “Isn’t that an oxymoron?”
“No, man, it’s great.”
Sully shook his head, hand on his office doorknob. “Can I take a rain check? I have plans for tonight.”
“I’m going to hold you to that,” Kyle said.
Sully pulled the voice recorder out of his pocket and said into it with a grin, “Have dinner with Kyle. No Ethiopian.”
“What is that ?” Kyle said.
“It’s a tape recorder.”
“How long have you had it? Since the Clinton administration?”
“What’s the deal?” Sully said. “It works.”
Kyle shook his head and strolled off down the hall, arms dangling at his sides. For a moment Sully was reminded of himself, ten years younger and surer and worldlier. Funny how life itself made you so much less certain that you knew a dang thing.
Sully had barely pulled a Frappuccino out of the refrigerator on his office patio when he heard a prim tap on the door.
“Come on in, Martha,” he called with more enthusiasm than he actually felt. He wasn’t up for another prepared speech outlining Kyle’s shortcomings. Despite the confrontations in the break room between the two of them, which Olivia reported regularly, Martha obviously wasn’t satisfied. She delivered a version of the outline to him every chance she got.
Martha shook her head when Sully held up his bottled Frap and again when he nodded toward a chair in front of the desk.
She remained standing and flipped open the ubiquitous leather portfolio. “I just wanted to update you on a few things.”
Sully leaned on the front of the desk and propped the bottle between his knees.
“Mr. Hillman has dropped his suit against us,” she said. “Another source reported abuse at his home, and this time CPS found evidence.”
“I hate to hear that,” Sully said. “But that probably works for everybody concerned. Especially the kids on the receiving end of whatever he was dishing out.”
“It doesn’t hurt us either.” Martha ran her finger neatly down the page again. “And your instincts about Bob Benitez.”
“Is that Bob the Blabber?” Sully asked.
Martha almost smiled. “Just as you predicted, he’s moved on to other things on his blog.”
Sully grinned. “So far you’re batting a thousand here, Martha. What else you got?”
The potential smile faded. “I’m still having trouble locating any of the people who complained about Carla Korman. I keep getting disconnected numbers and bounce-back e-mails. I’ll continue to work on it. I assume you don’t want me to send in the paperwork to have her license revoked without corroborating all of this.”
“Right,” Sully asked.
There was no doubt that Martha had more integrity than any three of your average people put together. He probably ought to sit down with her and Kyle and mediate.
Sully grinned inwardly. Or he could just send Martha out to have Ethiopian food in his place and see what happened.
“That’s all I have for now,” she said.
“You’ve gotten a lot done in a short period of time. I appreciate it.”
He expected the usual professional nod, the modest thank-you, but she lowered her eyes to the front of the portfolio she hugged to her chest as if she were looking for her next cue there. He was going to get the outline after all.
“I know I’m not the avant-garde psychologist you and Kyle are,” she said. “I am willing to learn new techniques, but I think I’ll probably always be more traditional.”
She looked at him expectantly. Sully was, for once, clueless.
“Well, I just wanted to put that out there,” she said. “Have a nice evening.”
“You too,” Sully said, though by the time he got it out, she was already closing the door behind her with her usual flawless propriety.
He took a long draw from the Frappuccino. What had just happened? Did he miss something?
Whatever it was, tomorrow was going to have to be soon enough to find out—after he had his own next step behind him. He abandoned the bottle and headed for the door.