Healing Sands Read Free

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.
    â€œGet back!” one of the officers yelled back at me.
    â€œNo—”
    â€œCome 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
    W hite 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.
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œWe 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.
    â€œHave you ever driven a vehicle before today?” the