Lending Light (Gives Light Series Book 5) (11 page)

"Does she ever actually talk?" I asked dubiously.

" 'Course she does!  Just this morning we had a great talk about Indian gaming.  I'm against it, you know I am, but she really opened my eyes--"

He opened the door to our house and flipped the overhead lights on.  I wished we had wicks and oil lamps like every other house on the rez.

"You seem happy today," Uncle Gabriel said, turning on me with a smile.

I dumped my trash in the plastic bag hanging off the front door.  I tossed myself haphazardly on the hardwood floor, snacking on black licorice.

"Yeah," I said.

"I saw you talking to Aubrey," Uncle Gabriel said.  "I'm glad you're making friends."

I hesitated.  I pulled the wet licorice out of my mouth.  "You still think I should stay away from Sky?  Skylar," I said quickly.

"Yes," Uncle Gabriel said, without pause.

I put the licorice back in my mouth, gut churning.  "Why?"

"Don't talk with your mouth full," Uncle Gabriel said.  He sat on the cushioned window seat.  "I think I already explained why, don't you?"

Because Sky had memories of the night he'd lost his mom and his voice.

"Yeah," I said.  "But what if--"

"He's not going to be here for very long," Uncle Gabriel reminded me.

My heart went crashing into my gut.  I'd managed to forget as much.

"Our clans don't have a good history, Rafael," Uncle Gabriel said.  "You don't want to pour salt in old wounds."

"It's not
our
clan that killed his mom," I said.  "Dad's clan is Maison.  You're not a Maison.  Neither am I."

Maison means Night Singer, or Cricket.  Some families just never bothered translating their names when we made the switch to English.

"Rafael," Uncle Gabriel said tiredly.  "I don't think the semantics matter very much."

"Our clan doesn't have to be punished," I said.  "Mom's clan doesn't have to be pun--"

Uncle Gabriel silenced me with a look.

"Don't disturb your mother's ghost," Uncle Gabriel said.

In Shoshone society, we believe that someone who died of wrongful causes doesn't rest until those causes are dealt with.  But once the ghost has finally laid down to rest, it's impossible to disturb them again, no matter how hard you try.

This should have been my first sign that Uncle Gabriel knew something he wasn't telling me.

7

Heyoka

At the end of June Nettlebush went all misty again, which I took as a good sign that the monsoon was approaching.  The mist was more of a damp rain than a wet rain, hot as hell to boot, but when I walked around the reservation one afternoon I saw families putting water buckets outside anyway, just in case there was something to catch.  I walked up to Sky's door and knocked impatiently.  He came outside with iced juniper tea, which I drank in one gulp.  I'd never seen him drink the stuff himself.  It flustered me to think that he was brewing it just for me.

"You ever been inside the badlands?" I asked.

Sky shook his head.

"C'mon," I said.  "Eat some peppermint first.  Don't want you getting sick."

He slipped inside his house with the empty tea glass.  He tried to get me to go in with him, but I declined.  What do we need houses for, anyway?  I sat down against Catherine Looks Over's stone sundial, feeble rain dripping into my knotted hair.  The dove's feather in my braid tickled my cheek like my mom's soft fingers.  Guilt punctured my chest.  I pushed thoughts of my mom aside.

Nettlebush looked nicer than I remembered it being.  I mean, I'd grown up here; and it didn't make sense for it to change shape over time, but it had.  The pine trees used to look sad and blobby to me, indistinct.  They still looked  blurry--or the needles did, anyway; to hell with eyeglasses--but they bled with colors I'd never noticed before.  Green like arcane jade, like youth and vivacity.  Brown in the way of the ancients, wisdom passed down in secret.  I could even see the grooves in the tree trunks, worn and silvery-white and thin, life-bearing veins.  What happened to my all-encompassing darkness?  It was gone.  The tallest bull pines were skinny like knives.  They cut holes in the gray clouds, revealing the blue sky underneath.

Sky's door squeaked open and clicked shut.  I stood up.  He walked up to me on the damp lawn, his jacket zipped up.  He touched my hand and smiled at me, flooding me with his feelings, a kind of giddiness cloaking a mellow, impenetrable calm.  I swallowed some giddiness myself.  His hair looked like a dense blond cloud in the rain, a glass peace symbol hanging from a cord around his neck.  I freaking knew he was a hippie.

"I wanna show you the promontory," I said.  "It's the highest point in Nettlebush.  It's like you're sitting in the clouds."

He hooked his arm around mine.  His feelings went from giddy to grateful.  I tried to separate them from my own so I wouldn't confuse the two.  It wasn't a very easy feat.

We walked north through the reserve, wading through a patch of parched brown grass.  We entered the badlands through a dipping, blue-gray gulch that sloped all the way down to the canyons' boundary.  I pushed my wet hair out of my eyes.  The badlands could be dangerous if you didn't already know your way through them, a series of overlapping cracks and dents marring some very malleable terrain.  I held Sky's hand, helping him down from the gulch.  I led him past a dried out hickory tree where turkey vultures sometimes liked to roost.  It didn't occur to me until too late that my bringing Sky out here might not have been a good idea.  Somewhere in the badlands Dad had dumped Rebecca and Mercy's bodies, enlisting the vultures to help him hide their remains.  Sky was my father's only living victim.  I didn't want him thinking I was reenacting the crime.

Sky's feelings surged through my palm.  Suddenly he was deeply upset about something.  For a moment I assumed the worst; but then I followed his gaze, and I saw he was looking at a fuzzy black bird on the ground, juvenile-sized, mere yards away from our feet.

"It's a falcon fledgling," I said.

Sky looked over his shoulder at the hickory tree.  I realized he was searching for nests.

"Falcons don't build nests," I explained.  "There's no way to tell where it came from.  Just wait for its parents to come along.  If the parents see us touch the fledgling, they might grow wary and abandon it."

Sky's hand tightened around mine.  He gnawed incessantly on his lower lip.  It surprised me that he cared so much about a single bird.  I liked animals, too, don't get me wrong; but sometimes what looked like a tragedy was only nature grappling for balance.

"Alright," I said, touched by Sky's pity.  "Don't move," I added.  I didn't want him hurting himself on the sliding clay.

I crouched down beside the bird.  It was dead, alright, one wing battered and ruffled, like it had fallen from the sky mid-flight.  I scooped it gingerly in my hands, but it was long cold.  I think I felt grateful for that, in a way; not just that the death was fast, but that I didn't have to feel its feelings.  Animals have feelings, too; they just aren't like ours is all.  One time when I was five I petted Grandpa Gives Light's rez dog, a floppy-eared mutt he called Georgie.  It freaked me the hell out.  Since then you can't get me to touch a living animal willingly.  Horses are the sole exception.  Humans and horses were made for one another, emotions and all.

"Probably it couldn't fly," I tried to tell Sky, turning to face him with the bird.  "So the parents had to leave it."

Sky struggled to keep his countenance firm, but he seriously looked like he was going to be sick.  His face sagged wearily, his eyes alert.  I decided I had to get that bird away from him.  I buried it under a rock beneath the hickory tree, so I'd know where to find it again later.

"Do you want to go home?" I asked.

Sky's muffin hair flopped when he shook his head "No."  I wanted to put my hands in it, just to see what it felt like.  I considered asking whether I could, but he grabbed my hand, steadying himself, and made to keep walking.  So I walked with him.

The promontory was a monster of a cliff.  Taller than the oak grove below, taller than the tent rocks far north, it had to be about a hundred meters.  One side was sloping and easy, good for climbing, but the rest of it was steep as hell, the drop sudden.  If you so much as sneezed up there, you were a dead man.  It was a good place to come and think.  Sky and I drew in sight of the promontory and Sky squeezed my hand, his head tilting all the way back while he scaled the length of the cliff with his eyes.  I didn't want to make him climb it, though, specially not in the rain.  Even if I'd suggested a climb, something told me I would have met resistance.

"It doesn't have any religious meaning," I said.  "Which is weird, 'cause everything has religious meaning."

Sky's feelings skidded through my palm lines, awed and humbled and a little nervous.  I squeezed his hand for comfort and his feelings went still, although I worried I'd squeezed too tight.

"You got any favorite places?" I asked.  "Back home?"

Sky mimicked a movie reel with his hands.  I'd never watched any movies before, and didn't understand the appeal.  I thought about how Sky might not be here once his dad got found by the police.  Unless his dad went to prison for people smuggling.  I told myself I probably shouldn't hope that his dad went to prison for people smuggling.

Sky's hand came down suddenly on top of my head.  It immobilized me, not because he was strong or anything, but because he was small and slight and I hadn't realized he could reach my head.  His torso was short, I guess, but his long puppy limbs must have worked in his favor.  If I'd expected him to whack me, I was wrong.  His fingers raked my hair in pattering scratches.  It felt ridiculously good.  His eyes were pensive but serious and I realized he was trying to comfort me.  I didn't know why.  I wondered if even he knew why.

Sky's feelings were a thousand times stronger when they touched me at the crown of my head, flowing through my body, becoming my own.  Nattering anxiety chewed away at the lining of my stomach.  I didn't need to be told Sky was worried for his father.  There was a warmth behind the anxiety, a belonging, and I knew just then that Sky didn't want to leave the reserve.  I didn't necessarily want him leaving, either.  Sky's light centered around me, warming my skin, bouncing the rain away.  He was so generous with it it made me feel like hiding, except I wanted more of it; I was greedy.  I could see now, in some way, that maybe even the planes of his face were woven from light, particles blurring fast enough to mimic color and shape and boyhood while belonging, in secret, to some other tier of existence.

I grabbed Sky's hands.  This time, for the first time, I wanted to feel somebody else's feelings.  I wanted it, but I wasn't prepared for it.  Sky's emotions hurtled me back in time.  My brain went slow and dull with groggy confusion, like I'd been sleeping for a long time, but something--some sound--had woken me up.  I could feel the dread pounding through me, a slow buildup.  I could feel the confusion, like whatever I was staring at didn't make any sense.  Then came the shock.  Then came the raw fear.  I thought I must have been in pain, but I couldn't be sure of it; pain on its own wasn't an emotion.  All the while I kept thinking that I wanted this to be over, that I wanted to go back in time, that if I pretended hard enough none of this was even a reality.

I let go of Sky's hands.  I had the very strong feeling that I'd just witnessed his last night with his mother.  Sky confirmed it when his hands shook, and he stuffed them into his pockets and smiled at me, forced but weak.

"I couldn't do anything, either," I said, my voice like sandpaper.  "When my mom died.  There wasn't anything I could do to make her better again.  Except--"

The guilt pummeling through me was solely my own.

Stop
, Sky said.

He put his hand on my arm.  He worked like a sedative.  All the heaviness weighing my spirit sapped out of me like rainwater from a desert sink.  With one gentle touch, Sky dug up my emotions and sealed them away.  Where did they go?  Inside of him?  I didn't want that.  I didn't want anyone to feel the way I'd felt since I was six, least of all Sky.  But then, in some form or another, Sky already felt this way.  He might have been the only other person going through the exact same motions as me.  His loved one lived on his face; it was his responsibility to keep her alive.  It was exhausting.

My shoulders went light, relieved of a burden.  My chest relaxed, full of cool air.  Whatever had been troubling me a second ago was gone.  Was this Sky's gift?  He could stop my feelings if I needed him to, just by touching me.  Who gave him that ability?  He said,
Slow down
, and the world slowed down.

I think it's over now
, Sky said.

It could be over now.  I could be friends with this guy--this person, this not-quite-a-human--without my dad or his mom getting in our way.  Sky looked at me and didn't see my dad.  I looked at him and didn't see his mom.  He was the boy who liked movies and baseball and didn't eat meat.  He was the boy who wanted to sing.

It was over now.

I released a breath I hadn't known I was holding.  Sky burst out laughing, unexpected, soundless.  I slugged him in his arm, except I didn't really want to hurt him.  His face lit up; he pinched my ribs.  I grabbed his head in a headlock and got a mouth full of muffin hair as a reward.  I couldn't stop laughing, and my gut felt sore, in a really good way.  "You haven't used me in a while," my stomach said.  "You haven't laughed like this in ages.  What gives?"  There was nothing I could do except apologize to it, and hope that maybe the hiatus had reached its end.