A Certain Kind of Hero (12 page)

She'd never pictured him in
his
kitchen. She'd never imagined him in such domestic surroundings. In her mind, he was part of the wild life, both outdoors and, less frequently, in honky-tonks and poolrooms. She'd always been fascinated by the wildness she perceived to be intrinsic in him. Barely controlled, barely controllable, Gideon's very nature was like a curious passageway that lured her with the promise of something new and exciting at the end. She'd always approached excitement cautiously, one shoulder leaning in its direction, the other aimed for a last-minute escape.

But she remembered that, in the end, it was Gideon who had backed away. Maybe that was the way of wildness, she had decided. And in her mind she had consigned all wildness
to a world quite different from hers, a world full of risk-taking and privation. She hadn't expected it to live in a place with dishes and cupboards, nor to make room in that place for her child. She should have felt comfortable with it, now that she could see for herself how unexpectedly familiar so much of it was. But she felt like an outsider. And that scared her.

“You've been pretty quiet,” Gideon observed as he handed her a cup of the coffee he'd just made. “I thought some decaf might go down easy right about now.”

She told herself it would be easier if she stopped letting his every move surprise her, and she murmured her thanks.

“Mii gwech,”
he said with a warm smile. “You remember.
Mii gwech?
Thanks?”

“Mii gwech,”
she repeated softly. They faced each other across the small kitchen, each with a countertop to lean against, each with cup in hand. “You speak Ojibwa fluently, don't you?”

“Mmm-hmm.” He sipped his coffee. “I get stumped when people ask me to spell it, though. I speak it, but I don't write it.”

“I don't think Jared knew much of the language at all.”

“See, I'm one up on him. But don't tell Peter. I don't want to spoil anything for him.” He glanced away. “The dad who knew everything. That was Jared. The man who could do no wrong.”

“Was that the way you saw him, too?”

He glanced at her curiously, then dismissed the question by changing the subject entirely. “What did you think of Arlen's suggestion? The one about coming back here to teach.”

“It's a little late in the year to start applying for teaching jobs.”

“There are still a couple of openings. I checked.”

“And you'd put in a good word for me?” He nodded. “A
few days ago you were discouraging an extended stay,” she reminded him. “You said the political climate had rendered relations a bit—” the pause was mostly for effect, because she did remember “—
dicey
was the word you used.”

“That was then,” he quipped, his tone suddenly as flat as hers was sharp. “This is now.”

“Yes.” An outsider, she told herself, needed to be sharp.
Stay
sharp. Mix in a little sarcasm. “And what a difference a day makes, hmm? A little controversy over a few fish suddenly seems rather insignificant.”

“Not to me.” He studied her with expressionless eyes. “Not to
us.
”

“And my son is now court-ordered to be one of
you.
”

“He always was.”

“I don't mean culturally. I never disputed that. I mean politically.”

“It's one and the same.” He drew a deep breath, still watching her, waiting with less than his usual patience for her to stop skirting the issue.

“You haven't answered my question, Raina. I don't know what your lawyer told you, but
I'm
telling you there's a good possibility that Judge Half will rule that Arlen deserves
some
time with his grandson and vice versa. I don't know how much time, and I don't know how he'll suggest you work it. I just know that the precedent is pretty well established.”

Sharp, she told herself. Stay sharp. But she glanced away, the threat of too much truth blunting her will. “Yes, that's what my lawyer said.”

“You won't lose him,” he said.

The hope that he knew something she didn't brought her eyes back to his, wordlessly asking for a promise.

“No one's going to take him away from you.” He couldn't stop himself. When she looked at him that way, he had to give
her what she wanted. “That's not gonna happen. I won't—” He swallowed hard, looking elsewhere for help—the bright light above the sink, the shiny faucet, the dish drainer. “Well, the
judge
won't let that happen. He knows it's too late to take the boy back.”

“You really think so?”

“Yeah.” He nodded persuasively. “I can't see that happening now.”

“I've thought about trying to get my old job back here.” She offered a tentative smile. “I checked, too. They need a fourth-grade teacher. I just don't know whether it would be good for Peter. Jared didn't think much of the schools up here.”

“He didn't think much of the
life
up here.” Gideon stared into his cup. “But as it turned out, life in the fast lane didn't agree with him all that well, either.”

“He used to say that
you
were the one looking for fast…oh, fast thrills or something.”

“That's
cheap
thrills.” His brow furrowed as he made a pretense of searching for the right words. “A fast buck and a faster woman. I think that about sums up my brother's favorite assessment of my basic needs.”

“He never spoke unkindly of you, Gideon. Sometimes I thought he envied you your—” she shrugged, glancing around her as if some piece of it might be found in his kitchen “—your freewheeling life-style.”

“My ‘freewheeling life-style,'” Gideon repeated with a dry chuckle. “Right. Nothing about my life appealed to Jared. ‘The good life'—that's what Jared wanted. The American dream, looming off in the distance at the end of that fast lane.” He shook his head, raising his coffee cup as though he were toasting her. “I had nothing he envied. He had goals—I had needs. Big difference between the two.”

“You don't think Jared had needs?”

“They were always met.” His eyes conveyed the full weight of his meaning. “Always.”

“And yours?”

He answered with a look, smoldering in silence.

“Gideon, I have to ask you something.” But she had to glance away before she withered beneath the heat in his dark eyes. “Something I've thought about often over the years, but never—” She bit her lip, hesitating as she looked up at him again and sought his indulgence. “I never asked, even though I told myself there was a good chance the truth would ease my mind. But the prospect of opening a ruinous can of worms was always enough of a deterrent.”

Before she went on, she stepped to the back of the kitchen and quietly closed the door at the top of the basement steps.

His eyes followed her every move.

She took a deep breath as she came back to him, speaking softly, steadily. “I have a feeling you know more about the circumstances of Peter's adoption than I do.”

“What do you mean?”

“Specifically,” she began carefully, “about Peter's biological father.” She looked up, looked him straight in the eye. “Was it Jared?”

He was thunderstruck. “Jared?”

She squared her shoulders, preparing herself to hear the truth, whatever it was. “Did Jared have an affair with Tomasina Skinner?”

“That's a hell of a thing for you to ask me, Raina.” He suddenly looked confused, even hurt. “My brother's dead. Why would you even…?” He shook his head, staring at her as though she'd just popped out of the floor. “Why would you think that?”

“Most people wait years for an adoption. Our was almost too easy.” She wasn't going to let his reaction alter her course.
“I said that to Jared once, just…just wondering how it came about. He said that being an Indian was an advantage for a change.”

“That and being a lawyer.”

“But it was all so—” Too good to be true, too wonderful to question. “One day he knew where we could get a baby, and the next day we had Peter.”

“Didn't happen quite that fast.”

“But Jared had had very little contact with the reservation since we left, as far as I knew. He seemed to go out of his way to avoid…”

“Avoid…what?” Gideon's smile did not reach his eyes. “Or should I say
who?
”

“All things that reminded him of this place, I guess. Once he'd left it behind him, he kept saying he didn't want to look back.”

“You guys wanted a baby,” Gideon recalled for her, and she nodded, acknowledging that much. “Jared said he had a low sperm count. It was like he was confessing some terrible personal secret when he told me, like he'd found out he was missing—” For lack of acceptable words, he used those he once scoffed at. “‘What separates the men from the boys,' I think he said. I thought he meant he couldn't get it—” His gesture, turning out to be as awkward as any word he could have chosen, ended in a frustrated slap to his own thigh. “You know, I thought he meant he couldn't perform.”

“Perform?”
She shook her head. “His sperm count was below average, but it wouldn't have been impossible for him to father a child…or for me, except for my…”

“He said you had a problem, too, but he didn't get—”
Personal
was the word that came to mind. The idea grated on him, but it had seemed as though once she'd become Jared's
wife, nothing about Raina had been any of Gideon's damn business. He settled on “Technical.”

“I have a tipped uterus,” she told him. “Which isn't the end of the world, either, but with the combination of the two…”

“He couldn't
produce.
Couldn't get you pregnant.”

Her eyes turned icy. “Sounds like you're talking about breeding stock instead of people.”

He knew it did, just as he knew that the pleasure he took in making such a statement was of a pretty perverse nature.
Jared couldn't get the job done.
“So you're thinking he managed to get another woman pregnant.”

“The thought did occur to me, yes.”

“Are you jealous?”

“Jealous!” She scowled. “My husband is dead, for heaven's sake.”

“They're both dead,
for heaven's sake.
” He lowered his voice and persisted. “Are you jealous?”

“No.” She had the look of a woman who'd swallowed the first half of a dose of bitter medicine and was still determined to take the rest. “But I think I'm entitled to the truth. Did he confide in you?”

“I just told you what he confided.”

“That's not what I'm asking.” She sighed, then recited with exaggerated patience, “I know he's not here to defend himself, and I know you don't want to betray his memory in any way. Or his trust, or your sacred oath, or whatever.” She laid her hand on his arm, found it rigid, and her touch turned to subtle stroking. “But it can't change anything now, can it?”

His throat went dry. “Not for him.”

“Then tell me, Gideon.” The pressure on his arm became insistent. “Did Jared have an affair with Peter's mother?”

His memory, his trust, a damned sacred oath? Did she imagine he had a suit of shining armor on, too?

Gideon shook his head and turned away.

S
he followed him to the back porch, where she waited, watching him light up the second cigarette he'd had in as many years. The second in a single day. The red ash glowed steadily in the dark as he filled his lungs, seeking the insidious calm of an internal haze. Gideon held his breath, mixed with the smoke, willing it to do its damage the way it always had, the way so many things had. If it felt good now, it would hurt later. But he could take it. Hell, he was tough.

But Raina wasn't. She was a good woman, but she wasn't tough. Jared hadn't been tough, either. He'd been smart, but not tough. And Peter…well, Peter was still young yet. Soft and malleable. With any luck he would end up good and smart, loving and well loved, proud of his heritage and strong in every way. And with all that going for him, maybe he wouldn't have to be tough.

She stood behind him, waiting for her answer, and, damn his mean soul, he wanted to tell her
yes.
Yes, your husband
was a sinner, too, and yes, he screwed up sometimes, and
yes,
Raina, you married the wrong man.

But he couldn't quite get the words out. He wasn't sure why. There was no one to dispute them, and they might have served him well.

For some equally mysterious reason, he couldn't tell her
no,
either.

“What difference does it make, Raina?”

There was no sound, and even though she had to be standing at least a foot away from him, he could feel her body stiffen. His first response to her question had seemed to confirm her suspicions, and she was wrestling with it. He could help her with that, he told himself. He could spare the living and let her think what she would of the dead.
I'm here for you,
he could say. He'd always known the truth would hurt, but whom would it hurt, and how?

“There's the chance that Jared's health problems might be hereditary,” she suggested, almost timidly.

He stared through the screen into the night. The trees behind the house stood like dark, shadowy sentries, and in the distance, there were lights twinkling on the lake.

“Is that it?” he asked quietly. “Is that why you want to know whether Jared had an affair?”

“I'm asking you whether Jared was Peter's biological father.”

“No, you're asking me whether Jared cheated on you.” It was a question, Gideon realized, that a man had to answer for himself. All his brother could say was, “If he did, it's history. It doesn't matter anymore.”

“Then he
did.
”

“I didn't say that.”
Yes, you did. To her, you did.
“Hell, I don't know,” he admitted, giving in with a sigh. “I wasn't living with him. You were.”

“I know he kept a lot inside,” she said. “That's just the way he was. And I guess we buried it with him.”

“Digging it up now might not change anything, but it could hurt somebody.”

“Who?” Her motherly nose smelled a threat. “Peter?”

“First you. Then maybe Peter. Old ghosts ought to be left in the closet, where they can't hurt innocent people.”

“I
am
Peter's real mother,” she insisted, as though she believed he needed persuading now, too. “No matter what the circumstances of his conception or his birth were,
I'm
his true mother. And as his mother, I'm responsible for his health and his well-being, so if there's any possibility that he's inherited some kind of—”

“Jared was not Peter's father,” Gideon said, his tone carefully controlled, utterly flat. “Not…biologically.”

He took another pull on the cigarette, looking for heat. He could have sworn his skin was coated with ice. When she'd brought up the subject, he'd walked, but not far enough. The complications were piling up so damn fast he just wanted to walk out the door, jump in the lake and dive to the bottom.

Instead, there in the dark, he faced her.

“Look, I knew you guys wanted a baby,” he said carefully, because now it was his turn to do some mental wrestling with all those damn pieces of the past. “And I knew that Tomasina Skinner planned to give hers up, so I told Jared about it. Simple as that. The fact that Jared was registered with the Pine Lake Band, along with him being a lawyer,
made
it as simple as that. No problem with the tribal court, and Jared handled the paperwork in the state court, smooth as still waters.” He turned away and dragged deeply on his cigarette. On a trail of smoke he added, “Then he went and died on us.”

“Gideon, you can't fault him for—”

“Don't
you?
” He wanted somebody else to, besides him. “Sometimes? Don't you ever say, ‘Damn it, Jared, what did you have to go and
die
for?'”

“In the last week, sure. Well, I guess there've been a few other times,” she admitted. “But I know it's selfish for me to think that way, as though he had a choice.”

“Maybe. But I get mad at him, anyway, for checkin' out so soon, leaving some things unsettled between us.” He reached for the empty coffee can he'd left on the porch, thinking it would come in handy for something. He hadn't expected it to be an ashtray.

Damn the complications, he told himself.

But a picture of his brother formed in his mind, and it made him smile. “Guess we're both human, huh? But if ol' Jared's earned his wings—and knowing him, he did it summa cum laude—then I don't believe he'll be wasting eternity looking for ways to use anything we say against us. I think he's above all that now.”

“Yes, he is,” she said with a sigh. “And I'm left with a predicament that wouldn't be a problem if he were here.”

She sank into one of the wicker porch chairs and began deliberating aloud. “I could move up here. That really wouldn't be a problem. The sensible thing for me to do is to apply for a job here. That way, whatever happens, I can adjust.”

The hand she lifted toward him was the color of moonlight. “Peter's all I have, Gideon. Everything else is superfluous. Is it possible…could I lose him entirely?”

“Not as long as he breathes.”

As quickly as he reached out from the shadows, her small hand disappeared between his, which were larger and darker and much, much warmer than hers. “Peter is just as surely your son as you are his mother. He's never gonna forget that.”

“But…say if this treaty thing turns out badly for you, and
there's a lot of resentment over it, and the judge looks at me, and he sees a white woman who's your sister-in-law…”

“Don't be lookin' to buy trouble now,” he warned, seating himself in the chair next to hers. “We've got enough to worry about. And I'm not going to let Peter become a political football. That I can promise you, Raina.”

“Are you…on my side at all?”

“I am.” He rubbed her hand, warming it between his. “Mostly because I'm on Peter's side.” He cleared his throat of the bitter taste of having to qualify a promise that he wanted to give her outright. “He's lost Jared, too. I don't want to see him lose his mother.”

“But the interests of the Pine Lake Band—”

“Are my responsibility.” He felt her stiffen again, and he withdrew, leaning back into the shadows. “Make no mistake about that. I won't compromise the interests of the people. But Peter is one of the people. The fact that you're not isn't as important to me as the fact that he
is.
”

“Is that supposed to be encouraging?”

“When you're talking to the chairman of our tribal band, yeah, it should be encouraging. I happen to think the judge will see it that way, too.”

“What about Peter's uncle? What about my brother-in-law, my—” she gestured, searching, and her hand came to rest on his knee “—my old friend. I want to be able to talk to
him
without talking to the tribal chairman. Is that possible?”

“Depends on what you want to talk about.”

“What I'm thinking. What I'm feeling. How worried I was the whole time I was gone, and how glad I am to be back.” She paused. The way her hand stirred against his jeans was appealing in every sense he could imagine. “Can you take your chairman's hat off for a while and let me talk to Gideon?”

“I can take off anything you want,” he told her. “Anything that's in your way.”

“Shades of the Gideon Defender I used to know.” There was an echo of relief in her laughter, a full range of appreciativeness in the way she patted his knee. “There must be a happy medium.”

“Yeah.” Gideon wasn't particularly amused. “His name was Jared.”

 

Before she left, Raina went downstairs to say good-night to Peter. She found him asleep on the sofa in the den. She started to wake him, but Gideon was right behind her with a blanket.

“Let him sleep,” he whispered as he covered the boy. “He's on vacation.”

The only thing Gideon regretted was that Peter was too big for him to lift in his arms and carry into the bedroom without waking him. He could have done that the last time the boy had visited, when Peter was only six. He could have kissed him good-night then, too, the way Raina did.

And there had been a time before that when he would have kissed her good-night, a time when she would have expected him to. A time before the first time she'd said,
We can't let this happen.

If she'd wanted him to kiss her this time, she might have lingered at the door. He knew she didn't feel right, leaving without her son. He could hear it in her voice. On the way to the front door, he'd kept his hands off the switches to avoid shining a rude light on her sadness, not because he hoped that in the dark she might reach out to him again, might turn and touch him somehow before she left for the night.

And she didn't, of course. He had something she wanted, but tonight it was not his kiss. She hardly paused at the
threshold. She simply told him in passing that it would be her turn to make supper tomorrow, and she hurried out the door.

Gideon had changed a great deal in fifteen years. He wondered whether Raina realized that, and whether it mattered to her. He and Jared had never had much in common, but Gideon had respected his brother for what he'd made of himself. Even though he knew the feeling had not held true in reverse, he indulged himself in thinking that it might have, had Jared lived a little longer.

But what about Raina? With her back against the wall, she was talking about moving back onto his turf, and she wanted to know whose side he was on. He couldn't blame her for clinging to the notion that the world was made up of straight, rigid sides rather than curves that might bend and rebound, ebb and flow. They saw the world from different perspectives, just as he and Jared had.

Jared had clawed his way closer to Raina's vantage point, and Peter…well, Peter's parents had been handpicked, so that he might enjoy the advantages of having a Native father who had made it in the white world and a mother who truly wanted a baby.

Whose side was he on?
When it came right down to the bare bones, hadn't he always been on her side? Hadn't he taken her emphatic
no
for an answer? Hadn't he stepped aside and stayed out of their lives? Hadn't he given her what she'd wanted, always? Maybe she still didn't see it that way, didn't even realize it, because she'd never bothered to inventory her allies. But he had been on her side even when he doubted the existence of sides.

And if there were sides, they were all curved. There were surely no straight lines, nothing to keep Raina's path parallel to, but separate from, his. The great distance between them
had gradually, inevitably closed in on them again, for all things in life were, after all, circular.

But he was on Peter's side of the circle now, too. He had been there at the beginning, and now the years had rolled around an inner curve and bumped the boy up against him again. That was the way of things. Gideon had learned the hard way. If Jared had lived a little longer, smart as he was, he would have come to recognize the circle, too.

 

Early the next morning Gideon went downstairs to wake Peter for breakfast. When he found only a rumpled blanket and a sofa pillow, he swore to himself that the next time the boy tried this, he wouldn't make it out of the house without running smack into Gideon, even if it meant
he
had to take up sleeping on the sofa.

“Hey, Uncle Gideon, is it okay if I put a nail in this wall?”

The voice coming from Peter's bedroom glided over Gideon's ruffled feathers. He kept a lid on his sigh of relief and followed the sound, ready with a smile by the time he reached the doorway. Apparently sometime during the night Peter had opted for more comfortable sleeping arrangements and moved to his bed.

“You got something you want nailed down?”

Peter handed Gideon a leather-wrapped circlet about the size of a small plate. “I tried a tack, but it fell on my head this morning.
Nimishoomis
gave it to me. He made it himself.” It looked like a large spider's web woven of sinew on a willow hoop. Blue and white feathers and beads dangled from the bottom of the hoop, and there was a loop at the top. “He told me to hang it over my bed.”

“It's a dreamcatcher.” Gideon examined the fine workmanship of the webbing. Peter couldn't ask for a better
artisan to teach him than his grandfather. “Do you know what this is for?”

“To catch dreams?”

“The bad ones get caught in the web.” Gideon fingered a blue bead woven into the lower portion of the web. “You see, like this little rascal here. But the good ones slip on through—” he demonstrated with sinuous, undulating fingers that took a plunge behind Peter's ear “—and into your head.”

The boy laughed. “It's a nice decoration, anyway. I needed something to hang on the wall.”