Burning (26 page)

Ah, the Fool—that was who I had wanted to be, was it not? I had asked for it, even welcomed it. And now here I was. It is funny how you can think you know what you are asking for, but of course you do not know at all until you get it. I had wanted to step off a cliff, and so I had. Was this where I had intended to land?

Of course I knew that any cards I might have pulled could have meaning for anyone who chose to look for it. These cards or an entirely different spread of cards could equally reveal something to me if I wanted them to.

I heard the tent’s flap rustle and I turned to find Anelie staring in at me. Ah. This was who I had come to see, and she had found me. I smiled tentatively and held my arms open for her, unsure of her reaction. I feared she might scream at me out of fear or anger, or the way one might scream at the appearance of a ghost.

“Lala,” she said, and she ran to me. We embraced and said nothing for long minutes, until her sobs had quieted. I did not allow myself to cry; what right had I to tears, when I had chosen my path?

Instead I stroked her hair and concentrated on memorizing the smell of her, warm and sweet in my arms.

“Is it true what they say about you?”

I nodded into her hair. “Most probably,” I said, “if what they are saying is that I was alone with a
gazhò
, and I let him touch me, and I waved my skirts at our own men.”

“That is what they say.” Anelie was miserable. “But Lala, why?”

Such a simple question. But such a complicated, twisting and turning answer. “I would not have been happy, Anelie.” That was the best, truest answer I could give.

“Are you happy now?”

Ah, Anelie. Such a smart girl. Such a quick learner. I remembered then the card I had set aside—the Page of Cups. An apprentice, in my Immediate Future. And here she was, arrived to me as if I had called her. There is no magic in this world—that I knew to be true. And yet, perhaps …

“Do Mother and Father know you have come out here?”

“Father is sleeping. Mother sent me.”

“She sent you? What for?”

“She saw the light. She wanted me to give you this.”

Anelie held out a bag to me. It was my own leather satchel.

“She wants you to know that she loves you. She says—she will miss you.”

“But not that I should stay.”

“No. She did not say that.”

I nodded. I felt terribly, terribly sad.

“What will you do, Lala?” Her voice was anguished.

What
would
I do? What would I become? I did not wish to show my fear to Anelie. Hers was too great already; I would not make it worse, if I could help it.

“Anelie,” I said forcing lightness into my voice, “do you not know by now that I am like the cat that lands always on its feet?”

She shrugged a little.

“Do you remember the time,” I said, “when Mother was ill with her pregnancy and had to be taken to the
gazhikanò
hospital?”

“How could I forget? She was gone for close to a month.”

“That is right. And how did Violeta, who should have shouldered Mother’s responsibilities, react?”

“She spent most of her time in the bathroom,” Anelie recalled, “styling her hair and painting her nails.”

“That is right. Who prepared the meals? Who took care of the laundry and the cleaning?”

“It was you, Lala. And I helped you.”

“Yes. I am the type of person, Anelie, who rises to a challenge. You are, as well.”

“But where will you go?”

I remembered Portland, our rainy home. I would not return there; this was certain. “I do not yet know,” I admitted. “But Anelie—this I do know. It is not necessary that I disappear from your life, if you do not wish it. I am not Ana. And we are not children.”

“I’m only eleven,” Anelie said. Her voice quavered.

“Eleven is old enough for many things,” I answered. “Not that many years ago, eleven could have seen you close to becoming a wife.”

She nodded. “I do not want to lose you.”

“Enough to defy Father and Mother?”

I was asking something terrible of her. To defy our parents—this was no small thing. How could I ask it—that
she risk her role in the family because of a choice I had made? It made me a terrible person to do this, and yet I did.

Her face disintegrated into tears. “Oh, Lala, I am so afraid!” she cried. “Why did you have to do it? How can you leave me? Doesn’t it matter to you
at all
that I will be alone?”

So much pain. I welcomed it like lashes on my skin, her words whipping me just as painfully. I deserved it, all of it. It was impossible that I should escape without scars; had I stayed there would have been scars, as well, but different ones—and perhaps I could have borne them myself instead of sharing them with Anelie.

I could not undo what I had done. I could not spare Anelie.

“I am sorry,” I whispered. She cried quietly so as not to draw attention to us in the tent. Then she managed to control her tears. It was a glimpse into her future—she would cry for me, and she would contain it.

“I will not make you choose,” I said, even as I did just that. I wrote for her on a scrap of paper my email address. She did not yet have one; it might be months before she would be able to create one, if she ever manifested the courage.

She took the paper from me, but she did not look at the words on it before she tucked it in a pocket of her skirt. Still, she had taken it. That was something. A hope, at least, that she would one day find me.

“There is money in the bag,” Anelie said. “I saw Mother slip it in.”

Incredulous, I opened the bag and felt through the clothes
to the bottom. There was an envelope. I looked inside it; it was thick with bills.

“This is a lot of money,” I said. “I cannot take this.”

“Of course you can,” said Anelie. “You earned much of it yourself.”

I thought of the next card in my reading, the Views of Others—the Seven of Swords, a hunched figure sneaking guiltily away from a city of tents.

Ben had seen himself in that card; I saw myself, as well. Might they see me that way—my parents, my siblings, Romeo and Marko—if I were to take the money, if they were to know of it?

Another choice. To take the envelope or refuse it. Anelie was right; I had earned the family much money over the years, far more than I could have used in room and board. But to think about my relationship with my family this way—as a business transaction—made me feel guilty anew, and full of shame.

It did not please me to push the envelope back into my bag. But I did it anyway, avoiding Anelie’s gaze.

When I looked up at her, I could not read the meaning in her expression. It was possible that she had expected me to refuse the money, in spite of her encouragement to take it. Taking it came at a cost, another cost that I alone would not bear. My father would be very angry when he learned that my mother had sent it to me, that Anelie had delivered it.

Again, others would suffer on my behalf.

But without the money I would be dependent entirely on the kindness of others. I was not yet eighteen—still a minor.
I could have gone to the
gazhikanò
authorities and found a place in one of their foster homes. Even with the money nothing was certain; surely it could not be more than a few thousand dollars, which would not get me terribly far.

“I should go back,” Anelie said, “before Father wakes.”

We embraced. When I saw her next—if I ever saw her again—she would be a woman.

I watched from behind the tent’s flap as she ran, light and filly-like, the short distance between the tent and the motor home. And then she opened the door, and then she was gone.

My cards still lay spread on the table. I slowly picked them up, one at a time, and replaced them in the velvet bag. I came to the second-to-last card of the reading, Hopes and Fears—the Lovers. Ben Stanley had asked me a question about this card.

“Didn’t you say that the Major Arcana … that the cards in it can, you know, represent actual
people
?”

There they were, a light-haired man with a dark-haired woman, so clearly him and me. They stood naked together under a tree, faces up and shining, no shame, no regret.

And there was the final card. The Three of Swords. A rounded red heart, floating against a rainy sky, pierced through by three swords.

Outside there was still no moon, no stars in the sky. I stood looking at my family’s camp. Just as I was about to turn and leave, the door to the motor home opened. Out stepped my
mother. She walked down the two metal steps and stood very still. I was obscured by the dark, but I think she felt me out there. She could not see me, but I could see her face in the circle of light thrown by the lantern. Her expression revealed nothing. She looked just as usual—a little lined, a bit rumpled, her streak of gray pulled away from her forehead with the rest of her hair.

Then she reached out for the lantern and switched it off. And I could not see her anymore.

Shouldering my bag, I walked along the highway’s edge. The picture on that card—the Seven of Swords—that was how my father would see me, and Romeo as well. Perhaps all of them would, even Anelie, though she would want to the least.

I had no power over this. If I was a thief in the night to them, so be it. Would
I
believe it, though? Would I accept their vision of me as the thief on the card?

Part of me did. The weight of my pack seemed overwhelming as I thought about the envelope tucked inside it. What hypocrisy, to take what served me while denying the rest of it—the union with Romeo, the pressure of my family to conform.

But I could do it. I could choose to take some of it with me—the money, yes, but not only that. The memories, too, of my childhood—I would take those with me as well. The incredible closeness we had shared, the indulgent love my family had lavished on me when I had been a child—all of that would stay with me forever, even as I walked away from them.

And the condemnation of being marked
marimè
? Would I accept that as part of the burden I carried away from here? Or could I refuse it, if I chose to?

That was a choice, and I could make it. My family might call me
marimè
, but perhaps I did not have to accept it as my own truth. My people believed that—that there is not just one truth, but rather many truths that at times contradict each other. Perhaps it was true that my actions had made me
marimè
. But equally true was that I was
not
. It depended entirely on which side of the table I chose to sit on. It spread through me like sunshine, this dawning of the idea that I could
choose
whether I would be
marimè
. I could shoulder that burden and accept it, or I could shrug it off.

This would be my choice. I did not know everything—indeed I knew very little about the world I was choosing to enter—but I felt the lightness of hope growing in my heart.

And I knew where I would go tonight.

As I walked, it seemed to me that I was in a different place than I had been in earlier that same night. I was still in the desert, yes, but barren? Suddenly, it did not seem so. Over my head I heard the flapping of bats’ wings. Somewhere, not too far away, an owl called. Around me on the sand insects rustled by. Life was all around me. Even out here, where life seemed impossible, it found a way.

Perhaps I had no right to happiness. Others might say that a girl such as I, one who had shamed her family, should have no claim to joy. Yet I felt it in my breast, a beautiful clarity, and when the heavy clouds at last opened above me, I smiled widely as I turned my face up to receive their rain.

It was the rain that woke me. I guess I’d been sleeping again—real sleep this time, no more crazy hallucinations. I was still on the couch and James was spread out on the carpet nearby.

Maybe it was close to midnight. I sort of remembered my parents coming home, asking James what was wrong with me, my mom peering into my eyes and making me track her finger as she passed it back and forth in front of my face. She must have decided I was all right, because I was still home—they hadn’t loaded me up and driven me into Reno.

The rain was intense, pouring down, and actually I was surprised I was the only one it woke. I stood and tried to stretch, but a sharp pain in my ribs on my left side stopped me short.

My jaw was sore, too, and my stomach felt like I’d done about a thousand sit-ups. I stepped carefully over James, not wanting to wake him, and made my way into the kitchen. The clock on the microwave read 12:32.

Saturday, then. Two days until the move.

On another day, this thought would have been enough to slap me with another round of anxiety. But my problems—my guilt over going away to college, the fact that I wouldn’t be in any shape to run when I got there, and what my new coach might think about that—none of that seemed important just then. I stared out the kitchen window at sheets of rain and wondered about Lala.

She was out there somewhere. I couldn’t imagine that she could really be at home with her family. The angry faces of Romeo and his brother flashed in my head and I felt a jolt of fear. They’d had no qualms about taking me apart out at the mine. Did that mean that they might be willing to hurt
her
, too?