Falling From the Sky (15 page)

“Where are we going?” I ask him. I glance out the window, but as always, there’s just dirt and dust.

“Somewhere I’ve never taken anyone else before,” he answers.

I’m too scared to ask where that might be, so I keep quiet until he pulls off the dirt road of the reservation onto another dirt road I’ve never noticed. Its entrance is nearly hidden by two huge trees, but Micah’s truck eases in with no problem. We drive through a shaded area for just a moment before we come to a clearing with a tiny gravel spot for Micah to park.

There’s a giant gravestone standing ahead of his truck. The words “Bear Creek” are engraved near the top, and a picture of a bear is carved below. I follow Micah as he walks across the grass to it. Flat red bricks line the ground surrounding the large stone. I squint to read the words carved into them.

“Those are the names of all the families in Jocolnu history, as far back as we have recorded anyway,” Micah explains. He kneels down and points to one on the top row. It reads
Youngblood
. He looks up and smiles. “That’s me.”

Against my better judgment, I extend my hand to pull him up, but he doesn’t let go once he stands. I’m stuck now. He leads me to a descending staircase with black railing. A staircase to nowhere just kind of creeps me out.

“What is this place?” I ask.

“There used to be a building here, where we’re standing,” he says. “It was the council house for the tribe. These were the outside steps.” He points to the staircase and leads me down to a lower section of grass.

“There was a door here,” he continues, motioning behind me. “The building was torn down later when the city decided this wasn’t Jocolnu territory. Long story short, all these years later, it actually is our land, and the staircase remains as a part of our history.”

He pulls me toward a stone picnic table with three matching stone benches shaped in arches around the table. A few feet ahead, a creek runs through the trees. It’s murky and barely has a flow of water, but a creek remains nonetheless. It looks like it might have been a river at some point in time. The ground is shaped at odd angles like it’s been pushed back by the flow of water and is now stuck in that form.

“This is the actual Bear Creek,” Micah says so low that I almost don’t hear him. “What’s left of it anyway,” he adds more clearly.

He squeezes my hand. I hate to interrupt this history lesson with a stupid question, but I do anyway. “How does this link back to Angel Horse?”

He smiles at me. “I’m getting to that. C’mon.”

He lets go of my hand and walks back to the staircase. I follow him up the steps and past the giant tombstone. The sun steals an opening in the trees and makes itself known, but I don’t mind it so much now. It’s dark at the creek, with all the hovering trees. This ray of light brings a few more tombstones into view. They’re placed sporadically in a clearing behind a few trees. Micah knows the path all too well, and he stops for me to catch up.

We walk over to a grave decorated with pink flowers and a small angel statue. “This is where my Nanna is buried,” Micah says. “She was my favorite person in this world.”

He makes himself comfortable and sits on the grass. He dusts off the silk flowers with his hand and motions for me to join him. As much as I don’t want to sit on this lady’s gave, I do just because he wants me to.

“She was the best. She’d have loved you,” he says.

I look away and play with a strand of grass to hide the fact that I feel absolutely weird.

“Really, she would,” he insists. “Because you make me happy. She always knew I was different. She never said I was outright gay, but she knew before anyone else. I never told her. She just pretended like it was normal for me to like guys.”

He picks up the angel statue and wipes dirt out of the carvings of her wings. “She was the only one who’d watch
Titanic
with me,” he says. “You don’t know how happy it made me when you knew what I was talking about with my ‘you jump, I jump’ reference.”

“My mom loves that movie,” I tell him.

His eyes light up. “Me too!” he says. He’s excited again, almost like I said it was my own favorite.

“Nanna knew something was up when I was more hung up on Jack than Rose, but God, he was beautiful. No one else would watch it with me because I cried until I nearly threw up every time. I always felt like
I
was losing Jack,” he says.

For someone who hates labels, it amazes me how openly he speaks of his preference of guys over girls. Micah uses his hand to dust off the stone and stares at it before talking again.

“We used to make pancakes all the time. She made them better than I do, but she always came over before school, and we’d make chocolate chip pancakes together. She’d let me help her in the kitchen, even though I wasn’t much help. We always made a coconut cake shaped like a rabbit at Easter and one like a Christmas tree at Christmas,” he continues on.

The light in his eyes begins to fade, and he stops smiling. “I never get to talk about her this much,” he says.

“I don’t mind,” I tell him.

“It’s not that,” he says. “Have you heard like, in some Indian tribes, they don’t talk about people who’ve died?”

I nod my head and suddenly wonder if maybe we’re breaking all kinds of Jocolnu tribal rules and laws.

“Well, we’re not exactly like that, but Poppa B says it’s disrespectful. He’s so old school,” Micah says. “But I like to remember Nanna. I don’t want to forget all of the things we did or how great she was. I don’t talk about her with anyone. And I only come here alone. But I thought maybe you could…relate?”

“Because my dad is dead?” I ask. It sounds so much harsher than I intended.

“Idiot,” Micah mumbles. “Me. Sorry.”

He shakes his head, and defeat consumes his face.

“Um, sorry Caveman, I didn’t quite get that,” I say. I laugh, hoping it’ll ease the tension.

“I said ‘idiot’ because I was stupid to bring you here. I know you’re trying not to think about your dad’s death this summer, and hell, I brought you to a graveyard,” he says. “But after I said ‘idiot,’ I was afraid you’d think I meant you, so I said ‘me’ and then I realized I wasn’t making sense, so I said ‘sorry’ and now I just sound stupid.”

He’s cute when he’s flustered. His face gets all pouty, and he looks younger, sort of like Pax. His hair falls around his face, and he doesn’t bother to move it – probably as a tactic to keep me from seeing him.

I push his hair back over his shoulder. “I do relate,” I say. “To some extent anyway.”

“I’m sorry I brought you here,” Micah says. “I just…I thought, maybe, it might…help for you to see that you’re not alone.” He stutters through the words as he motions around the tiny cemetery. “You know, you’d realize that someone else has lost someone and is here for you.”

Suddenly I feel more like I’m supposed to be here for him than the other way around. He brought me to his one special place where no one else has ever been with him. As much as I don’t want to talk about it, I’d feel like shit if I didn’t. I can’t ignore the topic after he went through all of this.

“What happened to her?” I ask.

“She got sick. Cancer. It was too late by the time they caught it. She only lasted a few months,” he says. He busies himself with rearranging the silk flowers. “I don’t understand how Poppa B can just push forward and not miss her. He acts like he has to be so damn strong.”

I reach out and pull Micah’s hand back. I take it in my own until he finally relaxes a bit. Then I speak.

“Maybe it hurts him to remember? Maybe that’s his way of dealing with the pain?” I suggest.

Micah shakes his head and pulls away. “No. Poppa B wasn’t really involved with us growing up. He didn’t like us going to a public school. He wanted us to go to school on the res, but it wasn’t much of a school. Wouldn’t have really taught us anything,” he rambles on. “Nanna didn’t want us to be different. She wanted us to go to a real school so we could meet other kids and ‘live in the real world.’”

I think back to Poppa B sitting in front of the fire that night, the way he was telling tribal legends and playing with Abby and Jade. It’s hard to imagine that same man not being involved with his family.

“And now he’s just hoping Pax doesn’t turn out like me because he wants someone to carry on the Youngblood name, and obviously the gay grandson can’t do that,” Micah says.

Micah has never been this candid, especially about his family. I want to dig deeper. I want to know about his relationship with Poppa B now that his Nanna is gone. I want to know more about his Nanna. I want to ask about his mom and how she seemed like she was a million miles away, and I want him to tell me what it was like when Zoey got pregnant with the twins. I want to know everything.

He turns toward me, all solemn. “Is it weird that I come out here and talk to her still?”

I shake my head. “No, never,” I say. “You’re really lucky. You have someplace to go where you can feel close to her. My dad doesn’t even have a stone.”

Micah narrows his eyebrows. “Why not?”

“There was no body to bury,” I say. The words sound insensitive coming out of my mouth. “There’s nothing. No stone. No ashes. Just a phone call from the airlines saying there were no survivors.”

Micah’s arm slides around my shoulders, but he doesn’t say a word. I’m actually glad he doesn’t say anything. I don’t want to hear that obligatory ‘I’m so sorry’ ever again.

“Sometimes I still think he’s out there, somewhere in that rainforest,” I admit. “Like maybe he survived the crash and has been using pieces of the plane to build a cell phone or some other device to contact the real world again. I have to imagine him somewhere, and I have nowhere else to put him.” I’ve never told anyone that before.

“And you’d feel better knowing he was in a box in the ground?” Micah asks. “I come here because I know she’s buried here, physically, but I don’t want to ‘put her’ here, you know?”

I stare at the stone and try to hide my envy. Maybe I don’t want to think about my dad in a box in the ground, but even a memorial stone would’ve been nice. Just something. Anything.

“Where do you want to put her then?” I ask. “Heaven? The sky? In the clouds? I used to think about that, the whole ‘up there’ deal, but I don’t want to think my dad’s eternal life is dodging airplanes, you know?”

Micah shrugs. “I’ve always thought more along the lines of the wind. You can’t see it, but you can feel it. You can breathe it in. It can knock you down as easily as it can be subtle and perfect, sort of like love. So I like to think she’s in the wind. That way, she’s with me at all times.”

If this was a movie, some huge fan off-camera would force a gust of wind in our general direction. But this isn’t a movie. Reality sucks, as does this summertime heat. I wonder if, after this summer is over, Micah will put me in the wind with his Nanna. So he can feel me when I’m gone. I can’t help but think that I may actually put him there too, just so I’ll always feel him.

Back in Micah’s bedroom, the green slime logo pours over his TV screen. I stare at the controller in my hand, realizing how foreign it feels today. I think Angel Horse had more of an effect on me than I want to admit.

“Micah, I need to tell you something,” I say. “The reason I hadn’t played the zombie side was because I always played Xbox with my dad. I quit after he died. I couldn’t play without him.”

I wait for an apology or maybe an inquiry as to why I went along with this. But Micah remains voiceless. Instead, he reaches across me and tries to grab my controller, but I stop him.

“It’s okay,” I say. “I just haven’t played since his death…until I started playing with you. I’ve missed it.”

Micah slowly pulls away from me, but his eyes still question me. I assure him that I want to keep playing. He settles in next to me on his bed, and we pick up where we left off with level twelve.

“I don’t know what it’s like losing a dad,” Micah says. “I never knew mine.”

Playing
Zombie Sanctuary 3
and having a heart-to-heart simultaneously wouldn’t work for most people, but there’s something about Micah that lets him pull it off.

“What’s the story?” I ask, not breaking my stare from the TV screen. My zombie moves along the hallway next to Micah’s green character, looking in each room for a victim. My zombie’s power level is running low. I need another brain.

“Well, he dated my mom through high school and into college. Early college, she got pregnant with Zoey. He stuck around until six months into the pregnancy then bailed,” he explains to me.

“Zoey was two when he came back feeling guilty. He and mom got married, but Zoey never took his last name. Things were okay until Zoey was four, when mom got pregnant with me. He said a five-year-old and newborn were too much to handle, so he bailed again, and the divorce was finalized after I came along…without his name,” Micah finishes.

I refrain from the obligatory apology and search for the right words, but Micah interrupts my thoughts. “Brain! Grab it!”

He points to the TV, and I click the button to grab, even though I’m not even near the brain. When I reach it, my power level goes up, and I know I’ll stay alive throughout the rest of this level. Our two zombie guys trail down the hallway and into the elevator. The words “Level Thirteen” trickle down the screen.

Micah drops his controller onto the bed and lies back. “Don’t feel sorry for me,” he says. “I can’t miss something I never knew.”

This is one of the instances when I’m glad he can read my thoughts. I reach across the floor and into the T-shirt I plan to wear tomorrow. I pull out a white paper sack.

“Got you something,” I say.

Micah sits up, and his face lights up after seeing the bag. “Is that what I think it is?” he asks.

I nod. “I was going to bribe you with it,” I admit. “I was going to beg you to come to my basketball games and entice you with rock candy.”

He laughs and then kisses my cheek. “I’d come to your games even without the rock candy.”

“I know,” I say. “That’s why I’m not going to make you work for it.”

I hand over the loot, but Micah sets it next to him instead of digging into the bag. He pushes me back on the bed and kisses me like he did the night he bit me. This time, I don’t even bother fighting it. I want to feel him as long as I can.