Lending Light (Gives Light Series Book 5) (16 page)

We were actually standing.  It wasn't just my imagination.  Annie's eyes were hard, her lips thin.  My fingers dug so deep into my palms it hurt.  I wasn't going to hit her.  I never hit girls.  I would have liked to pick her up and throw her across the reservation, though.

"Skylar!" Mrs. Looks Over called out.

Sky raised his head.  The pauwau was drawing to a close; the Kiowa tribe had already pulled their tribal flag out of the ground.  I guessed Mrs. Looks Over didn't want to stick around for the '49, because she beckoned to Sky with her wrinkled hand.  At that point Annie had left to find her siblings, Aubrey trailing after her, too caught in her snare.  Sky bit his lip and glanced at me.  Sky waved an awkward goodbye and started to walk.

"Sky!" I said, panicking.

I'd given him a head start.  I ran after him and he lingered so I could catch up.  Mrs. Looks Over went ahead without him.

"I didn't blind him," I said.  "Sleeping Fox.  I just decked him, that's all.  He's fine.  He's right over there, look."

I can't describe what was going through my head.  Sky was the best friend I'd ever had.  I couldn't handle the idea that he might take Annie's words to heart and look at me differently, like the monster I'd always been, but didn't want to be anymore.

I know
, Sky said, eyes candid, without judgment.

"You don't know," I said.  "You don't know how scared I am.  You don't know how sorry I am--"

Sky put his finger on my lips.  It was enough to shut me up, bewildered.  He moved his finger from my lips to his for emphasis.  My mouth tingled where he'd touched it.  He'd touched our mouths with the same finger.  I wondered if it counted as our mouths touching.

It was late at night, but I felt more awake than asleep, more awake than ever maybe, Nettlebush so sharp and crisp it really did look like a pop-up book; only the pop-up book had been painted by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, every line so achingly detailed you wanted to touch it, but wouldn't, for fear the ink bled all over your fingers.

Sky took my face in his hands.  My heart hammered rapidly and I was afraid it might crack my ribs open.  The bonfire burned low, but the firelight flicked across Sky's pale cheeks, across his birthmark, igniting the warmth in his small brown eyes.  The warmth in his hands was nonpareil.  The feelings that spread from his hands to my cheeks were trust, and acceptance, and reassurance.  I didn't know that I deserved all that.  It humbled me.  It hurt me.  It was a good kind of hurt.

You should smile more often
, Sky said.

He told me so by smiling at me, small and brief but demonstrative, like he wanted me to mimic it.  He told me so when his eyes crinkled, everything about his face calling to me.  My stomach pulled taut, nervous, ridiculously pleased, my head racing a mile a minute.  I thought I was going to throw up.  I don't mean that in a bad way.  You know when you're sitting at the top of a rollercoaster, and the drop is really steep, but you've
wanted to ride that thing all day?  Like that.  Sky's hands shaped themselves to my cheeks.  I reveled in the individual feel of each of his fingers, skinny, long like piano keys, careful and attentive wherever they touched me.  I was almost afraid to breathe for fear that Sky might take it the wrong way and let go.  I towered over him by no intentional means, my hair falling around his face, my shadow dispersed by his every-colored light.  He had to tilt his head back just so he could meet my eyes.  He never did look away.  I couldn't take my eyes off his: small and bright like a fox's, warm and spice-brown and friendly.

The rollercoaster plummeted.  The drop was amazing, adrenaline rushing in my veins, wind rushing at my face.  Imagine having all your favorite foods spread out on the table in front of you.  Samosas next to maple candy and herring eggs.  Red licorice and black licorice and ach'ii.  Imagine never knowing you liked
éclairs, and then you tasted one one day, and you couldn't believe you'd never eaten one before; you couldn't believe anything tasted so good.  You should have known, though.  It had everything you liked.  Cream and sugar.  Custard and caramel.  You've always liked éclairs.  If you'd paid any attention, you would have known.

You never were very bright.

"Rafael!"

Uncle Gabriel's voice screeched through me.  Sky let go of me and stepped back.  I turned around just as Uncle Gabriel came walking toward me, his polaroid camera hanging around his neck.  I was pretty sure he hadn't seen Sky's hands on my face; but he drew nearer in the firelight, and he saw me standing with Sky, and he took on an expression I'd never expected from him: fear.

The fear was gone in the next instant.  "Let me take your picture for the council building," Uncle Gabriel said.

He hid his face behind his camera; I got the feeling he was stalling for time just as much as I was.  One flash later, my eyes blurrier than ever, Uncle Gabriel shook the photo in his hand, smiling distractedly.

"Say good night to your friend, Rafael," Uncle Gabriel said.

I swallowed a bundle of nerves.  "Night, Sky," I muttered.

Sky's grandma finally got tired of waiting for him.  She shouted and he scampered after her, his flute swinging around his neck.  Uncle Gabriel watched me with appraising eyes.  I wanted the soil to open up and devour me.

"The one thing I asked you not to do?" Uncle Gabriel prompted.

The Navajo, the Hopi, the Pawnee gathered around a giant rawhide drum.  The '49 had started, Dr. Stout singing a song I didn't recognize at all:  "Spider Man, Spider Man, Something Something, Spider Cam."

"Let's go home," Uncle Gabriel said.

Uncle Gabriel wasn't like me:  He loved '49s.  For him to skip one told me I was in deep trouble.  I kept my head down when I followed him away from the windmills and east through the reservation.  My ears burned with silence, the drum beats rolling far away, the cold air whistling against my eyes.

When we got to our house and turned the lights on Uncle Gabriel pulled the front door shut and pointed at the window seat.  I shuffled over and deposited myself, laying my head back against the cold glass.  Uncle Gabriel paced for a while, rubbing his face in his hands.  He turned on me, eyebrows raised politely.

"You go first," Uncle Gabriel said.

"I'm sorry," I blurted out.

"Are you?" Uncle Gabriel asked.

Yeah, I was.  Because he'd taken me in and raised me when he could have sent me away.  Because I was living under his roof, and he'd only given me one rule, and I'd broken it.

"He's my best friend," I mumbled.

Uncle Gabriel breathed slowly through his teeth.

"I know you said there's bad history between us," I hastened to continue.  "But Sky doesn't think so.  He doesn't see it like that at all.  We goof around all the time and he's never thinking about his mom, or my dad.  He never feels weird about it."

"With all due respect," Uncle Gabriel interrupted, "how would you know what he thinks about this?  He can't speak."

"Yes, he can," I said.

Uncle Gabriel did the eyebrow thing again.

"Yes, he can," I said.  "He talks to me."

I heard Sky's voice all the time.  In my head.  In my chest.  I heard it when I was awake.  I heard it in my dreams.

"Rafael," Uncle Gabriel said with understanding.  "I don't want to hear any more about this--this 'I feel people's feelings' thing."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"You're not a child anymore," Uncle Gabriel said.  "So can we put those ideas aside now?"

"What are you talking about?" I asked.  "Everybody does that.  When you touch somebody--"

I shut up when I realized he was trying not to lose his temper with me.

"Are you gonna make me stop being friends with Sky?" I started over.  "He's the only real friend I've got.  I don't know why, but he likes me.  I like him back--I like him more than anything.  Do I have to stop hanging out with him?"

"Does it really matter what I say?" Uncle Gabriel asked.  "You've already spent time with him when I told you not to."

He made me feel ashamed.

"Kiddo," Uncle Gabriel said, his face softening.  "I know you're lonely.  Trust me."

"I miss Mary," I mumbled, for the second time that night.

"You think I don't miss her, too?" Uncle Gabriel asked.

I looked up, surprised.  "Do you?"

Uncle Gabriel's eyebrows twitched with confusion.  "Of course I do."

"Because we're just some bratty kids you took in when Mom died," I said.  "You never got to be a kid yourself.  You think I don't know that?"

Uncle Gabriel paused.  Uncle Gabriel laughed, hearty and sudden and definitely forced.

"Stop," I said, irritable.  "You don't have to pretend for my sake."

"I'm not," Uncle Gabriel said.

"Yeah," I said.  "Okay."

"I won't lie," Uncle Gabriel said.  "I had no idea what I was doing when Susan passed away.  And no, it wasn't exactly a picnic.  That doesn't mean we aren't a family, or we don't love each other.  You kids are my kids, whether you like it or not."

I dropped my eyes to the floorboards so I wouldn't have to look at him.  I felt small again, but not in a bad way.  No one else was ever going to love me the way my uncle loved me.

"It wouldn't be fair of me to tell you to stop spending time with Skylar," Uncle Gabriel said at length, sighing.  "Not at this point.  It's just--"

"What?" I asked, when he didn't continue.

"Forget it," Uncle Gabriel said.

What wasn't he telling me?

"You should get cleaned up and hit the hay," Uncle Gabriel said.  "We're hunting early tomorrow."

"Why does everyone do that?" I interrupted, frustrated.  "What is with the people in our culture?  Nobody just stands up and speaks his mind.  Is there a reason we're all trained to talk in
half-truths?"

"Yes," Uncle Gabriel said, surprising me.  "We are trained.  We are brought up to guard our thoughts, our emotions tooth and nail.  Do you really wonder why that is?  Look at how tiny our tribe is, Rafael.  Remember that there used to be one hundred million indigenous people living on this continent.  Remember that we have somehow become the minority on our own land."

Uncle Gabriel made me wash up and get ready for bed.  I squeezed into the narrow bathroom and splashed my face with water, growling at the claustrophobia-inspired walls.  I ignored my reflection in the hanging mirror, not in the mood to see my father staring back at me:  It was his fault, after all, that no one but me could hear Sky's voice.  I waited until I heard Uncle Gabriel close his bedroom door.  When I was certain that he'd gone to sleep, I crept into my room and stripped down to my underwear, blue chain tattoos gleaming off my right arm and leg.  I shucked the blanket off my bed, grabbed a book and a flashlight, and stole outside the house.

I liked to sleep outdoors.  Long as I woke up before Uncle Gabe in the mornings I normally got away with it, too.  Cold desert air crested over me, carding through my hair, tossing the leaves on the southern oak above my head.  I found a soft spot on the dry grass and pooled the blanket on my lap, laying my head against the thick, mossy tree trunk.  The flashlight above my shoulder, the book open on my knees, I squinted at familiar passages from
Dial-a-Ghost
.  I liked the idea that you could adopt ghosts who had no homes to haunt: a kindly British family that died during World War II, or a shrieking, quarreling couple who terrorized nunneries, but only because it was a decent way to pass the time.  I wished I had ghosts who liked me, not the ghosts of my dad's victims.  I guessed Sky was a kind of ghost who liked me.  He liked me, at least; and he wore his mom's ghost on his face.

I closed the book and drew the blanket up over my chest.  I found a nook in the tree and leaned into it.

I've always known I was gay.  I don't get it when people ask things like, "When did you find out?"  I mean, when did you find out the sun rises every day?  I never had that moment where I freaked out.  I still don't know a whole lot about non-Native communities, but I sure know about the Native ones.  Yeah, there are some homophobic Native communities.  Try telling an Apache you're gay and you'll get looked at like you're dirt.  Most Natives aren't like that.  Shoshone aren't like that.  We've always understood that there are people who are meant to fall in love with their own gender; and we've always understood that it takes a special kind of spirit to be able to do that.  It's called "Napaka."  Christians will say God gave you a gay son because he's testing you.  Shoshone will say God gave you a gay son because he's rewarding you.

I'd always known I was gay.  I'd always figured I'd never have a chance to act on it.  Everyone in Nettlebush hated me--or I'd thought they hated me--and I was way too shy to meet people outside my community.  But then this guy came to my community.  And he smiled at me.  And he turned out to be the coolest guy I'd ever met.

And my father had killed his mother.

Sky wasn't his mother.  I wasn't my father.  I finally felt like I didn't have to gauge my every move against my father's, like I could take Dad's blood running in my veins and steer it down a different path, and in doing so, reclaim the past he'd ruined.  My dad took Sky's voice; but I was going to give it back.  My dad took Sky away from his culture; I was going to bring him back to it.