Lending Light (Gives Light Series Book 5) (18 page)

"These amazing little buggers reproduce both sexually
and
asexually," Pirate Guy was saying to the kids, which elicited more than a few impertinent giggles.

Sky took my hand and tugged me under the bright red exit sign.  Sunlight filtered down the staircase at the end of the exhibit.  Sky took my shoulders and turned me this way and that, his frown questioning, concerned.

"You wanna see the electric eels?" I asked.

Sky brushed the hair from my eyes with his fingertips.  The discomfort drained out of me.  I didn't know where it went.  I could have collapsed against him with relief.

What was that?
Sky asked, watching me.

"I don't know how that doesn't bother you," I said.  I tried not to sound like a pansy about it.  "Touching people is okay, but animals--"

Sky waited.  Except I didn't have anything else to say.

"You think he was scared of us?" I asked, just to fill in the silence.

Sky's face went lax and blank.

"You have no idea what I'm talking about," I said.

Sky shook his head solemnly.

"You know, when you touch somebody," I began, thinking how stupid I must have sounded, "and you feel their feelings--"

Sky stood on his toes and put his finger on my lips.  It ought to have grossed me out--his hands were still damp; I could even feel the starfish lingering on them--but it was Sky; I think it wouldn't have grossed me out even if he'd vomited on me.  He took hold of my hands, and I saw the determination in his eyes, and the confusion, too.  For the first time it occurred to me that maybe people really didn't feel one another's feelings on a regular basis.  It was too late for me to question it, because Sky's feelings burst across my palms, seeping into my knuckles, burying themselves beneath the beds of my fingernails.  His happiness levels were off the chart today.  They rushed into my gut, swooping, indomitable.  Underneath them there was intrigue--almost fascination--like he alone had uncovered a great mystery.  What he couldn't hide, though not for lack of trying, was his apprehension.  I knew the cause for it, too.

"You're worried about your dad," I said.

Sky's eyes went gradually wide.  A blurry image of me reflected in his pupils.  I tried to make out the shapes of the indistinct dark spots skittering across his soft brown irises.  I couldn't.  I thought something just then that I'd never thought before:  I thought I wanted eyeglasses.

Guilt flashed across Sky's face.  He let go of me, rubbing the back of his neck.

"What?" I asked.

He shook his head.  Once more I couldn't glean his thoughts from his face.  I figured they probably had something to do with his dad, but just because Sky's dad worked illegally didn't mean Sky needed to take the blame.  I kept questioning him about it; he kept shaking his head.  I didn't want to push him.

"Don't worry about it," I said.  I wanted him to have fun.  "Let's go see the eels."

We climbed up the staircase and emerged in stale sunlight.  The first thing I smelled was sea salt; then mercury; then fast food.  The sky over our heads was a clashing blend of yellow welkin and gray clouds, cold air coasting across my bare arms.  Sky noticed the icy dip in temperature seconds before I did.  He grabbed my hand with gusto and dragged me yards to the right, where a penguin enclosure awaited us.  A meshed net of wires hung over a bed of wet gray rocks.  Penguins waddled clumsily on top of artificial domes of white ice.  I spotted pipes underneath the domes, rusted, humming, working in overdrive.  Ice didn't belong in Arizona.

"What happened to the walrus?" I said angrily.  "They got rid of the walrus."

Sky elbowed me gently and I stopped complaining.  To our left a father hoisted his small daughter on his shoulders.  I liked that better than I liked the penguins.  Sky leaned over the black metal railing, his weight on his elbows, beaming like the spirit of the sun.  I swallowed a wave of jittery contentment.  I liked that most of all.

We're not allowed to feed them?
Sky asked, touching his fingers to his lips.

I grunted.  "People used to throw pens and bottle caps and stuff into the enclosure.  Feeding's not allowed anymore."

Jerks
, Sky said, his face sober.

"I know," I said.  "A few people have to go and ruin it for everyone else."

Sky tapped my elbow. 
The eels?

"I forget where they are," I said.  "Hang on, I gotta read the signs."

We walked across cobblestone.  Sky put his hand on my arm and bells and whistles sounded in my head, victorious.  The exhibit signs were up on wooden poles, too far away for me to read properly.  Sky read them just fine.  We didn't make it to the eels just yet, because Sky noticed a vendor selling throwaway cameras and bought one.  He hung the camera cord around his neck and snapped a photo of me.  I didn't notice until I heard the shutter click.

"What was that for?" I asked, dazed.

Sky smiled secretively and shook his head.  He adjusted the thick cord around his throat.  I didn't need to be told he was trying to hide his scars.

It wasn't until we'd walked past the plastic palm trees that I realized Sky was holding an employee's clipboard and a pen.  "Where'd you get that?" I asked, astounded.

Borrowed it
, he wrote on the clipboard, his letters loopy.  He punctuated the sentence with a smiley face.

"Do you mean you stole it?" I asked, incredulous.

Sky scribbled like rapid-fire, then shoved the clipboard under my nose. 
No no no!!!
he had written--right across a receipt for fish food. 
I just need it.  For things!

"Things" apparently encompassed doodling suspiciously priapic rocket ships.  He promised he'd give the clipboard back at the end of the day.

We crossed a bridge over scummy pond water and skimmed past the gift shop.  We found the stingray exhibit next.  The handlers stood ankle-deep in what looked like a kids' swimming pool, plucking the specimens right out of the briny water.  Stingrays creep me the hell out.  Sky didn't ask me to touch them this time, but he surged forward, jotting something on his clipboard, and showed the clipboard to the handlers, who immediately let him pet the stingrays' rubbery backs.  That scared me.  He scribbled furiously, flashing the clipboard at the handler nearest to him, a young woman wearing pigtails.  She answered all his inquiries, like: 
What's the difference between a stingray and a manta ray? 
(Size and toxicity.) 
What's their toxin made of?
  (Something-nucleotidase, whatever that meant.)  Sky was bursting with questions, and it hurt me that he couldn't shout them out as they came to mind.  It hurt me even more that he never stopped smiling.  He wrote
Thank you!
between each and every one of his comments, like he was immensely grateful just to be paid attention to.  Everyone ought to have paid attention to him.  Blinded by anger, I kicked at the cobblestones.  I knew whose fault it was that people overlooked him.

"Not a bad job, huh?" a voice said in my ear.

It was a voice only I could hear.  I turned around and my dad was staring at me.  His hair was lank and black, his rough white teeth bared in an insincere smile.  He wore the last outfit I'd ever seen him in: a blue denim shirt, button-down, a brown leather belt around his black trousers.

I couldn't yell at Dad without everyone thinking I was crazy.  I cared too much what people thought of me.  I cared most of all what Sky thought of me.  Maybe I was crazy, in a way, because I knew that this was happening inside my head, but I couldn't shut it off.  What really scared me was that I thought I might not want to shut it off.  I hadn't seen my dad in eleven years.  I missed him.  I loved him.  I loved the man who raised me, but the man who raised me murdered seven women.  Wasn't I as good as spitting on those women's memories?  Wasn't I condoning their deaths?  What was wrong with me, that I loved a murderer?  He'd murdered eight women, not seven, because he'd broken my mother's heart, and without her heart, Mom had wasted away.  My father had murdered my mother.  My father had murdered my mother, and I still loved him, and something was really, really wrong with me.

"Not a bad job, huh?" Dad repeated.

It was something he used to say when we finished reading a book together.  It was something he used to say when I watched him drawing Mom or Mary from likeness.  He wasn't talking about books right now, or drawings.  His eyes glinted, appraising Sky.

A sound like helicopter blades tore through my ears.  The blood in my veins ran so hot, I thought it was going to eat my bones.  Dad killed eight women.  Dad took Sky's voice.  Dad didn't deserve anybody's love.  When I looked at the scars on Sky's throat I hated the man who put them there.  The man who put them there was the same as the man I loved, the man who used to camp with me in our basement when the annual monsoon scared me.  Dad was Waha Kopai.  Dad had two faces.  I couldn't love both faces.  I didn't want to love either of them.

Dad was the man who made me who I was.  He used to take me to the library.  He used to draw with me.  A murderer made me who I was.

Sky turned around at the stingray exhibit.  He touched my hands, his smile mellow and waiting.  His clipboard was tucked under his arm, his flute and his camera around his sad, scarred neck.  His crazy hair captured sunlight and kindness and fed his aura, the same aura that cast light on everything around us.  It cast light on my father, who flickered and extinguished like the wick of a black candle.

Dad's eyes were black.  Mine were blue.

"I'm hungry," I decided.  I wanted to curl my fingers into Sky's, to hold his hands.  People were already starting to stare.

We left the stingray pool and doubled back to the cafe.  The exterior of the building was painted to look like a striped lighthouse, red-and-white.  Sky took a picture of that, too.  We climbed the spiral staircase up to the open top of the lighthouse and the floor was broad and porcelain, the tables scattered.  The air smelled like fried potatoes and dry ice.  The middle section was cordoned off, polar bears swimming in crystalline water.  Sky ran right over to them, like I'd known he would.  Crazy bastard.  I felt myself relaxing, a muted smile touching my lips.  Just watching Sky made me feel like nothing could hurt me.  I knew that didn't make sense, but nothing about Sky made sense.  If I'd been in his position, disfigured, robbed of my mother and my voice, I likely would have become the most disagreeable son of a bitch on the planet.  I was already the most disagreeable son of a bitch on the planet.  Not Sky.  Everywhere he went, he practically glowed.  It didn't occur to him to live in the past.  He saw the beauty in the mundane: a plastic tree at an aquarium, a dirt road he passed every morning, a loaf of frybread that took five minutes to make.  That ability made him the most beautiful of all.  I doubt it occurred to him, though.  Beautiful people never know they're beautiful.

By the time Sky sat down at our table I'd already gotten him eggs, although the only kind the cafe served came with cheese.  He didn't seem to mind.  I was trying to eat my candy in peace when he started snapping pictures of me.  I reached across the table and snatched his camera away.  We fought back and forth for a while, kicking each other under the table.  He showed me what I can only describe as a demonic gaze and I threatened to chuck him in with the polar bears.  He cackled.  A woman who looked suspiciously like park security shot us a warning glare.  Too bad for her we only laughed harder.  I got rid of our trash around the same time she started toying with her walkie-talkie.  I'd been kicked off of Indian reservations before, but I didn't need to drag Sky into my life of crime.

"My sister carved her name on one of the door posts around here," I said, after Sky and I had left the cafe.  "Wonder if I can still find it."

We found it outside the electric eel exhibit.  Go figure.

Sky wasn't ready to forgive me for taking his camera away.  At one point he slinked away from me and I panicked, thinking I'd lost him.  A moment later a park employee in a freaky octopus costume came running after me.  It turned out Sky had coaxed him into chasing me across the aquarium.  The purple octopus sprinted after me, six arms flailing, and I ran for my life, knocking over a trash can along the way.  Amazingly, Sky and I still weren't escorted off the premises.

"I hate you," I lied, when Sky caught up with me.  I'd fallen on the ground in a dizzy heap, the gift shop behind me.

I can live with that
, Sky said, grinning.  He plucked the camera off my neck.

We decided to visit one last exhibit before heading back to Nettlebush.  We got in line outside a giant blue tarpaulin tent.  Sky grabbed a program out of the nearby bin, flipping through it.  The line moved slowly, until finally we were let into the tent through a pair of wooden doors.  The top of the tent was missing, the open sky hanging over bulky metal bleachers.  Big television prompters stood next to a diving board, the empty waters calm and blue.  "Caution!" one sign read.  "First Row Will Get Wet!"

Guess which row Sky wanted to sit on.

Sky and I took our seats on the bleachers.  I stared into the low glass separating us from the watery arena.  Sky sat close enough to me that our thighs pressed together.  Embarrassment crept through me, and pleasure, which only served to embarrass me even more.  I was very grateful just then that Sky couldn't feel my feelings as I did his.  I felt his giddiness sweeping through me, like nothing could go wrong.  He elbowed me, beaming.  I wanted to draw him: on notebooks, on cloth canvas, on my memory.  I was Waha Kopai.  I wanted to steal the sun.