Lending Light (Gives Light Series Book 5) (20 page)

The first rumble of thunder settled low over Nettlebush.  I jumped, knocking over my Eva Ibbotson collection.  The lights on the ceiling flicked sleepily and shut their eyes, bathing the house in shadow.  When you live on top of a desert, the days are hot and the nights are cold.  The wall hearth was already lit, curling flames tossing about red embers like tumbling fairy lights.  The lazy glow lit the shadows on the walls and the floorboards, the hardwood painted amber.  I turned on the oil lamps for good measure: the one beside the sofa, the one in the kitchen door.  The scenery outside the windows was ominous and dark, except for when thin slivers of lightning struck the cedar buried in the ground around the oak tree.  Cedar's a good insulator.  On the Plains, we used to put it on top of our tipis to bounce lightning strikes away from our homes.

"Alright, Rafael?" Uncle Gabriel asked.  He sat on the armchair with his reading glasses on.

The windows lit up in a second flash of lightning, scorching and white.  The raindrops rolling down the reinforced glass reminded me of sweat.  The lightning fizzed out in scrapes of angry thunder.  Nettlebush went pitch black, empty and void.

"Fine," I said.  My voice was high.

I waited until Uncle Gabriel and Rosa had both gone to bed.  I pooled as many books in my arms as I could carry and crept over to the basement door.  I crawled down the chilly, creeping staircase, dropped my books on the floor, and doubled back quickly for an oil lamp.

The basement was giant and drafty, the walls a scratchy gray concrete, the floor joists carpeted in thin blue polyester.  I reached for the swinging lightbulb on the ceiling before I remembered the electric was out.  I set the oil lamp on the floor, rearranging my books in their rightful fort.  I felt like I sat in the heart of a black hole, the lamp's glow around me a small yellow bubble of security.  The wall closest to the stairs bore sagging wooden shelves covered in canned goods: quinoa, ricegrass, cornmeal, blue corn mush.  Opposite on the floor were messy cardboard boxes, laden with dust.  An equally dusty portrait of Jesus sat on top of an ancient filing cabinet, his heart in his hands.

Far as I was from the ground floor, I could hear the hissing, lashing rain, the shrill whistling of the wind as it pushed against the unyielding foundation of the house.  I hunched in on myself.  I clutched
Island of the Aunts
against my chest.  I felt exactly like a little kid, susceptible to the elements.  I wanted to crawl under the floorboards; I wanted to hide.

I lay down between my book stacks, curled up on the carpet.  Borrowed light from Sky dangled feebly above my head.

When I woke up the next morning I didn't immediately remember where I was.  The smell of must and stale wood reminded me.  I sat up on stiff knees, rain sounding in my ears like the rattling of Stomp Dance gourds.  Uncle Gabriel called to me from upstairs.  My mouth tasted sour, my eyes bleary.  The blurriness didn't fade when I rubbed them.  Damn it, I didn't want eyeglasses.  I stood up, swayed, and knocked over my book fort.  I swore loudly.

"Raf!" Uncle Gabriel repeated.

"I'm coming!" I complained.

I remembered camping with Dad in the basement of our old house, just off the lake.  Every time the monsoon hit, we made a tent out of bedsheets and pillows, flashlights lining the floor.  We stuffed our faces with candy and old samosas and drew pictures: of horses, of deer, of my favorite monsters, sirens and Scylla and the Chimera and sometimes Windigo, except Cree monsters creeped me out.

I sat down on the basement floor.  Dull pain burned my chest when I flipped open one of my notebooks and shook my hair out, pencils falling to the floor.  I grabbed an errant pencil and rifled through the book's messy contents.  I pressed the pencil tip to a blank page, my hand shaking.  Even now it was my father who quelled the storm.  It was the memory of him I turned to when I wanted comfort, when I didn't know what to do with myself.

Why couldn't I get rid of him?  Why couldn't I clap my hands and make it so he wasn't my father anymore?  I'd loved him since the moment I was born.  You don't just unlearn something that's been a part of you from the time you first became cognizant.  I hated what he'd done to those women, to Sky, but I loved the memories he'd imparted me with.  I loved sitting on his knee while he listened to Megadeth, his leg bobbing as I learned to headbang with him.  I loved when he gave me my first library card and told me to keep it safe and I felt grown up; I felt bigger than the world.

Without my realizing, I'd started sketching Sky.  I noticed it when my hand stopped moving and I pulled back and the blank face on my paper was framed in crazy curls.  I swallowed, nervous.  I tucked my pencil behind my ear.  I flipped a couple of pages back through my notebook just to see what my previous sketches had been.  All Sky.  There was one where he was asleep with his head on his arms, drooling all over his wrists.  In another one he was standing on the tire swing outside the Nettlebush church.  His hands looked a little weird.  Hands are freaking hard to draw.  A good nine of the last twelve meaningless scribbles I'd drawn were all Sky, or related to Sky.  I used to draw the things I found beautiful.  Palomino foals and tiny tots in Grass Dance regalia.  The Little Mermaid munching on the Prince's heart.  It was like I only found Sky beautiful anymore.

"Great," I muttered.  I secretly didn't mind.

"
Rafael!
" Uncle Gabriel yelled.  "If you don't get up here this instant!"

I picked up the oil lamp by its swinging handle, the paraffin running low.  I gnashed my teeth and stomped upstairs.

When I made my way into the sitting room it was as dark as the night before, the windows shaded in unsettling black.  I followed the candles on the floor to the kitchen where oil lamps sat on top of the island and the refrigerator.  The refrigerator was empty now; Uncle Gabe and I had removed all the perishables and dried and salted them instead.  Uncle Gabe was sitting at the island, packing a flashlight full of batteries.  He looked funny in his pajamas, blue satin clashing with thick arms and reading glasses.

"Go wash up, kiddo," Uncle Gabe said kindly.  "You stink."

I trudged into the bathroom, an oil lamp sitting on top of the medicine cabinet.  I washed my face and hair but didn't bother changing clothes.  I trudged back into the kitchen and Rosa was cooking at the wood-coal stove, her pudgy back turned to us.  The air smelled like apples and spices.

"Why don't we find a game to play?" Uncle Gabriel suggested.

He did this every monsoon season:  He tried to find a way to placate me while I stormed and raged around the house, because I hated being indoors, but I couldn't go outside.  I wondered whether Uncle Gabriel had only brought Rosa over this year as a buffer against my temper.

"I wanna read," I muttered.

"Then you can read to us," Uncle Gabriel said pleasantly.

"Here," Rosa whispered, turning around.

She laid a basket of warm apple dumplings on the island, coated in a sticky cinnamon sauce.  I wanted to shove them in my mouth.  I reached for them, but Uncle Gabriel batted my hand away.  A good thing, too; steam was rising off of them.

"Thank you, Rosa," Uncle Gabriel said.  "Say thank you, Rafael."

"Thank you," I muttered.

Rosa was wearing a lightweight cotton tear dress in pink and mint green.  Black braids framed her wide face.  She scrubbed the tin cooking pot with her head bowed, chewing on her lip until she drew a bead of blood.  I tried to remember what Sky had said.  Maybe Rosa didn't hate me; she hated the memories on my face.

"Are you part Cherokee?" I asked.

Rosa lifted her head with a look of surprise.  She bobbed her head in a timid nod.  I'd only guessed because tear dresses weren't common among Shoshone, but I'd seen a lot of them in Oklahoma.

"Rosa here's from the Blue Holly Clan," Uncle Gabriel said.  "Did I get that right?" he asked, with a polite look her way.

I knew what Uncle Gabriel was trying to do.  It sort of worked, but it sort of didn't.  She nodded again, quickly, but without verbally responding.

"Do Cherokee clans work the same way ours do?" I asked.  Making conversation didn't come naturally to me, but I'd already decided to give it a good attempt.

"No," Rosa said.  Her voice was soft and halting, tiny.  "Cherokee clans are about professions.  Blue Holly is the medicine clan."

I tried to remember whether Rosa's mom had been a nurse, too, before Dad had killed her.  That much I'd never been told.

We ate our apple dumplings in silence, after which Uncle Gabriel washed our dishes by flashlight.  I went into the sitting room and listened to the thunder growling outside the opaque windows.  I hated the total darkness; not because it was dark, but because I couldn't see the grass on the ground, the moss on the trees, the trail the clouds took when they wrapped themselves around the sun.  My mood quickly soured.  Even Sky's light, forever my follower, wasn't an alleviant.  It flashed like a dying bug zapper, its radius shrinking.  It disappeared in a wink.

"Don't leave me," I said desperately, an idiot.

Uncle Gabriel and Rosa came into the sitting room and sat on the sofa.  I sat on the armchair and read to them from
The Song of Hiawatha
, an old Ojibway legend some white guy took credit for, but then white guys were always taking credit for our stuff back in those days.  I flinched when I heard the tent rocks falling down in the badlands, a screeching BANG, BANG that echoed through the reservation.  Rosa looked at me with worry.

"You're fine, Rafael," Uncle Gabriel said, the same soothing voice I'd known all my life.

I didn't feel fine.  Uncle Gabriel started telling Rosa about the time he'd spent on a Zuni horse ranch as a teen.  I went into my bedroom to listen to music, Brother Firetribe or After Forever, because Floor Jansen's boss.  I remembered too late that the electric was still out.  Even the battery-operated radio wasn't working.  I turned it on and static rasped at me.

"Son of a bitch," I said through my teeth.

My imagination ran away with me.  The harsh gale swept the roof off my bedroom.  I looked up at the dark sky, rain assaulting my face, soaking my braids.  The southern oak outside our house pulled out of the ground, groaning, roots snapping, and flew into the pulsing black void over my head.  Nettlebush's houses orbited the void in dizzying circles, roofs in ruin, porches in shambles.  It was the end of the world, or the start of the next one.  I could grab my spear and hunt stars instead of stags.  I could feel the heat of the asteroids on my skin.

Clinking piano keys disrupted my reverie.  An unfamiliar song funneled in and out of my ears.  I searched the rain and darkness, turning around.  I followed the melody out of my destroyed bedroom, into the destroyed sitting room.

The fireplace lay on the floor in a mess of broken stones.  The windows were shattered, glass sprinkled like starlight on the hardwood.  Rosa sat at my mother's old piano, her fingers on the aged ivory keys.  The piano was desperately out of tune, but the song was structured, precise.  A clear, bright harmony combated the infernal darkness, the howling rain.

"What song is that?" I asked.  I didn't see Uncle Gabe anywhere.

Rosa's fingers halted on the keys.  Her back stiffened, then relaxed.  Her neck sloped and she resumed playing, but slowly.

"It's a church hymn," she said.  "On Eagle's Wings."

Mom used to love church.  There was a good reason she'd named me Rafael, my sister Mary.

In a flash, Mom's ghost sat beside Rosa on the piano bench.  Her plaited black hair wound around her skull to the back of her head, tumbling down her spine.  Her dead gray fingers brushed the piano keys and played a phantom melody, the cacophony clashing with Rosa's hymn.

I froze; not just with apprehension, but with cold.  The stone pieces of the fireplace stacked themselves together again, one on top of the other.  The glass on the floor rained backwards, windows sealing shut.  The roof slammed down over our heads, the house shaking, my ears ringing.

The last words my mom ever said were, "Please help me."  I remember that night.  Her pills lay strewn around her on the bed like dust motes in dying sunlight.  Her skin was more yellow than brown, papery and thin: an immate
rial drawing, abandoned lineart hidden hastily in penicillin and death.

Mom turned around at her piano and stared at me with empty eye sockets.  She didn't say anything.  She didn't have to.  Her eyes were supposed to be blue, like mine.  I didn't deserve to share her eyes.  I hadn't helped her that night.  I'd just as good as killed her.  I couldn't stand to look at her, to think about her; and I missed her more than anything.

Sky's light was gone.  The whole house around me went black.  The oil lamps, the candles, the fireplace snuffed out.  A hole sucked open in my gut, tearing its way through my chest.

"Rafael?" Rosa said quietly.

"I gotta," I muttered.

I never finished what I was going to say.  I felt my way through the dark, yanking open the basement door.  I stumbled down the steps like an idiot.

Down in the basement I listened to the wind searching for cracks in the house, the rain battering the gable vents.  All the canned goods rattled on the wall shelves, percussion for an unwanted symphony.  I sat on the cold carpet with my knees against my chest, the rain's hollow echoes dripping in my ears.  I tried to think up a fictional character I could summon to my side.  Aslan used to make me feel safe.  So did Arabis from
The Whispering Mountain.
  I concentrated, hard; but neither of them showed up.