Lending Light (Gives Light Series Book 5) (21 page)

I hadn't needed imaginary friends since befriending Sky.  I thought about that suddenly; and just as suddenly, I remembered Sky was leaving Nettlebush once his dad came and picked him up.  Irrational anger crested over me, coupled with a pathetic sense of despair.  I didn't want Sky leaving Nettlebush.  Nettlebush had been dark and ugly before he'd arrived.  If I had to go back to that, I'd probably lose my mind, or whatever was left of it.  Most importantly, how was I supposed to take care of Sky if he left Nettlebush?  How was I supposed to make sure people were treating him okay?  He needed me to crush lavender for him, and bury birds for him, and keep his ridiculous hair from getting wet.  I wondered how the monsoon was treating him.  I wondered what it was like to have no one but Catherine Looks Over for company.

I stood up.  I paced the dark basement like a frantic, caged tiger.  It was bad enough that I was trapped indoors.  Thinking about Sky leaving me made matters worse.  Mom at the piano, Mom without her eyes was the worst of all.  My shoulders shook.  My hands went numb, blood pooling and cooling in my fingers.  I could hear somebody laughing at me--I didn't know who--laughing at the mess I'd made, at the death of a good woman--

Today was July 14th, 2000.  Mom died on July 24th, 1991.

I lashed out.  I swung blindly and my fists hit the cans on the wall.  The cans came clattering off the shelves.  The rushing, crashing din overrode my thoughts.  It only served to make me angrier.  I slammed my fists into the shelves and the splinters scraped the skin open on my knuckles, bones stinging, throbbing.  The shelves creaked and snapped and smashed to the poorly carpeted floor joists.

My chest heaved, my breath hot and tight.  Angry bright spots flashed in front of my eyes.  Rage coursed through me in crackling currents.  This was who I was meant to be.  This was the blood in my veins.  I had Dad's looks.  I had Dad's interests.  I didn't want to hurt anyone; but maybe Dad had felt the same way when he was my age.  Maybe he hadn't started off evil, but had grown into it over time.

The ringing in my ears drew me to my senses.  Realization gripped me, then horror.  I'd lost all control of myself.  I'd acted like a wild animal.  The air in my chest went shallow, my head light and faint.  The room spun around me and I hit the floor on my knees, shins colliding with canned food.  Unbidden, pathetic, I started to cry.  I can't describe how scared I was.  My shoulders shook, pain flaring through my fingers.  My heart hammered so fast I thought I was going to vomit it out on the floor.  My temples ached, tears chaffing sore tracks down my cheeks.  I wanted to scream for my mother to come and pick me up, to put her arms around me like she used to, like she never could again, because I'd let her die; because I was my father.  I was my father.  I couldn't control myself any better than he had.

I didn't want to hurt anybody.

A swinging oil lamp filled the basement with sheer yellow light.  My head shot up.  Rosa crouched in front of me, biting her lip.  My distress turned to terror.  If she didn't get out of here, and fast, there was no telling what I might do to her.  Animals couldn't control themselves.  Caliban couldn't very well control himself.

"We'll tell Gabriel this was an accident," Rosa whispered.

It was the most she'd spoken to me at once.  I didn't know how to respond.  She reached into the breast pocket of her tear dress and took out a white cotton handkerchief.  She wiped my face with it: the tears on my raw cheeks, the cold sweat pooled at my hairline.  I held my breath so I wouldn't cry anymore, but that only made me feel like I was going to pass out.

"It was an accident," Rosa said.  "Yes?"

I jerked my head in a half-assed nod.  She and I both knew it wasn't an accident.  I was scared.  I was so scared.

Rosa sat back on her knees.  She took a while to collect her thoughts; I could see the struggle on her plump, round face.

"I wanted to thank you," Rosa said.

I wanted to run away.  Distant monsters growled in my ears.

Rosa reached into her pocket a second time.  I thought she was putting her handkerchief away; but then she took out a folded piece of paper.  Old, dried spirit gum stuck to the back of it.  She unfolded the paper and handed it to me and I perused its charcoal contents by lamplight.  Charity Gray Rain sat playing an old church organ, the one Reverend Silver Wolf used to keep in his parish until squirrels built their nest in the valves and destroyed the flue pipes.  Charity's face was a replica of her likeness from photo albums: wide like her daughter's, but more rectangular, with thin, smiling lips.

"I know you drew this," Rosa said.  "Gabriel told me you leave them on the graves."

I felt stupid.  But then, I always felt stupid.

"I wanted to thank you," Rosa said, folding up the drawing in slow, thick fingers.  "I have many pictures of my mother.  But she is more alive in this one."

I used to wonder whether I could resurrect the dead.  So what?  I used to burrow around in closets, expecting to find Narnia on the other end.

"You're not afraid of me?" I asked Rosa.  That made one of us.

"You're a boy," Rosa said.  "You're a child.  This is the age when you find out who you are.  It's alright that you don't know just yet.  You are supposed to be learning who you are, but some very selfish people have made it impossible for you to think about yourself without first thinking about them.  Something was stolen from you.  I know this because I was your age once.  I was fourteen when my mother died, and I am still trying to understand the world without her."

It hadn't occurred to me that Rosa was a child once.  I must have figured she'd sprung out of a vacuum exactly as I'd always known her: quiet and forlorn.  The way she talked to me just then wasn't forlorn.  She wasn't afraid of me at all.  I might have been my own worst enemy.  I made up scenarios in which people hated me, reviled me, because I couldn't comprehend a world where people saw me any differently than I did.

Sky saw me differently.  I still couldn't comprehend it.

"Why did you cry in church that day?" I asked.

Rosa shook her head.  "The same reason you are crying now."

Was she like me?  Was she afraid she'd never escape her mom's memory, the way I feared I'd never escape my dad's?

"What are we going to do?" I asked.

Rosa climbed to her feet, the oil lamp rising with her.  "We're going to tell your uncle we knocked the shelves down by accident," she said.  "And then we'll read books, and play songs.  And I don't know what else.  But we can find out together."

"Did you ever find out who you are?" I asked, standing.  My cheeks felt cold and damp.  She'd said she was my age once.  She'd said I was at the age where I discovered who I was.

"Yes," Rosa said.  "But no.  Not exactly," Rosa amended.

If she was trying to confuse me, she'd succeeded.

"I'm doing that now," she said skittishly.  "You can do it with me."

We went up the stairs, a knot in my stomach.  Rosa was the one to tell Uncle Gabriel about the shelves.  I'm pretty sure he saw through her excuse, because his first response was, "Don't worry about it; Rafael's always a little twitchy during the monsoon."  I promised I'd rebuild the shelves, but I couldn't look my uncle in the eye.  As long as he thought I was twitchy, nothing more, I could hide my insecurities from him for the remainder of the monsoon.

No, I couldn't.  A couple of day later he gathered Rosa and me in the sitting room.  He said he wanted to talk about something serious.

"Let's stop dancing around this," Uncle Gabriel said.  He scratched his scruffy, tawny braids with a big hand.  He shook them over his shoulder, rubbing his eyes.  "We all have something in common that we'd rather we didn't."

I perched precariously on the armchair's arm rest.  "
You
don't," I said.

Uncle Gabriel gave me a look I can only describe as inquiring.  "I'm fairly certain Eli was my brother-in-law, and Susan was my sister."

It was my mother's name that sent a flurry of nerves fluttering through my stomach.

"I know it's painful," Uncle Gabriel said.  "I imagined one day it would stop being painful.  Eleven years later and it hasn't."

Rosa sat down on the piano bench, demure hands folded on her lap.  I wondered about Uncle Gabriel's sudden willingness to air out our history.  I've said it before, but the three of us were born into a culture that placed value on our ability to keep our feelings to ourselves.  "Don't be a burden" could very well have been the Shoshone sovereign motto.  Maybe Uncle Gabriel had cottoned on to the same truth as I had:  The cultural enforcement wasn't working out.  Or maybe he'd gotten cabin fever, same as me, and it was making him say crazy things, anything to combat the rainy silence.

"Had you any idea about him?" Rosa asked, her tiny voice shy.

"No," Uncle Gabriel said.  "I didn't like him, but I never thought--never imagined--that he would hurt anybody.  Let alone kill them."

"You didn't like my dad?" I asked.  I raised my head.

Uncle Gabriel smiled wryly.  "You either loved Eli or hated him," Uncle Gabriel said.  "There was no middle road.  He had a personality like gravity; he drew everybody into his orbit.  But he was, I found, a very callous man.  The only time he ever cared about other people's wants or needs was when they aligned with his own."

I didn't like hearing about my dad's negative qualities.  It was irrational of me, I know.  He was a murderer; you can't get any worse than that.  He was a murderer; he was my father.

"I want to be clear," Uncle Gabriel said.  "I don't think 'murder' is a trait you inherit, the way, say, brown eyes are.  I don't know what makes a person want to hurt another person.  What I do know is that we have the choice whether or not to act on our impulses.  Eli chose not to.  It never occurred to him to choose otherwise."

Psychopaths thought their feelings mattered more than everyone else's.  A stab of resentment found the hollow of my chest.  Dad had thought his feelings mattered more than eight women's lives.

"Every day I've asked myself about it," Rosa admitted, her eyes on her knees.  "About why he wanted to hurt people.  About why he chose my mother to hurt."

Why had he chosen the women he'd chosen?  I'd never even thought to wonder.  I hadn't wanted to.  Digging into my father's psyche was a thousand times more uncomfortable than dealing with the aftermath alone.

"I don't know," Uncle Gabriel said through a sigh.  "I've thought at times that it must have been a game to him.  But I don't know that that's true.  Eli wasn't the hunter, Susan was."

Mom was the hunter.  It instilled me with a surge of hope; because I was a hunter; because I had something in common with Mom.  I wanted to be more like Mom.

"It could have been about sexual attraction," Uncle Gabriel said, the unease apparent on his face.  "I've heard that in some cases, the violent act is like a release.  But again, I can't begin to understand that.  I
really
don't want to."

I doubted that theory myself.  If violence was the same as sex to Dad, he probably would have taken Mom's life, too.  But then he had taken her life; just not the same way he'd taken the others.

"I don't know why he chose your mother," Uncle Gabriel said to Rosa.  He looked her in the eye, hands clasped over his knees, face tense.  "What I think is that the women were all the same to him; interchangeable.  And that's unforgivable.  And I'm sorry.  I'm sorry it was your mother he saw as interchangeable."

Rosa looked up at him, the anxiety siphoning off of her face.  "I'm sorry he did not think about your family," she said.

Uncle Gabriel's fingers twitched in a weird way.  I had the feeling he wanted to hold her hand, only she was all the way on the other side of the room.

"Rafael," Uncle Gabriel said, tearing his eyes from Rosa's with difficulty.  "Is there anything you feel like saying?"

"Who killed Dad?" I blurted out.

It wasn't a matter of whether he had been killed; it was a matter of when, and by whom.  Blood law was ancient for us.  Non-Natives acted like it was disgusting, unthinkable, but they had a blood law, too.  They called it death row.  It was okay when they did it, I guess.  When we did it, we were savages.

"There's no reason to jump to conclusions, Rafael," Uncle Gabriel said, kind voice strained.

"You said I could talk," I murmured.

"I'm not taking it back."

"Then can't you tell me which clan staked their claim?"

"Rafael," Uncle Gabriel said, "blood law's illegal."

"The Ghost Dance is still illegal," I said.  "Isn't it?  The US never lifted the ban.  The Ghost Dance is okay, but blood law isn't?"

Uncle Gabriel started doing the face rubbing thing.  I wondered whether I'd gone too far.  I wasn't looking for a fight; I just wanted to know the truth.

"I'll play Greensleeves," Rosa murmured.

I'd ruined it.

The rest of the monsoon passed dismally.  I holed myself up in my room, stewing in misery, and only came out when Rosa made corn-stuffed mushrooms.  The days blurred together, the darkness thickening around me.  I wished I'd kept my big mouth shut.  I wished that I could control my temper, that I could stop devolving into this unrecognizable monster.  I lay on my bed, humming the words to King of Nothing by Stratovarius.  I wondered how Sky was coming along with his Plains flute.