Lending Light (Gives Light Series Book 5) (29 page)

Did you know there's no word for "love" in Shoshone?  That's because love is considered a lesser mental illness in our culture.  I don't mean that it's stigmatized or anything.  It's more like, "Why would you want the burden?"  Your whole life is going to center around this one person.  You don't get to pick who your heart wants.  You don't even get to pick whether they want you back.  What good is that for a person's wellbeing?  Seems more like an evolutionary fluke.

When I decide to love somebody, I love them with everything I've got.  I don't do things halfway.  I don't know how.  When I love somebody, I love them unconditionally.  Nothing they could ever do to me has the power to change it.  My own feelings don't have the power to change it.  It's a little scary; but it feels good.  It's the only part of me I've never doubted is wholesome by nature.

When I decided to love Sky, I knew that I was handing him a power I could never take back.  I understood, too, why love was considered an illness in our society.  Because an ailment like mine--thinking about Sky constantly, deriving light from him--I could believe it was an illness.  Illnesses are what happen when you have no protection against the elements.  There are flowers that grow bare naked in snowfall, snowdrops and witch-hazel and cape primrose.  Humans can't do that.  I couldn't do that.

The house's front door clapped open.  Sky and I leapt apart, his skin flushing delectably red.  God, I wanted to kiss that, too.  Catherine Looks Over hobbled past us without any real concern.  Sky didn't notice, but she glanced our way, her aura steely silver.  She gave me an approving nod before she thumped into her bedroom.  I slapped my hands against my face.  I wanted to curl up and die.

Rafael?
said Sky's soundless voice.

I started laughing.  It was delirious, hysterical; it was relieved.  Everything was okay.  I didn't know how I knew.  I dropped my hands and Sky was laughing with me, exquisite.  It didn't matter if no one else could hear his laughter.  I could hear his laughter.  I could tell everyone about it.

Sky bent down and lit a fire in the hearth with a piece of musty gray tinder.  He sat back when the flames snapped to life, curling and spitting and warming the room.  The fiery glow washed over his face, painting him yellow and apple red, remnants of a splotchy blush still tickling his throat.  If I didn't kiss that blush, and soon, I was going to go mad.  I turned my eyes away, hands in my pockets.  I stared at the slatted floorboards.  I tried to quell the shaky pounding in my chest, the exhilaration that was Sky; only Sky.

A small post-it pad slapped the side of my head.  I jumped as it clattered to the floor.  Sky smiled at me, deceptively innocent.  My face twitched until I burst out laughing.  I was halfway across the room, ready to punish him, when Mrs. Looks Over called out:  "Quiet out there!"

It was too much.  I hunched over, my arms around my gut.  Sky laughed so hard he rubbed the moisture from his eyes with the backs of his hands, but it did no good.  I couldn't breathe.  Sky gestured over his shoulder and took my hand.  He pulled me through the front room and onto the porch, probably so his grandma wouldn't flay us alive.

The night was bitter cold, my favorite kind of weather.  The wind blew my hair in my mouth; I spat it out.  Sky rubbed his arms, and I thought:  I should have made him grab his jacket.  I put my hands on his arms, his freckles, trying to warm him.  He melted into me.  He tipped his head back and my lips fell down intuitively to meet his, without my say in the matter.  He smiled into my mouth.  I snagged an arm around his skinny waist and felt his hands sifting into my hair again, wrapping whole strands around his knuckles.  I had the idea that maybe kissing Sky was my natural, default state, and the reason I'd been such a disagreeable person all my life was because I hadn't been kissing him all my life.  You take a starfish out of the ocean, you watch how irritable it gets.

Ow
, Sky mouthed.

"What?" I asked, worried.  I pulled back.

Sky pointed over his shoulder at the porch railing.  He must have bumped into it.

"Dumbass," I said; although it was probably my fault.

I kissed Sky again to make it up to him.  I kissed the corner of his mouth, his delicate jawline.  He squirmed delightedly, his hands bunching at my chest, his pulse matching mine. 
This is the best
, said his emotions, euphoric. 
Thank you
, they said. 
Thank you.

"What are you thanking me for?" I asked.

He rubbed the back of my bent neck with the cradle of his hand. 
Because you can hear me.

Because you're mine, I didn't say.  Because one of us was made with the other in mind, but it doesn't matter which; you're the more important by far.

"I should," I began.  I hesitated.  "I should be thanking you."

Sky pulled back to show me a quizzical smile.

"For not being afraid of me," I said.  "And..."

And if I told him he showered everything around me in light, even when he wasn't with me, he'd probably think I was insane.  Maybe I was insane.  It was dark outside, but the porch, the trees, the lawn radiated with pale gold.  I was Waha Kopai.  I wanted the sun.  The spirits made me ugly for it, but Wind and Sky came looking for me, prince of the heavens, and decided to love me anyway.

The moth's nest of nerves made a comeback, wings beating, alive.

"Sorry," I said suddenly.

Sky tilted his head. 
Why?

" 'Cause I ate a lot of maple candy tonight, and then you had to kiss me.  That's gross."

Sky's face contorted in kind, quiet laughter. 
You're not gross, Rafael.

"Yeah, well."

He surged up and kissed me again, surprising me, dizzying me.  He wound his arms around my neck a second time, standing on the tips of his toes.  God, he was perfect.  God, I loved him.  You can't blame me for that.  Anyone who knew him must have loved him; because it was impossible not to. 
Thank you
, I said, with every kiss I pressed to the contours of his lips, with shaking hands around his shoulderblades. 
Thank you
, I said; because his willingness to love me made me want to love me.  I'd never loved me before.  I hadn't thought there was anything to love.

It was late when I went home for the night--reluctantly, because the last thing I wanted was to let go of Sky, now that I knew how good it felt to have all of him at once.  I sneaked into my house, knowing all too well that Uncle Gabriel wouldn't be happy with me.  To my great fortune, he'd fallen asleep on the sofa in the sitting room, a book open on his lap.  I took the reading glasses off his eyes and folded them up on the side table.  I turned off the lamp over his head.  I kind of felt like shaking him awake just to tell him I had a boyfriend.  I decided the revelation could wait until morning.

When I went into my bedroom, the whale lamp was lit on the desk already, the library books on the floor pushed neatly aside.  I couldn't remember whether I'd left the light on by accident, or whether Uncle Gabe had turned it on for me.  Uncle Gabe was always making nice gestures like that.  I felt a little undeserving, and wondered whether I'd ever done anything nice in return.  I sat down on my bed, trying to convince myself that I was tired.  Except I couldn't stop thinking about Sky; and the more I thought about him, the more awake I felt.

I looked like my dad.  I knew that.  I'd have to be an idiot not to know it.  Sky looked like his mom.  He had to have known it, too.  My father had killed Sky's mother, and nothing was ever going to change that.  But maybe--maybe this was alright.  All of this.  Maybe it made sense.  Sky's mother and my father met each other all over again through Sky and me.  Their blood lived on in our veins.  When Sky decided to let me love him, my father's blood came to love his victim's blood.  Dad wasn't here anymore to make up for what he'd done.  Maybe I could make up for it in his stead.

I plucked my rice paper sketchbook out from under my pillow.  I opened to a fresh page and started sketching Sky's likeness for the millionth time.  Something compelled me to turn the book over and glimpse the front cover.  I hadn't thought to look before.

On the cover was a pilot whale, his black fins stubby, his belly gray.  I squeezed my eyes shut at the first sight of him.  I felt myself drifting on calm waters, siren songs in my ears.

13

Napaka

The next morning I sat down at the island in the kitchen while Uncle Gabriel stuck a knife in the toaster, the bread jammed.  I hunched over, squinting at a sheet of lined paper, penning a letter to my sister Mary.

"Is it supposed to be smoking?" Uncle Gabriel wondered, stroking his chin.

I didn't think so.  "Can't you put it in the sink?"

He decided not to.  "So where's Mary staying this time?" he asked.

"Some hostel," I muttered, sounding out the words in my head before I wrote them down.  As slow as I was to read, writing was a thousand times worse.

"She can't keep this up forever," Uncle Gabriel said thoughtfully, sitting down.

I missed her so intensely, it hit me out of left field.  Mary and I were practically the same person when it came to grief:  We couldn't handle it.  She and I were equally self-destructive, but in different ways.

"Sooner or later she's going to miss her family," Uncle Gabriel opined.

But that was the problem.  She missed our dad.  Eleven years didn't lessen the pain.  Mary was her daddy's girl, just like I was our mother's boy.

"Uncle Gabe," I said slowly, putting my pencil down.  "If Mom had overdosed..."

"She didn't," Uncle Gabe interrupted.

Suicide was the dirty S Word in our society.  It didn't make much sense to me, because our warriors used to practice self-immolation to scare violent colonists away, and we'd always praised them for their sacrifice.  Maybe if you made a big show of it, it didn't count as suicide anymore.

"But if she had," I pressed.

"She couldn't have," Uncle Gabriel said.

I learned to shut up about it.  Consequently I shut up about all the other things I would have liked to ask: like whether Dad might have stood a chance at redemption if we'd gotten him into therapy before he started targeting women.

"Uncle Gabe," I said.  "Are you happy?"

He raised his eyebrows at me over the top of his coffee mug.  He took a long drink.  "The smartest thing to do with a question like that," he said, "is take it day by day."

Yeah, well.  "Are you going to be happy today?"

"If we have a good hunt," he said gleefully.

He was so freaking evasive.  All I wanted to know was if his friends made him laugh, if he was content with his lot in life.  Maybe we shouldn't have been born Shoshone, I thought.  Maybe we ought to have been born Cree.  They even had love songs, and didn't consider it a lesser mental illness.

"I have a boyfriend," I announced.

"Is it Aubrey?" Uncle Gabriel asked.

I choked on air.  I coughed and hacked, eyes watering.  "No!" I said, mortified.

"That's too bad," Uncle Gabriel said.  "He's a nice boy."

"Stop it!" I said.

"I'm just saying," Uncle Gabriel relented.

The toaster spazzed behind him, spitting up a cloud of black smoke.  I crawled out of my chair, out of the kitchen altogether.  I'd forgotten my letter to Mary, but once she realized I'd died of embarrassment, I felt certain she would understand.

We hunted bighorns in the coal seams that morning and killed a decent-looking tup, about four hundred pounds.  If you're going to kill a sheep it's best to aim behind the ear, which was exactly what Holly At Dawn did, with the result that the chase was over in seconds, pain-free and almost bloodless.  Holly and Daisy and Zeke and I were left with the job of butchering.  Stu Stout oversaw us.  We cleaned the ram's neck and cut across the shoulders, the wool putting up a good deal of resistance.  We cut the ribs open with a gut hook and Zeke sat snacking on the raw heart, which was okay, I guess, because nobody used the heart for cooking those days.

"I don't see why we don't just breed our own sheep," Holly said dully, holding a pan under the neck.

"That's animal husbandry," Stuart dismissed.

"I know it is," Holly said.  "I'm saying I don't know why we don't do it."

"Because that's gross," Daisy said, grimacing.  "Raising an animal just to kill it.  It's cruel is all."

"It's not like they'd know what was going on," Holly said.

"I never know what's going on!" Zeke butted in, annoyed.

"I have a boyfriend," I announced.

"Rub it in, why don't you," Holly said.

"Ooh!  What's his name?" Daisy said, grinning.

"Not telling," I said.

"Will this make you a more agreeable person?" Stuart asked.

"Dunno," I said.

"Don't count on it," Holly said.

"Bite me," I said.

The conversation was cut short when Zeke tried to cartwheel, but crashed into Andrew Nabako's collection of crossbow bolts.  We all got up and shouted at Zeke, because he was an idiot, and anyway, he never did anything right.  Uncle Gabriel came back to our group and said we had to deliver the mutton to Reverend Silver Wolf, Meredith Siomme, and Mr. Red Clay, our schoolteacher.  The rest of it was going to the Pleasance Reserve, where they didn't have good hunting grounds like we did.