Lending Light (Gives Light Series Book 5) (31 page)

"You want to be respectful with your elders' time," Uncle Gabriel said.  "I'll ask around for you."

"Rosa," I said.  "I have a boyfriend."

Rosa looked very proud.

14

Sweet Valley Twins and Friends

One night I was trying to eat my rosemary dumplings in peace when Holly and Daisy started rowing, right in the middle of the community dinner.

"You did
not
date Jerry Del Amo," Daisy insisted, scandalized.  "
I
dated Jerry Del Amo!"

"Well, I dated him, too," Holly said sourly.  "Guess he got a twofer."

Almost everyone our age flocked around them to see what was the matter.  Just goes to show you how little actually happens in Nettlebush.  The chatter annoyed me, and I speared a doughy dumpling angrily with my fork.  I considered throwing it at one of the twins' heads.  Preferably Daisy; she didn't have asthma.

It was at that moment that I noticed Annie Little Hawk sitting alone by the bonfire.  Usually she ate dinner with her siblings, or even Sky, the thief that she was.  She held her face in her hands; and initially, I thought she was being her usual judgmental self.  Until I saw her shoulders trembling.  A pain shot through my heart.  I jumped out of my seat and darted over to her while everyone else was distracted.

It took a while for Annie to realize she had company, even after I'd tapped her on the shoulder.  She lifted her head, rubbing furiously at the tears on her cheeks.  She flinched when she saw me, but gradually relaxed.  I crouched down in front of her, worried.  Her hair stuck to her cheekbones in patches of dampness.  Her eyes were rimmed in red.

"Who's giving you shit?" I asked, my voice as gentle as I could make it.

Annie kept wiping her eyes.  "No one, Rafael."

"You can tell me," I said, lowering my voice.  "I won't hurt 'em or anything.  I'll just make 'em stop."

"My mom died," Annie said.

I felt cold.  I didn't know Annie's mom personally, but everybody knew her by reputation.  I remembered the last time Major Little Hawk came home from an army tour.  Our tribal council presented her with a feathered warbonnet, something only war heroes were allowed to wear.  Each feather represented a different deed, a different act of valor.

"She--she died?" I repeated, at a loss.

Annie sucked in a great big breath, like she was trying to force herself not to cry.  I didn't like that.

"I'm sorry," I told her.

"Forget it," she said.

"Ann--"  I broke off.  It felt weird, calling her by her given name, and I didn't even know what it was short for: Anne, or Anna.  "Annie," I said.  "You can cry."

"I'd rather not," she said.

She fell into such a silence, I could hear the rumbling sound the bonfire made when the flames ate up the logs.  I dug back through my own memories.  I realized we weren't so dissimilar.

"It sucks," I said quietly.  "Doesn't it?"

Annie's eyebrows knitted together.

"I never wanted to share this with you," I said.

She understood.  "I suppose we don't get a say in the matter, do we?"

Parents aren't supposed to leave their kids.  A kid without parents is nobody's kid.

"You can cry," I said, feeling inadequate.  "You should cry."

"How so?" Annie asked, teeth chattering.

"Creator gave you tears for a reason."

"I can't believe she's gone," Annie said.  "It doesn't feel real."

"I know," I said, thinking of Mom, of Dad.

"Until it does," Annie said, "and I devolve into a blubbering mess.  I'm sorry about all this."

"Don't.  I mean.  I want--you can cry."

I was the wrong person to comfort her.  Words never liked to cooperate with me; and anyway, I'd never had to comfort anyone before, because I'd never had friends before.  But something I'd said must have resonated with her.  She launched herself at me, crying anew.  She hugged me, arms around my shoulders.  I hugged her back instantly and realized I'd never known her.  How do you dislike somebody you don't know?  Think about it.  It's not really possible.

I don't know what to do
, said her emotions. 
I want to rewind time.  Please.  Please let me.  Somebody.

"You're really small," I said quietly.

"It's more like you're really big," Annie said through tears.

She pulled back from my grasp with another sucking breath.  She wiped her eyes again, one at a time.  She had the most intense aura, a furious, burning red.  People like that wind up going places.

"D'you wanna be friends?" I said.

I didn't know what else to say.  Annie laughed at the surrealness of it all.  She bobbed her head in an almost imperceptible nod.

"It's gonna be okay," I said.  "Not now, but someday."

I guess it took another person crying for her mom to really drill it into me.  I was lucky, because the loss of my parents wasn't raw and new.  Dad disappeared eleven years ago.  Being able to talk to a friend, or lie under a sunset, or commune with the earth--that was here and now.

You miss out on a lot when you judge a person before you know them.  I'd always thought that Annie was one of those insufferable martyr types.  But over the next few days I started heading over to her house after the morning hunt.  She cut off her hair at the chin, something we do when we're in mourning, and let me sample her recipes before she finalized them: kneeldown bread and corn cakes, watermelon bean soup, and a kind of chowder made of tumbleweed shoots.  I like people who feed me.  Consequently, I liked Annie.  I felt ashamed of myself, though, because if I'd only tried to hold a conversation with her in the past, I would have known she wasn't all that bad.

"What's Annie short for?" I asked her one day.

"Annette," she said absently, stirring hominy on the stove.

Sky smiled soberly at me, seasoning hotbread at the kitchen counter.  I shrank shyly into my jacket, because he smiled like he was proud, and adoring, and I'd never known anyone to feel so strongly about me as a person.  Annie turned her back and he slipped me a post-it note:

I'm going to kiss you the next time she leaves the room.

I coughed so hard Annie went into the back room to fetch barberry infusion for me.  I swear I didn't plan it.  As good as his word, Sky pulled me down and kissed me.  He accidentally knocked me into the alcove wall.

One Wednesday Aubrey came over to Annie's house, having finished his farmwork early.  Annie wrapped acorn bread and apple soup in aluminum foil and pushed them aside for the community dinner later that night.  Aubrey spoke to her in gentle, hushed tones about her mother, but like a good deal of the Shoshone population, she didn't want to talk about it if it meant talking about her emotions.  Sky frowned worriedly, drying his hands on a kitchen towel.  He snapped his fingers and gestured to Annie in sign language.  She gestured back.

"Well, we could go for a swim, if you like," Aubrey said.

"How do you know what they're saying?" I asked, surly.

"Oh, well," Aubrey said, very modest, "I just watch the way their hands move."

"Y'mean you're smart," I said.

"Skylar doesn't like swimming," Annie pointed out.

"We could go to the horse ranches," I said.

"That sounds like a good idea," Aubrey said, brightening.

Sky smiled at Aubrey.  Sky smiled the softest at me, a different shade of kindness in every crease of his eyes, in every angle of his lips.  My stomach flipped and turned and exploded with shy warmth.  You are Nue, I thought.  You own everything.  You can own me if you want.  I wouldn't mind.

The four of us went out to Meredith Siomme's horse ranch just south of the ancient gristmill.  Foals cantered on the grass around fruitless apple trees.  Meredith stood hosing the sweat off of a mare's roan coat.  She smiled and waved when she saw us, welcoming us over.

"Could we help?" Aubrey asked eagerly.

"Sure you can," Meredith said.  "But if you want to ride one, you do the saddling."

We went into the barn and filled up the horses' water troughs.  Sky covered his mouth when we shoveled out the old hay and shoveled in the new.  I got out the hard brush and the soft brush from the supply box and tossed him one.  I pointed at a gelding stamping his hooves in his stall.

"Did you know?" Aubrey said.  He fed a handful of oats to a mare and the rest of the stable's occupants came clomping over curiously.  That's always the way with horses.  "The very first horses were the same size as dogs.  Probably that's why the word for 'horse' is just 'big dog' in so many Native languages."

"Who fed them Miracle Gro?" I asked dubiously.

"Nobody!  It's evolution is all.  The specimens with the more advantageous mutations wind up surviving and breeding the most."

I've said before that horses are the only animal you can get me to touch willingly.  Yeah, well, I mean it.  I put my hand on the gelding's midnight black coat.  He looked at me with one beady brown eye and I knew what he was thinking.  But at the same time, I can't describe it, because animal feelings aren't human feelings; they aren't even compatible.  It was the same feeling you get when you're two years old and playing hide-and-seek with your sister, only there's snow outside the window, your favorite weather, and it's not supposed to snow in Arizona, let alone in August.  Humans and horses, we were made for each other.  A man who's never ridden one only knows half of himself.

Sky and I brushed the gelding together.  I showed Sky how to get under the gelding's chest, because sometimes the saddle girth digs in and you wanna make sure you don't got a sore horse.  Aubrey had me thinking about evolution.  I guessed that the things we took for granted as human nature were all a part of evolution, too.  At one point in time, they weren't natural at all.

What Dad had done wasn't natural.  I wondered if his wickedness was a mutation, the way eyes and noses and mouths were mutation.  I wondered if I could blame evolution for his crimes.  Because evil couldn't be a part of human nature.  Evil wasn't a part of nature at all.  When animals killed one another, they did it for resources.  They didn't hunt one another unless they had a damn good reason; like mating, or territory.

Except I was wrong, I thought suddenly.  There was evil in nature.  Atlas moths hatched from their
cocoons without mouths.  Invariably, they starved to death.  That was evil to me.  What God designs a helpless creature that's born for the sole purpose of suffering to death?  Even if you take the position that there is no God, atlas moths still evolved to have no mouths.  Or maybe they'd had no mouths to begin with, and they'd never evolved to acquire the right equipment.  Where was their fortuitous mutation?  Nature conspired tirelessly enough that my dad, and countless other serial killers, felt the compulsive need to ruin human lives, but it couldn't be bothered giving the atlas moth something it could drink water with?  What kind of screwed up priorities were those?

I watched Sky while he stroked the horse's mane, awe written on his face.  A tawny orange atlas moth tattoo shone off the pale skin of his upper left arm.  Sky didn't see evil.  Everything was good to him, no matter its nature.  I heard my heart in my ears, my eyes clouding over.  My chest pulled tight, fast, ready to burst.  I didn't
understand the way Sky's mind worked.  I didn't understand how one person could contain so much goodness.  I swear he'd never had a single bad thought.

In Shoshone lore, we say that God has two halves: Wolf, fair and wise, and Coyote, wicked and capricious.  The reason for God's dual nature is because everything around us has the capacity for both good and bad.  Nowhere is that more apparent than the sun.  The sun gives life, gives light, but if you look at it directly it can blind you.  People are about the same.  We love one another.  We hurt one another.  They're not mutually exclusive.  Even the kindest heart can make a mistake and say something terrible.  Even the blackest heart can spare rare kindness on an unsuspecting soul.

I wondered what that said about my father.  If I were a smarter person, I probably could have figured it out.

Later on Annie and Aubrey went to Aubrey's house for the afternoon.  Sky and I went into the abandoned gristmill.  The grist at the back of the building was a smooth stone wheel over a tin cereal tray.  The walls were so weathered they looked more gray than brown, harrowed and scrubbed.  We propped the doors open, because I needed to see that nature was nearby, but sat down in the cool, shady interior, Sky wiping sweaty hands on his jeans.

"If you get to stay on the rez," I said, "you'll go to school with me.  We could do all our reports together."

Sky looked delighted, which I took as a good sign that maybe he was staying in Nettlebush after all.  I couldn't bear the thought of him leaving, not anymore.  His smile filled the room with airy bauble lights, drifting.  I tracked them until I lost count.  I watched them change from gold to white to silver to gold.  Sky gave me a curious look, and I borrowed his notepad and sketched the floating lights with a pencil stub.  He leaned over to watch, appreciative.  He tapped my forehead with his index finger.