Lending Light (Gives Light Series Book 5) (35 page)

We stopped outside Mrs. Looks Over's house, the windows lit with lamplight and firelight.  Mrs. Looks Over turned on me and said,

"Perhaps you had better keep your own advice in mind."

"Sorry?" I asked, thrown.

"About expecting nothing from people, but loving them as they are."

"I'm trying," I said.

"Skylar is inextricably attached to you," Mrs. Looks Over said.  She let go of my arm.  Her face was heavy with a myriad of concerns.  "I wouldn't like to see the two of you part ways."

"Do you mean--"  I hesitated.  "That he might be leaving the rez?"

"Fool boy, can't you follow a conversation?"

Sure I could.  Just not very well.

Mrs. Looks Over sighed.  "I suppose I came to you tonight to make a case."

"What are you talking about?"  She was starting to scare me again.

Mrs. Looks Over never answered me.  She hobbled up her front porch and into her home.  She slammed the door shut in her wake.  I told myself I was seeing things that weren't there.  After all, I always saw things that weren't there.

Four days later I learned that wasn't the case.  I was walking Sky home from Annie's grotto when I stopped him on the dirt road to show him the drawings in my pilot whale sketchbook.  I freaking loved that sketchbook.  I felt certain I'd never get rid of it, not even once the pages were all used up and the spine started falling apart.  It was dark out, and I hadn't thought to bring a flashlight, but Sky's vision must have been better than mine.  He perused one whole page full of nothing but his freckles, his mouth tremulous.  He blinked very fast; I was afraid he might cry.

"Cubby?"

Sky turned around at a voice I didn't recognize.  I followed his gaze.  The man coming up the road toward us had long, straight black hair, gray eyes and a weak chin.  His belly was round around the middle, which I thought had more to do with his age than his diet.  I guessed he was about forty.  He looked familiar, but only distantly.

Sky ran toward the man.  Sky threw his arms around him in an incredulous hug.  There was no mistaking it when the man returned the hug with fierce bear arms, relieved.  Either this guy was Sky's father, or else he was a very convincing impostor.

I felt awkward.  I knew I was intruding; I knew I ought to have left.  Paul and Sky let go of each other, Paul checking Sky over, as if to make sure he was in one piece.  Paul glanced over Sky's shoulder, spotting me for the first time.

The gray eyes trained on me were lucid like thawing winter.  Recognition shone behind them.  It wasn't me Paul was recognizing, but my father.  Dad's blood in my veins came to life with a sick sentience. 
I know you
, whispered Dad's memories. 
I know you, I know you, I know you.

Everything in me told me to run away.  I would have, too, if Sky didn't seize my hand just then, holding me in place.  Paul's eyes skimmed the polish on our fingernails.  His face was a closed book, not at all like Sky's, but it occurred to me that maybe Sky had been so scared to let me love him because his father wouldn't have approved.  I didn't know why that was.  Like I said, homophobia is a western idea; you're not going to find it among Shoshone.  Only maybe Paul wasn't full-blooded Shoshone.  Mrs. Looks Over was a widow, but her husband could have been Apache, or Navajo, for all I knew.

"Maybe we'd best go inside," Paul said softly.

He couldn't have meant me.  Sky tugged me after him anyway, and the sickness in my stomach, the panic in my chest yielded to the familiar comfort of his grasp, his long fingers, his hand made for mine.  We went into the Looks Over house, through the front room, into the sitting room.  Mrs. Looks Over was sitting with Mrs. Threefold in a pair of rocking chairs, the fireplace lit.

"Oh!" Mrs. Threefold exclaimed.  She leapt up and scurried out of the house without preamble.  Mrs. Looks Over stood up, her hands folded, her eyes boring into her son's.

"Decided to grace us with your presence?" Mrs. Looks Over asked.

Paul bowed his head.  "It's been a while," he said quietly.

The tension in that household was so thick, it clogged my lungs.  Mrs. Looks Over took a cut log out of a crate and tossed it into the hearth.  And then she said something like:

"Is it over?"

Paul wouldn't stop staring at me.  Was what over?  Him running from the feds?  The blood in my veins broiled with anger.  It was a feral, primal impulse, like I was staring down my worst enemy.  I had a suspicion just then, a really ugly one.  I didn't want it to be true.

"Eli's boy," Paul said.

It was true, wasn't it?  I'd always said that someone took out a blood law on my father.  But with my limited scope, my
naiveté, I'd thought it happened years ago, over and done with, and nobody wanted to talk about it.  I'd thought Uncle Gabriel was playing dumb all those times he told me I was wrong.  My hands shook at my sides.  I put them in my pockets so nobody would see.  I didn't hear much else after that.  I don't remember much else after that.

I remember visiting the grotto the next day, my sketchbook open on my lap, my shaking hands caked in charcoal.  I remember the sound of screeching in my ears, so loud and so continual I thought I was going insane.  Annie and Aubrey were busy walking along the creek, trying to figure out whether it connected to the lake.  Sky came by and sat with me.

"Um," I said.  I showed him one of my drawings, Wolf and Coyote under Sun and Moon.

Sky took the pencil from behind my ear.  Sky took the book off my lap, turning to a clean page.  He didn't have to.  I already knew what he wanted to say.  I knew it because I could see it on his face, harrowed and tight.  I could see it in the sickness behind his
foxlike eyes, the pale flush of the red scars on his throat.

All this time I'd thought Sky's dad skipped town to escape the penalty for people smuggling.  Yeah.  How stupid was I?  Feds can't come on an Indian reservation except when one of the Major Crimes happens here.  Murder, robbery, rape, arson, something else--I forget--but people smuggling ain't one of 'em.  Paul skipped town and left Sky here so the feds would investigate him as a missing person, not a murderer.  All throughout the summer I'd been busy making friends with Sky, and Sky's dad had been busy killing my father.  Sky was a decoy.  Sky was a toy our community used to pull blinders over the police.  No one ever thought to clue me in.  It wasn't worth telling me.

How was it that my father had been alive these past eleven years and had never thought to contact Mary or me?  Didn't he miss us?  Did he know that his wife was dead?  Did he care?

And then I faced the ugliest suspicion of all.  Because Sky didn't just distract the feds.  Sky distracted me, too.  I'd fallen for him so completely, so ridiculously--can you blame me?--I'd worn a pair of blinders myself.  He probably could have stabbed an infant right in front of me and I would have found some other explanation for why the knife was in his hand.  Except he never would have done that; he was soft-hearted.  He was good.  He was the best person I'd ever met.  But the only reason he lived in Nettlebush to begin with was to facilitate my dad's death.  I didn't know whether he was aware of that.  I wanted to believe he wasn't.  I wanted to believe he had been kept as ignorant as I had; we were in this together.

See what I mean about the infant and the knife?

I remembered how reluctant Sky had been to let me love him.  I remembered him expressing guilt on more than one occasion; like when we visited the aquarium together, and we talked about his father.  I didn't know that that meant he was aware of his father's activities.  I didn't want to know.  I couldn't stop the churning in my stomach, the nattering in my head.  I couldn't stop the panic building in my chest, spreading to the tips of my fingers.

The ground groaned underneath me.  I jumped up.  Long, hellish cracks split the terrain apart.  The creek flooded over.  The roots of the willow tree came out of the soil, the willow tree falling on its side.  I coughed at clouds of rising dust.  The rock cave shredded away in dirty flakes.  Sky's face shredded away, his hair, his skinny arms and legs.  My eyes went black and unseeing.  A sharp tug at my navel jerked me into another dimension.

My eyes felt heavy and dark in my skull, like when you've just started lucid dreaming, but the dream hasn't begun yet.  The sound in my ears fizzled and died.  The colors behind my eyelids took solid shape.  I was standing on a tiny island, maybe sixteen feet wide, the sand bleached off-white.  My solitary neighbor was a shanty hut, the walls, door, and roof all woven from mismatched planks of wood.  I sat on my knees, teeth chattering.  The sand was wet and slimy, like putty, only colder.  The sky wasn't a sky at all, but an upside-down chess board in dizzying black and white.  The weirdest part was when I leaned over the edge of the island, peering into the sea.  The ocean comprised the cosmos, stars and darkness ebbing back and forth in gentle waves.

I sat back on my haunches.  I folded in on myself, arms crossed for warmth.  Dad had been alive for the past eleven years.  All this time I could have seen him, I could have talked to him; I could have asked him what he was thinking when he killed those seven women.  Try and imagine what I was feeling.  Try and imagine that someone who passed away when you were a child, someone you really loved, came back to you indefinitely.  And then, before you had the chance to get a word in edgewise, to ask whether this was real, or what Heaven was like, a stranger came along and killed your loved one all over again.  Because that's what Dad was.  Dad was a loved one.  I didn't want to love him.  I'd tried really hard not to.  I'd tried as hard as I could not to spit on his victims' memory; but my father was my father.  Nothing was going to change the fact that he had brought me into the world.  He'd given me some of my favorite memories: spare ribs on hot summer days, kickball in playgrounds outside convenience stores.

A gray wolf paddled through the cosmic sea, stars scattering under his paws.  He swam to my island, dropping a clod of dirt on the shore.  Just as he paddled away, a coyote swam in his place, snapping up the dirt in his maw, carrying it away again.  It continued on in this vein.  The elders say that's how Turtle Island--America--began.  Coyote wanted a place to rest after the giant flood, but every time Wolf put soil on the Sea Turtle's shell, Coyote went and knocked it away, like the numbskull he was.

"Cut it out," I muttered.

I buried my face in my knees.  If Dad had tried to contact me over the years, I could have talked to him about Mom's death; about whether he thought it was a suicide, or whether I was responsible at all.

But that wasn't right, I thought.  A stab of anger punctured my chest.  If anyone was responsible for Mom's death, it was Dad.  He shattered her heart and walked away while she got sicker and sicker.  Why did I keep taking the blame for him?  Had he taught me to do that, the same way he'd taught me to read and to draw?

I remembered the Sonoran Desert.  I jumped out of my skin.  The starry ocean rose around me in inverted waterfalls.  The raging and roaring reminded me of Bear River out in Utah, one of our old winter sites.  The Mormons got together a volunteer army and killed hundreds of us, just because they wanted the river and the valley for their own.  Afterward they told everyone we had attacked them first in order to justify it.  Like there was any justification for killing children.  At one point the Mormons cut fetuses out of moms' stomachs and wrapped them around their hats.  They kidnapped Bear Hunter, the Daigwani, and raped him with a bayonet.  He was practically a child himself, seventeen or eighteen years old.  He could have been Sky.  He could have been me.

I waded through knee-deep waters, encroaching on the waterfalls.  Small Shoshone faces shone back from the water, blurry with cascading.  I tried not to find Sky among them.  What was I supposed to do?  If he'd known all along that his father was killing mine, why hadn't he ever said anything about it?  Had he thought I'd side with my dad over him?  I didn't know that I wouldn't have.  But Dad was a murderer, and murderers deserved to be punished.  I knew that.  I knew that Sky's father had every right to exact justice for his wife.

I hadn't seen my father since I was six.  It felt surreal.  It felt like I'd only seen him yesterday.

Sky's face jumped out at me from the waterfall.  I squeezed my eyes shut and dove into him, ice water dousing me.  I came out on the other side, shivering, gasping for air.

The water was gone.  The island was gone.  A sweltering desert closed in on me, orange clay sand decorated with blood-red spider lilies.  A charcoal sky flaked and morphed in fluid lines, drawings sketching themselves above my head.  The air was still and silent and--despite the heat--without humidity.  I sucked in a relieved breath.  I was dry in seconds.

I realized where I was and I panicked all over again.

The Queen of Death Valley rose from the sands in all her fearsome, towering glory.  Her skin was blue-white, stretched so taut over her skeletal body that it tore: around her ears, around her joints.  Spider pincers took the place of her eyes in gaping eye sockets, her head bald.  They say the Queen of Death Valley is the reason the desert's so barren and hot.  She enslaved her own people and made us build her a palace to put the Aztecs to shame.  Her own daughter died of exhaustion.  Her daughter's final curse was to scorch the desert until the streams and valleys ran dry, and her mother succumbed to high fever.