Lending Light (Gives Light Series Book 5) (7 page)

"Rafael Gives Light, do you want to look at the farms with me?"

I opened my eyes.  Sarah Two Eagles hopped over to me like a bizarrely calm rabbit, her hair swinging around her chin.  She was wearing a raincoat and rain boots, both periwinkle blue.

"Get lost, tyke," I said.

"I'm jumping in rain puddles," Sarah explained.  "I think we're a bit like plants, but don't know it.  Maybe we can get all our nutrients from sun and water alone."

"Don't wanna," I said.  Not if it meant giving up samosas and candy.

Eventually Sarah hopped away again--weird brat--and I tucked my notebook under my arm, debating between the promontory and the tent rocks for today's hiding place.  I looked at the patches of soft, springy soil between the rain puddles.  A feather on the ground caught my eye, gray as slate, fuzzy toward the bottom of the quill.

There had to be a molting dove living in our tree.  I bent down and picked up the feather.  The raindrops rolled right off it, reminding me of mercury.  I thought of my mother with a pang of guilt.  Maybe the feathers were tokens from her.  If you think I'm crazy, I don't care.  In our culture everything is related.  We don't have individual souls so much as we are individual expressions of the same soul.  The dove's soul was my mom's soul; my mom's soul was my soul.  I felt bad for both dove and mom, that they had to share a soul with me.

I tied the feather in my wet hair.  All of a sudden I started thinking about the new kid in the Looks Over house, his curly blond hair, the spark in his small brown eyes.  My thoughts went slow and muddled.  Skylar looked so much like Christine.  Same curls.  Same birthmark on the left cheek.  The only difference was Christine had had an underbite.  A victim lived on Skylar's face.  A murderer lived on mine.

My sorrow and my legs carried me to the abandoned St. Clair house in the north of the reserve.  I wasn't even aware of it until I looked up and saw the house itself, half eaten by vines, the empty planters crumbling and the windows filthy with solid, thick dust.  I'd been to this house before.  I'd been to all the houses of Dad's victims before.  I reached out and pushed the door open.  I stepped inside, illuminated by the gray sun and rain through the gaps in the ceiling, flipping through my lined notebook for a clean page to draw on.

The front of the St. Clair house had a sitting room, a closet, and an unfinished support beam.  The walls were covered in charcoal drawings.  I sat down on bloated floorboards, on cobwebs, squinting while I sketched in my book.  I started with a face.  I wanted to draw Christine and her son together, like they should have been.  If I could have remembered what Paul Looks Over looked like, I would have drawn him, too.  I gripped my charcoal and it dirtied my fingertips, flaking off on the paper in rhythmic scratches.  The stub grew smaller and smaller.  I tilted my notebook toward the window for some light; and the front doorknob rattled.

I'd never moved so fast as I did then.  I leapt up, my notebook under my arm, scrambling to hide behind the support beam.  Ungainly, I almost crashed to the floor.  The front door squeaked when it swung open, footsteps crossing the threshold.  I didn't know what to do.  I was debating my escape plan when I heard something hit the wall and the plaster crumble.  I went stiff behind the beam.

I peeked around the beam.  Skylar St. Clair was standing in the windowed alcove, his brow furrowed in a frown.  He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand.  I could hear him breathing, which surprised me, like I'd expected his lungs to be paralyzed, too.  Light danced around him in satellites, breathy and gold and filling the entire room.  Everything went sharp, defined: the cracks in the floor and the seams in the walls, the moss crawling in under the door.  The saturation was so vivid it made the dingy old house look soaked in fresh, damp oil paints.

Skylar's head shot in my direction.  My heart lodged in my throat.  Had I made some kind of sound and given myself away?  I was waiting for him to call out--"Who's there?"--when I remembered he couldn't.  He stood so still I began to doubt he planned on leaving.  This had been his house once.  The impurity of his mother's death still lingered on the walls.  Maybe, in one of those side bedrooms, her blood still stained the floor with rust.

I stepped around the support beam, swallowing my fears.  Skylar's mouth fell open, his eyebrows rocketing toward his hairline.  His hair was blond but his eyebrows were brown.  Why?  What about the hair on his arms--was that brown, too?  I couldn't tell, because he was wearing that blue jacket again, zipped to his chin like it was freezing outside.  It was eighty degrees.  His chest moved fast enough that I thought he must have been scared of me.  But he never moved away.  He didn't back up; he didn't run.  I wanted to say that made him brave.  Maybe that just made him stupid.

He wasn't stupid; but I was.  I started worrying about him, wondering what he was doing here all alone.

"You gonna put it back, or what?" I asked, masking my concern.

He was holding one of my drawings in his hand.  It must have fallen off the wall.  Had he punched the wall?  Even I didn't pull crap like that.  Not like that's saying a whole lot:  I punched people instead.

Skylar folded up the paper, his fingers long and careful.  He stuck the drawing in one of the big, loopy pockets at the front of his jacket.  He went on watching me with small brown eyes; but they were softer now, his chest evening out.  He had a face like a sylph and I thought of
The Tempest
; I thought of invisible Ariel at his master's beck and call.  In a way maybe Skylar was invisible, too.  He couldn't talk with most people, right?  So they probably grew accustomed to overlooking him, like he wasn't even there.  At least he could talk to Annie, who knew sign language on account of her little brother Joseph, born deaf.  Poor bastards, I thought, that they were stuck with Annie Little Hawk for company.

While I was busy contemplating the logistics of sign language, Skylar took a tentative step toward me.  I wondered if this was what getting shot felt like:  All the breath had left my chest, hot with pain, my nerves jumping to life.  I didn't like the way Skylar looked at me.  He looked at me like I was a person, not a monster's son.  The sympathy in his eyes killed me.  He was the one who had been maimed irreversibly.  He was the one who had to live with the memory of the worst night of his life, then watch that memory play out on his and my faces.

I wanted to linger, to ask Skylar whether he was okay, whether anyone was giving him shit around the rez.  I could have taken care of that.  I could have taken care of him.  The weight of his eyes got to me, and I chickened out.  I slid past Skylar and bolted out the front door.  I hated being indoors.  I still wasn't sure why I'd come to this place.

Skylar's light followed me all the way to the windmill field out west.  It illuminated the dewy raindrops on the grass in refracting sparks, like the jumping, iridescent faces of a crystal.  Even the windmill blades lit up as they cut through the clouds, unraveling the pink, cheery sky underneath.  I released a breath I hadn't realized I was holding.  I sat on the damp grass and felt the earth's umbilical cord tug at my belly.

Zeke Owns Forty and William Sleeping Fox ambled over to me.  Skylar's light bounced off of them, hovering around them, changing colors.  Zeke's color was blue, a confused, tossing ocean.  Sleeping Fox's was dull green, making me think of sickness.

"Zeke owns the windmill field," Sleeping Fox said.  "You have to go."

William Sleeping Fox was probably the most foreign-looking thing about the Nettlebush Reserve.  His mom was half Japanese, half Shoshone, and his dad was half black, half white.  The result was wiry black curls, tall cheeks, and freckles scattered around the outsides of tiny, blue-green eyes.  His eyes were dizzy, but that had nothing to do with his glasses, or with my punching him months back.  He was born dizzy.  Dumbass.  I hated his guts.

"Uh," Zeke said, laughing nervously.  His hands and eyes twitched, his hair combed over one side, part of it shaven in a traditional style you didn't see much those days.  "We could just, you know--"

"Nobody owns the windmills," I cut in harshly.  Land ownership wasn't even a Shoshone idea.

"I saw that blond guy," Sleeping Fox said.  "The one who looks white.  I bet you're going to kill him."

Doors in my ears slammed shut, one at a time.  Sleeping Fox elbowed Zeke, who started.

"Uh," Zeke said.  "Yeah!  Yeah," Zeke said, losing momentum.  "Like your dad killed Naomi," Zeke mumbled.

Flames spread across the ground, embers crackling.  The heat climbed up my body, drying the rainwater on my torn jeans.

"Even your uncle looked scared," Sleeping Fox said.  "I bet he's afraid to be alone with you."

The flames crawled up the boys' bodies.  Self-immolation used to be common in our tribe when we wanted to scare away hostiles, but didn't want to hurt them.  How messed up do you have to be that you'd rather hurt yourself than your enemy?  Self-immolation was outlawed now.  Same as the Daigwani, but that was outlawed for us; by Roosevelt, I think.  A Daigwani was like a king, somebody whose word should be followed at all times.  This had to be a really wise person, or else he would have run us into the ground years ago.  In English you'd call Daigwani "chiefs," but that's a big simplification of what they really were.

"You wanna go back to the hospital?" I warned, voice low.

The flames leapt across Sleeping Fox's arms.  "You're just like him," he said.

The flames jumped up and swallowed me whole.  I disappeared.

All throughout the rest of the day, even into the next, the sensation of burning wouldn't go away.  It followed me to the firepit for dinner, when the rain stopped misting; to the badlands the day after that, for an unsuccessful morning hunt; back to my bedroom, where I half-assed a book report on
To Kill a Mockingbird
without having read the whole story.  At night I lay awake in my bed, fuming, flames roaring in my ears.  I stared at the wooden ceiling, Skylar's light flitting across the rafters.

"What are you following me for?" I murmured, eyebrows pinching together.

The light winked at me.  It skittered off to a corner of the room, pooling there, lingering out of reach.  I stretched my hand toward it regardless.  Generous, it lit my fingertips powder white.  It bathed me in confusing serenity.

That Skylar kid was in over his head.  If I couldn't control myself with Sleeping Fox, there definitely wasn't any way I could control myself around Dad's last victim.

I was still thinking about Skylar the following morning, when Uncle Gabriel fought with me because I wouldn't go to church and his voice made me feel small, cut down to a sliver of myself.  I was still thinking about Skylar when I brought
To Kill a Mockingbird
with me to dinner, because the book sucked, but I wanted to know how it ended.  Holly and Daisy At Dawn played Tootompi on the double-skin drum, which made no sense to me because Tootompi's a song about cold weather and it was hot and dry out, my braids sticking to my cheeks with perspiration.  I flipped through the pages of Uncle Gabe's book, frowning at the courtroom scene, reading about as slow as a tortoise.  I squinted at the text, wishing I'd brought a lamp with me, although normally I enjoyed the nighttime.

Skylar came over and sat down next to me, smiling softly, reluctant and cautious and my heart jumped.

I closed my book tentatively.  "What?"

The light around Sky turned night to day.  He reached into his pocket and handed me a paper.

Maybe it was an eviction notice, I thought.  Maybe it was a treasure map, or a writ proclaiming Skylar the rightful heir to the British throne.  In clumsy, hesitant fingers, I unfolded the paper.  When I opened it up, I was disappointed.  It was one of my charcoal drawings, Christine St. Clair tending to a garden, her hair in a ponytail.  It must have been the same one Skylar had taken from the abandoned St. Clair house.

"This isn't mine," I said.

Skylar's eyes went quizzical.  I must have sounded like an idiot.

"It's yours," I explained, embarrassed.  The drawing sucked, but it must have meant something to him, that he'd kept it on him all this time.  I pushed it into his hands, trying to be gentle.  "Keep it."

A new smile, a slow one, spread across Skylar's face.  It hit something square in my chest; I looked at him; I couldn't look away.  Apart from tempting fate, I didn't know what he was doing around me.  Did he have a death wish or something?

"What do you want?" I asked.

Why was I asking him?  He couldn't answer.  His light spread across the faces of our neighbors and made them look radiant.  Even Beth Bright, the hospital's receptionist, a shrew of a woman who didn't trust children as far as she could throw them.  Even Annie Little Hawk, sitting by the fire with her brother Joseph on her knee.  I tried--hard--not to glance at Skylar's throat.  His jacket covered it completely.  I was starting to guess why.

"I'm not my dad," I mumbled.

Skylar nodded softly, sadly.  His eyes stayed on me, which I gave him credit for.  He might have been mute, but his face was open and expressive, honest.  It felt weird to think that a kid who couldn't talk might have been more talkative than the whole of the Shoshone race, renowned for its reticence.

Just then Skylar glimpsed the cover of my book.  An excitable grin touched his lips, brief, but full of recognition.  His light held still.  His voice--the voice he didn't have--sounded in my ear.