Lending Light (Gives Light Series Book 5) (8 page)

I know that book.  I've read it.

His light held still and I held still.  Embers dropped off my skin, scampering on the ground like ants.  The heat that had burned me since my meeting with Sleeping Fox left me in a sudden cold spell, comforting.

I cleared my throat.  "Yeah?" I asked, cautious.  "Was it any good?"

The smile slid off Skylar's face.  For a moment I thought I'd weirded him out.  He hesitated, his confusion evident; but I must have read him accurately.  He brought his thumb and index finger together and signed, "OK."

I wanted to say more to him.  I wanted to ask whether there was someone looking out for him, someone other than Catherine Looks Over, who was old and white-haired and not a lot of fun for a teenage guy to hang around.  Every question that came to mind left me before it reached my lips.  Sleeping Fox had said that I was just like my father.  Maybe I was worse.  I couldn't even make sure Skylar was being taken care of.  He had no voice he could ask for help with.  It was my family's fault he'd lost that voice.

The next night's dinner continued in the same vein.  Isaac Takes Flight sat by the fire singing a song about Coyote, Isampu, the Liar.  It went like this:

Isampu peentsi

Pennan kwasin katsunka

Uu piyaatehki,

Piyaatehki,

Piyaatehki.

Which means:

Boisterous Coyote

On the end of his tail

Carries the child away,

Away,

Away.

It was a part of an old story we liked to tell our children.  "If you don't behave, Coyote's going to come and kidnap you, and then what?"

"Haiya wain!" Isaac said; which doesn't mean anything, it's just something we say when we finish a song.  Everyone clapped for him.  I didn't clap because his voice sucked.  I was sketching insects in my notebook when Skylar came and sat with me again.  He leaned over, trying to get a look at my paper.  I came to the conclusion that he was suicidal.

"It's an atlas moth," I said.

I showed him the lined pages in my notebook.  His head canted for a better view, his curls touching his jaw.

I took the notebook back, shading in the moth's antennas.  "When it hatches from its
cocoon," I said, "it doesn't have a mouth.  It starves to death in a week."

Skylar glanced at me, then away.  I avoided his gaze, the front of his throat.  I closed my book and stood up.  I said I was going for a walk.  Skylar kept looking at me, coloring the space around us in lush lights.  Where was Annie Little Hawk?  I felt guilty about leaving Skylar by his lonesome.

"Are you coming or not?" I said.

Skylar stood up.  He followed me away from the stone firepit, north to the crossroads.  I chose a pretty lousy time to remember that Uncle Gabriel had asked me to stay away from him.  It was like even Uncle Gabriel didn't trust that I could control myself.  Maybe Sleeping Fox was right about me; maybe I was exactly like my father.  Sleeping Fox must have believed it pretty strongly if he was willing to risk a second trip to the hospital to drive the point home.

The communal bonfire fell away behind me.  I stopped walking.  Skylar hovered at my side, hesitating, like maybe he thought I was about to axe him.  I swallowed a humorless laugh.  I dragged dirty fingers through my dirty hair.  I was losing my mind.

"It's even worse with you here," I said.

Skylar's head tilted to one side, without judgment.

"Everyone looks at me and sees Dad," I explained, desperate.  "Everyone.  All my life, it's like they've been waiting for me to grow up and kill someone.  And now you're here.  They're probably taking bets back there.  'Is he killing the white kid now?' "

There.  I'd said it.  My chest felt empty, relieved of secrets, yet hollow, deprived of warmth.  Shadows spiraled down the crossroads toward me, but recoiled.  They were afraid of Skylar.  Skylar shook his head just once. 
You're wrong
.  All I could do was laugh without purpose.  I was my father.  Dad killed seven women.  I killed one.

Skylar grabbed my arm.

The feelings flooding through me weren't mine.  Compassion and misery broiled in my veins simultaneously, most of it compassion.  Confusion followed, and a tinge of waning fear.  Under the first layer of feelings lay a hidden second.  Loneliness.  Insecure in his loneliness, Skylar chased people who looked like his mother's murderer.  Maybe I was his last living link to his mother.  Maybe he was my last living link to my father.

Skylar's feelings singed me like slow lightning, rotting my synapses in black flakes, dulling the signals to my brain.  I couldn't think.  I pulled my arm free from his hand and sucked in cool air.  He blinked very quickly.  He didn't look away.

"Your mom's not the only one he killed," I said slowly.

Skylar's jaw slackened, like this hadn't occurred to him before.  I'd figured as much.

"Rosa Gray Rain," I said.  "She lost her mom.  Aubrey and Isaac and Reuben lost an aunt.  Ezekiel lost a sister.  I leave drawings at their graves--"

I was trying to explain myself, I realized.  Skylar watched me patiently, but the more I rambled, the dumber I felt.

"I'm sorry," I finally got around to saying.  I leaned against a pinyon tree for support.  "About what I said.  You didn't do anything wrong, you're--"  Why couldn't I shut up?  "You're kind of--"  What was I doing?  "Alright."

The way Skylar smiled at me, happy, made me self-conscious.  I didn't know why he gave me his time.  Nobody our age gave me the time of day.  It was lonely.  Do you know how goddamn lonely I was?  I was the only seventeen-year-old I knew who still had imaginary friends.  Probably I was meant to be alone.  Nobody knew whether I'd turn out like my dad.  It was best not to risk it.  Better to lock me up prematurely: in the confines of my own mind.

Sarah Two Eagles was a good kid.  One day her father was going to whisper in her ear about mine, and everything would change.

"You wanna be friends?" I blurted out.

Skylar's face stilled.  The lights around him swarmed and spread and swarmed again in a kaleidoscope, perfectly symmetrical, red inside of blue, red and blue melting together in violet fringed in orange.  Orange for spirit.  Violet for mystery.  The colors cooled iridescent, like a soap bubble.  His lights left watery reflections on a nearby pine tree covered in blue moss.  His lights lit up the dark night clouds drifting over our heads.

My mother's name was Susan Gives Light.  I craved the light like dying men crave water.  Skylar's smile went soft and tame; and it struck me, yeah:  We were looking for something in each other that only the other possessed.  However twisted it was, I was a link to Skylar's mother.  I carried the face of the man who had been with her last.  However pathetic it was, Skylar was a link to my father.  He was the last person to see Dad a free man.  He was the only person who didn't hate me preemptively.  He might have been my last shot to fix Dad's legacy of pain.

5

Sycorax's Son

Once a week Uncle Gabriel went to the reservation's hospital to pick up our mail, because Nettlebush didn't have a postal service, or even a regular mail truck.  One morning I sat eating burned toast, fuming, when Uncle Gabe came into the kitchen carrying a wad of envelopes.  He tossed one down on the island in front of me.

I swallowed charred black bread.  "Wazzat?"

"You've got a letter," Uncle Gabriel said.  "From Mary."

I dropped my toast.  I snatched up the envelope and shredded it to pieces, anxious.  I accidentally tore the letter itself.  Cursing, I hunched over the island, squinting at the letter's typeface.

Hey, Raffy
, the round letters began.  They sounded cheerful. 
I'm in Los Portales.  Just bummed a new bass guitar off a drunk guy!  OK, "previously owned," blah blah.  P.S. - Ask Uncle Gay to wire me some money from the tribal fund.

I turned over the torn paper, expecting there to be more.  There wasn't.  I stared incredulously, my ears whistling like tea kettles.

"Raf?" Uncle Gabe said dubiously.

"She wants more drug money," I said.

I hated this.  I hated that my big sister was off playing rock star in dirty fishnets and day-old makeup and wouldn't tell me how she was doing; or ask how we were doing.  I hated that she'd been gone from the reservation about a year now, with no signs of coming back.

"Tell her if she wants more money," Uncle Gabriel said calmly, "she'll have to come home first."

Skylar's lights hovered behind me on standby.  The lights bounced off the wooden cabinets and the pantry, painting everything sunny and bright.  They lent Uncle Gabriel an aura of his own, crisp orange like citrus, like cool tea on summer days.  Orange was a weird color, I thought.  Vivid, but without red's hostility.  Warm and deep and grounded, but almost lurid, alert.

"You worried about something?" I asked, uncertain.

Uncle Gabriel laughed.  "Not in the least, no," he said easily.  "Listen, if you see anything strange around this reservation over the next few weeks--police--"

"What would police be doing here?" I blurted out.  "I thought state police can't do anything on Indian reservations."

Uncle Gabriel rubbed his knuckles idly.  "We're not talking about state police."

The feds.  That didn't make sense, either.  The feds had always ignored us--like when Dad's victims first started showing up in the badlands, in the brush.  Federal law said we were supposed to contact the FBI any time a murder happened on the reservation.  Yeah, well, seven murders, seven phonecalls, and eleven years later and they hadn't done jack.

"They're looking for Paul right now," Uncle Gabriel explained.  "But you're under no obligation to talk to them.  In fact, I'm asking that you don't."

Sky's dad.  "I don't get it," I said lamely.  "Why are they looking for him out here?"  More importantly, were they going to bother Skylar?

Uncle Gabriel wouldn't answer me.  He turned on the Shoshone reticence, by which I mean he segued into a story Rosa Gray Rain had told him after church the other day, which had nothing at all to do with the topic at hand.  If he liked her so much, why didn't he just marry her already?

"Wish we had a Daigwani," I muttered.  "Kick the feds' asses."

Uncle Gabriel glanced quickly at me.  "You know Daigwani's against the law."

"What law?" I asked rashly.  "Their laws aren't our laws.  We never agreed to be their subjects.  Why does everyone act like we lost a war when we never went to war with them?"

Again, Uncle Gabriel wouldn't answer me.

"I'm gonna get my spear," I said, irritated.

I was in a really bad mood that morning; but it doesn't take much to put me in a bad mood, so it's not like it was Uncle Gabe's fault.  We went into the badlands with our hunting party and I kept my eyes on the blue clay ground for hoof marks:  The antelope were going to go scarce once the monsoon hit.  I liked the badlands.  I liked the promontory best.  But it was a tense sort of admiration; because somewhere in the badlands--I didn't know which part--the tribal council had recovered Rebecca Takes Flight and Mercy In Winter's bodies.  This place full of life and spirit and mystery was also the breeding ground of death.  It didn't make much sense to me.  The only way I could reconcile it was by remembering death was not the end.  Death was the beginning, our souls gone back to earth.  Rebecca's ghost rose off the clay in a silver vapor, stocky, with thick eyeglasses.  Mercy's joined her, hair a flyaway cloud, nose small and mouth wide.  They followed me, sharing Sky's light; and for once I felt like they didn't hate my guts.

We didn't find any antelope that morning, but Andrew killed a couple of jackrabbits and Selena said the bighorns' birthing season was over, which meant fresh lamb soon.  We resolved to look for wild sheep the next day.  We came together for another prayer before we went back to the main reserve.  I was sweaty and sandy and I needed a shower, only I hated the new bathroom Uncle Gabriel had installed in our house.  Bathrooms are supposed to be outside.

"Come on, kiddo," Uncle Gabriel said.  "I'll make you lunch."

He went into our house first.  I was about to follow him when I noticed Skylar leaning over the water well to the south.  The well was circular with an eaved roof and an old wood bucket, the mouth made of wet gray stones.  I thought of the wishing well in
Magic Or Not?
, the one with Laura and Lydia and the black and white kittens.

I skulked over to Sky, my hands in my pockets.  He pulled his head out of the well and grinned when he saw me.  He waved.  The lights around him were opalescent, white with splotches of sea foam and sunrise.  I couldn't get over him wearing that long-sleeved jacket.  It was ninety degrees outside.

"You want me to get you water?" I asked him.

He rubbed his cheek sheepishly, baking flour in his hair.  I heaved the heavy, bloated crank beside the taut ropes, the bucket lowering to the shadowy bottom.

"The lake water's clean, too," I grunted.  I pulled the bucket back up by the rope pulley.  "Long as nobody swims in it with their clothes on, anyhow."

Sky's head went back, his eyes thoughtfully on the fleeting clouds.  I still couldn't see his throat.  His nose wrinkled, but his face was kind.  His voice echoed in my head.