Looks Over(Gives Light Series) (6 page)

It's funny.  I used to think his smile was rare.  When did his smile stop being rare?

"You're nuts," he said.  "Don't know why you hang out with me."

Because I was hopeless, I thought.  Because I was helpless when it came to him.  Because anything he said or did had the ability to make me smile, because I felt his pain for my own and wanted to wash it away.  Because I had a voice when I was with him.

The smile slipped away from Rafael's face.  I couldn't be sure--I wasn't the one with the crazy mind-reading powers--but I thought he could read each of my thoughts like written words on a sheet of paper; I thought he felt exactly what I was feeling.  He always knew what I was thinking.  His eyes dropped from my eyes to my lips.  My heart forgot its own rhythm; it pounded erratically in my chest.  In that singular, uncommon moment, I knew what he was thinking, too.

He set aside his notebook, his pencil tucked behind his ear.  He put his hands in the grass and leaned closer.  I rested my hand atop his and linked our fingers together.

It was soft when he kissed me, like homecoming, like summer linens on a taut clothesline, tossing in a summer wind.  Our lips slid together, his lips warm, his breath warm, heat crackling its way across my skin.  His glasses bumped against my cheek and we paused, for a moment, his expression sheepish, a laugh dancing at the corners of my mouth; but then he angled his head--just so--and it didn't happen again.  I held the nape of his neck in the palm of my hand and felt his earring tickle my bare arm.

We held hands when we walked back to the reservation proper.  Balto followed us as far as the forest's outer boundary before he yipped indignantly and ran back into the woods.  I guess he only felt safe around the trees.

The bonfire flared brightly in the tribal firepit that night.  Old men sat singing around a double-skin drum.  Men and women handed out hotbread and sagebread.  I sat down to dinner with Dad and Granny beneath the stars.  Dad quickly hid his beer bottle; he didn't like to drink in front of me.

Soon after that, Ms. Siomme came over to talk to us.

Ms. Siomme was a pretty lady.  I guess you could say her face was full of personality.  She had a long nose and a strong chin, dark brown hair and dark green eyes.  No matter what was going on around her, she exuded a calm energy.  Seriously--you could accidentally set her hair on fire and she'd probably just put it out and make sure you weren't scared.  Not that I'd ever tried it.

"Hello, Catherine," she said, smiling.  "Hey, Sky.  Paul said you've been talking about adoption."

My stomach turned.  I smiled anyway.  Don't be dumb, I told myself.  You're still Dad's kid.

"Tell me I've seen the last of that fool social worker, at least," Granny said.  "I don't understand why she keeps barging into my home."

"Actually, that's part of the reason why I think we should get the adoption out of the way as soon as possible," Ms. Siomme said.  "As long as you're Skylar's foster mother, he's what they call a ward of the state.  It's sort of like dual citizenship.  He may be living on an Indian reservation, but in the state's eyes, he still belongs to Arizona.  If they want to, they can take him away."

I looked quickly at Ms. Siomme. 
They wouldn't do that
, I signed. 
Would they?

She looked at me with sympathy.  She was one of the few adults around the reserve who knew sign language.  "I can't say for certain," she admitted.  "Law enforcement's pretty mad at us after that stunt we pulled in August.  I don't know whether they'd take you away in retaliation, but I wouldn't put it past them."

"Living on a reservation is a bit of a risk to begin with," Dad said.  "White families in America are constantly clamoring for children to adopt.  When there aren't any, social services will sometimes take Native children from their homes and put them into foster care.  The families who report the kidnappings often go ignored."

I looked at him.  No way was that true.

"It's true," he said mildly.  "It happens the most to Lakota children, I expect because there are so many of them."

"Of course," Ms. Siomme put in, "we're not concerned about that happening to you, Skylar.  Nola's too aggressive of a prosecutor to look the other way when intruders break reservation laws.  Besides, white families are almost always looking for cute little babies to adopt, not teenage boys."

"I think he's plenty cute," Lila Little Hawk said.  She marched over to our spot on the ground and sat heavily at my side.

Right back atcha, sister
, I signed.

She batted her eyelashes at me.

Ms. Siomme smiled at Lila.  "Well, we definitely agree on that," she said.  "Hey, can you show me what your jingle dance looks like?"

"You're not the boss of me," Lila said, but got up and danced over to the double-skin drum.

Ms. Siomme clapped appreciatively.  When Lila's back was turned, she gave Granny a serious look.

"I've got the adoption papers ready for you.  Nola's agreed to act as your attorney.  But you're going to need to get that social worker to sign them."

I looked disbelievingly at Ms. Siomme.  Ms. Whitler was the social worker who had called me a "little liar" only a month ago.  To be fair, I
had
been lying--about Dad's whereabouts--but I'd walked away from the experience with the distinct impression that she didn't like me, or the Shoshone community on the whole.  I wasn't at all certain she would sign off on letting me live with Granny permanently.

"Meredith," Dad said.  I think he had picked up on my misgivings.  "Isn't there any way to...work around her?"

"You mean get a new social worker?  Sure, Nola can petition the courts for that.  It will take even longer to get a brand new case worker, though, especially a case worker who knows sign language, so we have to try and work with the one we've got right now."

I smiled without any confidence.  That was sort of like dropping a crab down your pants and asking it not to pinch you.

3

Lilith

It was chilly come Saturday morning.  Granny made me put on a handmade sweater before she let me leave for Annie's house.  I walked through the reservation, the weak sun still low in the sky, and saw the bergenias in bloom, their heart-shaped leaves a burnt and coppery red.  I knew what that meant:  It was officially the start of autumn.

I found Annie on her front porch, pulling laundry off of a clothesline.  I climbed the short staircase and she smiled brightly. 

"I've just been to the council building," she said.  I wondered at that.  It was only seven in the morning.  "It looks like we're getting that radio station after all."

I grinned.  Aubrey had come up with the idea for a Plains music station a while back.  At the very least, I thought, it would probably help bring revenue to the reservation.  Nettlebush had its own economy, a gift economy, but in the rare event that we needed something from outside of the reservation, we relied on the tribal fund.

I helped Annie gather the last of the dry clothing and we went indoors to fold it.

"Isn't it exciting?" she went on.  "You could play a couple of pieces on the plains flute.  You're quite good, you know."

Playfully, I stuck out my tongue.  Granny had signed me up to play songs for the ghost dance over the summer, and I'd just about dropped dead from nerves.  I wasn't too eager to replicate the experience.

Critically, Annie peered at my laundry pile.  She pursed her lips.

"You may be a good flautist, but you can't fold for crap," she said evenly.

I tossed a sock on top of her head.

By afternoon, predictably, the autumn chill had dulled with the heat rolling in from the desert out west.  I took off my sweater.  Annie had baked bass for dinner.  I hadn't been much of a help; I always get squeamish around dead animals.

We sat behind the house and watched Joseph playing on the rope swing.  Annie pulled her knees to her chest.

"Mom was a good singer," she said distantly.

I wrapped my arm around her and pulled her against my shoulder.

"It's so hard to remember, sometimes," Annie said.  "That she's gone.  How do you stand it, Skylar?  Your mother being gone?"

I didn't really know her
, I signed.  My mom had died when I was five.  My memories of her were murky and incomplete. 
It's different.  It's harder for you.

"Oh, I don't know...  Let's clip some bergenias.  I'd like a bouquet."

Every day after school we went out east and watched the men and women building the radio tower and its accompanying studio on the other side of the lake.  I knew Dad was among them; he was good at building things, and he wasn't the sort to sit by and let others do all the work.  It was fun when the four of us sat on the lakeshore, our schoolbooks on our laps, and watched the bare wood and latticed steel skeletons fill out slowly and climb into the sky.  More often than not, Aubrey was so distracted by the sight of it that Annie had to hit him with her notebook and remind him we were supposed to be doing homework.

Come October, the oak trees bore new and grandiose foliage in shades of scarlet, persimmon, and gold.  The midday air cooled to a tolerable seventy degrees.  And the autumn crops the farmers had tended to so diligently over the summer finally emerged from the ground.

Suddenly the reservation was teeming with life.  The farmers set up tables and stalls out on the country lane and loaded them up with kale and carrots and radishes and leeks.  Families went out to the farmland with baskets for picking scallions and potatoes and blankets to sit on and spent the whole day chatting with their friends.  Women plucked the fat, round apples off of the trees and lit pieces of charcoal to lull the bees into sleeping and husk the honeycombs from their hives.  Aubrey threw open his family's farm gates and rolled enormous pumpkins out of the patch and onto the road and his two older brothers, Reuben and Isaac, brought out the fresh cheese and the fresh cream from the milkshed and started making cake.  The old women shook their turtleshell rattles and the old men sang to the Great Mystery of the universe, the heart and soul of the living planet, and the children danced a harvest dance in looping, dizzying circles.  I laughed to see Joseph Little Hawk, eager and dazed, spinning in the wrong direction.

Granny and Dad walked among the pumpkin crop--Granny, hard to please, couldn't decide which one she wanted--and Aubrey puffed and wheezed, catching his breath, leaning against the gate.  Aubrey's three-year-old niece, Serafine, stood clasping his hand, her thumb in her mouth. 

"They were a lot lighter going into the ground than they were coming out of it," Aubrey noted dolefully.

I laughed again and clapped him on the shoulder.

On the other side of the gate stood Mr. and Mrs. Takes Flight.  From her Coke bottle glasses to her humble, boisterous face, Mrs. Takes Flight couldn't have looked more like Aubrey if she were thirty years younger and male.  Mr. Takes Flight, wan and waxy-faced, leaned heavily on his wife's shoulder, his smile feeble.

Concerned, I nudged Aubrey.  I nodded toward his dad.

"Ah..."  Aubrey trailed off, discomfited.  "At least he's getting his pacemaker soon.  That should help..."

"Hello," Annie said pleasantly, tugging Lila along by her hand.  To her credit, Lila resisted.  "What are we talking about?"

"Annie!"  Annie's effect on Aubrey was instantaneous; he lit up like a Christmas tree.  "I put some apples aside for you--here--and a cake--well, it's not as good as yours--"

Annie was starting to blush.  I took it as a sign to give them some privacy.  I stole Lila's hand--not that Annie noticed--and we walked away from the gates to watch the harvest dancers down the lane.

We sat on the grass beneath an apple tree and Lila sighed.

"I wish I were pretty."

I looked at her in surprise.  I'd never heard her say anything like that before.

I tapped her arm to get her attention. 
You're the prettiest girl on the entire reservation
, I signed.

"Not like Mary Gives Light.  She's the coolest."

I watched Mary prance around the harvest dancers in flamboyant circles.  When she laughed, it was radiant and dark.  I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but it's true.  The rest of her body didn't match her Lilith-like countenance; she was so skinny, it was almost grotesque.  Frail and brittle, with what I thought was self-neglect, her clavicle and scapulas and every bump in her spine showed through her paper-thin skin.  Still, if you looked solely at her devilish grin, you couldn't see the ruin.  I guess that was why Lila thought she was pretty.  She chased Rafael, took his hands, and tried to get him to dance with her.  Clumsy, startled, and protesting furiously, he stumbled after her.

I tapped Lila a second time. 
I think you're the coolest.

Lila gave me a wobbly smile that reminded me, for one winding moment, of my dad.  "That's why I keep you around," she said.

Annie came to my house that evening and baked a pumpkin pie with Granny.  Dad sat at the kitchen table and carved an oddly cunning face into the pumpkin's empty shell.  Dad and jack-o-lanterns go way back.  I asked Annie to show me how to make samosas and Granny brewed a strong draught of spicewood tea, and by nightfall, the four of us carried our covered pots and dishes outside for dinner.