Gives Light(Gives Light Series) (2 page)

The yellow warmth that blinked and flickered in the cabin windows made me think of a sea of fireflies.  I couldn't at all reconcile the sight of it with my nerves, stretched taut, and the fierce pounding in my chest that told me
Turn back, now.

I stumbled when Officer Hargrove took me by the elbow and pulled me up to one of the doors.

Standing in the open doorway of the little wooden home was the tiniest woman I had ever seen.  To say that her face was wrinkled would have been an understatement; it was more like every inch of her skin was creased and folded with age to the extent that I couldn't tell what the woman underneath was supposed to look like.  Her hair was a shock of pure white, snow white, and fell down her back in a long and rigid braid.  But her eyes--I could see her eyes amid the heavy folds of her eyelids, and they were the same shade of wet gray that belonged to my father's face.

It felt like a brick had hit me in the chest.  Where was he?  Where was Dad?  What the heck could have happened to him that even the police didn't know where he had gone?

Catherine Looks Over drew herself up sternly, her back very straight, her hands tucked together beneath her belly.  Suddenly I knew that no matter how old or how feeble she looked, she was a woman I wouldn't want to cross.

"You are Skylar?" she asked sharply.

I nodded.  I can't say at all whether I remembered to smile, but I hope I did.

"Alright?" Officer Hargrove asked.  "Everything in order?  I should be going.  Listen, Skylar..."

Catherine moved away from the doorway.  Officer Hargrove had both of her hands on my shoulders.  I got the feeling she was looking at me like I was six again.

"Skylar," she said.  Softness returned to her harrowed face.  "I don't know whether you'll...have an easy time here, exactly--"

I hadn't.  I wanted to tell her that.  I had lived on this reservation with Mom and Dad when I was little, too little to remember much, and it had ended badly.  I wanted to tell her that, but I couldn't.  That I hadn't uttered a single word in eleven years was proof that I didn't belong here. 

I wanted to hit myself.  I sounded so petulant inside my head that I was glad, momentarily, not to have a voice.

"Your grandmother doesn't have a phone, but if you need anything, anything at all--well, the hospital has phones, that's how I got a hold of her, as a matter of fact--"

I smiled quickly, waving my hands.  I didn't want her to think she had to do anything more for me.  She had already done so much for me.

"And we'll do what we can to find your father.  We will."

I wanted to hug her.  Most boys my age wouldn't, I guess.  I settled for grasping her hands.  It wasn't that I cared what most boys my age would have done.  It was more like I was worried she might whip out the nightstick if I made too drastic of a sudden move.  But I had no reason for fear after all, because Officer Hargrove's eyes were soft and moist in the glow from my grandmother's doorway.  She was definitely looking at me like a six-year-old.  Maybe, I thought, that was okay.

She cleared her throat, gave me a hard thump on the shoulder, and took off in the night.  I stood in the doorway and watched her until I couldn't differentiate between her receding form and the shadows cast by the pine trees.

A leaden weight had settled in my stomach.  I couldn't postpone it any longer.  I turned my back on the reservation and stepped into my grandmother's house for the first time, snapping the door shut behind me.

There were handmade quilts on the walls--brightest blues and blood reds and soft, pearl grays--but apart from those, the little wooden home was austere.  Officer Hargrove had been right about the lack of telephone.  Now I saw that there wasn't a television, either.  Not even a sofa; just a couple of rocking chairs.  There was a loom next to the hearth, the hearth unlit; the room was chilly. 

"Well?" said Catherine.  She was standing with her back to the arching kitchen door.

I smiled uncertainly and lowered my garbage bag to the floor.  It occurred to me that she might not know I couldn't talk.  I started to part the collar of my jacket by way of explaining.

"Not that!" she interrupted.  "Fool boy!  Do you think I'm stupid?  I'm asking whether you've eaten anything this evening.  I doubt it; you're as wispy as a cricket."

I hadn't eaten; the brief trip home and the long car ride that followed had taken a chunk out of my night.  I wasn't hungry, though--I didn't think I could swallow anything just then, my throat dry, lead sitting in my stomach--so I lied with a nod.  Catherine gave me a suspicious look out of the corner of her eye and said, "Hmph," but didn't contest it.  She flicked her hand at me dismissively.

"You may take your father's old room," she said.  "It's upstairs and on the right.  You will be in bed no later than eleven every night and you will awaken no later than eight in the morning.  I don't know sign language, so you'll have to find someone else to talk to.  Should my name come up in conversation, you will refer to me as 'Grandmother.'  I don't like Granny.  It sounds silly."

I smiled wryly.  I had already pieced together that she wasn't much for silliness.

I found my father's old bedroom at the top of the stairs.  It was exactly as he must have left it when he was a kid, the stiff, checkered blue quilt on the mattress, the yellow "California or Bust" poster on the wall opposite the window.  The window, dusty, hadn't been washed in a long time.  I told myself that I would try to clean up in the morning, but I knew I'd probably forget it; Dad and I were perpetual slobs, and we'd never had a woman around to tell us to pick up our trash.

When I set my belongings on the floor, when I sat on my father's old bed, the mattress sagging beneath my weight, I felt like gravity was pulling me down, down toward the earth beneath the musty foundation of the house.  How horrible uncertainty was.  How cruel.

If I'd never get to see my father again, I didn't want to know.

2

Chronic Loser Syndrome

I woke before the alarm clock sounded the next morning.  Through the dusty bedroom window, I watched the first rays of sunlight climb above the tops of the pine trees, bleeding into the ink-blue sky.  It really was a beautiful sight.  For a moment I wondered how Dad could ever have left the reservation.

I touched the rigid scars on my neck and remembered how.

I dressed quickly and went frantically down the stairs. 

"Outhouse!" Catherine--Grandmother--shouted from the little kitchen, the acrid scent of cinders wafting from the wood-coal stove.

I found the outhouse behind the cabin and washed my hands at the water pump when I had finished.  I caught sight of a round wooden tub beside the pump.  So Granny--I mean, Grandmother--so she took her baths right out in the open.  Was that normal around here?  Around the reservation?  I tried to remember, but couldn't.  I was still puzzling it over when an old man a few doors down shouted, baffled, "Am I going colorblind, or is that a white boy?"

I hurried back inside the cabin.

Granny--Grandmother--was cooking eggs in the kitchen.  I think I might have stared.  I'd never seen anyone cook eggs before.  Back home, Dad and I tended to use the oven strictly as a closet.  And the only time I'd eaten eggs was when he took me to the local diner on Sundays, this really greasy dive with chrome tabletops and plastic booths that stuck to your thighs.  I liked that dive.  We ordered powdered eggs and burned coffee and sat complaining about baseball and church.  Those Sundays comprised some of my favorite memories.

"Why on earth are you wearing your jacket?" Granny asked.

I'd forgotten that I was wearing it.  Putting on my jacket and zipping it up to the neck was second nature, and unless it was just Dad and me, I never took it off.  Not even in school.  I'd started doing that when I was six, when I realized that I'd rather have people thinking I was cold all the time instead of gawking at my ugly neck.  The teachers in a public school don't really care about what you're wearing.  You can pierce your septum and tattoo your forehead and all they care is that you show up to class.

I smiled apologetically and took the jacket off.

We ate together at the scrubbed pine table, Granny occasionally telling me to sit up straight or tuck my elbows in.  Afterwards she asked me to carry her loom outside the house.  I put my jacket on when her back was turned and went out to the sitting room to pick up the loom.  It was a lot heavier than it looked; by the time I finally got it out of the house and set it up on the grass, Granny was right behind me, complaining that I had taken too long.

"What?" she said, when she noticed me looking at her uncertainly.

I pointed at myself.

"You're asking me what you should do?  Well, how am I supposed to know?  Do I look like a teenage boy?"

What I really wanted to know was whether I could help her or not, but I got the feeling she would have taken offense to the offer.  I was thinking, too, that this woman was my grandmother, and my grandmother was a total mystery.  Had she ever tried to contact Dad and me at all, or had Dad made sure she couldn't?  Why had he never talked about her over the years, and why didn't she talk about him now?  What had happened to estrange them?  Was it my mother?  Was it me?  What had Granny been like as a child?

"Skylar St. Clair?" said a sudden voice.

I looked up from the porch.  There was a girl standing in front of me in a plain white sundress.  She was my age, maybe--or maybe a little younger--with a soft, ashen brown complexion, burnished brown hair pulled up in an elegant loop at the nape of her neck.  Granny had called me "wispy as a cricket" before, but if she had had this girl in mind, she might not have.  This girl was so delicate looking, like a brief breath of wind on a summer day, that I felt like a Titan in comparison.

She knew my name.  I wondered what else she knew.

She smiled brightly.  "I'm Annie Little Hawk," she said.  "It's so rare that anyone new comes to the reservation.  I heard from a trustworthy source you might be needing a tour?"

I looked at Granny to see whether she'd object.  She waved at me dismissively, her attention on her loom. 

I followed Annie away from the cabin.

Annie Little Hawk was a pleasant girl.  It turned out she knew sign language--she said that Natives had invented it, though I wasn't sure how true that was--and that bolstered my mood.  Apart from ASL teachers in school, I'd never had the opportunity to talk to anyone before.  Annie pointed out different houses and told me the histories of the families living in them.  The Nettlebush Reserve, I gathered, was a small, tight, self-sufficient community; everybody knew each other, and I didn't know anybody.  At no time was that distinction more pronounced than when gaggles of kids or whole families stopped what they were doing--churning butter, whittling hunting knives, hanging clothes out to dry--and stared at the pair of us.  The sun was beating heavy patterns on the crown of my head, the only blond head on the reserve.  I imagined how weird it had to look amid a sea of burning brown and raven black.

Annie led me down a country lane to pick up eggs and a pail of milk from a farm.  No money passed between hands--my first hint that there wasn't a real economy here--but I noticed that the boy at the weather-worn gates, a weedy beansprout of a guy wearing glasses as thick as the bottoms of Coke bottles, gawked at Annie like she was a miracle.  She said "Hello" and "Goodbye" politely, oblivious to the effect she had on him.  I helped her carry the load back down the lane to her house, a thick cabin with a raised porch.

"We do a lot of cooking," she said, elbowing her way inside the house.  I followed her.  "For the night, of course.  Do you know how to cook?"

I shook my head sheepishly.

Lying on the sitting room floor was a pigtailed little girl, her belly to the wood, her legs kicking over her head.  She rolled onto her back and batted her eyelashes at us in a cute but bratty way.  I knew at once that she must have been Annie's little sister, eleven, maybe twelve years old; the only way they could have looked more alike was if they'd been born twins.

"Chronic loser syndrome," Annie's sister sighed.  I liked her immediately.

"Lila," Annie scolded.  We put the produce on a table opposite the hearth.  A complicated-looking tapestry was hanging above the mantelpiece; when I looked at it, I couldn't make up my mind whether it was a depiction of the flaring sun amid an endless sea or dawn encroaching on the end of nightfall.  "You can help us cook, Skylar.  I'll guide you through it.  Everyone on the reserve helps out, in his or her way."

"I'm too hot to cook," Lila said.  I didn't know whether she meant that figuratively or literally, but she was fanning herself.

"Honestly!" Annie said.

Annie and Lila and I spent the whole morning and part of the afternoon baking cornbread.  I didn't know what Annie needed so much cornbread for, and when I asked, Annie would reply, "For the night, of course!"  It sounded like something I was supposed to know already, and I didn't want to embarrass myself by admitting I didn't.  By the time we had finished, Annie and I were filthy--not Lila, suspiciously--and Annie giggled and flicked my curls with her fingers, showering the floor with flour.  We hastily cleaned up around the kitchen and went outside the house to wash at the water pump.  I dunked my head under the pipe and shook my hair at Annie; she squealed with laughter and gave me an indignant shove.