Gives Light(Gives Light Series) (22 page)

But then the most recent drawing caught my eye.  I could tell it was the most recent because it was at the top of the pile, and in color.  With the smallest of smiles, I examined it.  My smile gradually fell.

Mom's arms were around me--me, sixteen, not the baby she had last known.  Her curly ponytail tumbled over one shoulder.  It looked as though we had been racing each other, and she had cheated by grappling my waist.  We were both laughing.  Our hair was the same shade of blond.  There weren't any scars on my neck.

My fingers trembled as I sifted them beneath the paper.  Gently, but desperately, I pried the drawing off of the headstone.  The spirit gum stuck to the back was hard and dry.  The drawing underneath was of Mom with a friend, but I couldn't bring myself to look at it for very long.  The drawing in my hands was the one I couldn't take my eyes off of.  Mom with her arms around me.  Mom alive.  Me with a voice.

Hot tears trickled their way down my cheeks.

I drew in a cold breath and held it.  I'm sure that crying at your dead mother's grave is a perfectly commonplace thing for anyone to do; but I hadn't cried since I was eight years old, not even that time when I fell off my bike and the spoke went through my lower leg.  I guess one day, I'd just decided not to cry anymore.  I couldn't believe I was crying now.  It made about as much sense to me as Martians on a moon landing.

And it wasn't even the drawing that had me crying.  At least, not what the drawing depicted.  I'd already accepted that Mom would never put her arms around me.  I didn't like it; but I had accepted it.  No, it wasn't what the drawing depicted.  It was that Rafael had drawn it.  Rafael had sat down, had put his pencils to paper with me in mind, and something real, something heartfelt, had come out of it.

I wasn't sad.  In a bizarre way, I was happy.

I wasn't crying over Mom.  I was crying over Rafael.

I was reminded, for some reason, of a night when I had followed Annie back to her house, and she had sung Joseph a lullaby to help him sleep.  I guess "sung" isn't the right word; she had signed it to him while humming the tune.  Each hand gesture had been so rhythmic, so fluid--music without sound.  It was a song about the fairest, faintest stars at twilight. 
You are dearer
, Annie had signed. 
You are fairer.  You are my heart's friend.
  And Joseph had closed his eyes, sleepy and content, knowing how much he was loved.

I couldn't get that song out of my head.  It followed me around for the rest of the day and rendered me lethargic.  It followed me all the way to nighttime, when I sat up in bed and tried to replicate it with the plains flute.

A rock flew at my window.

Rafael had a new nighttime ritual:  He stood below my window and threw things at it until I stuck my head outside to greet him.  It didn't matter whether I was tired or not; he always had a surplus of energy, and he was under the impression that he lived in a world where this was true of everyone.

I slid the window open and shoved my head outside.

"I'm coming up," Rafael said gruffly.

That's the nice thing about log cabins, I guess.  The walls are easy to scale.

I lit the lamp on the bedside table.  Rafael climbed the side of the log cabin and slithered through the window.  He tumbled over the bed, sat, and pulled his gray jacket tight against the nightly chill.  I leaned around him and shut the window.

"That clock's creepy," Rafael said, his eyes on Dad's cat clock; it hung on the opposite wall, with the California or Bust poster.

Rafael made the same remark every night without fail.  Normally I smiled wryly at him and let him ramble about whatever was on his mind, which never took longer than a couple of hours.

Somehow I couldn't smile wryly tonight.  I could only stare at him, softly, and think about his hands on his pencils, his pencils on paper, the drawing he had left at Mom's grave.  It was sitting on my bedside table now, along with the earlier charcoal drawing and the picture frame.

"What?" Rafael asked, sounding--and looking--nervous.

I smiled slightly and shook my head.  It was ironic that he'd called the cat clock creepy, because he looked like a timid kitten right now, and it was adorable.  I hate using words like adorable, but there was no other word for it.

I kissed him on the nose.

There was something I really liked about Rafael's nose.  I don't know what it was.  The shape definitely factored into it, but...now that I think about it, it's probably just that it happened to be in the center of his face.  I liked his face on the whole.  I liked everything about him.  It was a little scary to realize there was absolutely nothing about him I found unpleasant.  Even his nighttime visits, groggy and irritable as they sometimes left me, weren't ultimately a nuisance.  I loved every minute I got to spend with him.

Rafael peered at me with that curious kitten look, uncertain and inquisitive and a little analytical.  Briefly, he touched his nose.  I don't think he realized he was doing it.

As much as I didn't mind sitting in silence, I knew Rafael better than that.  I waited patiently until the daze left his eyes.

"Oh," Rafael murmured.  He reached into his jacket pocket.  "Uncle Gabe got a bunch of pictures developed," he said.  "Told me I could give you the extras."

He handed me a wad of photographs.  We sat with our heads together in the lamplight and rifled through them.  I grinned at a photo of Aubrey falling off of a raft and into the lake, his brothers reaching after him with shock.  I pointed at a photo of a children's play; I'd spotted Joseph Little Hawk, dressed as a sheep, but didn't recognize the chubby boy in the coyote costume.  "Jack Nabako," Rafael said.  "Kid's annoying as hell."  My favorite of the photographs had been snapped during the summer pauwau.  Gabriel, at one point, had pulled Rafael and me aside and asked if he could take our picture.  Rafael had sulked--he didn't like smiling on camera--but I had tickled his side and his face had lit up with an irresistible grin.  I held that photograph in my hands and thought about how mismatched we looked, him large and dark, me ungainly and fair.  Something about that asymmetry made sense when it shouldn't have.  My arm, in the photograph, was around Rafael's, my cheek against his.  Even in a snapshot, frozen in time, I looked so obviously enamored with him, besotted like a total idiot.  The funny thing is, I hadn't realized it back then. 

I felt Rafael's eyes on me.  I lifted my head and met his gaze.

I realized he had the same look in his eyes that I'd had in that photograph.

I kissed him first.  Or I think I did, but he reacted so immediately, I couldn't be sure whether we hadn't made some kind of unspoken agreement.  His lips, full, molded against mine; and I must have made a sound when his tongue brushed by accident against my bottom lip, because he did it again, this time on purpose, and my head went crazy, stars bursting behind my eyes.  My hand went to the back of his head and he snaked his arm around me and I couldn't bring myself to care about anything else.

Until the beeper on the bedside table lit up.

Rafael jumped back, shocked.  He hissed with pain and touched his lower lip; he had bit it on accident.  His head whipped around; he stared at the bedside table.  The beeper flashed bright red and whistled loudly.  Rafael stared at it like it was a new breed of mule deer and he couldn't find his hunting spear.

"The hell is that?"

I placed the stack of photos on the table, my heart pounding vociferously in my chest. 

The thing about beepers is that they're completely untraceable.  A message sent to a beeper has to bounce off of dozens and dozens of transmitters before it finally reaches its target.  So if you're a cop or a hacker, and you're trying to intercept the message, there's absolutely no way to tell where the message was originally sent from--or where the recipient was when he received it.

I plucked the beeper off of the table, my heart in my throat, and read the message scrolling across the digital screen.

Cubby - Am fine.  Wait for me.  Be there soon.  Dad.

I could hear my pulse in my ears, could feel my skin prickling with the most peculiar combination of relief, excitement, happiness, and anxiety. 

"What?  What is it?"

I handed Rafael the beeper.  He took it between his fingers and squinted at the digital text.  I saw the confusion clear from his face with comprehension.

"Your dad's safe."

I nodded; but I wasn't so sure I'd call him "safe" so much as "alive."  The authorities had made it clear that they wanted him arrested.  That was my fault.

"Wait...he's coming?  Here?"

I knew what Rafael meant.  Coming straight to Nettlebush didn't sound like the smartest move Dad could make--not with the police circling the reservation.  But I couldn't warn Dad about what I'd inadvertently done to endanger him.  He hadn't left a phone number for me to call back.

My stomach turned.

Rafael set the beeper on the bedside table.  He reached for and took my hand, filling me with warmth.  "S'alright," he said.  "Nola Red Clay knows the law inside and out.  I bet she'll think of something."

I smiled at him, but I wasn't so confident.

"No, really," Rafael insisted; I had the feeling he wanted to reassure me regardless of what he actually thought.  "Don't give me that fake smile crap.  You smile too much."

I couldn't not grin at that.  He shoved my shoulder in retaliation.

"Oh," Rafael said.  "Before I forget.  Uncle Gabe said you can come with us tomorrow to get school supplies.  Annie and Aubrey, too.  Clear it with your grandma, okay?"

I grinned again, this time with more sincerity.  But almost immediately, I got to thinking.  Would I really be here for school in September?  If Dad was coming back for me, did that mean he was coming to take me away from Nettlebush?  I had been born on the reserve; but I hadn't grown up here.  Dad had seen to that himself.  Reticent, he'd seldom talked about his family or the life we'd left behind.  It was like he'd wanted to pretend none of that existed.

Rafael met my eyes.  I could see he had picked up on my train of thought; he was following it, and he didn't like where it led.

"Is he going to take you away?"

I hoped not.  Just months ago I had felt like I lived in the world as a spectator and not an active participant.  I'd had no friends and, aside from my father, no family.  I'd had no heritage, no hobbies, no pride.  I hadn't known then how living with Granny would transform me.  Now I couldn't imagine life outside of Nettlebush.  The very prospect was empty and cruel.

I looked away while I tried to figure out how I'd get Dad to stay in Nettlebush.  I didn't want Rafael seeing the uncertainty on my face.

I felt his fingers, ghost-light, in my hair.  I felt my heart in my chest, hot and fast.  I looked at him.  His eyes were blue and smoldering and warm, and the shadows within them were stony and cool; they tossed like tempests against his inner warmth, threatening to spill over.  His fingertips grazed my ear when he played absentmindedly with my curls.  His fingertips trailed across the curve of my cheek and rested just above my jaw.  I knew he was tracing the birthmark there.  My pulse jumped.  I was afraid he could feel it.

When he kissed me, it was slow and dizzying; his lips were warm on mine, his hand warm on my face; and my worries washed away with the storm-tossed tide of his eyes sliding closed, his eyelashes brushing against my cheek.

It was midnight when he climbed out the window and dropped down to the ground.  I watched him, the moonlight spilling down the crown of his head, his shoulders hunched.  He turned around, squinting in the darkness, and looked up at me.  I waved.

Good night
, he signed.

My heart fluttered dangerously.  My elbow on the windowsill, my chin in my hand, I smiled at him.  For a while, it seemed that neither of us would move.  An owl hooted in a distant oak tree; Rafael looked up, like he'd forgotten where he was; I laughed soundlessly.  I waved again and he took off against the night, hands in his pockets.

Long after Rafael was gone, I chanced another look at Dad's beeper, secretly willing it to light up for a second time.  It didn't.  All the same, my stomach ached with excitement and dread.

Dad was coming home.  I'd get to see his face again; I'd get to hug him, like I'd longed to all summer.  I didn't know that he'd be safe once he returned--or that he'd forgive me when he found out what I'd told Officer Hargrove about him--but when you want something, when you really want something, you don't care that it might not be the best thing to want.  I missed him, and nothing could compare to that.

Except for one thing, maybe.  I didn't know how he was going to react to Rafael.  Rafael, whose father had killed my mother; Rafael, whose hair felt like it belonged between my fingers, whose lips felt like they belonged on mine.

Never mind how Dad was going to react to Rafael.  I didn't know how Dad was going to react to me.

22

Daddy Won't Sell the Farm

"Look!  It's on--now it's off.  On--off.  On--off.  On--"

I had to hand it to Aubrey; it didn't take much to get him excited.  We were standing in the parking lot outside the reservation hospital, waiting for Annie, when he decided to show us his clip-on sunglasses.  I guess the attraction was that they fitted right over his regular glasses, so he didn't have to take them off or buy a whole new prescription.  But honestly--although I wouldn't have admitted it even if I'd had the ability--he looked geeky enough with his regular Coke bottle glasses.  The detachable shades were overkill.