Gives Light(Gives Light Series) (25 page)

Ms. Whitler sighed.

"It would be a shame," she said, "if I had to assign you to another foster home.  You were getting on so well in this one!  But that tattoo's got me worried.  If your grandma can't keep you under control at
all
..."

Granny wasn't the one with the control here.  That had me terrified; and at the same time, enraged.  My hands were in tight white fists beneath the table, my jaw taut.  My fingers were shaking.  I briefly smiled at Ms. Whitler.  I was aware it probably looked more like a grimace.

It's funny, but in the back of my head, I could hear Rafael's voice.  "You smile too much," he always told me.

Ms. Whitler drank the last of her water and waved cheerfully at me before she left Nettlebush for the day.

I ran out onto the lawn to find Granny the moment sensation returned to my numb legs.

This was one of those few times when Granny didn't look remotely cross.  In fact, she looked as I had never seen her before: soft and concerned.  "What?" she asked.  "Did that woman say something to you?"

I touched my fingers demonstratively to the atlas moth tattoo.

"What's wrong with that?" asked one of Granny's friends--the man, who wore a wide-brimmed sun hat atop his mop of gray hair.  "I've got an eagle on my thigh.  Want to see?"

I found the green post-it pad in my front pocket and wrote a quick note.  I ripped the note off of the pad and handed it to Granny.

I think she might try to take me away.

The result was instantaneous:  Granny was outraged.

"Over a
tattoo
?" she burst out.  "I can't count the number of boys on this reservation with tattoos on their bodies!"

I wrote another note: 
I think it's against the law for a minor.  I'm sorry.  I didn't know.

"Let me see that," said one of the women, sunflower-shaped earrings hanging from her ears.

Granny, still furious, handed her friend the note.  The woman read it; then she rolled her eyes and handed it back to me.

"State laws don't apply to reservations," she said.  "The authorities knew that when they decided to let you live here.  Unless it's one of the Seven Major Crimes, that woman has no case against you."

I wasn't entirely assuaged, but still, I was starting to relax.  I didn't know what the Seven Major Crimes were, so I tilted my head.

Ms. Sunflower looked flattered--I don't know why--and a little haughty.  She fanned herself with her hand.  "The FBI has authority if one of seven crimes happened on the reservation.  Those are murder, attempted murder, rape, manslaughter, burglary, larceny, and arson.  You'll notice I didn't mention body modification."

"Very good, Hilde," said Mr. Sun Hat.

"If that's true," said Granny, "then why do I have to let that nasty woman into my house?  Why can't I kick her to the curb?"

"You'd have to ask Nola," said Ms. Sunflower.

I felt like I was standing on the verge of two worlds, belonging solely to neither while both grappled for control of me.

But I knew which world I wanted to belong to.  I wanted to stay in Nettlebush.

I spent the rest of the morning as a mixture of sullen and distressed.  I arrived late to help Annie cook okra and chokecherry pudding.  Grandpa Little Hawk didn't help matters by cornering me in the sitting room and throwing confusing football terms at me.  I think he was trying to man me up.

"They're not going to remove you over a tattoo, Skylar," Annie assured me.  "Not when they can't be bothered to remove children from much more harmful homes.  She's probably trying to scare you into talking about your father.  Besides, you could always swear you got the tattoo before you came to Nettlebush."

I loved that about Annie:  She was a million times smarter than me.

When I went to the church cupola that afternoon, I found Rafael standing with his hand against one of the slats, squinting at the distant tops of evergreen trees and the startling blue sky.

"Uncle Gabe thinks I need glasses," he murmured.  "My eyes are getting blurry.  But it's only because I keep reading at night when the lights are out.  I have to sneak the flashlight into my room.  I don't care.  It's worth it."

He took one look at me and changed his tune.

"What happened?"

I shook my head with a dismissive smile.  I pretended I was looking at the skyline.

Rafael went on gazing at me until I was forced to pay him attention.  He took a step closer when I'd finally met his eyes.

"Why are you lying?  I can tell when you're lying.  Your smile gets tight."

I shook my head a second time.  I felt my curls slap me on the cheek.  Time for another haircut, I thought.

Rafael slid his fingers beneath my curls.  He twined my curls around his fingers and smoothed them between his joints and his thumb.  His clipped fingernails tickled my cheek.

"I like your hair like this."

Oh, I thought tremulously, I guess I can skip a haircut.

The space closed between us.  My vision filled with blue; my eyes closed.

His lips brushed over mine.

I don't know how long of a time we spent that way.  Time, at some point, became inconsequential.  Time wasn't Rafael; time didn't matter.  Only Rafael mattered.  Only Rafael possessed my thoughts, my every pounding pulse, euphoric and bittersweet, illogical and wonderful.  For that moment, devoid of time, even I didn't exist, except for the part of me that was touching Rafael, kissing Rafael, the part of me that couldn't tell where Rafael ended and I began.

I was shaking when our lips parted and he leaned his forehead against mine, his fingers carding through my hair, my hands on his face.

"I won't let them," Rafael said.  "I won't let anyone take you away.  I won't let anyone hurt you.  I'll protect you.  I'll always protect you.  I don't care how.  I just will."

There was a dam inside of me, and it was breaking--and I didn't know whether that was a good thing, or bad.  Rafael stilled my tremors with his hands on my shoulders, his hands on my arms, and kisses on my face; on my cheek and brow; on my lips.  I braced my hands against his shoulders and pushed him back against the wall slat.  I pressed up against him and kissed him like he was my lifeline, like he was air and I couldn't breathe.  I kissed him hard enough that I really couldn't breathe, in the end, and my lips ached when we broke away, and we were both panting, him burying his face against the crook of my neck, his breath burning hot against my skin.  I felt his heartbeat, jumping and hard, underneath my hand, my fingers splayed against his chest.  He felt so alive.  I felt so alive.  He entwined our fingers and held my hand hard enough to hurt; but it was a wonderful pain, a soothing pain, the kind of pain that reminds you how human you are, how desperately your heart wants, how good it feels to finally have.

His hand, on mine, loosened.  I think he realized he was holding too tight.  I didn't mind.  He could have held tighter, for all I cared.

Brown speckled wrens warbled to one another from the oak trees, calling for their mates.  Rafael's head rested on my shoulder.  I combed my fingers through his hair, my arms around him, stretched across his broad back.

He pulled me with him when he sat down, pulled me back against his chest and told me we'd go to the autumn pauwau together, on the Hopi reservation, and we'd dance together, because he didn't like dancing, but there was no way he'd let some Hopi girl dance with me, not when I was his.  I was his, I thought, my heart hammering wildly.  His braids fell over my shoulder, and I played with them, unbraiding them and braiding them again, while he told me about the time he'd gotten lost on the Paiute reservation in Nevada when he was six; how his mom and uncle had had to call the reservation police for help; how they'd banned him from sweets for a month and his big sister, Mary, had eaten all the candy in front of him just to rub it in.  I taught him the signs for "mother" and "uncle" and "dance" and he even figured out how to spell "sister" on his own, after a couple of tries.  I told him about the time I'd tried to blow up a school drinking fountain in fifth grade, mostly by miming water and explosions while he filled in the gaps and laughed.  His laugh was a quiet and understated laugh, something you felt more than heard; I felt it against my shoulder and cheek; I felt it rippling through his chest and across my back.

He swallowed me up in his arms as the midday sky flared into a fiery sunset, then dimmed to a bruise-blue dusk.  I traced the tattoo on his arm idly with my fingers and he told me he wanted to put a gray wolf on his back, except he couldn't reach that far.  We were missing dinner--I could hear the distant sounds of laughter and drums--but I don't think either of us cared.  "Play Greensleeves," Rafael commanded, toying with the flute around my neck.  I did.  And at the end of the song, Rafael had an epiphany:  "I hate Greensleeves."  I hit him lightly with the flute.

It was nighttime, the nightly bonfire long since extinguished, the scent of cinders and wet ash high in the air, when we finally left the cupola.  Rafael walked me home, his hand around mine, his palm rough, his arm pressing into mine.  It was a companionable silence that enshrouded us, a comfort like no other I had ever known.  Our fingers were threaded together.  I lamented that eventually, we'd have to let go.  But we reached the shadowed porch of Granny's house, and neither of us released the other's hand.  "Night," Rafael said.  He stood brushing my curls with his knuckles.  He had this look on his face that I couldn't read, but it was almost childlike.  I grinned at it, endeared, and before he could protest out of embarrassment, his hand sliding from my head to my hip of its own accord, I hooked my free hand around his shirt and reeled him in for a kiss, the grin still on my lips.  He let go of my hand at last; I felt his sharp teeth under my tongue and the palm of his hand cradling the nape of my neck, his fingers sinking into my hair.

The moon was heavy with stars when he left me--unwillingly it seemed, glancing periodically over his shoulder until neither of us could see the other anymore.  The time on my wristwatch read as 10:23.  Only slightly worried about what Granny might say, I carried her loom off of the lawn and inside the house and found the hearth already lit.

Granny was sitting in her rocking chair, an old book open on her lap.  At first sight of me, she closed the book and stood, ready for bed.  I moved forward to hug her.  She stopped me in my tracks with one all-knowing glance of her water-gray eyes.

"You could do worse," she said, "but
don't
kiss him on my front porch, for heavens' sakes.  It's unseemly."

She hobbled off to her room and left me standing between the loom and the fireplace, mortified, blushing red to my blond roots.

25

Cubby

Annie and Aubrey spent the latter half of August drawing up proposals for a Shoshone radio fund, and one night, at dinnertime, I saw the pair of them handing out petitions to the men and women gathered around the bonfire.  I managed to secure one of the flyers and sat at the picnic table, reading it with Lila Little Hawk.  Lila sighed in my ear.  "This is a stupid idea," she said, "and I'll only support it if they let me sing."  I gave Lila a thumbs up while secretly thinking that her proposal might not be such a good one.  I had heard her singing months ago at the summer pauwau, a screeching litany that scared even the owls away.  It was the equivalent of murder by music.

That same night, I brought the flyer back to my room and taped it to my closet door, along with the stack of photographs Rafael had given me.  Except for the California or Bust poster, the space around me was almost unrecognizable from the small, austere bedroom I had first moved into in June.  I guess I had made it my own, gradually, without realizing it.  I knew I liked the unpainted wood walls a lot more than the blue-gray stucco of my old bedroom back in Angel Falls.

I was about ready to turn off the lamp and go to bed when the beeper on the nighttable lit up.

My heart rising in my throat, I snatched the beeper off of the table and sat down.  If Dad was paging me again, did that mean something had gone wrong, delaying his return trip?  I fully expected another brief message; what I got, instead, was more puzzling.

A phone number scrolled across the digital screen.

Dad wanted me to call him.

It's true that he had run off to Wyoming without a word to me, but I didn't even consider ignoring him--which, I guess, says a lot about the bond between a father and his son.  All the same, Granny's house didn't have a telephone.

I stuffed the beeper in my pocket, leapt off the bed, pulled my shoes on, and raced down the stairs.  I darted out the front door.

The moment the cold air hit me, I realized how stupid I had been not to grab a jacket, or at least a warmer shirt.  The thermometer outside the front room window told me it was 40 degrees outside--a few degrees away from the freezing point.  It had been 104 degrees only hours earlier.  It's scary how drastically the temperature drops from day to night when you live close to the desert.

And then I thought:  Where the heck am I going, anyway?  Because I didn't know anybody in Nettlebush with a telephone.  Granny didn't have one, Annie didn't have one--even Gabriel's house, with its refrigerator and its ceiling fans, didn't have one, as far as I had seen.  Did I have to travel all the way to the city just to find a pay phone?  Did the bus even make trips to the city at this hour?