Gives Light(Gives Light Series) (29 page)

If Dad was bothered, though, it didn't show on his face.  Nothing ever broke through that lackluster veneer of somberness.  He was like a sad hawk without anywhere to fly, defeatedly resigned to the ground.

He looked at me suddenly.  "You survived," he said softly.  "By some miracle.  My miracle.  Terribly anemic; and your voice...  But alive.  I doubt you'll recall, but you helped to identify him from your hospital bed."

I saw melancholy and pride on Dad's face and ducked my head, embarrassed over something I couldn't even remember.

"I forget what I was...  Oh, right.  Eli."  Dad took another drink.  "At the first sight of trouble, the tribal council followed protocol and alerted the FBI.  By the FBI's imposition, if a murder happens on the reservation, we're not technically allowed to do anything about it.  The FBI is supposed to come and clean up.

"The problem is, they weren't too eager to come around when we called them.  When Rebecca first turned up in the badlands, and we appealed to the FBI for help, they procrastinated.  Had to follow a very specific chain of commands, they told us, but they'd be sure and see what they could do, if anything.  It took until Charity's death for them to send anyone here, and at that it was a cursory sweep, and they said they'd follow up at a later date.  They never did."

I'd finally sat down at the table with Dad and Granny.  Even as I listened, I found myself questioning parts of Dad's story.  Dad saw, and he smiled, but it was an unfinished smile, like most of his smiles were.  "It's true," he said simply.  "Native American reservations are at the very bottom of the government's priorities.  Thousands and thousands of murders go uninvestigated all the time on reservations simply because the FBI can't be bothered getting around to it.  White men don't want to control us so much as they want to pretend we don't exist."

Oh, I thought weakly.

"In any case, Eli saw this as his big break, and he ran for it.  He left Nettlebush the moment he caught wind that you'd survived."

I jolted in my seat.  So he was still out there somewhere?  Maybe hurting more women?

"Well, no," Dad said, and drank the last of his tea, "because I just finished killing him."

I stared.

Granny got up and stood by the window, gazing out through the glass.  I finally realized:  She wasn't looking for owls or coywolves.  She was looking for police.

"Don't sit there looking concussed, Skylar," Granny ordered sharply.  "Your father's done well for a change.  It's the order of things."

I thought briefly back to Rafael's story about the Pony Express War.  I wanted to protest.  Because it sounded textbook when she put it that way, but what about Dad?  What kind of guarantee could she make that Dad wasn't in trouble now?  Not a very good one.  Dad already had the cops circling his every route like vultures.  He already had unwanted attention on him--my fault, I thought sinkingly--and worse still, he hadn't committed a murder on an Indian reservation, where nobody would punish him for it, but out in the open, in the white world, where it couldn't go ignored.

Dad had taken another man's life.

Rafael.  Rafael's father had killed my mother, and now my father had killed his.

I thought:  This is beyond messed up.
My legs felt numb.  I was glad to be sitting. 

Granny tutted at me and moved over to the wood-coal stove to brew some passionflower tea.  She could tell, as I could, that I wasn't going to sleep easy tonight.

"Eleven long years it took to find him..."  Dad rubbed his face with his hands.

He had been looking for Rafael's father all this time and he had never told me.  I felt a short-lived stab of anger.  Would he have ever told me?  I thought back to all those nights he had spent at bars whose names he wouldn't trust me with.  Supposed "friends" I never got to meet.  I realized he had been building a contact list.  A contact list he hadn't wanted me to know about.

Dad dropped his hands.  He looked at me in one short moment and accurately surmised everything going through my mind.  "It's not like that," he said plainly.  "Childhood doesn't last long.  To you, I'm sure it seems like an eternity, because you've been a child all your life.  But you've had a short life, Cubby.  You don't even know it.  I wanted you to stay a child, just a little longer."

"He's not a child anymore, Paul," Granny said curtly.  "And the sooner you accept it, the better."

A silence fell among the three of us.

"You may take Julius' old room," Granny told Dad.  "I wasn't expecting you.  I already gave your room to Skylar."

I looked inquisitively at her.  Julius? 

"My younger brother," Dad said distantly.

I looked at him incredulously.  This was the first time in sixteen years that he had ever mentioned having a brother.

"He died when we were children," Dad explained.

I felt really acidic just then, in a way that didn't sit well with me.  I thought:  Okay, Dad.  So you've got a dead little brother, and you've secretly been on a revenge quest for the past eleven years.  Anything else you forgot to tell me?

"Cubby," Dad started.  I thought he was going to plead.  But I realized he just didn't know what to say.  He was a reticent person; he had been a reticent person for thirty-nine years.  He couldn't change that over night.

I couldn't stay mad at him for long.

I touched the back of his hand. 
It's okay
, I was telling him. 
I'm not mad at you.

He didn't exactly smile, but his eyes softened.  "Thank you," he said mildly.

"The FBI's visited the reserve several times this summer," Granny interrupted us.

Dad looked vaguely surprised.  "What?  Already?  That's not like them."

"About your activities," Granny said bluntly.  "Your 'career,' if that's what you call it."

"I like what I do.  Other people have the right to enjoy my country as much as I do."

"In any case, Nola escorted them off the premises both times.  They don't have any right to be here, you know--they're breaking their own laws.  Says she's got half a mind to report them for misconduct."

"That's good."

I think I must have had a guilty look on my face, because Dad gave me one of his fleeting, unfinished smiles.  "You told the cops?  It's alright.  You were afraid for me.  I
did
tell you 'If I ever disappear for three days straight, call the police'...  I always assumed that when I finally caught up with--you know--I'd have time to warn you that I'd be leaving.  Remember when you were ten?  And the neighbor who grew hemp?"

I grinned roguishly.  I couldn't help myself.

"That was a false start.  But--"

"What?" Granny asked, scandalized.  "What are you talking about?  You left him in the care of someone growing
narcotics
?  You could have left him with
me
!"

"I didn't think..."

"You never think!"

"Mother, please be calm, consider your cholesterol..."

They bickered between themselves.  They were still going at it when I waved good night and climbed the stairs to my bedroom.

My legs were leaden, my face cold, though the passionflower had helped to warm me.  I sat on the edge of my bed in disbelief.  Dad had killed someone. 
My
Dad, who couldn't look a waitress in the eyes without stammering, whose only passions in life were baseball and cats.  I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't heard it from his own mouth.  Even now, I wasn't sure what to believe.

Before I could turn off the oil lamp, my door eased open.  Dad stepped inside.  He looked around at the bedroom that was once his, musing over the unconscious changes I'd made, but smiled--a muted smile--at the California or Bust poster.

"I had the crazy notion that I'd grow up to be a surfer," he told me lightly.

He sat on the bed with me.  I was so glad to have him back that the prior conversation completely slipped out of my mind.  I gave him a smile while he looked around at the dreamcatcher hanging above my window, at the cat clock next to the yellow poster, at the photographs on the closet door.

"Are those all your friends?" he asked, gesturing to the photographs--with surprise, I thought.

I quirked a smile and tilted my hand. 
Most of them.

Dad got up and walked over to the closet to get a better look at them.  I couldn't see his face, his back to me.  I imagined the path his eyes were taking.  I knew I wasn't imagining it when his eyes lingered the longest on the photo at the very center--Rafael and me at the summer pauwau.

Dad, with his profile like a sad hawk's, turned around to survey me.  His eyes were so waterlike, so gray.  They were Granny's eyes.  I really wished I had his eyes.

"I'm glad you've made friends, Cubby."

I smiled warmly. 
I'm glad you're safe.

I saw Dad's eyes travel to my exposed arm.  I saw the look of bewilderment on his face before he threw back his head and laughed.  He had noticed the atlas moth.  I grinned, unabashed.

"So you've got a tattoo.  You're real dangerous now...  I should be worried..."

I picked up my pillow and threatened playfully to hit him with it.  I guess he wasn't as worried as he'd made out, because he sat right down next to me.

"And a flute?  You're learning to play?"

I'd forgotten I was still wearing the plains flute around my neck.  I nodded eagerly.  I thought he might ask me to play something--but then I noticed that his eyes were void of expression, which meant his mind was otherwise occupied.

"I want to tell you something," he said.  "But I don't know how to say it."

Well, I thought lightly, that made us a pretty sad pair, both of us handicapped in our own ways.

"I loved your mother," he said.  He released the confession like it was a breath he'd been holding.  "So very much.  We had our arguments.  But I...  I hope you understand.  I loved her, and I love you."

Seeing the constrained grief on his face, hearing the emotion that threatened to break through his reserved tone, I suddenly knew that there had never been an affair with Ms. Siomme.

"Skylar," he said.

Uh-oh, I thought.  Dad never called me by name unless it was some matter of grave importance.  The last time he called me Skylar, I had been caught trying to blow up a school drinking fountain.

"I love you," he repeated.

Puzzled, I nodded slowly.  I'd already heard that part, although it was always nice to hear it again.  I was sure he didn't need me to tell him how much I loved him back.

"I love you," he said once more.  "No matter who you love."

Now he'd really lost me.  I almost considered checking his eyes to see whether he'd had anything to drink.  I can always tell if he's got alcohol in his system, even if he tries to cover it up with mouthwash:  His pupils get small, and they don't move the way they're supposed to.

But no, he wasn't drunk.  He had something on his lap; and now he picked it up and handed it to me.  It was a photograph.  I took it between my cold fingers with wonder. 

It was me and Rafael.  He had taken it off the closet door without my even noticing.

I almost couldn't look at him, but when I did, I found him unchanged.  He was the same Dad as ever, somber, with winter water eyes.  And when I thought about it, I was the same Cubby as ever, moon-faced and brown-eyed, with Little Orphan Annie hair.

"Okay?"

I nodded softly.  I didn't trust myself to do anything else.

"Okay."

29

Dual Nature

Breakfast the following morning turned out to be a moderately interesting affair--interesting in that I got to spend it with the two most tight-lipped people on the planet and watch them behave like rocks with respiratory systems.  Compared to those two, I was a real motor mouth.  That should give you an idea of how little Dad and Granny had to say to one another, even after more than a decade apart.  I've never liked uneventful silences; so when the silence dragged on and on, I sat at the kitchen table making silly faces at the both of them.  Granny looked at me over the top of her teacup and declared me mentally unstable, the first words she'd said all morning.  Dad smiled fleetingly, but seemed to find the kitchen wall more engaging.

I washed our silverware in the basin, and I got to thinking.  It couldn't be long before Ms. Hayes and her partner found out that Dad was hiding in Nettlebush.  How were we supposed to protect him then?  My stomach churned with discomfort.  Dad was a murderer.  It didn't matter whether it was justified--although I couldn't really envision a situation when murder was ever justified--because the police wouldn't see it that way.  And if this murder had happened on the reservation, maybe no one with a badge would care, maybe no one would look into it--but it hadn't happened on the reservation.  It had happened out in the open, in a very public world, where it was only a matter of time before evidence betrayed him.

Dad, a murderer.  It was way too surreal to imagine him ending someone's life, especially a human life.  Dad was gentle, unassuming, the kind of guy who wouldn't even harm an insect if he could help it.  I'm not joking.  One time a moth got into our house and he spent the entire evening trying to chase it out the door.