Lending Light (Gives Light Series Book 5) (39 page)

"Sure you can.  It's the same way a blind man misses never seeing his family's faces.  Or--"

Or the way a mute boy missed never having a voice.

I felt Sky's rueful smile, even when I couldn't see his face.  Sometimes I'd caught him mouthing the words to songs on the radio when he thought I wasn't looking.  Sometimes I wondered what it was like not to be able to shout your friends' names when you wanted their attention.

Sky took my hand in his.  He closed my hand around the flute hanging from his neck.

My arm tightened around his waist.  I pressed my mouth against the top of his head.  I heard him breathe.

"You don't know," I whispered into his hair.

He didn't know what he did to me just by standing near me.  He didn't know that he'd made me a tolerable person.  He didn't know that I was going to give him his voice back, because I was going to be a speech therapist, even if I had to spend the rest of my life reading books I didn't understand.  I didn't mind.  I liked to read.

The water had long evaporated from the cooking pan.  The fire wasn't even lit underneath the gridiron.

"I'm going to tell you what your voice sounds like," I said.

Sky spent the next few minutes cooking samosas, except he didn't use potatoes, and you're supposed to fry them, not grill them.  I loved them anyway, because he'd made them for me.  I loved him so much, you have no idea.  We sat together while they simmered and I told him what his voice sounded like.  I told him it was the same sound you heard when you held very still and the roots of the trees around you drank the water in the ground, an audible shifting of old soil.  I told him that when he spoke to me he sounded like lifeblood rushing in my ears on a quiet, lazy night.  I told him his laugh was the woodpecker and his mirth the clever whippoorwill, but best of all, when he sang, it was the same singular voice our ancestors had sung with.  He laid his cheek on my thigh and I played with his hair.  I felt the love flowing out of him and knew it was enough to save me.  I knew, because of him, that people really were born good, and they were worth loving for it.

We ate samosas and went inside the house, but only because it was so hot outside.  We sat on the couch while the radio played.  Sky made me give him my hands and he pretended to read my fortune off my
palm lines.  I cupped his face in my hands and that was the end of it, him smiling at me, so earnest and so sweet I could feel myself losing my mind over him.  He lay back against me and asked me to tell him a story.  I racked my brains for something entertaining; and I wound up relating to him the time when Mary and I spent the night in a school we didn't even belong to.  I felt it when Sky laughed, his back against my chest, his legs between my legs.  I thought maybe summers existed for falling in love and building secret worlds.  The two were not mutually exclusive.

The next Sunday dinner was when summer met its graceful end.  I was sitting with Aubrey at a picnic table and he showed me his weird tin foil trading cards.  Two taipo'o stood talking to Nola Red Clay.  Uncle Gabriel watched them carefully.  I knew the taipo'o were feds by their clothes alone, formal, neatly pressed.  The next thing I knew the female fed was reaching into her jacket.  Nettlebush held a collective breath, like we expected her to take out a gun.  She took out a paper.

I didn't know what was going on.  I saw Sky standing on his grandmother's porch, his face white.  I didn't see his dad anywhere, so I figured he must have been inside the house.  I tossed my head, frantic, searching the crowd until I met Annie's eyes.  She gave me a nod.  She strode calmly, daintily over to Sky and helped him block the door.

I won't pretend a bunch of dumb kids made any difference in whether or not the feds could arrest Sky's dad.  But when I watched those dumb kids jumping out of their seats to scurry over to Sky--Aubrey and his niece, Siobhan and her brothers and Selena and Allen Calling Owl and
William Sleeping Fox
--something clicked on inside of me, and never clicked off again.  Because I realized these were the same kids who used to avoid me like I was a plague.  I'd asked them for help, and they were helping me.  Months ago I never would have asked for help.  I never would have thought I was worth it.  I knew exactly who it was who changed the way I saw myself.

I found my way onto the porch beside Sky.  Sarah wedged in at my side.  Nola said something to the taipo'o I didn't catch, and the woman taipo'o put her paper away, and she and her partner strode briskly off the reservation, none too happy.

Sarah tugged on my arm.  I bent down and she put her hands around my ear.

"Will you come to the Pine Nut Festival?" she asked.

She asked loud enough that Autumn Rose overheard.  "We could try lipstick this time!" Autumn Rose said, giggling so excitedly her whole face flushed pink.

I didn't know about the lipstick.  "Only if you'll go with me," I told Sarah.

It was the start of September.  Over the next few days the sun started setting earlier, readying itself for the autumn months ahead.  Autumn was Sky's favorite season, so I didn't mind too much.  Mostly I was just glad for the end of the annual heat wave.  Uncle Gabriel told me one morning that Rosa was going to be living with us from now on.  He said it very casually.  I knew it was anything but.

"Do I have to give up my room?" I asked.

"Very funny, Rafael."

"She can't stay in your room.  'Cause that'd be inappropriate."

"Thank you.  That's enough now."

I went into my bedroom and changed into my Grass Dance regalia.  Uncle Gabriel was surprised to see it.

"Going to the Pine Nut Festival?" he asked, when I rooted around in the refrigerator for juniper tea.

"Sky's never been," I said.

"Ah, right!" Uncle Gabe said.  "Skylar."

"When's Mary coming back?"

"I don't know, kiddo.  Soon, I hope."

I said goodbye.  I went out into the reservation, where families gathered around the multitude of pine trees, cracking open the sticky pinecones on the ground and husking out the nuts inside.  It was the Pinyon Maiden's blessed season.  Every time the pinecones fell, she told us she would never leave us to fend for ourselves.

"Hey, loser!" Zeke shouted, waving at me.

I waved back.  I went over to him and found him standing with Holly and one of the In Winter boys--Sage, I thought.

"Pinyon soup or pinyon bread?" Zeke said, annoyed.  "I don't know which one to make!"

"I doubt you'll be making either of them," Holly said dismally.

Sage peeked at me with one eye.  "Uh," he said.

I tried to smile, but he returned it with a very weird look.  Come on.  Seriously?

Sarah ran over to me in lavender regalia.  She captured my hands righteously and pulled.  I said a quick goodbye to Holly and the guys, stumbling after the Tyke so she wouldn't over-exert herself.  Anyway, I wanted to give her the illusion that she was in charge.

"Dance," Sarah said.

"What?" I said.

Solomon Knows the Woods played a hide drum of his own making.  Sarah whipped her shawl around her shoulders in a clumsy approximation of the Shawl Dance.  I could tell she'd never Shawl Danced before.  I chewed the inside of my mouth, accidentally drawing a bead of blood.  Damn it.  I needed to file my teeth down or something.

It was Mom's memory that prompted me to raise my arms, to bend my knees.  The simple act of positioning myself made me feel ridiculous and ugly; but Mom liked it when I Grass Danced.  A good son didn't ignore his mother's wishes.  I stepped lightly, gray fringe swinging around my elbows.  I felt the grass under my feet dance with me and knew that I was home, because home never leaves you, even when you want it to.

I didn't dance for long.  Jack Nabako, a first grader, leapt screaming into the fray, scaring away the Tradish dancers over by the drum.  That freaking kid was always pulling weird shit.  It didn't matter, anyhow.  I found Sky sitting by the water well and Sarah came with me when I sat next to him.  He looked at me and beamed, blinding me with light.  He showed me a dove's feather he'd found in the dirt.  I accepted it like treasure.  My memories were treasure, no matter how laced with pain: Mom teaching me to butcher, Dad waking me before dawn to hike into the desert.

"Hurry up, Rafael," Dad had said, frantic.  "I'm not kidding.  Hurry up!"

He was wearing a blue denim shirt, button-down, a brown belt around his black trousers.  He yanked the bed coverings off of me and I fell out of bed, too groggy to yelp.  I fell asleep twice while Dad threw clothes at me.  He told me to change my socks and tie my shoes.

I was yawning when Dad tugged me through the reservation by my hand.  We went out into the hospital parking lot, pitch black, until Dad took a car key out of his pocket and a red car--Dad's car--lit up in a flash.  He walked around the back of the car and did something with the trunk; I never saw what.  He slammed the lid shut, got into the front seat, and let me sit beside him, passenger-side, no seatbelt or anything.  I felt grown up.

Dad drove down the dark turnpike until it curved into the pale desert.  A smudge of blue light spread across the black horizon.  Dad pulled the car off the road on I-8, between pitches of flat sand and weedy cactuses, no road signs in sight.  He parked the car and I stumbled out of it.  He shoved a shovel in my hands.

"Just dig," he said, very fast.

I was tired, and my eyes itched, and the desert air was biting and cold.  I heaved the shovel as best I could.  I broke the sand with the metal blade and put my feet on top of it, but couldn't lift it out again, my arms too skinny.  All the while Dad opened the car trunk, rummaging around inside.  He rolled something onto the ground, so heavy that clouds of sand rose around us.  I peeked at the bundle.  It looked like it was wrapped in animal hide.

"Were you stealing Mom's deer skins?" I asked.  "She said she didn't know where they went."

With a great big push, Dad rolled the bundle over to me.  I wasn't digging fast enough for him, but luckily he retrieved a shovel of his own from the back seat of the car.  With the two of us at work, we managed to pull up a respectable looking hole by the time the sun climbed over the horizon, vultures rasping in the distance, ready for breakfast.

"Help me," Dad said.

I crouched down with him and we heaved the bundle into the hole.  It fell so heavily into the ground I could feel it echoing in my stomach.

"Is it buried treasure?" I asked.

Dad put his shovel down gingerly.  He sat on the sand as it warmed under the sun.  He tucked his lank black hair behind his ears, unveiling his square jaw, his squashed nose.  Even our eyebrows were the same shape, the same texture, black and feathery and thick.

Dad buried his face in his hands.  Dad's shoulders shook violently when he sobbed.  It was the most pitiful, terrifying sound I'd ever heard, more so that I couldn't see his face.  It reminded me of the time I'd delivered a litter of rabbits--although I hadn't wanted to, preferring not to touch them--and the kits had cried helplessly when they were torn unwillingly from their mother's body.  Young as I was, I had the idea that entering the world was an act of violence.

"I won't tell anyone," I promised.  "Where your treasure is.  You don't have to cry."

Dad wiped the wetness from his eyes.  He drew an uneven breath, his chest stilling slowly.

"It wouldn't be treasure if no one found it," Dad said.

The memory blurred.  The memory disappeared.  I returned to myself, to the sensation of hands on my face.  I knew those hands.  I knew them better than I knew myself.  Sky's face loomed in front of mine, conciliatory, heaven-sent.  His soft face was redemption.  His small eyes were mirrors.

He touched my forehead--a gentle prodding, playful, but deliberate.  With one touch he drained the bad feelings from me.  I didn't know where they went.  I hoped against hope he hadn't taken them inside of him; but then everything went back to the sky in the end.

I liked this treasure a lot better.