Lending Light (Gives Light Series Book 5) (6 page)

When I looked at Christine's son again he'd already turned his back on me, Annie Little Hawk chatting in his ear.  It was a good thing he couldn't see me.  I didn't know what my face was doing.  Light flitted in and out of the empty spaces between my fingers.  I closed my hands, trying to catch it, to hold it.  My head buzzed with summer sounds, cicada songs.  My eyes weren't blurry, but pierced with color, sore and bright with clarity.  Suddenly--eerily--I was calm.

I'd had everything planned out.  I would hate the St. Clair kid the way everyone else hated me.  I would force him to share the burden of my father's absence.  I'd had everything planned out; and it lasted all of two seconds.  The moment I saw that soft, unassuming face I could only think of protecting it.  He was new around here, but his face--his mother's face--was old.  People were going to tear him apart for it.  I'd thought I was one of them.  Maybe I was one of them.  Maybe I couldn't help myself; I had Dad's blood, after all.  I didn't want to hurt this guy.  You wouldn't blame me if you'd seen what I'd seen.  Who looks at a lamb and wants to hurt it?  Even hunters know to kill their prey humanely.

I went home early that night, not entirely sure whether I felt frazzled or at peace.  I sat between the tall, wall-wide windows in the sitting room, wishing they were the kind that opened, or at least that I lived in the badlands like the falcons did.  It was nighttime now, real nighttime, but the light from before hadn't completely left me.  It cloaked the badlands outside the windows in scattered, ethereal droplets, the blue-gray canyons rendered Titanic dreamscapes.  It made the stars in the sky look like suns, the blue-black of the sky look like as warm as the ocean.

"Hey," Uncle Gabriel's voice said.  I heard the front door snap shut.  "Where did you go all of a sudden?  I turned around to talk to Rosa and you disappeared."

Uncle Gabriel came into the sitting room with his winsome, unassuming smile.  His smile flickered when he looked at me, which made me wonder, again, what my face was doing.

"The St. Clair kid," I said.  My voice sounded weird, unsteady.  "Why exactly is he in Nettlebush?"

Uncle Gabriel resumed his polite veneer.  "You mean Skylar?"

Skylar?  Sounded like a hippie name.

Uncle Gabriel sat down on the Pendleton-patterned sofa, flares and triangles in orange and yellow.  "His dad's gone missing," Uncle Gabriel said, rubbing his face like he'd had a long day.  "Social services handed him over to Catherine."

"Mrs. Looks Over's his grandma?"  Skylar didn't have her winter gray eyes.

"Yes, that's right," Uncle Gabriel said.  "Huttsi," he specified; which meant father's mother.  Mother's mother was kaku.

"His kaku didn't want him?" I asked.  "Where's his Naneewi?"

"I'm guessing they're estranged from him," Uncle Gabriel said.

"Yeah," I said, "but so's Mrs. Looks Over.  I've never seen him at her house.  Is he really okay with that?  Living with a stranger?"

Uncle Gabriel looked at me, his hands folded on his knees.  His face was tense, brown eyes gauging my reaction.  What?  He didn't think I was going to kill the kid, did he?  Maybe I was.  Maybe I couldn't help myself; it was in my blood.

"I heard Mrs. Looks Over talking," I said.  "She said Skylar doesn't speak."

"That's right," Uncle Gabriel said.  "He's mute."

Dad's favored murder method had been pinning the women down, slitting their throats open.  I realized Skylar had worn a blue jacket, zipped all the way up to his neck.

"His throat didn't heal?" I asked.  I couldn't hear my voice.

Uncle Gabe could.  "His vocal cords are paralyzed."

No.  No, that wasn't right, because Dad had taken so much from him already; why did Dad need to take his voice, too?  How do you even live without being able to talk to people?

"Raf," Uncle Gabe said.  "Between you and me...maybe it's a good idea that you stay away from this boy."

I lifted my head.  My braids slapped my cheeks.  "What do you mean?"

Uncle Gabriel stood up.  His hands on his hips, he looked out the window at the wide open badlands.  I could tell he was fighting himself on something, his posture unnatural.

"It's very likely he has memories from that event," Uncle Gabriel said.  "He was about five when your father attacked him.  You have memories from when you were five years old, don't you?"

Sitting on my dad's lap while we sketched together.  Building rafts with Dad and Mary for the June races.  Falling asleep in my mother's arms while she played Shoshone songs on the piano.  "Mi'akinna, mi'akinna."

Mom's piano sat next to the fireplace.  Dust had settled in the cover's ancient wooden grooves.  Sometimes I thought about destroying it.

"Skylar's only going to be here temporarily," Uncle Gabriel said.  "I don't want...  There's no reason for you to get into a fight with him like you did William.  He'll leave once Paul comes back."

Uncle Gabriel sounded certain that Paul was, in fact, coming back from wherever he had gone.  It should have made me suspicious, but I'm a dumb guy.  "You think I'm going to punch his lights out," I said.

Uncle Gabriel did the face rubbing thing again.  "Can you blame me?"

No, I couldn't.  When I got angry, I couldn't control myself.  Almost like how Dad hadn't been able to control himself, or hadn't wanted to.

"Uncle Gabe," I said.  "You don't--do you think I'm like Dad?"

Uncle Gabriel looked at me.  "No," he said at once.  "You're very different from Eli."

Nobody had known the murders were my father's doing, not until the night when Skylar lived and identified him.  Nobody had even once guessed that there was something sinister under my father's surface.  You never know how any given person's going to turn out.  He can be raised by loving, attentive parents, in a good home with good values, and still wind up thinking ugly things; and acting on them.

"I'm scared," I said.

"Rafael," Uncle Gabriel said sharply.

I stared at the wooden floorboards under our feet.  They looked blurry.  I didn't want eyeglasses.  Aubrey Takes Flight wore glasses, and it was bad enough that people got our names mixed up all the time.

"Rafael," Uncle Gabriel said.  "You are your mother's son."

My mom had been a kind woman.  She'd loved the land more than anything, taking Mary and me to all her favorite spots: the promontory in the badlands, the amsonia field in the woods.  I still remember the day she found out the truth about Dad.

We'd been sitting on the east side of the lake, on the edge of a weeping willow thicket.  Mary had her hair up in these ridiculously foofy pigtails, picking snails out of the silty lakeshore with eight-year-old abandon.  Mom called the both of us over to the checkered picnic blanket.  She wanted us to eat the sandwiches she'd packed, peppers on toasted sourdough.

"Make me," Mary said loftily.  She danced into the shallow end of the lake, knowing full well that Mom wouldn't chase her; Mom had a fear of water.

Dad was supposed to get off work early that day and have lunch with us, but he never showed up.  Mom kept checking her wristwatch.  A gray cloud covered the sun.  That was about when Mom decided it was time to head home.  Mom folded up our blanket and tucked it into her giant carrier bag.  Why she didn't use the picnic basket, I'll never know.  Mary's jeans were soaked to the knee.  She flicked wet dirt at my face and I complained loudly; she kissed me, smearing mud all over my cheek.

Meredith Siomme, a tribal councilor, came running toward the three of us from the country road.  Her dark hair rippled behind her, dark green eyes flashing with fear.  My first thought was that something had happened to Dad and she was here to tell us the bad news.  I couldn't see any other reason for Dad to break a date with us.

"It's Eli," Meredith said breathlessly.  She leaned over with her hands on her knees.  She forced herself to stand up.  "It's been Eli all along."

I didn't know what she meant.  Mary did.  Mom did.  Mary's face looked terrified; which terrified me, too, because Mary was supposed to be fearless.  By contrast, the light dimmed in Mom's eyes.  Her mouth opened and didn't close and she started shaking.

"Where is he?" was all I could think to ask.  I was six and stupid.  "He missed lunch."

The tribal council spent the next two weeks looking for Dad.  They pulled apart the farmlands, the badlands, the forest; he was gone.  He must have left the reservation the very moment he realized Skylar was still alive.  Our chairwoman, Nola Red Clay, tried to get the FBI to help us look for him, but they were sluggish, noncommittal, the same way they'd been when Rebecca Takes Flight first turned up dead.  When you're Native American, you very quickly get used to the idea that other Americans don't think about you like you're one of them.  You're an afterthought.  You belong in the past.

Mom never recovered from the revelation that her husband was a mass murderer.  Over the next two years she got weaker, sicker.  Dr. Long Way's best guess was that Mom had contracted encephalitis, but she couldn't figure out where the virus would have come from.  I don't think it was encephalitis.  I think it was a broken heart.  People roll their eyes at me when I tell them our feelings can make us healthy or sick.  Doesn't stop it from being true.  I was there when Mom cried herself to sleep every night.  I was there when she started forgetting what she'd eaten for breakfast that morning, what day of the week it was; when she stopped playing her piano and singing her songs.

"Please help me," she said to me one day.

She was lying in her bed, the linens dirty, the windows partway curtained.  Sage and sweetgrass burned in a glazed white dish on her bedside table.  It scared me to see her cheeks sunken in, her eyes yellow with jaundice.  I was eight years old.  I took her bony hand in both of mine and her feelings surged through me in a violent assault.  Failure.  Hatred.  Longing.

I am Rafael Gives Light because my mom was Susan Gives Light.  Gives Light is "Makan Imaa" in Shoshone.  "Makan Imaa" also means Gives Morning.

Mom didn't wake up the next morning.  I lay with her in bed and felt her body growing cold against mine.  I put my head on her chest and it didn't rise.  The arms that used to protect me had gone stiff.  Her mouth was open, her breath sour.  Her hair fanned her pillow in dirty braids.  I touched her hands, fingers pale and chilly.  I couldn't feel her feelings.

"Rafael," Uncle Gabriel said, drawing me back to the present.

I didn't care what Uncle Gabriel said.  I was exactly like Dad.  I was a murderer.  I'd let a good woman die, like Dad had let seven.  But then the odds were stacked against me in the first place.  I carried a murderer's blood in my veins.  I wore his face for my own.  If it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a duck, it sure as hell ain't a prairie dog.

4

Ariel

I know a lot of people think the rain's depressing, or whatever, but if you ask me it's a good opportunity to get things done without your neighbors hounding you for favors.  Just drink some peppermint tea and have at it.  Seriously, that stuff's great for preventing colds.  Anyway, if you live in Arizona, the land wants all the water it can get, rain or otherwise.

When it started raining during the morning hunt my immediate thought was:  I'm staying outside.  I hated being indoors more than anything, even more than I hated easy listening music.  Uncle Gabe and I went home around ten o'clock and I raced to my room and changed clothes--by which I mean I grabbed the clothes on the floor, didn't find dirt on them, and swapped them out for my damp and sweaty ones.  I swiped a notebook off my desk, stuck a stubby pencil behind my ear, and raced outside my room again, down the hallway.

"Eat something!" Uncle Gabriel yelled.

I scowled.  I stomped into the kitchen where Uncle Gabriel sat with Thomas Little Hawk, Annie's dad, a long-faced guy with gray-streaked brown hair.  I didn't know exactly what was wrong with Mr. Little Hawk, but he'd suffered a stroke a couple of years back; now he was kind of slow-witted.  Not like I had any room to comment.  I'd been told I was pretty slow-witted, too.

"Hello," Mr. Little Hawk said to me.  "Are you having fun in school?"

I bit my tongue to keep from reminding him that it was summertime.  "Yeah," I said, unintentionally gruff.  "Thanks.  Sir."

Uncle Gabriel pointed at the refrigerator and raised his eyebrows at me.  My scowl deepened.  I opened the steel door, digging around inside until I found old, cold samosas.  I stuffed them into my mouth whole.

"You're disgusting," Uncle Gabriel said cheerfully.

Did he want one?  I took one out of my mouth, offering it to him.

"Oh, God, no," Uncle Gabriel cackled.  He stood up with his ceramic mug.  "Thomas, let me top off your coffee."

After I'd eaten I muttered a quick "Bye" to the both of them, skulking out the front door.  Imaginary shadows hung outside my house, blanketing Nettlebush in an indistinct, black vapor, but the raindrops cut slots in the sky when I tilted my head back, affording me a view of lush, heavy gray clouds.  The darkness was unsettling, yeah; but at least I was outdoors.  I closed my eyes and breathed.  I felt the grass breathing with me, the sky quivering with cold.  At that moment I was inside every single part of the earth at once: the pine nuts on the pinyon trees, the woody oak roots beneath the soil, the groundwater older than the blood in my veins and the skin on my bones.