Earth/Sky (Earth/Sky Trilogy) (16 page)

Suddenly linking these pieces of information together, I said,
“Is that why you and Kishi don’t like Zakia? But he’s not a sociopath, Adriel! He’s a really nice guy.”

Uncomfortably, Adriel said, “Jessa, remember what I said about complex beings in complex circu
mstances-”

“No, you distracted me.
I asked whom you couldn’t see, and you answered with shielded people. You
can
see their souls, and you just don’t like what’s there.” My mind working furiously, I said, “You can’t see Zakia, can you? There’s something else going on.”

After a long pause, Adriel said,
“He’s an absence, because of what he is.”

“What, homeschooled?” I said with sarcasm.
“He’s just a teenaged boy.”

“He was long ago, but not any longer.
”

“Then what is he?”

“That’s not for me to say. Don’t mention anything to him about this conversation. You don’t want to make the Coopers angry. It could have consequences you can’t foresee, and that you really don’t want.”

Frustrated at his stonewalling, I exclaimed,
“They aren’t bad people! God, they were all out searching for me when they thought I’d gone over the cliff and died. His older brother Jaden helped me get home when I was lost as a little girl.”

“No, he didn’t
.” Grasping my ankle through the blanket, Adriel said, “Just let it go, would you?”

I kicked off his hand.
“I will not let it go! And he did help me; I remember it perfectly well. I was a sniveling wreck about being lost, and Jaden was so sweet.” Groan-moan-hiccup . . . I realized I was hearing the creaking of the stairs. Grandpa Jack was coming up to bed. The mattress flew up beneath my feet as Adriel skimmed soundlessly over the floor to the window. By the time I got out of bed, the window was pushed up and Adriel out to the tree branch. Disco music began to play.

“Jessa, there i
sn’t any brother named Jaden. That was Zakia,” Adriel said.

Foot
steps creaked down to my room, and a shadow fell along the line of light coming under the door. Grandpa Jack said, “You in bed?”

I turned around and called, “
Yeah!”

“All right then.
Good night, Jessa. See you in the morning.”

“Goodnight, Grandpa Jack
.”

When I looked back to the branch, Adriel was gone.
I stuck my head out of the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of him flying away. But what little of the sky I could see through the tree held only clouds.

Chapter Seven: The Gap

When I woke on Saturday, I picked up the cream for my road rash and realized upon inspection of my leg that I no longer needed it. The new skin was a slightly brighter pink than the rest, but it was fading fast to a normal hue and there wasn’t any tingling or pain.

Grandpa Jack had arranged with Barney to go fishing together this w
eekend. They’d even extended an invitation for me to go along. I couldn’t think of anything more boring than sitting on a shore at some lake in the wilderness hoping for a nibble on the line. What was the point of fishing when you could just buy fish at the store? I blamed too much homework for having to say no, and once we were through with breakfast, we got into the old mail truck so I could drop off Grandpa Jack and have a vehicle for the weekend. Barney was going to bring him home Sunday evening.

It killed me how he didn’t lock the doors
or windows when we left the house. Since I was going to be home alone tonight, I would make sure everything was locked. Actually, as soon as I got back to the house, I was going to have to check over both floors to make sure no one had been there in our absence or, more frighteningly, was still there. It was too easy to attribute some benign creaking to a footstep, and I wanted to be able to relax with the television and know I was secure. Spooner wasn’t a crime-ridden place, but all it took was one crazy person to change that.

Grandpa Jack shook his head when we drove over the faint tracks my scooter had made on its way over the side of Sutter.
“That was a ruddy miracle.”

You have no idea, I thought.
He craned his neck to peer down the side. “Can’t even see what you would have held onto.”

“I caught the edge as the scooter flew off,” I lied.
“Sorry you got that for me and it didn’t even last a week.”

“Rather have my granddaughter survive an accident than a scooter,” Grandpa Jack
said with indignation. “You want another one?”

The last thing I wanted was another scooter.
“No, I’ll just use the mail truck. It feels safer in here.”

“Lucky, lucky, lucky,” said Grandpa Jack, who was now looking through the mirror back to the scene of the accident.
“We’ve had our mishaps on this road, usually drunks on their last tipple who go for their last topple. Fifteen years ago now, two kids your age died here. Thought this would be a great road to race on. Bet they wish that they’d thought a little harder as they went zooming over the side. Found them in the car below. Oh, and that biker.”

“What happened?” I asked, even though I didn’t really want to know.

“This isn’t a road for bicycling, as I’m sure you can see. No guardrail, barely a shoulder, full of potholes and hairpin curves and this foolish tourist group from somewhere decided to bike it. One got pegged with a mirror as a car tried to pass and she went flying. Her bike lived. She didn’t. That was quite a case in the news.”

“Poor woman,” I said.
I knew exactly how she had been feeling to go down.

“
Truth be told, I felt more sorry for the driver,” Grandpa Jack said. “He’d been stuck behind them for ages. They were riding four abreast in the lane, weaving everywhere and never turning into the rest areas to let him pass. When he honked his horn, they flipped him off and just kept ambling along like this is a path through a park. So he tried to go around. Got nailed for negligence and the cops told that tourist group not to come back. Not that they planned to with getting the pants sued off them by that woman’s family.”

Wanting to change the subject, I said, “What is there to like about fishing?”

“Quiet. Peaceful. Lets you get your thoughts together.”

It seemed to
me that his life was already peaceful and quiet, seeing as he didn’t use a cell phone or the Internet. Maybe being a mailman was more stressful than I envisioned. “I packed you some carrots and celery sticks.” At home, I had poked through the bag of food he was taking along and felt like I had no choice but to contribute something healthy. Inside were potato chips, marshmallows, candy, hot dogs, hot dog buns, doughnuts, and beer.

“See if the fish like them,” Grandpa Jack said.

“Vegetables are
good
for you,” I emphasized. This was fixing up to be a major battle between us, and I was determined to win it.

“I can’t see that my forebears beat their way out of the caves and built civilization just so I could go back to eating roots and
leaves.” Grandpa Jack looked at me ruefully as we pulled over into a rest area for someone who wanted to go sixty miles an hour around this awful road. The person zoomed past us. “I ate one of those spinach chips by mistake. That’s enough green for the month.”

Soon w
e dipped down the scary slope into the Gap. He turned right on a road before the campgrounds. Past a block of houses in shambles, he went left to a commercial area. The stores on Jacobo were nothing grand, but these were downright seedy. Bail bonds, bars, pawnshops, a trashy motel in lurid pink, a strip joint and adult toy store, it looked like the kind of place where one might get knifed in an alley. We waited at the light and pulled onto the next block, which had more of the same. Grandpa Jack nodded to a store. “That’s Botanic Wonderments, the Coopers’ store.”

It was a darling
shop in this sea of sleaze. Pinched between a pizza place and an empty business with graffiti on the wall, Botanic Wonderments had pretty white curtains framing windows stacked with candles and greenery. Wind chimes hung around the entryway and made sweet tinkles in the breeze. Too early to be open, it was dark inside. “I’ll have to go in there sometime,” I said.

“I like their store.
They get a lot of business. Oriel brought in the baby last week while I was dropping off the mail and she’s just another Cooper, smiles and dark hair and happy.”

I thought of what Adriel had said, that there was no Jaden and that had been Zakia who helped me home as a little girl.
It was preposterous, even if I had made the mistake at Hubbard’s of mixing them up. They
did
look the same, but still, one had a mole and one did not! And the hair was different shades. “Who is Oriel?”

“Oriel Cooper, she’s married to Nateso.
They had Liliana last year.”

“Have you ever seen Zakia and all of his brothers in the same place?
They really don’t ever come home here to the Gap?”

“No, not ever.
So the family just takes vacations to them. Good thing I don’t see them all at once, I wouldn’t know one from the other.” He turned right, which led back into residential. The road curved along this way and that, the houses few and far between. The mail truck slowed at a driveway on the left, where he turned in at five mailboxes stacked one on top of the other.

“Which one is theirs?” I asked.

“The bottom four are Coopers and the top one is Kreeling.” He gestured out the window to a white house with two stories. Trees drooped over the roof. “That one is the Kreeling house: one part of the family in the basement, another part on the second. Quiet people, real serious. Don’t think I’ve ever seen a Kreeling crack a smile, not even the girl. She’s about sixteen, seventeen.”

“Maybe she’d have a better sense of humor if she was around people her own age at school,” I said.

“Maybe,” Grandpa Jack said. “Or maybe she’d be just the same, since that’s who she is. Nothing wrong with being serious. Now this next house,” he said as we came upon a smaller one through a thick line of trees, “is Barney’s. He lives there with his great-nephew or second cousin or God knows how they’re related. I can’t remember. The kid is named Alex and he’s fifteen or so. I bet he’ll split come eighteen. This place doesn’t make him happy.”

“Aren’t we pulling in?” I asked when we rumbled past the driveway.

“No, we’re meeting up at the end of their road. So this third house, the big one there, that’s where Nateso, Oriel, and Liliana live. Well, they’ve got the second floor. Nateso grew up in Spooner and wouldn’t dream of leaving. The first floor is a bunch of other relatives. I can’t keep them straight except for Neala. She’s a relative from back East, came here about three years ago. Pretty woman. She keeps the younguns who help in the store in line. Nateso and Oriel do the shop four days a week and Neala does the rest.” We passed the driveway and went through more trees. On the right side was a fourth house.

“And even more Coopers,” I said.
There were bicycles spilled all over the lawn, which hadn’t been mowed recently. The houses looked old and somewhat humble, even the biggest ones.

“Even more Coopers.
Nateso’s sister lives there with her brood. The husband took off a few years ago, always a flighty guy, and left her with six of their kids under the age of ten and the two he’d had from some other relationship. But here she gets all the support she needs and she’s got a cousin from Montana who gets paid to help out with the younger ones-”

“She had six kids in less than ten years?” I asked.
“Didn’t she think it might be a good idea to stop sooner than that if the guy was flighty?”

“Well, she didn’t mean to have that many.
Three sets of twins. Oh, did she want a girl! That last set finally had one, little Nescha. She’s five now. Boys coming out of Vanya’s ears and the joke is on her, she says. Nescha lives up trees and in mud puddles, and her twin Cavary, he’s the one who prefers stuffed animals and staying clean. Now some of the older boys I can tell apart. Mostly. The first set is identical down to the last freckle, I don’t have a clue which one is which, but the second set isn’t, and the two half-siblings look a little different so I don’t struggle quite so much. So that’s the first and second floor of that house, and the basement has some other Coopers that rotate too frequently to keep track.”

The last house was
only one story. “So this is where Hoopie lives. That’s Lotus and Zakia’s father. Their mom has gone to help in Montana with another branch of the family for a time.”

Appalled, I said, “But Lotus is so young!”
It was one thing for my mother to leave me for nine months when I was almost eighteen; it was quite another to leave a twelve-year-old.

“Oh, soon enough Lotus will probably go there, too.
She’s not hurting for relatives and she’s a solitary sort anyway. Loves to say hello to me and then loves to go off to her own thoughts.” The mail truck pulled up outside that house and stopped. “The basement of that place is converted into a little schoolhouse for them. Or maybe I’m mixing it up with one of the other houses. And out there, where you can just barely see it, that’s where Zakia has his own place.”

I squinted at what was practically a shed
in a cluster of dark trees. “You can’t be serious. That’s the size of a postage stamp!”

Grandpa Jack pulled out his bags as I slid from the mail truck.
Nodding to the shed, he said, “When I was his age, I would have loved it. Some privacy. It’s wired up for electricity. He has to come back to the house to shower and wash his clothes, but he’s got a little bathroom attached to it, too. Lotus now, she was just telling me that she might like a shed of her own.” Once his bags were sorted about his shoulders, he started off in the direction of the shed. I came along with the bag of food, thinking this was bordering on child abuse.

A man about Grandpa Jack’s age was sitting on a lawn chair at a trailhead just beyond the shed.
His hair in a gray horseshoe about his head, I figured this was Barney. His hands rested on his big belly as he looked up to the trees. At the sound of our footsteps, he turned and called out to us. Grandpa Jack introduced me and Barney shook my hand. But it felt genuine, when all of the handshaking at school just felt like a covert attempt at behavioral modification. He got up with a grunt and collapsed his lawn chair to carry it along. The door to the shed rattled open and Zakia put his head out. “Hi! You going fishing?”

“
No, I’m just dropping off Grandpa Jack,” I said. “Are you going?”

He stepped outside and brushed
a hand through his curly hair. I preferred shorter hair on guys, but the slightly shaggier look worked for Zakia. If he ever got a crew cut, it would be a shame. We must have woken him, as he looked a little bleary-eyed. All he had on were a pair of sweatpants and thick gray socks. “I’m helping in the store this morning. They need some muscle.”

He
definitely had that to offer, I thought. Grandpa Jack and Barney sorted through their things, mumbling about which split of the trail to take to get to the lake faster. Multi-colored light was glowing within the shed around Zakia’s head. Wanting this tiny place to be nice, I said, “May I see your room?”

“Sure,” Zakia said
through a yawn.

The glows of color were coming from holiday li
ghts strung high on the walls and looped three times around the shed. I relaxed a little to see that this was a cute room, if small. A twin bed was pushed to the wall, the blankets askew upon it. A bookshelf was packed with novels and comics. There was a miniature refrigerator, a space heater blowing gustily, and a television set on a little table. The table was bracing open the door to the bathroom permanently, but I guessed that didn’t matter when he lived alone.