Gives Light(Gives Light Series) (27 page)

Dr. Stout had left the door open.  I rubbed my bleary eyes, my legs dangling from the exam table, and peeked outside.

When you're tired, really tired, every noise sounds magnified.  I heard a door across the skinny hall click and hiss open, heard the rubber soles of shoes beating on the floor as whoever was inside the room abandoned it.  I looked across the hall and realized the door was one down from the room opposite ours; and the male nurse fleeing the room had left it open, maybe by accident, allowing me to see right in. 

I saw giraffes on the walls.

"Stop your fidgeting and sit back," Granny ordered.  "You're going to take your medicine just as soon as we go home, and then you're going straight to bed."

I settled down; but I was panicking internally, the taste of bile rising through my throat, my pounding pulse loud in my ears.  I had lain in that room eleven years ago with my throat sewn shut.

The only reason I didn't scream now was because I couldn't.

The young nurse attending to us returned to the exam room and gave Granny my medicine.  Granny accepted the bag disgruntledly.  I had been exhausted mere seconds ago, ready to keel over, but now, alight with fear, I was wide awake.  I noticed the nurse's name tag just as she was about to leave.

Rosa Gray Rain.

Unthinkingly, I grabbed her wrist.  Her head snapped up on her shoulders with alarm.

I didn't even know what I would have said to her, had I been able to say anything at all. 
I'm sorry
was pretty high up there; somehow, though, it didn't sound right.  What was I sorry for?  That she had lost her mother to the same man who had killed mine?  I was sorry for that; but sorry wouldn't bring her mother back.  I don't know what I was thinking.  That we were kindred spirits, maybe.  Me with my ugly neck and her with her round face.  We both knew what it was like to have our mothers stolen.  And I wanted to do something to make it up to her--and I didn't know what.

Rosa looked at me with her big round eyes, earnest, and took one of my hands in both of hers.

"Eat the cat's claw here," she said slowly, haltingly.  "Your fever will go away."

Granny and I went home not long after that; she brewed me passionflower tea and I was unconscious the moment my head hit the pillow.  It was a sleep plagued with unpleasant dreams, women running for their lives, women lying with their throats cut open--in the forest brush, or in their own homes, even their beds unsafe.

27

Rose-Colored Glasses

My fever went away over the next couple of days, and my insomnia went with it.  Grateful to have my stamina back, I left Thank You notes at the hospital for Dr. Stout and Rosa Gray Rain. 

But that's just the thing--Rosa.  And the Owns Forty boy.  And numerous other people whose names I hadn't learned yet.  I had something in common with them, holes in our hearts that wouldn't mend, and I felt like there had to be something I could do to lessen their pain.  That thought nagged on my conscience when I went about my daily chores.  I wanted to do something for the families Rafael's father had stolen from, and I couldn't think of even the smallest gesture to alleviate their pain.

A change came to my afternoon routine:  Instead of visiting the church cupola with Rafael, I followed Annie to her grotto in the woods, and Aubrey and Rafael eventually joined us there.

The first time Rafael saw the grotto, on Annie's invitation, he couldn't possibly have looked more like a little kid who'd just been told Santa was in town on an early Christmas visit.  I grinned; because I knew at once that Rafael was seeing the beauty of the place, that he had been swept away by it.  I think the grotto must have inspired him, because he took out his notebook and his pencils, sat on the grass, and sketched feverishly.  Aubrey climbed up and sat on the forked boughs of the weeping willow, naming and calling to the birds that skittered through the trees.  And Annie--Annie smiled, and I was glad for it.

It was during that time that Annie showed me how to make glass.  Making glass probably doesn't sound at all exciting, but once you're actually doing it, it's amazing.  She and I went out to the badlands together and dug the sand up from beneath the clay and pulled stalks of glasswort out of the gullies.  We brought the sand and the plants back to the grotto, carrying them in one of Annie's willow baskets, and carved holes in the soft soil by the creek, Aubrey looking on curiously.  "Make the hole into whatever shape you want," Annie instructed.  Hers was the shape of a butterfly; she wanted to make more windchimes.  With my fingers, I dug my hole in the shape of a heart, not trusting myself with anything more complex.  We ground up the glasswort, mixed the ashes with the sand, and poured the concoction into the imprints in the soil.  Then we set to work building small kindling fires over the holes.  It was fascinating, watching the sand and ash melt into a red-hot liquid.  We snuffed out the flames and let the liquid cool, and I could hardly believe it when I was looking down into the ground at real, solid, crystal-clear glass.

"I wanna try," Rafael said at once.

"You'll set the whole forest on fire," Annie said placidly, dismissively.

"They look great!" Aubrey said enthusiastically.  He came over to sit by Annie, peering over her shoulder at the glass butterfly.  "You should make them during crafts month," he told her firmly.  "I bet they'll sell like crazy."

Annie flushed brightly, very pleased, and showed him a pair of lovey-dovey eyes that made me grin like a goblin while Rafael gagged.

The grotto might have been Annie's secret getaway when she was a child; but she was making it abundantly clear that she didn't mind sharing that getaway with the three of us.  I found her generosity very touching, and I'm sure Rafael did, too; very few people ever wanted to share anything with him.  He didn't say anything about the gesture, but sometimes I caught him looking at one of us with an almost wondrous expression on his face, and I knew he was thanking someone for this new stroke of fortune.  For his sake, I was just as thankful.

With Annie's help, I found out how to make all sorts of useful things with glass, cups and bowls and a gem-shaped trinket I tied on the end of a string, like a necklace.  She even showed me how to dye the glass different colors with inks found in forest plants.  Everything I made, I gave to Granny, who exclaimed and preened over the glassware in a way that made me feel silly, but happy.  She put that necklace around her neck and swore she would never take it off--and now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure she never did.

All told, that grotto became like a secret clubhouse.  Sometimes the four of us even spent our evenings there, in the cave, with the candle lit, and we ate simple dinners of wojapi and white mushrooms and young ferns.  Once, Rafael brought his hunting knife along and offered to kill us a quail, but that bothered me very badly, and he changed his mind in seconds.

My friends, too, were my teachers.  I gleaned snippets from Annie about a mysterious full moon ceremony that only the girls were allowed to partake in; Rafael and Aubrey countered with a week-long sun dance that took place in early Spring.  "And did you know?" Aubrey would say to me, right before he threw another interesting fact my way, like:  "There's no word for 'cousin' in Shoshone, because we consider our cousins to be our brothers and sisters."  Or, "Early warriors used to light themselves on fire to scare away hostile colonists.  Oh...that must be why there were more women than men..."

It was fun out there at night, when we lay on our backs by the whispering creek and counted the stars, brilliant, beautiful pinpricks of light on a blue-black canvas, until our eyes blurred; when Aubrey mimicked the owls with commendable accuracy, the coywolves less so, and Annie hummed a lullaby that sounded like an extension of her own heartbeat; when Rafael lay with his head on my belly, my fingers ghosting down his jawline and around the shell of his ear, and we breathed together as one.

Sometimes we fell asleep out there, but never Aubrey, who was good about that sort of thing.  Gently, he'd jostle us awake, and together, the four of us would trek home through the forest.  He'd see Annie to her doorway--her house being the closest to the woods--and then he'd wave goodbye to Rafael and me as he set out west.  And Rafael, never to be upstaged in the gentleman department, walked me home.

It was that last leg of our walk that always proved to be the most interesting.  We'd hold hands, and I'd forget to worry about who might see us, and Rafael would talk with no end in sight.  It was like he was clearing his head of all the various troublesome thoughts he might have accumulated during the day, and I was his sounding board.  I didn't mind being his sounding board.  In fact, I liked it.  I had the feeling that Rafael, for the longest time, had needed somebody to listen to him, someone who wouldn't pity him like his uncle did or start fights with him like the boys from school.  And here I was, practically prepackaged to listen, because there was no possible way that I could interrupt.  Not that that stopped him from cutting himself short and asking for my opinion whenever he was uncertain of himself.

"Could I draw you sometime?" Rafael blurted out one night.

I was completely thrown, at first, because he hadn't been talking about drawing a second ago.  He had been talking about automobiles, how ugly they were and how they ruined the ecosystem.  Then I thought:  Why the heck is he asking me this?  He had definitely drawn me before.  I still had that drawing in my bedroom, the one he'd done in colored pencils, of me and Mom laughing together.

I smiled quizzically at him.  And I swear he almost blushed.  I only say "almost" because his complexion was one of the swarthier ones, and it was a lot less noticeable when his skin colored than, say, when Annie's did.

"I don't mean that," Rafael said.  It still amazed me, the way he could pick up on what I wanted to say just by looking at my face.  "Not you and your mom.  Or you and whoever.  Just you."

I raised my eyebrows, teasing him.  He looked angry, but I knew he wasn't; just flustered.  Honestly, I couldn't imagine what he'd want a drawing of me for.

"Well, too late, anyway," he said, in a gruff, matter-of-fact kind of way.  "I'm already drawing you all the time.  Don't know why I thought I'd be polite about it."  He said the word "polite" like it was a curse.

Now I was curious.  I hadn't seen any of these supposed drawings he was talking about.  I eyed the notebook he had tucked under his arm.  Rafael saw where I was looking; his eyes darkened knowingly.  Maybe "darken" isn't the right word for it.  More like they took on a shadowy overtone, like he was ready for the challenge.

We fought for the notebook; never above trickery, I tickled his sides, and while he laughed uncontrollably, I seized it.

The first few pages were just like the countless other drawings Rafael had shown me, the reservation's flora and fauna mapped out in incredible detail, on occasion interspersed with familiar portraits of his family members.  I looked up from the pages to smile at him.  I wanted to tell him: 
Hey, you know, you're really talented
, because Rafael had this quietly self-deprecating air about him, and I didn't think he appreciated himself as much as he deserved to be appreciated.  Rafael accurately read the expression on my face--as always--and made a derisive sound at the back of his mouth as though to suggest he disagreed.  Typical.

It wasn't long before I'd located the drawings he must have been referring to.

I don't think I'm a particularly vain person.  If anything, I'm the kind of guy who avoids looking at mirrors, if I can help it.

So when I say that Rafael's drawings were absolutely beautiful--I mean it.  Mostly they were just simple portraits, but he had obviously paid a tremendous amount of attention to even the smallest details--the curve of my chin, the length of my fingers, even, I swore, the exact pattern of freckles on my arms--and I felt heat flood my face.  I didn't think they resembled me at all--I mean, of course they
resembled
me, but they were the cleaned up version, the pretty version, and I was the rough draft.  And they confirmed something, too, that I had started to suspect a while ago:  Rafael saw me through rose-colored glasses.

But, I thought, as Rafael took his notebook back decisively, that was okay, because I was pretty sure that I saw Rafael through rose-colored glasses, too.  I supposed that kind of thing, soppy and unbearable, was inevitable among young lovers.

My face, previously warm, felt cold.  Rafael was my boyfriend.  Just like Aubrey was Annie's boyfriend, except Annie was a girl and I was a boy.

Oh, God, I thought.  Because up until that point, I'd somehow categorized Rafael as my friend--my best friend, or one of them--whom I just happened to really enjoy touching.  Maybe it had been easier not to give him a specific label.  Maybe refusing to define him had helped me to pretend this was a little less real.  I was very much my father's son, no matter how much stress Dad had given me these past few months.  And the thought that I might have turned out to be someone completely different from the boy he'd raised terrified me.

"Sky?"

Wasn't I still Skylar?

"Cubby?"

Yes, Cubby, I was still--

My head shot up.  My heart thundered in my ribcage with disbelief.  No.  No way.  It was too good to be true, it had to be an auditory mirage--

But there he was, coming toward us; his long, crow-black hair held back in a loose ponytail; his eyes pale even in the darkness, wet and gray like water under a winter sky; his chest as broad as a barrel, his stomach slightly paunchy with age; his face so familiar that I'd have known it from a distance, from miles away, and I had longed to see it all summer, worried half to death over its owner's safety.