Looks Over(Gives Light Series) (22 page)

I collected my belongings and swung my duffel bag over my shoulder.  I tried to wave goodbye to Noel, but she wasn't interested.  I followed Officer Hargrove out of the room.  I heard Janet in the kitchen, screaming about her CPS check.

Officer Hargrove drove me to the other side of town, to a gated black tenement.  We went inside.

Officer Hargrove's apartment was small, but cozy.  Her refrigerator was covered in her children's schoolwork and Jessica's fanciful crayon drawings.  Next to the front door was an evolving height chart.  It looked like DeShawn had had a formidable growth spurt in the past six months.

"Thanks, Linda," Officer Hargrove said.  A tiny old woman sitting on the couch nodded and shuffled out the door.  Jessica was curled up at the end of the sofa with about a dozen different plastic dolls.  DeShawn sat businesslike on the armchair, kicking his legs.

Officer Hargrove cleared her throat.

"You're going to have to sleep on the couch," she told me.  "I'm sorry.  But--"

I shook my head, smiling.  There was nothing to apologize about.  In fact, I ought to have thanked her--and I would have, if I could figure out a way to do it without words.  I touched her arm and hoped that would suffice.  She smiled at me fleetingly.

"I'm going to see if I can get in touch with your grandmother," Officer Hargrove said. 

She bustled into the kitchen, preoccupied.

"Shawny, let's play dolls," I heard Jessica say.

I left my duffel bag on the floor.  I drew closer, curious. 

DeShawn sat on the floor at the bottom of the armchair.  He sighed.  "All your dolls are girls..."

"Let's make them dance."

"Girls don't dance with girls."

I smiled to myself.  Something about kids was like magic.

I knelt and unzipped my duffel bag, digging through the wrinkled clothes.  I pulled out Kaya's cornhusk doll.  I got up off the floor and handed it to Jessica.

Jessica whole face lit up.  "A present!" she cried.

DeShawn groaned.  "Now I'll never hear the end of it," he said.

"Skylar," Jessica said, "why doesn't she have a face?"

Cornhusk dolls never have faces.  The story goes like this.  At the beginning of the world, the Three Sisters created corn, beans, and squash for the Plains People to eat.  One of the sisters decided to make dolls from the cornhusks for the children to play with.  But one of the cornhusk dolls was so beautiful and vain, she didn't want to do anything except stare at her reflection in the pond.  Ever since then, Indian dolls don't have faces.  After all, we wouldn't want them to jump out of their owners' arms and run for the nearest mirror.

I tickled Jessica's face and she pealed with laughter, slumping over the armrest.

"Kids!" Officer Hargrove yelled from the kitchen, telephone in hand.  "What are we having for dinner?"

"French fries!" Jessica shouted.

"Pizza!" DeShawn shouted.

"Too bad," Officer Hargrove said.  "I want Chinese."

We sat on the sofa and ate wontons and egg drop soup, Officer Hargrove and Jessica in a heated, one-sided argument with the game show on the television.  I smiled, amused.  The two of them made me think of Dad, how he liked to listen to baseball scores over the radio and yell at the newscaster when the scores weren't to his liking.  I missed him.  I tried not to think about that.  I tried telling myself that I was going to see him soon.

DeShawn and Jessica went to bed around ten o'clock.  Officer Hargrove gave me blankets and a pillow for the couch.

She palmed my head, motherly, comforting, before she turned off the standing lamp and went to her room.

I rummaged around in my duffel bag late at night.  By the light of Dad's beeper, I looked through Rafael's drawings.

I smiled.  The first was a simple sketch of Aubrey, his Coke bottle glasses taped to his ears.  The next greatest fashion trend, no doubt.  I rifled through the sketches.  The next one was familiar:  Mom, her hair in a ponytail, her head bent as she tended to a garden.  Rafael had drawn a couple of scenes from his favorite stories, too.  I guessed that the woodland monster was Caliban and the girl in the sailor's clothes was Charlotte.  Monsters were a recurring theme in Rafael's drawings.  He'd drawn the eponymous Beast with long, clawed arms, a gaping maw, and blue eyes.  If that wasn't revealing, I didn't know what was.  I saw a drawing of Annie with devil's horns, steam coming out of her ears, her faceless subjects cowering in terror.  I laughed, long and hard, and I was grateful that my laugh was silent, that I couldn't wake the kids. 

My fingers halted between papers.  Rafael had drawn me.  My pulse missed its rhythm.  It wasn't the first time he had drawn me, but nothing ever really prepared me for seeing my face on paper.  It looked like he had sketched me while we were in school.  My elbow was on the long table, my chin on my fist; my legs were crossed at the ankle and my head was inclined toward my neighbor in conversation, a light smile on my face.  There was something softer, more deliberate in those sketchlines that wasn't apparent in his other sketches.  I didn't have a name for it.

I missed him.  I missed the reservation and everyone on it, but I missed Rafael in a different way.  I missed him the way the high tide misses the moon at day.  How else is it supposed to ebb and flow?  I missed his coarse black hair and his broad arms.  I missed his arms around me.  I missed his lips on mine.

Great, I thought.  I was
that
kind of boyfriend.

15

Buying Back Bear River

I didn't see Noel in school on Monday.  I worried about her all throughout math class.  I caught up with the school's ASL teacher before lunch--a bright, smiling woman with plump cheeks--and asked her if she knew anything about it.

"No, I don't," she said.  "I'll find out for you, okay?"

She never did, though.

In Angel Falls, cops work four ten hour shifts a week; four days on, three days off.  Officer Hargrove usually asked for Saturdays and Sundays off so her kids weren't home alone.  On all other days, except for Mondays, she worked from seven to five and we didn't see her at all until dinnertime.  Dinner was DeShawn and Jessica's favorite time of day, and it was endearing to watch them rush at their mom when she walked through the door, bombarding her with hugs and tales about their day.  Usually she brought takeout with her; the stove didn't see much use in the Hargrove household.  I decided to remedy that one day.  In the morning, I left Officer Hargrove a note; and in the evening, I made rosemary dumplings for dinner, a recipe Annie had taught me over the summer.  Officer Hargrove must have liked them, because she put me in charge of the kitchen from then on.

On Friday, Mrs. Red Clay came for a visit.

I was so happy to see someone--anyone--from the reservation, I could have hugged her.  I didn't, though.  I had no way of knowing how she would react.  She sat at the rickety folding table in the kitchen.  Officer Hargrove gave her a cup of coffee, and the two of us sat down with her.

"To begin with, I would like to thank you on Catherine's behalf for applying for emergency foster care."

"No need," Officer Hargrove said dismissively.  "The kid and I go way back."

She reached for my hair and ruffled it.  I winked at her.

"Our next step is to acquire a family court date.  Once Skylar's case is in front of a judge, I will lobby for permanent custody to be transferred to Catherine."

"That won't be a problem, will it?"

Mrs. Red Clay's face betrayed none of her thoughts.  "When a child is fourteen or older, family court informally deems him competent enough to attest to his own well-being.  If Skylar wants to live on the reservation--"

I did.  More than anything.

"--a judge will take that into serious consideration."

"But that Whitler witch is fighting this tooth and nail."

"Her whole case hinges on Catherine having taken him out of state without permission.  My argument is that Catherine did not take him out of state."

But that was a lie, I thought, alarmed.  Ms. Whitler probably wouldn't have a hard time proving it was a lie.  All she needed to do was take a look at the calendar on the tribal website.  I don't know much about computers; but I've heard it said that once something's out in the World Wide Web, it stays there forever.

"Let me clarify.  The Pleasance Reserve belongs to the Paiute Nation.  The Shoshone Nation recently put in a bid to buy back the Bear River Massacre site.  My argument is that any time Skylar spent on these two sites was not spent in a federally recognized state, but on tribal property.  Tribal property does not adhere to state laws."

"Can you do that?" Officer Hargrove asked dubiously.

"It all hinges on whether the US government will sell Bear River to us."

I wondered how likely that was.

"And that Whitler witch?"

"I will argue, as I have argued, that she does not have Skylar's best interests in mind and therefore ought to be dismissed from the case."

"And if the judge won't dismiss her?"

Mrs. Red Clay was silent for a long moment.  "I was hoping you would provide testimony, should the need arise."

"Of course I will."

This whole conversation was draining.  I felt sorry for the both of them. 

Mrs. Red Clay finished her coffee and left the apartment.  I wished she had stayed a little longer.  I wanted to ask her if the sun dance had started yet, if she knew how Rafael was doing.  Of course, I couldn't ask her anything; but that didn't mean I didn't want to.

I liked walking to school every morning with DeShawn and Jessica.  The elementary school was close to the apartment tenement, the middle school just beyond it.  Every morning I walked the kids to the school gates and waved after them as they ran up the steps to meet with their friends.  If DeShawn forgot his lunch on the kitchen counter--and he often did--I ran back to get it.  If Jessica's shoelaces came untied, she stuck her foot out and waited for me to tie them again.  I held their hands when they crossed the street and invariably, they complained.  I'd always wondered whether Mom and Dad might have had more children if Mom's time with us hadn't been cut short.  Now I knew the answer:  Probably not.  But walking DeShawn and Jessica to school, meeting with them at the end of the day...  It felt sort of like having siblings of my own.

"What do I do if a bully punches me?" DeShawn asked me one day.

I suspected that might be a recurring problem for him.  I didn't know what else to do:  I held up my hands and let him practice punching back until my palms were red.

My preliminary court date came mid-March.  Mrs. Red Clay picked me up and drove me to the family court building in Pima County.

The lobby was stuffy, sweltering, and jam packed with families.  Mrs. Red Clay and I got in line behind a young mother and her two sons.  The lobby walls were decorated with murals depicting happy family activities: a father playing catch with his son, a mother tucking her daughter into bed.  I'm sure the murals were meant to reassure the families whose lives were about to be ripped apart.  The thing is, they were hideous. The faces were grotesque, badly proportioned; the colors, garish, contrasted wildly.  Rafael could have drawn better than this.  The weird color scheming reminded me of an art technique he'd shown me one day.

"This is called chiaroscuro," Rafael said.

He sat in the church cupola with his back to the wall slat.  I sat between his legs, my head against his chest, his notebook on my lap, and he penciled in violent, sinister shading around his sketch, a drawing of the reservation's annual ghost dance.

"I don't know what it means," he said hastily.  "So don't ask me."

I laughed, and I was sure he could feel it in my rippling shoulders.  He rested his chin on my shoulder, tucked the pencil between my fingers, and guided my hand.  The pencil glided across the paper, his fingers entwined with mine, my heart somersaulting in my chest. 

"In the old days," he said, "artists sucked at drawing dimensions.  They hadn't figured out the secret to 3D yet.  You ever notice how really old drawings look flat and childlike?  That's what I'm talking about.  So when these artists wanted to make something in the drawing stand out, they drew it in ultra-light colors and made the rest of the drawing as dark as they could.  It had this weird effect; like...it looked like someone had just turned on a lamp in a badly lit room."

I laughed again at his description.  What a way with words.

"You wanna know something really weird?  The guy who codified chiaroscuro was called Rafaello Sanzio."

Well, that proved it.  It was fate.

"Skylar."

I drew out of my reverie and hurtled back to Earth.  For a moment, even, I was disoriented; I couldn't believe I was standing in this foreign building, so far from the people I loved and the comfort of my home.

I cast another look at the murals on the walls.  A mother breast feeding her baby.

Mrs. Red Clay drew me over to a row of metal detectors.  I jolted.  Why metal detectors?  The security guard made Mrs. Red Clay set aside her handbag.  He made me take off the plains flute hanging from my neck.  The handbag and the flute went on a conveyor belt through a box-shaped machine.  The guard waved a bulky wand over the both of us, nodded, and sent us through the standing metal detectors one at a time.  Mrs. Red Clay collected her handbag; I picked up my flute and draped it again around my neck.  My throat felt strangely bare when I wasn't wearing it.