The Silent Strength of Stones (23 page)

“I left it in the note spot on your dresser.”

“There was no note,” I said. The note spot was where she had always left notes to tell me of the day’s plans. She had always wanted me to know where she was, and she had always wanted to know where I was.

“Oh, Nick. Oh, God. I didn’t know ... I thought at least we’d have that much connection left. I left a note.”

I thought about the morning after she left. The morning I couldn’t breathe. Maybe there had been a note. Maybe Pop or Granddad or the doc had wandered off with it; I had been too far out of things to know. “I never got it,” I said.

“Did you get any of my letters?”

I hunched my shoulders. The thought of the unopened letters in the bottom dresser drawer nagged at me.

“Not a single one? I thought maybe one would get through. I kept saying the same thing over and over. I hoped you would get one.”

“Tell me now,” I said, and bit my lip.

She sat down on the edge of the bathtub, gripping the lip with her hands until her knuckles paled. “You remember what I told you about growing up in my family?”

She used to tell me stories about her family. I had thought she made them all up. I had always thought everybody in her family must be dead, because she never said anything about us meeting them. She never called her parents my grandparents, or her sisters and brothers my aunts and uncles. She didn’t have their names written down anywhere, no addresses or phone numbers for them. And she had never told Pop about them. He had mentioned to me once that he thought she must be an orphan.

She had told me about her brother Rick and his hunting with a bow and arrow, how he could sing the animals to him; and her sister Helena, who could make anything out of clay, so real you thought a clay baby might cry or a clay crow caw; how once Helena gave Mom a clay bunny and it came alive at night and cuddled with her when she was scared. There were other brothers and sisters, and each of them had a talent. She made the stories sound as if they took place long ago, in a faraway world. I had never believed they were true.

She chewed her lower lip for a little while, then ran a hand through her hair and looked up at me. “I grew up in a cage, Nick. In my family they give you a pattern and you’re supposed to fit right inside, and if any of you doesn’t fit, they just cut it off. I had too many pieces they wanted to cut off. I ran away. And then, after I’d been gone for a couple years, I realized there were some things about my family that I didn’t know how to live without, a kind of closeness and belonging and always knowing someone would be there for me—but once you run away from that family, you’re dead to them. I couldn’t go back.

“I found your father instead. He had some of the right things about him. He gave me what I needed .... No, I’m not telling this right. Do you remember what I told you about the memory stones?”

I frowned. It sounded familiar. Something in one of her stories.

“These are stones passed down from one generation to the next. They carry the skills. When I was born everybody decided I was supposed to have the skills of the seamstress, so they took the seamstress stone and pressed it to my forehead every Sunday, training my mind. I grew up with that mindprint, and everybody else had some other mindprint from the memory stones. It was all planned out before we were even born.” She took a deep breath and then let it out in a frustrated rush. “Nobody ever asked me what
I
wanted to be. When I found out I would rather be a painter ... no, this isn’t explaining it, either. I don’t mean to keep making this about me. Remember the wolf tree?”

“Yeah.” We had found the wolf tree on one of our walks by the lake. The wolf tree was a big tree standing in a place where no other trees grew close. It had long bushy limbs all the way to the ground. It looked like a giant shaggy Christmas tree. I hadn’t visited it much since she left, because it reminded me of her. She had always liked to stop and study it.

She said, “You asked me why I left. I left to save your life, and mine. I loved you so much, just the way your father loved me, that I was rooting down into you, giving you only air I had breathed first, keeping you away from the world, stunting and shaping you to my convenience instead of giving you room to become whoever you might be. Because that’s the way I grew up, too, Nick. Even though I was strong enough eventually to run away from home, that was all I knew about being a parent.”

She had been breathing my air for me. Yes.

And I had liked it.

“I was so deep in you I squashed you, and I lost myself, too. Trees that grow too close together never grow all the branches and thickness and height they could grow if they had more room. You’ve seen those stands where the trees are just tall shaded poles, all close, light-starved and skinny, all their green up at the very top where the sun can touch them. Not wolf trees.”

An image of her surfaced in my mind. She held out her arms to the wolf tree, dancing around it without ever touching it, stroking the air near it in a nontactile caress.

“I woke up one morning and realized I had been making you a memory stone. I wasn’t using one that had been in the family for generations, but I was making you a memory stone, as though I could take your character and turn it into just another coded lesson that maybe I could use on some other child or grandchild. I was doing the very thing I hated most in my own parents,
and I never even thought about it
. I had to leave, Nick. I had to stop myself.

“Is any of this making sense?”

I curled my left hand up in front of me. “A green stone,” I said.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“You said, ‘Hold on tight. Hold on tight.’ And then light came out of it.”

“Yes.”

“What happened to it?”

She shook her head. “No, Nick. You don’t really want to know. Look at you. You look wonderful. You look healthy and strong and self-possessed. You look like a wolf tree. I know you hate me now, but I think I made the right decision.”

“What did you do with the stone, Mom?”

Her eyes brimmed with unshed tears. “I guess it can’t hurt. You’ll never find it. I blessed it and threw it in the lake.”

I frowned and thought about that, about dipping my fingers in the water every morning, about ice kisses from the winter lake. I thought about Evan’s snow crystal: was that something like a memory stone? And then I thought about Evan, who liked puzzles, and heard his voice in my head saying, “They’re paying attention to all the wrong things.” There was a heat in my chest and behind my eyes. I wasn’t sure what it meant. I rubbed my eyes and tried to think of the questions I should be asking.

“I’m not a wolf tree,” I said. “Here’s Pop. Here’s me.” I held up my index fingers, close to each other, almost touching.

“Oh,” It was a small sad moan. “I couldn’t change that. All I could do was take myself away.”

“Away to where?”

“Away south.” She stood up. We faced each other across a space that was too small for a normal conversation. I was surprised to find that I was taller than she. “I went to San Francisco. I was very confused. I wanted so much to—” She put out her hand and pressed her palm to my chest. Shock jolted through me, followed by a wine warmth, bitter and sweet as a hard green apple, then finally just sweet as late afternoon summer sun, inviting me to bask. I breathed in her scent of tea and toast and breathed out the taste of myself, the taste of Evan’s and my blood, fading ....

“Stop it!” I said. “Stop it.”

She jerked her hand away.

It took me half a minute to stabilize my breathing. “Don’t you dare make that connection, not if you’re going to break it again.” My voice was low and harsh. It hurt coming out.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“Talk to me. Don’t touch me.”

She put her hands behind her back. She perched on the rim of the tub again. “I’m sorry.” She let her head fall back and just sat, breathing shallowly, for a little while. Then she straightened.

“I tore myself away from here,” she said. She pressed her hand against her own chest between her breasts. “It hurt. I did it anyway. I went to San Francisco, because I’d lived there before, after I ran away from my family. And I found something wonderful.” She dropped her hand to her thigh. “I found a relative I’d never met before. I was looking for a place I could belong without—without gluing myself to other people the way I had glued myself to your father and you, and I found this group of people living in a big house together, and one of them was Dru. There’s a thing you can do—Dru taught me—where you—” She held out her left hand and gestured above it with her right. Her motions resembled the ones Evan and Willow had made above my hand, above theirs. Threads of pale blue light shone above my mother’s hand. She looked up at me. She was sparkling, her eyes dancing and saying,
Share this with me
.

“Yeah?” I said. “So?”

The light faded from her face and from above her hand. “When Dru did it, she had these beads of purple and red light. She said that was one way members of our family could recognize each other. Show me your hand, Nick.”

I shoved my fists into my pockets. “It’s all right. Never mind.”

She lowered her hands to her lap. Her face went calm. “Dru has been teaching me a lot of things; Ways to exist without twisting myself and everything around me. I’m not very good at it yet, Nick, but I’m learning .... I know I let you down in more ways than one. You had to do your
plakyanish
all alone.”

“
Plaka
—huh?”

She frowned. “Did you get sick? Sometime soon after I left?”

I rarely got sick, and even days when I had a temperature or a cold Pop made me go to school. I thought back to being thirteen and fourteen. I’d had a pretty bad week in there somewhere, but I’d gone to school anyway, except for one day when I was running a temperature of 104°. I’d had some hallucinations that really delighted me. Ghosts had talked to me, some of them the ghosts of animals. Now that I thought about it, one was a white wolf, even. “Yeah,” I said.

“It’s a teenage thing. That’s when you grow into your powers. I wasn’t sure it would happen to you, because your father’s not—well, he is, a little, but mostly not—like me. But I knew you were like me. I should have been there for you. You needed a guide. It must have been horrible and confusing.”

“No,” I said. “I was just sick, a little. Nothing happened.”

“I should have been there.” She made a sound like a kitten’s growl. “But it’s better that I wasn’t.” She clutched her head. When she let go, her hair stood up in little twisted spikes. “I wish I could make it right, what I did, leaving like that, but I don’t know how.”

Part of me wanted to forgive her, to say it out loud and make her feel better, get this whole thing over with and go back to thinking she was the most wonderful person in the world. Part of me wanted to spit fire at her and burn her to cinders and bones. Leaving her twisting had a certain appeal, too. I sat with the heat inside me, staring at her and wondering what I really wanted.

“Tell me what you need from me,” she said, meeting my eyes, her face placid, her hair wild.

“What have you got?”

“I love you. I never stopped loving you, and I never will, no matter what.”
Believe me
, her voice pushed, and because I wanted to, because I was no longer under Evan’s protection, because it might be true despite evidence to the contrary, I believed her.

I slumped against the sink counter, for a moment unable to breathe.
She loves me.
I opened my mouth, but no air came in.
It doesn’t have to hurt
. I coughed out fear. I tapped my chest with my open hand and my lungs remembered how to draw again.

“Are you all right?” she asked, her voice tight and urgent, and I remembered what it was like to have a mother.

I coughed a couple more times. My breathing steadied. My face felt hot. I nodded.

“Because I can—I can—whatever you need—”

“I’m okay,” I said. My voice was a little scratchy. I filled the water glass and sipped from it.

She watched me for a little while, her hands reaching, hovering, dropping. I had told her not to touch me. I could see it was difficult for her, but she honored my instruction. “All right,” she said at last. “What else I could do for you is”—she touched one hand with the other, miming the gestures that summoned a light signature—“see what light you have, and try to teach you how to use it. Dru has been teaching me so many things. She’s been teaching me how to raise a child without”—she bit her bottom lip; she curled her arms out in front of her, making a circle by grasping one hand with another—“without binding it so tight to you that it doesn’t know how to breathe on its own.” She dropped her arms. “I have a little girl,” she said. “You have a little sister. I can let her run into the next room without following her right away. I’m learning.”

I blinked at her. “Jeez, Mom. Jeez! How old is she?”

“Almost four.”

Mom must have been pregnant when she left, then. “She’s Pop’s? And you never told him?”

She stared at her hands in her lap. “Dru says I have to. I am so afraid.” She looked up at me again. “But that’s not—that’s for next time. Next time I have to come as myself, and I’ll bring Anika. I’m not quite strong enough yet, but I’m getting there.”

I glanced back at the mirror. “How can you come as not yourself?”

“Dru taught me.”

“Teach me.” If this warding stuff worked the way it looked like it worked—Pop not recognizing Mom in spite of spending a whole dinner with her, and her making stupid mistakes—it would be a great skill for a detective to have. I wondered if I could disguise myself as a tree. No. Not a good idea. You’d have to stand still too long.

“You have to have a certain kind of light in your hand. You have to be a green or a blue. Will you let me look?”

“I’m a blue, I guess,” I said. “But Evan’s yellow, and he can ward.”

“What?” Wide-eyed, she glanced toward the door. “You’re blue? Evan—Evan? What? He said—oh, Nick.” She broke into a dazzling smile. “You found family too?”

Was that what I had found? Blood brothers. “Yeah.”