The Way We Bared Our Souls (4 page)

“You know more than you think,” Jay said. “I can tell. Dakota and I have mingled with a lot of souls over the years. Yours is powerful. And highly reactive.”

I wanted to tell Jay to repeat that to my muscles and my neurons on the off chance they’d listen.

“But,” he continued, “it is also entirely exposed right now. It’s vulnerable. And you’re in danger of compromising it.”

I nodded, overwhelmed.

TranquiLo. Take two dozen and call me in the morning.

“I have something for you,” Jay said.

He drew a small object from his pocket and held it out to me. It was a horse figurine carved from crystal the color of turquoise, and it was beautiful.

“For me?” I said.

“Yes, dear. A symbol of your journey.”

“Why?” I said, ignoring the “symbol” aspect. “A present? You don’t even know me.”

“It’s not forever,” he said, tenderly placing the horse in my hand. “You’ll give it back when you’re done with it. After your energy is healed.”

“How do you know I’m going to be healed?” I said. Maybe he knew of magical herbs and potions that could mend my body and allow me to start over fresh. What was this unfamiliar feeling? Hope? Why did it have its locus in a total stranger? But the man no longer seemed like a stranger. He seemed like a friend. Like an uncle, perhaps.

Jay merely smiled. “We can all be healed,” he said. “At any moment. You just have to change your perspective. You’ll learn. You’ll see.” He placed his hand on the coyote’s head. Dakota seemed much calmer now. “Your pain. My pain,” Jay said. Dakota whimpered again. “Her pain. The mountain’s pain when it’s burning. The caterpillar’s pain when it’s transforming. It’s all connected. It’s all one. And transparent. You just have to see it clearly.”

I didn’t know what to say.
See
pain clearly? Wasn’t feeling it clearly bad enough? Plus, if I did have MS, one of the first things to go would be twenty/twenty vision.

“I was meant to meet you today,” Jay said, once again disarming me with his beatific smile. He was like the pope of the desert. “You need my help. You need to feel the universe’s larger plan for you.”

“A plan? For me?” Lately it felt as if the universe only cared about me as far as it could throw me. Suddenly I was afraid that Jay was going to recruit me for Teen Bible Study.

“I may not look the part,” he said, flicking his ponytail, “but I know some things that might be useful to you if you’re willing to open your soul to them. I perform rituals. Ancient, time-honored rituals, born in these deserts by their native inhabitants. And one of these rituals can release you from your burden.”

My eyes must have widened a bit too much because Jay immediately altered his tone.

“But be warned. I’m offering you powerful medicine, and power can easily swing between positive and negative. If you give it a chance, however—if you embrace it with a full heart—the ritual can eliminate your pain and disease and teach you to accept everything fate throws your way. With joy.”

Okay, so maybe he was talking about something more like a hippie support group. I could get on board with that. In New Mexico everyone is familiar with the mumbo-jumbo vocabulary of spirituality, but that’s different from actually believing in sacred healing and medicine men and stuff. Still, I couldn’t help picturing Jay waving a turkey feather over my head and pronouncing me cured. I imagined him banging on a painted drum until the evil spirits were expunged. Clearly I didn’t know anything, really, about shamans or rituals.

“But is that . . . allowed?” I said soberly, to be respectful. Jay looked at me curiously. “For me to be included? Even though I’m not . . . ? I just thought those rituals were sort of trademarked by the Native Americans.”

Jay smiled indulgently. “The spirit world is for everyone, Consuelo. We’re all related. Our underlying energies are one. Remember? Speaking of which, when I perform the ceremony, you must have four friends with you, four friends who are similarly suffering and who also aim to safeguard their souls.”

I slipped the turquoise horse into the pocket of my hoodie.

Four?
Four friends who’d be willing to do an ancient Indian ritual with me? When one of our favorite pastimes was belting out rap songs from the back of a pickup truck while we drove from pool to pool? I knew Jay’s cure seemed too good to be true.

“I can see you’re wary,” he said. “But it would benefit you to trust me. I may not be Batman, but I know how to channel the superpowers. Think it over. If you decide to participate, meet me at Pecos Park on Camino de las Madres on Saturday evening. Sunset. I’ll lead you to the pueblo ruins where we will make our magic. Remember, there must be five of you. A full star. That’s essential. You have nothing to lose but your burdens.”

He gave a little whistle, and Dakota stood at attention, then the two of them turned to walk back into the Tinderbox.

Back in my car, I lost track of how long I sat in thought. What kind of madness was I entertaining here? No matter how kind and trustworthy Jay’s eyes were, it didn’t change the fact that he was a New Agey witch doctor who’d come out of the woods with a freaking pet coyote, and now he was headed back there as if he were on some kind of twenty-first-century, dope-driven vision quest. There was still a chance that modern medicine would save me. Or that I didn’t have MS after all. It was only Minor Silliness. Mañana Sadness.

And there was another major hindrance to following his instructions. I didn’t have four friends with problems.

IN THE FRONT OF THE
classroom, Indians were being massacred. A movie screen had dropped from the blackboard to show an all-too-realistic reenactment of the 1864 “Battle” of Sand Creek, the ruthless murder of more than a hundred Cheyenne and Arapaho people—mostly women and children—by American soldiers at a peaceful encampment in Colorado. The film was part of our section on the history of Native Americans in the West. Gun and cannon fire lit up the screen, terrified women shrieked words I didn’t understand, teepees burned to the ground, wounded old men were mutilated as they begged for mercy, and then someone dimmed the lights. I saw the flashing explosions. . . .

And then I saw nothing. The room went completely dark. I lifted my hand to my face. Nothing. I was blind.

Though I’d already been frightened by the scene in front of me, somehow not being able to see it was a thousand times worse. The military gunfire continued to blast into unarmed Indians. The detonations and the screaming were all amplified now that I couldn’t temper the horrible sounds with images. For a second it felt as if the mayhem was actually
in
my body. But no, it was just a movie. I couldn’t lose my mind along with my sight. Not now. My eyes were intact—just completely blinded.

Again.

This had happened once before. The last time I went dark was right after someone switched on a strobe light during a Justin Timberlake song at a Weekends on Wednesdays party. But then, my vision had come back in seconds.

This time was different.

This time, it wasn’t going away. And the longer I waited, the worse the feeling got. I sat very still in my seat and listened to the kaleidoscopic sounds of gunfire and screaming. I knew I had friends on either side of me, but that almost made things worse—to be surrounded by people I cared about but couldn’t see. I felt like I had disappeared. Like I was a black hole. Soulless.

The bell rang, and the movie cut out. What would I do now? The room filled with the sounds of shuffled papers and hitched-up backpacks as everyone prepared to file out to their next class.

“Aren’t you coming, Lo?”

“No,” I said, looking in the direction of Alex’s voice and her violet-scented body spray. I knew that the room would be empty next period. “Not right now, anyway. I feel pretty nauseated—same thing as yesterday, you know? I’m just going to chill here for a few minutes.”

“Do you want me to stay with you? Or take you to the nurse’s office?”

I could hear her voice, but did she even exist? Did I?

TranquiLo. Take with water. Do not operate heavy machinery. Limit exposure to sun.

“No thanks,” I said. “I just want to be alone, I think, until it passes.” I didn’t ask if Mrs. Laramie was still in the room because I didn’t want to betray my blind condition, but judging by the quiet, Alex and I were the only two people still there.

“Okay,” Alex said with concern in her voice. “Feel better, doll. I’ll let Mr. Rodriguez know that you’re running a few minutes behind for English.”

“Thanks, Alex,” I said, closing my eyes to another blanket of darkness and resting my cheek on the cold desk. “For everything. I mean it.” Alex rubbed my back, then departed, taking her floral-smelling skin with her, leaving me in a state of nothingness.

• • •

About an hour (I think—I couldn’t consult a clock) after the final bell rang, my sight came back. First the enameled wood of the desk shuddered into view, and then I slowly raised my head to the window and saw the sun penetrate the venetian blinds. The sun. I would never complain about it again.

Before I could start contemplating a life of solar worship, I was assailed by a rush of horrific thoughts. What if I’d been walking down the hallway when the blindness struck? What if I’d been driving? I would’ve plowed into a roadside saguaro stand or something. I could have
killed
someone. What if my parents found out things were this bad? Or Dr. Osborn? No, my current condition was totally unsustainable. I wouldn’t be able to hide these symptoms for much longer. Everything was going to change. Life as I knew it was going to be totally upended. I’d never felt so scared, so disoriented. I gathered my things and rushed down the empty hallway and out into the parking lot. I had to do something, and I had to do it immediately.

The way I saw it (now that I could actually see), I had one option, as crazy as it sounded. Well, maybe not so crazy for Santa Fe.

Jay’s ritual.

But to do that, I’d need four friends.

I couldn’t imagine taking Juanita to meet Jay. I loved her, but for one, she’d never take something like this seriously, and for two, what was her burden? That she’d recently gotten stuck behind a minivan full of kids in the drive-thru of Taco Sandy’s? That Luis persisted in buying her regular instead of diet at lunchtime? That her boobs were so big they caused her mild back pain? And Alex had nothing wrong with her except for what she termed her “spaghetti legs.” Everybody loved her. She was . . . happy. Like a character at the end of one of her mother’s romance novels. My friends weren’t shallow; they just weren’t searching for answers right now. They didn’t even have the questions.

No. If I was going to find real suffering, something more akin to mine, I would have to get creative. I would have to find the outsiders, those who didn’t drink from the agua of our lunchtime clique.

Like Jay said, I had to save my soul.

And to save my soul I needed to take a big risk. I needed to convince others to save theirs.

And suddenly I knew just the person who could help me do it.

• • •

I drove past my own house and parked three doors down, in Kit Calhoun’s driveway. Kit and I had grown up together and were in the same year in school, but he and I hadn’t talked much since our ill-fated “romance” three summers before. Today, however, he was my gateway to Thomas Kamara.

I was perhaps a little
too
well aware of the fact that Thomas had been hanging out in my neighborhood recently, always glued to a skateboard. Kit appeared to be teaching the Liberian orphan how to emulate Tony Hawk. Thomas was a fast learner. He also happened to look amazing with his shirt off. I’d seen them in the middle of my road, doing ollies and kickflips and skating in the empty pool in Kit’s backyard, which had been converted into a half-pipe. A lot of kids used to congregate there for long skating sessions, but Kit was more of a loner these days. Thomas, another notorious loner, seemed to be the only one allowed in.

How can I describe Thomas? In brief, he was a really hot student from Africa who looked half the time as if he wanted you dead and the other half as if he was about to hand you a bouquet of flowers and sweep you off your feet. There was just something so intense about him. Vibrant. Even when he seemed clouded or out of it at school, Thomas still had this piercing quality to him. And then there was the matter of that poem he wrote, the words he’d never meant for me to see. Right now it was those words more than anything that steered me toward him. But more on that later.

I let myself in through the Calhouns’ side gate, my childhood route, and walked around the house to the backyard. There was Kit, not skateboarding, exactly, but straddling the rusty diving board with his wooden deck on his lap, staring into the empty deep end of the pool. He was either lost in thought or ignoring me on purpose.

I suspected that Kit harbored some malice toward me. Which was understandable for two reasons: One, I might have been responsible for both his initiation into romance and his first broken heart. The summer between eighth grade and high school—the summer that decided many social fates—Kit and I hung out almost every day. In the not-too-distant past, Kit’s swimming pool had been filled with water and was a huge draw for me and the other kids in the neighborhood. Kit, on the other hand, had less appreciation for it. “I wish I could drain it and turn it into a skatepark,” he’d always say. Eventually, he got his wish.

But back during those lazy summer pool sessions, Kit and I got to know each other, floating head to head on inflated rafts in the blazing desert sunshine, drifting with the music that was always playing from his stereo. We talked about our parents, what we thought high school would be like, where we saw ourselves five years after graduation. We’d seen all the same high school comedies and romances and had read a lot of the same books. We felt qualified to declare to each other what mistakes we wouldn’t repeat.

“You’re going to get popular and forget about me,” Kit had teased. “You’re going to be one of
those
girls. I’ve got a bad feeling, Lo. You’ll start dating a generic senior quarterback on the first day of school. His name will be Rocco, and he’ll think Pink Floyd is a flavor of ice cream.”

I laughed and dismissed that prediction, throwing a beach ball at him. “Well,
my
crystal ball tells me you’re dead wrong,” I said. But secretly I thought that all sounded pretty great. Not the forgetting-about-Kit part, obviously, but . . . just . . . meeting new people, trying different things. And it turned out that Kit wasn’t too far off in his prediction. Except it was a junior lacrosse player named Simon, and it was the second week of school.

I’d never revealed this to Alex and Juanita, but Kit and I had kissed a little bit before that summer was over. I’d never kissed anyone before and . . . maybe I needed someone to practice on so I wouldn’t embarrass myself at the high school parties in my fantasy future. I admit that sounds awful, really mean-girl of me. But it’s the bitter truth. One day I just grabbed Kit in the pool and got to know his lips. They were soft, eager, and tasted a little like sunblock and chlorine. It was nice, but I didn’t feel that spark I’d read about in so many nineteenth-century novels, and I didn’t want to go into high school already attached to someone. Still, I thought we’d stay friends after I told him that even though I really cared about him, I wasn’t ready to be his girlfriend, that I wanted to start the new year with a clean slate.

But he wanted nothing to do with me afterward.

And though I made small efforts here and there, I all but avoided him because I felt so guilty for hurting his feelings.

And then there was the second reason Kit was cagey and despondent, around not just me but everyone. He was in mourning. The previous year he’d fallen completely Mohawk over Vans
for Lucita, a beautiful Zuni girl and a recent transplant to our school from the Four Corners area. She had eyes that everybody wanted to wallow in, eyes like the deep end of an inground swimming pool.

But Lucita died.

She was driving home to the rez from Kit’s house one night and she ran off the road. She overcorrected and flipped her car. She wasn’t wearing a seat belt. I don’t think she was texting at the time or anything. It was just one of those stupid errors that inexperienced drivers make, like not yielding to school buses or taking twenty minutes to parallel park. Except this time the mistake was fatal. On a weeknight after school when everyone else her age was joyriding, eating junk food, drinking, evading homework, figuring out what to do next to prolong the bliss of not doing anything much, Lucita bled out on the shoulder of an empty road.

Gone.

Ever since Lucita’s death, Kit had mostly isolated himself. I never heard music from his backyard anymore. He barely said a word at school, unless he was in American history class, during which he seemed universally outraged, especially about our government’s treatment of the Indian tribes.

So I wasn’t all that surprised when Kit started hanging out with Thomas last spring. But it wasn’t as if they were having long, intimate discussions over milk shakes. Actually, I’d never even heard them talk about personal things. They just seemed to be trying to leave all their feelings on the pavement. They were both so distant. I guess I was starting to relate to them.

I wondered how much Thomas knew about my history with Kit, or if Kit had ever said any resentful things about me. If Thomas thought I was a bad person who broke people’s hearts for no good reason. Well, I truly hoped not.

I was going to need his help.

“Kit?” I said now, unsure of my right to be in his backyard. He finally looked up, but he did it with such sluggishness he seemed barely alive.

“Lo? What are you doing here?”

“I’m actually looking for Thomas,” I said, “but I take it he’s not here.”

“Kamara? You guys know each other?”

“No . . . not exactly,” I said, remembering lines from Thomas’s poem:
He thinks you must be deaf / Not to hear the shots, / See the blood.
For a second I thought Kit was going to give me the third degree, but then he visibly lost the required energy.

“Nope. I’m alone.” He sighed. “But have a seat. Stay a while.”

Okay, so maybe he didn’t hate me.

I sat down on the edge beside the diving board. To populate the silence, I started tossing twigs into the pool, and from there I kind of understood why Kit was wearing that look of fierce concentration when I arrived. That gaping void of a view was rather entrancing. Such a deep, seductive sanctum. All sun-bleached concrete cut through with black tire marks. A person could easily disappear in it.

“I still don’t know how you convinced your mom to drain the pool,” I said, making conversation. “We used to have so much fun swimming.”

“Yeah, well, she was sort of desperate to do something to make me feel better since. . . .”

I nodded. So we were going to go there.

“I understand. And I’m so sorry, Kit. How long has it been now?”

“Eight months, three days, and two hours since the car accident. Eight months, three days, and forty-five minutes since she died.”

I looked up at him. I was crushed about my aunt Karine’s death too, but I wasn’t keeping such a morbid and precise timeline.

“I see,” I said. Lucita had been really special—like movie-star special—and Kit had adored her. I hadn’t known any other high school couples who seemed so in love. Seeing them hold hands down the hallway, or make themselves a table for two at lunch, or dart around Kit’s front yard playing with squirt guns, it had almost made me feel . . . well, not exactly jealous. But as if I had missed out on something wonderful. And then all that happiness was obliterated in a random instant by the side of the road. I tried to visit Kit after it happened, but he refused to leave his room. In many ways, he still hadn’t emerged.