Mary lay on her back on her bed, her legs dangling over the side. I lay down beside her, second nature to me, and we stared at the fake candle lights hanging from her ceiling. The metal fan hummed on the floor, cool air coasting our faces.
"It was Paul's idea," Mary spoke to the ceiling. "Me taking out a blood law."
I should have felt surprised, but I didn't. "He came up with all this?"
"When I first came back here," Mary said, "I talked to Paul. I called him a hypocrite. You punish murder by committing murder yourself? Paul said, 'You're right.' We sat down and tried to figure out how we could get the council to realize how messed up this is. The second blood law was Paul's idea."
"He's suicidal," I said, and wanted to throw up. Nothing bothered me more than suicide did. Years later I still didn't know whether Mom had intended to take her own life, or whether she'd only wanted to end the pain.
I felt Mary's shoulder digging into mine when she shrugged. "The old ways have to go," she said. "Doesn't matter that Uncle Gay's the Daigwani. If he'd never been born it would've been somebody else."
"You're going to ignore him?" I asked. Ignoring your Daigwani definitely wasn't Shoshone law.
"I told you," Mary replied. "The old ways have got to go."
"But--"
"We'll see what Paul says," Mary said.
"How can Paul do this to Sky?" I asked.
Mary shook her head. "How should I know?"
"I'm asking you," I said. "If Paul's suicidal, he can kill himself. I don't want you having anything to do with it. I'm asking you this time. Stay away from him."
"For Skylar," Mary deadpanned.
I didn't see what was so bad about that. "I love Sky."
"Please," Mary said.
"I do," I said. "I didn't love me. I didn't know it was even possible to love yourself. But then Sky loved me, and I realized there must have been something really, really good about me, something I'd never noticed before. Everything Sky loves is good. He loved me, and he made me love me, and that's--you can't not love that, Mary. You can't not love him."
"What are you on about?" Mary asked. "I love you. Uncle Gay loves you. That wasn't enough?"
"You guys have to love me," I said. "You're my family. Sky didn't have to love me. He did it anyway."
Mary settled down. Mary sighed, and I felt it resonate through me. In the past I would have known what it meant. I didn't now.
At some point Mary decided she wanted to listen to goth metal on her stereo. Normally I would have stuck around to hear her imitate the growls, something she was really good at. Right now I wanted to talk to Uncle Gabriel. I crept out of the bedroom. I stole down the hall and found Uncle Gabe in the sitting room armchair. Rosa played a calming tune on the piano, but Uncle Gabriel's eyes were out of focus. I didn't know where Caleb had gone.
"Can I talk to you?" I asked Uncle Gabriel, ready to hide.
We went outside the house. It was chilly out, but I hadn't thought to bring a jacket. Neither had he. The sky was pitch black between the glassy stars. God, but there were so many stars just looking at them dizzied me. It felt like they revolved around my head.
"A while back," I muttered, "you asked me if you were a bad parent."
Uncle Gabriel hoisted himself up onto one of the southern oak's lower, sturdier branches. I wished I had the confidence to do the same. I sat against the trunk instead.
"You're not," I said. "You... You're good. You took real good care of us."
"I didn't know you were dating Skylar," Uncle Gabriel said.
"That's not your fault," I said. "I never told you."
"I couldn't see it?" Uncle Gabriel said. "As much as I love you, I couldn't tell you loved this kid?"
"Maybe I wasn't open with you," I muttered. I put my hands in the soil and felt the earth breathe. "We're Shoshone. We're tight-lipped. When our babies are born, we cover their mouths so they stop crying."
"I don't know," Uncle Gabriel said beneath his breath.
"I do," I said. "You've had a rougher time than all the rest of us put together. And you still took care of us through it. And it's okay if you're not perfect at--at whatever it is you gotta do. Because you're doing good."
"I swear to God," Uncle Gabriel said, looking down at me. "I promise I wasn't trying to replace your father."
It took me a while to figure out what to say. I knew he was telling me the truth. Uncle Gabriel only ever lied if it was to protect somebody. Nothing on the planet could have protected me from what my father was.
"If you'd been my father all along," I said, "I would have been better off."
Uncle Gabriel visibly froze. "Don't say that."
"I'm not saying I don't love my dad," I explained. " 'Cause I'm always gonna love my dad. Doesn't matter what he's done. But that's the problem. Loving my dad is the reason I grew up hating myself. Wearing his face like it's mine is the reason I never completely trusted myself not to follow in his footsteps. If I'd never had to love my father, I could have felt free to hate him, like everybody else does. If I'd looked like you--"
I would have liked that. I would have liked having light brown hair and light brown eyes and a widow's peak.
"I would have been lucky," I said quietly. "That's all."
Uncle Gabriel had dimples. So did I.
"From now on," Uncle Gabriel said, "we're going to be honest with each other. We're going to share what's on our minds. Even if we think it's stupid. Alright?"
"Does that mean I don't have to go live with Grandma Gives Light?" I asked.
"Where did you get that crazy idea?" Uncle Gabriel asked, bewildered.
"You said you should've left me with her," I mumbled.
"I shouldn't have said that," Uncle Gabriel explained. "People say things they don't mean when they're feeling hurt. I'm sorry, Rafael."
I felt better.
"Besides," Uncle Gabriel said, laughing. "You're turning eighteen in March. I can't send you anywhere."
"Holy shit," I said. "I'm gonna be a grownup."
"Language, Rafael."
"Grownups curse all the time," I protested.
"I don't," Uncle Gabriel pointed out.
Sometimes I thought Uncle Gabriel was the only grownup who mattered. Sometimes I thought he wasn't a grownup at all. We tell people when they reach a certain age that they can take the training wheels off and make decisions on their own. That doesn't mean they ever gain the confidence that they'll always make the right ones.
"Are you sure about this?" Uncle Gabriel asked suddenly.
I struggled to remember what we were talking about. "Huh?"
It wouldn't have done me any good. "You and Skylar," Uncle Gabriel said. "I'm not trying to make light of your feelings. But are you sure it's appropriate? Considering?"
"Considering?" I repeated, dumbfounded.
"Your past," Uncle Gabriel said. "You're young now. I know you think you have the whole world figured out--"
The opposite.
"--but nothing will change that your father killed his mother. There will be times when it will come out of nowhere to haunt you. You notice, for example, that he looks like his mother when he smiles a certain way. You remember a story your father told you when you were little, but you can't share it with him."
Those moments had already come. Sky always looked like his mother. I always remembered my father.
"We're supposed to love each other," I said.
Uncle Gabriel pulled his gigantic feet up on the tree branch. I don't know how it didn't snap. "What do you mean?"
"Me and Sky," I said. "We were supposed to love each other. It makes sense to me. Doesn't it make sense to you?"
Uncle Gabriel waited to hear what I had to say.
"Because that's how we heal the past," I said. "We can't bring his mom back. We can't get my dad to apologize. We can only love each other. We love each other, and that turns the tie between our families into a good one. It turns the pain into love. It's like magic."
I'
d always believed in magic. Not rabbits in top hats, witches on brooms, but a lingering embrace. A cool spring day. Recognizing yourself in someone else's eyes.
"I'm sorry," Uncle Gabriel said.
"What for?" I asked.
"Because you're a smarter kid than I necessarily acknowledge. You're a good deal smarter than me."
"Naw," I said. "Nobody's smarter than you."
"That's what you think right now. You'll see someday."
We went back into the house and Uncle Gabriel listened to the radio with Rosa. I decided to read a book. Two hours later I'd only finished three more pages in Charlotte Doyle, but that's always the way with me. I turned my ears instead to Mary and Caleb's muffled chatting a few rooms away. I'd given Caleb my room to sleep in, least until he built his own room, or his own house.
"How's your story, Rafael?" Rosa asked, her smile subdued.
I told her about Charlotte smacking the Captain across the face. That chick was boss.
It was only later, when everyone else had gone to sleep, that I stole back outside and across the reservation. I didn't care how late it was; if Sky was awake, I wanted to see him. I climbed up the side of his house and knocked on his window, but I needn't have, because the light was on in his bedroom. He slid the window open within three seconds, grinning wanly. He must'a been so worried about his dad.
"Do you wanna go somewhere?" I asked him.
He was too chicken to climb out the window after me. He turned his lamp off and crept down the stairs. I waited for him by his front porch. He smiled at me when he came outside, his jacket zipped up to his chin. His curls looked funny with the noisy wind blowing them.
"C'mon," I said.
I took him by the hand. It said a lot about his confidence in me that he never protested, or got fed up with me, or tried to go home. Wariness tingled in Sky's palm lines when we walked east into the woods. I asked him if he was okay and he beamed at me; and for a moment all I could do was stare at him in scant moonlight, overwhelmed that he existed. He asked me what the matter was by touching my hands. His fingers were warm. I bent my head to kiss him, and he anticipated it, rising on his toes, his hands catching in my jacket. His mouth felt so soft. There wasn't a single part of him that didn't feel soft and kind. I wondered if I was shaking. I wondered because he held me tightly, his hands sliding down to my waist, burning me, but in a good way, and if he hadn't I might have left the planet. I held him, too. I held him because he was too precious not to hold. My arms went around his back, my hands spread against the dip in his spine. I laid my head on top of his head, folding him into me. He laid his arms on my chest and his hair tickled my chin and my throat. He was my favorite resting place. He was the reason I felt like a good person, and wanted to keep being that person.
We went to the hillock in the woods, moonlight spilling over the taut rope bridge. We crossed the bridge, the arroyo spilling down under our feet. The more nervous Sky looked, the tighter he gripped my hand, pressing himself into my back. I liked that I was the one who made him feel safe. We walked the bridge out of the woods and into the badlands, Sky gazing about in a stupor.
The eastern side of the badlands was a place nobody visited all that much. For starters, big game animals didn't hang out there, and the clay wasn't porous enough for dry farming. A few years back the tribal council had discussed turning it into a tourist attraction, but the tribe had voted against it. If you'd seen it, though, you would'a known why they'd considered it. Five Old West houses decorated the gritty sand, roofs splintered, windows missing. A water trough stood next to what might have been a sidewalk once. The drinking tray was bone dry. The poles for the livestock had crumbled with age.
"Freaking ghost town," I grunted. "That's not the cool part. Come on."
We walked a little farther. The canyon opened up on a deep, smooth crater. The crater was covered in a natural glass deposit, something you'll see in the desert sometimes, especially after lightning strikes. The glass reflected every detail in the sky above it: the smoky stars with fluttering candle wicks; the coal blackness of the shivering night. The moon settled low over the crater, and where the silvery-yellow glass caught its image the reflection flared a startling sun red, rising to kiss the spectral satellite. For that exact reason we called this place the Sun-And-Moon Crater. It was the only spot on earth where Moon and Sun, quarreling lovers, put aside their differences.
Sky looked around in awe. Sky sat down between the peyote flowers, spidery and white on fat cactuses, and the carpet echeveria, fanning, apple-green petals thick and hardy with bashful pink tips. A leaf bug traipsed across the sand, and Sky put his hand down and it crawled onto his knuckles. Sky's face lit up. I didn't know how he could stand it. I loved nature more than anything, but I could'a done without the insects.
The moon looked watery and blue tonight, veins delicate, craters frothing with sea foam. He was Titan, the Mermaid Moon, and we were standing on Jupiter. He didn't hold a candle to the kaleidoscope around Sky's shoulders, the blues inside of reds, the reds inside of whites and the whites inside of purples. I watched Sky letting the leaf bug down, back into the desert; and I realized I couldn't tell him about his dad. It would hurt him. Hell, it even hurt me. Why couldn't Paul get it through his head that Sky was the most important person on the planet? If Paul cared about Sky, how could he go through with this?
Sky looked at me weirdly. I realized I was still standing, dumbass that I was. His gaze lingered, and for a moment I was afraid he'd somehow read my mind. Wouldn't'a been the first time. I sat next to him begrudgingly. I tried to read the warmth in relaxed eyes. The folds at the tops of his cheeks were pinched. He'd looked at me like that before, at least once to my recollection, on Fort Hall. It worried me.
Sky elbowed me. Annie likes Mary, he signed, bending his middle finger.
I took a moment to celebrate that I could understand him. I grunted. "Long as she doesn't start hanging out with her," I complained. "Annie was our friend first."
Sky stared at me.
"What?" I asked, unsettled.
Annie likes Mary, Sky signed again.
"Yeah," I said. "Can't say I blame her, I like Mary, too, when she isn't being a pain--"
All at once, I understood.
"What--no she doesn't," I choked.
Sky raised his eyebrows. Yes she does.
"She's got a boyfriend," I protested.
So?
"So--she doesn't--she's not--"
My mind wasn't working. I started over.
"Did Annie tell you that?" I whispered, like I was afraid she could hear us.
She doesn't have to, Sky said, by means of his quirky, cheeky smile. She's my best friend.
"Yeah," I said. "But--"
I don't think she even knows it, Sky told me, shaking his head.
I sat back, dumbfounded. I put my hands on my lap. I never would'a thought--I mean, Annie? And a girl? Did my sister count as a girl? I thought she counted more as a growth, or a minor plague. I guessed some people were into that kind of thing. Only I never thought Annie was one of those people. I'd thought she had more sense than that.
"What about Aubrey?" I asked, worried.
Sky frowned.
"I guess it ain't our business," I said. "Damn. Are you serious? Annie's crazy."
You're crazy, Sky said, his fingers digging into my ribs.
"Don't do that," I grunted, ticklish. "No I'm not."
You are, Sky said, grinning brightly.
He tried to wrestle me to the ground. I let him believe he'd overpowered me. I felt so happy to do it, to hold him close and warm him when the night was cold. He scooped up handfuls of sand and pretended to bury me in them: my arms at least, my shoulders. I kissed the freckles on his wrists, mouthed the chilly blush on the side of his neck until he gave up, slumping against me. We lay between the glass and the desert flowers, beneath spiral galaxies and warm stellar dust. I loved Sky so much I don't know how I stayed inside my own mind.
That's the way
it always was with Sky: I felt like nothing could touch us. Maybe I was right. But in the beginning of spring I had reason to feel otherwise. Uncle Gabriel told Sky and me about the upcoming Sun Dance and invited us to try it out this year. The Sun Dance was a pretty big deal; only grown men were allowed to participate. I guessed this meant we weren't kids anymore. It was early evening, and I was walking Sky back to his house when he gave me another of his weird, lingering looks. I finally got fed up; not with him, but with my inability to read him. I touched the back of his hand, waiting for his emotions to flow through me.
They opened up in the pit of my chest. They spread into my stomach, into my throat, rising through my ears and my temples and filling my eyes. I felt love. I felt incomparable contentedness, even resignation, that this was a part of me for the rest of my life and nothing I did could ever change it, and maybe free will was as much a myth as satyrs and sirens.
I let go of Sky. I looked at him, bemused. I already knew he loved me. Was he only just figuring that out? His face took on a sickly puce shade. I felt so sad to see it I wanted to apologize. Sometimes I knew things, and I expected that everybody else knew them. If I'd paid a little more attention, I could have spared Sky the worry.
I didn't get the chance. We both noticed a pair of taipo'o standing on his front porch. He ran to them first, and I followed him; I could tell by the slapping of his shoes on the soil that he was scared. When I drew closer I realized the taipo'o were police officers, or at least dressed like police officers, uniforms dark blue, hats on their heads. Mrs. Looks Over and Mrs. Red Clay from the tribal council came out of the house and onto the front porch, Mrs. Looks Over yelling something fierce.
"This is outrageous! I am the boy's custodian!"
I didn't know what was going on. I only knew how afraid I felt. I wrapped my hand around Sky's wrist, because the part of me that was paranoid, the part of me that hadn't had a lot go right in his life, thought that these taipo'o had come to take Sky from me. I told myself I was being stupid. I told myself nobody cared if we were together or not.
I was wrong. One of the cops started talking about how Sky was a foster kid, which meant he belonged to the state, which meant we'd done a bad thing taking him to Idaho. My stomach dropped. The sound shut off in my ears. I'd taken Sky to Idaho to show him our heritage. I'd hurt him in the process.