He means the kiss. I glance at the back door, willing my father to appear and end this conversation. Of course he’s never around when I need him. I fold my arms. “Oh, that.” And then I add, so he doesn’t have to, “It was no big deal.”
“I hurt you. I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.”
I reach for a lie like a shield. “You didn’t hurt me.” I force a smile. “Let’s just forget about it, okay?” I’m proud of the way I deliver the line, confident that he can’t see how I’m barely breathing because he’s standing way too close. “So, thanks for coming, but you don’t have to stay. My father is probably going to incinerate the chicken, anyway. You should save yourself.”
My effort at humor falls flat. His lips tighten. “I shouldn’t have kissed you, but not for the reason you think.” His gaze fits mine. “It’s for your own good.”
I give a small, humorless laugh. “Come on, Jalen. That’s just a crappy way of saying you don’t like me like that—which is fine—but at least be honest.”
He shakes his head. “I am.”
“Okay. Message delivered. We’re friends.”
He doesn’t move, but looks hard at me as if he’s trying to tell me something he either can’t, or isn’t willing to say. “You don’t understand.”
You’re right, I start to say. I don’t understand. And then it hits me. “Oh. You have a girlfriend.” I feel like an idiot. I should have realized this before.
“No.” Jalen sounds a little surprised, maybe even offended. “No.”
“Is it because my father is your father’s boss?”
“No.” He hesitates a long beat. “You’d think I was crazy if I told you.”
“Try me.”
He shakes his head. “You have to trust me.”
My lips twist. I know a blow-off when I hear one. “Maybe you need to trust me.” When he stays silent, I know I’m right.
The reality is that we aren’t going to be friends or anything at all. If there’s anything I’ve learned from Aaron, it’s that you can’t be friends when one of you feels something more. The balance will always be off, the scale lopsided, the conversation awkward.
I turn away from him. “You should just leave.” There’s no anger left in me, only sadness, resignation.
Jalen touches my arm, no more than a brush of his fingertips, but it’s enough to make me turn around, to make me look up. “I can’t do that,” he says softly, almost gently. “That’s the one thing I can’t do.”
He wants me. He doesn’t want me. It’s like that silly game where you pull off the petals of a flower until you get to the last one. I abandon my last shred of pride and simply ask, “Why not?”
The silence stretches between us. I stare into his eyes, thinking that I could know him for a thousand years and still his thoughts would be unreadable to me. He will show me only what he wants to. I close my eyes so I am equally blank to him.
After what seems like a long moment, he says in a halting, hesitant voice, “In our culture…there are what we call holy men.”
He pauses, and I open my eyes at the serious note in his voice.
“They’re also called healers…or medicine men.” His voice gets a little stronger. “A lot of people claim to be healers, but there are very few legitimate holy men. It’s a family thing, passed down through the generations. My uncle is one of them. You saw him once—he came to the park.”
The face of a fragile-looking man wearing strands of turquoise beads on his thin, hollowed chest flashes in my mind. She has pretty eyes, he said.
“What they do is very private. Even to discuss who they are and what they do isn’t something we do. I shouldn’t even be telling you this much.”
I nod, afraid if I say anything he’ll stop talking.
“My uncle. He is a great man, a great healer, but he’s ill. And this illness he has, it affects his gift. Just how much, we don’t know. Sometimes he dreams and they’re just dreams, and sometimes they’re more…”
I think of my dream—of Emily wandering into my room, her long pale hair eclipsing her dirt-stained face. The cloying smell of roses.
“All my life I’ve known that my uncle has this gift, but we don’t speak of it. We try to give him privacy and respect that, despite his illness, he is a great man and the things he sees are real.”
Jalen pauses, and I can see him struggling with the idea of telling me more. Without even thinking about it, I reach out and take hold of his hands. He grips mine back.
“A couple of months ago, my uncle woke me in the middle of the night. He said that a girl was in danger. She would come to me, but I would turn her away. She would die because I wouldn’t help her.”
“He was talking about Emily.”
Jalen shakes his head. His eyes are dark and troubled. “After Emily disappeared I thought that, but it didn’t make sense.”
“Why not?”
He shifts his weight. Sweat beads his upper lip. “He said I would be…involved with this girl.”
“Involved? What do you mean, involved?”
His cheeks flush almost imperceptibly. “You know what that means.”
“No, I don’t.”
“He said I would have feelings for this girl. Strong feelings.” He releases my hands. “I liked Emily, but I wasn’t involved with her. She never came to me for help.” He looks at me, and I have never seen his eyes look so sad. “But you did.”
The realization is instant. “You think it was me? You think your uncle dreamed about me?”
He nods. “That’s why I tried to stay away from you. I thought if we didn’t get involved, the rest of the prophesy wouldn’t come true.”
I try to laugh it off. “You’re kidding.”
“If I get involved with you, you’ll die. You’re better off without me.”
The fire in the grill has burned down slightly. My father comes to the door. He looks at me, and when I shake my head, he retreats.
“Jalen, how could your liking me get me killed?”
His lips tighten. “I knew you wouldn’t believe me.”
“It’s not that…” But it is kind of that. I can’t accept that walking away from me is a good thing, especially not if he has feelings for me. “It was a dream. You said yourself his dreams don’t always come true.”
“He said I would be responsible for your death. You don’t know him. How strong his gift is.” He shakes his head. “I’m not gambling with your life.”
“What about what I want?”
“He knows things. The night Emily disappeared, before anyone knew she was gone, he was singing the death chant.”
“We don’t know she’s dead.”
He sighs, and it contains a world of grief. “You need my uncle’s dream not to happen.” He holds his hand up as I start to protest. “That’s why that kiss can’t mean anything. That’s what I came to tell you.”
Disappointment tastes bitter, like the pill you can’t quite swallow. What I want is for him to want to be my boyfriend. It hurts to look at him, to see the stubborn frown and know he’s made up his mind. That I’m falling for him and he’s falling for me, but we still can’t be together.
It’s humiliating to have to plead for him to give us a chance, but I know we’re only moments from him walking away. “What if it’s already too late? What if whatever your uncle saw is already happening?”
I don’t think he’ll have a comeback, but he shakes his head. “It’s not. You’re still alive.”
He says this flatly, without emotion, but I’m not fooled. Behind his stoic features, I feel everything he’s not saying.
“Nothing is going to happen to me.” I step closer to him.
“Don’t,” he says, but he doesn’t back away.
“Don’t what?” We’re standing so close the tips of my sandals touch the tips of his hiking boots. The chemistry, or whatever you want to call this thing between us, instantly leaps to life. I can barely breathe.
“Don’t make me want you,” he say
s so softly that it’s almost like I’ve imagined him saying it. His eyes look at me as if I’m everything he has always wanted and can’t have.
“But you do.” Even seeing him look at me this way, the sentence is more of a question than a statement.
“Of course.”
“Then take a chance.”
He’s silent, but I can tell he’s battling inside, torn between his beliefs and his feelings for me. I want to help him, but it’s his decision. He has to want to be with me more than he fears losing me. My choice already is clear to him. My father appears at the door with the platter of chicken breasts in his hands. I scowl at him, and he retreats.
Jalen releases his breath slowly. “I’m sorry,” he says.
My father looks puzzled when Jalen doesn’t stay for dinner, but I don’t explain. How could I? I know Jalen is being all noble and everything, but his leaving still hurts. I begin to wonder if my destiny is to be the girl who always gets left behind.
But being left behind isn’t nearly as bad as being dead. Growing up, I heard a lot of stories about healers and medicine men and know that they are capable of doing things and knowing things that science can’t explain. As much as I want to dismiss what Jalen told me, I can’t.
Suddenly it feels like something has been set in motion, something that neither Jalen nor I can control. I might not have admitted it to Jalen, but I’m scared.
THIRTY
Paige
Once you start, it’s hard to stop thinking about dying. When I was ten, lying in the underground cavern, my leg broken and Emily gone for help, I believed that if I fell asleep I’d die. That death sat like a person in the corner, watching me, waiting for me to close my eyes before he grabbed me.
Lying in bed, I avoid looking at the dark corners of the room and the thought that maybe you can’t cheat death twice.
The air-conditioning rains down like a cold mist. I pull the covers closer. Maybe I should go back to New Jersey. On the other hand, it might not change anything. My plane could crash and I’d die running away, a coward’s death. Or I could die a week later in a car crash going to the mall.
I feel sleep tugging at me, pulling me backward. As I feel myself start to doze off, I picture Emily’s earnest face in the cornfield that day so long ago. You have to face the things that scare you, Paige, she says, or you’ll never grow up.
I jerk myself awake. I need to be strong and do what she says.
But then, Emily’s dead, isn’t she?
In the morning, I’m tired, irritable. I snap at my father for leaving the dishwasher door open and the milk loosely capped, for invading my space at the table with the edge of his newspaper, for being my father.
“Since when do you drink coffee?” my dad asks, looking up from his bowl of cereal.
I raise the cup of burning, bitter liquid to my mouth. “Since now.”
The drive to the park is quiet, uneventful, filled with the silence of the things I can’t tell him. After the briefing, I go to his office, turn on his ancient, wheezy computer, and wait for a connection to the Internet. I guess one of the benefits of not sleeping is that it gives you plenty of time to think. It occurred to me last night that of all the places I’ve looked for Emily, I missed the most obvious one.
A couple of keystrokes later, I’m on the park’s website. I click on the blog, but the page comes up invalid. They’ve pulled it. Frowning, I dig into the archives and a moment later a picture of Emily, sun-bronzed, leggy, and blonde, appears.
“Eyes of the Intern” by Emily Linton
March 12
From the moment my fingers closed around the warm metal of the first rung of the ladder, I knew my life was going to change forever. I’m getting to do something very few people get to do—climb up these 1,500-foot cliffs into the ruins of an ancient civilization that lived here a thousand years ago.
As I climbed each rung, I could feel the life I knew slipping away from me, like a snake shedding its skin. Gone were petty worries about high school, grades, the gossip of who was seeing whom. I felt the warm sky at my back—an enormous blue expanse that grew exponentially greater with each intoxicating step upward. It was here in these great limestone cliffs more than six hundred Native Americans lived—and here they disappeared. But why?
As an intern, I hope to come up with my own theory. So come with me, up these ladders, into the largest and best-preserved cliff dwellings in America. I promise to show you a world you’ll never forget.
I realize I’m gripping the arms to the desk chair so tightly that my hands hurt. It’s just…hard. This is Emily, and her writing is so like her: strong and beautiful, pulling me toward her in words. Making me realize all over again just how, to her, the world was a big adventure and how unafraid she was to go after what she wanted.
I skim the responses, mostly people welcoming her to the park—good luck with the internship; already a fan, looking forward to working with you; interesting start, looking forward to more. There’s nothing sinister or romantic-sounding so I move onto the next entry.
March 13
As I pulled myself over the edge of the cliff, I gazed up into ruins looming over me. They look kind of like a high-rise apartment building, only a burned-out, abandoned one. From the ground, you can’t see the war between the cliff dwellings and time. But up close, you can see the cracks that run like scars across the face of the building and the crumbling edges of the turrets. It looks dead, lost, a place time has forgotten, but then Dr. Shum slid his finger along the ground and lifted off a layer of chalky limestone dust.
In these fragments, he said, there’s a record—fragments of human and animal bones, remnants of plants thousands of years old. They have a story to tell us. Life amongst death.
It made me look at the ruins in a different way, and I could hardly wait to step inside the darkness of the thick masonry walls.
It feels almost as if I’m slipping into Emily’s skin as I read her blog, skimming through an interview with Dr. Shum, a funny story about hiding in the shadows of the ruins and scaring a couple of structural engineers, and a trip to Topeka Well with my father to take water samples.
I flip through another couple weeks and then stop at an entry from early April.
April 1
Today as I hiked to the ruins, I glimpsed a coyote trotting through the desert. With his long legs and bushy tail, he looked a lot like a skinny German Shepherd. I watched him until he disappeared, and even then he stayed on my mind all day. He was hunting, of course, and from his thinness not doing too well. But before you start feeling too sorry for him, I’d like to tell you the story of Coyote and the monster, an old Native American myth.
In the story, there is a monster, and it eats all of Coyote’s friends. Coyote decides to get even and ties himself to the top of the tallest mountain he can find. The monster tries to blow Coyote off the mountain, but he can’t. Trying a new strategy, the monster pretends to be Coyote’s friend and invites him to his house. Coyote accepts, but asks if, before he goes, he can visit his friends in the monster’s stomach. The monster agrees. Big mistake. Coyote cuts out the monster’s heart and sets fire to his insides. Coyote frees his friends and kills the monster.
As you walk around the park, you will see a variety of plants and wildlife. To the ancient American Indians, they were such more than just birds or lizards or butterflies. Take time to look them up in the guides or on the Internet. You may be surprised at what you learn—and how relevant these myths are in our lives today. Are you the monster or Coyote? I think I’m both.
The comments on this blog are more interesting. Bone Man writes that she isn’t either Coyote or a monster—she’s a fox. Desert Dude likes Bone Man’s comment, as do seven others. Blue Planet thanks Emily for the beautiful retelling of the myth, and King Stag says, Nicely done. You must be reading Earth’s Song. Good choice.
My heart stops, and I hear myself say, oh shit. It’s one of the books my father wrote. Is King Stag my father? I glance back at Ki
ng Stag’s other responses: Already a fan; interesting perspective; and Well done, let’s meet and discuss this some more.
THIRTY-ONE
Paige
My head spins. I still can’t believe my father and Emily were lovers, but then how do I explain the reference in the blog?
I jump at the sound of the door opening. Spinning around, I see Jalen walk into the room. I don’t have time to shut down the page, but I block the screen with my body.
“Hey,” he says, “they let us off early.” His eyes pass over me, reading me. “Some problem with vibrations on the third level. Your father said you’d be here. What are you doing?”
He moves closer, but I keep the screen hidden from him. “Reading Emily’s blog.”
He nods. “Did you see anything?”
I shut down the computer as casually as I can. It’s one thing for me to doubt my father, but I don’t want Jalen to know about King Stag. “I don’t know.”
He stands so close the heat of the sun rolls off him, as if he’s managed to bring some of it inside. He stays very still, and as the moment lengthens, I realize after last night’s speech about staying friends that his being here is as awkward for him as it is for me. Yet he’s here anyway.
“I have the rest of the day off,” he says. “Want to take a ride?” He pauses. “There’s this place I want to show you.”
I look up. His arms are crossed and his face is as stoic as ever, but behind the shield of his dark eyes, I glimpse something. My answer means something to him. “Where?”
He shrugs. “You’ll see.”
After what he told me last night, I don’t want any more surprises and yet I’m curious. “Why do you want me to go?”
“I think you’ll like it.”
A hint of a smile comes into his eyes. I don’t know what he finds amusing, and then I realize he’s already figured out what I am just understanding—that I’m going to go with him.
In the battered, summer-scented pickup truck, Jalen takes the highway northwest. With no air-conditioning, we ride with the windows rolled down and the wind, hot and fierce, in our faces. I don’t know where we’re going, but it doesn’t matter. With every mile between us and the park, a feeling of lightness opens up in me. It’s like we’re leaving everything bad that happened there and going somewhere new to start over. I realize this chain of thought isn’t fair to Emily, but I don’t care.
Bone Deep Page 17
