Bone Deep

by O'Brien, Kim;

  On the way home, I scoot over on the bench seat and lean my head against his shoulder. He puts his arm around me, and although we don’t talk much, I’m okay with that. I know he’s crossed a line he never meant to cross and wouldn’t have if he didn’t have feelings for me. If he didn’t love me. If this were not the start of something.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Jalen

  When I get home, it’s ten o’clock and Uncle Billy is waiting for me in the kitchen. He’s wearing a neatly pressed button-down shirt tucked into a pair of Wranglers. His hair is neatly braided, and best of all, his eyes gaze at me without the sheen of alcohol.

  “I’m ready,” he says.

  “Ready for what?” I drop my keys on the counter and walk to the refrigerator.

  “For you to take me to Walmart,” he says patiently, as if I’ve forgotten. “We’re going to buy supplies for the yellow corn maiden.”

  “Uncle, I never said we’d go tonight.”

  “You said you’d take me.”

  The last thing I want to do is get back in the truck and drive to Walmart where we’ll spend at least an hour as my uncle wanders around, as distractible as a child, gathering supplies.

  “Another night, Uncle.” I peer into the refrigerator without much interest.

  Uncle Billy’s finger feels skeletal as he pokes me in the back. “Maybe I should be picking up some black yarn. Maybe I should be making the blue corn maiden.”

  I shut the refrigerator door. “What are you talking about?” I search my uncle’s eyes, twin black coins currently sparkling with humor. For a moment, I glimpse my grandfather in his broken, weathered face.

  “The professor’s daughter. You were with her.”

  “How did you know?”

  He smiles. “We were talking at dinner.”

  A blush creeps up my neck. “What was everyone saying?”

  He blinks innocently. “That you have taken an interest in her.”

  An interest? A rush of heat ignites in my body. I kissed her. And it was amazing, but what was I thinking? “We’re friends.”

  Uncle Billy laughs. “Friends?” He teases. “Since when do you go riding around for hours with a girl? Just where did you go?”

  I look away from his sharp, knowing gaze. He probably wouldn’t like my answer. Wouldn’t think she belonged there. “Since when is this any of your business?” I say it as if I’m teasing. My intention is not to disrespect him.

  “This girl,” he persists, “she reminds me of the blue corn maiden.” His face realigns itself from teasing uncle into the composed features of teacher, which, when he’s sober, is his favorite role. Who else will remember if I don’t pass the stories along to you? “Do you remember the story?”

  I fold my arms and lean against the edge of the tile counter. “Of course.”

  “The blue corn maiden,” he says, completely ignoring me, “was the most beautiful of all the corn maiden daughters and the people loved her because of the delicious blue corn she gave them every year.”

  “Uncle, I know this.”

  He lifts his brows and gives me an injured look. I resign myself to the retelling— how the blue corn maiden was captured by Winter Katsina and brought to his house and kept there until Summer Katsina found her. A fierce battle between Winter and Summer—fire and ice—ensued, and then the two katsinas realized neither could win and they needed to make peace between themselves. They agreed to share the blue corn maiden, each getting six months of the year with her.

  My uncle stops talking, and yet there’s more he wants to tell me—the lesson he wants to make sure I understand, although I’m pretty sure I know where he’s going with this.

  “Jalen,” he says, “if you get involved with her, she will divide you in half. It will be your world and her world. You cannot live like that. If you learn nothing from me, learn that.”

  Am I not already divided in half by blood? I bite my lip hard not to say this. And yet, if I have to choose, don’t I already know which side I would take? Paige and I were happy today, but would she ever want to live on the Nation? What about her family? How would they feel about me?

  “Uncle, with all respect,” I say, “you don’t know what you’re talking about.” But he does, and before he spears me with any other truths I walk out of the kitchen.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Paige

  Jalen arrives at six o’clock with a toolbox in his hands. A toolbox. It seems a strange thing to bring to dinner, but then I guess if I’d wanted a flowers-and-candy kind of guy, I would have stayed with Aaron Dunning.

  No regrets there, especially now, looking at Jalen. His black hair is pulled tightly back and shows off his strong facial bones and his deep-set onyx eyes. His black shorts and T-shirt look freshly ironed. The care he’s taken with his appearance, more than anything that shows on his face, tells me that tonight is important to him and he wants to make a good impression.

  “You look nice,” I say and step forward to hug him. Until now, I didn’t realize how part of me expected him to change his mind about us, even after what happened in the Navajo Nation.

  The hug is quick, slightly awkward, as if we’re about to get caught doing something we shouldn’t. Yet the pieces of what we are, what we could be to each other, are there.

  “You look nice, too.” His eyes linger on the red peasant blouse cinched around my waist. A happy tingle goes through me. When he lifts his gaze to mine, I feel it in my stomach.

  “So what’s with the toolbox? We’re feeding you—not making you work.” He smells of rain and soap and something that has become my favorite scent in the world.

  “Your father will appreciate this more.”

  “Appreciate what more?” My father suddenly looms behind me. He extends his hand in greeting. “Good to see you, Jalen. Come on in.”

  My father was not around for the whole Aaron Dunning chapter in my life, and I really don’t know what to expect from him tonight. Maybe I should have warned him. Told him that Jalen was going to tell him about us. With Aaron, I took great pride in excluding my dad from any information which would have given him the opportunity to hand out advice or approval. But most of all, I wanted my exclusion to hurt him. Sorry, Dad, I can’t talk now, is what I’d say when he called. I have a date.

  Jalen steps inside and immediately the entranceway shrinks. He has at least three inches over my father who, at six feet, has always seemed tall to me.

  Jalen carries the toolbox into the kitchen and sets it on the counter next to a stack of archeology magazines that probably go back several years.

  “Soda? Juice? Water?” my father asks, opening the cabinet and taking out one of the four glasses he owns. They’re the cheap, unbreakable kind, just slightly nicer than plastic, but at least they’re clean.

  “Water, please,” Jalen says and leans against the counter. He slouches, but his eyes are alert. “Thanks,” he adds as my father hands him the glass.

  “Well,” my father says, opening a beer. “What project has Paige talked you into doing?”

  Jalen and I exchange puzzled glances, and then I remember the toolbox. For a moment I want to laugh. Sometimes my father can be so clueless. “He’s not here to work, Dad.”

  Jalen straightens. “I do want to work…but that’s not why I’m here.” He looks at me and then back to my father. “Paige and I want to see each other. Go out,” he adds, and then, in the silence that follows, adds very seriously so there will be no doubt, “I would like to date your daughter.”

  It isn’t as firm as what I’d hoped he’s say, but we’d argued a little about this earlier. I thought asking for permission was old-fashioned and silly. It was my choice, not my dad’s, but Jalen said it was a way of showing respect. No matter what I said, it wouldn’t change his mind. There’s a depth of stubbornness to him I am just beginning to understand.

  My father takes off his glasses, cleans them on the hem of his shirt almost as if he’s trying to fill time while he figures out what to sa
y. “Well,” he says and holds up his glass of sweet tea. “Congratulations!”

  He says it loudly, as if we all have gone hard of hearing. The moment that follows is awkward, but at least the worst is over.

  At dinner, we eat very well done steaks, baked potatoes, and blackened corn. We talk about progress on the restoration project, the recent sighting of a relatively rare owl by one of the park rangers, and Jalen’s family. Throughout it all, Jalen answers everything, but uses as few words as humanly possible. I’m relieved when my father starts rambling on about the discovery of skeletal remains in Ethiopia that suggest early hominoids were able to climb trees as well as walk upright.

  After dinner, Jalen takes out his toolbox and we start hanging pictures that have probably been resting against the wall since the day my father moved in here. We hang them more or less above the spots where they’ve been leaning. My mom would have known exactly where they belonged and done a much better job, but seeing them on the wall is a huge improvement.

  In the dining room, Dad and Jalen space out three framed Audubon prints—a duck, a pheasant, and a turkey—that used to hang in our dining room back in New Jersey. It was a room we never used much, except on holidays. For a moment I let myself fantasize that my mom and dad will get back together, and we’ll be a family again. My father will carve the Thanksgiving turkey so slowly and carefully it’ll be like he’s excavating bones. My mom will keep telling him to hurry before the butter peas and mashed potatoes go stone-cold, and my grandparents will laugh as if everything is funny and refill the champagne glasses.

  Jalen straightens the final print. “What do you think?”

  “Good,” I say. “Dad?”

  He nods and rubs his hand over the rough, blond stubble just beginning to cover his chin. “They’re good for now,” he says, “but I never really felt right about eating turkey while the damn bird was on the wall watching.” He laughs, though, his first one of the night, and maybe, I think, the first real one since I’ve arrived.

  We move to my father’s office, where Jalen hammers a spring hanger into the wall for an oversized watercolor called The Seven Navajo Bows. My father’s face lights up as he retells the story—how a maiden lived alone and one day Coyote came to visit. When they ran out of meat, the maiden used a magic horn to call spirit hunters and armed them with the seven bows and seven arrows hanging above her fireplace. The hunters brought back meat. Coyote stole the horn, but the warriors, loyal to the maiden, turned against him and Coyote had to flee.

  Jalen has heard this story—only, in the version he tells us, the spirit hunters are the maiden’s brothers and the magic horn is a windpipe. Coyote stole the windpipe multiple times, and ultimately, when he used it to call the spirit hunters, a swarm of bees emerged instead and stung Coyote, who ran off into the forest. The next thing I know, my father and my boyfriend are talking Native American mythology and Jalen’s face has become animated, his sentences longer, his shoulders relaxed.

  To illustrate a point, my father pulls his textbook, Footsteps in the Past, off the bookshelf behind his desk and begins flipping through the chapters.

  “That’s Paige,” my father says, pointing at one of the photographs. “She had to be, like, six or seven in that one.”

  “Dad…” I try to grab the book, but Jalen lifts it out of my reach. “Stop it,” I say, laughing. It feels good, though, to get the attention. I was happy back then. In the back of my brain, Mrs. Shum’s voice tells me to look at who I was in order to know who I want to become. I know suddenly what that means.

  The phone rings as my dad is showing Jalen a picture of a collapsed pit house. I remember my father re-laying the roof while Emily and I danced beneath, conjuring up spirits as we hopped the beams of light.

  “Excuse me.” With the phone pressed to his ear, my father walks out of the office.

  Jalen sets my father’s textbook on the shelf and pulls another book off the shelf.

  “Dad likes you,” I say, moving closer.

  He doesn’t look up, but the corners of his mouth lift. “He’s cool.” He reads the back cover of a book, resets it on the shelf, and then pulls out another one. “Think he’d let me borrow something?”

  “Are you kidding? He’d be thrilled.”

  He puts the book aside and returns his attention to the shelf, running his fingers along the spines. He doesn’t seem to get that we’re alone. I shove his shoulder playfully. “Put the book down and talk to me.”

  Pushing him, however, is like trying to move an oak, and he seems completely absorbed in the book in his hands.

  “Come on, Jalen,” I say.

  He looks up. I freeze. He’s scowling deeply and his eyes are dark, almost angry. For a second I think he’s mad at me, and then his gaze returns to the book. “Half of the first page is missing,” he says. He holds it up. On the cover is a picture of a girl with long blonde hair tied in braids. The title reads, The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares.

  “So?”

  “Half the first page is missing,” He repeats.

  A chill passes through me as it hits home that the missing page to this book might be the one we found tucked into Emily’s sneaker.

  “Give me that.” I grab the book. He’s right. The second page mentions that guy, Jude, that Master of Eyes. “You don’t know that this is the same book.” But we both know it is. So what’s it doing on my father’s shelf? I hug myself tightly to fight the feeling that I’m falling into a hole deeper and more despairing than the one Emily and I stumbled into all those years ago.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Paige

  Jalen turns the book over and skims the back copy. He glances up, his face unreadable. “An eleven-year-old girl with the color of corn silk gets kidnapped. Then killed. A ritual sacrifice.”

  I try to speak but can’t. I rub my arms as if I can scrub away the layer of dread that has settled over me like a fine layer of dust. If that page came from this book, what’s it doing in my father’s office?

  My heart feels like it has exploded in my chest and is now beating in a hundred places at the same time. My mind floods with terrible thoughts of Emily bleeding atop a stone tablet, begging for her life, my father’s face looking coldly down at her.

  “We need to tell the police.”

  “It could be just a coincidence,” I have to push the words through the dryness of my throat and mouth.

  “Or it could explain what happened to Emily.”

  I close my eyes, but what I really want is to cover my ears against Jalen’s words, my own fears. “The police already suspect my father. If this is the book, they’ll arrest him. It’ll ruin him.”

  Jalen shakes his head as if what I’m saying makes no sense. “Your father has an alibi.”

  My gaze slides away from his. For the thousandth time, my mind tries to measure how long my father was gone.

  Realization blooms in Jalen’s dark eyes. “Shit. He wasn’t with you, was he?”

  I lift my chin. “Of course he was.”

  He looks hard into my eyes and then shakes his head. “You covered for him? All this time we’ve been looking for her and you couldn’t tell the truth?”

  “He didn’t do anything wrong!”

  Jalen’s gaze narrows. His face is almost ugly in the anger he’s not quite masking. “Then it shouldn’t be a problem to tell the truth now. You owe Emily.”

  A hundred images of Emily flash through my mind. I see her at five, a slight gap between her teeth, smiling at me from the river bank. I see her laughing before we both jumped from the top of one tall rock to another. The images keep coming, fast-forwarding until all I see is Emily walking into my bedroom, her hair dusty and matted, her face as pale as the moon. Have you seen my sneakers? she asks.

  I look at the book in Jalen’s hand and three things occur to me. One, that it can’t be the same book and we’re making a huge deal out of nothing. Two, that Jalen is staring at me as if he is seeing me for the first time. And three, if I lie to him, he
’ll know it.

  “My dad wasn’t gone long enough to do anything.”

  “Shit.” Jalen shakes his head as if he can’t believe what he’s heard. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

  “It isn’t that big a deal.”

  His black brows raise. “No? You broke the law. You obstructed justice. You could have ruined any chance of finding Emily. And you lied to me. You let me believe you were with him.”

  “Everything I told you and the police was true.” My lie is by omission. “The police asked if he was with me, and he was.”

  “But not the whole time.”

  “When was I supposed to tell you? When I thought you hated me? After you told me I might be in danger? Or when you kissed me? Besides, it isn’t him. I know it.”

  Jalen’s face darkens. “From the beginning. You should have told the truth.” His lips twist, and his voice rises as if he can’t help it. “You lied to the police. You lied to me.”

  “Maybe I didn’t want them to act like you’re acting now. All judgmental. Jumping to conclusions.”

  Our gazes lock and hold. Gone is the invitation to walk into his mind, his thoughts. His eyes are as cold and hard as onyx. “If he’s innocent—if this is just a page missing in a random book—then you shouldn’t worry about talking to him about it.”

  “I don’t worry about talking to him,” I say tightly. “But in private. He’s my father. I don’t want him blindsided.”

  Jalen hesitates. I lay my hand on his arm, and he jumps as if I’ve stung him. Yesterday he wouldn’t have done that, and a new kind of fear moves through me. I can probably make him do what I want, but it’s going to come at a cost—maybe our relationship. “Please. You have to trust me.”

  Something goes flat in his eyes. “It stops tonight,” he says. “If you don’t tell the police by tomorrow morning, I will.”