by S. L. Naeole
“If you must give me a title, then grandmère is fine. It sounds so much better in French.”
I giggled when the caption beneath the photo read “Grandma Ameila” anyway.
I turned to the next page. A photo of Robert and me caught mid-laugh made my cheeks burn. “This was taken at Dad’s going away party, after that...”
“After we snuck away and christened our new bedroom,” Robert said thickly.
“I’m not sure I’m ever going to get used to this,” I laughed.
“To what?”
I put my hand on my belly and sighed. “To us being able to just…live, without worrying about someone trying to kill us, or-”
“Or me trying to kill you.”
My nostrils flared in irritation. “Yeah. That.”
“I appreciate it, too, Grace. Knowing that I can leave—or that you can leave—to answer the call, and that we will always be able to come home to each other gives me such a sense of contentment and satisfaction. I’ve never felt that way before; I’ve always felt right about us, but I was always fearful of its lack of permanence. Now, that’s not a worry at all.”
My heart swelled at his words, and I pushed myself up to reach his lips, kissing him gently before grabbing the back of his head and bringing down, the kiss intensifying, churning sensations through the lower half of my body. My heart moved like a frantic bird in my chest, and I giggled when I heard his thoughts. “Really? Even when I look like I swallowed Pluto?”
“Grace, if you’re implying that you’re so big you’re planetary—don’t. I’m going to be attracted to you no matter what you look like because everything about you is beautiful and sexy to me. Except maybe your strange fascination with that egg-bread thing you like to eat.”
“Egg-in-a-hole; and that’s the best part of me,” I kidded before returning my attention to the album. I turned the page, still smiling at the naughty thought that Robert had allowed me to hear when I my breath caught in my throat.
The page was blank, but the area for a caption was already filled. The page itself didn’t match the others in the album—it was thicker and slightly yellowed with age—but it fit perfectly despite that. Written below the empty photo corners in my mother’s handwriting was “Grace and Maia: Mother and Daughter”.
“I tore this page up,” I said in a shaky voice.
“I know. But you forget that I’m an angel; I might not be able to fix people anymore, but I can still fix this.”
My vision fogged up with tears. My mother’s ring on my finger grew warm, and I could see the moment when she wrote it, feel the emotions that ran through her.
“Your grandmother told her,” I said to Robert. “She told my mom everything that would happen and then my mom wrote it on this page. Our entire future was written here on this page and I didn’t see it. Or…maybe I didn’t want to see it because I didn’t believe it was possible.”
“And you do now?”
“Yes. I think that anything’s possible now.”
“Really? Like what?” he asked playfully, his hand tickling my side.
I turned around and put my hand on his chest. I focused, my eyes looking up at his and never letting them go from my gaze. Beneath my palm, his shirt allowed me to feel the warmth of his skin. The stillness, the quiet that resided there felt odd against my own blatant pulse.
With only a simple thought—a wish really—my pulse was joined by another, the beat weak and tentative at first, but growing more sure, steadier with each passing breath. Only when the beat was strong enough to vibrate through my hand did I finally remove it, waiting for Robert’s response.
“Why?” he asked softly.
“Because you will spend the rest of your existence taking the life of others, and I believe that the only thing that kept my mother from allowing the balance to slip through her fingers is the fact that she had a heart beating in her chest. I know that I’m supposed to be your balance, but now…now you have a part of me inside of you, so that if anything happens-”
“Nothing will happen, Grace.”
“I know, I know, but there’s always a possibility. We don’t know what happened to Uriel and he has supporters among your kind.”
Robert grabbed my hand and returned it to his chest. “Our kind, Grace. They are our kind. And it doesn’t matter whether or not he has supporters. The first circle is broken. You are the only remaining legacy to it and no one will try to hurt you because of it. It’s quite awesome, really. You’re the only reason I’m still alive—the only reason why Heath still exists.”
“So what happens if you’re wrong?”
“Then we make it right again.”
A song began to resonate in my head, the repetition of name and a location that was far from Heath, and I sighed with disappointment. “I’ve got to go.”
“My wife, the working woman,” he chuckled. “At least you know that there will be a good outcome from this.”
“This is true. I’ll probably stop by the hospital and see how Madame Hidani is doing when I’m done. She has physical therapy today.”
“Okay. I’ll finish up the painting in here.”
I grunted and then pushed myself onto my knees, the awkwardness of pregnancy still finding a way to defeat the grace and strength of being an angel. “Thanks.”
Robert helped me to stand, and then pushed my hair back so that he could see my face clearly, wiping at a smudge of lavender and then smiling into my eyes. “I love you, Grace.”
“I love you, Robert,” I said back, my mind suddenly finding an idea that hadn’t been broached in a while.
“Oh no,” he said, backing away and laughing. “No, no, no. I thought we’d settled this; we are not going to let Bala be our daughter’s godmother. No. No, no, no. She’s even more protective now than she was before! She’ll turn our house into tree, Grace! She’ll fill our front yard with man-eating plants! No. Bala cannot be godmother. No. That’s final.”
I laughed, and braced myself for the argument, glad that this was the worst of our problems.
Life was good.
It wasn’t normal, but then again, whose life ever really is?
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank yous have to go out to Alisha, Chyrie, Kerri, Tia, Alan, Allison, Lincoln, Shey, and anyone else who’s read and re-read, and re-re-re-read my books and told me what works, what doesn’t, and why I shouldn’t give up just yet.
To the fans, Robert and Grace made this journey only because of your help and your support.
We owe you our undying gratitude.
Read the first chapter of S.L. Naeole’s new book, Gossamer, the first chapter in the Faeble series coming out in April 2011
BLUE MOON
His hair shined like hardened coal, his eyes the color of the sky when the moon crept in.
I gripped the bar in front of me as the jerky Ferris wheel began its rotation with a piercing squeal and shuddering moan. As I came over the crest, I was finally able to view the pink sky as the sun sank below the horizon, and the reflection of the ocean as it absorbed the last of the sunlight seemed to change the sky to a dusky purple that gave the flashing lights around me an odd, yellowish tint.
Up here, the world felt a million miles away, and I was free from their stares, free from their whispered words. Here, there were no articles about me, no stories, no rumors. Here, I was no one. Here, I could disappear into the sky like a star.
“I’m getting off! I’ll meet you by the track,” I heard called out to me as the ground grew closer.
By the time I stepped out onto the decking, making room for two giggly girls who squeezed themselves into the rickety carriage, the last light of day was gone and the blazing halogens had sparked on, destroying what color there was left in the sky.
It was Friday night. The Tillamook County Fair was on and it was race time. The sound of the announcer echoed throughout the fairgrounds, the calling of names and numbers ringing out with an unnatural speed. I jumped down, my boots landing in patc
hy grass, and hurried towards the racetrack, keeping my eyes open for any familiar faces.
“Over here!” My gaze drifted towards the waving hand that belonged to Astor, my best friend. Her black ponytail swayed with each pass of her lithe arm, and the way the artificial light glinted off her coffee colored skin made her look like some Amazonian goddess, or perhaps someone that a goddess strived to look like. I sighed with envy before jogging to meet her.
“Joel’s horse is in the next race,” she said with an excited grin. “He’s got Jemmy riding him I think, but I could be wrong. Jemmy told me earlier that his shin was giving him some problems.”
“Jemmy’s always complaining about his shins,” I murmured as I raised my hand over my eyes to see if I could make out Shelby, Joel’s two-year-old thoroughbred. “Which gate?”
“Six, I think. Joel said that there was some last minute entry and he had to be shifted over a spot.”
I could see the grooms were still combing the horses down, their saddles standing by as the jockeys adjusted…themselves. “It looks like we’ve got some time. You hungry?”
Astor looked at me and rolled her eyes. “Are you crazy? I’ve got three more pounds to lose before I fit into my bikini. I am not going to be throwing all my hard work away just so I can eat a greasy, lard fried something with you.”
“So you’ll go halvesies on it with me then?”
“Duh.”
We both laughed at her obvious lack of dedication to her diet, the one thing she never seemed to be able to finish, and I left in search of something edible before the race began. I wandered through the fairgrounds with my eyes and nose singularly acting as one organ. There were so many stands selling food, it was mind boggling. Deep fried, boiled, grilled, all of the above; it didn’t matter what you wanted – someone was going to have it.
The acrid scent of burnt sugar turned me away from one stand, while the pungent odor of charred garlic and blackened beef from another called out my name in a rather demanding sort of way: my stomach growled. Knowing that I’d be sharing this with Astor, I opted for some roasted corn on the cob and a cup of lemonade, and waited while my order was wrapped up by a girl that played the clarinet in the band. She smiled at me, but in a way that told me she was only interested in my money. I smiled back because she was the one with batter covered hands.
“Hello there, beautiful,” a gruff voice called out before I was swung up into a pair of strong arms.
“Jack!”
My attacker mashed his lips onto mine for a brief moment before removing them to take a sip of the lemonade that he now had in his hand.
“Hey, that’s mine,” I grumbled, reaching out to retrieve my beverage before he gulped it all down.
“And?” he laughed before handing me the cup. “It doesn’t matter; I’ve got my own little pick-me-up right here.” He patted his back pocket that bulged with the presence of a flask that I knew probably contained his dad’s best whisky. When he passed the paper tray containing my buttered cob to me, he frowned. “Corn? You’re eating corn at the fair?”
“Yes. I always eat corn at the fair, you know that.”
“I know, but come on – since when do you eat like a bird?” he muttered before walking ahead of me.
Jackson was what Mom called “boy-next-door” handsome. His curly, light brown hair, coupled with green eyes the color of clover on a face that looked like it was formed in some kind of all-American-boy mold was definitely one that I didn’t mind looking at. He loved baseball, and worked for his father’s farm equipment and feed store on his down time, all of which kept his skin a sweet, sun-kissed shade of tan, and his muscles fit and toned in ways that made girls forget their own names.
“Jackson Granger is the catch of all Tillamook”, Dad would say whenever Jack and I would fight and I’d hint at breaking it off. “If you let that one go, you can kiss your acceptance in this town goodbye, missy.” Leave it to a parent to make things all about acceptance and fitting in and not about what actually made me happy.
That’s not to say that I didn’t care about Jack, because I did. It’s just that whenever I thought of being with him, picturing any kind of future with him, it’s like I can hear the doors of everything else in life slamming shut to me. Guys call it cold feet, I call it being me.
“Hey, day dreamer, are you going to answer me or what?”
I blinked. “What?”
“I asked if you knew what you wanted to do for your birthday. I know it’s still a few months away, but I need to know in case I gotta take off from school.”
My head shook as we headed towards Astor, whose agitation was clear when she saw who was with me. “I haven’t even thought about it, to be honest with you.”
“Haven’t thought about it? You’re going to be eighteen, Sophia. You can do whatever you want. How can you not think about it?”
I sighed at that and tried to explain it to him for probably the fourteenth time this month. “I’m going to be eighteen, but that doesn’t mean that I can do whatever I want. I’m still going to be living at home, and you know that my dad isn’t exactly Mr. Free Thinker. Come on, he’s the host of the most conservative radio talk show on the west coast! The last thing he’s going to let me do is ‘whatever I want’.”
“Are you two still grumbling about your birthday?” Astor asked as we settled in beside her.
“She’s stalling because of your dad,” Jack explained.
Our dad. For a lot of people, it’s still an odd thing to call him. A few years ago he was no one to us, just a stranger who stood on the porch of a small house in east Tillamook with his wife. Gordon and Leanna Ackerman took the two of us in as foster parents almost six years ago, way past the age when we’d be easily satisfied with fill-in parents, but still too young to not necessarily need them either. It had been the final stop for the two of us after years of bouncing from one home to the next.
I first met Astor when I was four, when the two of us were placed in the same emergency shelter together. We formed an unusually fast friendship in the two days we were there, and rekindled it when we were reunited a year later, our juvenile memories not allowing us to forget each other at all. We spent the next two years in a home filled with ten other kids, getting lost in the numbers before she went to live with some woman in Portland while I got shipped off to Eugene. After three years apart, we ended up at a home together just north of Tillamook, Oregon. We probably would have stayed there but our foster mom suffered a stroke and couldn’t care for us anymore. So, once again we bounced from home to home, sometimes meeting up again, sometimes not.
By the time the Ackermans got us, Astor and I had been in more homes than we could count, and had seen the inside of a courtroom more times than most judges. Neither of us expected to stick around too long, especially when we learned that the Ackermans had Joel, but we were both wrong. Turns out, Leanna was a pretty good mom and Gordon, while strict, wasn’t too bad. They even tried to adopt the two of us like they did with Joel, but was only successful with Astor. By then, her last living relative had died, whereas my mother was still alive and refused to give me up.
When Dad’s radio show was picked up by a major radio network and went into full syndication and a few years ago, he tried again to get the courts to terminate my mother’s rights so that I could be adopted, but the court refused. I remained Sophia Jane Blithe, foster kid and most notably, the infamous Blithe Baby; Astor insists that I got the better end of the deal…
“Well, she’s right, you know, about not being able to do what she wants to. When I turned eighteen, I got to watch R-rated movies and that’s it. But who knows. According to Dad, Sophia can do no wrong. I, on the other hand, could be farting gold and all I’d hear is ‘you’re being crass, Astor.’” Astor laughed mockingly at her comment before stretching a hand out for the corn cob.
“There’s not enough butter on this,” she mumbled before taking a bite and turning her back to us.
I put a hand on her shoulder and
she reached up with greasy fingers to pat it. I knew she found the entire situation unfair, but soon she’d be away from here, away from the rules, and away from whatever it was that she simply couldn’t let go of. And damn it all to hell, I was going to miss her.
Together, we stood at the railing circling the outer field and surrounding the race track, far from the bleachers that held the screaming kids and the drunken adults. This was where the farmhands and people who had come only to watch the horses race stood. These were the best seats in the house.
“So who bumped Joel?” I asked as I spotted Shelby and Jemmy being loaded into gate six.
“I don’t know,” Astor responded. “I didn’t catch the name of the horse, only the rider. Someone named Silver or something.”
Everything became quiet. And then the buzzer sounded. Jemmy, Shelby’s jockey and Joel’s best friend since the sixth grade, was easy to spot in his bright fuchsia shirt and matching helmet. Shelby looked beautiful, his long legs pulling and lengthening the muscles bulging beneath his glossy mahogany coat, each stride growing longer as he pulled ahead with such fluid ease, he could have been all alone on the track for all anyone knew. His long neck and proud head jutted out like a flag announcing his undoubted victory, Jemmy encouraging him along the entire way.
“Go Shelby!” I shouted, while Astor’s cries of “Ride, Jemmy, ride like you’ve got the cops on your ass!” caused an outburst of guffaws from several of the men standing around us who were cheering on their own favorites as the thundering sound of dozens of hoof beats drowned us all out.
“Wow, look at that one,” Jack whistled as a sooty horse gained on Shelby. Its rider’s gear was completely black, making him one with the animal. We would have sworn it was Death himself riding had it not been for the flash of skin as the rider went by.
“Who’s that?” I asked loudly, watching the back ends of the horses as they pushed on through, nearly half-way around the track by now.
“That’s that Silver person I was telling you about,” Astor replied. “Man, that’s a beautiful filly!”
