But maybe they shouldn’t be. Maybe it was better for her to risk caring about a daddy who could let her down.
She couldn’t quite smile back at him. A whisper of leftover anger wouldn’t let her. But maybe soon she’d get past that.
Tess took hold of his wheelchair to help him back into the house. “Let’s go eat,” she said.
13
A couple of days later Tess got up very early, while it was still dark. Ten thousand stars shone down bright as daisies. At four in the morning Tess walked through the woods and down Miller’s hill toward the creek bottom.
Almost from the start she’d known Kam would have to go away someday.
She found her way between rocks and little cedars as surely as a cat. Never stumbled. Never strayed. Winding along the creek path, she watched the stars reflected in the black water, like wild lilies floating there.
There was a man named Rojahin living in Eli, Nevada, Kam’s missing-persons expert said. Mark Rojahin. About the right age.
Near Kamo’s camp, treading between clumps of honeysuckle, Tess did not try to be silent, yet she was. The honeysuckle was starting to bloom already, with a smell sweet as angels, white flowers clustered like stars in the night. But the brightest star lay on the dark ground ahead. She followed its hot golden glimmer and walked up to the embers of Kamo’s fire.
He was awake, sitting by the fire, as she had thought he might be.
“Couldn’t you sleep?” he asked, his voice ghosting to her soft as a moth.
“You should talk.” She sat down opposite him. “You anxious?”
“More—more like I’m holding my breath. I don’t dare think about it. Don’t dare get my hopes up.” She could hear the excitement in his voice, low and vibrant, like distant drums.
“I hope it’s him,” Tess told him. “Your father. I hope you find him. And I hope ...” She let the sentence trail away. Couldn’t say that she hoped his father would be glad to see him. If that happened, Kam would be so happy he’d forget all about her.
But she wanted that for him anyway. Happiness.
“Tess.” He was looking at her the way he had done that first day, his head alert, his single eye narrow. Wondering why she was there. Trying to read her. “Everything okay?”
“Sure.”
“Mr. Mathis all right?”
“Yeah.” She and Daddy were doing pretty good.
“Something wrong at work? Butch been hassling you?”
“No.” Butch was going to military school in a few weeks. Till then, she could handle him.
Silence stretched too long as Kam watched her, wary, almost afraid, as if he thought she might try again to keep him from leaving. He knew darn well there were things on her mind—she had wished he was her brother, he had wished she was his sister; she looked in the mirror and saw his music shining in her eyes; she wished he could stay, he had to go.
He had to go away. And her heart was aching.
But they knew those things. What was the use of saying them?
She said, “Sing for me?”
He gazed back at her and she saw that she had done right. His scarred face softened. His dark eye went wide and soft.
His things were all packed. His wash line gone. Knapsack bulging. Blankets rolled, even the one that he had always kept spread at the back of the cowshed. Tess knew now what he had hidden under it: a guitar. Small, battered and old, its mellow-gold wood glowing in the emberlight, it rested on top of his gear. Kamo reached for it and laid it across his lap.
He did not hold it up the way people usually played a guitar. Instead, he cradled it flat in his lap and pressed his fingers straight down on it to strum a few chords—peculiar chords, minor with a twist that was all his own. Tess had almost forgotten until then about his bent, crooked left hand. He strummed and picked with it, and fingered with his right hand, when most people were taught to do the opposite. But his damaged hand could not have managed the fingering.
So he did not play guitar like anyone else anywhere. Because he came at the strings from a different angle, he had made up his own chords, and they made Tess feel as though music should have been invented that way in the first place. Like she was sitting there watching the god of all guitarists shaping music out of darkness the way God had shaped Adam out of clay—Kam was that good. His fingering hand ran up and down the guitar like fire. He key-changed to major, and the notes flew up like sparks, bright and hot and starry.
He sang.
In the sin-bin city
you can’t see far
In the shadows
the bad pose
bullets fly
sirens cry
the blood flows
blows stun
children sob for pity
children cry for pity—
But out beyond the pollution
out beyond the fear
out beyond the shadows
shines a secret star
That incredible voice. It seemed made out of grit and dreams. She could hear his scarred throat in each note—it was Kam. Yet it rose to be a cross of air floating above the clouds. It was Crux.
“Drum for me, Tess!” he cried, strumming.
The only drum she had was the earth, and she wasn’t quite strong enough to really make it reverberate. But she tried. Her hands slapped out the rhythm, trying to make music out of dirt.
Yet—it wasn’t so crazy. Sky and earth belonged together. Stars and dust.
Out beyond the clouds
out beyond the fear
out beyond the shadows
shines a secret star
In this dirty world
you can’t see far
but you gotta believe
there’s a secret star
Her palms felt on fire with drumming when the song ended. Kamo laid the guitar aside and leaned back, but he didn’t look tired. He just looked serene. A quiet pool.
“That felt good,” he said.
She felt herself smiling at him. Felt the smile start somewhere deep and bubble up, the way music bubbled up in her.
“Someday,” Kam said. A pause. “It may take years.” A pause as he looked past her into the years. “But someday, I am going to have the courage. I will stand up and say to people, I am Kam, I am Crux. They brutalized me, see? I will not need to hide anymore. I may even take off this stupid eye patch. I will want to say, Don’t let it happen to children anymore. I will need to say that.”
He looked back to her.
“And I will want to play for people. Sing. Be who I am. And I’m going to need a drummer, Tess.”
It wasn’t a promise, she knew. She would have to be good. Very, very good. But it was a wonderful maybe. It was a hope worth more than any amount of money.
“Tess?”
She managed to get her mouth moving. “I’ll try,” she whispered.
He sat there looking at her. Then she realized she was seeing him by more than the glow of embers. Hushed light lay soft as a mother’s touch on his face. Dawn.
The stars were going out. But she tried not to think of it that way.
“Time for you to get going,” she said.
Her saying it released him. He nodded, stood up, kicked dirt over the fire.
“I’ll be back every now and then to check on you,” he said. “Don’t forget.”
“I hear you.”
“Just when you least expect me. You’ll be coming around a bend in the path holding hands with your boyfriend, and there I’ll be.”
She wrinkled her nose at him. “Get out of here.”
He hoisted his knapsack. She got up to help him fasten the blankets on top of it. The guitar hung from a strap around his neck and left shoulder.
Then he stood there.
“Let me know if you find him,” she told him.
He nodded. “Bye,” he whispered. He turned away.
“Bye.”
She had meant to let him go without any more than that. Stand and watch him walk away. If he turn
ed to wave, wave back.
But then she thought of something. “Hey,” she called after he had gone a few steps.
He turned to look at her, holding his face still. She looked at him, memorizing him: One eye. Scars. Headband doing nothing to tame his wild black hair. Broad shoulders. Slim strong muscle. Damaged hand.
How did it all add up to so much?
“You’ve got what you wanted, anyway,” she told him.
He swiveled his head, quizzical. “What I wanted?”
She told him, “Somebody loves you.”
His face moved like when the wind ripples a still pool. For an eyeblink he looked as if he might cry, but there was no need to cry. Maybe he understood that already.
“Tess,” he breathed.
“Get your butt moving,” she ordered him.
He turned to wave once, at the top of the hill. She waved back. Then he went striding into the woods, and she could no longer see him.
It was stark, white, too-damn-early daylight. But Tess knew: even when she couldn’t see them, the stars were still there. The stars were still there, behind the glare. Like a secret. Like a mystery. Like a hope.
She headed toward home, up the rocky pasture, stomping along, tapping out a rhythm on her leg and getting the music going inside her head and planning how she might scrape together money for drum lessons, how she might hook up with a band. And watching the white trumpet flowers open up, every single one of them tilting toward the sky.
About the Author
Nancy Springer has passed the fifty-book milestone with novels for adults, young adults, and children, in genres including mythic fantasy, contemporary fiction, magic realism, horror, and mystery—although she did not realize she wrote mystery until she won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America two years in succession. Born in Montclair, New Jersey, Springer moved with her family to Gettysburg, of Civil War fame, when she was thirteen. She spent the next forty-six years in Pennsylvania, raising two children (Jonathan and Nora), writing, horseback riding, fishing, and bird-watching. In 2007 she surprised her friends and herself by moving with her second husband to an isolated area of the Florida Panhandle where the bird-watching is spectacular, and where, when fishing, she occasionally catches an alligator.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1997 by Nancy Springer
Cover design by Drew Padrutt
ISBN: 978-1-4976-8886-5
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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