Overlooked (Gives Light Series Book 6)

by Christo, Rose

  Hooves sounded behind me, soft and clomping over wet terrain. I turned around. A solid white antelope cantered delicately between the low trees, ghostly antlers curved like scimitar blades. I let go of the cotton candy cone and it floated into the sky. I knitted my eyebrows together. I started after the antelope, careful not to frighten it.

  “Hey,” I said, reaching for his tufted tail.

  He never turned around to look at me. He never broke into a run. If this weren’t a dream he would have taken off so fast I’d be eating his dust. My fingers grazed the hairs on his tail. I felt them as if they were real, threads of silk tickling my knuckles.

  “Rafael!”

  I jumped awake, darkness filling my eyes. A crash echoed in my ears. Uncle Gabriel was yelling outside my bedroom door.

  “Rafael!” Uncle Gabriel shouted, irate. “Please put your books away!”

  I guessed my trap had backfired. Or worked, if you want to be technical.

  The next morning Rosa made peach and cherry sorbet for breakfast. Yeah, as if I’d needed any more reason to love that woman. We sat down in the kitchen and ate together, the guy on the radio droning about a parade downtown. I was halfway through breakfast when Rosa put her hand on my shoulder, interrupting me. I felt her emotions before I felt her fingers, well-meaning and shy.

  “I would like to teach you to drive,” Rosa said.

  “Drive?” I repeated stupidly. I looked around the kitchen for confirmation. Mary wasn’t awake yet.

  “A car,” Rosa specified.

  I didn’t like cars. They were giant and dirty and they smelled weird. But I found myself saying: “Okay,” and digging my spoon into my sorbet. Rosa was the kind of woman you didn’t want to disappoint.

  Uncle Gabriel hobbled into the room, wincing. “I think I sprained my ankle.”

  “Sorry,” I said through my teeth, mortified.

  “Let me see,” said Rosa, who was the best nurse on the rez, and I ain’t biased.

  Rosa knelt on the floor and rolled Uncle Gabriel’s pants leg back. A second later she diagnosed him with a mild case of being a crybaby. She told me we could leave in a few minutes, because she’d written a note to Mr. Red Clay excusing me from school. Maybe this driving stuff wasn’t so bad after all. I grabbed my jacket, and she did the same, and we left the house and headed south. We didn’t need the jackets after all. Yesterday it was chilly out. Today it was eighty-five degrees.

  “Here,” Rosa said.

  We stopped in the parking lot off the hospital. She unlocked the doors to Uncle Gabriel’s monstrous SUV. When she didn’t climb in the front seat, I realized I was supposed to.

  “Does this mean I’m like Sal Paradise?” I asked.

  Rosa gave me a puzzled look.

  “Never mind,” I said.

  My heart was hammering when I got in the car. I sat and pulled the door shut, locking my seatbelt. Rosa slid her door shut, too. It felt weird to sit in the driver’s seat, like I’d usurped Uncle Gabriel’s throne. My knees kept hitting the bottom of the dashboard. Rosa leaned over and showed me how to adjust the mirrors. I scowled at my reflection, my hair unbrushed. It wasn’t really me I was scowling at. It was my dad’s face. The hell did he think he was staring at?

  “Put the engine on,” Rosa said.

  “How?” I said.

  She pointed at the ignition. Oh, yeah. I turned the key.

  “And this is the gear stick,” Rosa said. “See?”

  Rosa spent the next few minutes showing me how to use the lever-whatsit-thing. Why were there so many gears? Why did the car have to be stopped if I wanted to use them? She went as slowly as she could—for Rosa, like molasses—but all the instructions piled up, confusing me.

  “Put your foot on the brake,” Rosa said.

  “The what?” I asked.

  “The pedal on the left,” Rosa said.

  I stepped on it.

  “Now put it in reverse,” Rosa said.

  I pulled on the lever-whatsit-thing. We inched forward.

  “Reverse,” Rosa said quickly.

  “I’m trying,” I said, just as quickly.

  Rosa grabbed the lever and yanked it. The car rolled backward. My stomach lurched.

  Pulling out of the parking spot was easy enough, I guess. Alright, no it wasn’t. I threw the steering wheel with both arms, sweat pooling on the back of my neck. It was when Rosa made me put the car in drive that the real trouble started. The car vaulted forward like a javelin, the steering wheel flying out of my hands. Rosa grabbed my wrist in her hand, panicking.

  “Brake,” she said.

  I slammed the brake. The both of us shot backwards in our seats. Rosa’s braid slapped me in the face.

  “Kwitatawin!” someone shouted outside my window. That’s a bad word, and I ain’t translating it for you.

  “I don’t wanna do this,” I said frantically.

  Rosa kneaded my shoulder with her hand. Her feelings jolted me, jumping, apprehensive. “If you are to leave the reservation at all,” Rosa said, “you must know how.”

  “Why do we have to drive cars?” I asked, furious. “We got on fine with horses and pony drags long before taipo’o made these stupid things.”

  Rosa patted the back of my hand. “Cars are the horses of the 21st century,” she said.

  “Bullshit,” I said, but immediately felt guilty. You don’t curse at Rosa.

  “Do you want to try driving on the turnpike?” Rosa asked.

  I stared at her. “Do you want me to kill people?”

  Little by little Rosa coaxed me off of the rez, onto Route 89. I squinted against the stark sun. The highway stretched out in front of me, cruel and tarry and black. The desert leered at me from the west, a stale orange color, like hospital food and cigarette burns.

  “You can go a little faster now,” Rosa said.

  I concentrated on the asphalt, my mouth pursed, my forehead wrinkled. I concentrated so intensely I didn’t notice the giant white moving truck whizzing past us on our right. The driver blew his horn. I jumped in my seat, wrenching so hard on the steering wheel we screeched over the yellow lines. Rosa screamed.

  “I’m sorry!” I yelped.

  “Rafael!” Rosa shrieked.

  We veered off the tarmac. We skidded into the desert, sand rising around us in a thin, dirty cloud. I mowed over two cactuses and destroyed a tire. Rosa kicked her leg over my seat, stomping on the brake. Rosa hyperventilated.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”

  “Let’s change seats,” Rosa said, voice shaking.

  So yeah, that was a disaster. Rosa drove us back to the rez and I stumbled out of the car, humiliated. Rosa suggested we head home for lunch. I couldn’t bring myself to answer her, my tongue like cotton, my stomach in knots. Stupid taipo’o and their stupid taipo’o inventions. It felt like they were collectively conspiring to ruin my life.

  “Why are you covered in sweat?” Uncle Gabriel asked when we went home. He sat on the sitting room floor, stripping the feathers off a dead hen.

  “Don’t ask,” I answered darkly. Rosa hobbled into the kitchen, shell-shocked. I started to calm down, mostly because my uncle was here. “Where’s Mary?”

  “In her bedroom,” Uncle Gabriel replied.

  “Still?” I asked, alarmed. “Did she come outside at all?”

  “Only to use the restroom,” Uncle Gabriel said. “I’m trying to give her space.”

  “She needs to eat,” I said, mind racing. “She’s, like, five pounds.”

  “I left her some kneeldown bread,” Uncle Gabriel said. “Why don’t you ask her to have lunch with you?”

  I darted into the kitchen. I grabbed honey biscuits from the refrigerator and raced down the adjacent hallway. I just about tripped right out of my boots. I knocked on Mary’s door with the back of my hand, shuffling nervously on the hardwood.

  “Mary?” I called out, when she didn’t answer.

  For some reason my mind always leaps to the w
orst case scenario. What if Mary had gone to sleep and never woken up? No, wait. Uncle Gabriel said she came outside to use the restroom. No, wait. What if I’d made that up? I made a lot of things up, sometimes without realizing it. I gave people color-coded auras. I turned them into animals when they scared me.

  If Mary were an animal, I thought, shouldering open her door, she’d probably be an octopus. One time there was an octopus at the aquarium in Ute Grove that unlocked its cage every night, crawled across the floor, and climbed into the nearby fish tanks to eat its fill. It even memorized the security rotations so the guards wouldn’t catch it in action. Mary must have been the same kind of escape artist; because her bedroom had no windows, no exits but the one I’d come in through, and it was empty.

  “Mary?” I said loudly.

  I checked inside her closet. I peeked under her bed. I dropped my honey biscuits on the floor, dragging my fingers through my hair, bursting out of her bedroom like a clumsy octopus myself. I didn’t need to be told she’d gone looking for Paul again. The only problem was I didn’t know whether Paul was at the radio tower or not. It was going to take fifteen minutes to walk to the lake, another fifteen to cross to the other side. If Mary was killing Paul right now, I didn’t have half an hour to waste.

  When I went out onto the reservation I found it busy, but in a reassuring way. Families worked the butter churns on their porches, and the washboards, and stripped the saffron from the wild crocuses, their fingers staining red. A couple of kids beside the road sat smashing dead honeybees in a bowl. I know that sounds gross, but bee stomachs work better than antibiotics if you can get your hands on ‘em. I followed the main dirt road to the Looks Over house, the front porch teeming with wrapped presents. That’s not uncommon in Nettlebush, where your neighbors’ll gift you with all the random stuff they’ve accumulated but have no use for: clothes, tools, pauwau paraphernalia, even shower curtains. Don’t ask. I climbed up the front steps, because it was closer than the lake and I could always sprint north if Paul wasn’t home. Sage In Winter was sitting outside the house on one of the twin rocking chairs, his too-big legs bent uncomfortably.

  “Uh,” Sage said, eyeing me.

  I eyed him back, confused. I wasn’t even sure whether the Looks Over family knew this kid. He was a fifth grader, or a sixth grader; I couldn’t remember which.

  “Hu—hi,” Sage said. Sage swallowed. “You never answered my e-mail.”

  “Dunno how,” I grunted. I reached for the front door.

  “You probably don’t wanna go in there,” Sage said, rocking himself. “They’re with a social worker.”

  “What’s a social worker?” I asked.

  “Like,” Sage said. “Uh. The people who snoop around your house, make sure your family treats you right?”

  I remembered a woman in black stockings who came to my house a few days after Mom died.

  “Well,” Sage began. “Uh—”

  “Is Paul inside?” I asked.

  Sage looked at me blankly.

  “Mr. Looks Over,” I specified.

  “Uh—yeah,” Sage said.

  The feds weren’t supposed to know Paul was on the rez. Was he hiding in the attic or something? Suddenly I wasn’t sure who I was protecting him from: my sister, or the taipo’o police.

  “Listen,” Sage said, drawing a breath.

  “I gotta go,” I said. I’d decided I’d climb into the house through Sky’s window.

  “Wait!” Sage protested. “I need your help!”

  I stopped in my tracks. I looked at him, confused.

  “I,” Sage fumbled. “I, uh… You’re gay, right?”

  I stared disapprovingly. “Yeah.”

  “Well,” Sage said. “How do you know?”

  I kept staring. ” ‘Cause I think guys are hot.”

  “Oh,” Sage mouthed.

  I looked around at the pine trees, the oaks. I listened to five different pairs of footsteps in the distance, but none of them were Mary’s signature clomping gait. I said to Sage, “You think you’re gay?”

  Sage’s cheeks tinted pink. “You don’t have to say it like that…”

  “Look,” I said. The more I didn’t see Mary, the tenser I felt. “I wanna help you, but can it wait? Tonight at the community dinner?”

  Sage swallowed. “Yeah, sure,” he said bitterly.

  He leaned over the side of the rocking chair, scooping one of the Looks Overs’ gifts onto his lap. It was a loaf of kneeldown bread, mushy dough wrapped in papery corn husks. For Paul, said the tag on the plastic, in familiar round handwriting.

  I jolted. “Don’t touch that.”

  Sage froze. “I was gonna pay them back!”

  I snatched it from him. I ripped the cellophane off the present, breaking off a piece of bread. I rubbed it on my mouth and my lips prickled. It smelled like Angel’s Trumpet, noxious and sweet.

  “What is it?” Sage gulped, eyes wide.

  “Go back to your house,” I ordered.

  “But—”

  “Just go, alright?”

  Sage threw me a spiteful look. He leapt out of the rocking chair, blazing defiantly off the porch. The dumbass almost tripped.

  It was when Sage was gone that Mary came looking for me. She stepped off the main road, so abrupt, so imperceptible that I couldn’t figure out where she’d been hiding, and half wondered if she’d materialized from thin air. I met her between the houses and the road. Her makeup was stale and faded, her eyes tired. I couldn’t find the forests in them anymore.

  “What if Sky had eaten this?” I asked Mary, my arms around the bread. “What if Mrs. Looks Over had?”

  “Be awfully dishonest of them, wouldn’t it?” Mary replied. “It says ‘For Paul,’ clear as day.”

  I wanted to strangle her. I wanted to hug her. I tore the bread to pieces in shaking hands. I dropped them angrily on the ground.

  “Stay out of my way, Raffy,” Mary warned.

  “You stop putting my boyfriend in danger and I’ll stay the hell out of your way.”

  “Your boyfriend, huh?” Mary asked.

  I didn’t like the word myself. It didn’t do Sky justice. He was my best friend. He was home.

  “Fine,” Mary said, nonchalant. “No putting Skylar in danger.”

  “Or Paul,” I stressed.

  “You gonna rewrite the laws of our tribe?”

  “Leave!” I raged at her. “You hate our tribe so much? Then leave! You had no problem leaving me the first time!”

  “You wouldn’t have wanted to come with me,” Mary said.

  “You don’t know that!”

  “Yes, I very well fucking know that!” Mary snapped at me. “I used to spend all day shooting up. I let anyone do what they wanted with my body just so I’d feel filled up inside. You think I was going to bring you into that? You think you deserved to be treated like that?”

  “What makes you think you deserved to be treated like that?” I returned.

  “Because I’m the one who picked the victims!” Mary yelled at me.

  Halfway down the road Immaculata Quick stared at us with interest. Immaculata didn’t speak English; but she alerted me to the possibility that someone else was gonna overhear. I grabbed Mary’s arm, frightened by how skinny it was, how brittle it felt. I tugged her off the road and we sat together under a yellow pine.

  “You did what?” I asked quietly.

  Mary slid her arm out of my hand. “How do you think Dad decided which women he wanted to kill?”

  Nettlebush spun and tilted around me. Rosa and Uncle Gabe and I had discussed this exact subject during the July monsoon. We hadn’t come up with a solid explanation.

  “He used to ask me,” Mary said. She deepened her voice. ” ‘Which woman do you think is pretty? No, not girls, for God’s sake, pick a grown woman. Come on, Mary.’ “

  I flinched. We’d known Mary was gay since the first time she forced her headless Barbie dolls to kiss. To think that Dad had taken advantage of an innate part
of her made me want to rouse him from the dead so I could kill him myself.

  “I didn’t know what he was asking me for,” Mary said. “Just thought he was bonding with his kid, you know? ‘Hey, we both like girls! Let’s knock back a few beers.’ But then the girls started disappearing. And then they turned up dead. One by one they started dying. We were down to Charity before I realized what I’d done. I couldn’t say a word.”

  I couldn’t find my voice. For a moment, I felt like I was Sky.

  “Only one I didn’t pick was Chrissy,” Mary said. “I don’t know why Dad killed her. I guess we’ll never find out.”

  “That’s not your fault,” I said. “Mary. Dad killed them. Not you.”

  “Oh, I know that,” Mary said, laughing a fake laugh. “Doesn’t stop it from messing with my head, you know? Good for me Angie in the arm takes the edge off.”

  “How can you not hate Dad?” I asked, incredulous. “After he did this to you?”

  “I told you before,” Mary said. “You don’t hate people just because they follow their nature. That’s a problem with you, not a problem with them.”

  I couldn’t understand that.

  “Anyway,” Mary said. She looked—she sounded—exhausted. “I won’t hurt your little boyfriend. I didn’t think the kneeldown bread thing through. I feel a little loopy, you know? Probably took too many sleeping meds last night.”

  “You’re always loopy,” I muttered. “Mary,” I said.

  “What now?” Mary asked.

  She looked so clear through my eyeglasses. She looked deliberate, manmade. I guessed we were both manmade.

  “I helped Dad bury one of the bodies,” I said.

  Very slowly, Mary sat up. “Wha?”

  I stared at my fingers. “Whichever one he buried in the desert. I helped him bury her.”

  “Naomi,” Mary said.

  I put Zeke’s sister in the ground. I did that.

  “Are you kidding me?” Mary asked. Her voice was so low it scared me, because Mary never did anything quietly.