He hesitated. Then he served himself. “Salt,” he said.
“Oh, yeah,” said Pop, fetching the salt and pepper shakers from the stove and putting them in the middle of the table.
“Salt,” I said. “Thanks, Pop.” Evan had never eaten anything with me before. I hadn’t even thought about it. How could salt between us be any more intense than breath between us? I got the Kraft Parmesan from the fridge and put it on the table.
“Enough salt for everybody,” Evan said, watching Pop as he dished up spaghetti and sauce for himself, then glancing at Mom. Evan licked his upper lip. He made a pass above the food that reminded me of the way he had signed above the skilliau rock that afternoon and murmured a few words.
Oh. Salt between Evan and me, salt between Evan and my parents. What had Lauren said about that? You couldn’t hurt people you had shared salt with, couldn’t be enemies with them. And it extended to their whole families.
I wasn’t sure how Evan defined family. Didn’t salt between Lauren and me mean Evan had to respect my family already? Apparently not, or he wouldn’t be worried about it. Maybe he no longer thought of Lauren as family.
Probably just as well if Evan and my family had salt between us. Only I wondered what this would mean if it came down to a tug-of-war between Pop and Evan as to who really owned me. Technically, taking me away from Pop might hurt him.
My stomach growled. I got supper and sat next to Evan at one side of the table, across from Pop, with Granddad on my right, Mom on Evan’s other side. Realized I had forgotten to get something to drink, and fetched myself a Coke.
“So, Evan, how’d you and Nick meet?” Pop asked after a period of forks and knives scraping plates and people chewing and swallowing, and Mom’s murmured, “Delicious, Nick,” another throwback to old times that made me wonder how long Pop could continue to ignore the fact that Mom was Mom.
“Evan is Willow’s brother,” I said.
“Willow’s the little gal you took to the dance last night? And never really introduced me to?”
“Oh. Sorry. Yes.”
Mom smiled, almost sparkled. The tightness in my chest moved up into my throat. She was wonderful when she sparkled. She could convince you that whatever you were doing was the most exciting thing you had ever done, even if it was just a walk in the woods. She could make you believe that your picture or your rock or the song you sang was the best one in the world. She could give you a glow that would carry you through a cold night.
“Your folks staying at Lacey’s?” Pop asked Evan.
Evan nodded.
“Different from the usual Lacey’s folks,” Pop said, looking at Evan’s overalls, then squinting his eyes and looking closer. “I could swear…”
“I got them in the attic,” I said, before he could swear anything. “Evan forgot his suitcase.”
Pop’s eyebrows rose. I could see him thinking about making an issue out of it, but then he glanced at Mom. She was also studying the overalls. She wore a faint smile.
I wanted to ask her what she was remembering. She probably knew Pop when he was still wearing things like overalls. The questions were percolating through me again till I couldn’t even taste what I was eating.
Mom looked up at Pop with such a smile, her eyes tender. It was as if she were saying right out loud how she remembered him, and how she remembered loving him.
Pop’s eyes widened. He cleared his throat. “We should talk about this later,” Pop said to me.
“One man’s trash, another man’s treasure,” said Granddad.
I chugged some Coke, said, “You were saving them. Pop, but for what? Were you ever going to use them again? Why not let somebody who really needs them use them?”
“Later, Nick,” Pop said, going a little red. He slid a glance toward Mom.
Later, when there were fewer strangers and/or relatives around. Then he could yell. Maybe he was like Old Faithful, had to let off steam regularly. I put down my fork and studied him, wondering why I’d never had a thought like that before. Until this moment I had kept hoping that if I just did everything right, he wouldn’t yell at me again. But it occurred to me that he always did yell, eventually.
The last time he had yelled at me—last night, before Willow and I went out—I had defied him, and both of us had survived.
“Susan, what brings you to these parts?” Pop asked, smiling at Mom. I studied that too. He really looked charming. How could Pop look charming?
Mom stared down at her half-empty plate. “I…uh…I was up here one summer a long time ago, and I wanted to see if it was still the same.” She looked up, uncertain, maybe a little scared.
She was scared of him. I didn’t remember that. I thought back. I could remember Mom and me doing things, but Pop wasn’t in the picture very much. He was there at meals. He said silky loving things to her and touched her often. She smiled and pressed against him. She made little gestures in the air all the time. I had thought of it as dancing. It seemed like she waved us closer to each other, an air nudge here, an air stroke there, a soft humming you had to lean closer to hear, until Pop and I were part of her dance, moving in and out between Mom’s movements, all of us harmonized. Scared had never entered the picture.
“What do you think?” Pop asked. “Are things still the same?”
“Oh, no,” she said, with a sideways glance at me. “Everything has grown so.”
Pop glanced out the window toward the night. “It’s beautiful here,” he said. His voice had a tiny wobble in it.
That surprised me again. I’d never seen Pop cast any but darkling looks toward the forest and the lake. He never swam. He never hiked. His idea of a good time was satellite TV, and driving down to the valley to shop for bargains. He was glad other people had outdoors interests, since it kept the store alive, but he never…that wasn’t quite true. He did fish, and he shot, mostly at targets. I had always had the impression that nature spooked him, though. Which was another reason why I liked running around in the woods.
“It is,” Mom said cautiously.
Pop took a deep breath and roused himself. “Evan, what are you doing in these parts?” He said it friendly, as though he had forgotten that Evan was sitting there in Pop’s own pilfered overalls.
“Looking for rocks and some other local things,” Evan said. “There’s a lot of power in this landscape.”
“Interesting,” said Pop. “Nick used to collect rocks. He kept getting ugly ones that all looked like each other, though. Not like a regular collection, one each of really pretty things. He picked up a lot of brown and gray ones.”
“Maybe they were valuable in another way besides just looking nice,” Evan said.
“What other way is there? You think they might have been ore samples? S’pose there’s uranium up here?” He sounded curious rather than confrontational. “Nick, what were you doing with all those ugly rocks?”
“I don’t know, Pop. I just like picking things up.”
Mom was watching me, her eyes wide.
“And saving them,” Pop murmured, “just like your old man.” He glanced at Evan’s overalls and then at me. He smiled. “I’m sorry I threw them out.”
I shrugged. “I didn’t know what to do with them, anyway.” If I had stroked them and murmured to them and gestured at them the way Willow and Evan had with the afternoon’s rock, I wondered what things I would have wakened in them. I could have used comfort. But I hadn’t known to think at the rocks.
“I was afraid you’d throw ’em at cars or something,” Pop said.
“Why?” I was almost startled into a laugh. “Did I ever?”
“It just…looked like you were stockpiling ’em upstairs. That was the only reason I could think of for doing it.”
I shook my head. “There was no planning involved.”
“Huh,” said Pop. He looked up, realized everyone was listening, smiled. “Well, I’m sure there are more interesting things to talk about than a kid’s rock collection,” he said.
/> “Dessert,” said Granddad. He had cleaned his plate long before.
I laughed and got out the Tin Lizzy Special ice cream.
“Can Evan spend the night?” I asked Pop as I cleared the table. Granddad had turned on the TV in the living room half of the kitchen and retreated to his wicker rocking chair, and Evan and Mom were sitting on the sofa, watching a rerun of “Roseanne” with him. Mom had slipped into her old place near the lamp, where she used to do cross-stitch while she watched. Evan sat where I usually sat. He was staring so hard I wondered if he had ever seen a TV before. After all, he came from a home with no telephones and not much mail.
Pop was still sitting at the table, nearer to me than the others. He sipped from his coffee mug. “Where would he sleep? The motel’s full.”
“He can sleep on the floor in my room. He’s used to roughing it.” I loaded dishes into the dishwasher.
“Tell me true, Nick. Is he really staying over at Lacey’s? If he is, why doesn’t he go back there?”
“He’s feuding with his family. He can’t go back, Pop.”
“And he doesn’t have any clothes.”
I got a mug of milky coffee and sat down across from Pop.
“But he has darned nice manners,” Pop said. “All right, he can stay. You can even give him some more of my old clothes, if you want.”
“Thanks, Pop,” I said, surprised.
“No matter how I feel about my backhoe days, chances are I’m not going back,” he said. He watched the back of Evan’s head. “Somebody might as well get some use out of my old rags. Guess I was saving them to paint the house in, but there’s more. Not sure they’d fit me anymore anyway. And we got fifteen-year paint on the house right now. Might last us eight or nine years,” He smiled. There was that surprising charm again. “What do you think about that Susan, eh?”
“She seems nice,” I said.
“Nice? With cannons like that?” He wagged his eyebrows at me.
I stared at my mother again. She looked way too skinny to me, and almost flat in front. I needed to ask Evan some more questions about warding.
“Nice,” I said.
He parted my head. “You’re so young.” He got up, carrying his coffee mug, and wandered over to sit in his easy chair, where he could watch Mom and the TV at the same time.
I sipped coffee and watched my family from behind as they were transfixed by images on a small screen. This was like old times, with Evan standing in for me. Could we actually return to the way life used to be? Everything was so calm. Where was the fear and panic I had felt?
Mom turned to look at me. Her eyes were shadowed and looked like tunnels. I had stared into her eyes more than once until I got lost in them, not because they were silver and animated like Uncle Bennet’s, but because I knew all she saw was me and all I saw was her. I had never needed friends while she was still living with us. She had been everything I wanted and needed.
Panic was right there, waiting. I stood up, turning away from her gaze, and said, “Night, Granddad, Pop, Susan. Evan, I’m going upstairs now. Pop says you can stay.” My voice was a little high.
“Thank you, sir,” Evan said to Pop. He rose. “Good night. Pleasure to meet you all.”
If I had had wings, I would have flown up the stairs.
7
Trouble Breathing
I started feeling sick just as I finished brushing my teeth. One minute I was leaning over the sink, glaring at my foam-mouthed face in the mirror, occasionally staring at the reflected images of the biplanes on the brown-and-white shower curtain over the tub behind me, tasting the mint in the toothpaste and trying to ignore the mildewy scent the bathroom still had after a long steamy winter of showers with the window closed. The next minute I felt a theft of breath that left me dizzy and weak, and my stomach cramped. I spat out toothpaste foam and rinsed my mouth, hoping that would help, but it didn’t.
I wondered if I had done the perfect thing, cooked a meal that would give my parents food poisoning; but the expiration date on the marinara sauce had been years away, and I knew the pasta and the sausage were fine. I hadn’t eaten anything else since breakfast besides a handful of potato chips, and I’d never heard of potato chips making anybody sick. Maybe I had the flu. Which would just make things more difficult. Pop didn’t cut me much slack for sickness.
Hadn’t Evan told me to be well? How long did commands like that last? I would have asked him, but I was feeling too sick to even leave the bathroom.
I was wheezing. It was just like the day Mom left. My chest burned. My lungs labored. I lay on the fuzzy brown rug on the bathroom floor, sweat rolling down my face. I wished I were dead.
Evan staggered in through the open door and knelt beside me. His face was gray and wet with sweat. “It’s happening, Nick. They unbind,” he whispered, shutting his eyes tight. His cheeks were taut with strain, and tendons stood out in his neck. He gripped his head with both hands.
“Fools, they don’t even know what they’re doing!” Evan said in a harsh whisper. “Nick, bind!”
Breath whistled on its way into me. I didn’t understand him in my head, but something in me understood, because I sat up, dug my Swiss Army knife out of my pants pocket, opened the smaller, sharper blade, and pulled his hand away from his head. I cut across my thumb and across his, said, “Blood brothers,” and pressed my cut to his.
He opened eyes burning and golden and repeated it, then said some words in the other language. The constriction in my throat eased. I gasped in air. It tasted cool, refreshing as ice water on a hot day. My stomach settled and I started feeling normal again.
Keeping his thumb pressed to mine, Evan gripped my hand and drew it toward him. He touched his lips to our joined thumbs. Gently he released my hand, easing his thumb from mine, then licking the blood away from his wound with just the tip of his tongue.
“Taste,” he said.
I waited a beat just to see if I could.
His power to command me had vanished.
I sucked the blood off my thumb. It had an undertone of salt.
“Now I’m in you and you’re in me,” he whispered.
“It’s not the same,” I said, feeling muted shades of disappointment, sharper fear, and sadness. For the first time since Mom left I had found somebody whom I actually wanted to take care of me, and now that was over. It had barely lasted twenty-four hours.
“It’s not the same, but it’s something,” he said. “Without it, we might have died. Akenari. They know they’re right, but they’ve never dealt with a fetch bond before. They chose the wrong unbinding. I should have loosed you myself.”
I got up and splashed cold water on my face. I filled a glass with water and offered it to him. He drank most of it, splashed some on his face too. I slumped down across from him, my back against the cupboards under the sink; he had his back against the tub, and we propped our feet up on each other’s backstops.
Evan said, “So what is ‘blood brothers’?”
“A way to choose your relatives. Something best friends do. Not a big formal thing like what you did to me before.”
“Something they won’t know to unbind,” he said, “at least not yet. I don’t understand why the Presences allowed the Keyes to unbind us…I thought I was doing the right thing when I fetched you. Maybe there just aren’t enough Presences here in this strange land to influence us one way or the other.”
Thinking of the moment back in Lacey five when all the Keyes had gone silent, asking for guidance, listening, not hearing, I said, “What is a Presence, anyway?”
“It’s…it’s complicated. Those who have gone before are Presences, and then there are other sorts—creatures and beings that live with Powers. Some of them know a lot; some of them know only a little; some sleep deep and some sleep lightly, and some are always awake and watching; some come because they want to and some come because we call them. Some are strong and some are barely there. At my real home there are a lot of them, but they’re pretty quiet.
At the Keyes’ home I haven’t noticed many. Here, none have spoken to me at all, but I thought maybe that was because I have cast myself out from the family. Once you cut the thread, the Presences abandon you, or so people say.” He studied his cut thumb a second, then glanced sideways at me and offered me a small smile.
“Are these Presences supposed to actually guide you through your daily life? How do they talk to you?”
He thought for a moment. “Well, I guess first you have to practice your disciplines. Sometimes the Presences don’t talk very loud. Disciplines help you hear them. I was never very good at my disciplines. Second, you have to decide you want to listen for the Presences. You look around and see if there are signs. You make a space where they can contact you—there’s all kinds of ways to do that, with fire, water, earth, air, with skilliau or spiritspeak, or other things. I was never any good at that either. I’m not interested in having outside things telling me what to do. I don’t know if you noticed that.”
“I noticed.”
“Third, you have to figure out how to interpret the messages you get. Actually, I’m pretty good at that part. I like puzzles. And fourth, you have to decide whether you want to follow the directions you’ve been given. That’s the tricky part. If you don’t actually perceive any of the directions, you don’t have to follow them—that’s my theory, anyway. If you actually figure out what the Presences and Powers want you to do, you can get in terrible trouble if you don’t do it.”
“You prefer flying blind.”
“No. Not flying,” he said. “If I’m a bird, I’d just as soon see where I’m going. But acting on my own, yes. So. Blood brothers, whatever that means.” He frowned and stared down at his hands, which lay palms up on his knees. “Saved us, anyway. We were too bound together to survive being separated without preparation. Thank you, Nick.”
“You’re welcome,” I said. I wondered if I loved Evan with the same intensity now that he wasn’t a wolf and my master. I could still remember the orders he had given me, about accepting him no matter what shape he chose, about how his relatives’ curses should slide off me, about how I should be comfortable. I looked at him. He raised his eyes and met my gaze. The instant overwhelming feeling I had gotten before from just looking at him was gone. I knew I didn’t know him very well, and I could think about that now. Everything I knew about him, though, I liked.
The Silent Strength of Stones Page 17