The Silent Strength of Stones

by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  “Almost four.”

  Mom must have been pregnant when she left, then. “She’s Pop’s? And you never told him?”

  She stared at her hands in her lap. “Dru says I have to. I am so afraid.” She looked up at me again. “But that’s not—that’s for next time. Next time I have to come as myself, and I’ll bring Anika. I’m not quite strong enough yet, but I’m getting there.”

  I glanced back at the mirror. “How can you come as not yourself?”

  “Dru taught me.”

  “Teach me.” If this warding stuff worked the way it looked like it worked—Pop not recognizing Mom in spite of spending a whole dinner with her, and her making stupid mistakes—it would be a great skill for a detective to have. I wondered if I could disguise myself as a tree. No. Not a good idea. You’d have to stand still too long.

  “You have to have a certain kind of light in your hand. You have to be a green or a blue. Will you let me look?”

  “I’m a blue, I guess,” I said. “But Evan’s yellow, and he can ward.”

  “What?” Wide-eyed, she glanced toward the door. “You’re blue? Evan—Evan? What? He said—oh, Nick.” She broke into a dazzling smile. “You found family too?”

  Was that what I had found? Blood brothers. “Yeah.”

  “Oh, I’m so glad. Oh, I’m so happy. Oh…Unless they’re like the family I ran away from.”

  “No,” I said. Evan and Willow might have wanted to own me, but neither of them seemed to want to box me up and cut off parts of me.

  “Oh, this makes it better. I knew it was bad that I went away, for a lot of different reasons. You need a chance to learn how all these things work. But I didn’t know all the good things when I left. I couldn’t have taught you how to disguise yourself…how did you know it was me?”

  I shrugged. “To me, you look just like you. Skinnier, and your hair is shorter, and you look tired. But you’re you: you sound like you, you act like you, and you even say some of the same things. Evan told me you were warded and wouldn’t expect me to know you. But until I saw you in the mirror, I didn’t know what he was talking about.”

  “Oh, my. You mean, all during dinner, you knew—” She frowned. “Dru has names for these talents. I wonder what she’d call it, that you can see through my veil.”

  I pointed to the mirror. “Why would you want to look like that?”

  She smiled. “It’s different, for one thing. For another…oh, this is very odd…but before your father met me, that’s the kind of woman he liked. I wanted a chance to see you here at home, and I thought he might invite somebody who looks like that to dinner. When we first met, he was so confused. He didn’t want to love me. I didn’t look like his dream girl. But I…I wanted him, and in some ways I was stronger in my desires than he was.”

  I had a very weird moment, thinking about big blonde Kristen and small dark Willow, and realizing maybe Pop and I had something in common.

  Mom stopped looking over my shoulder at the past and came back to the present. “Do you know how to talk to your light?”

  “What?”

  “The first thing you need to do is—”

  Evan tapped on the door. “The Pop is coming up the stairs,” he muttered through the door.

  I stared at Mom. I had forgotten; there was a world beyond the two of us; and that was often the way it had been when I was younger.

  “Susan?” Pop called. “Why didn’t you use the downstairs bathroom? Are you all right? Star Trek ended almost half an hour ago.”

  Mom and I looked at each other, and there was a quickening in the air, a conspiracy between us. I remembered that too. I didn’t like it anymore. No wonder Pop and I never talked. Mom and I had treated him like some kind of enemy.

  Still, I wondered if I should duck behind the shower curtain and let Mom leave the bathroom alone. Pop had always thought women spent too much time in the bathroom. He would just think Mom’s delay was natural.

  In a lower voice, Pop said, “What are you doing here, son?”

  Jeez! Could he see through a door? Before I could even frame an answer, Evan said, crystal clear, “Waiting for Nick.”

  “What?” Pop slammed the door open, nearly hitting Mom. She moved just fast enough to evade it. “What’s going on in here?” he yelled.

  I gripped the counter behind me and pushed myself up so I was sitting on it. “Just talking,” I said.

  “Talking! What do you have to talk about, huh?” He looked back and forth between me and Mom. “What the hell is going on here? Nick, did this woman do something to you? Susan? What are you doing up here alone with an underage boy? What kind of woman are you, anyway?” Each sentence was louder than the last.

  “Nothing happened, Pop. Calm down.”

  “Don’t tell me to calm down!”

  “Calm down,” I said again, and this time I meant it. He blinked. He stared at me. He breathed deep and slow. His face lost its bright red hue.

  I looked at Mom to see if she would say anything. In a detective sense, I didn’t want to blow her cover. In a Nick sense I really wanted her to let Pop know who she was. Mom had always made me feel special by telling me secret things we kept from Pop. I had hugged those secrets as though they could feed me. Some of them had kept me going even after she left—touching the lake, walking the woods, sneaking a listen to the classical music station when Pop was out of the house, things I had done with Mom but never with Pop.

  For the first time in my life I actually wanted my parents to talk to each other and me, all of us together. I didn’t want Mom to leave me with the secret of her visit, just another stone in the wall between me and Pop.

  Mom looked at Pop. Her eyes were tender and sad, but her voice stayed silent.

  “Good night, Susan,” I said. “Say good night, Pop.”

  “Good night,” he said in a normal voice. “Good night, Susan.”

  “Good night,” she said, after a moment. She touched her mouth, staring at Pop, then glanced at me. “Maybe we can sort this out tomorrow.” She edged past Pop and left, murmuring something to Evan before I heard her footsteps clattering down the stairs.

  Pop and I stared at each other. “What are you doing to me, Nick?” he asked. “I don’t want to be calm!”

  “Nothing happened, Pop. We just talked. Honest.”

  “Sometimes just talking is worse than anything else…Don’t order me around, Nick. How can you? You can’t tell me what to do. How can you tell me to do something and make me do it?”

  “You do it to me all the time.”

  “That’s my job. I’m the parent. And it’s not like I tell you to do something and you automatically—this is different.” He thumped his chest. “This is…this is my involuntary muscles, Nick. My nervous system, my lungs. This is my vocal cords. How is this possible? This is bad. This is not right.”

  “I’m worried about your blood pressure. Your face gets red, and you yell. You yell all the time.”

  He closed his eyes for a long moment. When he opened them again he looked really tired. “I didn’t used to,” he said.

  I thought about that and realized it was true. He had started yelling after Mom left.

  “I don’t like this, Nick.”

  “You keep going off half-cocked.”

  “Not from my perspective. From my perspective I’m getting more and more worried about you. Why are you late all the time? Why are you lying to me? What happened to the dog? Who are these weird friends of yours? What are you doing alone in a room with a woman old enough to be your mother? What the hell did she want with you? I just thought she was somebody lonely and nice, and here I find out she’s—I’m not sure what. What did you talk about? Why…why aren’t things normal and comfortable anymore?”

  “Comfortable for whom?” I said.

  We stared at each other for a while.

  “I’ll try not to yell,” he said eventually.

  “I’ll try not to boss you.”

  He squinted at me. “Gaw dang,” h
e said. He shook his head. “Gaw dang.”

  “Good night, Pop.”

  He stared a moment more. “Night,” he said. “Sheee-oot.”

  8

  Business Affairs

  “So what happened?” Evan asked after we crossed the upstairs hall and closed ourselves in my room.

  I went to my dresser and took the stack of Mom’s letters from the bottom drawer. I flipped the edges, glancing at different stamps, differing postmarks, most Californian. One a month, none of them very thick, for four years, two months—with a few missing at the beginning of the sequence, lost to ashes and the wind. A steady forthcoming of some kind of connection, one I had not accepted.

  “I was so scared of her. I was so mad at her. Now I don’t know what I feel.” I tried to remember everything Mom had explained to me about stones and trees and her family, but it all mixed together.

  During dinner I had been looking at her and thinking, There is everything I ever needed. There is the person who took it away. While I talked to her, my thoughts about her kept shifting. She had changed from someone who filled the whole sky to someone who was a confused person who had done the best she could. I was still angry at her. She had hurt me. If I wasn’t careful, I might almost understand why.

  I didn’t want to understand her. If I did I might start worrying about her.

  Of course I wanted to understand her. Wasn’t that what all this spying was about, trying to understand people?

  There had to be somewhere between her breathing my air for me and her not being present at all, somewhere between my wanting to kill her and my not wanting to let her out of my sight. Maybe letters could do it for us. I didn’t think so.

  I slipped the most recent letter from the stack, turned it over, and looked at the sealed flap. I picked at one edge of it, and then suddenly I slid it back in with the others. I didn’t want to know anything else about Mom right now.

  I was starting to get a headache.

  “I could tell you to go to sleep and let it all sort out in your dreams, but it wouldn’t work anymore,” Evan said.

  “Thanks for the thought, anyway.” I looked at my watch. Tomorrow was Sunday, when I could either sleep in an extra hour (the store didn’t open until ten) or spy an extra hour. It wasn’t even ten o’clock at night, and already I was exhausted. It had been a long day. “Even though you don’t own me anymore, can’t you use that voice thing on me the way I did on Pop? Say something like, ‘You’re not tired anymore’ or something?”

  “I don’t do voice. Willow does voice. Elissa does voice. You do voice. Why would I need voice? In my natural state most people can’t even understand me.”

  “What?” I stared at him for half a minute before I figured out he meant that his natural state was being a wolf. “God, I’m tired. Guess I’ll go to sleep.”

  “Good idea.”

  Evan settled down to sleep on the floor, curled up under a blanket It looked really uncomfortable, but he refused the pillow I offered him.

  I put the stack of letters on the lamp table by the head of my bed and turned out the light.

  Sometime later I woke, staring up in darkness. Something in my throat felt warm, a wet sticky heat I coughed and switched on the bedside lamp. It was around midnight. Evan sat up, blinking, and looked at me. I coughed again and touched my throat. Hot. I touched my forehead. Cool. This wasn’t like other colds I had had.

  “What is it?” Evan said.

  “Throat hurts.” My voice came out in a croak.

  He came over and sat on the bed beside me, flicked his fingers near my throat. I could see the light that leaked out under my chin in response to his gesture. It was sickly pale blue. “Silence,” he said. “Oh! They are so sloppy.” He touched my throat with his fingertips and murmured words in a soft two-tone song. Gradually my throat stopped hurting.

  “Silence?” I whispered.

  “So you won’t tell outsiders about them.”

  “What? I can’t talk at all?” I whispered. I coughed against the back of my hand and tried to vocalize. “I can talk,” I said. To my relief, my voice came out of my mouth.

  “Good. They’re so sloppy I was afraid they overstepped. Tell me something about them.”

  “Huh? Oh. Ah—” I tried to say “Aunt Elissa” and nothing but air came out of my throat. “Weird,” I said. Not as bad as blinding or unbinding. Not even crippling, as far as I could figure out. I didn’t want to talk about them, anyway. Still, it was disturbing that they could decide to do something to me, and then do it, and we didn’t even have to be face-to-face. “Eh—eh—eh…”

  His eyes widened. He touched his chest. I nodded.

  “Akenari,” he said, disgusted. He touched my forehead with all his fingertips and muttered in the other language, then said, “I am in your family, not theirs. Willow is in your family, not theirs.” His thumbs moved against my forehead. Green light flashed for a second, and I felt tension and release in my skull. “Try again.”

  “Evan.”

  “Good.” He muttered a few curses I couldn’t understand, shaking his head. “These people, these people. Their teachers must be terrible. No fine-tuning. You okay?”

  “I don’t know.” I felt fine, physically, but I was starting to feel a little sick on a thought level. This would teach me to watch interesting strangers. It had always seemed like such a safe sport. I’d never considered possible backlash from those being watched.

  “Anything I can do?”

  “Not, that I know of. Unless you can make this go away.” I touched my throat.

  “I wish.” Narrow-eyed, he stared out the window at the night beyond. “They’re powerful when they act together, And they’re raising the kids to work with them. That’s something these Southwater people do a lot better than my more immediate family—work in concert. Makes for better, stronger bindings; one’s loners can’t fight very well.”

  I looked out the window too, and saw nothing but darkness.

  I had forgotten to set my watch alarm the night before. I woke about seven anyway. Evan was gone. I heard the shower running. I went through my regular sets. By the time I had finished, he was back, wearing the overalls again. His hair lay wet and flat and darker against his head and neck. I went for my shower, wondering what came next. I wasn’t at all in the mood to follow my route today.

  He was sitting on the bed looking at Mom’s letters when I came back to the room. “There’s a feel to them,” he said, “like what was in the attic trunk.”

  “Huh,” I said. I picked up the packet and pulled a letter from the middle somewhere. I opened it and took out a single sheet of lavender paper, unfolded it, stared at my mother’s familiar sloping handwriting, her unique way of making rs. “Dear Nick,” I read, “I love you. I will always love you, no matter what. I’m so sorry I had to leave…”

  I folded the letter and put it back in the envelope, then put all the letters in the bottom drawer.

  Downstairs, I got out Granddad’s cereal bowl and filled it for him and turned on the coffee maker, then went up to the motel office to set out coffee and pastries. Evan followed me silently. I went down to the lake to touch fingers to it, glanced up toward Mom’s room in the motel, then finished my ritual anyway. The lake felt warmer than usual. For a minute I thought about diving in and swimming down and staying. I enjoyed thinking about it. I let it go.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked Evan.

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s get breakfast.”

  Pop was yawning and mixing milk into his coffee when we came inside. I couldn’t remember the last time I had had breakfast with him. Usually he got up after I had gone in to open the store. Granddad was studying the Sunday funnies. I wondered if they made any sense to him or if he just liked looking at the pictures. “Want eggs?” I asked Pop. Granddad never wanted eggs. He loved sugar cereal. I poured milk over the Frosted Flakes in his bowl for him.

  “Sure,” Pop said.

  “Evan?”

  “Su
re,” said Evan.

  “Toast?”

  Everyone said yes. I heated the skillet and set up for a family breakfast, feeling strange. When Mom lived with us, breakfast together was an everyday thing; since she’d left it almost never happened. Eerie.

  “Pop, can Evan live with us?” I asked when everybody was sitting down and eating.

  “Wha-a-a-at?”

  “I mean, he really doesn’t want to go back to his fa—fa—to, you know. Could he stay with us?”

  Pop studied Evan, who put down his fork, sat up straight, and raised his eyebrows.

  Pop frowned. “Nick,” he said.

  “I know you don’t know anything about him, but I think he’d…” I couldn’t figure out what to say that would recommend Evan to Pop. I hadn’t asked Evan about this, either. When I started to think of the real-world ripples this could have, I got dizzy. Would Evan go to school with me? Would he mooch off us? Would he even consider helping us? He didn’t seem to like helping his other family. Would he just keep sleeping on my floor? It might have worked if we were both ten years old, but we weren’t. These questions wouldn’t have come up if he were still a wolf, but he wasn’t. And how did magic fit into the picture?

  Pop drummed his fingers on the table for a minute, then said to Evan, “Son, would you be willing to pull your weight around here?”

  “What does that mean?” Evan asked.

  “Learn the business or get an outside job that brings in a little income—rent and food money. There’s space in the attic; we could fix you up a room, if you really want to live with us. I know Nick’s been lonely here, especially in the winters.”

  That surprised me. I had thought Pop didn’t notice things like that.

  “I don’t know how good I would be at jobs,” Evan said.

  “Nick could train you how to run the store easy, if you wanted to learn. I’m not sure there’s enough work here for three people, though. How are you on housekeeping? You know anything about boats or fishing? Archie could use some help at the dock. If you got any maintenance skills, people keep having little jobs come up—reroofing or fixing a step or painting. Any experience?”