When Mrs. Youngcloud dropped by for a visit, she walked around those canvases and nodded, saying, “Good work,” then embraced his mother sadly, as if she knew the world those paintings came from, but wasn’t about to encourage anything by saying so aloud.
She would never do anything really crazy, but there were times he felt like he had to keep an eye on her, act up a little, push limits to remind her she had other reasons to make dinner than just a son being home for the summer.
Kennedy’s bullshit aside, turning seventeen wasn’t any easier than being fifteen or sixteen. Oh, there were corners you turned with relief. His half-sister’s christening, where he and his father had to shake hands, be “men,” and Peter had to look at that baby and realize he was no longer the only child in his father’s life. She wasn’t totally ugly. He sent her birthday cards, stuffed animals Bonnie loved to help him pick out. Bonnie Tsosie had saved his life. When they took off their clothes and touched each other, he understood why adults did the things they did. It was all there, right there under your hands, in your faces, the spaces you fit each other into and around. When she did what he liked most—something that had nothing to do with sex—spoke his name aloud, it didn’t matter that he couldn’t hear her. Her compromise made a space that was all theirs, not of the deaf world, where he still got some of the signs wrong, and not of the hearing one he could never go back to. If he had come to any understanding in the time since his illness, it was that he would always be caught somewhere between those two worlds, but it didn’t have to be by himself.
Otherwise his life felt regular, like one giant waiting game where you harnessed your restlessness and sat through classes for credits. The things they tried to teach you didn’t always get sucked into the sponge, but he when he needed those facts, he’d find out he’d learned more than he thought. If you piled up enough credits, they let you go off to college. San Juan was like a trial run, but real college, that was more like waiting for the one bus that never came. He’d look up from his textbooks and there would be Bonnie, signing to him, “Ten more months, Washington, D.C.!” and he’d nod his fist, yes, yes, but he still couldn’t see over the horizon to Gallaudet University just yet.
Riding the horse helped. Feeling Red’s responsiveness to his leg cues, cutting through woods where his ancestors had once lived, had made their way though bad weather and famine, leaving bits of flaked rock and pottery behind—that helped pass the time. Horses didn’t care if you were deaf or hearing; they cared how light your touch was, if you remembered to check their feet for stones or thought to put the sliced green apples into the bucket underneath the oats for a surprise. If you stroked them softly, said their names over and over, what happened was your anger filtered away, and even better, they looked forward to your visits. If deafness was a penalty, Peter guessed RedBow was one reward.
He was waiting for another thing besides college, and growing up. He was waiting for the right time to tell his mother something he’d known all along but felt move into his heart only recently, charge into the chambers with an urgency as real as and wonderful as sound. It was something “John Wayne” had said—whatever his real name was, he wasn’t a liar. A man didn’t leave behind a horse this good, not willingly. After riding Red all summer, Peter knew. It was a matter of time, of clearing a path through some heavy-duty crap, maybe. But in two and a half years, he’d learned a new way of hearing—that what passed through your heart amounted to a different kind of hearing, a sound you could believe in and trust. This whole thing—her being sad, painting demented dogs on the canvas, the longing it seemed like she never could fill—all that was as temporary a thing as those weeks he’d slept on in the coma, until Echo barked loudly, insisting he come home. No matter what the doctors said, he knew he’d heard her, and that the ears sprouting from your head were no match for those in your heart. His mother’s own dogs were barking. She had to listen, and she had to believe.
If not before the first snow, then soon after. Peter Sweetwater might be deaf for good, but O-w-e-n Garrett was coming back.
About the Author
JO-ANN MAPSON, a writer, poet, and teacher, is the author of Hank & Chloe. She lives in Costa Mesa, California, with her husband and teenage son, and is at work on her next novel.
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ALSO BY JO-ANN MAPSON
Hank & Chloe
Fault Line (stories)
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
BLUE RODEO. Copyright © 2007 by Jo-Ann Mapson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ePub edition January 2007 ISBN 9780061739491
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