The Way We Bared Our Souls

by Willa Strayhorn

  But not Kaya. She was outside our vault now. Her energy was elsewhere. And yet . . . I could still feel it.

  “I was thinking,” I said, moving my lips away from Thomas’s but keeping his body close, “about how a lot of native tribes didn’t keep a written history. So most people in the outside world don’t have any idea how they danced, how they laughed, how they loved their babies and celebrated each other. . . . All of that happy, abstract stuff is sort of skipped over by the history books. But that doesn’t mean it’s lost. I think suffering is only part of the picture. The Indians were tricked, killed, even massacred. But that joyful energy, that music that they made, can still survive. When you think about it. Just like our dead can survive, as long as we keep them in our hearts.”

  “You’re right,” Thomas said. “Let’s remember Kaya the way she lived.” I closed my eyes and pictured her riding a bike like a mustang through the streets of Santa Fe. I pictured her racing around a Zozobra picnic blanket with heaven in her hands. I pictured her childlike expression as she comforted me in the car on the way to our first—and her only—ritual, responsive to my suffering even though she had no reference points for pain.

  “Hey, guys,” said a new voice. I opened my eyes to Ellen’s gentle, sober face. Kit stood beside her with his arm around her shoulders. I hadn’t realized how much Kit and Ellen had bonded during the ritual week, but in hindsight it was only natural that they should get together. They had both crafted thorny exteriors to hide their fundamentally tender souls. When they were finally able to ease up on their defenses, they discovered kindred spirits on either side.

  “We thought we’d find you here,” Ellen said. I hugged her. Our group wasn’t complete, but it was still full of love.

  “How are you guys feeling?” I asked, after we’d dried our fresh tears.

  “New and old at the same time,” Ellen said.

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “It’s like being reborn, but in your same old body.”

  “Good, though,” Kit said.

  “Yes,” Ellen said, clasping him to her. “Good.”

  Though everyone had shed their adopted burdens after last night’s ritual, we didn’t feel that we’d regressed. Something had happened to us over the course of the week to forever alter the angle of our energy. We had roused our dormant souls and bared them to the light, and to each other. Now we felt a truth and a . . . harmony to our lives, an inner wellspring that could weather any drought. At least that’s what I sensed when I admired the faces, simultaneously brave and vulnerable, of my friends.

  “Does anyone want to go on a trip with me after school tomorrow?” Kit said. “There’s an Indian reservation around Four Corners that I’ve been wanting to check out. I’m doing research for a short story.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said. “What’s the story?”

  “It’s about a beautiful Zuni girl who dies. Her parents take her body to a mountain and bury her in the space between boulders. They pray over her body for three days, until they’re sure she’s taken refuge in the next world. Then they leave her to the rocks. And then her story really begins.” Ellen reached for his hand and squeezed.

  “That’s kind of cool,” I said. “So in your story, life doesn’t start properly until after death.” We were all quiet for a moment.

  “Is your arm okay, Lo?” Ellen said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s actually . . . a relief to feel it.”

  A coyote howled in the infinite distance behind the airfield.

  “Did you guys know that in Native American legend,” Kit said, “the coyote is responsible for death? The story goes that in the beginning, people lived forever. But the coyote alone knew that the world wasn’t large enough to hold all the people, so he tricked the dead into staying away, even though it made the living sad. The coyote alone knew that sometimes we have to die.”

  I touched the bandage on my arm. “Maybe Dakota knew that too,” I said.

  Thomas looked up at the sky thoughtfully, as if searching for one of his balloons. “You can wish for a different life all you want,” he said, coming back to earth and to us, “but in the end we’re all guided—whether by an animal alter ego, or a shaman, or the spirit world . . . or whatever—to be where we need to be. Or just to be. And I don’t know about you guys, but it makes me feel safe. This week has convinced me that each one of us has a powerful soul that can communicate with something that transcends . . . us. And that same soul can give us direction along the way. If we know how to listen. As long as we pay attention to life—all of life—and keep our hearts wide open, we’ll be protected. We just have to tune in.”

  I thought about how I used to read energy as music and think people were different strains of the same song. Somewhere along the way I’d stopped listening. I’d had to block it all out because it was too much. I hadn’t wanted to be so sensitive to the sounds of the world. It was a liability to feel everything—like my aunt’s pain, like my mother’s grief that her little sister had died before fulfilling all her dreams. Like my conflicted body. But maybe it was a gift to be burdened, because then you could change. Then your soul could be enlightened. Now my ears felt open again to what everyone intoned.

  “And we can’t get rid of human suffering,” I said, picking up Thomas’s thread. “We can’t block out what happened to Kaya. But there’s something to be said for feeling pain, in all its various songs and colors. Because it can inform us.”

  Any number of energetic forces can make us see more clearly. Sometimes just seeing that other people are suffering is enough to forge a blessing of compassion. You can’t make your burdens disappear by putting them into a burning man or into a prayer book or even into someone else. You can only make a healing miracle in your own mind.

  Epilogue

  ON THE DAY WE GRADUATED from high school, I decided to be late to the school-wide party Kit was throwing at Fort Marcy Park. I made a note on a slip of paper and took it to Shell Rock, where Kaya had once planned to hold her seventeenth birthday party. This was my final burden, and I’d borrowed it from the Indians. “Nothing lives long,” the note read, “only the earth and the mountains.”

  I released it into the May sky and watched it float away. It was part of the transient air now, drifting east and west in the same currents that carry tribes, children, and balloons. I watched the note until it disappeared into the airstream along with the fragrance of juniper, along with a hint of water just beneath the surface of the desert. Circling home.

  Just because it’s paper doesn’t mean it has to burn.

  Acknowledgments

  Sometimes I think that acknowledgments should occur in the middle of a book instead of in its final pages, because the halfway point has always been the clutch moment for me as a writer. That’s where I worry that I’ll never finish or that I’ll never do justice to the story I want to tell. In those intense times of doubt, a relentless cheering section makes all the difference. The Way We Bared Our Souls met with its own midlife crisis, but I was able to make it to the end with the help of the following people:

  My mom, who first drove me across the Mississippi.

  Matt, who let me bounce ideas off him about rodeos, Califor-nia, and young love on our long walks around Brooklyn.

  My siblings, especially Stephen, who managed to support my writing despite my rejection of all his YA book ideas.

  My “co-madre” Susannah, whose lifelong spiritual guidance informed this novel.

  My cousin Margo, who was always ready to celebrate with me every accomplishment, however minor, throughout the writing process.

  Charles, who remains with me long after death, and whose face I often saw when I moved Thomas through the world.

  Lance Weisand of Albemarle High, who first awakened me to the darkness of American history, while also giving me hope that our nation’s ideals could prevail.

  Gloria Loomis and
Julia Masnik, whose enthusiasm for the project at times dwarfed my own.

  My late father, whose paperback westerns and Native American histories I still read when I miss him. And who was also on that long-ago trip across a great river.

  Finally, this book would not have made it five pages, let alone to the middle, without the devotion of Liz Tingue at Razorbill. Though as my editor she was always savvy, insightful, and exacting, she was (and remains) first and foremost my friend.

  Looking for more?

  Visit Penguin.com for more about this author and a complete list of their books.

  Discover your next great read!