“What gives them the right?” Mena asks. “I danced here. I ran and sang and became a woman here.” She turns liquid, dark eyes to me. “So did you, Lenn.”
I can’t even manage a nod. I’m numb. She’s right. If I close my eyes, I can still see the bonfire flames licking bright orange into the darkness, ringed by friends and family, singing, dancing, celebrating. Mama stood by, her face wet with emotion, her eyes bright with pride.
In me.
“My crowns,” I whisper, sudden realization bringing fresh tears to my eyes.
“Oh, honey,” my father sighs, pulling my head down to his shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
At the end of the Sunrise Dance, young women receive the crowns worn by the Mountain Spirit dancers. The elaborate headdresses are decorated beautifully, painted with symbols representing the visions seen by the medicine man. Sacred, they can only be used once and are then hidden. Mine are secreted in the hills surrounding this cursed pipeline slithering through our valley like a serpent, every sound from the heavy machinery below a hiss and a strike.
Injustice never rests and neither will I.
My mother’s words float to me on an arid desert breeze. It feels like we never win, but my mother never gave up. I don’t know how she died, but I do know how she lived. She would have fought until the end. And so will I. I’ll learn to work the very systems set up against us.
Some of the women start singing one of the old songs. The Apache words, the sound—it’s mournful like a dirge. Their voices rise and fall, cresting and crumpling with sorrow. We stand by like pallbearers watching the land flattened and hollowed and filled with tubing. I’ll never forget this feeling, but will call on it when I’m weary in the fight. No, I’ll never forget this feeling.
And I’ll never forgive Warren Cade.
Part II
“What you get by achieving your goals
is not as important as what you become
by achieving your goals.”
― Henry David Thoreau
5
Lennix
Four Years Later
“So have you decided what you’ll do after graduation?” Mena asks.
The question may as well be a pebble she tosses into the river we sit beside. It ripples through the doubts puddled in my chest. My time in Arizona State’s College of Public Service and Community Solutions has been amazing, but now the real world awaits. And it’s broken and hurting and a landscape wrought with so much injustice, I’m not sure where to start.
“I’m still deciding.” I stretch my bare legs out in front of me on the riverbank’s dry patch of grassy land.
“What are your options?” she asks.
“Hmmm, options. Maybe that’s the problem. I have too many of them.”
“Tell me.”
“I’ve been accepted into Arizona State’s master’s program.” I push the heavy rope of my hair back over my shoulder. I haven’t cut it in forever. “I’ve been offered the Bennett Fellowship, which would be awesome and require me to serve in a designated area of community service for a year. Or I have an offer from this big lobbying firm in D.C.”
Mena whistles and sends me a wide grin. “Well look at you. Those are all great options.”
“Yeah, but I graduate in a few months and I’m still figuring out which is the right one. Nothing feels like it.”
I’m like this river, twisting through Arizona’s hills and forking along the way, each tributary leading somewhere different, directing the flow of water in a new direction. You can’t take them all at once. Not for the first time, I recall running to the four directions when I was thirteen, gathering the elements into myself. Which way should I go?
“Maybe it will become clear while you’re away,” Mena offers.
“Somehow, I don’t think Viv and Kimba have meditative pursuits planned for spring break,” I chuckle, plucking at the sun-fried grass.
“Amsterdam, huh? That should be fun.”
“Yeah, Vivienne’s best friend Aya goes to college over there. She’s half Dutch, and has promised to show us everything.”
“You’re so lucky. Make the most of your time there.” She gives me a teasing look. “And maybe finally find a man.”
“Auntie!” I fake a scandalized tone and expression. Mena has never been shy about her love of a fine man. “Well, I never.”
“Exactly. You’ve never,” Mena says, her chuckle knowing and throaty. “And, girl, you have no idea what you’re missing.”
I’m picky. I know that. My bar is high and I haven’t found a man I wanted to take that final step with, to give my body to. I dated a few guys in college, had a good time, and even experienced real passion. But when it came down to it, I just didn’t want to be with any of them that way. I’ve taken the elements into my body. The first time I take a man into my body, I want it to mean something to me.
“I’m not judging you or anyone else,” I tell Mena. “Believe me. I know I’m in the virgin minority, but I’m just not that pressed. When it happens, it’ll happen, and I think I’ll know who that first time should be with.”
“I’m not rushing you, honey. I see too many girls down at the reservation clinic pregnant and stuck with a baby before they’re ready. I say anything you’re not ready for, just wait. That includes sex.” She slides me a wicked grin. “But, oh, when you find the man worthy to crack that code.”
“I’m not a safe, Auntie,” I protest with a short laugh.
“I think you are.” Her eyes and mouth sober. “I also think something kind of froze in you when your mama disappeared. I wish you’d kept seeing that therapist. I told Rand one session wasn’t nearly enough.”
My good humor slips, too, but I force a grin, hoping to restore it. “I have a ten-year plan, and the therapist doesn’t happen until around year eight.”
“You’ll have to let yourself feel again, Lennix. I see it, you know? That reserve you have with everyone. That guard that locks into place when you feel anyone you could care about getting too close.”
She’s right. Something inside me did flounder, fall when Mama never came home. That hurt is a dull ache I’m not sure will ever go away. Better not tempt fate to do that to me again. My father? Well, it’s too late to block him out. And if the Sunrise Dance hadn’t tied us together inextricably, the last eight years when Mena has surrogated for my mother time and time again would have. I have my best friends I made at college, Vivienne and Kimba, but that’s about it. Anyone beyond them stands outside a closed circle. I think again, as I do unreasonably often, of the man I only knew by his first name, Maxim. Something about him stormed through my defenses right away even though I was too young for anything with him.
“Lennix,” Mena says and snaps her fingers in my face. “You hear me talking to you, girl?”
“Sorry, Auntie.” I pass a hand over my eyes, blinking away the image of a young, handsome man who’d traveled far to protest with us. With my tribe, but ultimately, with me. He took a dog bite that was intended for me, and as I think of it, I don’t know if I ever properly thanked him. “I was daydreaming, I guess. What’d you say?”
“I said let’s do what we came here for, to clear your mind and set your heart.” She nods to the river.
The sun may be warm, but that river is freezing. It wouldn’t be the first time its rushing frigidity set me to rights and cleared my head.
“Let’s do it.” I stand and strip away my denim cut-off shorts and peel the tank top over my head to reveal my one-piece bathing suit.
Aunt Mena does the same until she wears only a black sports bra and boy-leg underwear. She was a little older than my mother, but they had been friends since they were girls. She’s still relatively young, barely over forty, and in great shape from the yoga she does outdoors every day. Makes me wonder what Mama would be like if she were still here.
“Ready?” Mena asks, brows raised.
“Ready.”
With careful steps, we make our way down the bank toward the r
iver. We wade in until the water laps at our thighs, shockingly cold. Mena holds a tiny bag, which she tips over her hand until pollen, like powdery sunshine, spills into her palm. I’ll never forget the medicine man sprinkling me with sacred pollen from the cattails. I feel just as reverent as Mena dusts it over my face now. I close my eyes, letting it flutter over my cheeks and eyelashes as if each particle holds healing restorative power. And maybe it does.
“It’s not science or magic,” Mena whispers to me. “It is hope. It is faith that connecting with the land, with our land, will tell the universe, tell the Creator, that we have been blessed and are ready for what is ahead. Now, dip to wash it away. Not just the pollen, but all the things that cloud your mind and blur your vision.”
She points to the river. I hold a bracing breath against the cold I know waits for me and sink into the water. It closes over my head, insulates me for just a few seconds and I feel it all. I feel the loneliness, the fear, the uncertainty about my future. The river swallows me whole and then spews me out, making me gasp and swipe hair from my face.
“You feel more clear?” Mena asks, her tone and eyes searching my face, coated with droplets of water.
“I don’t know about clear,” I say, smiling and letting the sun kiss my face. “But I’m ready.”
6
Lennix
“So you made it?”
The concern threading my father’s voice kicks in my instinct to reassure him. He needs lots of reassuring. Ever since Mama disappeared, he worries constantly.
I get it. He’s a professor of Native American Studies. He knows the statistics. Four in five American Indian women have experienced violence, and more than one in two have experienced sexual violence. Even knowing the facts, he never expected them to hit so close to home. He and my mother never married, and didn’t always see eye to eye on how I should be raised, but I know he never stopped caring for her and was devastated when she disappeared.
“We made it, yeah.” I lean against the wall outside our hostel room. “I’m fine. The hostel’s great. Amsterdam’s beautiful.”
“Please be careful, Lenn. Three pretty young girls in a foreign country—you could be snatched off a corner in broad daylight. You know not to drink anything you’re not sure of. God, not to mention sex trafficking.”
I’ve heard his concern veer into panic before, so I stop him before it goes there. “Dad, did you watch Taken again?”
His guilty silence provides my answer.
“No one is going to snatch me off a corner, or traffic me or sell my virginity to the highest bidder.”
“Could we not discuss your virginity? I’m not prepared for this.”
“I’m twenty-one, and believe me, my father is the last person I want to discuss my sex life with, too.” Non-existent, though it is . . .
“Could you also avoid using the word ‘sex’ in the same sentence as . . . well, you?” he asks. “Men are pigs. I’ve told you this, right?”
“Um, on more than one occasion. I believe you once called your species the scourge of the earth, and told me they were basically petri dishes with bad intentions.”
“I stand by that assessment.”
“Yeah, well, you’ll be happy to know I’m not even in the lab, so to speak. Maybe I’m asexual? Or broken? I just don’t ever meet guys who seem worth my time, ya know?”
“When I asked you not to use the word sex in the same sentence as you, that included asexual. But, baby, you’re not broken. You’re . . . discriminating. In the good, picky way, not in the systemic racist way.”
“Yeah, I figured.”
“All jokes aside,” he says, his voice dropping, sobering, “someone will feel more special than the rest.”
I want to ask if Mama felt more special to him than the rest. I want to ask if he ever cries for her, like I still do. Does grief hit him in the most unexpected times and hang over the day until he wants to crawl back in bed and sleep so he won’t remember she’s gone and never coming back? Does she come to him in his dreams?
Or is that just me?
They weren’t together for years before she died, and it makes me wonder if I’m the only person on Earth still hurting this way for her. If her memory only lives in my heart like a knife lodged between my ribs. Grief is its own kind of intimacy, a bond of sorts between you and the one you lost. No one else feels it the way you do about that person you loved most. And maybe it helps to know someone reaches that same level of despair. That’s what family is for, right?
I wish I could go back to the night of my Sunrise Dance and beg her not to go to that protest. Ask her, just this once, to let someone else fight the world’s problems because I needed her more than everyone else did.
“Lenn, you still there?”
I shake off the helplessness of done deals and irreversible things, and straighten from the wall. “Yeah, I’m here. Sorry. Time difference has me out of it. I just wanted to let you know I got here safely.”
“Thank you for that.”
“I’m sure you have a stack of papers waiting to be graded so I’ll let you go. You need a social life, old man.”
“You’re right,” he says, his voice lightening. “So you’ll be happy to hear I might be getting one. I have a date tonight.”
I frown and blink and lick my lips and tug on my ear. Apparently the thought of my father on a date makes me fidgety. “A-a date? Wow. Good. Good for you.”
“Yeah?” he asks with unexpected tentativeness.
I think of my father as I usually see him. Distracted in that way academicians often are, lost in a pile of papers he’s grading or books he’s reading or something he’s researching. His gray eyes always half-hazed with whatever task I interrupted. He deserves more than that.
“Yeah, I’m happy for you, Dad. Do I know her?”
He goes on to tell me her name is Bethany. She’s an English professor who started a few months ago. They’ve had coffee, but are grabbing dinner tonight. Hearing him excited about something other than his work lifts my heart a little. I find myself smiling as we disconnect.
“I miss you, too.” Vivienne, my best friend number one, is clutching her phone and wiping a tear away when I enter the hostel room we’re sharing. “I keep telling myself it’s only a week, but my heart won’t listen.”
I catch the eyes of my best friend number two, Kimba, who gives me her famous can you believe this shit look.
Vivienne glances at us a little self-consciously, turns her back, and lowers her voice.
“Sorry, I should have told you. I took the pillow case,” she says in a sad whisper. “Because it smelled like you.”
“Jesus, keep me near the cross,” Kimba mutters, rolling her eyes and raising her voice. “Bitch, get off that phone. Stephen, she’ll be fine. We’ll make sure she doesn’t screw anyone before the wedding.”
I snort, but over her shoulder, Vivienne’s eyes are wide and horrified and filled with poison.
“Sorry,” Kimba hisses with unrepentant humor.
“I have to go, Stephen,” Vivienne says. “The girls need help settling in.”
As soon as she hangs up, she grabs a pillow from a nearby couch and puts it over Kimba’s face where she lies on the bottom bunk.
“You’re smothering me,” Kimba’s muffled voice, mixed with laughter, comes from under the pillow.
“That’s the point.” Vivienne chuckles and lifts the pillow. “Were you trying to get me un-engaged?”
“It would take a stick of dynamite to blast you and Stephen apart,” I tell her, climbing the short ladder to my upper bunk on the opposite side. “I’m not sure he’ll make it this one week without you.”
“It’s gonna be tough,” Vivienne says, completely serious, which sets my and Kimba’s eyes to rolling again. “What? It’s our first time apart since the engagement.”
“I get it,” Kimba says, then shakes her head and mouths, “I don’t get it.”
“I mean, it’s a week.” I try to keep the exasperati
on from my voice. “Surely you can last a week without him.”
“Just wait’ll you meet the one,” Vivienne says. “And you’ll see how it feels. Maybe even here in Amsterdam. Wouldn’t that be romantic?”
“Until I figure out what I want to do with my life,” I say dryly, “the great problem of ‘the one’ will have to wait, and I’m in no hurry.”
“While I’m looking for the one of many,” Kimba says. “Nothing that lasts beyond an orgasm. Maybe I’ll find a big, blond Dutchman to woo me with his foreign tongue.”
“Some tongue.” Vivienne laughs. “And some abs, chest, arms, dick.”
“Oh, for sure some dick.” Kimba high fives Vivienne and peers up at me from the bottom bunk in our tiny, but cozy hostel room. “Come on, Lenn. You planning to get you some while we’re here?”
“Oh, yeah.” I turn over onto my stomach. “Because I’m most likely to rando hook-up. I doubt very seriously I’ll be surrendering the V-card to some stranger in Amsterdam. I’ve held onto it this long; that would be a waste.”
“Already a waste, if you ask me,” Viv says. She climbs the ladder to her top bunk, but stops midway, propping her butt against a rung. “I know you’ve been tempted.”
“Of course I have.” I shrug. “But it passes, and I always see something I don’t like, don’t trust, or can’t tolerate. I’ll know when it’s the right time, the right guy. I literally just had this conversation with my father.”
“You and your dad,” Vivienne says, shaking her head and grinning. “How is the professor?”
“Better now he’s heard my voice and knows I haven’t been sex trafficked yet.”
“Ugh,” Kimba groans from the lower bunk. “Did he watch Taken again?”
“I know. I told him to stop. Anyway, he assures me that I’m probably not asexual.”
“Was that a serious thought?” Vivienne asks. “I mean, it’d be okay if you were, but you’ve had boyfriends and seemed to like all the pre-game activities. I bet you’ll like dick once you get some.”
The Kingmaker Page 5