No more school bus!
I pocket the keys and go into the house. Everybody’s huddled around the table.
“Alan!” Aunt Lisa motions for me to sit down.
“I’ll eat in my room.” Courtney glares at me before grabbing her plate and heading up the stairs. I watch her go as I make my way toward the table.
“Alan, did you go in her room without knocking?” Mom asks. Both her and Aunt Lisa are looking at me, waiting for an answer.
I nod, guilty. “Yeah.”
“Why?” Mom asks.
“I …” I thought I saw the boogeyman in her window. Can’t say that. “I went for a walk after school. When I was coming back I thought I saw something in the window. I was worried about her.”
My mom repeats what I said like she’s trying to convince herself to believe me. “You were worried about her.”
“Aimee called while you were gone,” Aunt Lisa says, changing the topic. “She wants you to call her back, Alan.” She pauses and her eyebrows kind of come together and a deep line forms over her nose. She’s trying to think of something to say.
Aimee called and wanted to talk to me. Why?
Mom drops her gaze to the table and I do, too. There are hamburger fixings laid out on plates. I reach for a bun.
“Wash up, Alan, and sit down to eat,” Mom says. “I want you to be extra nice to Courtney, okay?”
I wash my hands and sit back down to eat my second hamburger of the day. I let a few minutes go by before I ask, “Did you say Aimee called for me?”
“She’s been dating Blake Stanley for a long time,” Aunt Lisa says. “Personally, I think all his brains are in his muscles.”
I think of how I beat him in the seven-mile today and how, if his brains are in his muscles, he still isn’t very well off. I force myself not to gobble down the burger in two bites. I can feel the two women watching me and I know they know I’m much more excited than I’m letting on. They pretend to talk about things at the mill, but their eyes keep sliding back to me and tiny smiles play around their mouths. I can’t take it anymore. I cram the last quarter of the burger into my mouth and wash it down with a swig of Coke.
“I guess I’ll call her back,” I say, getting up from the table.
“Gonna talk about her boyfriend?” Mom teases.
Aunt Lisa points me toward the wireless phone and recites a number for me. The phone starts buzzing in my ear.
“That’s her cell number, in case you’re interested,” she adds. “And the phone gets reception upstairs, if you want some privacy.”
I think about staying downstairs just to prove there’s nothing going on, but I can’t. I take the stairs two at a time and Aimee answers when I’m about halfway up.
“Hey, Aimee. It’s Alan,” I say. “Alan Parson. The new guy at school.”
“I know who you are, Alan.” It sounds like she’s smiling. Is she smiling? I hope she’s smiling. I make it to the top of the stairs and into my room.
“I heard you called looking for me.”
“I did.”
“What’s up?”
“I was just checking to make sure you were okay. We were talking on the way home. I can’t believe you outran Blake.”
She really did call to talk about her boyfriend? Crap! Does she want me to let him beat me? I keep my voice as neutral as I can. “Well, I guess. He’s good. I just got the jump on him there the last hundred yards or so.”
“He was so furious. He drove home at like ninety miles per hour. He’s super competitive, you know. Nobody’s bested him since middle school.”
“Oh.”
“Competition is good for him, but he … he took it hard or something. He wasn’t himself,” she says, and then there’s a silence, like maybe the words have more meaning than cross-country. No, that’s stupid. I’m putting connotations to her words. Connotations. That’s one of those words we had to learn in English class.
“Competition is good for any athlete,” I say, because it feels like I have to say something. There’s another long pause that feels really awkward. “So, you okay? No more woozy spells like at lunch?”
“No, I’m fine. Sorry. I hope I didn’t freak you out. It was just so weird. I’m good, really. Thanks for helping me.”
“That’s cool. I was worried about you for a second there.”
She pauses. “Um. That’s really nice of you, but I’m okay. I’m so sorry I made you worry.”
“Yeah. Well …” There has to be something to say. Why’d she really call? I grope just to keep her on the line. “How about biology? Is Swanson always so boring?”
She laughs a little, but it sounds like it’s just a polite laugh. “Mr. Monotone,” she says. “There’s no inflection to his voice, unless you can make him mad. Then he’s like a volcano. His eyes get all red. If he’s just minor-league mad, he’ll yell at the class. If he’s super-insane mad he storms out of the room and slams the door, then comes back for a while and sends somebody to the office for sniffing or slouching or whatever. He’s not bad, though. Kind of funny sometimes. They say he smokes pot during his planning period to stay mellow.”
Long silence.
I break it. “So, did you call to tell me Blake’s mad at me?”
“Oh, I didn’t mean it like that. He’s not mad at you, specifically, you know, as an individual. He’s just mad that somebody beat him.” She hesitates. “But no, that’s not why I called.”
“Okay.”
She pauses again. “Okay. Um … Well, basically, I saw your painting in Mr. Burnham’s class.”
Holy crap! I forgot about that. I can feel the blood rushing to the surface of my face. “You did?”
“Yeah.”
Did she recognize herself ? Stupid question. Of course she did. She wouldn’t be calling if she hadn’t.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I was thinking about … something else and just painting. You know, just letting my hands work, and then Burnham told me I’d missed the bell. I didn’t even realize I was painting that. Well, you know, that I was painting you.”
“You didn’t know you were painting me?” She sounds like she doesn’t believe it.
“No.”
“So, you’re saying you subconsciously painted me screaming while ghosts are swirling around behind me and a cougar is watching it all?”
“A cougar?” Could she really have recognized Onawa’s eyes? That would be too freaky.
“It wasn’t a cougar? Those weren’t cougar eyes?”
“Yeah,” I admit. “I just didn’t think you’d recognize them.”
“Alan, I want to ask you something. You’ll probably think I’m crazy for asking, but when I saw your painting it really freaked me out.” She pauses for a long time. “Oh … I can’t do it. I’m sorry. I can’t do it. I should go.”
“I won’t think you’re crazy,” I say really fast.
“Okay … You have to promise not to think I’m a freak or anything. I know freak is a bad word, but, um … can you just promise?”
“I promise.” I think she’s a lot of things, but freak is not one of them.
She pulls in her breath so hard I can hear it over the phone, then she blurts out, “Do you have dreams that, you know, come true?”
“Not really.” My hand goes to the medicine bundle at my chest. How do I tell her about Onawa?
Her voice gets really tiny. “Oh. I do.”
Neither of us speaks for a minute. Then I say, “I don’t think you’re a freak.”
“Oh. Thanks. That’s really nice of you to say … I don’t … I don’t think you’re one, either.” She makes this tiny hiccup noise. “Listen, Alan, I don’t want to talk about this on the phone, but I think we have to talk because my dream is really not good and I don’t want to sound like a wimp, but it’s scaring me. We should meet somewhere. Not at school. Too many people might hear.”
Blake would get jealous. I don’t say it. Instead I say, “Okay. Where and when?”
“Tomorrow,”
she says. “I’ll figure it out. Peace, Alan.”
Peace?
I promised Mom I’d never go to sleep wearing my medicine bundle. Since I came home from Lake Thunderbird with it, she’d reluctantly allowed me to keep it, but wouldn’t let me wear it to bed. “You’ll get it wrapped around your throat while you’re asleep,” she argued. I wasn’t sure that would happen, but I’d promised. Still, I’m holding the bundle in a tight fist against my chest right now.
And I’m praying. That’s something I don’t do very often. Sure, I have conversations with Onawa in my head all the time, but that’s different. Onawa isn’t the Great Spirit. The Great Spirit intimidates me, I guess. I mean, who am I to pray to a Navajo god, even if it is the same deity anyone else prays to, just with a different name? I don’t even know who my father is. I can’t apply for the tribal roll because Mom isn’t 100 percent sure my dad is Navajo or if the partial name he gave her is really his name. It makes me feel like I’m trying to claim something that isn’t really mine.
I lie awake in bed. Everyone else in the house is sleeping. The house should be quiet, but the scratching noise goes on beneath the floor of the upstairs bedrooms. Is it just mice? I’m not so sure anymore.
Mom met my father at a party. They had sex. Apparently the condom failed, and I was the result. All Mom can tell me about him is that he was very good looking, tall and muscular with long hair and fierce eyes. “Bad-boy eyes,” she calls them. She says I have his eyes. She says she was a little drunk, but she felt it when he locked his eyes on her at this party. They barely talked before sneaking off to a bedroom of the house where the party was going on. He told her his name was White Deer, that he was Navajo and didn’t live in Oklahoma City. That’s it. Mom screwed him, they went back to the party, then he was gone. She’s never seen him since. She doesn’t even have a picture of him.
She stopped partying when she found out I was growing in her womb. She hasn’t told me everything she used to do, but she’s told me enough that I know she led a pretty rough life. She sobered up and got a job at a tire factory right after I was born, and she worked there until we moved to Maine.
She named me after my father. Alan Whitedeer Parson. She says she wanted my birth records to show that my father is Indian, but without knowing his last name she couldn’t do it.
“We don’t need their casino money,” she said when she told the story. I don’t care about the money. White Deer, whoever he is, probably saved her life by knocking her up. When I was little I liked to think that the Great Spirit sent him to save her and help create me, but I guess that’s pretty conceited.
Only Onawa tells me different. If not for the vision quest, I’d think I’d just made her up out of my desire to know something about where I came from. Mom’s dead parents were both the grandchildren of German immigrants. Fine. Okay. I’m half German. That’s not the half I’m interested in.
I don’t know many of the prayers. The ones I know I got off the Internet. Still, it’s the best I can do. I recite a Cherokee prayer over and over as I lie awake, listening to the scratching.
“As I walk the trail of life in the fear of the wind and rain, grant me, oh Great Spirit, that I may always walk like a man.”
Walking like a man in the face of fear. Sometimes it’s the best we can do.
I’m in that state between being asleep and being awake. That’s when Onawa usually finds me. I can only think of Aimee. Aimee screaming something at me as the black spirit world closes around her. Is she being possessed or something? I don’t know. Aimee’s red hair is flying around her face, like in my painting.
Remembering the painting breaks the vision apart. Onawa calls to me. She has more to say, but I can’t hear it. My eyes open as I feel my face flushing again over the thought of Aimee finding my crude painting of her in the art room.
“I’m such a dumb-ass,” I tell the ceiling. Still, it had gotten her to call me, and she didn’t seem mad that I’d painted her.
It’s early morning. I dress and go downstairs. I start the coffeepot, then put some water on the stove for oatmeal. Aunt Lisa is in the kitchen when I turn away from the stove.
“You’re quite the handyman around the kitchen, Alan.” She gives me an early-morning smile before adding, “Not in a girly way, you understand.”
“It’s the least I can do for the aunt who found that awesome truck for me,” I say. “Want some oatmeal?”
Eventually, Mom and Courtney make their way to the kitchen, too. I run up to my room to get my books, and as I’m coming out of my room I hear a commotion downstairs.
“No, I’m not riding with him. I’ll take the bus like I always do,” Courtney says loud enough that I can hear her on the upstairs landing. “I don’t like him.”
“Why?” Aunt Lisa asks. “Alan is a nice boy.”
“He’s an asshole. He came into my room!”
“Courtney Rae Tucker! You will not use that kind of language or tone in this house, and especially not about our family.” Aunt Lisa is furious. I wonder what Mom is doing during this exchange. As far as I know, she’s still in the kitchen. I feel awkward even hearing the conversation from up here.
“Fuck you!” Courtney screams. Even I’m shocked by this, and I’m pretty used to hearing kids cuss at their parents. She runs through the dining room and out of the house. She doesn’t bother to close the door.
Below me, Aunt Lisa starts crying. Mom is saying something to her, but I don’t get to hear what because something sharp slams into my back. The pain is sudden, completely unexpected, and right on my spine. I can’t help but let out a girly little yelp, like a dog that’s been stepped on or something. Whatever hit me falls to the floor and I hear glass breaking.
God, it hurts!
I look down and see a framed picture of Courtney. It looks like it’s from early grade school. The glass is broken and one corner of the frame is busted. Her face stares up at me with a happy little gap-toothed smile. She doesn’t look like a girl who’d yell curses at her mother.
My back hurts. The pain isn’t quite as sharp as it was, but it’s still there, in a spot just out of reach so I can’t even rub at it.
What caused that?
I look around the hallway and find a rectangle of space on the wall that’s whiter than the rest. The spot is a good twenty feet away from where I was when the picture hit me. My arm hair prickles up again. No way that was a coincidence. No. Freaking. Way.
• 7 •
AIMEE
You are mine. You are all mine.
Despite the stupid dream voice that’s echoing in my head, I go kayaking when I wake up, same as always.
Last night it wasn’t just the voice. I dreamed of boys beneath the water and a seal with seeing eyes. But things are normal on the river. It’s so quiet as the kayak glides over the water that I almost think I can hear my mom there, feel her breath when she kisses me good night, hear her say my name. Ospreys glide in ever-widening circles above me, catching up winds. I would like to stay out here forever, but there’s school. There’s always school.
I get ready to go, kissing all the men in my life good morning, which causes Benji to make fake puking noises. I bop him lightly on the arm, but it’s like I’m just going through the motions. In the shower I make a list of things I have to do today, but the first one makes me stumble, slip in the stall, and hit the tiled wall. Today I have to dump Blake.
He picks me up in his Volvo. I slide inside, put my bag on my lap. He leans over to kiss me. It’s all I can do not to cringe. I turn my head so he gets my cheek.
“So, how’s my favorite beautiful groupie this fine morning?” he asks, pulling out of the driveway, acting like nothing at all is wrong. He turns the music back up. He always turns it down when he gets me so that Gramps won’t lecture us about our precious eardrums.
“I’m okay,” I answer.
It’s like all my courage washed down the drain in the bathroom. Blake keeps talking about his tunes and cross-country and more abo
ut his tunes. Then he suddenly throws out, “Him beating me was just a fluke.”
“Yeah? Who?” I have this disconnect, can’t figure out what he’s talking about.
“That Indian. Courtney’s cousin.”
My heart beats once. It beats twice. We head down a hill toward Schoolhouse Corner. “Did you just refer to him as ‘that Indian’?” I shift around, trying to find a way to get comfortable. My foot lands on the top of some ancient Glue CD cover.
Blake reaches over and yanks it from under my foot, then straightens up again. “Jesus. You cracked the cover. What’s wrong with you?”
Somehow he manages to stay on the road.
I decide to not be the peacemaker this time.
“What’s wrong with me?” I say. “You’re the one who just referred to someone by their race like it’s their one defining character trait or something. I’m not the one who just did that. Plus, you took the Lord’s name in vain.”
“Aimee, calm down.” His face sort of gets normal again, like his anger is seeping out of him. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“You said it, Blake. Lately you’ve been acting differently.”
“I could say the same about you.”
I stare at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Whatever, Aimee.”
“Whatever?”
He grabs the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles whiten. “Whatever.”
All my insides tighten up. I shut off the music, trying to calm myself for what I have to say to Blake, who I thought I knew, who I thought was nice, but somehow isn’t all of sudden. I just say it. “We can’t go out anymore.”
“What?”
I repeat it. “We can’t go out anymore.”
He gets his I’m-humoring-her voice. “Okay. Why can’t we go out anymore?”
“Because you’re a racist.”
He stops the car. “What? Saying ‘that Indian’ does not make me a racist. You’re acting crazy.”
“I’m not crazy.”