Lifting the Sky (29 page)

“I'm trying to brighten your lights,” I said. “There are different places up and down your body where light seems stronger. Just holding my hands over these places makes them brighter. That's good, that means they're getting healthier, and all their bright rainbow colors are coming back really strong too. You're fantastic at healing yourself, Shawn.”

“Wait!” Shawn grabbed my hand. “You said there was a fire? What happened to Tivo?”

“Tivo went back to your grandma's. That's how she knew something was wrong. The fire didn't start till late yesterday afternoon.” I smiled to myself as I felt his grip on my hand relax. Now he could put all his attention to healing himself. “Now
shhh,
” I whispered. “Let's see what the two of us can do to make this bone heal more quickly.”

I took a deep breath. What had I gotten myself into? Like yeah, just stick your arm out and let me wave my
magic wand over it, and pretty quick it'll stitch itself back together again, no hitches, no glitches, no witches required. Just little ol' batty me.

What
had
I been thinking?

But weren't we in a special place? I had the feeling that anything could happen here.

We'd do it. The two of us together. We'd heal his arm.

I grew still as still. I put all my intention on my
intention.
If I'd learned anything since we'd arrived at the ranch, it was that you had to be clear about what it was that you wanted. And then to not be surprised when magical things actually happened.

And then I just kind of got out of the way. I let go and let it happen. As I kneeled beside Shawn I could see my own lights growing brighter and brighter until I could no longer tell where I ended and where he began.

The smell of smoke was not the first thing that I noticed when I woke—this morning the world smells of wet sage. We've had two days of showers and last night it
poured
, so the wildfires must finally be almost out. It seems more like a month than just a week since they started.

Mam about rattled my brains out when they hauled Shawn and me back to the ranch. Then she cried. It took several days for her to get back to her usual self. She even brought me breakfast in bed that first morning. I seriously doubt I can expect that today, though (yawn!) it still might be worth a try. But I reckon I've already milked my sprained ankle for all it was worth.

Honestly, you'd think that after whatever it was that happened in the cave to make Shawn's arm strong enough to climb out of the hole, healing a sprain would be a breeze, right? But no way. I can barely put any weight on my foot. Maybe I need to get Shawn to come heal it. Or
maybe I just needed some time to myself up here in my attic room. I've got lots to put down in my journal.

Not that Shawn's arm was totally healed, but it's so much better that hardly anyone believes it was really broken. You should've seen all the winks and sideways glances we got when we came up with
that
story. You better bet he's getting ribbed something awful about hiding out in that black hole until a white girl had to come find him.

So things are getting back to normal, if such a state exists. Rumors, though, are running wild as mustangs across the reservation. The only way to round them up and get them all corralled is to tell what really happened.

First, my apologies to the tribes for trespassing, though Shawn says not to worry; they're so thankful that he was found. And my sincere thanks to the search parties and the firefighters who risked their lives looking for us. And to Mr. Mac and his crew.

I'm sorry for the years Mam says I swiped from her life. Really, how was I to know that a wildfire would start up and then grow till it covered thousands of acres? Or that she and the whole rez would come to believe we were goners?

I mean, there we were, Shawn and I, down in that black timeless hole. He was lying stretched out on the floor while I kneeled beside him. Time seemed to float by. And then suddenly Shawn grabbed my arm.

“You're on fire!!!” he called out, his voice sounding shaken and scared, as if he'd just noticed—well, me, on fire.

But I knew it wasn't fire he was seeing.

“Tell me,” I whispered.

“It's dark, but I
see
you. You're glowing as if you're on fire! You're like the most
beautiful
rainbow.”

I reached down and touched him. He was shaking like leaves in the wind.

“The black isn't black anymore,” Shawn whispered, his voice sounding dazed. “For a moment this hole lit up—it actually glowed. Then I think you were holding that crystal and saying my name when one of those sounds struck me and rang me like a bell.” He stopped. “And my arm. Feel it.”

I ran one hand down his arm. Then I felt it with both hands. It certainly felt more—what was the word? Hitched together?

“Toto,” I whispered, rolling my eyes at the roof of the cave, “I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore. We must be over the rainbow….”

Shawn sucked in his breath. “I feel like a candle's burning inside my head,” he whispered. “The light's so intense I don't think my body can hold it.”

And he burst out crying. He cried so hard I thought the hole would fill up and we'd float to the top on his tears. They were happy tears, though, the kind you might cry when your most incredible prayer has been answered.

“I see them,” Shawn kept saying, and then he'd cry some more. “You did something. I don't know what, but now I can see them. I see your lights. I see
auras
!” And suddenly he burst out laughing.

I laughed too. It felt so good, as if our laughter was dissolving all the horrors of yesterday, as if the bad memories were swelling up to the top of the hole and floating right out of the cave. Finally Shawn reached over and took both my hands in his. “Thank you,” he gasped, “for whatever it was that you did.”

“Well, it wasn't me,” I said when I could talk. “It took the two of us to make this happen. Really, I just let the light do all the work.” I thought about that for a minute. I bit my lip. I couldn't say that I'd chanted his name with such a huge feeling of love that maybe that had had something to do with it too. “But you know what?” I went on. “No one's going to believe that your arm was actually broken.”

“No one except the old ones.” Shawn sniffed, wiping his nose on his sleeve. His lights glowed so brightly he lit up the hole. I felt awed at the sight of him.

“The elders,” Shawn went on, “they know the power of song and they know about healing. They'll believe us. And you and me.
We
know what happened down here.”

We hung a high five. Our hands clapped and held, and the bluish white light from our fingers reached up through the dark like a prayer.

Shawn took a deep breath and got unsteadily to his feet. He rubbed his arm. I reached out at the same time and his fingers gripped mine. I could feel my face getting red, feel something pulse up my arm and down into my heart. A glowing pink light swelled out around us. We stayed like that for the longest time, both of us grinning and not saying a word.

Shawn's stomach suddenly rumbled. He patted it. “I think I got skinny down here,” he boasted. “And this is sure one tough bone. I'm ready to climb out of this hole. I'm strong as a bear.” And he growled.

I flicked on the flashlight. Its weak golden moon found the rope and trailed up the knots to the top. Shadows swung back and forth like giant spiders as Shawn grabbed the rope. It made me think of those tales where a rope falls out of the sky or a bean stalk grows up to the clouds. They always ended with the hero climbing up it and finding himself in a whole different world.

A world twenty feet up.

There was no way he could make it. He'd break his arm again. Or worse, his neck or his leg.

“Better move back or I'll squash you like a bug if I fall,” Shawn warned as he reached up. He tested his arm and pulled himself up to the first knot. Then he reached up again and climbed to the next knot.

I closed my eyes and crossed all my fingers. I twisted my legs like a pretzel, crossed my eyes, and inside my boots I even tried crossing my toes.

“Hey, little bug,” he called down. “I was just kiddin'. What, don't you
believe
?”

I unpretzeled myself. Maybe for good and forever, now that he'd put it like that.

Slowly, taking his time, resting at each knot he came to, Shawn climbed up the rope and with a yell of triumph he pulled himself over the top. I clapped so hard I about broke the flashlight. Then, scuffing a hole in the dirt with
my heel, I stuck the light into it and aimed its pale yellow moon halfway up the rope. Then I grabbed hold of the rope and hitched myself up the knots, past the moon, and out of the underworld.

We scrambled over the rocks that guarded the hole, and then to the barely glowing embers of my fire. I hurried to the jumbled-up sticks by the wall and lugged back all I could carry, and in no time we had us a fire.

High above, up by the entrance, a shaft of smoky light sifted through the narrow mouth of cave. “Wait here while I check on what's going on outside,” I ordered, though Shawn had already plopped down and was pulling his boots off, flexing his toes and warming his feet by the fire. I left him and climbed up the rocky steps to the ledge and poked my head out of the crack.

In the smoky dawn light I could see that the fire had swept through the canyon. The black stumps of trees still smoldered and smoked. The willows and shrubs were burned toast. I coughed and ducked back into the cave like a turtle tucking its head into its shell.

“The fire's still smoldering,” I said when I got back to where Shawn sat warming his feet. “We'll have to wait till it's safe to go out. But now, food,” I said, and I smiled at myself for not having eaten up all of the trail mix. We sat munching and stirring the fire while Shawn asked me a zillion questions. I tried as best as I could to answer them.

What does blue light mean when it flows out of your throat? Green just sparked out of your chest. Why? The yellow that for a second hovered over your head—what was
that? That pink cloud around you—around both of us! What does that mean? And when you were saying my name, why did lights bubble up like huge colored mountains?

“You'll have to figure that out for yourself,” I said. “It's trial and error and looking as hard as you can until it begins to make some sort of sense. When you get used to seeing the lights you'll pay more attention to the ones that look different, like dark holes or spikes or tentacles. There'll be lopsided lights and lights that look scary. You'll be able to tell when someone's happy or sad or angry or jealous, or when there's something seriously wrong, like maybe illness. It's like being a snoop, so you'll have to be careful and, most of the time, hold what you see to yourself. But your great-grandmother said you'd use this to see into people's souls for healing, right? She was saying you'd be a medicine man.”

He stirred the fire, frowning. “That's one thing I don't understand,” he said. “The thing about the rainbow petroglyph. About finding it and then being able to see rainbows. I'm seeing rainbows, but I didn't find the petroglyph. How can that be?”

We had no answers.

For the longest time we sat and stared at the fire. I thought about Pot and my poor, probably worried-plumb-out-of-her-mind mom. When I thought of my dad it was as if somehow, in this short bit of time in the cave, I'd let go, and let
him
go. Maybe Shawn hadn't been the only one to get healed.

Beside me, Shawn had burrowed down into his own
thoughts. The fire burned low. We threw on more sticks and let it burn low again. Above us the pale greenish crystals twinkled and glowed.

Finally Shawn stood up and stretched. He reached his hands out to the four corners of the earth, down to the earth, and up to heaven. The firelight flickered off the crystals and for an instant the whole cave seemed to glow almost as brightly as Shawn. Against the smoky light he was almost transparent; against the dark he was light.

It seemed like we'd been down in the cave for a very long time, so we both figured we should take our chances with the smoldering fires. We shouldered our packs and said our good-byes to the cave. I held my crystal to my heart and thanked it. I so badly wanted to slip it back into my pocket. But no. There was something else I'd learned on this journey to the underworld. And that was that the little people and water ghosts that the Indians believed in might really, actually be real. Or at least real
spirits,
if that was the same thing. They might really be protecting certain places. So I carefully placed the crystal back on the ground where I'd found it, and then, with Shawn following slowly behind me, we climbed up to the mouth of the cave.

I poked my head out. The red sun of late afternoon shone through the smoky haze. “It looks safe enough,” I said, and I squeezed myself out through the crack. Shawn squirmed out behind me, joking that coming in he'd fit tighter than a cork, but now …

He stopped.

Black skeletons of trees lifted leafless arms up to a
hazy sky. Charred stumps of trees smoldered and smoked. Ashes covered the ground and the boulders and rocks. It was an almost-lifeless, smoky-gray moonscape.

“Did you ever see anything like this?” Shawn asked, his voice plumb full of wonder.

I shook my head. “Pretty sad, isn't it?” I muttered.

But Shawn was so wide-eyed it looked like he'd been blinded by a spotlight. He reached down and picked up a small sooty rock. “It's like I've been blindfolded all my life,” he said as he looked at the rock as if it were a diamond in disguise.

As we hiked, Shawn kept reaching out to touch the scorched bark of a burned tree or the withered, curled leaves on a willow or a charred root sticking out of the cliff side.