Gives Light(Gives Light Series) Read Online Free PDF Page B

of my hand and drew a deep, unsteady breath.  I looked absently around the house, trying to dispel my thoughts.
     
    The walls were covered in drawings.
     
    I wouldn't be surprised if my heart had stopped just then.  I drank in the drawings with yearning; familial scenes reimagined, mother and father with their infant, husband and wife on their wedding day.  I thought they were all by the same hand, but I couldn't be sure.  There was a tremendous amount of anatomical accuracy, but some of the details were wrong, my father missing his paunchy stomach and wobbly chin.  And then it occurred to me:  Dad might not have had the excess weight when he was young.  It was eleven years since the last time Granny had seen him.  Granny must have made these drawings.  It seemed like the sort of thing she would do covertly.
     
    A floorboard creaked on the far side of the room.
     
    My head shot up on my shoulders.  I stared at the raw support beam, my pulse sounding loudly in my ears.  I swore I saw something moving amid the shadows.
     
    An unsettling, artificial silence diffused the air.  I wanted to call out, Who's there?   At the same time I didn't.  What if it was a wild animal?  No, that didn't make sense.  How would an animal have got in here when all the doors were closed?
     
    For a long time, the only sound was of the rain drizzling through the cracks in the ceiling.  I wanted to make it clear:  I wasn't moving.  This was my house, all the heartache and ruin that went with it.  I was not the intruder here.  This was the only place on the reservation that I wasn't intruding.
     
    Finally he stepped out from behind the beam.
     
    He was hulking, his jeans torn at the knee.  His hair looked more tangled and braided than it had the night before.  Annie had said he hated everyone equally, but the hatred in his eyes, the eyes on mine, looked unparalleled.
     
    I had a distinctly unfunny thought just then.  Rafael's dad had killed my mom in this house.  Maybe Rafael would kill me in this house. 
     
    "You gonna put it back, or what?"
     
    I stared.  He meant the drawing.  There was spirit gum on the back of the paper.
     
    I folded up the drawing and stuck it in my front pocket.
     
    I don't think I managed to keep the suspicion out of my gaze, though it wasn't exactly my idea to make Rafael uncomfortable.  I couldn't take my eyes off of him, much in the same way that you can't look away from a train wreck, or a burning forest.  I half expected him to hit me.  But no; he went on looking at me, eyes dark and intense.
     
    He moved past me, toward the door.  He was gone in seconds.
     
    I didn't know what to make of the encounter.  I was still thinking about it at dinner that night, sitting on Granny's porch, when the rain had stopped, the grounds dewy and damp, when Granny nodded off in the middle of a story about a spider who wove the webs of fate and Annie chased a little boy I took to be her brother around the bonfire.
     
    It wasn't until much later, when I was already in bed, that I realized where Rafael had sat during dinner.  On the wet ground by the bonfire, embers illuminating his hands and face.  A notebook on his lap and a piece of charcoal in his hand.
     
    I had worn my day clothes to bed; I didn't own a proper pair of pajamas.  I reached into my pants pocket and unfolded the charcoal drawing.  The spirit gum had dried up.  I laid the drawing on the table next to Dad's bed, the moonlight through the window casting it in radiance; I ran my fingers along the curves of Mom's face, a distant wolf baying in the woods, his mournful song echoing in my ears.
     
    I wasn't the only boy whose life had changed eleven years ago.
     
     
     

4
    Lottery
     
    I wound up with a cold.  I've never fared very well in the rain.  Granny tutted over me for the next few days, exasperated, and fed me extremely strong draughts of peppermint tea.  Peppermint tea, I learned, was the locals' secret:  You drink