Winter's Child by Margaret Coel

Author:Margaret Coel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-08-01T12:12:25+00:00

* * *

“She didn’t tell me everything.” Shannon watched the cabin, a dark smudge in the gray light, pass outside her window as they drove along Blue Sly Highway.

“What else would you have liked to know?”

“What else?” Shannon laughed. “E degio e posso,” one of her favorite arias, was playing between them. “Everything else. Did Lizzie ever look at her white arms and legs and wonder who she was? Where she came from? Why was she different from her people? Why she resembled the white people in town? Did she wonder what they thought of her?”

“What do you think?”

“Of course she did. So did John Brokenhorn. He moved the family into the mountains at one point to hide her from white people who might take her. Recapture her.” She slid sideways into the corner and stared at the man beside her, the clumps of reddish hair beneath the brim of his cowboy hat. They were alike; they were related; they came from the same tribe. What was it like for Lizzie to look at her Arapaho family—husband, aunts and uncles and cousins, all the people who gave her her place on the earth—and know she was different?

She straightened herself and stared out the windshield. It looked like snow again, the dark clouds hanging low, stationary and heavy, waiting to open up. She would spend the rest of the day writing out her notes, deciphering what she wrote, reading between the lines. Is that what history was about? The past that lodged between the lines?

And this evening? This evening she would see James Two Horses. Hamburger or pizza someplace. He would know a little restaurant with small tables that they could hover over, faces close, voices low, talking. She still felt the ripples of amazement that had run through her last night. She had never been able to talk to David like that, where she felt he was taking in every word, taking her seriously.

She turned into the passenger window and dabbed at her eyes. She didn’t want Uncle John to see. God, she couldn’t think of David without crying. It was as if his name turned on a faucet inside her. What a fool she’d been. She had always known it was coming. She had to give him that—he hadn’t lied to her. But she had hung on, hoping for what? That he would change his mind, of course, fall in love with her, be unable to imagine life without her.

“Are you all right?”

She felt Uncle John’s eyes on her. She couldn’t hide from him.

She swallowed hard and tried to compose herself before she turned toward him with the most relaxed smile she could muster. “Sure. The research is going just as I hoped.” She drew in a long breath, aware of the stuttering sound. “James and I are having dinner again tonight. I hope Elena and the bishop don’t take offense.”

Uncle John gave her a sideways glance. A glance, nothing else, but she knew that he knew everything.

She stopped

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