“It’s me,” I whispered.
He released a relieved choke of laughter.
“Where are you?”
“Here.”
As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw that he’d set his blanket in the middle of the shed. Gleaming tools hung on the walls. I spread my blanket beside Amir’s and lay down. The ground was cold and damp.
“We’ll tell Rei,” I said, pulling my blanket around me. My teeth would not stop chattering. “Rei will make Bear let you sleep inside again.”
Amir was silent.
“Amir?”
“We can’t tell Rei.”
“Why not?”
“If she finds out how badly Bear treats us, she’ll take us both away from here. I could see she was thinking about it earlier today. She was trying to decide what to do. If she doesn’t trust Bear, she’ll take us away.”
“Then we’ll live with Rei! And we can go to Little Earth again.”
“Rei doesn’t get to decide if she keeps us. That’s not how it works. We’ll be sent away. Who knows where we’ll end up. Or if we’ll be allowed to stay together.”
“Of course we’d be allowed to stay together,” I said. But I realized it was a subject Amir knew more about than I. He had been sent away from everyone and everything he knew before, when his mother died.
“We’ll stay together if we stay here.” Amir’s voice was determined. “Even with Bear... even with sleeping in this shed...” He folded his arms behind his head and looked up at the ceiling. “I think sometimes of my friends at the orphanage and how they would love it here. The ocean. The beach. The garden and the orchard and the grove. So many places to run and explore and... be free. And Rei is a good person. Not everyone is like her. She watches over us. I’ll sleep in the shed if it means that we can stay here, together.”
I didn’t have to see his face to know his expression in that moment. The fierce way that Amir spoke of Horseshoe Cliff,and his certainty that we would never be parted, thrilled me. He seemed older than me then, more confident of his ability to shape his own destiny. His bravery always seemed to me a choiceless matter; it was just who he was.
“Fine,” I said. “We won’t tell Rei. But if you have to sleep out here, I will, too.”
When I told Amir how Bear had kicked Pal, Amir worried over our dog in a voice so gentle that Pal burrowed himself under Amir’s arm and licked his chin repeatedly. We talked about the other children and teachers from Little Earth and what they might be doing, how strange it was that we would no longer attend the school. The fog outside must have grown thin because moonlight suddenly fell through the shed’s many cracks, brightening the room and making the teeth on the saws that lined the wall glimmer.
“Oooooooo,” I moaned, ghostlike.
“Spoooky,” Amir joined in, making his long fingers scramble through the air like spiders on a web.
Our laughter excited Pal. He stood and yawned and then tugged at our blankets, growling and playful even as he limped. We shushed him, laughing, but we knew the noise didn’t really matter. Bear was passed out in the cottage and wouldn’t stir until morning. There was no one else for miles in any direction. We were alone.
MY BROTHER NEVERsaid anything about me sleeping in the shed each night with Amir, but a few weeks later a silver truck rumbled down the driveway pulling a horse trailer behind it.When the truck stopped in front of the cottage, a man with a beard as silver as his truck stepped out.
“Hello,” I said, hopping down the porch steps to stand before him. Amir trailed after me more slowly, holding one of the wood animals he’d been whittling in one hand and the knife that Bear had returned to him in the other.
“Hello, young lady,” the man said. He cocked his head and looked Amir up and down, his gaze resting for a moment on the knife in his hand. “Oh, that’s right,” he said. “You’re that Indian boy Jacob took in a few years back. I see he managed to teach you to whittle.”
There was something in his voice that set my teeth on edge. I took a step forward. “Are you looking for Bear?”
The man gave me an amused smile and was about to respond when he caught sight of something over my shoulder. I turned, shielding my eyes from the sun with my hand, and saw Bear walking toward us with Old Mister and Guthrie on either side of him. Their lead lines encircled his hands in the way that my father had always warned us to avoid. If your hands were tangled up in a lead line, a horse could drag you with him if he spooked and galloped away. Bear had never had any interest in the horses, and it showed in the careless way he led them.
“Hey, Lawton,” he called gruffly. He didn’t look in my direction. “Here they are.”
My heartbeat sped up.
“What’s going on?” asked Amir.
Bear ignored us. The stranger walked around the horses,running his hand along their haunches, lifting each of their legs and looking at their teeth.
