Mama sat next to me in the yellowing grass of late summer. Asher knelt on the other side of her. I gazed out at the gentle sway of leaves in the tops of trees and tried to compose myself for Mama’s sake. 

“We have an important duty now,” she began, rocking gently to keep Gabriel content. “It’s up to us to protect his gift.” 

“What are you talking about?” I snapped. “Buck’s gift is gone.”

“No, Jemma. You saw what I saw.” She pulled the blanket back from Gabriel’s face to look down at her baby boy. “Now there are a lot of specifics I don’t know about how it all works, so we’ll have to do some trial and error. Buck kept it all to himself. That was our biggest mistake. Assuming he’d always be here.” 

“Can I ask you a question?” Asher said. “Are you afraid?”

She swallowed hard. The kind of swallow that answers the question without words. “Terrified.”

“Of what, exactly?” Asher asked. 

“Raccoons,” she said. She turned her gaze back to Gabriel and began to hum. Asher and I exchanged a glance, unsettled by the definitiveness of her response.

“Robert Halliday abused his son.” Her words were heavy and deep in her throat. “Built himself an empire on your father’s back. The Halliday family wants one thing and that’s power. They will stop at nothing to rebuild what they used to have.”

It wasn’t cold but I felt chilled. 

“Buck’s gift was the source of their fame. And when we took it away? Well, they want what they think we owe them.” 

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The gift.” Mama’s eyes looked back and forth from Asher to me. “I don’t mean to frighten you. But the Hallidays are dangerous men.”

“What about Alma?” Asher asked.  

Mama’s face grew hard. “Alma will do whatever it takes to reclaim her place. So that means when the gift shows itself, we must conceal the light.”

Conceal the light. Even as a child I understood that had multiple meanings. When I spoke, my voice quivered in time with my chin. “They can’t take a baby from his mama. Isn’t it against the law or something?”

“There are men in this world who don’t follow laws.” 

“What about your family?” Asher asked. “Can they help us?”

Mama’s lashes fluttered over mermaid eyes. “My mother is dead.”

“But—”

“My mother is dead.”

The sting of her words silenced us. Tension settled so thick between my little family you could dish it like tapioca. I held my breath. Did Asher too? Gabriel seemed content. Mama relaxed her face and reached out her hand to squeeze or forearms the way she did when trying to make us feel better. “Asher, you are strong and capable like your father. You’re going to see us through this. And Jem? You were his honeybee. His light. You two are the best of him, you know that? The absolute best of him.”

The best of him? That might be true of Asher but not me. I was foolish. Impulsive. Quick to judge. Didn’t she see? Buck was the sun that lit the world.
I was the moon who stole light to be seen.

Footsteps on the path behind us pulled our attention. “Folks are waiting for you,” Valdez said, standing with his back against the sun. “Will you be much longer?”

Asher stood, brushed dirt from his pants, and reached out to help Mama stand. Gabriel gurgled in her arms, but all remained well. 

“Wait.” I scrambled to my feet, trying to keep my dress from climbing up my legs. “If Buck was once Gideon Halliday, who were you?” 

Mama’s soft smile didn’t exactly match her words. “No one, Jemma. I was no one.”

I watched Mama’s back as they all headed back up the buggin’ trail. On some, unconscious level, I could relate to her feelings. That might have been the moment I internalized how a person disregards themselves. Tell children how to feel, what to think, and children will listen. Children will become what they see. As Asher and Valdez flanked Mama on the way back to the reception, each concerned for her wellbeing, no one turned back for me. Good.

I had business to attend to.

In the water not far from where I stood was the stick cross, almost completely submerged in the water. Why wouldn’t it just wash away already? How long would it remain a haunting symbol of sacrifice? 

“Mama lied,” I blurted out, resentment pushing words from the depths of me. “She said if I was good and had faith in you, you’d come through. Why didn’t you?” I looked up at the sky and whisked away a surprise tear before it tumbled down my cheek. “We’re just a bad match, you and me, so it’s best we go our separate ways. That way in the end? Neither of us disappoints the other.” 

My first breakup was with God. Not as devastating as a breakup yet to come, but I had no way of knowing that then. At the moment, it hurt like hell. Like wax that dried on my innards and was mercilessly ripped away. I wanted to feel light after shedding the weight of heavy and useless dogma. I wanted to feel free. Instead I felt more shackled than ever as my heart collapsed like one of Tía Raquel’s white dwarf stars. 

And then? A dragonfly hovered close to my ear. I froze, shifted my eyes to the side. I could reach out and cup her in my hands, she was just a little insect, so much growing still to do. But I didn’t capture her. That’s not what I was meant to do that day. Eventually, like all things, she and I parted ways. I wanted to tell her goodbye, that I’d miss her. But she was never really mine in the first place. She belonged to the world.

When I started up the buggin’ trail I left the spirit of Buck behind me. In a place where the river swallowed my youth and my hope. I was awfully young to be that cynical, I can see that now. But when you’re a child anger and fear manifest themselves as hate. Maybe that’s the way of it even when you’re grown. 

With all the conviction a nine-year-old can muster, I took my first steps towards the darkening sky, away from my father’s light. Something else laid ahead of me. Shadows of a world where uncertainty crowded the horizon, like clouds moving in from the west.