It's Only Temporary (19 page)

But the truth was, she didn't know
what
to expect this Thanksgiving, because – was everything going to be okay with her mom, her dad, and Scott? Or “something
like
okay,” the way she had put it to Kee last Sunday morning?

Skye actually felt nervous about her own family reunion.

She spotted them at once, in spite of the many people pushing toward the baggage carousel like iron filings being drawn to a giant horseshoe magnet. Scott was sitting on a brown leather bench, probably trying to look as if nothing was wrong with him, though his walker – complete with yellow tennis balls on its front legs – crouched nearby. Her mom leaned against a square pillar, while a few feet away, her dad scanned bobbing heads in the crowd like a human radar device.

Her mom looked old, Skye thought, feeling guilty about sounding so critical – or if not old, old
er
. Her hair needed cutting, and she'd gotten thinner, and she wasn't wearing any lipstick.

“Skye!” her father shouted, waving his arms in the air. “There's our girl,” he announced to his wife and Scott.

“
Darling
,” her mother said, rushing over to greet Skye with a warm embrace.

Her mom still smelled the same, Skye thought gratefully – like lemonade, or something else sweet and citrus-y. She had missed her mother's hugs. “I'm here,” Skye announced unnecessarily.

“Oh,
you
,” Mrs. McPhee said quietly, giving Skye another squeeze.

“Hi, Mom,” Skye said, her voice muffled against her mother's dress. “This lady says you guys are supposed to sign something saying I got here okay.”

“I'll take care of that,” Skye's dad said, smiling broadly at the toe-tapping airline representative as he scribbled his name. “You have a nice Thanksgiving, now,” he called out to her disappearing back.

“We're heading straight up to Santa Fe so we won't waste a moment of our vacation,” her mom told Skye, sounding excited. “Oh, and here comes Scott!”

Scott looked a bit fatter, Skye thought as her brother laboriously approached with his walker. It was as though he'd gained all the weight their mom had lost. But compared to last August, anyway, he seemed to be moving around a lot better. “Hey,” she greeted him, feeling strangely shy. She leaned over the front of Scott's walker to give him an awkward hug.

“Hey, Skye,” Scott said back. “
Art jerk
,” he whispered, grinning.

“What does your bag look like, Skye?” her dad asked, scanning the carousel.

“It's that old green duffel,” Skye reminded him. “And Gran put a big orange X on the side of it with tape.”

“Sounds familiar,” her dad said with a smile. “It should be here pretty soon.” He turned to his wife. “Why don't you and Scotty go get the van, and then meet us at the loading zone?” he suggested. “That'll be his physical therapy for the day.”

For a moment, it looked as though Scott was going to argue, but – in the spirit of their upcoming mini-vacation, a relieved Skye supposed – he just shrugged, then headed
toward the wide glass door that led outside, his mother trailing after him.

Her dad looked tired, Skye thought anxiously as she stole a peek at him. “So, how's Scott really doing?” she asked, feeling a little disloyal to her brother – her newest friend, in a strange way – for talking about him behind his back. But she had to know.

Her dad sighed as the same few orphaned suitcases cruised around once more. “He's doing a lot better, honey,” he said. “The seizures have pretty much stopped, and he's not as depressed as he was, and he's cooperating with his rehab people more. I guess the meds are working.”

Meds
. Becoming familiar with a term like that was never a good sign, Skye thought sadly.

“It was real sweet of you to answer all those e-mails of his,” her dad was saying, distracted now by the new bags that had started to hurtle down the chute toward the carousel. “One of his therapists was just saying how much his small motor skills have improved, at least in part because of all that keyboarding.”

How patronizing, Skye thought, scowling. “Well, thanks,” she mumbled. “But I wasn't being sweet, Dad – except at first, maybe. But after that, I
wanted
him to write me, and I liked writing him back.”

So there
, she added silently.

“Don't worry, we'll be chowing down on chiles rellenos and sopapillas before you know it, Skye,” her father said, glancing at the expression on her face and mistaking it for hunger. “You're back in New Mexico. Welcome home, honey!”

“S
o, you got busted, huh?” Scott asked quietly in the backseat of the McPhees' new van, after removing his ear-buds and clearing his throat. He actually looked as shy as Skye had felt about forty minutes earlier, she noted, surprised.

Skye's parents sat without speaking in the front of the van – as if there were an invisible wall between them.

“Busted big-time,” Skye whispered, trying to smile. “And it's gonna get worse when I get back,” she added, thinking of the threatened sensitivity meeting.

But at least that meeting would probably keep Aaron, Cord, and the bad ballerinas in line for the immediate future – not because of anything amazing the principal might say, but because of those kids' fear of further incurring the wrath of the entire meeting-hating student body.

“
Tell me about it later
,” Scott mouthed, jerking his head toward the front seat.

“
Okay
,” Skye whispered back, and she resumed staring out of the boxy van's windows at the gray-bottomed clouds above their car, clouds that streaked the surrounding landscape with shadow.

The McPhees were well on their way north to Santa Fe, about an hour's drive in all. Albuquerque's looming Sandia Peaks – bare, brown, dusted with snow at the top, and wrapped with cloud shadows – had slipped behind them. Ahead, the distant snowy peaks behind Santa Fe and Taos – which lay even farther north than the McPhees' destination – seemed to beckon.

Interstate 25 shot straight through the desert, climbing gradually as it passed a small town – Bernalillo – and several pueblos that were invisible from the highway. Wild winter-gold grass sprawled for miles in every direction, Skye noted, its expanse punctuated only by the dark green bushes that looked like shaggy marbles someone had flung across the desert floor.

Skye sighed. The truth was, she was feeling weirdly awkward around this new Scott, because – who was he, now? Obviously, her brother was not the pint-sized hero who'd towed her around the neighborhood in his Radio Flyer when they were little. And he wasn't the moody
whirlwind who'd basically dominated their lives for the past four years. And he wasn't, thank goodness, the cursing, raving Scott of last summer.

This new Scott, the Scott who had been e-mailing her for the past three months, seemed unfamiliar to Skye – as if, in the nine months that had passed since his accident, an entirely new person had been born.

This Scott – in his e-mails, anyway – could be angry and self-pitying, true. So could she. But he could also be funny, brave, and even optimistic, in spite of everything.

And he truly cared about her once more. They cared about each other.

But where had this new Scott McPhee been for the past four years, Skye wondered? Hidden, like the artist inside Danko Marshall?

And why had it taken a tragedy for that person to emerge?

It didn't seem to Skye as if their van had driven uphill at all, but it had; they were now only a few miles south of Santa Fe. There were puzzle pieces of snow by the road now, and many more bushes on the surrounding slopes.

It occurred suddenly to a half-awake Skye that there was so much horizon in this part of New Mexico – spreading for miles in a complete circle around her family's car –
that they must be somewhere near the exact center of the universe, or at least at the heart of the world. “X marks the spot,” she whispered sleepily.

“Huh?” Scott asked, removing his ear-buds once more.

“Tell you later,” Skye said, echoing her brother's earlier words.

“
N
o leftovers. That's the only bad thing about Thanks-giving in a hotel,” Skye said late Friday morning, the day after Thanksgiving, as she and Scott sat bundled up on a bench in chilly sunlight in Santa Fe's central plaza. Behind them, skeletal trees cast lacy shadows on the remains of the snow – dirt-sifted now – that had fallen a week earlier.

Skye had dreamed about Christmas in Santa Fe the night before, she suddenly remembered, surprised that her imagination had picked the wrong holiday to celebrate. It had been a lavender-blue twilight in her dream, and very cold, with snow decorating the tops of the town's adobe walls like white frosting on flat-roofed gingerbread houses, and she was all alone. But hundreds of
farolitos
lined every walkway and rooftop, and they warmed her with their glow.