The Obsidian Blade (2 page)

“No! I’m telling you! He was up there, and he yelled, and he was gone. And I saw something up there.”

“Saw what?”

“I don’t know. It was round.” He pointed up at the roof.

There was nothing there.

His mother put her hands on his shoulders. Her eyes, sometimes blue and at other times green, searched his face. “Maybe he went over to the Reillys’ to borrow a tool. People do not just disappear, Tucker.”

“Yeah, well, he
did
disappear.”

“I’m sure he’ll be home soon.” She went back into the kitchen and began picking up the spilled laundry. Tucker stood outside, watching her through the screen door. Had he imagined it? He didn’t think so. Maybe his dad had fallen off the roof, banged his head, and run off into the woods . . . but that didn’t explain the disk he had seen. He walked around the house again and again, looking for any sign of his father hitting the ground, but found no trace of him.

T
UCKER’S MOTHER WAS PROVEN CORRECT
. A
N
H
OUR
later, the Reverend came walking up the long driveway. He was not alone. Beside him was a slim, pale girl with hair the yellow-white of corn silk.

Tucker ran to him.

“Dad! Where’d you go? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, Tuck.” The Reverend Feye clasped the boy to his hip with one arm, then released him. Tucker looked from his father to the girl, then back to his father.

“Tucker, this is Lahlia,” said the Reverend.

The girl might have been anywhere between ten and fourteen years old. She wore a slightly torn and smudged shift made of material that shone like silver foil but draped like fine fabric. Her feet were covered with what looked like bright blue painted-on stockings. In her arms she held a small gray cat.

“Hi,” said Tucker.

Lahlia stared at him with the biggest, blackest eyes Tucker had ever seen. She looked frightened. Tucker looked to his father for an explanation, but the Reverend stood gazing at the house, lips parted, eyes moist. The clean jeans and blue flannel shirt he had been wearing an hour earlier were dirty. One knee was torn open. His skin was a shade darker, and the lines radiating from the corners of his eyes appeared deeper, as if he had spent hours squinting under a hot sun. His feet were covered by skintight blue sheaths identical to those worn by the girl.

“What’s on your feet?” Tucker asked.

His father looked down. “I lost my shoes.”

“What happened to you? You look different.”

“We’ll talk about it later,” he said. “Let’s go see your mother.”

Tucker followed Lahlia and his dad into the house, where his mom was sitting on the sofa, reading a book. She looked up, set the book down, and smiled.

Unlike the Reverend’s grim, flat smile, Emily Feye’s smile transformed her face and brought light into the room. She stood up and kissed her husband on the cheek. He put his arms around her and hugged her, burying his face in her hair.

“Emily,” he said. He held her as both Tucker and Lahlia stared at them. Tucker was surprised — his dad was not usually so demonstrative. After a few seconds, his mother gently broke the embrace and gave her husband a searching look.

“Where have you been?” she asked.

“I had to . . . I had to run into town.”

Emily Feye frowned, waiting for more, her eyes moving from his face to his tattered clothing and back again.

The Reverend put a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “This is Lahlia. She’ll be staying with us for a while.”

“My goodness,” Tucker’s mother said, her puzzled frown becoming a puzzled smile. She knelt down to face the girl. “Where ever did you come from?”

Clutching the kitten to her chest, Lahlia stepped back, bumping against the Reverend’s leg.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Emily Feye said.

Lahlia stared back at her and swallowed. The kitten yawned.

“Such a cute kitty. Look at those big yellow eyes.”

The Reverend said, “Lahlia is an orphan. She is from . . . Bulgaria. I don’t think she speaks much English.”

“An orphan! Oh, dear!” Emily Feye looked at Lahlia, then back at her husband with a slight frown. “From
Bulgaria
?”

“We can talk about it later,” the Reverend said. It was the same thing he had said to Tucker — his way of saying,
I don’t want to talk about it at all.
Or maybe this time he was saying,
Not in front of Tucker and the girl.

Tucker’s mother put on a bright smile for the girl’s benefit. “What
interesting
clothing,” she said, fingering the edge of Lahlia’s tattered shift. “I had a silver-colored dress when I was a little girl. What is your kitten’s name, sweetie?”

“Lahlia,” the girl said, pronouncing it
lah-LEE-uh.

Tucker’s mother smiled. “So you can speak! Your kitten’s name is the same as your name?”

Lahlia shook her head and pointed at herself. “Lahlia.”

“I don’t think she likes being called
sweetie,
” Tucker said.

“Oh! I’m sorry.
Lahlia.
That’s a nice name.”

Tucker’s father cleared his throat. “I’m going to change clothes. Perhaps you could find something more appropriate for her to wear?” Without waiting for an answer, he left them and went upstairs.

“I think some of Tucker’s old things will fit you,” Emily Feye said. “I’ll see what I can find. Then we’ll have some cookies. Do you like cookies?”

Lahlia nodded. It was not clear whether she understood the question or was simply trying to be agreeable.

“Back in a jiffy.” Emily Feye opened the basement door and trotted downstairs, where she kept boxes of clothes Tucker had grown out of. Tucker, not sure what to do, stood looking at Lahlia.

The girl’s dark eyes flickered across the sofa, the easy chair in the corner, the coffee table, the pictures on the walls.
She
is
very odd looking,
Tucker decided.
Not exactly pretty, but interesting.

He said, “So how’d you . . . uh . . . What are . . . What are you doing here?”

Lahlia stared back at him with an intensity that made his skin prickle.

“Can you speak English?” Tucker asked.

Lahlia did not say anything.

Uncomfortable with her staring silence, Tucker took a step back. Lahlia followed him with her eyes.

“Tuckerfeye,”
the girl said.

Tucker wasn’t sure he’d heard her right.

“Just Tucker,” he said.

Lahlia nodded.
“Tuckerfeye,”
she said again, then walked over to the easy chair and sat down with the cat on her lap. Both Lahlia and the cat kept their eyes locked on Tucker. He stood there feeling stupid for as long as he could stand it, then said, “Excuse me,” and ran up the stairs to his parents’ bedroom.

His father was sitting on the edge of the bed, peeling off the blue foot coverings. His feet were as white as a bullhead’s belly.

“Dad?”

“What is it, Tuck?”

“Where did you go? I mean, really.”

The Reverend looked at Tucker. He seemed about to say one thing, hesitated, then said, “I just came up here to change.”

“I mean
before.
You were on the roof, and you yelled, and all of a sudden you were gone.”

“I went downtown.” He squeezed the blue foot coverings into a surprisingly small ball and dropped them into the wastebasket.

“You disappeared!”

“Maybe it seemed that way, Tuck. I — ah — I remembered suddenly that I had to run into town. That’s where I picked up Lahlia.”

“After you disappeared, I saw something on the roof. Like a disk.”

The Reverend took a moment to reply. “Probably just heat distortion from the hot sun.”

Tucker sensed he was being lied to, and it frightened him. He watched as his dad put on a clean pair of jeans and a flannel work shirt.

“You look different,” Tucker said.

“People change, Tuck.”

“Yeah, but not like
that.
Not that fast.”

His father regarded him for several silent seconds, his face growing hard. “Why don’t you go see what the girl and your mother are up to, Tuck,” he said at last, making it clear from his tone that the subject was closed.

Minutes later, the Reverend was back on the roof pounding nails, finishing the job he had started that morning. Lahlia and Tucker’s mom were in the kitchen eating cookies. Tucker went outside to finish fixing his bike tire and contemplate his father’s odd behavior.

The strangest part of it all — his dad never said a word about the wooden troll.

That evening, they sat down to a meal of roast pork, boiled new potatoes, and fresh peas from the garden. Tucker’s mom opened a can of tuna for the kitten. They sat at the kitchen table, hands folded, waiting for the Reverend to say grace. The Reverend picked up his knife and fork and looked at each of them in turn.

“There will be no more praying in this house.” He gave them a few seconds to absorb that, then said, “It’s all lies.”

It felt to Tucker as if a smothering mist had descended upon them. The act of breathing became a conscious effort.

Tucker’s mother put her hand to her heart. “Adrian . . .”

“There is no God,” said the Reverend Feye, serving himself a slice of pork. “And that is all I have to say on the matter.”

Lahlia, wearing Tucker’s old Mickey Mouse T-shirt, smiled uneasily. Tucker stared at his father, waiting for him to make it into a joke — except his father rarely joked, and never about God.

The Reverend began eating. Tucker looked to his mother, who, with a grim set to her mouth, began to serve herself and Lahlia.

They ate their meal in silence. Only Lahlia, who refused the pork but fell eagerly upon the fresh peas and new potatoes, seemed to enjoy the unblessed food.

A
FTER SUPPER, AS HIS MOM MADE UP THE GUEST BED FOR
Lahlia, Tucker retired to his own room. He tried to read a book about submarines, but couldn’t focus. There was too much strangeness in the house. He lay in bed, staring up at the cracks on his ceiling, trying in vain to understand what had happened that day.

Eventually, he fell into a troubled sleep and dreamed of a strange silent girl with eyes as black as charcoal. He was awakened around midnight by the muffled sound of his parents’ voices coming from their bedroom. He couldn’t understand what they were saying, but his mom’s voice had a strident tone, while his father’s preacherly drone came through like white noise. He pressed his ear to the wall.

“. . . then Tucker said you fell off the roof, and the next thing I know, you’ve brought that little girl home. What am I supposed to think?”

“I’m sorry, Em. I can’t explain it. Maybe I did fall off the roof. Maybe I was confused and walked in to town. It’s not important.”

“Not important? You bring a strange girl into our home and it’s not
important
?”

“I don’t mean it like that. Of course it’s important. We’ll find a home for her soon.”

“Yes, but who is she? Where did she come from?”

There was a long silence, then his father spoke.

“I don’t know. I found her wandering around downtown. She wouldn’t speak except to tell me her name.”

“You should have called the sheriff.”

“I notified them, but they won’t find her parents.”

“How can you know that?”

“Trust me. She is an orphan, abandoned by her parents. Like you,” his father said in a softer voice.

Again, a long silence.

“Do you remember anything about that, Em? About before you were adopted?”

“Nothing real,” said Emily Feye.

Tucker knew that his mom was adopted, and that she had never found out who her birth parents were. He had never thought about it much — it was a fact of life. His mom had told him that Hamm and Greta Ryan, an older, childless couple, had found her crying outside the boarded-up Hopewell House hotel when she was no more than four years old. Unable to find out where she had come from or who her parents were, they had adopted her. Both Hamm and Greta had died of natural causes shortly after Tucker was born — he didn’t remember them at all, but his mother spoke of them fondly and often.

Tucker sat with his ear to the wall for several more minutes. Except for a few soft murmurs, he heard nothing more.