Page 25 of Dove
Not if I have anything to say about it.
Cameron
By the time I pull myself out of the dark shadows of memory and get my legs to start moving, Sammy is down the stairs and across the family room downstairs, heading for the kitchen, and I'm racing after her, taking the stairs three at a time and trying to catch her.
And to my surprise, I'm laughing, the ghost of my mother's voice left behind in the room above and my mind clean of anything but the sound of Sammy's laughter echoing through the empty kitchen. The slam of the kitchen door and then her cry of delight at whatever she sees outside it. As usual, she's erased everything else and filled every corner of my mind with nothing but herself and her soda pop excitement.
And Jesus Christ do I love her for it.
I let the blackness of my past flee like the shadow creatures in one of my nightmares and run after her, trying to remember what's back here... and what she might decide to do with it.
When I burst through the door and close it carefully behind me–old habits are hard to forget, and I used to get in trouble if I slammed the doors–I turn and immediately remember what's back here. Whoever built this house decided that the garageshould stand free of the main structure, so there's an additional building sitting at the back of the lot, accessible but a narrow path that runs along the side of the house.
Stupid, really. The only wheeled contraption you could get down that path is a wheelbarrow. Maybe a motorcycle.
Not a car.
My mouth quirks as I re-write my opinion of whoever built this house in the first place, and then walk quickly toward the 'garage,' where I can already hear Sammy rustling through things that don't belong to her.
"Holy fucking God, it's perfect," her voice says, carrying out of the dusty darkness and into the courtyard between the house and the other building. "Cameron! There's so much space!"
"You're mother would smack you for putting 'fuck' and 'God' in the same sentence," I say, coming to a leaning standstill against the frame of the door.
She pops out from between two boxes, cobwebs in her hair and a smear of dust across one cheek, and makes a face. "Lucky she's not here, then, isn't it? Come see what I found!"
I grin at the naked joy in her face–the relief at having a direction–and step into the garage, my shoes sliding along the dust that coats the ground and my eyes adjusting to the dim lighting. I haven't been in here in years, and by the looks of it, no one else has bothered. The place is packed so tightly that I wonder how anyone ever had this much stuff, and dust motes dance through the air in the shafts of light. Everything around me is grubby and nearly colorless under the dirt.
Three steps and I'm surprised Sammy only has the one smear of dust on her face.
I walk through stacks of boxes and magazines, car parts and discarded gardening tools, twisting and turning to try to avoid the worst of the grime, and finally get to where the girl has stopped. She's found an empty section of the garage–impossible–and is standing in a beam of light, her face shining with excitement and her arms spread as if she's presenting some grand ballroom. Around her, the light is settling to the ground and dust floats like freaking fairy dust, and I have the fleeting, very stupid thought that she's a fairy come to live in the human world, here to spread laughter and whatever else they do.
I follow that with a memory that stems from something I read a long time ago about fairies playing pranks on humans, and huff out a laugh.
Because that sounds exactly right.
"You found an empty spot?" I ask, letting my skepticism drift across my face. "Is that... exciting for you?"
Her face turns quickly to a scowl and she swings at me. Uselessly, of course, as she's too far away from me to do anything. All she does is disturb the dust motes, but she spins on her heel like she's actually done damage, and I stifle my laughter.
I know from experience that laughing at her is the worst thing you can do when she's pretending to be angry. And if I wait just three seconds...
"I found a plan!" she says breathlessly.
Ah, there it was.
She could never stay angry for long. Just until she found a new idea.
I look around the room, trying to see what she sees, but can't find anything special in the space. "A plan?" I ask. "I just see a room."
She scoffs at this–like I knew she would–and immediately starts working it out for me. She paces toward the corner and starts walking along the wall, gesturing and explaining.
"We can put the forge here, in the light, so you have natural sunlight when you're working. and here–" She takes several steps into the corner. "–A booth for welding. We can put the walls here–" More gestures. "–And you'll have plenty of space.On that wall, a place to hang all your tools so they're in easy reach. And back there, storage space."
She whirls, hands on hips and black curls becoming increasingly erratic, and tips her head. "And out in front, where all that clatter is, a place to display the pieces you've already made." When she looks at me again, her gray eyes are practically glowing with excitement. "Cam, ashowroom."
That takes me back several steps, because we've never had anything like that. I've spent the last three years interning with the town's blacksmith, learning the secrets of heating metal and then bending it to my will using hammer and anvil–my favorite version–or a welder, depending on what I'm doing, and somewhere between hammering out horse shoes and helping to build sign posts, I realized that there was more to be had from the skill than I'd realized. I used Byron's tools at night, when we were finished with work, to weld two horse shoes together, and then fixed them onto a sheet of scrap metal, and it had been... art.
And suddenly all the time I'd spent painting and drawing in my spare time morphed into something entirely new.
