“Lennix,” Mena says and snaps her fingers in my face. “You hear me talking to you, girl?”
“Sorry, Auntie.” I pass a hand over my eyes, blinking away the image of a young, handsome man who’d traveled far to protest with us. With my tribe, but ultimately, with me. He took a dog bite that was intended for me, and as I think of it, I don’t know if I ever properly thanked him. “I was daydreaming, I guess. What’d you say?”
“I said let’s do what we came here for, to clear your mind and set your heart.” She nods to the river.
The sun may be warm, but that river is freezing. It wouldn’t be the first time its rushing frigidity set me to rights and cleared my head.
“Let’s do it.” I stand and strip away my denim cut-off shorts and peel the tank top over my head to reveal my one-piece bathing suit.
Aunt Mena does the same until she wears only a black sports bra and boy-leg underwear. She was a little older than my mother, but they had been friends since they were girls. She’s still relatively young, barely over forty, and in great shape from the yoga she does outdoors every day. Makes me wonder what Mama would be like if she were still here.
“Ready?” Mena asks, brows raised.
“Ready.”
With careful steps, we make our way down the bank toward the river. We wade in until the water laps at our thighs, shockingly cold. Mena holds a tiny bag, which she tips over her hand until pollen, like powdery sunshine, spills into her palm. I’ll never forget the medicine man sprinkling me with sacred pollen from the cattails. I feel just as reverent as Mena dusts it over my face now. I close my eyes, letting it flutter over my cheeks and eyelashes as if each particle holds healing restorative power. And maybe it does.
“It’s not science or magic,” Mena whispers to me. “It is hope. It is faith that connecting with the land, with our land, will tell the universe, tell the Creator, that we have been blessed and are ready for what is ahead. Now, dip to wash it away. Not just the pollen, but all the things that cloud your mind and blur your vision.”
She points to the river. I hold a bracing breath against the cold I know waits for me and sink into the water. It closes over my head, insulates me for just a few seconds and I feel it all. I feel the loneliness, the fear, the uncertainty about my future. The river swallows me whole and then spews me out, making me gasp and swipe hair from my face.
“You feel more clear?” Mena asks, her tone and eyes searching my face, coated with droplets of water.
“I don’t know about clear,” I say, smiling and letting the sun kiss my face. “But I’m ready.”
6
Lennix
“So you made it?”
The concern threading my father’s voice kicks in my instinct to reassure him. He needs lots of reassuring. Ever since Mama disappeared, he worries constantly.
I get it. He’s a professor of Native American Studies. He knows the statistics. Four in five American Indian women have experienced violence, and more than one in two have experienced sexual violence. Even knowing the facts, he never expected them to hit so close to home. He and my mother never married, and didn’t always see eye to eye on how I should be raised, but I know he never stopped caring for her and was devastated when she disappeared.
“We made it, yeah.” I lean against the wall outside our hostel room. “I’m fine. The hostel’s great. Amsterdam’s beautiful.”
“Please be careful, Lenn. Three pretty young girls in a foreign country—you could be snatched off a corner in broad daylight. You know not to drink anything you’re not sure of. God, not to mention sex trafficking.”
I’ve heard his concern veer into panic before, so I stop him before it goes there. “Dad, did you watch Taken again?”
His guilty silence provides my answer.
“No one is going to snatch me off a corner, or traffic me or sell my virginity to the highest bidder.”
“Could we not discuss your virginity? I’m not prepared for this.”
“I’m twenty-one, and believe me, my father is the last person I want to discuss my sex life with, too.” Non-existent, though it is . . .
“Could you also avoid using the word ‘sex’ in the same sentence as . . . well, you?” he asks. “Men are pigs. I’ve told you this, right?”
“Um, on more than one occasion. I believe you once called your species the scourge of the earth, and told me they were basically petri dishes with bad intentions.”
“I stand by that assessment.”
“Yeah, well, you’ll be happy to know I’m not even in the lab, so to speak. Maybe I’m asexual? Or broken? I just don’t ever meet guys who seem worth my time, ya know?”
“When I asked you not to use the word sex in the same sentence as you, that included asexual. But, baby, you’re not broken. You’re . . . discriminating. In the good, picky way, not in the systemic racist way.”
“Yeah, I figured.”
“All jokes aside,” he says, his voice dropping, sobering, “someone will feel more special than the rest.”
I want to ask if Mama felt more special to him than the rest. I want to ask if he ever cries for her, like I still do. Does grief hit him in the most unexpected times and hang over the day until he wants to crawl back in bed and sleep so he won’t remember she’s gone and never coming back? Does she come to him in his dreams?
Or is that just me?
They weren’t together for years before she died, and it makes me wonder if I’m the only person on Earth still hurting this way for her. If her memory only lives in my heart like a knife lodged between my ribs. Grief is its own kind of intimacy, a bond of sorts between you and the one you lost. No one else feels it the way you do about that person you loved most. And maybe it helps to know someone reaches that same level of despair. That’s what family is for, right?
I wish I could go back to the night of my Sunrise Dance and beg her not to go to that protest. Ask her, just this once, to let someone else fight the world’s problems because I needed her more than everyone else did.
“Lenn, you still there?”
I shake off the helplessness of done deals and irreversible things, and straighten from the wall. “Yeah, I’m here. Sorry. Time difference has me out of it. I just wanted to let you know I got here safely.”
“Thank you for that.”
“I’m sure you have a stack of papers waiting to be graded so I’ll let you go. You need a social life, old man.”
“You’re right,” he says, his voice lightening. “So you’ll be happy to hear I might be getting one. I have a date tonight.”
I frown and blink and lick my lips and tug on my ear. Apparently the thought of my father on a date makes me fidgety. “A-a date? Wow. Good. Good for you.”
“Yeah?” he asks with unexpected tentativeness.
I think of my father as I usually see him. Distracted in that way academicians often are, lost in a pile of papers he’s grading or books he’s reading or something he’s researching. His gray eyes always half-hazed with whatever task I interrupted. He deserves more than that.
“Yeah, I’m happy for you, Dad. Do I know her?”