Read Online After Obsession by Carrie Jones, Steven E. Wedel - Free Book Online Page B

I admit. “I just didn’t think you’d recognize them.”
    “Alan, I want to ask you something. You’ll probably think I’m crazy for asking, but when I saw your painting it really freaked me out.” She pauses for a long time. “Oh … I can’t do it. I’m sorry. I can’t do it. I should go.”
    “I won’t think you’re crazy,” I say really fast.
    “Okay … You have to promise not to think I’m a freak or anything. I know freak is a bad word, but, um … can you just promise?”
    “I promise.” I think she’s a lot of things, but freak is not one of them.
    She pulls in her breath so hard I can hear it over the phone, then she blurts out, “Do you have dreams that, you know, come true?”
    “Not really.” My hand goes to the medicine bundle at my chest. How do I tell her about Onawa?
    Her voice gets really tiny. “Oh. I do.”
    Neither of us speaks for a minute. Then I say, “I don’t think you’re a freak.”
    “Oh. Thanks. That’s really nice of you to say … I don’t … I don’t think you’re one, either.” She makes this tiny hiccup noise. “Listen, Alan, I don’t want to talk about this on the phone, but I think we have to talk because my dream is really not good and I don’t want to sound like a wimp, but it’s scaring me. We should meet somewhere. Not at school. Too many people might hear.”
    Blake would get jealous. I don’t say it. Instead I say, “Okay. Where and when?”
    “Tomorrow,” she says. “I’ll figure it out. Peace, Alan.”
    Peace?
    I promised Mom I’d never go to sleep wearing my medicine bundle. Since I came home from Lake Thunderbird with it, she’d reluctantly allowed me to keep it, but wouldn’t let me wear it to bed. “You’ll get it wrapped around your throat while you’re asleep,” she argued. I wasn’t sure that would happen, but I’d promised. Still, I’m holding the bundle in a tight fist against my chest right now.
    And I’m praying. That’s something I don’t do very often. Sure, I have conversations with Onawa in my head all the time, but that’s different. Onawa isn’t the Great Spirit. The Great Spirit intimidates me, I guess. I mean, who am I to pray to a Navajo god, even if it is the same deity anyone else prays to, just with a different name? I don’t even know who my father is. I can’t apply for the tribal roll because Mom isn’t 100 percent sure my dad is Navajo or if the partial name he gave her is really his name. It makes me feel like I’m trying to claim something that isn’t really mine.
    I lie awake in bed. Everyone else in the house is sleeping. The house should be quiet, but the scratching noise goes on beneath the floor of the upstairs bedrooms. Is it just mice? I’m not so sure anymore.
    Mom met my father at a party. They had sex. Apparently the condom failed, and I was the result. All Mom can tell me about him is that he was very good looking, tall and muscular with long hair and fierce eyes. “Bad-boy eyes,” she calls them. She says I have his eyes. She says she was a little drunk, but she felt it when he locked his eyes on her at this party. They barely talked before sneaking off to a bedroom of the house where the party was going on. He told her his name was White Deer, that he was Navajo and didn’t live in Oklahoma City. That’s it. Mom screwed him, they went back to the party, then he was gone. She’s never seen him since. She doesn’t even have a picture of him.
    She stopped partying when she found out I was growing in her womb. She hasn’t told me everything she used to do, but she’s told me enough that I know she led a pretty rough life. She sobered up and got a job at a tire factory right after I was born, and she worked there until we moved to Maine.
    She named me after my father. Alan Whitedeer Parson. She says she wanted my birth records to show that my father is Indian, but without knowing his last name she couldn’t do it.
    “We don’t need their casino money,” she said when