The peacekeeper, p.25
The Peacekeeper, page 25
Sakima and Ashwiyaa—skinny and awkward and fourteen and twelve, respectively—pointedly looked like they were not having fun, even though it was clear that they were. Chibenashi understood the feeling but was truly starting to appreciate the familial nature of the event. Their two families were one that night, happy and relaxed.
Just as the sun set on their family for the last time, his father took his mother by the hand and brought her to the sacred fire, where they began dancing with each other. Chibenashi remembered how the flames flickered off their eyes, their hair, their teeth. He remembered the wide smiles and stolen kisses between them. And then he’d left them to find his friends, Kichewaishke and others. Ashwiyaa had given him a pleading look, begging him to take her along, but he’d just smiled back at her and left her with both sets of parents and Sakima. They got into the alcohol, and the rest of the night was a black hole.
Just moments after he left, Sakima and Ishkode had walked away to get another pot for the manoomin, and Wiishkobak would see the resemblance.
There would be a fight that would cause Ashwiyaa to flee the house.
For twenty years, Chibenashi had looked back on that night and ransacked his memory for clues. What had he missed that would have suggested his father was shortly to murder his mother? He’d never seen anything to suggest what was coming. Even though he would dismiss it following the murder, there had been real love between his parents that night.
It never occurred to Chibenashi that he’d been asking the wrong questions.
It had never occurred to Chibenashi that Ashwiyaa might have come back home.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Usually, whenever Chibenashi woke up, he could tell that some amount of time had passed. This time, it was impossible to tell how long he had been out. It could have been moments or days. It had apparently been long enough for him to be tied up where he lay on the floor, on his stomach, hands bound behind his back. His head throbbed. He felt hungover and dehydrated and like he’d been beaten with a stick. His back and chest muscles strained under where he’d been tied with . . . not rope. Duct tape? Zip ties? Something that did not bend when he strained against them. He felt cool metal: his handcuffs that he carried with him as a Peacekeeper—ones he’d never had to use in the line of duty.
He blinked. Whatever light there was in here was too bright. He was still on the floor of the kitchen. The cool wood beneath his face was beginning to hurt. No matter how he strained his head, he could not see a window or door to gauge what time it was. He wondered if Ziigwan or Peezhickee were back from Shikaakwa yet. He had no way of reaching them if they were.
Chibenashi wished he were still blacked out. Reality was too inconceivable, too frightening, and he dared not even breathe. The revelations of the past day—the past days—would all have been too much to handle on their own. But now this last one, the last puzzle piece clicking into place, revealed just how wrong he had been about everything and everyone. It had all been staring him in the face the whole time.
He lay there, recriminating, when he heard the soft sweep of footsteps walk toward him. Ashwiyaa knelt down and looked at him.
“You’re awake,” she said. “You didn’t sleep as long as your friend’s animosh usually did.”
She’d changed out of the baggy clothes she usually wore. These were more formfitting, revealing a shape to her he hadn’t known was there. Muscles he hadn’t known she had bulged. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually seen his sister’s arms. They were . . . formidable.
“Then again, he didn’t require as many drugs as you do to keep down,” she said. “And he hardly had time to build up any resistance.”
She gazed at him with the same disinterested look she’d given him when the drugs had first kicked in, then bent and hoisted him over her shoulders like a sack of manoomin. He groaned with the pain that came with being moved after lying on a hard surface in an uncomfortable position for a long time. She moved with ease, like he weighed nothing. He blinked and looked around. It was dark outside. Impossible to know what time it was. At this time of the year, it was dark more than it was light. It could be late afternoon or the loneliest time before dawn.
Ashwiyaa deposited him on the hard ground in front of the fire with a thud. At least there was a blanket on the floor here, though it offered minimal relief. His joints cried out in agony. His brain nearly throbbed out of its skull. He couldn’t help the yelp of pain that escaped him. Ashwiyaa rolled her eyes at the sound, as if it annoyed her that he was in pain and incapacitated because of her.
Confusion overwhelmed him. Desperate as he was to reject it, DNA testing didn’t lie. His sister was the one who had killed Meoquanee and had killed his mother. Since children had the same mitochondrial DNA as their mother, it had not shown up as a separate DNA profile for his mother’s murder. He was lucid enough to accept that this could be the truth, but he could not yet believe it.
He tried to say, “I don’t understand,” but all that poured out of his mouth was a slurry of grunts and gibberish.
“Don’t speak, nindawemaa,” Ashwiyaa said. “You’ll only hurt yourself further. And you’ve already hurt yourself enough.”
She knelt by the fire, poked it a bit. The embers were dying. She stared at the glowing remnants of logs. They reflected in her eyes, making them look red.
“None of this had to happen, you know.” She rested back on her haunches, not really looking at him. She faced the fire but stared at some point beyond it that only she could see. “I never wanted it to happen. It wasn’t planned this way.”
Chibenashi again tried to speak. Ashwiyaa clicked her tongue and walked out of his line of sight. When she returned, she had a roll of duct tape in her hands. She ripped off a piece and faced him.
“I said,” she hissed, slapping the tape over his mouth, “don’t speak.”
She pressed her hand over his mouth to emphasize the point. Chibenashi stopped making any noise. He didn’t recognize his sister. She spoke with a coldness and authority that he’d neither seen nor heard from her before.
“As I was saying, this wasn’t planned. It’s been twenty years, and I never thought I’d have to hurt you. I didn’t want to hurt you. Really, I haven’t ever wanted to hurt anyone. It just . . . happens. I break from myself and watch it happen. One of those out-of-body experiences. Like a vision quest but a twisted, obscene version of one. Maybe it means that I’m both twisted and obscene. I suppose I am. Twisted and obscene. But only because they made me that way.
“Our father was the first person to see what I was capable of. It was out in the woods, past the grazing areas. I was alone, or so I thought. I saw a baby apichi that had just fallen from the nest, learning to fly. Something about it was so fragile, so breakable. I had to break it. Just to see if I could. I didn’t want to hurt it. I just wanted to see if I could do it. So I did. It broke. It broke so easily. I thought I’d feel bad, but instead I just felt . . . powerful. I turned around and there he was, our father, staring at me like he’d never seen me before. Maybe he never really had. He always watched me so carefully after that. Around you. Around others. Around animals. I was never alone. I thought for sure he wouldn’t tell our mother, but like an idiot, he did.
“Ngashi wasn’t content to just watch me—she wanted to stop me. Like I was some sort of deviant. I had only done the one thing the one time! And I probably wouldn’t have done it again. I already knew what I was capable of; I didn’t need to prove it again. But she was worried about me. About what I might become. So she asked Meoquanee to have a look at me. She had many looks at me. All the questions. All the assumptions. She tried to get me on pills. Tried to ask me stupid questions. Had I hurt any other animals. Had I ever started fires. Had I ever hurt a person. Had I ever thought about hurting a person. Or myself. Like I was messed up in some way. I wasn’t! I was just a little girl. I hated it. They made me feel like a specimen in a jar. A wolverine in a cage.
“Noos started everything. If he had just not said anything, not overreacted to what he saw, not started this chain reaction, none of this would have happened. None of it. Everything and everyone would have been fine if he had just left well enough alone. But no. He had to run and jump to conclusions. Assume I was a threat to others, and get others involved to try to ‘save’ me.” Her eyes flashed and her voice went shrill. “I wasn’t a threat until he made me into one!”
Her screech was loud enough that Chibenashi wondered—hoped, prayed—that someone else could have heard it.
“He took my freedom away from me. So I took away from him what he loved the most.”
Their mother.
“No,” she snapped, as if hearing his thought. “Not her. You.”
Chibenashi gave her a puzzled look, hoping the expression would not set her off again.
“He was so close to you. He loved you. He loved you so, so much. You were the good child. The one who didn’t have the issues. The one who wasn’t a threat. The one who would never kill a baby bird just to see if he could. Chibenashi could never hurt a baby bird. Chibenashi was the baby bird. It’s even what part your name means—big little bird. The little bird who thinks he’s so big. I think maybe that’s what disturbed him about it so much—by hurting a baby bird, I could hurt you. And I did hurt you. I took both your parents away from you and left you alone with me.
“Killing ngashi wasn’t so different from the baby bird. It just took a lot more planning and a lot more cunning. I couldn’t crush her like I did the baby bird. But if I could get her subdued, I could cut her just in the right place. That doesn’t take much. Just the ability to hold the knife and the strength and will to use it in the right place. That’s all killing is, really. We all have it in us. We all can; most of us just don’t. Most are too weak to do it. That’s the first thing you have to kill—that weakness.
“They were so weak, the two of them. Weak in the face of commitment, weak in the face of taking responsibility, too weak to tell the truth. Ngashi was the first to figure it out, when she saw Sakima and noos at Manoomin. They walked away with the same gait, same stride. She turned to Meoquanee to say something. Meoquanee’s eyes said it all. That’s when ngashi realized—it wasn’t the stride, like Peezhickee told you.”
How did she know what Peezhickee said?
“It was Meoquanee. She as good as confessed. I know. I saw it. I figured it out that night but didn’t say anything. I realized that these people who thought they were all so superior to me? They were monsters too. Noos betrayed our mother. Meoquanee, the selfless paragon that we all thought she was? She’d deceived her husband for fourteen years. She deceived her son until the very end and never admitted the truth to him. You tell me, who is the real monster?
“We left Manoomin quickly, all of us, and I was sent to bed. Sakima was sent back to their house, alone.
“Even though I was sent to bed, I heard the anger, the tears. I couldn’t hear the words, but I didn’t need to. I saw my chance to make things right for what they’d done to me. So I snuck out. I knew they’d be arguing for a while. So many feelings to sort out.” Ashwiyaa didn’t say the word feelings—she spat it out. “I left the wigwam, heard their shouting. Anyone who walked by would have heard what they were talking about. Had the night ended then, that would be all anyone in the village would have ever talked about with regard to our family.” She smirked, reminiscing. “But of course, it wasn’t. White Teeth is so easy to come by. I know you deal with it in your incidents that you investigate. Tourists use it on each other in bars and restaurants, use their victims, then scuttle back to their cruise ships before they can experience the consequences. Very easy to come by if you know where to go. And even though I was twelve, I knew where to go. And with so many people and tourists, no one really paid me much attention. I can be small and invisible when I want to be.
“Slipping it to you was so easy. It’s always been easy. Offer you a drink, you down it without question or hesitation. I’ve been doing it to you for twenty years. Every night. Haven’t you ever wondered why you sleep so well at home? And how well you didn’t sleep in Shikaakwa? I wonder if you even can anymore without my help. But that night was my first. It was so easy; I didn’t need a practice run. I just did it. You and your friends, thinking you were so cool, out at the edge of the woods, in the dark, with alcohol you weren’t supposed to have. You were all well on your way to getting drunk. But I couldn’t risk you coming home. You had to be out all night. So I snuck up and slipped it into your drink. It did its job. You thought you were drunk. You haven’t touched the stuff since. I took that away from you too.
“When I got back, things had calmed down. They were both asleep. Ngashi was in their bed, noos was on the couch. Ngashi should have thrown him out. Might have saved him. But thankfully for me, she didn’t. I stood there, watching them, for a long time—first him and then her. The last moments of peace either would ever know, and they slept through them. I don’t know how long I waited there, but finally I knew I was ready. I’d overcome my weakness.”
Chibenashi bit back sobs, knowing she might hurt him again if he made a sound. He didn’t recognize this woman before him. This wasn’t whom he had given up his life to care for.
“I woke ngashi and told her that I’d heard a noise outside that scared me. I remember how exhausted she looked—the kind of tired that’s not only physical. She had so much going on, but she put that aside and did this for me. It was almost enough to make me reconsider it. Almost. But that’s why killing that weakness is so important. The baby bird was sweet. Ngashi was sweet. So I did it. I led her to where I said I heard it—like an animal to slaughter. She was groggy and disoriented, and it was really easy to jump her. I wasn’t too much smaller than her at the time anyway. She was so caught off guard she didn’t fight back the way she should have. Fighting back would have meant hurting me, and I don’t think she had it in her to do that, even at the cost of her own life.
“There was a struggle, but not a big one. I cut my finger, dripped blood. She died quickly. I tried to make it as painless as possible, but, well, there’s only so much you can do. I regret it, for her sake. All she did was love, and all anyone did in return was betray her. But not for the greater sake, which was to punish noos for what he had done to me. What he had turned me into. For his hypocrisy.
“I sat there, watching the blood pool. It didn’t look the way I expected it to, really. Not like in TV or movies or in books. It was sticky. It was dark. It had a smell to it. You never think something like that would have a smell. But it did. Like copper. I almost cried. I almost lost it. But I didn’t.
“Then noos came out. He had to have so many regrets from that night, but I think his greatest regret was letting his guard down about me. For once, he let himself see me as the little girl I had been, not the monster he’d made me into. He came out just as ngashi breathed her last. He ran to her, cradled her body in his arms, began sobbing. I don’t think he realized it was me at first. He didn’t even see me. He had eyes only for her in that moment. He loved her so much. He touched the knife, held the body. It was like he came up with the idea himself. His sobs got louder and louder. It was only a matter of time before they’d wake up our neighbors. And White Teeth only lasts a short while. I knew our time was limited.
“So I told him that I had done it. That I’d do it again, to you, right then and there. That you were drugged and out there somewhere sleeping, perfectly vulnerable. That I would expose his other secret—Sakima. And kill him too. Unless he did something to save you. He had to decide, then and there, whether to confess to the crime himself. Whether he would agree to imprisonment for the crime. If he was in prison and did not speak the truth, I would leave you and Sakima alone. I would leave you alone for the rest of your pathetic lives if he confessed. If he didn’t, I would scream and cry that he did it, that I saw him do it, and while it was all being sorted out, you and Sakima would be killed too. It was sort of a bluff. I don’t think I could have pulled it off. We would have been taken away; someone would surely have noticed you had been drugged.”
Ashwiyaa smiled like a fox. “But he agreed. He did it knowing he would lose you, lose Sakima, but doing it so he could keep you both alive. He swore to suffer the punishment and to never reveal what happened. Prison was for you two, not for him.”
Chibenashi’s body curled into a crescent-moon shape at this news. His stomach cramped as the force of the truth of her words squeezed him from within. What he had learned in recent days had been bad enough. And now this?
“I had to survive, of course. We never would have been left on our own unless you were responsible for me, and I couldn’t show what I really felt: nothing. Satisfaction. People never would have believed noos’s confession. Really, they shouldn’t have. All they had to do was a little investigation. My finger was cut, and nobody ever noticed or asked about it. A little bit of forensic work would have revealed that he was not responsible. But that didn’t happen. A twelve-year-old shouldn’t be able to trick an entire investigative team. But I did.” She sounded proud.
“You staggered home and played your part so, so perfectly. It shouldn’t have gone as smoothly as it did. You believed exactly what I needed you to believe. And our father complied. He saw how you believed. He willingly went to prison so that you could stay alive, blissfully ignorant and unaware. You lived with me all those years, under my control. And he knew it. He knew that if he made any move to save himself, to clear his name, you were dead. There was no one here to protect you from me. So he protected you as best he could, from afar. It was pathetic.
“I played the role of traumatized sister. It had the desired effect. It kept you close, away from him, hating him, focused solely on me and my needs so that you wouldn’t stop and think about all the holes in the case. That became even more important when you became a Peacekeeper. Don’t ask me to psychoanalyze that. It was clear you felt responsible and wanted to protect me. As the years passed, I had to pretend to be more and more traumatized so that you would never put all of your focus on your work but would always keep some of it on me.
