I look back into the kitchen for the dragon but she isn’t there. She’s already outside.
“If you didn’t need me to open the door in the first place…” I mutter, but it makes me glad to see her outside, stretching her wings, waggling her tail, lengthening her neck. I go to them, wanting to be close to these old friends I haven’t seen in so long.
The night air embraces me, pulling me into itself, and I find myself stretching out my own arms, lengthening my own neck, moving just like my dragon. The sky is endless above me and looks low enough to touch. It looks like it would feel like velvet.
“Why are you here?” I ask again, and in reply the lioness comes over and nudges the back of my knees. My legs are taut and tense and weary, like the rest of me.
I wonder if anyone will wake up and look out their window and see a girl, not just any girl, the sister of the fallen Marcus Jones, out in the middle of the street with only her dragon and her lioness for company.
My dragon starts to flap her wings, the air rushing against me, and rises above me into the low, low sky. I want to join her; I want to fly. To get away. To go somewhere this hasn’t happened. Somewhere safe. Somewhere new.
My lioness nudges me again, her sandpaper tongue brushing against my hand. “You can’t fly,” I murmur, bending down to feel her warm breath against my face. I wrap my arms around her, feeling her strength. Needing her strength.
She responds with a low growl before pulling away from me and crouching low to the ground. She glances at me once, and then she is running, running, running, running, down the street after my dragon. She is beautiful to watch, her body is music in motion, and I feel my own limbs responding, my muscles tensing, wanting to join her. I watch my lioness and my dragon until I can’t see them anymore. Until I’m not sure I ever did see them.
When I slip back inside, the heat in our house is still stifling; I feel like I’m in a coffin. I go back into my brother’s room because there is nowhere else for me to go.
CHAPTER 11
“Wing? Wing!”
I start. I’m lying on Marcus’s bed, over the covers, and sunlight is streaming in through the open window, making the dust in the air shimmer like gold. The pillow is damp beneath my cheek.
“Wing?” My LaoLao is getting louder, which for her means more anxious. She must have gone to my room and seen that I wasn’t there.
I clamber out of my brother’s bed and pull open the door.
“Wing?” LaoLao’s tone is incredulous. She stares at me, her eyes wide and round, her mouth open, the rolls under her chin tucking into her neck. For a moment I think I see a dragon’s tail behind her, but then I blink and it’s gone, and there is only my LaoLao staring at me.
I close the door behind me firmly.
“What you doing in your brother’s room?” She frowns and then shakes her head. “It is OK. I understand. But you know his room is for him. And now we keep it waiting for him. Go into the kitchen. Make tea. Today…” She sighs deeply. It’s so similar to the sound the dragon made last night that I take a step back, half expecting fire to come out of her nose, but instead she puts her small, callused hands on my back and pushes me out the doorway. “Today will be a hard day.”
It is the first of many hard days.
I try to be there for my mother, but there isn’t much I can do. Officer James comes. Other police come. Ones we don’t know. A lawyer comes. We can’t afford him. A reporter comes. Granny Dee chases him off the porch with a broom.
Only my mom is allowed to see Marcus. He’s still in a critical condition and needs to be in a private room. Our insurance doesn’t cover it. My mom says we’ll make it work. LaoLao asks Mom if she can come help at the restaurant. “I too old to work, but for Marcus…” LaoLao shrugs and I know what she means. It’s been three days and the hospital bills are already mounting, and apparently even though Marcus can’t go to court – he can’t go anywhere, might not ever go anywhere – he needs a lawyer. Someone to defend him for this indefensible thing he did. I don’t see how a lawyer can be of any kind of help to anybody. But Officer James says we’ll need one, and when my mom asks, in a strained, dead voice that doesn’t sound like her own, how much we’re looking at in terms of legal fees, he names a number so high I think he must be kidding, but all my mom does is nod and write it down on the yellow legal pad she’s started carrying around with her everywhere.