Come In and Cover Me Read Online Free Page B

they didn’t want to be known, that they didn’t need their stories told by people who dug in the dirt. That maybe it was the diggers who needed the stories.
    She looked down toward her feet, and the fire in front of her was all shining embers. Red and orange flashing. A long time ago her mother had a ruby ring that had fascinated Ren. It was huge and almost definitely fake. Ren would sit at the kitchen table as her mother cooked and just hold the ring in her hands, watching the light reflect off the stone. Not only off it but inside it. She imagined that if she were very, very small and could climb into the ring, she would hear a sound like wind chimes as the light moved through the ruby. She thought maybe there were, in fact, little creatures inside the ring that sunbathed in the red light and warmed their hands in the sparkle. She would tell this to her mother, and her mother would ask her what the creatures were called and what they looked like. One afternoon her mother came home with a set of wind chimes as a surprise. Ren walked out onto the porch with her mother’s cool, soft hands over her eyes, her mother nudging her forward, and before her mother told her she could look, Ren heard the sound of rubies.
    When she raised her head again, the fire was dead. Ed and Paul had melted away. She and Silas were left. He gave no sign that time had passed. Colors were always a problem: She could make herself forget conversations and feelings and entire months and years, but colors rose up clear and bright from the past. Still, she did not remember often.
    â€œI told you that I wanted to ask you a question,” Silas said, head back, either resting his eyes or looking at stars.
    She straightened in her chair. “Sure.”
    â€œI’ve seen your map of the site. That room where you found the bowls was way off from the center. It looks like the room itself wouldn’t even have been visible from the surface. What made you dig there?”
    She looked at the sky herself, away from his face. A falling star streaked down.
    â€œI was lucky.”
    The bed was not comfortable. She could feel a broken spring gouging her back whenever she rolled over. The pillow was thin foam, and she had to fold it in half to make it acceptable. She tried moving the pillow altogether, lying flat on nothing but mattress. She dropped the pillow over her face, huffing into its bleached cotton. She thought about the dead, about the Mimbreños’ burials with a single black-and-white bowl over the faces. Everyone equal in death. Such fair-minded grave diggers—not like those in Chaco, where the rich were showered with trinkets and the common laborers earned nothing but stooped spines and brittle bones. She wondered if her artist had been loved and celebrated when she was put into the dirt. She wondered who had laid her in the ground and if she was out there in this canyon somewhere, the dust of dead flowers mixed with her bones.
    She slept in bursts and dreamed in disjointed fragments that she wouldn’t remember in the morning. Once she woke to the moonlight streaming in the window and the sound of wings hitting the screens. Probably a moth. She blinked and rolled onto her back. She could hear the night sounds clearly—wind through the trees and against the tin roof, chirping tree frogs, a single owl.
    She heard humming and, still not quite awake, tried to place the song. The humming was slightly off-key, as usual, and she wished he would sing the words. One phrase floated past, and she snagged it:
With her hands on her hips and that smile on her lips
.
    Springsteen. But the name of the song wasn’t coming to her. She frowned, not opening her eyes. He only did this to her to wake her up in the middle of the night.
    A rattle and clank outside. Probably raccoons in the recycling. Wait, she nearly had it. She hummed under her breath, tapping a rhythm on the sheets with one finger.
And her eyes that shine like a