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clicked the remote control once more. This time she turned off the television.
    Elan stared at the blank screen.
    “Elan,” she said. “Talk.”
    “Aunt Birdy,” he answered, his voice growing soft. “I don’t want to go home. Ever.”
    It was a start. Vague, but a start.
    “All right,” Birdy said. “You don’t want to go home. I understand that, Elan. But what I need to understand is why . Why don’t you want to go back?”
    The teen stayed silent.
    “I need to call your mother,” Birdy said, holding her exasperation to a minimum. She hated the idea of calling Summer. Their last few encounters had been less than cordial. There was always the lingering sting in Summer’s comments that Birdy was selfish and preoccupied with her own life. Her life away from the others. That dead people mattered more to her than her own living family members.
    “You think you’re too good for us, don’t you, sister?” Summer had asked the last time they spoke, a repeat of a conversation they’d had many times before.
    Birdy took a step back. “I never said that.”
    Summer pointed her index finger, one—like all of them—that was coiled with silver rings.
    “You inferred it,” she said.
    Birdy smelled alcohol, but made no mention of it.
    “ Implied is the word, Summer. But no, I didn’t.”
    Summer threw her hands in the air. It was a showy move, but within the confines of her living room—where her husband, oldest son, and the family dog watched TV—it didn’t spark the slightest bit of interest.
    “There you go again,” Summer said. “Making me—making all of us—feel like we’re stupid.”
    Birdy had heard that one before. Part of it made her angry. The same song over and over. And yet, the other side of the coin was that Summer didn’t have to end up the way she had. She was intelligent. She was creative. She was all of those things when she was a teenager.
    “You could have gone to college,” Birdy said. “You were the smart one.”
    Summer didn’t say another word. She had been disarmed by the truth and she had nothing to do but accept what her sister had said. Summer had been at the top of the class. She was the sister who taught Birdy the joys of reading, of dreaming of a life beyond the reservation with its endless gossip, heartache, and futility. All of Summer’s dreams evaporated when she dropped out of school, became a mom, got married. Waffled on what she’d do. After that, Summer foundered like a wreck off the edge of Neah Bay. She never got her footing again. She never fulfilled the promise that her intellect had once assured.
    Instead she drank, drifted, and watched from afar as Birdy escaped the reservation and the life there that was never going to be anything but hard.
    “Call her,” Elan said, meeting his aunt’s gaze. “But I’m not going back. If you try to make me, I’ll just run away. I’ll go somewhere far away where no one can find me. And if I do, it will be your fault.”
    Birdy wasn’t sure what she should do. She knew that while she and her sister had their differences they did have a bond, a history that wasn’t always so strained. There were things that kept them wound together like the jute twine they’d used to make bracelets when they were kids.
    “Can’t I stay with you?”
    “You have to be in school, for one thing. For another, I don’t really even know you, Elan. I don’t know how to take care of you.”
    “I’m sixteen. I don’t want to go to school anymore.”
    Birdy didn’t like that response at all. Education was the only way to a better life. She didn’t want Elan to fail. She just couldn’t have that happen. Even though Summer was older, she’d always felt that there was truth to her sister’s insistence that Birdy had abandoned her when she left for the university in Seattle.
    “If you stay here,” she said, “you have to go to school.”
    Elan brightened a little. “You mean you might let me stay?”
    “Are you on drugs?” she