“Stop that.” He grinned, a toothy coyote grin, and I rubbed my eyes. “Shouldn’t it take more than a blink of an eye to shape-change?” I demanded waspishly. He laughed, a mixture of human laughter and a coyote’s cheerful yip.

“Not when you’ve got as much practice as I do.” He sat up, lining his paws up together again. “It’s a lever, Joanne Walker. Siobhan Walkingstick. You can move the world. It won’t be easy, but I told you that before. You have the power to heal.” He leaned forward and butted his head against my shoulder. It was like having a block of furry concrete smack me. I rubbed my shoulder, frowning at him.

“But what am I, a physician’s assistant or a surgeon? I don’t understand this, Coyote.”

“You’re both.” He stuck his nose under my palm and asked for more scritches while he spoke. “Heal the patient, Jo. The patient—”

The drumbeat stopped and I opened my eyes on a sigh. “—is the world.”

“Eh?” Gary set the drum aside and leaned forward, looking down at me.

“The patient is the world,” I repeated, then slowly grinned at him. The euphoria of the drumbeat surged through me even though it had ended. The colors were brighter, noises sharper. Gary looked different. There was an air of contentment around him, knowledge of a life well-lived. “Goddamn, Gary, I feel good.”

He chuckled, like a nice big V-8 engine purring. I bet his Annie had been a V-4, higher pitch to complement his deeper sound. Divisible numbers, too: one went into the other. It fit. I wished I’d been able to meet her. Gary stood up and put the drum carefully on top of my computer desk. “Glad to hear it. You get anywhere?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I did.” I got up from the floor, whistling “I’m A Believer.” Gary pursed his lips like he was trying to fight off a smile. “You hush,” I told him happily. Another crack fused shut, a feeling of heat and sizzling deep inside me. I rubbed the heel of my hand over my breastbone and grinned at Gary. “You hush,” I repeated. “You just let me be giddy and weird here for a minute. I’m jumping between worlds here. This is too wild. You just hush.”

Gary laughed and I stuck my nose in the air and went into the kitchen to put some water on for coffee. Gary followed me, leaning in the door. “Tell me something.”

“What?”

“How come you don’t know anything about your heritage?”

I was in a good enough mood that the question didn’t even piss me off. I turned around and leaned on the counter while the coffeepot started up and looked for a place to start. Some of the good humor fell away, but not enough to make me clam up. “I was about twelve when I told my dad we were going to choose one place to live and stay there until I was out of high school. My whole life we’d been picking up every three or four months and going somewhere new and I was sick of it. He looked at me like he’d never seen me before and the next time we got in the car we drove to North Carolina, where he’d grown up. Eastern Cherokee Nation.”

I shoved my hands in my pockets, looking at the floor while I spoke. “I knew he was Cherokee, but he hadn’t ever talked about growing up. He taught me pretty much my whole primary school education, math and science and English. I mean, I went to school, but we were always moving, so I was never anywhere really long enough to get the curriculum. Anyway, he didn’t tell me anything about the People. So I got to North Carolina and I was already years behind in what a lot of other kids had just grown up with. And I’m all horrible and pale like my mother was. Not that there aren’t other Native kids who’re pale, but I was really sensitive about it.” I spread my hands, looked at them, and shrugged. “So I worked really hard on not learning anything. Not caring.”

“Were you born contrary or did you have to work at it?”

I looked up. “Born that way.”

“So where was your mom?”

I snorted and looked over my shoulder to check the coffee. “Ireland. I was the unexpected product of a one-night stand during an American holiday.” God. Apparently I was the deliberate product of a one-night stand. It was just that the deliberation wasn’t on the part of my parents. I fell silent, trying to adjust to that thought.

“And?”

“Um. And she brought me back to the States when I was three months old, handed me over to Dad and went back to Ireland for good.”

“I thought your dad was on the move all the time. How’d she find him?”

“That,” I said, “was the last time he spent more than five months in one place.” Gary winced.

“But you said you’d gone to her funeral. So she turned back up?”

“Why are we playing Twenty Questions About Joanne’s Life?” Everything was still a little too clear, the smell of coffee brewing sharper than normal. My question didn’t come out as acerbically as I’d meant it to. I felt too good to be really bitchy, and I was still trying to absorb what Coyote had said.

“I guess she’d been corresponding with my dad for pretty much my whole life. Once every couple years. She sent letters to his parents in North Carolina and they’d forward them on to wherever we were.”

“And your dad didn’t mention this?”

“No.” I didn’t feel like adding anything else to that. “Anyway, so Mother just called up one day and said she was dying and she’d like to meet me before she keeled over. I was furious. I mean, who was she to ignore me my whole life and then turn around and pull something like that?”

“Your mother?” Gary offered. I sighed and nodded.

“That was basically what I came up with, too. I mean, I spent a really long time…” I went quiet, choosing my word carefully. “Resenting her. Maybe even hating her. She abandoned me and I was like any other kid who figured her life would’ve been way better, way different, if she hadn’t. But in the end I thought, you know, if I don’t go meet her, I’ll never know. Maybe I’ll find out it was best that way.”

“Was it?”

“I still don’t know.” I leaned on the counter, dropping my head. “Her name was Sheila MacNamarra. She looked a lot like me. Black Irish. She liked Altoids. Um.” I pressed my lips together. “We spent four months together and I feel like all I really know about her was she liked Altoids. I didn’t really like her. I didn’t really dislike her, either.” I touched my throat, where the necklace she’d given me wasn’t. “She gave me—I don’t know if you noticed it. A necklace. I was wearing it yesterday.”

“The cross thing, yeah. I saw it.”

“Yeah. It was literally the last thing she did, giving me that. I don’t know why she did it, really. It didn’t seem very much like something she’d do. It was this weird personal touch after months of hanging out with a stranger. She didn’t ask me very many questions and she didn’t talk about herself, the whole time. She was a lot like my father. He doesn’t like talking about himself either.”

Gary’s eyebrows rose. “The apple don’t fall far from the tree.”

“What?” I poured two cups of coffee, frowning at him.

“I mean, you don’t open up so easy, either. I’m askin’ you questions all over the place and you’re real careful about choosing your answers. Maybe she couldn’t figure out how to say anything to you.” Gary took his coffee and watched while I ladled sugar and milk into my own.

“She was my mother,” I said, frowning.

“So what? That means she was s’posed to be able to just know how to talk to you? You’re an adult. I bet it’s pretty hard trying to talk to a kid you left behind almost thirty years ago.” Gary waved his coffee cup as I frowned more deeply.

“So you’re saying it’s my fault I don’t know anything about her?”

Gary shrugged and waved his coffee cup again. “I ain’t sayin’ anything. What’d she die of?”

I exhaled. “Boredom, I think.”

Gary lifted his eyebrows skeptically. I shook my head. “No, really. I think she was done. She’d seen what she wanted to see and she’d met me and she was done. So that’s the kind of person she was. I don’t know. Tidy. Focused. Capable of dying of boredom, or at least dying when she was done with her checklist of things to do.”