Chapter 23: Aurora

The lights moved over the lagoon for an hour, green and then white and then, once, a faint pink along the edge.

Nobody spoke.

My mother stood with her hands folded under her chin, and the cameraman filmed until his fingers stopped working.

When the sky finally dimmed, my mother turned around and looked at us.

"I'm going to ride back with the nice man with the earflaps," she said. "He has a heater."

"Mom, we have a heater."

"He has a better one." She patted my arm. "Don't wait up, either of you."

The van with the crew pulled out of the lot, and its taillights went around the bend.

It was suddenly very quiet.

Sunna stood beside me at the edge of the water with her hands in her pockets.

"Your mother is not subtle," she said.

"She's a school bus driver. She has to be able to clear a bus in a minute flat."

"She has cleared the bus."

I took the gloves out of my coat pocket.

They were the old ones, brown leather, with a hole in the left thumb that she had never mended.

"Give me your hands," I said.

She looked at me for a long moment.

Then she took her own hands out of her pockets, and I put the gloves on them, one at a time, careful with the thumbs.

They were too big for her.

"Idiot," she said. Her voice was not steady. "You will be cold."

"I'm not."

I put my bare palms on either side of her face.

Her skin was freezing and flushed, and her eyes had gone dark.

"Emmett."

"I want to do this properly," I said. "I want you to know I'm not doing it because I'm lonely, or grateful, or because of your mother."

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