“Well,” said Joseph Stands in Sun, “you cannot be a Heyoka; this is the twentieth century. But you will have your thunder dream.”
Three nights later, Will sat naked in a sweat lodge across from Joseph Stands in Sun. He had seen the lodges before; sometimes teenagers built them and smoked peyote in the cramped, curved quarters, getting high enough to run bareassed through the fields and dive into freezing streams. But Will himself had never been inside one. From time to time Joseph poked at the glowing stones that were used to create heat.
Mostly he sang and chanted, syllables that swelled and burst like bottle rockets inches before Will’s eyes.
As dawn was sneaking across the plain, Joseph took Will to the top of a flat butte. Will would rather have been anywhere else than on a rock ledge, naked, but he knew better than to disgrace his grandfather or Joseph Stands in Sun. Respect your elders: it was the way he’d been taught. Shaking, Will did as he had been told. He faced the sun with his arms outstretched, keeping perfectly still and trying to ignore the grass that whispered around Joseph’s legs as he walked away. He stood for hours until the sun began to sink again, and then his legs gave out beneath him. He curled onto his side and began to cry. He felt the butte tremble, the sky melt.
On the second day, an eagle flew over his head from the east. Will watched it circle, moving so slowly that for entire minutes it seemed to be suspended just an arm’s length away. “Help me,” he whispered, and the eagle flew through him. “You have chosen a life that is difficult,” it cried, and then it disappeared. It might have been hours that passed; it might have been days. Will was so hungry and faint he had to force air in and out of his lungs. In the moments his mind was clear, he cursed his grandfather for believing in this kind of crap; he cursed himself for being so easily led. He thought of school baseball tryouts that past spring, of thePlayboyhe had hidden under his mattress, of the tingling smell of his mother’s Pond’s cold cream. He thought of anything that seemed leagues apart from the Sioux way of life.
We are coming, we are coming. The words whistled over the plain, wrapping themselves around Will’s neck and drawing him to his feet.
Directly overhead was a dark, roiling cloud. Exhausted, starving, delirious, he threw back his head and opened his arms, willing a sacrifice. When the thunder began in his head, he realized he was no longer on the ground. High above, and peering down, Will saw the girl. She was small and thin and she was running in a snowstorm. From time to time the blizzard winds would sweep around her, blocking her from Will’s view. He thought she was running away from someone or something, but then he saw her stop. She stood at the heart of the storm, arms outstretched. All the time, she had been trying to find the center.
“Help her,” Will said, and he heard the words echoed a hundred times around him. He was standing on the ground again. He knew he would remember none of this. He knew that even as a man, this would be the nightmare that tugged at his consciousness in the heavy minutes after waking.
When the sky shattered and the rain came, Will screamed into the wind. Eyes wide, he watched lightning crack the night in two, splitting his world into equal halves that rocked, broken shells, at his feet.
EVEN THE SUN LOVED ALEX. CASSIE TOUCHED HER FINGERS TO HIS jaw, mesmerized by the fact that the one sliver of morning light in the bedroom had managed to fall directly over his sleeping form. His skin was dark, shadowed by beard, marked just below his chin with a tiny curved scar. Cassie tried to remember how he had hurt himself. She watched his eyes shift beneath his lids and wondered if he was dreaming of her.
She curled herself out of the bed, careful not to wake him. Smiling, she hugged her arms around herself, thinking that she was quite rightfully the envy of every woman in America. If she had had any doubts about the validity of her marriage to Alex, they were gone now. Two people could not make love like that without a history. Cassie laughed.
If her heart stopped beating that very second, she could say she’d lived a fine life.
It is a good day to die. The words stopped her, and a shiver ran down her body before she realized they had not been spoken out loud. Recovering, she padded into the bathroom and stared into the mirror, touching her fingers to her swollen lower lip.
A lecture. It had been the opening line to a lecture she’d heard by a colleague atUCLA. Cassie let her hands drop to the marble sink basin, sighing with relief as she realized she was not facing an omen, but a genuine memory. It was a course on Native American culture, and that phrase was part of the ritual prayer spoken by tribal warriors of the plains before riding off to do battle. Cassie remembered telling the professor he sure knew how to draw a crowd.
She wondered what Will was doing now. It was Thursday morning;
he’d probably be on his way to work. He had left her his phone numbers.
Maybe later she’d call him at the station, tell him she lived in a castle in Malibu, mention she was flying to Scotland.
Cassie brushed her teeth and dragged a comb through her hair, careful to place each item back on the counter quietly so that Alex wouldn’t stir. She tiptoed back into the bedroom and sat on a chair in the corner.
Alex was snoring lightly. She watched his chest rise and fall a few times, then stood up and walked to the closet across the room that held all of his clothes. She pulled open the door and drew in her breath.
Alex’s closet was twenty times neater than her own. On the floor, on little shoe trees, were lines of sneakers and Italian loafers and black patent leather formal dress shoes. A hanging closet organizer proudly displayed folded sweaters, Shetland and Norwegian on one side and cotton on the other. His shirts stood stiffly on cedar hangers. A lingerie chest tucked into the corner of the walk-in closet was lined with neatlyPicture Perfect
53folded silk boxers and socks—arranged in separate drawers by their uses.
“My God,” Cassie whispered. She ran a fingertip over the line of shirts, listening to the music of the hangers batting each other. Neatness was to be expected, especially if one had a good housekeeper. Something, though, something else made this closet cross the line between fastidious and obsessive.
The sweaters. Not only were they segregated by material and folded neatly, they were arranged in color order. Like a rainbow. Even the patterned sweaters seemed to have been placed by predominant color.
She should have laughed. After all, this was odd to the point of being funny. This was something to joke about.
But instead Cassie felt tears squeeze from the corners of her eyes. She knelt before the rows of shoes, crying in near silence, pulling a sweater from its appropriate spot and holding it to her mouth to muffle the sounds she made. She bent over, her stomach knotting, and she told herself she was losing her mind.
It was the stress of the last few days, she thought as she wiped her cheeks. Cassie walked back to the bathroom and closed the door. She ran the water until it was so cold it numbed her wrists, and then she splashed some onto her face, hoping to start over.
FOR DAYS, THEY HAD BEEN TALKING ABOUT THE BLIZZARD. IT WAS going to hit sometime after three on Friday. It was going to be the storm of the century. Fill your bathtubs with water, the weatherman said. Buy batteries and firewood. Find your flashlights.
The only thing that could have been better, Cassie decided, would be if the blizzard hit on Sunday, so school would be canceled the next day.
Cassie walked into the kitchen. She had been at Connor’s all afternoon but had promised her mother she’d return before the first flakes fell. Cassie’s mother was terrified of snow. She had grown up in Georgia and had never seen snow until she moved to Maine when she got married. Rather than being efficient about a winter storm—like Connor’s mother, who had taken out candles and bought extra gallons of milk to store in the drifts—Aurora Barrett sat at the kitchen table with wide eyes, listening to the weather reports on her transistor radio and waiting to be buried alive.
The one thing Aurora did like about nor’easters was that they provided a chance to accuse her husband of everything that had gone wrong in her life. Cassie had grown up understanding that her mother hated Maine, that she hadn’t wanted to move there, that she didn’t want to be a baker’s wife. She still dreamed of a house with lawns that rolled down to the river, of a latticed bench veiled by cherry trees, of the melting southern sun. While Cassie watched, tucked in the shadows, her mother would rail at Ben and ask just how temporary ten long years in the same godforsaken place could be.
