“WHAT I DON’T UNDERSTAND,” CASSIE SAID, STARING AT THE GOSSIP column Will had brought her, “is why my father would lie and admit he’s seen me. I mean, it makes perfect sense for Alex to do it since people are going to ask, but my father has nothing to lose.”
“Except you,” Will pointed out. “You don’t know how ugly that whole thing got; what people were accusing Alex of. Collusion. Murder.
Even you—one magazine said you had a European prince as a lover, and you’d run off with him to the jungles of Africa or something.”
Cassie laughed, rubbing her hand over her growing stomach. “Oh, right.”
Will didn’t tell her what he wanted to, which was that she was beautiful, even bloated out of shape with Alex Rivers’s child. “It occurred to me that maybe Alex paid off your father,” he said. Cassie immediately shook her head. “He wouldn’t do that.” Her face brightened. “He probably thought I’d hear what the papers were saying about me, and he wouldn’t want me to be hurt. He’d tell my father that, and my father would retract whatever he said for my sake.” She beamed at Will. “You see?”
He didn’t see, but he still could not make Cassie understand that.
“The funny thing is that out of all the stories flying around Hollywood about you two, no one’s come up with the truth.”
Cassie began to dig a pebble out of the ground. “That’s because no one wants to believe it,” she said.
They were sitting outside the frame of a sweat lodge, inside which a Sioux wedding was taking place. Will had been back for a week now, having broken his lease in L.A. He told Cassie he wasn’t planning on staying in Pine Ridge, but he wouldn’t go back to L.A., either. He figured he’d wait until the baby was born, and then when Cassie left, he’d go too.
He only sometimes let himself think that Cassie would come with him.
He’d returned in time to see his old betrayed friend Horace get married. He had long ago made his peace, but it surprised him to find out that Horace had never left the reservation. In fact the woman he was marrying was a fullblood Sioux.
Horace had met Cassie in town at the feed and grain, which he now managed. She had been buying food for Wheezer, and she needed him to carry it out to the truck, where Wheezer was jumping around in the flatbed. “I know that dog,” Horace had said, and that’s how they’d figured out they both knew Will.
Horace and Glenda were sitting inside the sweat lodge with Joseph Stands in Sun, the medicine man. No one else but the best man was around—the guests would come later for the civil ceremony—but Horace had specifically invited Cassie and Will. Will had been asked to keep the hot coals going on the vision hill so the stones would be ready when Joseph passed them inside the canvas flap.
“I think they’re coming out,” Cassie whispered. She was trying not to admit it to herself, but she was entranced. This was the closest she’d come to a Lakota ritual. The physical anthropologist in her scorned her interest; the cultural anthropologist she’d buried deep inside her whispered that she should take notes; but the woman in her had only seen two people very much in love enter the sweat lodge to seal their vows.
Will had passed the last four stones to Joseph twenty minutes ago;
they had watched the steam hiss out the edges of the seamed canvas. The flap opened, and Joseph stood up, old and bent and utterly naked. He smiled at Will and walked down the path that led to a little stream.
Glenda was next, and then Horace. Neither of them seemed to care that they were wearing nothing except necklaces strung of bright ribbons, each signifying a different issue in marriage—their relationship to each other, to God, to the planet, to children, to society. “Hey,” Will called, grinning. “Aren’t you going to kiss the bride?”
But Horace just smacked Glenda on the bottom and raced her to the stream. Their ribbons flashed like rainbows over the water.
Beside Will, Cassie sniffled. He turned her chin so that she was facing him. “You’recrying?” he said.
Cassie shrugged. “I can’t help it. I cry at everything these days.” She stared into the open flap of the sweat lodge, still pouring steam. “That’s the way a wedding ceremony ought to be done,” she said. “It’s for you and him and nobody else. And there’s nothing you can hide.” She struggled to her knees, then rolled to her feet, pressing her hand to the small of her back. “I would have liked to get married like that,” she said softly.
In the distance, Glenda laughed, her voice wrapped delicately around her new husband’s. Will stood up next to Cassie and stared where she stared, trying to see what she was seeing. “Okay,” he said lightly, “when?”
Cassie turned to him and smiled. “Oh, I don’t know. Next Tuesday.
And then we’ll wire the papers so theyreallyhave some dirt on me.”
Will didn’t say anything, not even when Cassie slipped her hand into his and began to pull him down to the bank of the stream. “Taη yaη yahi´ ye´lo,” she said haltingly.I’m glad you came.
And although he couldn’t force the words past his lips, he knew he was too.
TO THE DAY, IT HAD BEEN FOUR FULL MONTHS SINCE CASSIE HAD disappeared, three months and six days since she had called. Alex sat on the veranda outside the bedroom, nursing another drink, trying not to feel sorry for himself.
He had a routine by now, one that involved running through a list of memories he had of Cassie so that she’d become almost real: Cassie bent over a moldering bone in the single light of her laboratory; Cassie making fun of a producer’s Elvis swagger, or of an actress’s habit of cracking her anorexic knuckles; Cassie’s hair spilled over her shoulders as his mouth traced a path down her stomach; and yes, the one he forced himself to remember—Cassie curled into herself at his feet, bleeding and beaten and still reaching out to soothehim.
He’d made himself a vow. He’d do anything to get her back. He’d go see a shrink. He’d join a therapy group. Hell, he’d even do an exclusive baring his soul toEntertainment Tonight. His reputation couldn’t become much more shredded than it already had, and any backlash he’d suffer from coming clean still wouldn’t compare to the pain Cassie had taken over the years. He told himself this every time he lifted his drink to his lips, but of course, it was an empty toast. The person who most needed to hear it was still gone.
There was a knock at the bedroom door, and Alex growled. He wasn’t in the mood for any of the staff. They asked him things he didn’t give a flying fuck about anymore, like what he wanted for dinner and whether his appointment with Mr. Silver was still standing. “Get away,”
he yelled. “I’m working.”
