A few minutes later, she tried again. “Hello?” Alex said, irritated.
“It’s me,” Cassie whispered.
She could hear the background noise—water, or maybe a stereo—
being switched off. “Cassie. God. Did you just call?” Alex’s voice sounded round, filled to a bursting point with shock and joy and relief and other touches she could not name.
“No,” Cassie lied. This time, she could not let him sense her indecision. “You’re all right?”
“Cassie,” Alex said, “tell me where you are.” There was a silence.
“Cassie,please.”
She ran her fingers over the cold snake of metal that connected the receiver to the pay box. “I need a promise from you, Alex.”
“Cassie,” Alex said, his voice low and urgent, “come home. It won’t happen again, I swear it. I’ll see anyone you ask me to. I’ll do anything you want.”
“That’s not the promise I need right now,” Cassie said, stunned by the sacrifices he was willing to make to his pride just to have her return.
“I’m going to tell you where I am because I don’t want you to worry, but I want to stay here another month. I want you to swear to me that you won’t come till then.”
He was thinking of what she could possibly be doing that would require another month away: some underground activity, or a delayed visa, or a calculated goodbye to a lover. But he forced himself to listen.
“I swear,” he said, digging for a pen. “Where are you?”
“Pine Ridge, South Dakota,” Cassie murmured. “The Indian reservation.”
“Thewhat? Cassie, how—”
“That’s it, Alex. I’m going to get off now. I’ll call in a month and we’ll figure out how and when I’ll come back. All right?”
No, she could hear him thinking.It isnotall right. I want you here, now, mine. But he didn’t say anything and she took this as a sign of hope. “You won’t break your promise?” she asked.
She could feel him smile sadly all those miles away.“Che`re,”he said softly, “you have my word.”
CHAPTERTWENTY-FOUR
CASSIEpressed herself across Connor’s fiery, wriggling body, pinning him to the examination table while two white nurses straightened his flailing arms to draw blood. Her head was just below Connor’s mouth, and he was screaming convulsively, his chest rising and falling in exaggerated rasps. Before they began, the nurses had asked her if she wanted to leave the room. “Some parents can’t take this,” one said. But Cassie had merely stared at them, incredulous. If she fainted right on top of her baby, so be it. “I’m all he has,” Cassie said, the best explanation she could offer.
It was killing her. She couldn’t stand to see his tiny form shaking with fever; she couldn’t listen to cries that—even three weeks after his birth—seemed to come from deep inside of her. Cassie watched the vials of blood flow one after another. “You’re taking too much,” she whispered to nobody. She did not say what she really was thinking:
Take mine instead.
The clinic doctor in Pine Ridge town had sent them to the hospital in Rapid City. Too young, he had said. Bacterial something or other.
Maybe pneumonia. The nurses were asking the lab to do a full blood workup. Then there would be an X ray. They would keep Connor overnight, or as long as it took to bring down his temperature. Cyrus, who had driven her all the way to Rapid City, was waiting downstairs in the lobby, unwilling to go any farther into the hospital after having watched his son die in it. So when the lab returned the results, she sat in a thin metal bridge chair, alone with Connor, who was connected by wires and tubes to a portable IV machine. He was being given saline solution, with an antibiotic. The doctor had pronounced him dehydrated, and this Cassie knew to be true, since her breasts were aching and had long since leaked through the front of her shirt. Connor had fallen into an unconscious exhaustion a few minutes before, and Cassie found herself wishing she could do the same thing.
She thought of all the times she’d offered her body to Alex rather than see him suffer, and shook her head at the fact that this one time, when she so gladly would have taken the pain to spare Connor, she was not given the chance.
The door to the tiny room flung open, and Cassie turned her head with a slow grace born of fatigue to see Will standing at the threshold, his eyes wide and dark, his chest heaving. “My grandfather called,” he said. “I came as soon as I could.”
He took in the image of Cassie, straight-backed, feet wrapped around the legs of the frame chair, her arms clutching Connor to her stomach.
He saw the little brace on Connor’s arm, the point of the needle beneath the white surgical tape where it entered the vein, the fingerprinted smudge of blood on the baby’s forearm.
Cassie looked up at him. Will threw his hat onto the linoleum and knelt at her side, turning her face against his neck and sliding his arms beneath hers in an effort to buoy Connor.“Ce´ye s?ni yo,”he said. “Don’t cry. It’s all right.” He smoothed her hair and felt her tears soaking his collar.
Cassie’s fingers gripped and released his light chambray shirt. Will tenderly brushed a kiss over the top of her head, forcing himself not to remember his father lying pale and fading in a hospital bed a few floors above them. He held his fingers to the folds of Connor’s neck, seeking the simple pulse, and tried to act the way he thought he should in a situation he knew nothing about.
