“DO YOU TRUST ME?” WILL ASKED FOR THE SECOND TIME.
Cassie stared at him from the other side of the hospital Isolette, a domed plastic bubble that had sealed her away from her child for the past two days. In spite of the Tylenol and the pediatric ibuprofen and the sponge baths, Connor’s fever was still alarmingly high. The doctor had as much as said he didn’t know what to do.
Cassie nodded and watched Will’s face split into a dazzling smile.
He came around to her side of the Isolette and held his hands over the warm plastic dome. From that angle, his stretching fingers blocked Cassie’s view of the lines and tubes that were invading her son’s body.
She stared up at Will as if he’d already worked magic. “Do whatever you have to,” she said softly. “Whatever you think will help.”
The doctor was paged to tell Cassie this wasn’t a wise idea, but she simply shook her head and leaned back slightly, where Will was standing for support. She watched the interns disconnect the IV from Connor. As she held her child again in her arms, his eyes opened for the first time in forty-eight hours.
“At least take this,” the doctor urged, pressing into Cassie’s free hand the tiny dropper of infant Tylenol. Cassie nodded, turned, and with Will, walked out of the hospital that had done nothing at all for her son. She very gently got into Will’s pickup truck, careful not to jostle Connor. And as soon as they were on the open highway, she threw the bottle of medicine out the window.
INTHEMIDDLEOFTHENIGHT, INTHEFLYINGHORSES’LIVINGROOM, they sponged the heat from Connor’s little body. Then Cassie pushed aside her nightgown so that the baby could nurse. Will sat across from her, his fingers stroking the hot smooth skin of Connor’s bowed calves.
They laid the baby down in the middle of the fold-out bed when he fell into a fitful sleep, and then they sat, cross-legged, on either side of him. Outside, a brisk wind picked up, and a truck roared into the darkness.
“Is everything ready?” Cassie asked.
Will nodded, then rubbed his hand over the back of his neck. “My grandmother says she’s taking care of it.” He started to speak, but hesitated and looked up at Cassie. “I don’t have any right to tell you what to do. I’m not his father. If it doesn’t work,” he said, “I’ll never forgive myself.”
He was so intent on his thoughts that he did not notice Cassie getting off the bed, coming to stand behind him. He felt her tentatively touch the back of his head, her fingers thread through his hair. And his back stiffened involuntarily as he realized thatCassiewas reaching out forhim.
He did not turn to look at her. “What are you doing?” he said, angry at the rough edges of his voice.
Almost immediately Cassie lifted her hand away, and Will swung around. She wrapped her arms around herself. “I—Ineeded—” Her voice broke, and she lifted her eyes to meet Will’s. “I just wanted someone to hold me,” she said. “Please.”
The simple fact that Cassie had asked such a favor of him nearly brought Will to his knees, but that soft-spoken “Please” at the end of her sentence broke him. He stood up and folded her into his arms in one swift motion, pulling her against his hips.
After a few minutes Will stepped back, pushing Cassie against the edge of the bed. He let her stretch out on her side, facing the baby, and then he lay down close behind her. He pillowed her head on his arm and together they watched Connor’s measured, ragged breathing. He mindlessly whispered Lakota endearments he knew Cassie could not understand, phrases he thought he had forgotten long ago. He fell asleep mouthing the words“Waste cilake,”Sioux for “I love you,” and did not hear the last thing Cassie said before she too drifted off. She had been looking at Connor, at the tipped curve of his nose and the tiny perfection of his fingernails, and feeling behind her the warmth of Will’s body, like a safety net. “No,” she had murmured past the constriction of her throat, “you’renothis father.”
JOSEPH STANDS IN SUN WAS LYING PRONE ON THE SAGE-STREWN floor of Cyrus and Dorothea’s living room, wrapped in a star blanket, pretending to be dead. The furniture was sitting in the front yard, so there was plenty of room even outside the string-cordoned sacred square for the onlookers. They sat on the floor, their backs to the four walls.
Some of the people Cassie recognized as neighbors. Others were there simply to lend support during thisyuwipiceremony, the finding out and curing of ills.
Beside her, Will squeezed her hand. Connor was lying in his cradleboard, no better than he had been when he left the Rapid City hospital. It had been four days now, four days of a spiraling fever and frightening convulsions and endless cries. When Will had driven up to his grandparents’ house late last evening, Dorothea was waiting on the porch. She came down to the truck and held out her hands for Connor so that Cassie could step down easily. Clucking her tongue, she shook her head.
“No wonder,” she’d said knowingly. “This isn’t the kind of sickness white medicine can fix.”
Joseph’s grandson, who sometimes acted as his singer, was chanting theyuwipisongs and beating the ceremonial drum. He stood in front of the makeshift altar, on which sat Joseph’s buffalo skull, a red and a black staff, an eagle feather, and a deer tail. There was no light in the room, unless one counted the strips of moon that had made their way inside.
Cassie was dizzy, and she didn’t know if it was from simple exhaustion or the overwhelming scent of the sage, which carpeted the floor and was worn in the hair of every onlooker. Will, who had done his best to explain the ceremony to Cassie before it began, had said that sage was the sacred plant of the spirits. Any messages they brought to Joseph, the representative of the “dead,” would be carried along the sage.
In the shifting currents of the night, shadows and sounds filled the living room. The noises were high and strained, inhuman, urgent. “The spirits are here,” someone said, a voice Cassie had never heard before but that could have been entirely familiar, could even have come from herself. She felt her shoulders pushed out of place by the ringing cry of an eagle, and although she squinted her eyes to see better, she could not tell whose hand had flung a string of stars across the ceiling. She kept one arm linked with Will’s, the other wrapped around the frame of Connor’s cradleboard, as if she feared that something might steal him away. But she could hear his deep belly giggle, and she turned to see his clear, shining face being brushed by the softest of wings.
When the ceremony was over, the lights were turned on and Joseph Stands in Sun was unwrapped from his star quilt. He shook the sage from the handworked pattern, taking his time to fold the quilt and rearrange the collection on the altar before he came toward Cassie. But instead of speaking to her, he walked to Connor’s cradleboard and knelt in front of it. He pressed his hand against the baby’s forehead, then reached for Cassie’s wrist and urged her to do the same.
Connor was flushed and sweating, but making soft, happy sounds that buffeted through her heart. His fever had broken. Amazed, Cassie turned her face up to Joseph’s.
´“Uyelo. His father is coming,” Joseph said simply. “Like you, his body was burning with a fear of the unknown.”
BEHIND THE FRAYED CURTAIN THAT SEPARATED THEIR BEDROOM from the rest of the house, Cyrus and Dorothea were still wide awake.
They lay on their backs staring at the ceiling, their bony fingers knotted together between them.
“What are you thinking?” Dorothea whispered, careful to keep her voice down so as not to disturb Cassie and Connor and Will, who slept in the living room. She ran her hand up Cyrus’s forearm, feeling not the wrinkled skin and sinews of an old man but the thick muscle she remembered from her youth.
“I’m thinking of the first time I touched you,” Cyrus said.
