Picture Perfect (39 page)

Joseph Stands in Sun walked up to Will, waiting beneath the forked cottonwood pole. He murmured something in Lakota, and then lifted a bright silver skewer. For a moment he held it up, and Cassie watched the sun reflect off its polished, speared tip. Joseph leaned close to Will, whose back stiffened. It was not until Joseph brandished a second skewer that Cassie realized that the medicine man had pierced the skin of Will's chest, that blood was running down his stomach.

Like the other dancers', Will's two skewers were tied to rawhide thongs that dangled down from the top of the sacred pole. With Joseph leading them, the men began to dance, much as they had the other three days. The drums beat, but no louder than Cassie's pulse. She gripped the armrests of her chair, her face drawn and white.

“You knew,” she whispered to Cyrus, although she did not take her eyes from Will. “You knew and didn't tell me.”

Will whirled and sang. His entire chest was slick with blood, since every time he twisted he tore the wounds. He pretended to pull away from the skewers, and Cassie stared, horrified, as his skin stretched to its limit.

Cassie grabbed Cyrus's arm. “Please,” she begged. “He's hurting himself. You have to do something.”

“I can't do anything,” Cyrus said. “He has to do this himself.”

Cassie let the tears run down her face and wondered why she had ever encouraged Will to accept the Lakota side of himself. This was barbaric. She pictured him in his neat LAPD uniform, his cap tilted low on his forehead. She saw him standing near her in the emergency room the day he'd found her, his arms crossed with concern. She imagined him dancing with her in the summer rain, her baby kicking between them.

“Why
this
dance?” she whispered brokenly, thinking of the other ceremonies she had seen, ones that hadn't involved self-mutilation. She turned her head, shocked to see the milling crowd with smiles spread across their faces, enjoying the taste of someone else's agony.

“He's not suffering,” Cyrus murmured. “Not for himself.” He pointed to the dancer beside Will. “Louis dances the Sun Dance so that his daughter will live, even though her kidneys are dying. Arthur Peel, over to the right, has a brother still missing in action in Vietnam.” He turned to face Cassie. “The dancers take pain upon themselves,” he said, “so someone close to them won't have to feel it.”

As the dance drew to a close, Joseph Stands in Sun stepped from the circle. The men began to twist and pull in earnest, straining to free themselves. Cassie stood up, helpless, and felt Dorothea's hand on her calf. “Don't,” Dorothea said.

Suffering so someone else didn't have to suffer. Sacrificing your body for someone else's well-being
. Cassie saw the skewer split another inch of Will's skin, watched the blood run down his chest.

He was looking at her. Cassie dragged her eyes to meet Will's, locked her gaze with his. His image flickered, and she pictured her own body, bleeding and broken at Alex's feet, a venting ground for anger that had no connection to her. Will was only doing for Cassie what she had spent years doing for Alex.

When the skin of Will's chest ripped ragged from the skewers, Cassie cried out. She ran forward and knelt beside him, pressing the wounds on his chest with sage from his wreath and then with the hem of her shirt. His eyes were closed, and his breathing was fast and shallow. “It still hurts,” she whispered. “Even when you're doing it for someone else, that doesn't stop your ribs from getting cracked, or your wrist from swelling, or your cuts from bleeding.”

Will opened his eyes. He reached up his hand to wipe the tears from Cassie's cheeks. “You did this for me,” Cassie said. “So it would hurt less when I did it for
him
.” Will nodded.

Through her tears, Cassie laughed. “If I didn't know you better, Will Flying Horse, I'd say you're acting like some Big Indian.”

Will grinned at her weakly. “Go figure,” he said.

Cassie brushed his hair away from his face. She rubbed her fingers lightly over the gaping edges of Will's wounds. Even Alex, who had offered her the world, had never given her so much.

 

T
WO WEEKS AFTER THE
S
UN
D
ANCE
, C
ASSIE WENT INTO LABOR
. S
HE
would have had plenty of time to make the drive into the clinic in town, but she wanted to have the baby somewhere familiar. And so, ten hours later, propped up in the bed where Cyrus, Zachary, and Will had all been born, she was screaming at the top of her lungs.

Dorothea stood at the foot of the bed, measuring Cassie's progress. Will was next to Cassie, suffering her death grip on his hand. “Less than an hour now,” Dorothea said proudly. “Baby's crowned.”

“I'm going to go,” Will said, trying to tug free, but Cassie wouldn't let him leave. He had been uncomfortable in the first place, but Cassie had begged. He might still have found the fortitude to refuse if Cassie hadn't been seized by a contraction just then that had nearly doubled her over in his arms.

“Please,” Cassie panted. “Don't leave me to do this all by myself.” She grabbed handfuls of Will's shirt.

But then she couldn't talk because her belly was knotted up and this unbelievable pressure was forcing itself down through her lower half. Ridiculous, wasn't it, that she'd run away to save this baby's life, only to die in the end? She took a deep breath and fell back against the pillows again.
I understand you
, she silently told the baby.
I know how hard it is to go from one world into another
.

“Here it comes,” said Dorothea. Cassie could feel the cool pressure of Dorothea's fingertips breaking the seal of flesh around her baby's head. She struggled up, dug her fingernails into Will's hand, and bore down.

Ten minutes later, Cassie felt something long and wet slip between her chafed thighs. Dorothea held up a squalling, stunning bundle. “
Hokšíla luhá!
A boy!” she crowed. “Big and healthy, even if he is a little pale for my tastes.”

Cassie laughed, reaching out her hands, first noticing the tears in the corners of her own eyes. She jiggled the baby in her arms, trying to get comfortable, not really knowing exactly how that should feel. The baby opened up his mouth and howled.

“It even sounds like you,” Will murmured, and Cassie remembered he was there. His hand stroked the back of her head, lightly, as if he were awestruck and not sure he should be allowed the contact.

“How do you feel?” Will asked.

Cassie glanced up at him, struggling for the right word. “Full.”

“Well, you look a lot more empty.”

Cassie shook her head. How could she explain it? After all the longing she'd done for Alex, she wasn't alone anymore. This tiny wriggling thing completed her too, in a different sort of way.

A boy. A son. Alex's child. Cassie rummaged through the epithets, trying to find the one that best fit the baby in her arms. He had turned his face toward her breast, as if he already knew what he wanted out of this world.

“You're just like your father,” she whispered, but even as she said the words she realized they weren't true. The face looking up at her was a tiny replica of her own, except for the eyes, which were certainly Alex's. Clear and pale, the silver of a fresh-minted coin.

There was nothing about Alex in the mouth, in the shape of the fingers and feet, in the length of the torso. It was almost as if the lack of contact had diminished Alex's mark on his own infant.

The baby burrowed closer to Cassie, demanding her heat. And she thought about how she was his only means of support—for food and shelter and warmth right now, and later, for love. He would come to her when he drew his first crayon picture, coloring half the kitchen table as well. He'd hold out a scraped elbow and believe a kiss could quit the sting. He'd open his eyes every morning and know, with that sunny childhood certainty, that Cassie would be there.

He needed her, and that, Cassie realized, was the way in which he most resembled Alex.

But this time, being needed wasn't going to be synonymous with being hurt. This was her second lease on life. She and this baby were going to grow up together.

Will touched the baby's hand and watched his fingers close like a summer rose. “What are you going to call him?”

The answer came to Cassie so quickly she realized that she had simply been carrying it all along. She thought of the very first time she had been loved by someone who wanted nothing in return. Someone who had given her enough hope to believe, years later, that Alex still might change, that there might be someone like Will, that a child might consider her his very world. “Connor,” she said. “His name's Connor.”

 

W
ITHIN TWO WEEKS
C
ASSIE WAS LIGHT ON HER FEET
,
JOYOUS
. A
FTER
carrying around so much extra weight, she could not get used to the spring in her step. But she also knew that part of it came from a decision made only hours after she had given birth to Connor. She wasn't planning on leaving, not immediately. Maybe three months, maybe six, maybe longer. She told herself she wanted Connor to be strong before making the trip, and none of the Flying Horses challenged her. In fact, Cyrus had given her a traditional cradleboard as a baby gift, and when he passed it across his own bed, he had simply looked her in the eye. “It will be nice,” he said, “to take him to next year's powwow.”

She was going to contact Alex as she'd promised; she owed it to him, but she had put it off for a week, and then Will's truck had broken down and she didn't have a way to get into Rapid City. So, blissfully free from her obligations, she sat on the porch with Dorothea, shelling peas for dinner.

Connor was in his cradleboard, swaddled tight, wide awake. Most of the day he slept, so Cassie was surprised—she'd just finished feeding him and he was still alert, his light eyes surveying the landscape.

“Giving up your nap?” she asked. She popped a pea into her mouth.

“You,” Dorothea scolded. “We won't have enough for tonight.”

Cassie put her bowl to the side and stretched out, lying back against the rough pine boards and staring at the sun. She could not look at it now without thinking of Will, of the puckered pink scars that still frowned across his chest.

Connor started to cry, but before Cassie could even sit up, Dorothea had clapped her hand over the baby's mouth. Startled, Connor widened his eyes and fell quiet.

Dorothea took her hand away and looked up to see Cassie staring at her, furious. “What the hell do you think you were doing?” Cassie demanded.

It felt strange to be so self-righteous on someone else's behalf, especially when motherhood was such a new thing, like a pretty party dress you could take out of your closet and try on but felt nervous about wearing around all day. “He was crying,” Dorothea said, as if this explained everything.

“Yes, he was,” Cassie said. “Babies cry.”

“Not Lakota babies,” Dorothea replied. “We teach them early.”

Cassie thought of all the archaic family values she'd run across in cultural anthropology, including the Victorian tenet that children should be seen and not heard. She shook her head.

Dorothea looked surprised herself. “I know it used to be done in the days of the buffalo because if one baby scared a herd away, the whole tribe would go hungry. I don't know why we bother anymore.”

“Well, I'd rather you didn't,” Cassie said stiffly. But she was thinking of all the times she had lain beside Alex in the dark, stifling tears of pain. She remembered hearing the sound of his hand striking her, and her intake of breath, but never hearing a cry. She considered the lesson she'd learned in her marriage: that if you were quiet and blended into the background, you were less likely to make waves.

She glanced at Connor, peaceful, willfully silent. One day, in the long run, it was a skill he might need.

The truth of that nearly broke her.

 

C
ASSIE SAT IN THE DRIVER'S SEAT OF
A
BEL
S
OAP'S JEEP, BENT FORWARD
at the waist as if she'd been punched in the gut. She had borrowed the jeep to come to the feed and grain in town, which housed the nearest pay phone. Talking to Dorothea earlier had convinced her she could no longer put off the inevitable. She would call Alex and tell him where she'd been all this time. She would have to trust him with the truth.

The thought made her slightly dizzy. There was no proof Alex had changed during the past six months, no indication he wouldn't lash out at her—and Connor—during a rage. She had left Alex so that her baby wouldn't suffer before it was born. How could she even be considering taking Connor back now?

Her mind raced. She could leave Connor with Dorothea and Cyrus and go back to Alex herself, for a little while, just until she saw that things had changed. If she did it soon, in the first few months, Connor might never know the difference. But she couldn't leave Connor. She'd only too recently discovered him to be able to let go.

She got out of the truck and walked into the store. Horace waved as she struck through the cluttered aisles toward the pay phone. For several moments she held the receiver in her hand, as if it had the same power and irrevocable impact as a loaded gun.

When Alex's voice came over the line, her milk let down. Cassie watched the dark patches spread on her T-shirt and hung up.

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.