Picture Perfect (40 page)

“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.”

“The
what
? 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 is
not
all 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.”

C
ASSIE
pressed 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.
“Céye Å¡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.

 

“D
O YOU TRUST ME
?” W
ILL 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.

 

I
N THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT
,
IN THE
F
LYING
H
ORSES
'
LIVING ROOM
, 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 that
Cassie
was reaching out for
him
.

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—I needed—” 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're
not
his father.”

 

J
OSEPH
S
TANDS IN
S
UN 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 this
yuwipi
ceremony, 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 the
yuwipi
songs 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.

“
U´yelo
. His father is coming,” Joseph said simply. “Like you, his body was burning with a fear of the unknown.”

 

B
EHIND 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.

Dorothea flushed and swatted blindly at him, but she was smiling. “You crazy old fool,” she said.

“I used to stay up at night thinking of ways to get rid of your grandmother,” Cyrus said. “She went everywhere you went.”

“Well,” Dorothea mused, “that
did
keep you away.”

Suddenly Cyrus laughed. Dorothea rolled toward him, her hair spreading across his chest, and clapped her hand over his mouth. “You want to wake them?” she hissed, but Cyrus was still laughing.

“It's just that I remember what the old woman said when I asked her advice on how to get you to pay attention to me.” He propped himself up on one elbow. “She told me that
her
husband had killed a buffalo in her honor.”

“There weren't any more buffalo in the thirties,” Dorothea whispered, grinning.

Cyrus smiled. “Your grandmother told me that was my problem, not
hers
.” They both laughed. “At least she had the good sense to fall asleep long enough for me to kiss you,” Cyrus said. He leaned over Dorothea, smoothing her long white hair back from her forehead, much as he had done the very first time. He leaned forward and touched his lips to hers.

“She wasn't asleep,” Dorothea murmured against his mouth. “She told me so the next day. She said she was getting tired of you hanging around all the time, so she figured she'd better hurry things along.”

Cyrus's eyes widened. “I thought she hated me,” he said.

Dorothea laughed. “That too.”

They both settled down on their backs again, staring up at the ceiling and listening to the symphony of the owls outside. Dorothea's hand crept between them blindly to find Cyrus's, and she threaded her fingers through his. She thought of Cassie lying in the fold-out bed, time ticking before her like a life sentence as she awaited the arrival of her husband. She considered how different the white girl's life might have been if she'd been born a hundred years earlier, like Dorothea's grandmother; if this Alex had courted her under the cover of a buffalo hide blanket; if abuse had been something never even considered, because it went against the grain of the tribe.

Cyrus squeezed her hand just as surely as he'd been reading Dorothea's mind. “It was easier back then,” he said flatly.