CHAPTER FIVE
IN another time and place, Will Flying Horse would have been a Dreamer.
He was eleven when his eyes opened in the middle of the night, seeing and not seeing at the same time. It was summertime, and outside the cicadas sang in the quiet of the half moon. But Will’s head screamed with the thunder, and when his grandparents rushed to the side of his bed, they could see violent blue bolts of lightning reflected in his pupils.
Cyrus Flying Horse reached across the glowing blanket of his grandson’s bed to grasp his wife’s hand. “Wakan,” he murmured. “Sacred.”
Although many things had changed for the Sioux over the years, certain habits died hard. Cyrus was a man who had been born on a reservation, who had seen the development of television and automobiles, and who, a month later, would watch a man walk on the moon. But he also remembered the things his father had told him about the Sioux who had visions. To dream of the thunder was powerful. If the dream was ignored, one could be struck dead by lightning.
Which was why, one morning in 1969, Will Flying Horse’s grandfather took him to see the shaman, Joseph Stands in Sun, about becoming a Dreamer. Joseph Stands in Sun was older than the earth, or so it was rumored.
He sat outside with Cyrus and Will on a long, low bench that ran the entire length of his log cabin. As he spoke, he whittled, and Will watched the wood as it first took the shape of a dog, then an eagle, then a beautiful girl, changing with every brush of the shaman’s hands. “In the days of my grandfather,” Joseph said, “a boy like you would search for a vision when he was ready to be treated like a man. And if he dreamed of the thunder, he would become a _Heyoka. _” Joseph peered down at Will, and for the first time Will noticed that the man’s eyes were different from any other eyes he’d ever seen. There were no irises at all. Just black, fathomless pupils. “Do you know this, boy?”
Will nodded; it was all his grandfather had talked about on the walk over to the shaman’s cabin. A hundred years earlier, the Heyokas had been tribal clowns, men who were expected to behave strangely. Some moved only backward, some spoke in a different tongue. They dressed in rags and slept without blankets in the winter, wrapped themselves in thick buffalo skins in the summer. They would dip their hands in boiling water and pull them out unscarred, proving they were more powerful than other men. Sometimes they received a vision from the spirits, warning of danger or another’s death. As Heyokas, they had the power to prevent it; but because they were Heyokas, they’d receive nothing for themselves in return for their efforts. Will had listened patiently to his grandfather, and the whole time he kept thinking he was damned glad it was 1969.
“Well,” said Joseph Stands in Sun, “you cannot be a Heyoka; this is the twentieth century. But you will have your thunder dream.”
Three nights later, Will sat naked in a sweat lodge across from Joseph Stands in Sun. He had seen the lodges before; sometimes teenagers built them and smoked peyote in the cramped, curved quarters, getting high enough to run bareassed through the fields and dive into freezing streams. But Will himself had never been inside one. From time to time Joseph poked at the glowing stones that were used to create heat.
Mostly he sang and chanted, syllables that swelled and burst like bottle rockets inches before Will’s eyes.
As dawn was sneaking across the plain, Joseph took Will to the top of a flat butte. Will would rather have been anywhere else than on a rock ledge, naked, but he knew better than to disgrace his grandfather or Joseph Stands in Sun. Respect your elders: it was the way he’d been taught. Shaking, Will did as he had been told. He faced the sun with his arms outstretched, keeping perfectly still and trying to ignore the grass that whispered around Joseph’s legs as he walked away. He stood for hours until the sun began to sink again, and then his legs gave out beneath him. He curled onto his side and began to cry. He felt the butte tremble, the sky melt.
On the second day, an eagle flew over his head from the east. Will watched it circle, moving so slowly that for entire minutes it seemed to be suspended just an arm’s length away. “Help me,” he whispered, and the eagle flew through him. “You have chosen a life that is difficult,” it cried, and then it disappeared. It might have been hours that passed; it might have been days. Will was so hungry and faint he had to force air in and out of his lungs. In the moments his mind was clear, he cursed his grandfather for believing in this kind of crap; he cursed himself for being so easily led. He thought of school baseball tryouts that past spring, of the Playboy he had hidden under his mattress, of the tingling smell of his mother’s Pond’s cold cream. He thought of anything that seemed leagues apart from the Sioux way of life.
We are coming, we are coming. The words whistled over the plain, wrapping themselves around Will’s neck and drawing him to his feet.
Directly overhead was a dark, roiling cloud. Exhausted, starving, delirious, he threw back his head and opened his arms, willing a sacrifice. When the thunder began in his head, he realized he was no longer on the ground. High above, and peering down, Will saw the girl. She was small and thin and she was running in a snowstorm. From time to time the blizzard winds would sweep around her, blocking her from Will’s view. He thought she was running away from someone or something, but then he saw her stop. She stood at the heart of the storm, arms outstretched. All the time, she had been trying to find the center.
“Help her,” Will said, and he heard the words echoed a hundred times around him. He was standing on the ground again. He knew he would remember none of this. He knew that even as a man, this would be the nightmare that tugged at his consciousness in the heavy minutes after waking.
When the sky shattered and the rain came, Will screamed into the wind. Eyes wide, he watched lightning crack the night in two, splitting his world into equal halves that rocked, broken shells, at his feet.
EVEN THE SUN LOVED ALEX. CASSIE TOUCHED HER FINGERS TO HIS jaw, mesmerized by the fact that the one sliver of morning light in the bedroom had managed to fall directly over his sleeping form. His skin was dark, shadowed by beard, marked just below his chin with a tiny curved scar. Cassie tried to remember how he had hurt himself. She watched his eyes shift beneath his lids and wondered if he was dreaming of her.
She curled herself out of the bed, careful not to wake him. Smiling, she hugged her arms around herself, thinking that she was quite rightfully the envy of every woman in America. If she had had any doubts about the validity of her marriage to Alex, they were gone now. Two people could not make love like that without a history. Cassie laughed.
If her heart stopped beating that very second, she could say she’d lived a fine life.
It is a good day to die. The words stopped her, and a shiver ran down her body before she realized they had not been spoken out loud. Recovering, she padded into the bathroom and stared into the mirror, touching her fingers to her swollen lower lip.
A lecture. It had been the opening line to a lecture she’d heard by a colleague at UCLA. Cassie let her hands drop to the marble sink basin, sighing with relief as she realized she was not facing an omen, but a genuine memory. It was a course on Native American culture, and that phrase was part of the ritual prayer spoken by tribal warriors of the plains before riding off to do battle. Cassie remembered telling the professor he sure knew how to draw a crowd.
She wondered what Will was doing now. It was Thursday morning;
he’d probably be on his way to work. He had left her his phone numbers.
Maybe later she’d call him at the station, tell him she lived in a castle in Malibu, mention she was flying to Scotland.
Cassie brushed her teeth and dragged a comb through her hair, careful to place each item back on the counter quietly so that Alex wouldn’t stir. She tiptoed back into the bedroom and sat on a chair in the corner.
Alex was snoring lightly. She watched his chest rise and fall a few times, then stood up and walked to the closet across the room that held all of his clothes. She pulled open the door and drew in her breath.
Alex’s closet was twenty times neater than her own. On the floor, on little shoe trees, were lines of sneakers and Italian loafers and black patent leather formal dress shoes. A hanging closet organizer proudly displayed folded sweaters, Shetland and Norwegian on one side and cotton on the other. His shirts stood stiffly on cedar hangers. A lingerie chest tucked into the corner of the walk-in closet was lined with neatly Picture Perfect
53 folded silk boxers and socks—arranged in separate drawers by their uses.
“My God,” Cassie whispered. She ran a fingertip over the line of shirts, listening to the music of the hangers batting each other. Neatness was to be expected, especially if one had a good housekeeper. Something, though, something else made this closet cross the line between fastidious and obsessive.
The sweaters. Not only were they segregated by material and folded neatly, they were arranged in color order. Like a rainbow. Even the patterned sweaters seemed to have been placed by predominant color.
She should have laughed. After all, this was odd to the point of being funny. This was something to joke about.
But instead Cassie felt tears squeeze from the corners of her eyes. She knelt before the rows of shoes, crying in near silence, pulling a sweater from its appropriate spot and holding it to her mouth to muffle the sounds she made. She bent over, her stomach knotting, and she told herself she was losing her mind.
It was the stress of the last few days, she thought as she wiped her cheeks. Cassie walked back to the bathroom and closed the door. She ran the water until it was so cold it numbed her wrists, and then she splashed some onto her face, hoping to start over.
FOR DAYS, THEY HAD BEEN TALKING ABOUT THE BLIZZARD. IT WAS going to hit sometime after three on Friday. It was going to be the storm of the century. Fill your bathtubs with water, the weatherman said. Buy batteries and firewood. Find your flashlights.
The only thing that could have been better, Cassie decided, would be if the blizzard hit on Sunday, so school would be canceled the next day.
Cassie walked into the kitchen. She had been at Connor’s all afternoon but had promised her mother she’d return before the first flakes fell. Cassie’s mother was terrified of snow. She had grown up in Georgia and had never seen snow until she moved to Maine when she got married. Rather than being efficient about a winter storm—like Connor’s mother, who had taken out candles and bought extra gallons of milk to store in the drifts—Aurora Barrett sat at the kitchen table with wide eyes, listening to the weather reports on her transistor radio and waiting to be buried alive.
The one thing Aurora did like about nor’easters was that they provided a chance to accuse her husband of everything that had gone wrong in her life. Cassie had grown up understanding that her mother hated Maine, that she hadn’t wanted to move there, that she didn’t want to be a baker’s wife. She still dreamed of a house with lawns that rolled down to the river, of a latticed bench veiled by cherry trees, of the melting southern sun. While Cassie watched, tucked in the shadows, her mother would rail at Ben and ask just how temporary ten long years in the same godforsaken place could be.
Most of the time her father would just stand there, letting Aurora’s anger blow over him. Technically, it was his fault: he’d promised Aurora that as soon as it paid to sell the bakery with a tidy profit, they’d move back to her neck of the woods. But the bakery lost money every year, and the truth was, deep down, her father had no intention of leaving New England. Ben had given only one piece of advice to Cassie as she was growing up. Before you decide what you want to be, he said, know where you want to be.
It did not snow that night until Cassie went to sleep, and when she woke in the morning the world had changed. Outside, a white lawn rolled right up to her bedroom window, and hills and drifts had smoothed the landscape so completely she almost lost her sense of direction. She grabbed an apple and stuffed it in her pocket; then she sat at the kitchen table to pull her boots on.
She heard the argument clearly, although it came from her parents’
room upstairs. “Sell the bakery,” her mother threatened. “Or I can’t tell you what I’ll be driven to do.”
Cassie’s father snorted. “What could you possibly be driven to that you don’t do already?” Cassie jumped as a blast of wind whitened the window before her. “Why don’t you just go home?”
Go home. Cassie’s eyes widened. For a long while there was silence, save the shrieks and moans of the storm. Then she heard her mother’s exit line. “I’m not feeling well now. Not well at all.” And after that came the unmistakable ting of the bourbon decanter Aurora kept on her vanity being opened. The more she drank, the less Cassie’s father could tolerate her. It was a vicious cycle.
“Jesus Christ,” Cassie’s father said tightly, and then he thundered down the stairs. He was dressed as she was, ready to brave the blizzard.
He glanced at Cassie and touched her cheek, almost an apology. “Take Picture Perfect 55 care of her, will you, Cass?” he said, but before she could answer, he left.
Cassie finished lacing up her boots and cooked an egg, soft-boiled, just the way her mother liked. She carried it up on a plate with a piece of toast, figuring if her mother had something else in her stomach, it might not be so bad today.
When Cassie cracked the door open, Aurora was lying across the bed, her arm flung over her eyes. “Oh, Cassie,” she whispered. “Honey, please. The light.”
Cassie obediently stepped inside, shutting the door behind her. She smelled the cloying sweetness of the bourbon hovering at the edges of the room, mingling with traces of her father’s rage.
Aurora took one look at the breakfast tray Cassie had set down and started to cry. “Did he tell you where he went? He’s out there, in this, this blizzard—” She jerked her arm toward the window to prove her point. Then she rested her forehead against her hand, rubbing the bridge of her nose. “I don’t know why this happens. I just don’t know why.”
Cassie took one look at her mother’s eyes, red-rimmed and raw, and she planted her hands on her hips. “Get up.”
Aurora turned toward her daughter and blinked. “Pardon me?”
“I said get up.” She was only ten, but she had grown old long ago.
Cassie pulled her mother off the bed and started handing her clothes:
a turtleneck, a sweater, bulky socks. After a moment of disbelief, Aurora began to follow her, silently accepting what she offered.
When Cassie opened the front door, Aurora took a step back. The chill of winter followed her inside. “Go,” Cassie commanded. She jumped into the snow, grinning for a moment as the drifts hollowed up to her thighs. She turned to her mother. “I mean it.”
It took fifteen minutes to get Aurora more than five feet away from the front porch. She was shivering and her lips were nearly violet, unaccustomed as she was to being outside in a storm. The wind ripped Cassie’s hat off and sent it dancing over the snow. She saw her mother bend down, like a child, and touch the drifts.
Cassie scooped a mittenful of snow and rounded it into a neat ball.
“Mom,” she yelled, a minute’s warning, and then she threw it as hard as she could.
It hit Aurora in the shoulder. She stood perfectly still, blinking, unsure what she’d done to deserve that.
Cassie leaned down and made a pile of snowballs. She tossed one after another at her mother, leaving her mark on Aurora’s shoulder and breast and thigh.
Cassie had never seen anything like it. It was as if her mother had no idea what was expected of her. As if she had no idea what to do.
Cassie clenched her hands at her sides. “Fight back!” she yelled, her words freezing in the cold. “Goddammit! Fight back!”
She leaned down again, more slowly this time, waiting for her mother to copy her movements. Aurora was sluggish with alcohol, and she stumbled as she straightened, but in her palm she held a snowball.
Cassie watched as her mother wound her arm back and sent the snow flying.
It hit her square in the face. Cassie sputtered and wiped the ice from her eyelashes. Her mother was already building a small arsenal. In the blinding white, Aurora’s eyes didn’t look nearly as red; in the frigid cold, her body was starting to move with a little more rhythm.
Cassie strained her ears to catch a sound over the howl of the wind.
It was clear and fine, her mother’s laugh, and it got louder and lighter as it broke free from where it had been locked. Smiling, Cassie whirled in the snow, arms outstretched, and offered herself up to the soft, sweet blows.
WHENEVER WILL WOKE UP WITH THE BLANKETS KNOTTED AT HIS hips and his chest soaked with sweat, he knew he’d been having the thunder dream. But he did not dwell on the details; in fact, over the years, even though the number of dreams increased, he found it easier and easier to dismiss them. He’d get up and shower, sloughing off with the sweat the memories that bound him to the Sioux.
Having been scheduled for the evening shift on Thursday, Will slept in and dreamed of the thunder until the phone jolted him awake. “This is Frances Bean at the library,” a voice said. “We have the materials you requested.”
“I didn’t request any materials,” Will started to mumble, stretching to place the receiver back in its cradle.
“. . . anthropology.”
The word was all he heard, faint and fading, and he pulled the phone back to his ear.
The library was small and dark and quiet as a tomb on a Thursday morning. After identifying himself at the front desk, Will was handed a sheaf of papers secured with a rubber band. “Thanks,” Will said to the librarian, moving to a spot where he could read Cassie’s articles.
Two were from technical journals. The third was from National Ge-
ographic, and it was composed of dozens of photographs of the illustrious Dr. Cassandra Barrett at the Tanzania site that had yielded the hand.
Will quickly read the anthropological significance of the hand and its stone tool, but found nothing Cassie hadn’t mentioned. He skimmed ahead to the paragraphs that mentioned Cassie herself.
“Dr. Barrett, young enough to look more like one of the UCLA students she often brings on excavations than the head scientist, admits she’s more comfortable on a muddy site than on the lecture circuit.”
Will mouthed the words silently, staring at a photograph on the facing page of Cassie bent over the ground, dusting off half of a long, yellow bone. Will skipped to the final line of the copy: “In a field dominated by men, Dr. Barrett seems to emerge as a leader, hands down.”
“Patronizing bastard,” he murmured. He scanned the page, looking for another picture of Cassie. Seeing none, he flipped back to the beginning of the article. On page 36 of the magazine was a photo of the hand itself; and spread beneath it for comparison was Cassie’s hand.
Another picture of her took up the rest of the page. She was caught in shadow, with the sun behind her the way all those National Geographic
photographers liked, and her chin was tilted up just the slightest bit.
Will touched his thumb to her throat. The photo was too dark to show her eyes. He would have given anything to see her eyes.
He wondered how a woman perfectly at home in the African grasslands could also be happy being hounded by paparazzi at premieres. He wondered how you could go from writing a piece for a scholarly journal to scanning the Enquirer for stories that defamed your husband’s character. He wondered how the hell Alex Rivers had met Cassandra Barrett; what they did on Sunday mornings; what they talked about at night, wrapped around each other, when no one else was there to listen.
Will left the articles on the table, everything but that one page with the picture of Cassie in silhouette. He folded the picture when the librarian’s head was bowed to her computer screen, and then tucked it into the pocket of his jeans. He thought about walking home with it there, knowing it would get soft and faded at the edges until he could barely see Cassie’s face at all.