She Sighed, “No One Wants A Bride With Three Kids” The Cowboy Smiled, “I Always Wanted A Big Family”

Chapter 13

It was Lily who took sick first. Of course it was Lily. The littlest one, the one who had never been tested, the one who slept with her one-eyed doll and followed Gideon Hale around the yard like a small, devoted shadow — of course it was Lily.

It started as a flush in her cheeks and a crossness she could not explain. Lily, who was sunny by nature, who laughed at everything and nothing, who had to be told to be quiet at the table because she could not contain her joy — Lily went quiet and fretful and would not eat her supper, and she pushed her plate away and laid her head down on the table, and Willa felt the cold hand close around her heart and knew.

She knew before the thermometer, before the doctor, before anything. She knew the way you know the sound of your own child crying in a crowded room. She knew because she had seen this before, had watched this sickness work, had sat through nine days of it in a house on a lane in Ohio, and she knew exactly what was coming.

She put Lily to bed. She told herself it was nothing. She told herself Ellis had flushed up the week before and it had been nothing, a chill from the creek, a boy being a boy. She told herself all the things a mother tells herself in the hours before she stops being able to tell herself anything.

By the second evening, Lily was hot to the touch and would not eat, and her eyes had that glassy, faraway look that Willa remembered with the particular horror of a thing you have tried very hard to forget.

By the third night, Lily was burning.

Truly burning. The kind of burning that makes a small body shake, that turns a child’s face to a mask of flushed, pitiful confusion, that makes her cry out for her mama and then not know her mama when she comes. Willa sat on the edge of the bed with a cool cloth, and her hands would not stop shaking, and she heard herself making a sound she had not made in two years — a small, animal sound, the sound of a woman watching the thing she fears most in the world begin to happen again, and being powerless to stop it.

The old terror rose up in her. The terror she had carried west, the terror she had thought she had left behind at the river crossing, the terror of watching and being helpless. It rose up in her throat and it choked her, and she pressed the cloth to Lily’s forehead and she prayed, and the words came out broken and wrong, and she could not remember how to pray properly because she had stopped believing, and now she needed to believe and could not find the words for it.

Gideon heard her moving in the night.

He came to the door in his shirtsleeves, his hair standing up, his face still carrying the flat lines of sleep, and he took one look at Lily, flushed and shivering under the quilt, and one look at Willa’s white face, and he did not say a single soft, useless thing. There was no there, there, no she’ll be all right, no empty comfort. He said:

“I’ll ride for Doc Ellsworth. It’s a hard hour in the dark, but Sadie knows the road better than I do.”

And before Willa could answer, before she could thank him or stop him or tell him the thing she was too afraid to say, Gideon Hale was pulling on his boots.

And then it happened.

The thing Willa had been dreading since the platform. The thing she had seen coming since the moment she got off that stage in the dust of Stone Creek. The small, cruel voice that had moved west with her, that had ridden in her trunk and sat with her at every meal, the voice two years in the making, spoke up in the dark of that sickroom, clear and cold as a bell:

Now he sees.

Now Gideon Hale sees what a ready-made family truly costs. A sick child in the night. A doctor’s bill. A fever that might run through all three of them before it’s done. Now he’ll start counting. Now he’ll do what they all do. Now he’ll remember that none of them are his, and he’ll find his way out, and you’ll be back on the road with your three children and your one trunk, and you’ll be worse off than you were before, because this time you let yourself hope.

Willa almost wished he would count.

She almost wished he would show his face, the changed face, the reasonable face doing its arithmetic, the face of Mr. Miller over the spilled milk. It would have been easier. It would have been so much easier to lose this thing now, clean and early, the way she had planned to lose it on the platform, than to keep hoping through the night, than to watch him ride out into the dark and wonder, for a hard hour, whether he was coming back.

But Gideon Hale did not count.

He finished pulling on his boots, and he stood up, and he looked at her across the small, lamplit room, and he said, in that low, easy voice that she was coming to know better than she knew her own heartbeat:

“I’ll be back before dawn. Keep her cool. Keep talking to her. She knows your voice. She’ll hold on for your voice.”

And then he was gone, down the stairs, and the door opened and the wind came in, and she heard the old mare snort and shift in the yard, and she heard his voice low and easy, the way he talked to animals and nervous children, and then she heard the hooves.

They faded down the lane and into the dark toward Stone Creek, and the silence they left behind was enormous.

Willa sat on the edge of the bed and took Lily’s hand in both of hers, and the child’s pulse beat against her palm like a small, frantic bird, and the old terror rose and rose, and she pressed the cloth to Lily’s forehead and she talked to her, the way he had told her to, in the voice that was the only thing she had left to give.

She talked about the platform, and the dust, and the tall man waiting by the rail. She talked about the one-eyed doll and the clumsy stitches and the way he had knelt in the spilled milk. She talked about Ellis on the corral fence and the old bay mare breathing her warm breath over his hand. She told her daughter the whole story of the summer, the whole story of the man who had filled the wood box and sewn the doll’s arm and said we’ll watch him, and she told it the way you tell a story to a child who is sick, to keep her in the world, to hold her here with the sound of your voice.

And all the while, in the dark, she listened with her whole body for the sound of hooves coming back.

And she did not know, sitting there in a stranger’s house with a child that was not his, whether the man riding through the black dark was coming home.

And she realized, with a terrible, quiet clarity, that she was not afraid he would not come back.

She was afraid of what it would mean if he did.