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

Chapter 14

Doc Ellsworth arrived before dawn, gray-faced and brisk, and he took one look at Lily and one look at Willa, and he did not waste a single word on comfort. He set his bag down, he climbed the stairs, he bent over the small, burning child for a long time, and Willa stood in the doorway and watched his face the way a condemned woman watches the jury file back in.

“It’s a bad fever,” Doc Ellsworth said at last. “But it’s a child’s fever. The kind that turns, if it’s watched and cooled and kept. It hasn’t touched her lungs, and that’s the thing to be afraid of, and it hasn’t touched her lungs.”

Willa’s knees went weak with the relief of it, and she had to put a hand on the doorframe to hold herself up.

“She’ll need to be watched round the clock,” the doctor said. “Cooled and kept drinking. If she sweats it out in a day or two, she’ll be cross and hungry and entirely herself, and she’ll drive you to distraction, which is how you’ll know she’s well. Gideon tells me you’ve seen this before.”

Willa nodded. She could not speak.

“Then you know,” Doc Ellsworth said gently, “that watching is not the same as helplessness. Watching is what keeps them here. And you are not watching alone tonight.”

Willa looked past him, down the stairs, where she could hear Gideon moving around the kitchen, banking the fire, putting water on. He had ridden a hard hour in the black dark and brought the doctor back before dawn, and he had not gone to bed. He had not even taken off his coat.

He was standing at the stove, and Willa watched him through the crack in the door, and she saw him bow his head for a moment, and she saw his shoulders move, and she did not know if he was praying or simply steadying himself, and she did not know which of those things frightened her more.

The next two days passed in the gray blur that such days pass in. Willa would remember them later the way you remember a bad dream — in fragments, out of order, lit by lamplight and the pale shift of daylight at the windows. She remembered Ada appearing at the bedroom door with a cup of water she had drawn herself, her ten-year-old face white and set, and Willa had taken the cup and had not known what to say, because Ada had not slept either, because Ada did not sleep when her family was afraid.

She remembered Ellis, standing in the yard under the window, not coming in, just standing there, watching the upstairs window the way you watch a thing you are afraid to look at and more afraid to look away from.

She remembered Gideon carrying Lily to the window in the small hours, when the little girl woke crying for the stars, and holding her up so she could see them, talking low to her, his big hands steady around her small, burning body, and Willa had stood in the doorway and watched and had been unable to make herself look away.

And she remembered the moment, on the second night, when she had finally let herself sleep.

She had not meant to. She had been sitting in the chair by the bed, wringing a cloth, and the next thing she knew it was gray dawn and she was lying on the floor with a blanket over her that she did not remember getting, and Gideon was sitting in the chair she had vacated, his elbows on his knees, his face gray with tiredness, watching Lily with the particular stillness of a man who has been watching a long time.

He had let her sleep.

He had lifted her off the chair, or she had slid off it, and he had covered her and let her sleep, and he had taken the watch himself, and Willa lay on the floor in the gray light and watched him watch her daughter, and something in her chest cracked.

It was not a loud crack. It was the sound a floorboard makes when a weight it has been holding for a very long time finally settles into it. It was the sound of two years of bracing, two years of keeping her chin up and her heart small, two years of waiting for the floor to fall away, finally, quietly, beginning to give.

That night — the second night of watching, with Lily finally sleeping a true sleep and the worst of the fever turning at last — Willa sat across the small bed from Gideon Hale in the lamplight, both of them gray with tiredness, and the thing she had been holding for two years rose up in her throat and would not be swallowed back down.

She asked it in a whisper, so as not to wake Lily.

“Why are you doing all this?”

Gideon looked up from the cloth he was folding.

“She’s not yours,” Willa said, and her voice shook, and she did not care anymore whether it did. “None of them are yours. You could have answered any letter in the Territory. You could have had a wife with no children at all. No trunk full of somebody else’s ghosts. No doctor’s bills. No fever in the night. Why would you sit up two nights running for a child that is not yours, when you could send us all back to the road and be shut of us by morning?”

Gideon Hale was very tired.

He looked across the sleeping child at her, and he set the cloth down, and he was too tired to be anything but honest, and so he told her the truth. He told her the whole of it, not the short version, the whole of it, and it came out of him the way water comes out of a cracked jar, all at once, because it had been held so long.