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CHAPTER 29

September 9 th

9:43 AM

T ILLMAN C OUNTY DECL INES to press charges in the death of Tom Byrd. A deputy questioned me while I was still in the hospital—“just due diligence,” he promised, “just making sure we got our story right”—but nothing further came of it. Josiah assures me I don’t need to worry about a wrongful-death suit either, seeing as the only earthly family my father has left are me and my sisters. “It’s all over,” he tells me over the phone. “Go home. Live your life. It’s done now.”

I’m free.

I spend two weeks recovering at Sara’s, and that’s when I start having anxiety attacks and nightmares. The nightmares are always a little different. Sometimes my father and I are reliving the liquor store, other times we are brawling at the pool hall, occasionally we are fighting in the house, right over the dead spot on the landing. The settings change, but each dream ends with my father pinning me to the floor and driving the switchblade through my chest like a stake through the heart of a vampire. It never kills me instantly. I gasp for air and struggle against him, but he plunges the knife deeper, twists it, then stabs me again and again between different ribs.

Merely shaking me does not end the nightmare. Sara quite literally throws me on the ground to wake me, and when I do, I am struggling to breathe just as I did when he shot me.

The bullet is gone, but the pain lingers, a persistent, dull throb that aches the same way my reconstructed cheek does in the winter. The doctor wanted to prescribe me Percocet for the pain, but I thought of my mother and declined. Regardless, he assured me it would dissipate in time. The limp would be temporary too. He said the same about my hearing loss, and while I still hear out of both ears, the left will never be the same. Things sound tinny and distant, and I lose words like I’m trapped in a permanent game of telephone. Eventually, only a scar will remain to remind me of that day, a patch of mottled flesh not unlike Mitesh Jadhav’s neck, warping my moth tattoo beyond recognition. Kiera was horrified when I sent her the picture.

At my final post-op appointment, the doctor apologizes for leaving such a grisly scar, but I smile and tell him it’s okay, I’m covered in scars as it is, what’s one more? He writes me a prescription for Valium to ease the nightmares and sends me on my way.

One afternoon, as I am lounging in the sun with Zenobia and my sketch pad, Sara invites me to the annual wacipi— or powwow, as she translates—a colorful gathering of dancing, ceremony, and music. It’s her favorite weekend of the year. “You haven’t left the house in two weeks,” she says. She keeps herself busy by cleaning out my father’s liquor store. I’ve given her the deed. She still doesn’t know what to do with the building, floating a new idea by me every day, but I know it will be a beacon of hope amidst the squalor of Annesville, the way flowers persist even in the harshest tundra. “You should be among the living.”

“It’s been nice to have peace and quiet,” I say.

“Providence.”

“My leg—”

“Leg, schmeg. You’re going.”

I straighten my afflicted leg out on the picnic blanket and finger the bullet scar, and then the scars dotting my arms. I’m gradually learning how to stop hiding my scars beneath my sleeves. I’m tired of the secrecy and the shame. If I would not hesitate to show people the bullet scar, why should I hesitate to show them the bite mark scars? Both are acts of violence, against myself and against another, but violence nonetheless. I want to leave the shame in Annesville. “Is it appropriate for me to be there? It’s your tribe, your celebration. Your people.”

She sits across from me and Zenobia, rubbing the dog’s nose with her foot. “It’s appropriate as long as I’m inviting you.”

“I don’t know, Sara.”

“You’ve seen a lot of sadness on the reservation,” she says. “I know it’s hard to see anything else. Shit, I’m all doom and gloom. But you should see the joy too. There’s nothing like it.”

And of course, my dearest friend is right. The wacipi is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. In a meadow, inexplicably green and lush despite the brownness of the earth surrounding it, hundreds of people dressed in kaleidoscopic tribal regalia dance to the airs of drummers and singers. Sara walks me through the maze of people cooking traditional Lakota foods. She points out the wojapi (and insists hers is the best), the wohanpi soup of bison and potatoes and turnips, the wasna bars made of jerky and dried cranberries. Artists display handmade jewelry and beadwork in kaleidoscopic colors. Sara buys me a dreamcatcher with different shades of green used for the hoop, net, and feathers.

“I think you’re going to need this,” she says as she eases it into my purse.

She introduces me to a collection of cousins, one of whom asks what happened to my arms. I tell him I lost a fight with a snapping turtle, and he laughs. A few of them steal looks at my tattoos, but no one else comments. I take a picture of them, Sara standing in the middle, brilliant like a supernova, a woman who is exactly where she belongs.

Eventually, I excuse myself to rest on the nearby bleacher. I massage the scar to ease the epicenter of the pain, but it diffuses down into my calf and my foot. I tell myself when the pain finally goes away, so too will the nightmares, but I know it isn’t true.

“Hi, Providence.”

It’s Scarlett. I could recognize those orange braces from a county away. She ascends the bleachers like a staircase and sits on the row below me. Her lips are tinted from her popsicle, artificial raspberry with a smell sugary enough to make my stomach clench. She sprinkles salt on it from the tiny packet in her hand before taking her next lick.

I scrunch my nose. “Salt on a popsicle?”

“It sounds gross, but it’s so good. Like olive oil on ice cream.”

“That also sounds gross,” I say.

“As my dad would say, don’t knock it ’til you try it.”

Not long after I was discharged from the hospital, when my days were still just one medication-induced nap after the other, Sara checked Daniel into the rehab facility in Rapid City. I insisted she take the money that Gil gave me to help pay for it. “Pretend it’s from an anonymous Good Samaritan,” I told her. I can’t undo my decision to leverage someone else’s addiction for my own gain (that callousness may haunt me forever), but I can play a part, however small, in helping them heal.

Scarlett reads my mind. “I’m not, like, mad at you or Aunt Sara. I’m not even mad at him. I just want him to be healthy. I think it’s a disease.”

“It is,” I tell her as she salts the popsicle again. “My mother had it.”

“But she never got better.”

“No, she didn’t. But she didn’t have people in her corner like your dad does.”

In the grass, the dancers begin a whirlwind choreography that leaves me breathless just watching. “That’s what Aunt Sara says,” Scarlett murmurs dreamily, “that the only thing that matters at the end of the day is having people who love you.”

People love me. I am lovable.

Sara is somehow still hungry when we leave the wacipi . We pick up a pizza on the way home and eat it on her bed like teenage girls at a sleepover, the dogs pawing at our closed door. Sara consumes her slices crust-first. She laughs when I scold her for eating in a supine position. “If I choke to death on a slice of mushroom pizza,” she says, “I deserve it. Just please make sure my headstone says something nice.”

“Here lies Sara Walking Elk—sister, aunt, friend, and car thief.”

“Car larcenist ,” she corrects. “It sounds more intriguing that way.”

“Is my favorite car larcenist going to come visit me in Kansas City?” I ask.

“Only if you pay for a five-star hotel room.”

“I’m being serious, Sara. I don’t … I don’t think I can come back here ever again. The triggers would kill me.”

She sets down her pizza slice to take my hands. My fingers slot perfectly between hers. I’ve never been a believer in soulmates, but I think that’s because I’ve understood the word all wrong. A soulmate doesn’t have to be a lover. It can be someone like Sara, a friend who loves you even during the moments you are impossible to like. “I promise I’ll come visit. I’ll visit so often, you’ll start begging for the days where we only sent birthday cards. It’s my honor and privilege to be a thorn in your side, Providence Byrd.”

“You’re going to make me cry.”

“Tell me something happy then. Tell me the first thing you and Grace are going to do when you get to Kansas City.”

In less than twenty-four hours, I will be driving back to Missouri, Grace in the passenger seat, whatever earthly possessions we can fit in the trunk and back seat rattling along with us for the ten-hour drive. The thought fills me with as much terror as it does joy. Josiah and Zoe called in every favor they had to expedite the custody process. The court named me Grace’s legal guardian in record time.

“We’re going out for dinner,” I say. “Kansas City barbecue is world-famous. And then I’m …”

“Come on, spit it out.”

“I’m going to think about enrolling in community college with her next year, as ridiculous as that sounds.”

“It’s not ridiculous. It’s brave,” she says.

“There’s nothing brave about a remedial math class.”

“Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is start over.”

A fresh start, for Grace and for me. Two orphan sisters slowly unshackling themselves from their traumatic pasts. We don’t have much, but we will always have each other. I think that can be enough.

And the Lord said unto Cain, “Where is Abel thy brother?”

And he said, “I know not. Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Happily, I will be my sister’s keeper.