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“Don’t be,” Lev tells him. “Where I come from, everyone wants to be cheered for something. It’s normal.”
“Ready to go back?”
Lev isn’t sure whether he means Wil’s home or back to the world outside of the rez. Well, Lev isn’t ready to do either. He points down a winding path. “What’s down there?”
Wil huffs, his mood clearly darkened by Lev’s talk of adoration. “Why do you need to see everything? Maybe there are some places it’s best not to go!”
Lev stares at the ground, feeling more hurt by the rebuke than he wants to admit.
When he looks up, Wil is staring with pain at the cliffs on the other side of the village, then down the winding path. “The medical warren is down there,” he tells Lev. “It’s where my mother works.”
And then Lev recalls something. “And where your grandfather is?”
Wil nods, saying nothing for a moment . . . and then he takes off his guitar and leaves it hidden behind a boulder. “Come on. I’ll take you there.”
Lost in thought, Wil walks down the cobblestone road. His face looks grim, and Lev leaves him alone, wrapped in memories of his own. Clappers remind him of the last time he saw Connor and Risa, and guilt prickles him. They had rescued him, and in his own uneasy ambivalence between his past and his future, he had betrayed them. Connor and Risa had pretended to be clappers, solemnly applauding in grand, rhythmic sweeps—and it caused a panic. They had escaped. He hopes. The truth is, he has no idea what befell them. They could be unwound by now. In a “divided state.” The more he thinks about it, the more he despises that euphemism.
The road curves outside the village toward the wide fissure in the cliff and dips into a gulch filled with gleaming one-story buildings separated by greenbelts.
“This first building is the pediatrics lodge,” Wil explains tersely as they pass. Wil doesn’t stop, but Lev peers through the windows and into the patios, hoping to see the medicine woman. He sees other healers and groups of children, but not Wil’s ma.
Lev shoots a look at Wil and sees his eyes glued on someone ahead: a short girl with warm almond eyes, a cascade of feathers woven into her vest, and a faint smile that reminds Lev of Risa. She is standing in front of another medical lodge, stalling at the door, when she catches sight of Wil.
Even before they speak, Lev realizes that this must be Wil’s fiancée. There’s a connection between them perhaps even more powerful than Wil’s connection with his guitar. As Wil approaches her, Lev thinks they might kiss, but instead Wil reaches for the beaded ribbon restraining her hair and unties it, sending her shiny black locks cascading down her shoulders.
“Much better,” he says, with the slightest of smiles.
“Not for the workshop,” she points out. “It’ll wrap around a saw blade, and my head will get cut off.”
“Now that’s what I call unwinding!” Wil says with a smirk. She gives him a glare that’s more like a visual rim shot, and he laughs.
“Una, this is Lev. Lev, Una.”
“Hi.”
“Nice to meet you, Lev.” She snatches at Wil’s hand, but as he’s a foot taller than her, he easily holds the ribbon out of reach. “Give it to me, Guitar Boy.” Then, as if she’s had years of practice, she leaps and yanks it from his hand. “Ha!” Winking at Lev, she says, “Take notes, little brother. If you hang with this one, you’ll need that move.”
Lev isn’t sure why she’s calling him little brother, but he feels pleased.
Una studies Wil. “Is your uncle back?”
Something intense passes between them. Lev notices that this long, narrow lodge has CARDIOLOGY carved in large wood letters above the door.
“Yah,” Wil says. “Didn’t find anything. So are you here to see my grandfather?”
“Someone has to,” she says. “He’s been here for weeks, and how many times have you visited?”
“Stop it, Una. It’s bad enough I get it from my family.”
“You get it because you deserve it.”
“Well, I’m visiting now, aren’t I?”
“Then where’s your guitar?”
Something crumples in Wil’s face, and Lev looks sideways, not wanting to see the tears building in his eyes. “Una, I can’t do it. He wants me to soothe him into death. I just can’t do it!”
“It doesn’t mean he’ll actually die.”
