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“Will you tell my parents what happened to me? Please?”
“I’m sorry, Wil. No one can know.”
This shakes him worse than death. His parents, Pivane, Una, the whole tribe grieving his absence, never knowing his fate.
She takes his hand in hers. “I want you to know that your talent will not be lost. These hands and the neuron bundles that hold every bit of your musical memory will be kept together. Intact. Because I, too, treasure that which means the most to you.”
It’s not anything close to what Wil truly wants, but he tries to cling to the knowledge that his gift of music will somehow survive his unwinding.
“My guitar,” he manages through chattering teeth, ignoring the fact that he can no longer feel his toes.
“It’s safe,” Roberta says quickly. “I have it.”
“Send it home.”
She hesitates, and then nods.
Wil’s unwinding proceeds at an alarming rate. All too soon a wave of darkness crashes over him. He can no longer hear Roberta. He can no longer see her.
Then, in the void, he senses someone lean close to him. Someone familiar.
“Grandfather?” he hazards to say. He cannot hear himself speak.
“Yes, Chowilawu.”
“Are we are going to the Lower World?”
“We will see, Chowilawu,” his grandfather says. “We will see.”
But whatever happens now, it doesn’t matter to Wil. Because someone finally came.
11 - Una
Not through smoke signals.
Not through the intricate legal investigations of the Council.
Not through the tribal nations’ security task force, put in place after the parts pirates took him.
In the end, the rez finds out Wil is no more when his guitar is delivered with no note and no return address.
Una cradles the guitar in her arms and remembers: Wil building mountains for her in a sandbox when they were five. The quiet delight in his eyes when she asked him to marry her, when they were six. His grief as Tocho died, while she and Lev sat watching on the hospital floor. The touch of Wil’s hand on her arm when he said good-bye.
In every memory is his music, and she hears it again every day, playing in the wind through the trees to tease and torment her. Or maybe to comfort her and remind her that nothing and no one is ever truly lost.
Una tries to hold on to that as she lays Wil’s guitar on the workshop table. There is no body; there is only the guitar. So she gently, lovingly, unstrings it and prepares it for the funeral pyre in the morning.
And she tells no one of the strange hope she cradles in her heart, that somehow she will hear Wil’s music again, loud and pure, calling forth her soul.
THE END
