And then he was breathing steadily, and then he was simply asleep. Next to the large dark along time William not on the marker, just in a room in December of 1886. Said once by a man who had then apparently put it somewhere internal and kept it there alone for seven years because there was no one to say it to. Because the person you say those things to was the same person you'd lost. Because grief for a child is also grief for the person you would have said his name to.
The person who would have said it back. The person who would have shared the weight of that particular silence. She understood this in her own way. In the way the last weeks had forced her to understand things she would have preferred not to yet. She went outside into the cold to the back of the cabin.
She stood in front of the small marker, the one with only a year. The one that had been blank for seven years while the man inside kept a name that had nowhere to land. She looked at it for a while. Then she went to the edge of the tree line where the snow lay thick under the pines, and she found a branch. Small.
Green still underneath the winter dried outer surface. The kind that would hold its shape. She placed it on the small grave. She said something quietly in Apache, not for Hadley. Not for the child.
For the idea of a small life that existed briefly and was not forgotten by the man who had held it. For all the small lives like that. For all the names being kept by the wrong people in the wrong places so the right people were gone because the right people were gone. Then she went back inside. Three days.
He needed three days. Which he would never have given himself if he'd been alone. Alone, he would have gotten up in the morning and worked through the fever the way you work through cold or wind or any other thing that territory throws at you that you can't negotiate with because there was no one to make him stop. And stopping alone feels like giving up, but Nayeli made him stop, not forcibly. She wasn't the type for force in that direction.
She just didn't leave the room when he sat up. Didn't hand him his coat when he reached for it. Sat at the table and looked at him with a certain patient expression until he looked back and understood that she was not going to let this go. "Fine," he said on the second morning. She put coffee in front of him.
Sat back down. "Fine," he said again, more quietly. "You said that," she observed. "I'm reiterating." "I know what reiterating means."