The vision fades, leaving behind only the certainty of its truth. With a heart lighter than it has been in days, Dakota heads back to the ward to check on a coyote with a short, absurd tail.
*
Kirsten finds herself moving toward the clinic at a clip that could technically, she supposes, be called a jog. With a flush of embarrassment, she slows to a walk, then quickly ducks behind a large tree as the clinic door opens, its glass sending out bright flashes of light as it catches the sun. Tacoma slips outside, well-muscled arms swinging easily with his movements. His head turns briefly in her direction, and Kirsten fancies he spies her, though she’s pretty sure she’s adequately hidden.
After a second, he turns away and Kirsten sags against the tree in relief, not at all wanting to tell Tacoma something she doesn’t even know the answer to herself. She watches him walk away. The ease of his stride and the proud tilt of his head reassures her. It is a one hundred eighty degree change from the sorrow-filled man she’s seen the past couple of days. This can only bode well for Dakota’s state of spirit as well.
Which, of course, renders pretty much useless her need to be here in the first place.
“Alright, smarty,” she mutters to herself. “What now?”
Back to the jury selection? Home? A quick jog around the perimeter?
Her feet answer the question for her as they step around the tree and continue in her intended direction, toward the clinic. She looks down at them, traitorous things that they are, and frantically casts about for plausible excuses, discarding one after another the way a baseball player discards the shells of sunflower seeds he’s consumed.
“Shit!” The door’s to hand, and her mind is a complete blank. A tabula rosa, as her mother used to say when into her wine. The warm memory brings a brief grin to her face as she slips inside the cool, antiseptic scented clinic.
Shannon, from her position behind the reception desk, greets her with a warm, welcoming grin. “Hi, Doctor King!”
“Kirsten, remember?”
Shannon blushes. “Ok, Kirsten.” Her smile returns. “Dakota’s in the back finishing up with mama wolf and her baby. You can go back if you like.”
“That’s ok,” Kirsten demurs, still feeling a bit the idiot for having come all the way over here without a suitable excuse. “I’ll just wait…out here.”
“Okay, then. She shouldn’t be long. Do you want some coffee? I just made some fresh.”
“No. Thanks.”
She shrugs as if to say ‘suit yourself, then’ and returns to her paperwork.
Several quite uncomfortable moments later, the door opens, and Dakota steps through, wiping her hands on a white towel. The smile she sports upon seeing Kirsten wipes every bit of embarrassment and self recrimination from the young scientist’s mind. She rises to her feet quickly, grinning herself as Shannon looks between them like a spectator watching a tennis match from the front row.
Kirsten casts about for something to break the silence. “I…um…I was in the neighborhood and figured I’d drop by.” God, Kirsten, could you possibly sound any more lame?
Taking the comment in stride, Koda tosses the towel into the laundry chute. “How are the selections going?”
“Boring as hell,” Kirsten answers truthfully. “Plus, I think I was making the potential jurors nervous. Nothing like having the de facto President around to make it damned difficult to try and squirm out of jury duty.”
Both Shannon and Koda chuckle at her feeble attempt at witticism, and Kirsten feels unaccountably warmed for it.
“So,” Kirsten casts again, “have you had lunch yet?”
Koda shrugs. “I was planning on going over to the mess. Our cupboards are pretty bare.”
“Mind some company?”
Once again, that smile comes; a smile that knocks all rational thought from Kirsten’s head and leaves her reeling in a whirlwind of pure emotion. The hand suddenly clasping her own grounds her like a lifeline, and she willingly follows wherever Dakota may lead.
*
“How about some fish for supper?”
Kirsten looks sharply up at Dakota. Long lashes veil her improbable blue eyes, but even in the gathering dusk, the small smile twitching at her mouth is unmistakable. She is not sure where the joke lies, but she knows better than she cares to that there is no fish in the refrigerator at home. For days, there has been no protein except for dried beans, eggs produced by a neighbor’s hens and the disgustingly spongy “cheese food” salvaged a month ago from the local USDA surplus station. The trouble with being a geek, she reflects, is that you become every Tom, Dick and Harriet’s straight woman. “Okay,” she says, “I’ll bite. Yes, I’d like some fish for supper.”
The twitch almost becomes a smile, and Koda says, “We don’t have any.”
“So why are we talking about it?”
“Because if we take a couple rods down to the water in the morning, we might have some tomorrow. Do you fish?”
“No. I just bite.”
Koda bursts into laughter, and Kirsten joins her, incredulous. I made a joke. And someone’s actually laughing at it. Love does weird things to people. It’s doing very weird things to me.
Above the flounced silhouette of a larch tree, a single star flares into visibility against the rapidly darkening eastern sky. In the west, the red glow of sunset lingers along the horizon. Kirsten stares up at pinprick ofbrightnesst. Star light, star bright—do I dare wish for what I wish tonight? Aloud she says, “When I was a child, I thought the stars were the eyes of great owls flying across the night sky. I was always afraid one would swoop down and catch me.”
The taller woman tilts her head back and gazes at the sky for a long moment. “We Lakota have always believed that Ina Maka brought us forth from her womb here in the Paha Sapa. We were created here; we have lived and died here. Take us away, and we lose our souls. When Tali and I went to University, we were home to each other.”
“That must have been lonely.”
“It was. Some Nations believe we came from the stars, though, and will eventually return. That must be lonelier still, to have no land at all, anywhere, that is your own.”
‘Home was never a place for me,” Kirsten says softly. “We moved around too much. It was always my parents. For a long time now, it’s been Asi.”
Dakota takes her eyes from the sky and looks down at Kirsten. “That must have been lonely,” she echoes.
“It—”
From the street behind them comes the sound of squealing tires and the blare of a horn. “Doc! Thank God, there you are!”
Koda looks up sharply, and Kirsten, swiveling, swears under her breath. A battered red Dodge pickup skids to a stop beside them, a Tech Sergeant still in uniform at the wheel. His buzz cut and neatly clipped blond mustache belie the agitation in his face. “Doctor Rivers,” he says, “can you come? My daughter’s cat has been trying to have her kittens since this morning, and can’t. She’s crying and won’t stop.”
Light as an evening breeze, Dakota’s hand brushes hers as she steps up to the passenger window. “Who’s crying, your daughter or the cat?”
“Both of them. Can you come? Please?”
“Later,” Dakota says softly, and again there is the soft brush of her hand. Then she climbs up into the truck and is gone, the tires squealing again as the driver hangs a hard U-turn and speeds off.
Kirsten turns back toward the house, making her way slowly through the growing dark. When she pushes the door open, Asi tumbles out past her, makes a couple circuits of the yard at a trot, then pauses to anoint his favorite fencepost. He halts again at the gate, ears up, tail poised but not quite wagging. From inside the house comes the fragrant aroma of coffee and something rich with basil and tomatoes, and she is suddenly as hungry as she is tired. “Sorry, guy,” she says. “Maybe after supper, okay?”