EPILOGUE

Carrie Starr didn’t have many visitors during her hospital stay—not when she was in that nearly pleasant state of suspension like a cloud above her pain, her problems; and not when the care transitioned to something worse: walking the halls, lifting her arm overhead, feeling the pain of muscle knitting itself back together all along her side. There was Minkey, who, summoned by Winnie, had ignored his termination and led a search team to Starr’s location. And there was Byrd, of course, which was how she’d learned that the recovering mayor was putting the blame for her financial misdeeds and Chenoa’s trauma on Holder and Bernard. Starr told him that one of the BIA cold cases labeled a Jane Doe had been his daughter—not missing but dead all those long years—and he rose from the bedside chair and left without saying a word. A pair of tight-lipped investigators sent by the BIA spent several long hours trying to draw details from Starr, which she made sure never to change. Yes, it was me. No, Chenoa was only a victim here, nothing more.

The administrative leave hung like a fog over everything she did: sleep, ask for pain meds, walk, move, think.

It was the thinking that got her, caused her the most trouble; ran like a current under her skin, worries wired directly into her brain. She was alive. And maybe she wasn’t meant to be.

Death stalked her body, showed up like a knife in every electric twinge. Deer Woman walked her memories, traversed them like a game trail, some familiar, hidden route. Starr kept death and the Deer Woman at bay by concentrating on looking out the window like it was a film, some immersive performance that captured all her attention. But it was the birds, finally, that saved her.

Not that she’d ever paid attention to birds. Hadn’t really given them a second thought. But the view from her bed was nothing but treetop and sky, the action nothing but flight. The witnesses to her slow recovery had wings.

When Starr left the hospital, wheeled by an aide over the bump of an industrial doormat and out into the world, the only thing she had that she wasn’t wearing was The Sibley Guide to Birds. In the too-bright sky, a murmuration of Sturnus vulgaris shifted from shape to shape. “Starlings,” she said, her voice sounding strange in her ears, like she was leaving as a different person.

The aide, who was kneeling in front of her, busy releasing the footrests of the wheelchair, looked skyward. “Pests,” she said. “Farmers hate those things. Must be a feedlot over there.”

She might as well have said to take the bus to Times Square and have lunch with the Dalai Lama. Starr had no idea what she meant.

“You know, cattle?” The aide stood and surveyed the cracked and pitted parking lot. “They feed up the steers, then send ’em to the processing plant. All them birds come along and eat dropped grain, pick through manure for it even, then poop everywhere. Real nuisance.”

Thousands of black birds were changing direction as one, signing out a message Starr couldn’t understand. So beautiful she might stand suddenly from this chair, throw off the chains she carried and run. What it must feel like to be free, she thought.

“All right, let me give you a hand here.” The aide grabbed under her elbow, offering steady pressure to help her rise, and when she did, Starr felt all the heaviness of gravity. Not hers, not this earth’s, but some other planet’s gravity that would crush such a ridiculously fragile thing: the human body. “Got it? You’re doing great. Just take a minute and make sure you’re stable. There you go. That’s the way.”

Starr laid a hand on the aide’s shoulder to stop her stream of encouragement but knew it would be taken as a sign of gratitude. She had woken to discover that her mask had slipped, that all the raw edges of her were exposed to air, and, inch by inch, she was pulling the mask back on. She would remember how to be a person. She would take on human form.

Starr thought of Chenoa, safe and back on campus, then pulled the keys from a pocket with her good arm, moving the side of her body that hadn’t been shredded and forced to mend, and shook them in a wave as she walked away. She wasn’t looking back.

“You don’t have someone to drive you?”

She kept moving.

“Wait. You need someone to drive you.”

Farther.

“But hospital policy…”

Key in lock, door cranking open, groan of broken bench seat. Then ignition. The old girl sputtered, fired. Starr leaned her forehead against the cracked vinyl of the steering wheel in relief. The Ford Bronco, that BIA castoff, smelled of Febreze and weed and, as always, oily exhaust. Byrd, thank God. Byrd said he’d drop her service vehicle in the parking lot. She’d never had a horse, never even ridden one, but she thought of cowboys and the trusty steeds that offered them comfort on the dry Oklahoma plains.

Starr turned the Bronco toward the rez, toward Junior and Odeina, toward the old woman with the wild inside. Toward home.

“Better get out of here before they take me back in.”

Beside Starr, at the far end of the bench seat, her daughter nodded.

“You better,” Quinn said. “I’m sick of that place. Hospitals only make you sicker. Everybody knows that. I know that. And look at me. I’m already dead.”