Paige refused to name him, and the only reason we were eventually able to take him home without a name was because Frick lied to the doctor, told him there needed to be a naming ceremony to take place on sacred ground. Maybe it wasn’t a lie, but I remember no ceremony taking place, and I remember one night Frick laughing about it on the phone with his brother who lived out West. Nonetheless, perhaps to avoid a lawsuit or to fulfill a commitment to cultural sensitivity, the doctor agreed to let the boy go home after his stint in the ICU and the doses of phenobarbital that he took in the mornings.

But before Frick told his lie, as the days passed with no name given, the hospital began to call and call. “Next week,” Mom would say. “We have to wait a week for the ceremony.” Mom paused, listening. “Because,” she said. “It has to do with the position of the planets.”

When she hung up, I asked her if she knew where Neptune was.

“At the bottom of the ocean,” she said.

The days passed, and with each call the hospital grew more impatient. “He needs a name,” they said, “or we’ll name him. You can change the name when you have one.” I’m curious now to know what they would have named him; Google says that a hospital will enter “Baby boy” or “Baby X” on the birth certificate. All I know is that they didn’t name the child, but they kept calling us every day at around the same time—four in the afternoon. We knew when to expect the call, and Mom would take the boy, bundle him up (the nights were getting colder), and Frick and I would follow her outdoors where we’d sit on the concrete steps and for an hour get fresh fall air.

It was one of those days outside when we gave him a name, or we called him something. Frick came up with it. A small rainstorm blew through and we waited it out in the shed—Mom and the baby, Frick and me. For not long it downpoured and the green leaves flipped over and shivered their white pale-green undersides while the sky lit with sharp white light and the ground below us rumbled. During it all the boy did not cry. The storm was ending, the rain pattering gentler and gentler on the shed roof; Frick took one more puff of his smoke, then held it out the open shed door under some dripping water where it hissed out and he flicked it to the earth.

“Bedogi,” he said, blowing smoke. The name means thunder in Panawahpskek, and so that was the name we gave him, or the name we thought we’d use until Paige emerged from that dark place.