My Soul to Keep Part 41

David had to swallow twice, a struggle, before he could speak. "The things I want are impossible," he said. "So instead, I think I only wanted to see you. And to warn you, Jessica. What you do here is very dangerous. Already, everyone is talking. This clinic ..."

"You said yourself it's amazing."

"Of course it is. I don't dispute it." He held up the magazine story. "But you see? Already, stories are appearing in print. You know investigators will come. You won't be permitted to operate without-"

"When that happens, we'll move," Jessica said calmly. "We've already scouted alternate sites."

Dawit's heart pounded. She was serious? "Jessica ... You're going to bring yourself grief. The people already think you're magic. They know."

"We've never told them about the blood," Jessica said. "I can't help what they think."

"The blood wasn't intended to be used this way."

Now, for the first time, Dawit saw unbridled anger in his wife's eyes. He shrank from those eyes. "How can you stand there and tell me how this blood wasn't intended to be used? You?"

"Jessica ..." Dawit said, near tears. "Don't punish yourself this way. I understand how it must feel, healing these children, protecting them from early death, but you know why you're doing it. And you can't bring her back."

This time, Jessica raised her finger, her eyes still afire. "Say that one more time, David, d.a.m.n you. And this conversation will be over."

Dawit, defeated, felt his insides sinking. He wondered how he still had the strength to stand. He had hoped things would go better than this, though now he didn't understand how he could have imagined such a thing. He wished he were still hidden in Lagos, that he had never found her. How could he have chosen to relive this pain?

"You hate me," he said quietly.

"I did," she said, gazing at the air as if reading her own thoughts. "Maybe I still do. I don't want to. That hurts too much. I didn't ask you for this, what you've done to me, but now it's done. And good things are happening because of it. So maybe you've blessed me. And I can't hate you for that."

When Dawit didn't respond, Jessica went on in a detached voice, outside herself. "We leam more about the blood every day. Alex does her research at night, when she finishes with patients. Blood diseases are easiest: leukemia, sickle-cell. Most viruses. It takes a little longer, but HIV too. We're very excited about that. But we lost a girl with heart disease. We haven't figured that out. We can't give sight to the blind or anything. And some more progressive cancers.... The blood helps, but it's not enough.... But we'll find a way."

"You're going to save all the children in the world?" Dawit asked her gently, trying to point out the fallacy in her thinking.

Jessica nodded. "Yes. I hope so," she said.

Dawit sighed. "You know they'll die. You'll heal them of one thing, but something else will take them. That's why Alex will never find all the answers, Jessica. Without the Ritual, the blood alone cannot prevent death."

"But even so ..." Jessica said in the same removed voice, stroking her cat. "We can give them a chance to live, at least. They deserve that."

And so, Dawit realized, this is how it would end. He could not remain here with Jessica, and she would not go with him. One day very soon, her work at this children's clinic would end with some heartbreak, or Jessica would be studied like a circus oddity in medical laboratories. And he had done this to her. He alone.

"I admire all you've built here," Dawit said. "The clinic. This house. And you are surrounded by people who love you. Those things are good. But if you learn nothing else from me, Jessica, learn this: Do not stake your attachments too deeply. In a very short amount of time-it will amaze you how quickly-one by one, they will all be gone. They are mortals, and you are no longer of them. And you and Teacake, alone, will remain."

For the first time, Dawit saw tears in her eyes. Had he at last gotten through to her?

"Is that your lesson?" she asked him. "I'm sorry to hear that, because you always said just the opposite. Love what you have while you have it, before it's gone. Isn't that what you were always trying to tell me?" Her damp eyes glimmered.

For the first time during his visit, Dawit again felt like a husband to his wife. Their thoughts were resting in a comfortable place, remembering.

"I did," Dawit said. He did not say the things that further anguished his mind: how inhumane it was that circ.u.mstances would ever see fit to bring people together to love for a short time and then force them to part; or, nearly as cruel, to bring love to people who, even while living, could never be together.

But he must hope for something, at least. In that, he might find purpose in the endless, waiting years.

"Lalibela is a city built of stone in Ethiopia, with underground churches adorned with paintings and magnificent religious relics that are centuries old. Many liken the city to Jerusalem. Coptic priests, the very devout, live there," Dawit said. "And so do we. There are fifty-nine of us, and we dwell in six houses of learning. Our teacher is a bearded man named Khaldun, whose name means *Eternal.' There are many among us who believe he is the closest thing our Earth has to a G.o.d. He gave us this Living Blood we share. He is, in a sense, my father, Jessica. That makes him yours. And Lalibela is our home."

He blinked, beholding the sight of his wife in her magnificent dress of white, sitting in this room washed in sunlight. This was not Jessica as she had been. She had buried so much of herself; all he could see in her face was everything that was missing. He did not know her. The discomfort of trying to speak brought sharp tears to Dawit's eyes.

"One day-when all of this is gone, or perhaps before-when you have nowhere else, you should go there. And you will find me. For all of time, I will be waiting for you."

He did not remain to hear her answer, or to hear her utter the word goodbye. That said, Dawit turned and walked down the stairs, past Gaines's stare at the doorway, around the playing children and chickens in the courtyard, and through the clinic of miracles.

Outside, his driver was still waiting.

63.

As soon as Jessica heard the irregular clump-clump on the stairs, she knew Alex was coming. The hurried sound pulled her back into herself somewhat. Even now, the sight of this whitewashed room felt distinctly false, as though it weren't real. This was not her life. This was not her. But, yes, it was. An African sun was shining through her window, brightening the colorful Zulu beads hanging on her wall. Those beads had been a gift from a grateful mother. A mother whose child had been spared by her blood.

Alex came limping into the room, sweat dripping down her face. She was wearing her lab coat-that, at least, was not so unfamiliar-and she probably still had patients on her exam tables. This was their clinic. Their new place.

Could David have really been here, in this room, only ten minutes before?

"Where's your cane?" Jessica asked, forcing herself not to think about David. Instead, she thought of Alex. It was ironic; for all the testing her sister had done with her blood, drawing new samples as she needed them, sometimes enough to make Jessica feel lightheaded, Alex had never once injected herself to see if it might help her back mend properly or make her limp disappear. "It's not here for me," Alex always said.

"Girl, please, I left from down there so fast, I forgot all about it," Alex said breathlessly. "Sipho came running in with some foolishness about *the sister's husband,' and then Daddy Gaines said David was here. Bea is downstairs saying she's faint. What happened?"

So, she would have to think about David, after all. Not David, she reminded herself when tears threatened, Dawit. That was who had been here. David, who was so much a part of her that she still couldn't bring herself to sleep on his side of the bed, had never existed. He'd been a fantasy conjured up for her by Dawit. A lie. She'd wanted the lie so much, she'd believed it. And knowing that David was a lie wasn't enough to keep her from missing him.

"He came," Jessica said.

Alex inhaled abruptly, sitting gently on the bed beside Jessica. She nudged Teacake out of her way, staring at Jessica with wide eyes. "All the way out here? How did he find you?"

"He read about the clinic in a magazine."

Alex's mouth dropped open. "Jessica ..."

"Don't worry. We knew people would find out. Daddy's already bought the land in Botswana. All we have to do is move."

"That's not what I mean, Jessica. If David found you, what about those other-"

Jessica shook her head. "They would have come by now. I don't think they will. I just have a feeling."

"You and your feelings."

"The thing is," Jessica said, speaking words she still could barely bring herself to believe, "I'm one of them. Maybe they respect that." She heard her own words repeated back to her: One of them? What did that mean? She was one of what?

"Jessica, David is one of them, and you see how they messed up his life. But I guess we'll have to just pray on that and leave it alone. What did David want? What did he say?"

For all of time, I will be waiting for you.

Now, Jessica could not stop the tears she'd fought since David was here. She hid her eyes behind her arm, hoping to force the tears back to where they'd come from. Instead, a tiny sob escaped.

"Oh, Jessica ... girl ..." She felt Alex's arm slip around her, and her sister's head rested on her shoulder. "I know. You don't think I understand, but I've watched you, and I know. Let it go, Jessica. It isn't natural not to cry. Let it out."

Furiously, Jessica shook her head. At last, the wall was coming. The room had been trying to melt, trying to take her back to Miami, to her own house, to the family she'd once had, the little girl. Ki-. No. She would not think her name.

When Jessica chose, she could make that time seem like a century ago, and she could make the place it had held in her heart feel cold and barren; not fragile the way it had felt when she'd walked toward the stairs and seen David there. When she'd wanted to run downstairs into his arms and have him hug her and tell her it was all a dream. He was back now, he would have said, and it's over now, Jess. It's over. The way he'd comforted her in the cabin.

The feeling was gone, now. Jessica blinked, her mind remarkably clear. She heard the boys arguing outside, some childish dispute, Sipho's voice louder than anyone's. It helped. Sipho would not be alive today if not for her, if not for what had happened.

Jessica moved away from her sister's embrace, patting Alex's knee to tell her she was all right. "It just shocked me a little, seeing him."

Alex gazed at her with perceptive eyes. She knew there was more, that Jessica had pushed it away, but Jessica prayed she wouldn't try to draw it out. "Well, why did he just run in and out like that?" Alex asked at last. "He didn't even want to see Beatrice?"

Beatrice! Bee-Bee had cut herself, Jessica remembered. She'd seen the blood. And Katie was a great help around the house, but the teenager was no nurse. And she wasn't a mother. "Shoot, I have to go downstairs."

"Jessica," Alex said, dead serious, holding her sister's wrist. "You told David about his daughter, right?"

There was a commotion, more footsteps on the stairs. Bea appeared, holding her smiling namesake in her arms, and Daddy Gaines followed behind her, b.u.t.toning his shirt. Jessica's mother looked fifteen years younger since she'd started dyeing her hair black, wearing it in cornrow braids. Jessica saw a drop of blood on Bee-Bee's T-shirt, but her tears were forgotten. Bea, straining, lowered Bee-Bee to the floor, and she ran between Jessica's knees. "Par-ty, Mommy!" she cried.

"You come here," Jessica said, lifting her up to rest her plump little b.u.t.tocks on her knee. She'd grown so much! Jessica was still amazed at how much Bee-Bee looked like neither her nor David, but like Jessica's father when he was a boy. That was the first thing Bea had said when her grandchild was born. "Did you cut yourself, Bee-Bee?"

"Look, Mommy." Grinning, Bee-Bee held up her hand for Jessica to look at it. Jessica checked each finger on that hand, then each on the other. There was no mark, and the blood was gone. But of course the mark would be gone.

"That was almost twenty minutes ago," Daddy Gaines said. "Cut's long healed by now."

"Jessica, you answer my question," Alex said. "Did you tell him?"

"What was David doing here?" Bea whispered. She, like Jessica, rarely spoke his name.

"Would you all please hush?" Jessica said, focused on watching her daughter play with her own fingers. No matter how often it happened, she couldn't get over how quickly Beatrice healed. The crazy girl sometimes hurt herself just to watch the marks go away, as if playing a game. That was probably what happened this time too. "He just came to see me, that's all."

"Why didn't you tell him about Bee-Bee?" Alex asked.

Because it would have hurt him more to leave us if he'd known, Jessica thought, understanding for the first time. And he had to leave. There might be a time when it would be different, but for right now, he had to leave.

"Daddy went away?" Beatrice asked, startling Jessica. Her smile had faded, her magical little fingers suspended in midair.

Jessica met her daughter's eyes beneath her beautiful crown of black curls. Again, she was startled at something that shouldn't startle her; she'd never said a word to Beatrice about her daddy, or shown her a picture of David, but Beatrice knew things. She always had. Jessica forgot she couldn't keep things from her.

"You'll see him someday, Bee-Bee. I promise." She hadn't planned to say that, and didn't know why she had, but the words filled her chest with comfort.

Beatrice scrunched up her face, concentrating. "La ... li ..."

"That's right. He's going to Lalibela. That's far away, in a country called Ethiopia."

The taller Bea had her hands on her hips. "I wish somebody would tell me what's going on. I don't like David Wolde showing his face here. When I saw him, I nearly-"

"Mom, please," Jessica said wearily, stroking Bee-Bee's hair. "He's gone now. I just think it means we'll have to leave here soon, that's all. The rest of them probably know we're here too. So we better get back to work."

"Well, you all can do what you want," Bea said, "I may go to Botswana, but I'm not going to any durn Ethiopia. You hear? I'm tired of all this moving."

"I said soon, Mom. Not now," Jessica said, smiling at her. What would she have done without this woman? And Alex, too. All of them had accepted so much, purely out of love. They didn't exactly sit around talking about Jessica's condition-What was the word in Spanish? Her inmortalidad-but they knew. Their knowing made it easier for Jessica, like she had some kind of disease they were supporting her through. Everything was changed, and nothing was changed.

For now, they were here.

Daddy Gaines finished fixing his shirt, tucking it into his pants. "I think Jessica needs to be alone," he said, always intuitive. "Alex, you have a clinic full of patients. And Bea, I wish you would help me get ready for the party. I can't blow up all those balloons."

"Par-ty!" Bee-Bee said, squirming out of Jessica's arms. She danced on the floor, bouncing on her fat, st.u.r.dy little brown legs.

"What party?" Jessica asked. She felt dazed, disconnected, again.

Alex leaned close to Jessica, whispering in her ear. "New Year's, remember? It'll be the year two thousand, girl."

Of course. That was why she'd thought David might come today. She'd been expecting him, for some reason, since Christmas. She was both dismayed and relieved that he had come. "Two thousand," Jessica repeated, imagining David's face from the picture he'd shown her with his jazz group, so long ago. "I can't believe I forgot that."

Would all of her photographs one day look that way too? Would that photograph of Kira on her desk one day be yellowed and frayed? Would it turn to dust before her eyes?

Kira. She'd actually thought her name. And she was still fine.

The comfort Jessica had felt earlier, talking to Bee-Bee, began to glow from her. She was all right. But she wouldn't be doing much partying tonight, Jessica thought. She would make an appearance because the children were always happy to see her-"the sister," they called her-but then she would leave them. Tonight, more than other nights, she would need to stay in her room. She would read some pa.s.sages from her Bible. And she would pray. What was it that had kept her from praying for so long? Only anger?

If the answers weren't in the Scriptures, maybe she could find them in herself, in her heart. She was a part of something. Her new baby, this remarkable first child of the Living Blood, was a part of it too. She could feel the power between them, more than a parent-child bond. It excited her. But she would be lying if she tried to convince herself she wasn't more afraid than ever. She was.

Her life was bigger now.

But she was just about ready. That was the most amazing thing of all.

"Par-ty... P-A-R-T-Y..." she heard Bee-Bee saying as she made her way down the hallway with Daddy Gaines stooping low to hold her hand. Jessica watched her from the bedroom doorway, and Bee-Bee twisted her head back to stare straight into Jessica's eyes with a smile lighting up her round, coffee-brown face, as though she were sharing a secret.

Despite the hurts, which went to her soul, Jessica's spirits soared.

Acknowledgments.

First, special thanks to my family and foundation: my mother, Patricia Stephens Due; my father, John Dorsey Due Jr.; my sisters, Johnita and Lydia; and my grandmother, Lottie Sears Houston.

Much grat.i.tude to the advance readers who helped make this a better book: Muncko and Carol Kruize, Luchina Fisher, Robert Vamosi, Olympia and Chris Duhart, Grace Lim, Bonita Whytehead, Alex Cambert, Rene Rodriguez, Ivan Roman, and Angela Youngblood. And, naturally, thanks to my agent, Janell Walden Agyeman of Marie Brown a.s.sociates; and to my editor, Peternelle van Arsdale.

For a.s.sistance and inspiration, much thanks to Dr. Charles Pegelow, M.D., director of the Sickle-Cell Center, University of Miami School of Medicine, who has a vivid imagination. To Fernando Gonzalez and Larry Pomilio, for teaching me so much about jazz. To Greg Kihn and Michael Marano, for their scary stories. And to Mitch.e.l.l Kaplan, who still looks out for me.