by S. M. Butler
Luke shook his head. “Your cousin’s a zombie?”
“The doctors called it a ‘coma.’ Said he O.D.’d on some Colombian shit that he was selling, but we all knew her black magic did it.”
Luke slammed his hand on the dashboard. Colombian shit?
“Man, you should see your face. I thought you didn’t believe in zombies. Anyway, Juni’s okay. When he left that hospital, he bought her a new rose bush. They’re cool now.”
“Your cousin.” His jaw clenched. “He’s still pushing drugs?”
“No man, televisions, radios, computers. He helped me fix your watch. The point is, Deolina may be old, but she’s more powerful than you can imagine. There’s only one person on the island who scares me more than that black magic Vodun. So watch your back.”
Luke stared out the window. “I don’t believe in black magic.”
“Believe, don’t believe, doesn’t matter none when you’re dead.” Tico pulled up to the curb. “We’re here, chief. Get your money and fly away.”
“I can’t do that. Not yet.”
“You’re not too bright, are you man? Don’t you understand? The Vodun has seen your future and it’s bad. It’s real bad.” Tico grinned. “One way or another. You’re gone.”
*
A nurse knocked on the door to examination room and came in. “Dr. Morno? A man is here to see you. Says his name is Luke.”
Ysabeau felt the blood drain out of her face. “He’s here? How?”
The nurse leaned over and whispered in her ear. “You want me to have Tico get rid of him?”
“No! Tell Luke that I’ll be with him in a minute.” To her patient, Bertie Horn, she said, “Your blood pressure has come back down. That’s a good sign.”
Bertie clapped her hands together. “I knew it! The medicine’s working. Thank you, Dr. Morno. Wait ’till I tell Paulo!”
Ysabeau was about to lift her hand and blurt out the truth, but stopped herself mid-hand lift. Why not let Bertie believe in the serum? Positive thinking had its own healing powers. And maybe the serum was working, even though the current tests didn’t agree. Could there be a delay in the results while the patient’s immunities built up? Ysabeau was hopeful that with a little time the serum would do what it was supposed to, and Bertie and Paulo would be able to take that trip to Miami they’d been dreaming of.
Then she remembered Luke sitting in the clinic and swallowed hard. Time was up. No one’s dreams were going to come true.
Why is he here? They talked about this last night. He promised to give her more time. Or did he? She’d replayed that kiss a hundred times in her mind, but the ugly stuff—her begging like a street urchin for more time—was sort of a blur.
“Are you feeling poorly, Dr. Morno?” Bertie asked.
Ysabeau looked down and realized she was clutching her belly. “Uh, no. I’m fine. See you in a few days.”
After Bertie left, Ysabeau stomped to the waiting room. She crooked her finger at Luke and turned on her heel. She didn’t wait for him to catch up. If he’d come here to close the clinic after all, he’d have to fight her for it.
She led him into her tiny office just big enough to hold a desk, a few chairs, and a four-shelved bookstand. He stood in the doorway, waiting for her to ask him in or offer him a chair. He could wait all day for all she cared.
“I’m surprised to see you here, Luke,” she said.
“I can see that.”
She gritted her teeth. “I thought we agreed you wouldn’t come to the clinic yet.”
He leaned against the doorframe looking so darned confidant. “You said you have new results. I want to see them.”
“When I’m ready.” She fisted her hands on her hips.
“Doesn’t work that way. Remember the contract you signed? The Guardians do spot-checks we deem necessary. It keeps everyone honest.”
A nurse passed by and raised her eyebrows at Ysabeau.
Grabbing him by the arm, she yanked him inside and closed the door behind him. “You think I’m lying about my new results?”
He shrugged, so casually. “Show me.”
She wanted to scream. “You should leave. Right now.”
He strode toward her until he was close enough that she could pinch his nose. Or kiss him. Her breath stuck somewhere in her chest at the thought. Her lips trembled.
“Ysabeau.” Gently, he took hold of her arms. “We can talk about this.”
“No.” She jabbed a finger in his chest. “No!”
He held her gaze for a long moment. “If I leave here now, your clinic will be locked up tomorrow. Do you want that?”
Anguish replaced the desire to bloody his nose. “Oh, Luke. You can’t.”
“I don’t want to. I need your cooperation.” He released her. “Talk to me, Ysabeau. Tell me the truth about the trial.”
Knowing she couldn’t fight him and feeling beaten already, she sat on the edge of her desk. “All right. Come in and have a seat.”
He cocked an eyebrow as if her answer had surprised him. Slowly, he moved past her and took a look around her office. The first thing that caught his eye was the framed photograph behind her desk. He studied the man and a woman in the picture who were gazing deeply into each other’s eyes.
“My mom and dad,” Ysabeau said softly. “This is the way I remember them—oblivious to the camera, or the flaming orange sunset behind them. They only had eyes for one another.”
“Great picture,” Luke said softly. “You look like your dad. Except, you have your mom’s smile.”
“It’s the last picture I have of them. Dad used to call Mom the other half of his heart and said he couldn’t live without her. I always wondered how he knew.” She pressed her lips together before going on. “They were killed together in a car crash when I was ten years old. Grann raised me after that.”
He turned toward her. Compassion spread across his expressions. “I’m sorry.”
“Me too.”
She marveled at the intensity in his gaze. He shifted uncomfortably as if he wanted to say something, but didn’t know what. She’d experienced discomfort with people after the accident. What do you say to a kid who suddenly loses both parents? Sorry that you are all alone in this dark world; here, have a cookie?
But seeing the deep emotions on Luke’s face now surprised her. How could he look at her with such raw concern? Like he really cared? Emotion balled in her throat. Like he cares a lot.
“‘The other half of his heart.’ That’s really something.” His voice was deep and sent thrilling waves across her skin. More delicious than a sudden cool breeze on a summer’s day.
“Imagine loving like that. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever find the rest of my heart.”
Emotion, raw and rich flashed across his face as if her words had cut open a vein. “Ysabeau…” He reached for her.
And she panicked.
Since she was ten years old she longed for someone to save her from a lifetime of grief and loneliness. A man who would love her as her father loved her mother. Luke wasn’t that man. No matter that he knew the words to her favorite song, or could make her laugh, or, oh holy heavens, kiss every thought out of her brain. No matter how much she wanted to believe, he couldn’t be her heart.
She ducked away from him and walked to the opposite wall. “And these…” she motioned to the dozen pictures of smiling faces. “…are my patients.”
Luke’s face registered surprise. “Your patients?”
“Don’t they look happy? Healthy?” She focused on Julia Kelly, an adorable seventeen-year-old with the most gorgeous smile.
“These can’t be the clinical trial patients.”
“No. They are the ones who responded to the regular anti-viral therapies when I worked at GHESKIO—the Haitian Study Group on Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections. The HIV survivors.”
“Not our patients.” He searched for the truth in her face.
Our? “Once the serum works, their pictures will go
up on the wall too.”
His blue eyes pierced her to the core. “None of them will make it on your serum. It’s time to start preparing for the inevitable.”
She opened her mouth to snap at him, but all that came out was a choking sound and a hot tear rolling down her cheek.
“Oh, angel, this is damned hard. Understand you’re not alone.” He pulled her into his arms. “I’ll stay and help you close up the clinic.”
She pushed him back. “Tell the Guardians to give me time to adjust the serum with the new results. A month, or two is all I need.”
He blinked. “You really have better results?”
“Yes!” She opened her desk drawer and pulled out the report. “See? One patient is showing marked improvement.”
“One.”
He took the report from her hands and scanned it. His jaw was set in a way she couldn’t decipher. Anger? Frustration?
She rushed on, “And I know why. I think. But I need time, Luke. Please.” She pressed her hand to his chest, taking strength this time from the pounding under her palm. “Please.”
He held his hand over hers. “Five days. That’s all I’ve got. At least ten percent of your patients need to show improvement, or the Guardians walk. Understand?”
She nodded, but she felt sick. How in the world she was going to cure seven more patients in the next five days?
*
He sat at her desk and read her reports while she examined her patients. She had taken extensive notes throughout the medical trial. Studying the data, he looked for a clue, a crumb, anything, to change his mind. One patient showed improvement? One? That was so far below the Guardian’s criteria for funding that it was laughable. He wasn’t laughing.
He wanted to vomit.
Spinning around slowly in her chair, he glanced again at the photo on the wall. Ysabeau’s parents wouldn’t even look at him. He shook his head. She was ten years old. Unlike Sunny, who lost her mom when she was a baby, Ysabeau knew her parents. She had memories, lots of them. And she’d felt the crushing grief of losing both parents at once. How had she survived? How does anyone?
“They only had eyes for one another,” Ysabeau had said.
Two hearts beating only for one another. He’d had that with Soli. When she died, a chunk of his heart withered up and disintegrated into dust. He still had phantom pain in that lost piece, like veterans do when they lose a limb. For a while the pain almost killed him.
Ysabeau was helping him to heal. He was feeling alive again. Was it possible to grow another heart?
He didn’t know the answer.
He did know that Ysabeau’s laughter was a sweet music he wanted to hear again. She didn’t laugh enough. She worked hard and carried the weight of her patient’s lives on her shoulders, every day, all day. It was too heavy to carry alone. He longed to make Ysabeau happy and to fill her house with laughter and music. Make her feel safe and cared for. Once the clinic was closed, she’d be able to relax. And live.
But then, would she want to breathe the same air as the man who closed her clinic? Probably not.
If he didn’t close the clinic, would he be able to live with himself? Hell, no.
Groaning, he pressed his pounding head. He was trapped between a rock and her soft lips. There was no way out.
His gaze fell on the report on her desk. He sat up and looked closer.
“Ah, crap.”
One of the test subjects, number forty-two, hadn’t come in for general assessment in three days. This was bad. Had patient number forty-two died?
He called the nurse. “Please, tell Dr. Morno I have to see her as soon as she is finished with her patient.”
Ysabeau came within five minutes.
“What happened to this guy?” Luke pointed to the gap in data.
Ysabeau swallowed hard. “I don’t know. I assumed Mr. Johnson was busy. His granddaughter is getting married.”
“Did you call him?”
She pressed her teeth against her bottom lip. “He doesn’t have a phone.”
“If he’s dead, it’s a game over. More than twenty percent mortality rate is too high. He can’t just pull out either. You don’t have enough patients left to finish the trial.”
She exhaled. “Come on, let’s go find him.”
He shouldn’t go. The Guardians had a big rule: don’t fraternize with the patients. Then again, he had already blown the one—don’t get chummy with doctors—when he kissed Ysabeau.
He followed her out to the parking lot, stopping in his tracks when they reached her space. “Whoa. This is your car?’
In the spot marked “Dr. Morno” sat a Mini Cooper. Not the new, barely-large-enough-to-hold a man version, but the 1960’s go-cart style. Luke could almost pick up this gray vehicle with its white racing strip and turn it around with his bare hands.
“You don’t love my car?” Ysabeau asked.
What is it with people and their miniscule cars? “Will I fit inside?”
“You did just fine the last time you were in it.”
He cocked his head at her. “Last time?”
“After the gang attacked you, I brought you home in this very car. Brigitte is her name. Now be nice, she is very sensitive.”
“Shit, I’d like to have seen how you squeezed me into Brigitte.”
“I did have some help from my godmother, Deolina,” Ysabeau said.
The mumbo-jumbo priestess was Ysabeau’s godmother? Somethings were making a little more sense, like why the old woman had been rude to him at the clinic and why she wanted him to go home now. “What did she do to me?”
A wave of worry rolled over her face. “Deolina did something to you?”
“Fold me like a pretzel? Jump up and down on me until I fit, what?”
Ysabeau laughed. “Nothing like that, no.”
He patted the roof of the car. “Brace yourself, Brigitte, I’m coming in. Ysabeau, please unfold me once we get there.”
She drove straight into the heart of the Port-au-Prince. It was a busy city, nothing like San Francisco, or any other American city Luke had been to. Hawkers on the street corners called loudly to potential customers, while smoke rose up from food stands. A peculiar odor of exhaust mixed with fried bananas wafted in through the car vents. Men and women, kids, dogs, goats, chickens, motor-bikes, and tap-taps moved by at a strangely different pace. Not slow, not fast.
When they stopped at a red light, two women walked by his window carrying man-sized sacks on their heads—one sack filled with sugar cane, the other charcoal. He could only guess how heavy those sacks must have been and yet the women moved along as if their bundles weighed no more than straw hats.
Ysabeau pressed on the gas and buildings zipped by outside the car window that were mostly white, or had been many years ago when someone had the wherewithal to paint them. Now the underbellies of ancient metal and rotting wood were showing through like unhealed wounds. What wasn’t white was brightly colored. Pinks, green-blues, purple hues splashed across the buildings, up the doorframes, and swirled across the grafittied walls.
He turned and studied Ysabeau’s profile. She chewed her lip.
He reached out and took her hand. “Are you okay?”
“Mr. Johnson is a kind old man. What if he died? Oh, Luke, I don’t know if I can bury another patient.”
Bringing her hand up to his lips, he placed a gentle kiss on her knuckle. “We’ll get through this. Together.”
After about ten minutes of driving, she parked in a crowded parking lot. “Mr. Johnson sells his paintings here. Hopefully, he’s selling today.”
“What is this place? A mosque?” Luke asked.
“A bazaar. It’s called the Iron Market.”
Vendors clogged up the sidewalks. What seemed like thousands of people yelled, bartered, and laughed. The noise level was sub-rock-concert high. They passed rows of stands loaded with fruit, vegetables, and several kinds of animals—living and butchered. Booths filled with carvings, leatherwork, straw
hats, cigars, and jewelry were jammed altogether. Native handicrafts, good and downright awful, were sold side-by-side.
He stopped to investigate paintings hanging on a wire display. Big bold strokes of the brush had produced scenes of working Haitians adorned in bright clothes. Other paintings depicted brilliant country sides and rural towns. Some were pretty good and others were too cartoonlike for his tastes. “Interesting style.”
“It’s the typical Haitian style of painting called Naif,” Ysabeau shouted above the din of people. “I don’t see Mr. Johnson’s work yet. Let’s keep going.”
One painting stopped Luke in his tracks. In bright blues, oranges, greens, and purples the artist had painted a Voodoo scene. An old priestess stood with her arms outstretched toward a crowd of people. Some of the people in the painting danced while others knelt with their hands raised above their heads. A small group of people were sprawled across the floor, their bodies twisted in weird angles.
Dead?
“You found it! How did you know?” She pointed at the Voodoo painting. “This is one of his. Mr. Johnson must be here somewhere. Ah, over there. Come on.” She took his hand and led him toward a makeshift tent. Ducking under the colorful blanket-door, she pulled him inside with her.
It took a second for his eyes to adjust to the dim light and then Luke found himself staring at an old guy slumped over a chair. “Shit. Is he…?”
Ysabeau released Luke’s hand and stepped closer to the man. She lightly tapped him on the arm. “No. Sleeping.”
The man sat up and rubbed his eyes as if he was staring at an angel. “Dr. Morno?”
“Mr. Johnson, komon ou ye?”
The conversation was short and included Ysabeau ticking something off on her fingers and the old guy shaking his head. Luke noticed the tension on Ysabeau’s face and wondered what he was missing. He could count all the Kreyòl words he understood on two fingers.
Mr. Johnson rose and took Ysabeau’s hand. “Mwen regret sa.”
Holding his hand, she stared into the old man’s eyes. “No?”
He shook his head.
She sighed deeply, and then to Luke’s surprise, she quickly kissed Mr. Johnson’s weathered cheek and ducked back under the blanket.
