Silently, Jared nodded. Then, for the first time, a shadow of real concern passed over Jared’s face, giving Lucas the uncanny impression that his son was aging right before his eyes.
“What?”
“Careful, Dad,” Jared whispered. “On your trip. . . . Please?”
“I will. I swear it,” Lucas said, realizing that after tomorrow he might never see his son alive again. Tomorrow. It had all crept up so fast, and somehow the mere thought of it hadn’t yet made him insane. Or at least he hoped it hadn’t.
“You be careful, too, Jared. Your old dad sure loves you. Don’t forget that. More than he thought he could love anything or anyone.”
“Me, too.” Jared smiled. “Next chapter . . . ’kay?”
“You got it, kid.” Lucas reached with an unsteady hand for the copy of Tom Sawyer nestled on the panda bear’s lap on the nightstand. Suddenly, the oppressiveness in the room vanished. Like Jared, Lucas was eager to escape to the last place he and his son had left to run.
10
Botswana
Finally, the trouble that Jessica and Alex had always feared came. Or at least its first hot, unpleasant breath.
The visitors reached the house with the first traces of the morning sun, knocking loudly on the door. From experience, Jessica had learned that some families camped out in the front yard while it was dark, waiting until dawn to disturb them. Sometimes she woke up late at night to the muffled sound of chatter and the bleating of goats or calves brought as barter. The city visitors came in gleaming cars with license plates from Gaborone and Francistown, or in dusty bakkies, or pickup trucks, they’d borrowed from friends. But Jessica was still amazed at how many poorer families came on foot. Sometimes, they’d traveled for weeks with their sick, who were probably much worse off by the time they arrived than they’d been when they set out.
And it all came to this, a purposeful knock on the door at dawn.
With her bedroom door closed, Jessica listened to Sarah’s sleepy transaction with the new arrivals between Fana’s shallow, delicate snores. Jessica had not gotten out of bed in two days, except to hobble to and from the bathroom. Her shaking had stopped the day after the episode with Kira, but her fever had only broken last night. She and Alex both knew the fever couldn’t have been due to a physical problem; Jessica never got sick anymore, not in that way. She must have brought on a fever with her mind, aggravated by the wretched, near-silent sobs that had racked her body for hours at a time. But she was through crying. Now, for the first time in days, she felt full alertness growing at the edges of her mind.
That was why she noticed the visitors. They hadn’t had any visitors in more than a week, but today, already, the living room was flooded with clamoring voices. The suddenness of their arrival made her uneasy, and so did the pitch of their words, their hurried manner of speaking. Jessica couldn’t understand what the visitors were saying, nor Sarah’s responses to them, but she could already hear their anger, and she didn’t like that sound one bit.
The door flew open, startling her, and Alex stuck her head inside. Alex was wearing the gold-and-rose-colored African housedress she slept in, her breasts bobbing loosely beneath the thin fabric. Alex’s sleepiness made her look much older, Jessica thought.
“What’s going on?” Jessica asked her.
“Don’t know yet. You and Fana stay put.” Alex vanished, closing the door again.
With Alex’s more commanding voice joining the fray, the argument in the living room quieted. Maybe it was nothing, Jessica decided. People often showed up at the clinic tired, hungry, and thirsty, so it was inevitable that tempers were sometimes short. A piece of fruit, a glass of water, and a place to sit were usually all they needed, besides the injections they sought.
But as soon as Jessica began to relax, a booming, angry man’s voice ricocheted through the house like an explosion. He was shouting an unfamiliar phrase over and over—with each repetition, his voice rose—and a cacophony of dissent erupted again. Fana sat straight up, pulled from sleep. “Mommy—” she said instinctively, her eyes frightened. She clasped at the arm of the chocolate-colored Raggedy Ann doll Bea had sewn for her when she was six months old, which had never left her bed since. The doll’s painted-on eyes, nose, and happy red grin were only slightly cracked and faded in three years.
“Shhh. Don’t worry, sweetie. Some people outside are upset about something,” Jessica said, getting out of bed to scoop Fana into her arms. Jessica held her, bouncing her reassuringly, even though her arms were so weak from inactivity that she worried she might drop her.
Jessica was nervous, and she was sure Fana knew it. She could hear the desperation outside her door. Desperation separated people from themselves, she knew, and that could awaken all kinds of chaos. Irrationally, Jessica halfway expected someone to kick her door in.
Damn. Fana had caught that thought. She began to wriggle, panicked. “They’re gonna come in here . . .”
“No, baby, no, they’re not,” Jessica lowered Fana to her bed. Jessica reminded herself that Fana’s perceptions seemed much sharper now, and they might be evolving more all the time. Jessica would have to be more aware of what was in her head, and especially her emotions. “You sit right here. Do as Mommy says, no matter what you hear. I’ll see what’s happening, okay? I’ll take care of it.”
From the living room, there was a loud thump, followed by more shouting.
What the hell was that? It sounded as if someone had dropped something large on the floor or bumped a piece of furniture. Now, Jessica was more annoyed than worried as she flung on her robe and opened her bedroom door. Her face set in anger, she made her way toward the living room.
The scene there stopped her where she stood.
At least ten adults were in the house, four men and six women, and all of them were shouting at each other animatedly, gesturing and flinging their arms. Four young children stood near the front door, and a tallish girl who looked about ten was hugging them in a circle around her as they watched with wide, interested eyes. Two of the children had runny noses, and all of them looked heartbreakingly weak and exhausted. Some of them looked similar enough that they might be siblings. The strangers were so bedraggled that it was obvious they had come a long way. Even inside their rage, they addressed each other with a familiarity that made Jessica think they might have come together. Maybe they’d set out as a group, but now that they were here, something had ignited between them.
The man who seemed to be at the center of the controversy was tall but gaunt, with stooping shoulders and only slight traces of what might have once been an impressive physique. He had an open sore near his chin and others on his arms that Jessica couldn’t even speculate about. Alex was the doctor, not her. The word AIDS popped into her mind, but it was only a guess. The man was wild-eyed and adamant, repeating himself over the din of other voices. Near him, Jessica noticed that an end table had been knocked on its side. The books that had been on top of it were scattered on the floor. Had he kicked the table over?
Soft-spoken Sarah, in the midst of the group, was a useless referee. Alex was closest to Jessica, and she turned to look at her with an exasperated sigh.
“What’s the problem?” Jessica said.
“They’re talking too fast for me to catch it all,” Alex said urgently. “I know that guy with the lesions wants a shot—he says his parents, wife, and brothers are already dead. AIDS, I guess. But some of the mothers are saying the clinic is only for children. It’s like they’re afraid there isn’t enough medicine for everybody.”
“Well, tell them there is.”
“We’ve tried, Jess. I think this is personal, too. They don’t like him. Whatever it is, this whole episode is making me very nervous. Uh-oh.”
“What?”
“I hope I heard that wrong. It sounded like he just said, ‘Then we all die.’ ”
As the voices rose and fell from near-screams to utter hoarseness, Jessica studied the strangers’ faces. One older wom
an’s eyes were filled with enraged tears, and her mouth sprayed as she yelled. Another man seemed to be pleading with the group in logical terms, slapping the back of his hand against his palm as he struggled to make his point heard. And a thin, birdlike woman with sharp, stunning facial features beneath her head-wrap was beseeching the group person by person, gesturing toward the huddle of children. The others were just yelling.
But Jessica was captivated by the gaunt man himself, whose gestures were so unbridled and off-balance that she wondered if he was drunk, or if his illness had made him a lunatic. His teeth were bad, nearly rotted out, and his eyes were as brown and runny as weak tea. If she had ever run across this man on a city street, she would definitely have crossed to the other side—and now he was standing in her living room, in the bosom of her family.
Something about him made Jessica want to run.
“Let’s take the children into the library.” Jessica tugged her sister’s arm. “Come on.”
But as soon as they began to walk toward the children, Jessica heard a roar at her back. Instinctively, she cowered to a crouching position in front of the children, her arms raised high to protect them.
The man had lifted the mahogany end table high above his head with both arms, screaming at her. His arms trembled from the weight of the table, which Jessica knew was heavy enough to break bones, and worse, if he hit anyone with it. The man’s face told Jessica that he didn’t care if he hit her, Alex, or the children. He was a dying man full of blind, empty rage at his dying who would not mind hurting anyone else. In fact, perhaps he longed for it.
Violence was about to come to their clinic.
Sarah stood between Jessica and the man like a statue, nearly tall enough to meet his eyes. While everyone else was in a frozen hush, Sarah held up one arm as if to block the table’s path if he threw it, speaking to him in a soothing tone. “Rra, ga re itse sentle gore o batla eng, Rra,” she said, adding in English, “Why do you do this? What have we done to you?”
As he glared at Jessica, the man’s runny eyes gleamed with poison. His whole face, in fact, radiated unmasked hatred. Jessica knew she would never forget this man’s face, not even if she truly did live forever. And Sarah was in his path, not even cringing, as if she were the immortal. Sarah, whose voice was as gentle and lyrical as a waterfall, was actually standing between her and this man to protect her. “Ke eng? What’s wrong?” Sarah said to the man. “Put that down, Rra. Throwing that won’t cure you.”
Alex, beside Jessica, was as tense as an animal waiting to spring. Jessica knew that if this man made a move to hurl the table, Alex was ready to tackle him, limp or no limp. With another cry of anger, the man whirled toward the other strangers in the group, nearly rocking himself over with the effort. Everyone backed away from him, men and women alike.
A shape in the hallway caught Jessica’s eye, and she gasped. Fana had disobeyed her and left the bedroom, and her tiny daughter now stood only a few yards behind the man. At first, Jessica’s mother’s instinct was jolted at the sight of her child so close to this nutcase. Then, Jessica’s concern suddenly shifted wildly. Although Fana was shirtless and still clinging to the arm of her Raggedy Ann doll, which dragged beside her on the floor, her face didn’t look like a child’s. She was gazing at the man’s back purposefully, as if she could bore a hole in him.
Something in Fana’s eyes struck Jessica as so foreign, so feral, that Jessica felt a horror well up in her that overwhelmed anything she’d thought was fear until now. The intensity of the feeling made her dizzy, as she could feel the hammering of her heart from her throat to her unsteady knees. Her fear made Fana’s image seem to shimmer before her eyes.
Fana was going to hurt this man, Jessica realized wordlessly. Jessica was certain Fana could hurt every person in this room without even being aware of what she was doing.
The man sensed Fana, too. His back bent slightly under the weight of the table, he lurched around to face the half-naked child standing in the hallway with a rag doll. His eyes lowered to hers. Instantly, as if Fana had just shot up ten feet and spit fire at him, the man took two steps away from her, the anger on his face replaced with shaken disbelief. He stumbled back against the sofa. The table fell and crashed to the floor only inches from his toes, but the man didn’t move to avoid its impact.
Then, like a child himself, the man crumpled to the floor and began to sob.
When Fana looked over at Jessica because she wanted her mommy, her features melting back into a child’s vulnerability and nervousness, Jessica wondered if she had somehow imagined the unnameable something she’d been so certain she’d seen in Fana’s eyes only an instant before. But she knew better. And she was sure the man sobbing on the floor knew better, too.
“Take these kids to the library,” Jessica told Alex again, standing up straight. She leaned over to whisper directly into Alex’s ear. “Give them the real thing. All of them. Him, too.”
“After what just happened?”
“Just do it, Alex.”
Jessica had made her decision even before she went over to Fana, who was crying by now, to carry her back into the safety of her bedroom. She had probably made her decision as soon as she’d seen the hatred on the face of the man who wanted to hit her with the table. But she’d really known what she had to do after what she’d just seen in Fana’s eyes.
• • •
Despite the half-open window inviting in the cool air, Jessica’s room smelled sour from her unbathed scent and from food crumbs that had fallen to her sheets and floor. Her room smelled the way she remembered her grandmother’s room smelling more than twenty years before, when Gram had been confined to her bedroom on an oxygen machine, suffering from emphysema. The main difference, Jessica told herself, was that the smell in her room now signaled healing, not sickness.
She’d retreated to bed right after Kira had died, too, except without all of the sobs. The last time she’d had an episode like this had been when she was still living with David, when she had learned her best friend at work, Peter, had been killed in the newspaper parking lot. The whole time she was in bed, David had doted on her like a mother hen.
Probably just guilt, she realized now. After all, David was the one who’d killed Peter.
Remembering that time, Jessica understood why Alex’s eyes grew so icy whenever she heard David’s name. Oh, yes, Jessica understood fine. But she was also beginning to understand that the problems looming in her life now made the past instantly petty. She had to grow beyond herself to do what she needed to do for Fana. Maybe in the past few days, she had done just that.
“I’m going to the Life Colony, Alex. I’m going to find David.”
The patients had all been treated, and the house was once again silent except for the sound of laughter as Fana and Sarah fixed dinner together. Alex didn’t respond right away, staring at the wall while she sat at the edge of Jessica’s bed.
“And David was right,” Jessica went on quietly. “We have to stop giving away the blood.”
Alex sighed, glancing at Jessica sidelong. Her eyes seemed to glint like copper. “You’re just tripping now, overreacting to what happened today. You need a little more rest, hon, that’s all.”
“No,” Jessica said, shaking her head. “I know what I’m saying. I’m not delirious. Today was the last day. And I meant what I said about the colony, too. I’m going.”
“You don’t even know where they are. What do you think, they have a sign posted? A billboard?”
“I can find them. I know the name of the city where they live. I’m not going to tell you which city because it might give them an excuse to hurt you if they found out, but David told me. I’ll just go there.” Jessica stretched her legs out flat on the mattress, and they ached with stiffness. It was time for her to get up, to walk around the property again. It was past time.
“And then what?”
“And then . . . who knows? But I have to go.”
“See there? It’s that ‘Who
knows?’ part I don’t like. You don’t know what those people are like,” Alex said, drawing out those people like a cussword, leaning closer to Jessica. “In fact, from what you do know, they are not the kind of folks anyone would want to find.”
Jessica felt a chink in her resolve as the truth of Alex’s words made her stomach squirm oh so slightly, just enough to notice. What did she really know about them, after all? Only that David was not alone, that there were other immortal men. David had called the others Life Brothers, but she had no reason to expect them to be brotherly to her. In Florida, David’s brother Mahmoud had tracked their family down and set her waking nightmare into motion. Mahmoud had not only tried to kill Alex, he’d also tried to shoot Jessica and Kira point-blank when their van stalled out on a dark road. That man had chased them down and fired on them as if they were two wild dogs, not an unarmed woman and her child. All for the sake of preserving the Life Colony’s precious secrecy.
To him, they had been disposable, less than human. Was that why David, too, had been able to kill so easily? Was that the vicious mind-set that immortality brought?
But she prayed she could find David and the other Life Brothers now. David had made her a promise: For all of time, I will be waiting for you. Her heart hadn’t been strong enough to respond to him then; and maybe it never would be, unless she really did lose the memories Fana had tried to take from her. But she needed him now, whether or not her heart was ready.
She needed to go to Lalibela. She needed to bring David his daughter.
“David won’t let anyone hurt us,” Jessica said, thinking aloud.
Alex shook her head, barely smothering a sarcastic laugh in her throat. “Lord have mercy . . . That’s your plan? You show up out of the blue, you somehow find these people who have hidden themselves for centuries because they are not in the mood for company, and you think David will be there to rescue you? Listen to yourself.”
The Living Blood Page 16
