The Living Blood

by Tananarive Due

  And Jay-Red was helping her, too. He was helping her look for Aunt Alex at the same time he looked for his daddy. When she talked to him in the not-real place, Jay-Red had told her his daddy wasn’t like hers—he wouldn’t wake up. He might sleep forever if they didn’t find him.

  “Yes, she’s fine. She’s resting,” Daddy said, talking about Fana. “I’ve held my tongue so far, Jessica, but I can’t help questioning your judgment. I know you love your sister, but this search has taken precedence over even your own daughter’s safety. Khaldun gave us very specific instructions, and yet since we left the colony she’s been exposed to nothing but trauma. This is lunacy. We should be isolating her, searching for a place to raise her . . .”

  Fana didn’t like the angry thoughts in her father’s head. He didn’t care about Aunt Alex one bit! But, still . . . Daddy cared about her. And he cared about Mommy. That was why he was so mad. He thought Mommy was hurting her, and hurting herself, too.

  Fana couldn’t hear her mother’s words from the telephone, but she could hear them in her father’s head. She was promising him they would go to Miami next, to Gramma Bea’s house. That made Fana smile. She missed Gramma Bea and Grandpa Gaines. Fana wasn’t exactly sure if Mommy had thought of going to Gramma Bea’s house first or if she’d thought of it herself and then helped Mommy think it. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference. Just like when they went to the co-lo-ny to see The Man, Khaldun—she and Mommy seemed to have had the idea at the same time, only maybe Fana had it first. When she thought about something really hard, it didn’t take long for other people to think of it, too. On the airplane, the lady walking up and down the aisle with the juice had filled up her cup again before she even asked her to, and Mommy said the lady was con-si-der-ate, but Fana knew better. People needed help to think of things.

  “I don’t see that she’d be much better off there, but that’s an improvement,” Daddy said. “Have you heard about the storm? We’ll have to keep an eye on it before we travel again.”

  The storm was on the TV. Daddy had been watching the TV in the room while she tried to sleep. Fana had never had a TV because the people in her kraal didn’t have any either, even though all the people in towns did. Mommy had told her she was glad their house didn’t have a TV because children in America watched it so much they had forgotten how to play. Fana didn’t understand how children could forget how to play, but that was what her mommy had said. When Fana had gone to town, she’d seen TVs in windows at the stores in rows on top of each other, showing pictures of places and people. Once, she’d seen herself on one of the TVs in the store window, and that had made her cry, until her mommy pointed out that the camera was taking a picture of her, see? Then she’d smiled a little, and the girl on the TV had smiled.

  But Fana hadn’t liked the feeling that the camera was watching her. She got that feeling a lot, and it was scary. She didn’t like knowing there were eyes she couldn’t see. But there were.

  “And, yes, please call me when you’re finished. Don’t stay any longer than necessary, Jess. I still don’t understand why it’s so important to see this boy.” Mommy tried to explain that it might help her find Aunt Alex, but even though Daddy didn’t say so, he thought it was a waste of time.

  After Daddy hung up the telephone, he turned around to look at her, and he saw that her eyes were open. “The phone waked me up.”

  “That’s all right, my precious,” he said, stroking her forehead with his big, warm hand. He leaned over to kiss the same spot, and she smiled. Fana could hardly remember when she used to be scared of him, when he’d been burned up. Now, he was just Daddy, as if she’d always known him. “You can go back to sleep now.”

  “I wanna go with Mommy to see Jay-Red.” She tried to put the idea in his head to take her to wherever Mommy was going, but she knew right away that she would have to push hard to do that because Daddy’s thoughts were strong. He didn’t want to take her out of this room, and it was always harder to make people think what they didn’t want to. If she tried to do that, she might make a mistake and he might feel it. He might get mad and tell Mommy.

  “Well, I think it’s best for you to close your eyes and sleep. Mommy will be back soon.” His eyes had moved back to the TV, which was showing a fat man standing next to a colorful map, pointing to a picture of the ocean with a long stick. The man sounded worried. A spot of bright, pretty colors was in the water. Tro-pi-cal storm Beatrice, the man called the colors.

  “That’s Gramma’s name!” Fana cried, excited. “It used to be my name, too. But now my name is Fana, ’cause The Man said so.”

  Her daddy looked at her, and Fana knew he wanted to ask her about the co-lo-ny, and especially Khaldun. He was worried about Khaldun. But he didn’t say anything. He thought it could hurt her if he asked her questions from the not-real place. He didn’t like her trances, because he thought bad things would happen, like when she had made the bed shake—except she hadn’t been the one shaking the bed. She didn’t know for sure, but she thought maybe the Bee Lady had done it somehow, like a monkey at the zoo shaking the bars.

  And anyway, Fana didn’t know anything about The Man. She’d been trying to see him, but she couldn’t. He hadn’t talked to her in a long time. She wanted to tell her daddy that, but she didn’t think he liked it when she could see what was in his head.

  Suddenly, it looked like the man on the TV was pointing his stick at her.

  “And I have a special advisory for little girls,” the man’s voice on the TV boomed, his eyes staring straight at her as he leaned close, his face filling up the entire screen. He was so close, she could see the veins across the whites of his eyes. “It’s good when they’re afraid, isn’t it?” He winked at her. His grin was too big, spreading so far that it took up half his face.

  Fana stared, too scared to move. Would the man climb out of the TV?

  “Fana?”

  That was her daddy’s voice. Fana gasped, blinking at him. When she looked at the TV again, the fat man was gone. Instead, a man and a woman were riding in a fast car with no roof, their hair blowing in the wind. Whimpering, Fana sat up to hug her father. “The m-man on TV . . .”

  “That’s a big storm, sweetheart. It’s nothing for you to worry about,” Daddy said, holding her. “It’s very far from here. That man was a weather forecaster, and he said it’s losing strength. Pretty soon, it won’t be a tropical storm at all. It won’t harm us.” Her daddy hadn’t heard what the man on TV really said, Fana realized.

  Her father’s arms got tight around Fana for a moment, and she felt a sadness fall over him like a heavy blanket. He had stopped thinking about her. Instead, he was thinking about Kira. He was remembering a hotel room where he’d hugged Kira, too. The memory was awful to him, but he couldn’t fight it away even though he was trying hard. She could see his hands around her sister’s throat, squeezing hard.

  “Daddy?” Fana said, looking up at him. “Don’t be sad.”

  There were tears in his eyes, but he nodded. Fana had only seen tears in a man’s eyes one other time, when Moses’s father came to carry him home after she had made him go to sleep.

  “It must be a terrible burden, Fana, to be privy to all men’s hearts.”

  Fana didn’t understand the words burden and privy, but she knew what he meant. “I don’t like it. It makes me feel bad.”

  “I know it does, sweetheart. I know. I’m sorry I can’t . . . shut it off.”

  “But you can. Te-fe-ri can, a little bit. He won’t let me hear sometimes. And he can talk to me with his head. Maybe he can teach you, Daddy.”

  “I hope so.” Daddy kissed her forehead again. His sad thoughts had lifted a little. “Will you try to sleep now?”

  “How come I can’t go see Jay-Red?”

  “Because you have to stay here with me, or I’ll be terribly lonely.” Daddy eased her back down until her head was on the pillow, and he pulled her covers over her. “You need to sleep.”

  Fana squirmed, annoyed
. But she could see Jay-Red, Fana realized. In the not-real place.

  Fana closed her eyes, imagining herself climbing into a rabbit hole in the ground just like Alice in her book. The hole’s tunnel reminded her of the tunnels at the co-lo-ny, the way it twisted and turned, with some parts narrow and some parts wide. But soon she saw a light beneath her, and she craned her head down to try to see what was there.

  It was a room with a bed, she realized. The room was at a place called Whee-ler, where everyone was very sick. Even from where she was perched high above, peeking from her hole, she could smell sickness all around her. She could smell Jay-Red’s sickness. Fana saw a bed covered in clear plastic below her, and she knew Jay-Red was underneath the plastic. She could see his pale face lying on the pillow, with his eyes closed. And the machines! There was a machine breathing for him.

  “See?” a voice whispered from beside her. “I told you the machines are awful.”

  “Why is it doing that?” Fana asked him, awed. She had learned never to be startled when people appeared in the not-real place. Jay-Red was wearing different clothes than he was wearing in the bed below; in bed, he was wearing plain white, but beside her he had on red pajamas with cartoons on them, and the letters spelled out M-U-T-A-N-T and M-E-N across his chest. Jay-Red’s eyes were green, but parts of them were gold. His face was very pale from being sick, like a white person’s who had been browned only slightly by the sun, and he had a smile almost as wonderful as Moses’s. She couldn’t wait to meet him in real life.

  “I’m not breathing by myself. I need help.”

  “I can make you breathe again! Is that all?”

  “Well, there’s lots of other stuff, too. I bet you can’t fix leukemia.”

  “I can, too. I can fix whatever I want.” Fana began to wonder if maybe all boys liked to argue, and not just Moses.

  Then, beneath them, Fana saw the door to the room open. She wondered if she should hide, but then she remembered that no one could see her. She was in the not-real place, so she was invisible to people in the real place, the ones who were awake. Maybe this was where the invisible eyes hid to look at her, she thought.

  Mommy, Teferi, and a white man Fana had never seen walked into the room in a line, not saying anything. Fana smiled. Mommy wouldn’t need her help with Jay-Red, after all.

  “My mommy!” Fana said, excited. “See? I told you she’d help you!”

  “That’s my uncle Cal. Except he’s not my real uncle, he’s my godfather. A godfather is somebody who takes care of you when your dad’s gone. Uncle Cal is good friends with my dad.” Jay-Red sounded sad when he mentioned his father, and Fana felt sad, too.

  “Well, here’s Jared,” Uncle Cal’s voice said from below them, as if he were far away. “I told you he’s in bad shape.”

  “We’ll need a minute alone with him,” Mommy said.

  Uncle Cal shook his head. “I’m sorry, but no way. I’ll let you stick a needle in his arm, like you said, but that’s as far as it goes.”

  The three of them argued back and forth a little while, which made Fana and Jay-Red giggle. It was always fun to listen to people when they didn’t know you were there! Then Mommy went up to Jay-Red’s bed and lifted up the plastic. While both of them watched from above, she pulled a needle out of her purse.

  Fana squirmed with excitement. “She’s got blood in it, just like I told you! The blood heals. Just watch!”

  Then, Mommy took the needle and stuck it slowly, slowly, into sleeping Jay-Red’s bare arm. She used all the blood, until the needle was empty. Then, she stepped back from the bed.

  “I feel it, Fana!” Jay-Red said beside her, rubbing his arm up and down. “I feel it.”

  “Of course you do, silly.”

  “But that means I have to go soon,” Jay-Red said, his smile vanishing. “I’ll be awake! We can’t look for my dad if I’m awake.”

  “But I can. Just tell me how.”

  He sighed, thinking. He had looked pale the first time she’d seen him, but she could see normal colors in his skin now, seeping to his cheeks. He was beginning to look like a well person.

  “Well, you just have to listen really hard. You’ll see lots of stuff here that’s kind of scary, so you have to stay away from that,” Jay-Red told her.

  “Like what?” Fana asked, thinking of bees.

  “Ghosts and stuff. I mean, they’re not all bad.” He lowered his voice. “My mom’s a ghost,” he whispered with his cracked pink lips. “I see her here. She says she’s looking out for me, until I’m safe. She’s trying to keep me away from them, so they won’t take me. They came to my house one time, when my dad built a tepee. My dad’s friend the Magic-Man couldn’t stop them like he thought. They scared him. He never got that close to them before. That was the day they started making me get sick, even though I didn’t know it. You have to keep away, too, Fana. You better.”

  Why did all the boys she met in the not-real place always try to tell her what to do? Still, Fana’s irritation couldn’t make her forget how scared she felt about them. She knew what they were, even if she didn’t know all the words, or what they looked like. They were the Bee Lady.

  “I don’t get sick,” Fana said.

  “There’s worse things than getting sick,” Jay-Red said, his eyes as serious as a grown-up’s. “Worse than being dead, even.”

  “Like what?” Fana said, although she already knew.

  “Getting lost,” Jay-Red said, whispering again. “Getting stuck.”

  Jay-Red’s skin began to look funny to Fana, as if she could see through it. He was fading away. He noticed, too, staring at his arms. “It’s almost time for me to go back.”

  “But tell me how to find my aunt Alex first!”

  Jay-Red sighed impatiently. “You don’t need me, Fana. You’ll see them when they’re sleeping and they’ll tell you things. Do you remember when you told me ‘The blood heals,’ and I woke up and told my dad? It’s like that. You listen and try to remember when you wake up.”

  Before she could ask Jay-Red any questions, he was gone. Only the Jay-Red in the bed below her was left, and he was still sleeping. Mommy, Teferi, and Uncle Cal were crowded around him, watching. Fana knew he would probably wake up soon, before it was light outside.

  Even though she was nervous about being left alone, Fana decided she would look for Aunt Alex and Jay-Red’s dad by herself then. She turned around to see where else her tunnel might lead, and then she realized that it branched away in many different directions. She counted them all: one, two, three, four, five, six. There hadn’t been that many tunnels before!

  Which way should she go?

  Fana wanted to cry at first, but then she remembered that she was in charge in the not-real place, and she could turn the tunnel into anything she wanted to. She covered her eyes and counted to ten, deciding that when she opened them again, she would be somewhere close to Aunt Alex.

  But she wasn’t. She was still in the tunnel, still lost. And there was hardly any light.

  “ . . . we shall overcoooome . . . we shall overcoooooome . . .”

  Fana craned her ears. Someone was singing! She felt her heart beat faster. It sounded like Aunt Alex! If she listened really hard, she could hear, just like Jay-Red had told her.

  “ . . . we shall overcome . . . some . . . dayyyyyyyy . . .”

  “Aunt Alex!” she screamed out. The singing was echoing around her, but it seemed to be coming from the tunnel on her right side, which was narrow. Fana began to crawl in that direction, even though she could feel the tunnel squeezing her. The tunnel was spongy—it wasn’t rocky like the one with the bees—but it still felt too tight, not quite big enough for her to fit. Fana tried to make herself smaller like Alice in her book, but the tunnel only squeezed tighter and tighter, until she could barely move at all. “Aunt Alex!”

  This time, she heard a tiny-sounding response: “Fana?” Almost like a mosquito in her ear.

  “I don’t know how to find you!” Fana screamed out,
wriggling uselessly.

  Aunt Alex tried to talk to her—Fana could hear her saying many things quickly, an outpouring—but she couldn’t hear everything because her voice was so tiny, so far away, and every time the voice sounded as if it were coming closer to her, it got so soft that she could barely hear it. “. . . both still alive . . . armed men . . . asking us . . . the blood . . . don’t know . . . heard them say Star Island . . . at the guard gate . . . asked for the O’Neal . . . hear that, Fana? O’Neal is the . . . Fana? Tell your mommy, hear?”

  Now that Aunt Alex had told her the name O’Neal, it seemed to her that a very old man lived in the house where Aunt Alex was, and that his name was Shannon. It was as if Fana had known that all along. Shannon was a funny name, and she was sure she had heard it before. He stole blood.

  Suddenly, the tunnel was gone and everything went dark. Fana felt herself falling, falling, until her legs caught with a snap, and suddenly she was hanging upside down by her ankles, swinging back and forth. Fana screamed, flailing her arms wildly in the darkness. She felt dizzy. She didn’t know which way was up and which way was down, and she couldn’t move. She couldn’t keep herself from swinging.

  She remembered what Moses had said to her about the wagon wheel getting stuck, and she wondered if he’d been right. This time, she did begin to cry.

  “M-Mommy!” Fana called out between her sobs. But Mommy wasn’t in the not-real place, so she couldn’t even hear her. It had seemed as if Mommy was very close before, but she wasn’t close now. Fana didn’t know where she was. She didn’t know where anything was, not anymore.

  Then she smelled it again, just as she’d known she would. The Bee Lady. She didn’t like that smell, like a dead animal rotting in the sun, and suddenly it seemed plain to her that the Bee Lady had meant to hurt her all along. That was why she’d fed her cakes, hoping she would come back! Except the Bee Lady wasn’t a real lady. The Bee Lady was nothing but shadows, thick shadows that could touch you and swallow you forever.