The Canopy

by Angela Hunt

  Question filled the shaman’s eyes as Delmar interpreted: “So— when we die, are we like the babies?”

  Michael smiled. “Yes. When Yai Pada Son lived on earth, he cut a trail for you to follow. When the time comes for your body to die, the hawk will carry your spirit to Yai Pada’s beautiful land.”

  As Delmar translated, the shaman stared into the fire, his face shifting to the look of a man who has just walked into a surprise party. A moment later the lines of heartsick weariness faded from his face. Raising both hands, he cried out, “Yai Pada Son!” and no translation was required.

  Following their leader’s example, every man, woman, and child lifted their hands. Chanting “Yai Pada Son” again and again, they danced for joy, arms and legs and bodies jumping in a melee of celebration. Having made a communal decision to embrace the Son of Yai Pada, they congratulated themselves with warm hugs, wide smiles, and more whooping than Alex had heard in her life.

  Irritable and confused, she drew back from the fire, pulling in her legs lest she be trampled in the merriment. Caitlyn sat next to her, her face rapt with interest, and Olsson and Baklanov leaned against the wall and watched in amusement. Between the two men, Emma wore a frown the size of Atlanta.

  She caught Alex’s eye, then leaned toward her. “He has no right to meddle in their religion!” She yelled to be heard above the din. “More harm has been done to native people groups in the name of God than anything else.”

  Bancroft cast Emma a scornful glance. “Why don’t you stick a sock in it? They’re happy. And they believed in God long before we got here. They just didn’t have the full story.”

  “The full story as you know it,” Emma countered.

  “The full story,” Bancroft insisted. “They deserve to know the entire truth. What they do with it is up to them.”

  Sighing heavily, Alex lowered her head. She intended to bring her hands up to block the sight of Kenway’s overactive new converts, but a cold sweat prickled on her jaws when her arms trembled and did not obey. She flexed her arms, trying to stop the trembling, but they continued to . . . shudder.

  The truth crashed into her consciousness like a jet disintegrating on the ocean surface. Athetoid tremors resulted from the destruction of brain fibers responsible for the inhibition of muscle movement.

  Her disease had just taken a giant step forward.

  20 APRIL 2003

  5:45 P.M.

  Rising from the midst of the happy hubbub, Michael stood and made his way to the water skin that hung from a branch near the entrance. He hesitated, however, when he saw Alex sitting against the wall, her arms trembling and her face ashen.

  Caitlyn hovered over her mother. “Mom? Are you okay?”

  Alex bared her teeth in an expression that was not a smile. “I’m f-fine.”

  “You don’t look so good.”

  Michael crossed to Alex’s side in broad strides, then knelt by her side and lifted her arm. The sheer lightness of the limb surprised him—she had lost an alarming amount of weight, though it was hard to tell how much in the long pants and long-sleeved shirt she wore.

  He smiled up at Caitlyn. “Be a dear, would you, and see if you can find some fruit for your mum? I think I saw a bowl of bananas near the woman who has the twins.”

  Alex glared at him. “I’m not hungry.”

  “You need to eat.” Michael caught Caitlyn’s eye and gave her a “please humor me” look. When she reluctantly moved away, he frowned at Alexandra. “Why didn’t you tell me how far the symptoms had progressed?”

  Her disease had not diminished the fire in her eyes. “I’m not your patient.”

  “I’m not your doctor. I hoped I was your friend.”

  She grimaced at the word. “Are we friends? Sometimes I think we are mortal combatants.”

  “Then I must apologize for leading you astray.” Slipping his arm around her waist, Michael helped her to her feet. He had intended to walk her to her hammock, but once she found her balance, she pulled away.

  “I’ll be fine now.”

  “How long have you been experiencing tremors?”

  She shrugged. “This is a fluke. The stress of the day, probably.” Tossing her head, she took a step forward, then swayed on her feet. “Oh.”

  He caught her arms before she could fall. “Let me help you.”

  “I don’t need your help.”

  “You are the personification of stubbornness.” He spoke with a creditable attempt at coolness, marred only by the thickness in his voice. “You’re going to need my help and everyone else’s to get out of the jungle. Bancroft and I can fashion another travois if necessary, and—”

  “Leave me alone, w-w-will you?” Her voice had gone ragged, torn by the threat of tears that now sprang to her eyes.

  Floundering in an agonizing maelstrom of emotion, Michael pulled her into a darkened spot behind a hanging hammock, then placed his hands on her shoulders and forced her to look at him.

  “Alex, I know you’re brave; Cait knows you’re brave. You don’t have to put on a front for either of us.”

  Tears were rolling down her face, leaving dusty tracks over her sallow skin. “I . . . don’t . . . want her to know.”

  “Good heavens, woman, the child is a budding genius! Do you really believe she can’t see how sick you are?”

  He felt a sharp stab of regret as Alex’s face went slack.

  “She knows, dear heart.” He whispered the words as he stroked her face, her tears burning his fingers. “We all know, and we want to help.”

  “Oh, God!” She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling, then slid between his hands to land in a heap on the ground. He followed her, kneeling in the dirt, and heard the words she spat into her hands: “There is no help for me. I’ve found no cure here.”

  “Others did.” He waited, desperately hoping she would look up and understand the faith that lived in him and within these people. “Don’t you see? Caitlyn gave me the key this afternoon. She said God healed Shaman’s Wife, and in that moment I realized we were wrong to look for bacteria and proteins and biochemicals. We should have been looking for God.”

  Her hands lowered then, but the look she gave him was anything but gentle.

  “They were all cured,” he continued, pressing on before she could completely harden her heart, “when they climbed the tree in faith. The kapok didn’t hold the cure—God did. The tree is God’s gift to them, and their faith in him healed their diseases.”

  “Faith?” she asked, her voice soft with disbelief. “And how on earth am I supposed to manufacture that?”

  20 APRIL 2003

  6:40 P.M.

  Alex drew a long, quivering breath, barely mastering the anger that shook her to the core. When it came to matters of science, sometimes Kenway made no more sense than one of these simpleminded natives.

  “You talk about faith as though it were something I could reach out and snatch from thin air.” Her hands, wet with her tears, curled into fists. “I can’t do that, Michael. I can’t lower myself to the level of superstition and folklore.”

  “Not even to save your life?”

  She released a hoarse and bitter laugh. “Not even. Don’t you see? We’ve already tried that. I wore myself out climbing that cursed tree, and your mysterious keyba didn’t work for me. Because I don’t believe. I can’t believe in hocus-pocus.”

  She pressed her hand to her head as a train of new thoughts roared through her brain. Could his argument be valid on a purely chemical level? Every neurologist knew the neurotransmitter serotonin could induce feelings of happiness and well-being. In the same way, could some other chemical neurotransmitter lead a patient to a childlike belief in spirits and healing trees? The brain created serotonin from the amino acid tryptophan, derived from high-protein foods. If she had more time and the proper equipment, she might discover that something in the diet of these native people produced a neurotransmitter for faith, and that same chemical had something to do with healing prion diseases.
Why not? Neurotransmitters originated in the brain, where prions did their deadly work.

  Groaning, she pounded her head. Her ideas, which should have been clear and logical, felt muddy and complicated. This puzzle held too much to contemplate and too many variables to cloud her thought processes. She couldn’t think in this condition. Nothing made sense, especially the events of the last twelve hours.

  Kenway took a deep breath, then bent to catch her eye. “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy. . .”

  Her lower lip trembled as she returned his stare. “Don’t quote the B-B-Bible to me, Doctor.”

  “That’s Shakespeare, not Scripture.”

  She flushed. Now he knew how badly she was floundering.

  “Listen, Alexandra, and try to follow my reasoning.”

  “I thought you wanted me to cast reason aside.”

  “Faith requires reason, too. Since God gave us brains, I’m certain he expects us to use them.”

  Snorting softly, she pressed her fingertips to her pounding temple.

  “You went up that kapok tree as a researcher, not a seeker.” His brittle smile softened slightly. “If you had gone as a supplicant instead of a scientist—”

  She couldn’t stop a laugh. “This village may be primitive, Kenway, but these are not the dark ages. I haven’t met a sackclothed supplicant in ages.”

  “Perhaps it’s the wrong word, but it’s the right meaning. I meant supplicant in the sense of someone who is truly seeking God.” He looked past her with an intense but guarded expression. “I was a supplicant after my wife’s death. I could find no answers for what had happened to us, no comfort in the world. So I went to God for explanations.”

  Alex swallowed hard, trying to dislodge the scream of frustration irritating the back of her throat. “Let me get this straight—your wife died, you couldn’t understand why, and you went to God. You said a prayer, Jesus waved some sort of magic wand, and suddenly everything became clear?”

  A look of inward intentness grew in his eyes, then he shook his head, sending wisps of black hair flickering past his face. “I still don’t have all the answers, but I have faith enough to believe God does. He created us, he loves us, and he hurts when we suffer the effects of evil. He loves you, Alexandra, despite what you may think of him.”

  An unexpected weed of jealousy sprang up in Alex’s heart, stinging like nettles. She didn’t understand Kenway’s faith, couldn’t accept it, and didn’t want it, but oh how lucky he was to have found something that made life make sense. She’d give anything to be able to drop her burdens and rest in the certainty that someone else would carry them.

  Grief welled within her, black and cold, forcing words over her stammering tongue. “H-how can God know what I’m suffering? And if he loves me so much, why did he give me this disease? Why—” she choked on a sob that rose from somewhere deep in her chest—“w-why is he going to take me from my little girl and leave her alone in the world? If God exists, and if he is all-powerful like you say he is, then he took my mother, my husband, and now he’s going to take my life. How can you look at all he’s done and say he loves me?”

  “God didn’t take your husband—from what Caitlyn’s told me, he ran off because he didn’t want to be a father. That’s his fault, not God’s. And your mother died from a disease, and disease is a corruption of God’s design. Don’t you see? Sin is corruption; we are all born into it—”

  She threw up her hand. “If I wanted to hear this, I’d have stayed home and watched a televangelist.”

  “Why don’t you want to hear truth, Alex? Why won’t you consider the simple facts in evidence? You know God exists—with your own eyes you saw him heal Shaman’s Wife.”

  “I saw . . . a sick woman convince herself that she’d been healed.”

  “You know that’s not true.”

  Alex gritted her teeth. “Okay—suppose we do p-p-postulate that Shaman’s Wife received some kind of supernatural healing. If so, then why did God k-k-kill her only a few hours later? And what about Deborah Simons? The woman claimed to be a Christian. She sacrificed herself for all of us—”

  “For you, Alexandra. She sacrificed herself so you could find the healing tribe.”

  Alex took a wincing breath. Not true. Deborah couldn’t have— wouldn’t have known.

  As if he’d read her mind, Michael nodded. “She may not have known of your need, but God knew. And Deborah was obedient, so when the Spirit nudged her to stay, she agreed. Her death, as hard as it is for us to understand, was a victory—at least, it could be.”

  Unable to focus, Alex pushed his words aside. “That’s crazy.” Her throat tightened. “God shouldn’t have allowed so many deaths today. They were all innocents.”

  His mouth shifted just enough to bristle the whiskers on his cheek. “God didn’t kill those people. Evil did.”

  “And that I can’t accept.” She tossed her head and eyed him with cold triumph. “If God is all-powerful, he could have saved every one of those people today, but he didn’t. Why not?”

  “God is all powerful,” Kenway answered, speaking in a low baritone that was both commanding and gentle. “His thoughts are higher than our thoughts, and his ways far above our ways. He is greater than evil, and not at its mercy, but he has created men and angels with free will. When men choose evil, suffering always results.”

  He spoke hesitantly, as if about to say something he knew she would dislike. “God’s gift to us is that he takes the suffering we endure and uses it for our good. It’s sort of a spiritual alchemy, if you will— lead becomes gold.”

  “Sickness,” she whispered, thinking of Shaman’s Wife, “becomes healing?”

  “And death,” his gaze came to rest on her questioning eyes, “becomes life.” He hesitated a moment, then reached out to grip her trembling hand. “The others want to leave tomorrow, so there’s little time remaining. If you want to spend tonight in the kapok tree, I’ll help you climb, and so will Olsson. We’ll devise some way to hoist you up—”

  “Haven’t you heard a w-w-word I’ve said?” She snatched her hand from his, then struggled to stand. Leaving him alone in the shadows, she shouldered her way through the celebrating villagers, then moved into the quiet of the curving alana. The air was cooler here, the atmosphere less irritating.

  The man was as dense as a London fog. She’d rebuffed his religious ideas a hundred times, yet still he dangled them before her, doubtless expecting her to snatch at them out of sheer desperation.

  How could she believe in something that defied everything she’d ever been taught? Tonight he’d told the natives that God created the world, and everyone knew the Big Bang had led to evolutionary processes that had been creating the world for millions of years. Tonight he had spoken of spirits, good and evil, when everyone knew that life existed on one physical plane. Spirits and ghosts and demons belonged to the realm of folklore, not modern science.

  And yet—

  She pressed her hands to her head as the events of the day tumbled in her brain like bits of glass in a kaleidoscope.

  This morning she’d witnessed something she couldn’t explain, but early man couldn’t explain the sun or the seasons, either. Inexplicable mysteries were nothing but logical occurrences that had yet to be explored and understood, so maybe she could admit that Shaman’s Wife had apparently been healed in the kapok tree.

  “Okay, yes!” She hissed in the silence of the alana. “All right! The woman was healed. She was sick, ready to die, and by the time we left, she had been restored!”

  Nothing answered in the narrow tunnel, but nothing was present to answer—no demons, no God, no spirits. Just Alex and the echo of her illogical confession.

  She snorted as she considered the ramifications of this trip. If they made it out of the jungle, Kenway would undoubtedly take his observations of the incident back to England where he’d publish a paper that would be hotly disputed for years to come. Then some bright young res
earcher would look beyond the religious explanation for a rational reason and that scientist would discover a link between a chemical neurotransmitter and prions. His work would provide a cure just in time for Caitlyn. . .

  But not for Alex. Because she would not be around.

  Blinking, she looked up. She hadn’t meant to follow the alana to its entrance, but she found herself standing at the edge of the field, where seven charred mounds marked the circle that had earlier held funeral biers.

  Breathing in the scents of ashes, despair, and desolation, she moved through the trampled field with shaky strides, then broke into a hobbling run as she neared the papaya trees at the edge of the forest.

  She had risked everything to find this village and she was about to lose everything she had gambled. If she remained, she’d only become a burden to her daughter and her companions. If by some miracle she made it back to Atlanta, she’d lie in a limp and helpless body for weeks while her brain frantically formulated theories no one would ever be able to capture.

  Better to die here, now, than to drag out the inevitable. Better to let Caitlyn deal with a tragic accident than to suffer the horror of watching a death caused by FFI.

  Gathering all that remained of her ebbing strength, Alex pushed her way into the jungle.

  20 APRIL 2003

  7:02 P.M.

  Dr. Mike?” Michael looked down to see Caitlyn by his side, a pair of bananas in her hand. “Have you seen my mom?”

  He glanced toward the alana, where Alexandra had disappeared. “I think she needed some peace and quiet. I’m sure she’ll be back soon.”

  “I hope so.” A frown knit the girl’s forehead. “I know the alana’s supposed to be safe, but it creeps me out after dark.” She offered him a banana. “Want one?”