The tree cover was too thick to drive the car into the brush, as Dawit had originally hoped to do, so he would have to empty Mahmoud’s trunk. Because Jessica had thrown the keys away, Dawit had to pry open the trunk with a tire jack. This took ten minutes of too-precious time, more to blame on Jessica. She stood behind him, watching, waiting. When the trunk popped open, Dawit was assailed by the scent of blood from the fractured corpse.
“Lord Jesus,” Jessica said, taking a step back. “I can’t do this. I can’t.”
“If you were trustworthy, I would leave you in the car with Kira. Since you’re not, you’ll accompany me. I won’t make you help carry him. I wouldn’t want you dirtying your hands.”
Dawit hoped Kira was sleeping by now so she would be spared this sight. Dawit had wrapped Mahmoud’s body in one of Princess’s old blankets, which he’d found on the floor of the cargo bin in the minivan. A few bloodstains had seeped through in a macabre pattern, but not many. Aside from the damage to Mahmoud’s crushed face, most of his injuries were internal. Dawit grunted, heaving the two-hundred-pound load across his shoulder firefighter-style.
Jessica gasped, stepping away from him. “David, don’t make me go. Please. Why didn’t we just leave him back—”
“Someone would have found his body where it was.”
“So what?”
“The coroner would have had a mild shock in the morning when his corpse woke up in a bad mood, don’t you think? Come. Let’s be quick so Kira won’t worry. Turn on the flashlight.”
Dawit staggered down the embankment, squeezing between the straight trunks of thin pine trees, following the weak beam of light that Jessica directed in his path as insects flurried around them. Dry twigs snapped beneath their feet, and Jessica made a frightened sound. Just a bit farther, he assured her, slipping into ingrained habits of tenderness. They needed to go far enough to keep Mahmoud out of sight from the road. When they finished, he would have to haul Mahmoud’s car another few miles north and then leave it on the shoulder. Even if someone found the abandoned car with its mutilated trunk, it was unlikely they would discover the corpse before dawn, when it would be a corpse no more.
“I’m trying to protect Kira from all this, David, but I’m not going to allow you to kidnap us. You hear me? You can’t use her to control me. I’ll tell her the truth if I have to.”
Dawit’s ears burned as he tossed his burden against the trunk of a peeling paper tree. Ignoring Jessica, he propped Mahmoud into a sitting position, the bloody head dangling forward beneath the blanket. It was more kindness than Mahmoud deserved.
“I know you killed Peter,” Jessica said, her voice a venom. “And I know you tried to kill Alex. I left a message for a policeman in Miami. They’re looking for you right now.”
Dawit spun around to peer into the flashlight beam glowing from where his wife stood behind him. His mind could not swallow her words. How could a woman who’d been so understanding through so much, his own wife, have become so heartless as to turn him in! Would this horrid night never end in its cruel surprises?
“You shouldn’t have done that. You’re wrong about Alex.”
“I don’t believe you!” Jessica shouted. “You know you pushed her because of what she found out, how your blood heals.”
Dawit staggered, this time from disbelief. Betrayed, yet again! “You …”—he could barely form the words—”You told your sister about me? How did you get my blood?”
“From the shed. In a syringe.”
Dawit raised his fingers to his temples, as though to steady himself from fainting. Had he been careless enough to leave his blood in the shed when he finished the Ritual with the cat? He should be smitten down for his own stupidity, if that were true. And it was, apparently.
Dawit laughed in surrender, hanging his head.
Jessica looked at him as though he were a specter. “What are you?” she hissed.
“What am I? I’ll tell you what I am,” he said, stepping toward her. “I’m your salvation, Jessica. Your sister will die soon, and perhaps your mother too. Don’t you see what you’ve done, you fool? Mahmoud is our least concern. I thought he’d chased you as a tactic to prompt me to go. But it’s worse than I feared. He must know what I’ve told you. Mahmoud wants you dead because Khaldun wants you dead. Every day you live, you endanger us all. And you have told your sister too? Who else?”
“No one,” Jessica whispered, apparently frightened by his words. Dawit imagined he could feel her trembling, and he longed to hold her despite his rage and sorrow. He was now orphaned in every sense, for the second time; he must be anathema to Khaldun and his brothers. He could no longer claim his home in Miami, nor his true home in Lalibela.
“Mahmoud attacked your sister to protect the Covenant, just as he has attacked you and Kira tonight,” he said, weary to his soul.
“But what about Peter? And Rosalie Tillis Banks—”
“Rosalie is none of your business,” Dawit said, his body rigid. At the sound of Rosalie’s name, carelessly tossed at him, his heart had dropped. “My daughter is none of your business. You didn’t see what had become of her. Until you have been in my place, and seen your own child as she looked, you have no right to ask me about her.”
“Tell me why you killed Peter,” Jessica said. “Just tell me why. Was it because of Rosalie? He never made the connection, David. Neither of us had. I don’t understand why.”
Dawit took a deep breath, gazing up at the thick darkness above them. Black-gray nimbostratus clouds hung against the skies. “Killing Peter,” he said slowly, “was a mistake.”
His confession bound them in silence. Then, he heard her sob. She’d known, he realized, but she had not believed. Not until now.
“I would live my entire lifetime from the beginning and suffer everything twofold,” Dawit said softly, “to regain that one night, Jessica. To correct that one night. That night, I laid a path to this one, so full of rage and distrust. You have harmed me now in more ways than you will ever know, but I forgive you everything because my forgiveness is unconditional. And you, my love, have forgiven me everything but this.”
“I won’t go with you,” Jessica sobbed.
“That’s your choice. I won’t hold this gun to you. But Kira is going with me. I suggest you get as far away from Mahmoud as possible by morning. And I can guarantee you that your sister is not safe where she rests. Your police officer friend’s energy would be better spent with her.”
Jessica’s sob turned into a wail, half vengeful, half frightened. It reminded him of a wail from another horrible night in the wilderness, when she’d watched helplessly while his body met death. If Dawit had not thought she would strike him, he would have surely hugged her now. Instead, he turned and began to walk back toward the car, where Kira was waiting.
“What can we do?” Jessica called after him.
He paused, but did not turn to face her. “Very little. But there is one way, at least, they cannot harm you or Kira.”
“What is it?” Jessica whispered.
Walking on, Dawit didn’t answer because it was unnecessary. She knew. The words need not be spoken. The answer was coursing, silent and hot, through his very veins.
52
Teacake was dying. It was the last absurdity.
As the shabby rental car rolled beneath the summer sun, David and Kira were in the front seat, and Jessica sat with the cat in the back. Teacake had hurt himself somehow. She’d noticed a small trickle of blood in one of his ears, so maybe he’d been injured from flying glass. Or hit his head somehow. She didn’t know. He was lying flat and quiet on the seat beside her. So quiet. His eyes were open, but looked glazed. And he wouldn’t drink the water from the eyedropper David had bought at the Walgreen’s west of Pensacola, right before they crossed the Alabama state line. Jessica told him to buy it, along with whatever other things he wanted to pick up, because Teacake looked dehydrated. But he wouldn’t drink. The drops of water were rolling back out of his mouth, dribblin
g on the stubbly hairs on his chin.
It figured. Like Job, she’d lost everything else she cared about, so why not the cat she’d raised since he was a fur ball of a kitten? Don’t even get started, she thought. She couldn’t dwell there, or she’d start screaming and David might turn around and have to knock her in the head with the gun he was carrying in his jeans. That would be a sight for Kira.
See, Kira, you think Daddy’s this nice guy because he saved us from that other maniac, but did you know he’s a maniac himself? Did you know that?
Every few minutes, Jessica caught David gazing at her in his rearview mirror. For a strange half-second, their eyes would meet where their minds couldn’t. Then she would look toward her window and stare out at the long, unfamiliar miles.
She could run. At Walgreen’s—the only time David had left her alone, except in the filthy bathroom of the burger place at the last truck stop—Jessica sat in the car and realized she was free to go. David had Kira. He always took her with him wherever he went, his unknowing hostage, his peace of mind. But that was okay. If she jumped out of the car to run to the pay phone just across the street, he wouldn’t have gotten far with Kira yet. The police would find them.
But what if they didn’t?
In the end, Jessica was relieved when David and Kira walked back outside through the store’s glass doors. Her chance was gone. No more decisions to make. All she had to do was ride in the backseat and wonder if David would ever actually shoot her, wonder what it would be like to live for five hundred years, wonder if Alex was all right, wonder what Peter had felt when his throat was slashed. And stroke her cat’s tummy while he died.
“I saw an M!” Kira cried to David, pointing somewhere out of the windshield. “There.”
“You’re telling tales, Kira. That’s not nice,” David said.
“It is too there.”
“Then where’s the M in Dairy Queen, young lady?”
“In the middle,” Kira said, and she was beset by giggling.
“Spell it.”
“D-A-I-R- … Kira began, and laughed again, “… M-Y …”
Unexpectedly, Jessica chuckled once, deep from her chest. She didn’t even know she’d been listening, but a part of her mind had decided to laugh. David glanced at her in the mirror, surprised. Too bad for him if he expected to see her smiling. Jessica couldn’t remember the last time she’d smiled in days. She couldn’t even remember where smiles came from.
“Just for that, you lose a point,” David said to Kira, his eyes still on Jessica in the mirror. “You have to find L all over again too. I’m still ahead of you.”
Jessica’s eyes locked with his, just that fast, and her stomach and chest and every loose part inside her seemed to gather, and she realized what she’d been thinking all this time she’d been staring outside: I’m still in love with him.
“Mommy, what’s wrong with Teacake?” Kira was staring at the cat’s wide-open eyes. Until she spoke, Jessica hadn’t noticed that Kira had clicked free of her seat belt and was leaning over the seat to gaze back at them.
“He’s very tired,” Jessica answered hoarsely. Her voice was gone now too. Soon, she feared, everything would be gone. “I think he needs to rest.”
“He’s not the only one,” David said. “Look out for a motel so we can pull over before the sun gets unbearable. More than it is already, I mean. Okay, Jess?”
Jessica looked. His eyes were there again.
Dawit was beginning to realize how selfish he’d been. He’d thought so much of his own losses that he hadn’t considered Jessica’s. He had never seen her look so wretched.
In fact, he had brought her nothing but wretchedness. Her life would have been better without him. He’d known this in the beginning.
Stay away from that woman, he’d told himself the first day he noticed her. You will make her life a misery, as yours always has been. You will bring her the same pain you brought Christina and Rufus and Rosalie.
“David, why did you fall in love with me?” Jessica had asked so often, especially when they were first married. To him, the reasons were obvious, but they were impossible to explain. How could he tell her that when he saw himself reflected through her eyes, he could forget what he was? He’d wanted her in his bed because of her face, her youthful shapeliness, the challenge in her defiant eyes. But he’d lost his heart to her because she was everything he was not. And for everything he’d known he would teach her, he had hoped she could teach him too.
What did she see now? Would she ever again touch him, or always tremble away?
He wanted her still. Despite all the turmoil of the past twenty-four hours and the worse suffering that he knew remained, all he could think as he stared in the mirror at her face was that he wanted so badly to make love to her and hear her whimper her pleasures in his ear.
He wanted to hear her say that she loved him, even if it was a lie, or to at least assure him that she’d loved him once. He, who had taken love so much for granted. Christina’s love had been of no real value to him. And Adele’s love only showed its true power when she was no longer with him.
Could he even name the others? Rana, of course. His first.
But what of the women in Cairo, the chieftain’s daughter in Ife, the naive bargirl in Paris (Monique? Charmaine?), the noblewoman he’d toyed with in Gonder before losing his hand to her husband’s sword? They had all loved him. So was this what they had felt when he was gone, this horrible longing to step backward in time?
Oh, to take it all back. To take everything back!
Couldn’t Jessica see that this was why he could not leave her and Kira? He could never leave anyone again. And if he must spend eternity longing to see the love missing from Jessica’s angry eyes, then the punishment suited him. At least he would always, always have Kira. He must never give Kira reason to hate him as Jessica did.
Dawit clutched his daughter’s hand. It was sticky from the Coke she’d spilled from the burger place when she tried to push her straw through the plastic top. “My legs hurt, Daddy.”
“They’ve probably fallen asleep because you can’t move around enough. We’ll stop soon, Duchess. Then you can stretch.”
First, to find lodgings, for rest and an escape from this horrible sun. Next, the Ritual. He had all he needed in the bag he’d brought from Walgreen’s. Dawit’s heart leaped from both joy and fear. He would do it sometime before morning. He could not dwell on it long, or he would lose his nerve.
And tomorrow? More driving. He hoped he would be able to locate his contact in New Orleans, the man who could manufacture passports and birth certificates for Jessica and Kira. Fifteen years had passed since he’d seen the red-haired man—he’d never known his name—and he had no phone, but Dawit knew how to find his secluded bayou home. It was unlikely he would have moved, even after all this time. He’d told Dawit, in his butchered English and with an ironic twinkle in his eye, how his family had owned the overgrown parcel of land since the days of slavery.
This would be Dawit’s last return to the region stamped with his suffering. They would be away from here at last, beginning fresh. And living, at last, a life without unhappy endings.
53
From somewhere, there was light.
Mahmoud’s eyes flew open and he blinked hard, his senses momentarily stunned. His head was covered, he realized. He smelled blood directly beneath his nose. Beyond, he smelled pine trees all around him, and a fainter scent of exhaust fumes. When Mahmoud tried to move, his body grew so rigid that he had to clench his teeth in pain.
Suddenly, the rough fabric covering his face was whipped away and Mahmoud was greeted by the fresh, dew-drenched scent of morning.
“Come now,” a familiar voice said. “This is a very strange resting place, brother.” Could it be his imagination? He was seeing his Life brother Kelile, the jokester, grinning widely beneath his wiry moustache. He had no skullcap, but he was dressed traditionally in a white tunic and white linen slacks. His clothes s
eemed to glow against his dark skin.
Kelile, with a grunt, reached beneath Mahmoud’s armpits to pull him until he was sitting up straight. Someone behind Mahmoud began to yank the blood-spotted tarp from his shoulders to free him. Startled, Mahmoud turned to see who it was. Teka, the technological master from the House of Science! He, too, wore a white tunic and pants. How could his brothers be here? Was he dreaming?
Mahmoud’s thoughts were interrupted by pain. He cried out, feeling as though his limbs were being torn apart as they tried to bring him to his feet.
“The devil has shit on you,” Kelile laughed in Amharic, touching Mahmoud’s soiled Western clothing. “What is this shambles?”
“Are you an illusion?” Mahmoud asked.
“No, my brother,” Kelile said, squeezing his shoulders hard. “No illusion. Flesh.”
Despite his confusion and pain-wracked body, Mahmoud grinned. No joy could compare to the unexpected appearance of two Life brothers, and such well-respected Searchers. No other Searchers could boast the swiftness of Kelile and Teka, especially guided by Teka’s devices. What a happy reunion! Khaldun always said Searchers should not think of themselves as individuals: They were a smaller family created to preserve the peace of the larger family. Mahmoud held Kelile and Teka in a long, hearty embrace.
As he leaned against them, he was barely able to stand. What had happened to him? The van with Dawit’s wife and daughter had stopped along the roadside. He’d fired his gun at them. What next? Instantly, Mahmoud remembered the oncoming headlights, the grill of an automobile upon him. And its deadly impact, mercifully swift.
“Dawit must not have changed much,” Kelile said. “By your appearance, I see he still has the heart and strength of ten men.”
“Not so. Do not be fooled. He is resourceful, but he is not the Dawit you remember,” Mahmoud said sadly. “It is not so much Dawit’s victory you witness here, but only my own failure. That is why Khaldun has sent you, I’m sure. But so quickly?”