For the first time during his visit, Dawit again felt like a husband to his wife. Their thoughts were resting in a comfortable place, remembering.
“I did,” Dawit said. He did not say the things that further anguished his mind: how inhumane it was that circumstances would ever see fit to bring people together to love for a short time and then force them to part; or, nearly as cruel, to bring love to people who, even while living, could never be together.
But he must hope for something, at least. In that, he might find purpose in the endless, waiting years.
“Lalibela is a city built of stone in Ethiopia, with underground churches adorned with paintings and magnificent religious relics that are centuries old. Many liken the city to Jerusalem. Coptic priests, the very devout, live there,” Dawit said. “And so do we. There are fifty-nine of us, and we dwell in six houses of learning. Our teacher is a bearded man named Khaldun, whose name means ‘Eternal.’ There are many among us who believe he is the closest thing our Earth has to a God. He gave us this Living Blood we share. He is, in a sense, my father, Jessica. That makes him yours. And Lalibela is our home.”
He blinked, beholding the sight of his wife in her magnificent dress of white, sitting in this room washed in sunlight. This was not Jessica as she had been. She had buried so much of herself; all he could see in her face was everything that was missing. He did not know her. The discomfort of trying to speak brought sharp tears to Dawit’s eyes.
“One day—when all of this is gone, or perhaps before—when you have nowhere else, you should go there. And you will find me. For all of time, I will be waiting for you.”
He did not remain to hear her answer, or to hear her utter the word goodbye. That said, Dawit turned and walked down the stairs, past Gaines’s stare at the doorway, around the playing children and chickens in the courtyard, and through the clinic of miracles.
Outside, his driver was still waiting.
63
As soon as Jessica heard the irregular clump-clump on the stairs, she knew Alex was coming. The hurried sound pulled her back into herself somewhat. Even now, the sight of this whitewashed room felt distinctly false, as though it weren’t real. This was not her life. This was not her. But, yes, it was. An African sun was shining through her window, brightening the colorful Zulu beads hanging on her wall. Those beads had been a gift from a grateful mother. A mother whose child had been spared by her blood.
Alex came limping into the room, sweat dripping down her face. She was wearing her lab coat—that, at least, was not so unfamiliar—and she probably still had patients on her exam tables. This was their clinic. Their new place.
Could David have really been here, in this room, only ten minutes before?
“Where’s your cane?” Jessica asked, forcing herself not to think about David. Instead, she thought of Alex. It was ironic; for all the testing her sister had done with her blood, drawing new samples as she needed them, sometimes enough to make Jessica feel lightheaded, Alex had never once injected herself to see if it might help her back mend properly or make her limp disappear. “It’s not here for me,” Alex always said.
“Girl, please, I left from down there so fast, I forgot all about it,” Alex said breathlessly. “Sipho came running in with some foolishness about ‘the sister’s husband,’ and then Daddy Gaines said David was here. Bea is downstairs saying she’s faint. What happened?”
So, she would have to think about David, after all. Not David, she reminded herself when tears threatened, Dawit. That was who had been here. David, who was so much a part of her that she still couldn’t bring herself to sleep on his side of the bed, had never existed. He’d been a fantasy conjured up for her by Dawit. A lie. She’d wanted the lie so much, she’d believed it. And knowing that David was a lie wasn’t enough to keep her from missing him.
“He came,” Jessica said.
Alex inhaled abruptly, sitting gently on the bed beside Jessica. She nudged Teacake out of her way, staring at Jessica with wide eyes. “All the way out here? How did he find you?”
“He read about the clinic in a magazine.”
Alex’s mouth dropped open. “Jessica …”
“Don’t worry. We knew people would find out. Daddy’s already bought the land in Botswana. All we have to do is move.”
“That’s not what I mean, Jessica. If David found you, what about those other—”
Jessica shook her head. “They would have come by now. I don’t think they will. I just have a feeling.”
“You and your feelings.”
“The thing is,” Jessica said, speaking words she still could barely bring herself to believe, “I’m one of them. Maybe they respect that.” She heard her own words repeated back to her: One of them? What did that mean? She was one of what?
“Jessica, David is one of them, and you see how they messed up his life. But I guess we’ll have to just pray on that and leave it alone. What did David want? What did he say?”
For all of time, I will be waiting for you.
Now, Jessica could not stop the tears she’d fought since David was here. She hid her eyes behind her arm, hoping to force the tears back to where they’d come from. Instead, a tiny sob escaped.
“Oh, Jessica … girl …” She felt Alex’s arm slip around her, and her sister’s head rested on her shoulder. “I know. You don’t think I understand, but I’ve watched you, and I know. Let it go, Jessica. It isn’t natural not to cry. Let it out.”
Furiously, Jessica shook her head. At last, the wall was coming. The room had been trying to melt, trying to take her back to Miami, to her own house, to the family she’d once had, the little girl. Ki—. No. She would not think her name.
When Jessica chose, she could make that time seem like a century ago, and she could make the place it had held in her heart feel cold and barren; not fragile the way it had felt when she’d walked toward the stairs and seen David there. When she’d wanted to run downstairs into his arms and have him hug her and tell her it was all a dream. He was back now, he would have said, and it’s over now, Jess. It’s over. The way he’d comforted her in the cabin.
The feeling was gone, now. Jessica blinked, her mind remarkably clear. She heard the boys arguing outside, some childish dispute, Sipho’s voice louder than anyone’s. It helped. Sipho would not be alive today if not for her, if not for what had happened.
Jessica moved away from her sister’s embrace, patting Alex’s knee to tell her she was all right. “It just shocked me a little, seeing him.”
Alex gazed at her with perceptive eyes. She knew there was more, that Jessica had pushed it away, but Jessica prayed she wouldn’t try to draw it out. “Well, why did he just run in and out like that?” Alex asked at last. “He didn’t even want to see Beatrice?”
Beatrice! Bee-Bee had cut herself, Jessica remembered. She’d seen the blood. And Katie was a great help around the house, but the teenager was no nurse. And she wasn’t a mother. “Shoot, I have to go downstairs.”
“Jessica,” Alex said, dead serious, holding her sister’s wrist. “You told David about his daughter, right?”
There was a commotion, more footsteps on the stairs. Bea appeared, holding her smiling namesake in her arms, and Daddy Gaines followed behind her, buttoning his shirt. Jessica’s mother looked fifteen years younger since she’d started dyeing her hair black, wearing it in cornrow braids. Jessica saw a drop of blood on Bee-Bee’s T-shirt, but her tears were forgotten. Bea, straining, lowered Bee-Bee to the floor, and she ran between Jessica’s knees. “Par-ty, Mommy!” she cried.
“You come here,” Jessica said, lifting her up to rest her plump little buttocks on her knee. She’d grown so much! Jessica was still amazed at how much Bee-Bee looked like neither her nor David, but like Jessica’s father when he was a boy. That was the first thing Bea had said when her grandchild was born. “Did you cut yourself, Bee-Bee?”
“Look, Mommy.” Grinning, Bee-Bee held up her hand for Jessica to look at it. Jessica checked each finge
r on that hand, then each on the other. There was no mark, and the blood was gone. But of course the mark would be gone.
“That was almost twenty minutes ago,” Daddy Gaines said. “Cut’s long healed by now.”
“Jessica, you answer my question,” Alex said. “Did you tell him?”
“What was David doing here?” Bea whispered. She, like Jessica, rarely spoke his name.
“Would you all please hush?” Jessica said, focused on watching her daughter play with her own fingers. No matter how often it happened, she couldn’t get over how quickly Beatrice healed. The crazy girl sometimes hurt herself just to watch the marks go away, as if playing a game. That was probably what happened this time too. “He just came to see me, that’s all.”
“Why didn’t you tell him about Bee-Bee?” Alex asked.
Because it would have hurt him more to leave us if he’d known, Jessica thought, understanding for the first time. And he had to leave. There might be a time when it would be different, but for right now, he had to leave.
“Daddy went away?” Beatrice asked, startling Jessica. Her smile had faded, her magical little fingers suspended in midair.
Jessica met her daughter’s eyes beneath her beautiful crown of black curls. Again, she was startled at something that shouldn’t startle her; she’d never said a word to Beatrice about her daddy, or shown her a picture of David, but Beatrice knew things. She always had. Jessica forgot she couldn’t keep things from her.
“You’ll see him someday, Bee-Bee. I promise.” She hadn’t planned to say that, and didn’t know why she had, but the words filled her chest with comfort.
Beatrice scrunched up her face, concentrating. “La … li …”
“That’s right. He’s going to Lalibela. That’s far away, in a country called Ethiopia.”
The taller Bea had her hands on her hips. “I wish somebody would tell me what’s going on. I don’t like David Wolde showing his face here. When I saw him, I nearly—”
“Mom, please,” Jessica said wearily, stroking Bee-Bee’s hair. “He’s gone now. I just think it means we’ll have to leave here soon, that’s all. The rest of them probably know we’re here too. So we better get back to work.”
“Well, you all can do what you want,” Bea said, “I may go to Botswana, but I’m not going to any durn Ethiopia. You hear? I’m tired of all this moving.”
“I said soon, Mom. Not now,” Jessica said, smiling at her. What would she have done without this woman? And Alex, too. All of them had accepted so much, purely out of love. They didn’t exactly sit around talking about Jessica’s condition—What was the word in Spanish? Her inmortalidad—but they knew. Their knowing made it easier for Jessica, like she had some kind of disease they were supporting her through. Everything was changed, and nothing was changed.
For now, they were here.
Daddy Gaines finished fixing his shirt, tucking it into his pants. “I think Jessica needs to be alone,” he said, always intuitive. “Alex, you have a clinic full of patients. And Bea, I wish you would help me get ready for the party. I can’t blow up all those balloons.”
“Par-ty!” Bee-Bee said, squirming out of Jessica’s arms. She danced on the floor, bouncing on her fat, sturdy little brown legs.
“What party?” Jessica asked. She felt dazed, disconnected, again.
Alex leaned close to Jessica, whispering in her ear. “New Year’s, remember? It’ll be the year two thousand, girl.”
Of course. That was why she’d thought David might come today. She’d been expecting him, for some reason, since Christmas. She was both dismayed and relieved that he had come. “Two thousand,” Jessica repeated, imagining David’s face from the picture he’d shown her with his jazz group, so long ago. “I can’t believe I forgot that.”
Would all of her photographs one day look that way too? Would that photograph of Kira on her desk one day be yellowed and frayed? Would it turn to dust before her eyes?
Kira. She’d actually thought her name. And she was still fine.
The comfort Jessica had felt earlier, talking to Bee-Bee, began to glow from her. She was all right. But she wouldn’t be doing much partying tonight, Jessica thought. She would make an appearance because the children were always happy to see her—”the sister,” they called her—but then she would leave them. Tonight, more than other nights, she would need to stay in her room. She would read some passages from her Bible. And she would pray. What was it that had kept her from praying for so long? Only anger?
If the answers weren’t in the Scriptures, maybe she could find them in herself, in her heart. She was a part of something. Her new baby, this remarkable first child of the Living Blood, was a part of it too. She could feel the power between them, more than a parent-child bond. It excited her. But she would be lying if she tried to convince herself she wasn’t more afraid than ever. She was.
Her life was bigger now.
But she was just about ready. That was the most amazing thing of all.
“Par-ty… P-A-R-T-Y…” she heard Bee-Bee saying as she made her way down the hallway with Daddy Gaines stooping low to hold her hand. Jessica watched her from the bedroom doorway, and Bee-Bee twisted her head back to stare straight into Jessica’s eyes with a smile lighting up her round, coffee-brown face, as though she were sharing a secret.
Despite the hurts, which went to her soul, Jessica’s spirits soared.
Acknowledgments
First, special thanks to my family and foundation: my mother, Patricia Stephens Due; my father, John Dorsey Due Jr.; my sisters, Johnita and Lydia; and my grandmother, Lottie Sears Houston.
Much gratitude to the advance readers who helped make this a better book: Muncko and Carol Kruize, Luchina Fisher, Robert Vamosi, Olympia and Chris Duhart, Grace Lim, Bonita Whytehead, Alex Cambert, Rene Rodriguez, Ivan Roman, and Angela Youngblood. And, naturally, thanks to my agent, Janell Walden Agyeman of Marie Brown Associates; and to my editor, Peternelle van Arsdale.
For assistance and inspiration, much thanks to Dr. Charles Pegelow, M.D., director of the Sickle-Cell Center, University of Miami School of Medicine, who has a vivid imagination. To Fernando Gonzalez and Larry Pomilio, for teaching me so much about jazz. To Greg Kihn and Michael Marano, for their scary stories. And to Mitchell Kaplan, who still looks out for me.
Finally, thanks to Blanche Richardson for her warmth, her love of books, and for introducing me to such an impressive, powerful fellowship of African-American writers.
About the Author
TANANARIVE DUE is a Miami Herald columnist, a Bram Stoker Award finalist, and a contributor to the bestselling collaborative Florida thriller. Naked Came the Manatee.
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Praise for My Soul to Keep by Tananarive Due
“I loved this novel, and think it may be the next hot thing to happen in the supernatural suspense genre—it’s really big and really satisfying, an eerie epic that bears favorable comparison to Interview with the Vampire…. I read it non-stop, and think it’s destined for bestseller lists.”
—Stephen King
“Due, the author of The Between … blends the supernatural with ordinary humans, creating a suspenseful tale of great love and even greater loss.”
—Washington Post
“With one foot in the crime-novel genre and one foot in Anne Rice territory, Due delivers a gripping thriller that’s a worthy companion to her award-winning debut.”
—Time Out New York
“In this harrowing and moving second novel, Due enlivens the potentially formulaic genre of supernatural suspense with a sharp eye for realistic detail…. The pull between the mortal and the immortal defines the span of this deftly woven tale, a novel populated with vivid, emotional character that is also a chilling journey to another world.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A deftly crafted journey into the darkness of a man’s soul when confronted with the inevitabl
e loss of those he holds most dear…. Leads the reader to a stunning climax.”
—The Observer Reporter
“My Soul to Keep is compelling, dark and eerie. It calls into question all of our common assumptions about life and death and turns them inside out.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Tananarive Due does what many suspense writers only hope to do: She grabs us, scares us and convinces is we should hold on tight to the very end.”
—Houston Chronicle
“My Soul to Keep is richly imagined, using details of history, the arts and sciences to craft a riveting tale.”
—Emerge
Other Books by Tananarive Due
The Between
Copyright
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This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
MY SOUL TO KEEP. Copyright © 1997 by Tananarive Due. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.