“Yeah," John said. "He's that kid. That stupid kid that went into the river naked and was attacked by two alligators. The kid that had an article in the newspaper the other day about what happened. Remember, I showed it to you?” he said.
Anna looked at me. “Yeah I recognize you from the photo now. What the hell are you doing here anyway? Have you completely lost your mind?"
“Are you cheating on me with this guy?” John asked. “Did you hook up with him when he was in the hospital?”
Anna shook her head. “No. Are you kidding me? He is a lunatic. Says he wants to save us from some sort of accident. I say he is crazy.”
As they were agreeing I was a madman and were laughing at me instead of fighting each other, I turned my head and my eyes fixated on the clock on the microwave. It read 8:29. I sighed with relief as I stared at the stove where the pot of boiling water still stood untouched. That was the number from my dream. That was what it had looked like. And today was the twenty-ninth of august. 8-29. I fully believed that this was the moment that the accident was meant to have happened, but somehow I had managed to change it. I looked at the daughter who now rolled her eyes at the whole scene, then turned and walked up the stairs with heavy feet not knowing how lucky she really was.
I started laughing. At myself, at the absurdity of the situation, at the fact that no one would ever believe me if I told them about this, except for Aiyana of course, but maybe that didn’t matter one bit. It didn’t matter what anyone thought. I had changed the destiny of this family in my own clumsy way, and most important of all, I had saved that girl’s life. I could never prove to anyone that I had, but I knew it myself. That was enough.
“I told you he was crazy,” Anna said when they heard my laughter.
Then John grabbed me by my collar and carried me out of the house. “And never show your ugly face here again, you hear me?” he yelled as I walked towards my car. “I know who you are and I know your car anywhere,” he continued. “Stay away from my wife!”
I waved at him as he slammed the front door. Then I sneaked back towards the house and cut off the power to the house, just in case. Water wouldn’t boil without electricity.
Chapter 25
I was going wild in the car on my way back. I turned up the radio and started singing and tapping on the steering wheel. I felt such a sense of purpose and direction in my life. It all made sense in a weird way. The voices, the images, the craziness.
When I drove back to my own street, I passed the Kirk’s house and went directly to Aiyana’s. I even parked the car in front of her house not caring what Heather or anyone else would think.
It was the grandmother who opened the door. Aiyana wasn’t home, she said. I laughed and then I grabbed the supposedly old woman who looked like she was in her late twenties and lifted her in the air. She laughed with me as I spun us both around.
“Tell her I did it,” I said when I put the grandmother down again. “Just tell her I saved the girl.”
“I will,” the grandmother said.
When she spoke I could tell that she was a lot older than she looked. Her voice was rough and experienced. It belonged to someone who had seen it all.
Back in the house, I grabbed my dinner after heating it and brought it to my room. Dr. Kirk had been gone all day at the clinic and later he went to visit Mrs. Kirk in the hospital, so Heather and I were alone and luckily she was nowhere to be seen. I turned on the TV in my room while I ate and started flipping through the pages in the books Jim had sent me. Pictures of internal organs and surgical procedures grossed me out. It was like I could no longer look at these pictures, as if it had started to appall me.
I put the book down and pushed my plate aside on the table. I had lost my appetite. Tomorrow afternoon Jim was going to come and begin the tutoring. I dreaded it. I leaned back in my chair and almost dozed off when something interesting appeared on the TV screen. I turned up the volume. It was a historic program about the Timucua Indians of Florida. I sat on my bed and started watching it. They began by showing on a map where the Timucua had lived in the North Central part of Florida and Southeast Georgia. They were “the largest indigenous group in that area and consisted of about thirty-five chiefdoms,” the narrator said. “When the European first made contact, speakers of Timucuan dialects occupied about nineteen thousand two hundred square miles, and was home to between fifty thousand and two hundred thousand Timucuan. They had no immunity to the Eurasian infectious diseases, that the Spaniards brought with them and it killed thousands and thousands. By 1595, their population was estimated to have been reduced from two hundred thousand to fifty thousand. By 1700, the population of the tribe had been reduced to one thousand. Then the war followed. The English colonists along with their native allies completed the Timucuan extinction as a tribe soon after the turn of the nineteenth century. When the United States acquired Florida in 1821, only five or fewer Timucua remained. They became extinct as a people. Their language is now also extinct. A population that we know inhabited the Florida peninsula for thousands of years was gone in a few years. Twelve thousands years of human history has completely vanished. ”
I leaned back on my bed shocked at what had happened to these people. But I was also wondering. If they were extinct how come Aiyana kept talking about herself and her family as direct descendants of the Timucua Indians? They couldn’t be. Only five or fewer were left when Florida became a part of the United States and eventually they became extinct.
My eyes grew heavy with sleep as I watched the rest of the show about Florida’s first people. I began to dream and in my dream I was with Aiyana. We made heavy and passionate love in the clearing at the Twelve Mile Swamps. We were alone at first, but soon I realized we were being watched by eyes between the trees. Flocks of Native American Indians were hiding in there watching us. They were tall, wearing their hair in a bun on top of their heads, making them look even taller. They wore linen clothes of animal skin and had tattoos all over their bodies. The tattoos were gained by their deeds and social class, I somehow knew. I was filled with an anxiety as I realized they had come to take her away from me. They were calling for her. “The one to save them all,” they yelled as they came closer while dancing and humming in a threatening way, like they were trying to scare me away from her. Meanwhile, Aiyana was laughing her childlike laughter, and as I turned my head to look at her her light brown eyes turned yellow. They were glowing in the moonlit night like my jaguar’s eyes had done.
Needless to say, I woke with a start. I was screaming from the top of my lungs and hyperventilating. My body was sweaty and had left the sheet on my bed soaked. Realizing it had all just been a dream, I lifted my curtain and saw that night had become day. I stepped on Jim’s books as I stumbled into the bathroom. I wanted to take a shower but decided to go in the pool instead. The house was empty, I realized with relief as I walked down the stairs. Only Maria was humming in the kitchen. Heather had already taken off for her classes.
I dived in and swam a couple of laps, trying to wash out the dream and cool myself down. I felt like my entire body was still shivering. It had been nothing but a dream, I thought as I tried to calm myself. It was my fear of losing her; I didn’t need any psychologist or dream interpreter to tell me that. I had never loved anyone like I loved Aiyana so it was only natural that I was afraid of losing her. Maybe I was even afraid of losing the jaguar, as well. My fear that Jim would one day succeed in his quest had scared me. Of course it had.
It was only a dream.
I took a couple of laps more and when I stuck my head out of the water my eyes gazed upon the most breathtaking sight—Aiyana. She stood at the edge of the pool, smiling at me.
“Hi gorgeous,” I said.
She laughed. Her laughter was clear as a bell. Enchanting as ever. I climbed out of the pool and took her in my arms. I hugged her and held her body close to mine.
“Christian. You’re making me wet,” she said.
“I know. I just needed to h
ear your heartbeat again. I needed to feel you close to me.”
“That’s sweet,” she said gently.
I let go of her and grabbed a towel. She laughed at my hair when I wiped it and said it looked like a lion’s mane. Only blond. I combed it back with my hand and tried to straighten it a bit. She grabbed my hand.
“Don’t,” she said. “I like it wild.”
I grabbed her around the waist and lifted her in the air. “I know you do,” I said. Then I kissed her, intensely. I smelled her and drank from her lips. Then I kissed her again like I was afraid that this would be the last time. I held her tightly, maybe too tightly, because she suddenly pulled away from me. She smiled gently. “Take it easy, Christian.” She caught a curly hair in front of my face and put it behind my ear. I wanted to kiss her again but she put her hand over my mouth. It filled me with frustration. I didn’t want to hold back. I wanted her. I was aroused, I was panting, I had to have her, here right now and the fact that she was asking me to hold back made me even more aroused. I grabbed her neck and forced her lips on mine. I forced my tongue in her mouth. Again she pulled away. She was teasing me, I thought. She wanted to be the one in control. It made me desperate. I wanted to be the one to take what I wanted, when I wanted it. I was the man, she was mine, I needed her. Why was she pulling away? Couldn’t she tell I needed her to love me, I needed her to make love to me right here right now? I grabbed her again by the shoulders and pulled her towards me. I was so hard now I was almost bursting. I put her hand on my crouch on my shorts. I started moaning, panting heavily.
She pulled away again. “Not now, Christian. Not like this.”
I could see her breasts through the dress, those wonderfully sculptured, fleshy breasts. I wanted to touch them, hold them in my hands and she saw it in my eyes. She put a finger under my chin and lifted my face till I looked into her eyes. “I have to go now, Christian,” she said. “My family is waiting for me. I’ll see you later?”
I nodded as she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. I felt so devastated, so defeated. It was an unusual situation for me. Normally girls were throwing themselves at me, they were the ones who wanted me to be their boyfriend while I was trying to escape them. What was this? I thought as she started walking towards the fence.
“I only came to ask you if you’d sing my song for me this afternoon?” she yelled while smiling mischievously.
“I am being tutored, but maybe after?” I said. My voice was trembling and I sounded like a child who just realized he wasn’t going to get what he wanted for Christmas.
She waved as she leaped over the fence and I went back into the house to get dressed and have breakfast.
They called from the newspaper and said they loved the story, especially the pictures. It would all be in the paper the next day. I was happy when I hung up and decided to forget all about the nightmare and this morning with Aiyana. She was only playing hard to get, I thought to myself. Maybe she enjoyed the power she possessed over me, which was beginning to be pretty obvious. Yes. That was just it.
Later I started reading in the books and going through the notes Jim had given me. It was all just a lot of words and more appalling pictures that no longer meant anything to me, but at least I was giving it a try.
Jim rang the doorbell at two o’clock and we studied until four. He was being really nice and patient with me, which was necessary since I had a hard time finding the interest for all this that had once been a huge part of my life. We sat in the garden afterwards and talked about med school and what I had to be aware of and which teachers I should try and avoid and so on. Jim was in his third year so he was going to be a great ally to have. He even told me he would be willing to help me with my exams as long as Dr. Kirk kept paying him. Then he laughed and gave me an elbow. I laughed politely.
“You’ll do fine,” he said when the laughing had stopped.
It felt reassuring. They all had so much confidence in me, and I was really afraid of letting them down.
Jim left just as Heather came home. This time I could no longer avoid her. I was sitting in the kitchen having a snack when she entered and threw her bag on the table. Then she looked at me.
“Do you mind telling me what is going on?”
I swallowed a bite of my peanut butter and jelly sandwich that I had enjoyed until that moment. It was something completely new to me since we didn’t have it where I came from. When I first saw Maria make it I was revolted but since I took the first bite I had to surrender.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Don’t start with that. I saw you over there. I saw you sitting on that porch outside that … that … crazy house, with that strange girl.”
I got up from my chair and took my plate with me. I shrugged. “So what? What’s the big deal about that?”
Heather rolled her eyes. “What’s the big deal? The big deal is that Daddy is going to go ballistic when he hears that you have been spending your time in there with that family.”
I threw out the remains of the sandwich and put the plate in the dishwasher. “Why?” I asked.
“Because he hates them,” she said.
I looked at her. “Hates them? But why?”
“Don’t you understand? They’re destroying this neighborhood. They don’t fit in here.”
I shook my head. “No, I don’t understand that at all. All I have seen are nice people that have been really nice to me and treated me like a part of their family.”
Heather exhaled. “Okay. There is no easy way to say this so I am just going to say it straight out. They’re living off drug money.”
I had to laugh out loud. “Drug money? Are you kidding me? You know they are just a bunch of nice women in there, right?”
“It was the father,” said Heather.
I went quiet. “What do you mean?”
“He worked for a drug cartel or something. That’s what Daddy told me. I asked him the other day when we were at the hospital while mother was asleep, if he knew what had happened to their father. He said that he knew from friends in the police that they had an eye on him. They suspected that the father was like a courier. That’s why he traveled all the time. You know, to South America and Asia and Europe and stuff. They think he might have come in bad standing somehow and that’s why he disappeared all of a sudden. It has happened to a lot of people these last years. They make tons of money with drugs and suddenly they disappear. The body is never found. Some say they feed the alligators with their bodies.”
I swallowed hard. I didn’t want to hear this. “It can’t be true,” I said.
Heather shook her head. “I know you don’t want to believe it, but look at them. How do you think they can afford to live in a twenty-five million dollar house like that? In a neighborhood like this where people are doctors and famous lawyers. They don’t work, they don’t even send their kids to school. You can’t be with those people. They are not right in their minds. They are like children. They are not decent people like you and I. None of those girls will get a proper education. Social Services have been on their case several times about their lack of schooling, but somehow they manage to keep out of trouble. She is allegedly homeschooling them, but she is always playing that horrible instrument. I don’t think she is teaching them anything. I tell you, Chris. That mother in there is nuts. Not letting her children go to school, growing all those weird weeds that she calls herbs in the garden and turning the place into a hippie festival whenever they have guests. They’re living off drug money, it is only a matter of time before the police gets on to them. You don’t want to be in the middle of it when they’re going down, do you? They’ll drag you with them. You’d be thrown out of the country.”
I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t believe what she was saying. I refused to believe it. “No, they are good people. They are nice and loving and caring and …”
“Tell me you haven’t wondered where they get their money from,” she said.
I breathed deeply. Of c
ourse I had. “I just assumed they had some kind of insurance or that the father left them some money somehow.”
“Oh, he left them money, alright. Blood money. They didn’t even look for him, did you know that? The father. When he disappeared they didn’t even search for him nor have the police search for him. I think they knew he was dead. They also knew why he was dead and they didn’t want the police to find out about it. You have to be very careful with those women. They will dazzle you with their beauty and make you believe all sorts of things. They’re just scammers. Like the gypsies they look like.”
“That’s nonsense. That’s all stupid rumors, coming from people who don’t understand who they really are,” I replied. My voice was shaking.
“Now you are protecting them? It is worse than I thought. They’re slowly turning you into one of them. They want you for some reason. Maybe they think you should marry one of the girls. They must be anxious to get rid of some of them and have fewer mouths to feed.”
“To say a thing like that is idiocy and you know it.” I was yelling now. My throat felt tighter and I had a hard time breathing. “I love Aiyana and it doesn’t matter to me what her family might have been or might not have been!”
Heather laughed an insecure laughter. “She has you nicely rolled around her finger, hasn’t she? She knew how to push the right buttons and make you fall for her. Lifting up her skirt in front of you, casually throwing a laugh at what you said. But it is all just an illusion, Chris. She wants nothing but your money so she can continue to live a life without having to lift a finger. Besides. Dad is never going to allow it.”
“Dr. Kirk is not my dad,” I said. “He doesn’t rule over me.”
Heather laughed again. “Oh, yes he does. No one defies Dr. Kirk.”
Realizing that this was an endless discussion that I would never win, I rolled my eyes at her and walked away. She yelled something at me that I didn’t hear, and as I reached my room I slammed the door behind me. Sitting on my bed I felt my body shaking. What if Heather was right? What if they had been playing tricks on me the whole time? But how? Why? I pulled the covers over my head. Why should I believe that story about the father? Heather had no evidence, only the doctor’s words for it. It could be nothing but rumors. They knew nothing for sure. Aiyana had told me herself that people made up stories about them because they were different than others. This was just one of them. My thoughts were like a whirlwind in my head. An illusion? Could she just have pretended to have heard my thoughts? After all, she did just repeat what I had just said with a “I know, I heard it.” But there were other things, too, that she couldn’t have known about me, wasn’t there? And what about Halona? She definitely had powers. That couldn’t be an illusion. And my own visions? They had turned out to be true. Mrs. Kirk had been attacked and that woman had been pregnant. That I knew for sure. That couldn’t be just a coincidence. I felt like screaming. It was all so messed up. I had no idea what to believe anymore. So I chose to believe my heart. I grabbed my guitar and ran to meet with Aiyana.