Jessica’s bottom lip trembled slightly. Obviously, Fana knew Jessica was scared, so her only option was to explain why. “Well, there’s different kinds of scared, Fana. All mothers are scared for their children. And even though you can do a lot of things I don’t understand, mostly I’m just scared for you. I want you to learn control. I want you to know right from wrong.”
“It’s wrong to hurt people,” Fana recited, recalling her lesson from Moses.
“But it’s not that simple, Fana. You didn’t mean to hurt me when you made me forget Kira. You were trying to do me a favor. But in the end, it hurt me some, too, when I believed she was with me, and then she really wasn’t.” Even now, the memory of touching Kira’s face and clothes threatened to pull Jessica back into the emotional swampland she’d been fighting her way through. But, then, maybe what she’d touched in her bedroom wasn’t only memory at all, Jessica thought. Maybe Kira had come back to her, just to let her know her spirit was there. Who was to say that ghosts weren’t really just bundles of memories come to life?
“You love her more than me,” Fana said bitterly.
The effect felt like a slap to Jessica’s face. “Fana, that’s not true.”
“You wish she was me.”
Jessica’s emotions collided. Distress, pity, then anger. “Is that why you did it, Fana? Is that why you made me forget, because you think I love her more?”
Fana bit her lip. Tears glistened in her eyes, but didn’t fall.
Jessica gripped her daughter’s shoulders tightly. “First of all, you listen to me good: That’s not true. If you’re telling yourself you’re pulling that out of my mind, it’s a lie. There’s no one in this world I love more than you. And if Kira were here, there would be no one I’d love more than the both of you. It’s not a question of more or less—it just is.
“But you are right about one thing, sweetheart: Kira was different. She couldn’t wake up after she died. And that means she’s gone, and I miss her. I wouldn’t want to forget her any more than I would want to forget you. You’re inside me, just like Kira is inside me. You’re both part of who I am. And there’s plenty room enough, Fana. Sweetheart, if you could never see Moses or Aunt Alex again, would you want to forget all about them? Or would you want to remember how much you love them?”
“ ’Member!” Fana said, not hesitating.
“Right. And if you miss Moses, would that mean you don’t love me?”
Fana shook her head. Then she smiled. She understood.
Jessica tugged Fana’s nose. “And know what else? I’m not taking you away because I think you’re bad. You just need your daddy, sweetheart, and that’s the one thing that makes you exactly like all the other children in the world.”
Fana’s face opened up with a beautiful grin. For years to come, whether or not it was true, Jessica would be convinced this night was the last time she had truly seen her baby girl smile.
11
bump-bump
Lucas snapped awake, clutching at the warm, diluted cup of rum and Coke sitting before him on his tray. The drink nearly spilled, more from his sudden movement than from the turbulence that had jarred him from sleep. From habit, as if he could see the weather disturbance outside his oval window, Lucas tried to peer into the darkness, but all he saw was his own reflection staring back, illuminated by his dim overhead light. The hum of the South African Airways jetliner, which had seemed nearly silent when he’d fallen asleep, now sounded like a roar to his sleepy ears. For a disorienting moment that tugged relentlessly at his reason, Lucas felt as if he weren’t really where he thought he was, as if the man staring back at him did not exist.
I don’t feel nothin’, Luke.
He’d expected to open his eyes and find himself in the reclining chair at Jared’s bedside, where it seemed he had been sleeping for an eternity. But not tonight. Lucas had numbed himself enough to tell Jared good-bye and go through his last rounds of sad hugs with Cal and Cleo at Wheeler. Jared was far away by now, Lucas thought.
Jared was under Boog’s bed.
bump-bump
Lucas had fallen asleep again without realizing it and was awakened by yet another jolt as the plane shuddered against the rough air, bouncing upward enough that Lucas felt it in his stomach. This time, he made an audible gasp, forgetting himself for another endless instant.
What nonsense words had just gone through his mind? Under Boog’s bed. Jesus Christ. When was the last time he’d entertained even half a thought about scrawny little Boog?
“Howzit, sir? Another drink?”
A pretty girl with ruddy cheeks and tight blond curls stood over him with a smile that seemed sincere, almost hopeful, as if she were grateful for his company. Lucas gave the cabin a quick once-over and noted all of the placid, sleeping faces. The other passengers captivated him for a moment in their apparent security, their lack of anxiety. For an instant, Lucas felt like a visitor from another world.
“Sure. I guess this one needs freshening,” he said.
“I’ll bring a new one.” She spun around.
Though she’d spoken in a hushed tone to avoid waking the student sleeping next to Lucas, he had heard her Afrikaner accent. Funny, wasn’t it? Not long ago, he wouldn’t willingly have set foot on South African soil, period, not so long as the whites there were benefiting from the most blatantly racist empire on the planet. And South African whites, obviously, were still benefiting. One of the male flight attendants on this flight had looked Indian, but Lucas sure hadn’t noticed any black Africans in uniform.
But now, he couldn’t wait to get to South Africa. He needed to get there.
A panel overhead rattled slightly as the plane took a sudden dip. This time, the accompanying jolt felt as if it had centered squarely against Lucas’s back.
“Jesus,” he said aloud, noticing how the all of his pores seemed to have come alive in that instant, especially across his back. It had felt just like—
that thing under Boog’s bed.
A crazy thought seized Lucas: Was the entire plane shaking or just his seat? As soon as he thought it, his mouth felt so dry his tongue nearly stuck to the grooved, hard flesh at the roof of his mouth. He whirled around to see if someone might have given his seat a push, but the bearded man behind him had his face flattened against his pillow on his window, his mouth an open cavern, as if he’d been sleeping for days. Like everyone else, he was asleep. Everyone.
So why wasn’t the turbulence disturbing anyone else?
“Is there rough air?” he asked the flight attendant when she returned with his drink. One quick sip from the plastic cup told him she hadn’t remembered to bring rum with his Coke, but he decided it was for the best. He didn’t want to wake up with a hangover, not with so much to do.
“The captain made an announcement about fifteen minutes ago. Sometimes the weather has a mind of its own. Nothing serious. Just a few bumps.”
A few bumps. But a few bumps could be very serious sometimes, couldn’t they?
“You don’t like to fly, do you?” the girl asked, lingering. Lucas couldn’t remember when every woman under thirty-five had become a girl in his mind, but it was a sure sign of age.
“Usually I’m fine. My nerves are on edge tonight. Thanks.”
That was an understatement. Actually, Lucas realized, he was probably in the throes of an honest-to-God anxiety attack, the kind he’d had now and then as a child and again since Rachel’s death, and caffeine would only make it worse. His tingling skin was the giveaway. Sometimes caffeine triggered the attacks, so maybe the Cokes he’d spiced his two previous bottles of rum with were responsible for this sudden uneasiness.
No, uneasiness was the wrong word. This was mindless fright, the kind of fright that makes a normally levelheaded man wonder if his seat is the only one bouncing around at thirty thousand feet, until a flight attendant holds his hand and tells him everything is all right—and judging by her glance back at him while she walked away, she was probably wondering if
she should offer him a Valium and a bedtime story.
Worst of all, goddammit, he was remembering Boog. Lucas’s anxiety had carved a path straight back to his childhood, resurrecting memories he’d felt sure he’d managed to misplace long ago. Such as that Boog’s real name had been Everett Porter. And that he’d lived at 125 Juniper Way. And that he was the worst damn speller in their entire third-grade class—he couldn’t even spell the name of the street he lived on and, with hindsight, had probably been dyslexic—but he could run faster than anyone at the school and could hit a baseball clear to next week. And he’d always looked skittish, nearly jumping away when people came too close to him, as though he thought anyone who came near was going to attack.
And only when Lucas had spent the night at Boog’s house had he understood why Boog was so jumpy. Or understood some of it, at least. More than he wanted to know.
Bump-bump
Jesus, it was as if he were there all over again. Trying to sleep. The bumping waking him.
Boog, what’s that?
It ain’t nothin’, Luke.
Boog had said it in such a deadpan, robotic voice, like a creature from one of those flying-saucer movies Lucas’s uncle Cookie had taken him to see when he spent the summer with him in Atlanta, the ones that had made him mistrust the stars. Boog had said it staring straight up at the ceiling with eyes so wide that Lucas could see the whites glowing from his night-black face, which had become featureless in the dark. Ain’t nothin’. Lucas had tried to hold on to Boog’s words as if they were a rescuer’s rope into a deep, dark well, but he’d known his friend was lying.
But, then again, maybe he wasn’t lying. Maybe Lucas had had a dream, or maybe Boog’s dog, Sassy, had gotten inside and was sniffing around under the bed, and that was the reason—
BUMP-bump
When it had happened the second time, Lucas had sat straight up in bed. The whole bed had jumped, its legs scraping against the wooden floor with a whine. It had actually hurt that time, as if someone had taken a sledgehammer under the bed and whacked it good, pounding against the sharp bones of Lucas’s shoulder blades. It felt like a fist almost, except bigger and more solid. When Lucas had looked over at Boog, he was still staring straight up at the ceiling, his hands folded across his chest like someone about to be buried, his eyes still wide, afraid to blink. And before Lucas could say anything, Boog had said in the same machine’s voice, “I didn’t feel nothin’ that time neither.” Except he sounded less like he believed his own lie this time, and his voice was so shaky that Lucas wondered how he’d been able to speak at all.
It wasn’t intellect but instinct that made Lucas fling his head over the side of the bed to try to see what was there. He was more afraid of not seeing the pounding thing than he was of seeing it, because he knew that whatever he saw could not be as bad as the creature with glowing red eyes and dripping claws that his imagination was conjuring, so looking under the bed was the only way he was going to send that monster back wherever he’d come from. And he saw—
Nothing.
The moonlight had sliced a path across the floor, brightening the loosely laid floorboards, and Lucas could see under that bed as if he had been granted Kryptonite-enhanced night vision. He saw his own brown loafers sitting neatly beside Boog’s thrown-over work boots that were not made for children and Lucas suspected really belonged to Boog’s older brother or one of his uncles. He saw a red flyswatter. He saw two or three tiny green toy soldiers, long forgotten and tangled in a large dustball Boog’s mama’s broom had missed. The emptiness under that bed stretched so far that Lucas nearly toppled over trying to take it all in.
BUMP-bump
If Lucas had been able to find his voice anywhere inside him, he would have screamed. Because he’d felt it again, that same pounding that jolted his legs and made the bed move, nearly knocking him off-balance, and he knew as well as he knew his own name that it was the mattress pounding, not the floor, because that was where he felt it, and he also knew that it was doing it by itself because no one was under there, not even the drooling monster. Something invisible, something he could not see, was alive and angry beneath him.
Lucas barely felt the rough tug from Boog that prevented him from tumbling to the floor in a heap. The Boog who was speaking to him then was not the same crybaby from the playground, nor the same Boog who, as his grandmother would put it, looked like a strong wind would snap him in two. This Boog was brave, and he was all Lucas had. Just lie still, Luke. Lie still like me. Stay quiet. Fold your hands, see? Then close your eyes and count to ten. Usually it goes away.
And even though the only thing Lucas wanted to do was run as fast and as far as he could, he seemed to have lost even the simplest control of his limbs, so it was all he could manage to fold his shaking arms across his chest and lie rigid beside his friend, trying to remember the sequence of numbers between one and ten. He had to begin counting more than once. And before he could reach three for the second time, bracing for the next jolt he was certain would stop his heart, he felt warm urine seeping through his cotton pajamas like fresh blood. He didn’t know which of them had peed, or maybe it was both of them, but he couldn’t wonder about it long enough to care. . . . eight . . . nine . . . ten. He was holding his breath—he had no idea how long he’d been doing that—and he could hear his booming heart in his ears. Then, Boog’s triumphant voice: See? I told you it was nothin.’
And there were no more bumps, not all night, which Lucas knew for a fact because he could barely bring himself to close his eyes, much less actually sleep, even though, miraculously, it wasn’t even a half hour later that he heard Boog’s breathing slow to snores that sounded as if his nose was clogged up. Boog had gone to sleep, just like that. That was how Lucas knew Boog had felt the bumps before, perhaps many times, and even though they scared Boog half to death, he had learned to live with them and act as if they were nothing. Nothing at all.
When daylight finally began to glow outside and Lucas accidentally awakened Boog as he climbed out of bed in his cool, damp pissy pajamas and shoved his feet into his loafers as fast as he could, the only thing Boog had said was, “Don’t you say nothin’ to Mama, or she’ll get mad. She don’t like hearin’ ’bout it.”
Which, frankly, Boog needn’t have worried about, because Lucas didn’t see Mrs. Porter or anyone else on his way out of that house, and before he’d even reached the front door, he’d vowed he was never, ever coming back.
Grandmama agreed. She was the only one Lucas ever mentioned the bumping to, the very next day as he sat beside her in her kitchen while she shelled peas for Sunday dinner. He told her everything exactly as it had happened, from beginning to end, except the part about messing in his pajamas. He was too old for that, and he’d washed them out himself in the kitchen sink so even his mother would never know.
He wasn’t sure Grandmama would believe him, not exactly. But he knew old people were wise in ways young people weren’t, so maybe she could give him an answer better than the ones he’d already tried to think of, such as someone blasting dynamite or the ground shaking because of an earthquake like the ones his father said they had out in California. None of his answers worked, because Lucas’s house was on the end of the same street as Boog’s, and nobody in his house had felt so much as a tremble all night long, they said. Besides, even if the newspaper itself had claimed there had been an earthquake or a twister that night, Lucas wouldn’t have accepted it because he knew what he’d felt, and what he’d felt was coming from under the bed, period.
Grandmama, he figured, might have some kind of answer he hadn’t thought of. An answer that would make it possible for him to sleep at night again.
“I’ll tell you somethin’, Lil-bit,” Grandmama told him, stopping her work long enough to stare him in the eye, something she rarely did when she had a large meal to fix. “Boog’s family ain’t like ours. There’s ugliness in that family of a sort I can’t discuss with a child, even a child smart as you. That’s why your mam
a fretted about letting you stay the night there. You’ll understand, when you’re older, why Boog’s mama sometimes can’t show her face outside that house because it’s swollen big as a pumpkin. And why Boog’s father’s breath smells to high heaven.”
“Whiskey,” Lucas said. Boog had told him that much.
“Well, you never mind that. The point I’m making is this: I ain’t surprised about what happened at Boog’s. Some might say what you felt from under that bed was a haunt of a nasty temperament raising a ruckus. That may well be. I’ve heard about plenty. But you know what else it could’a been? Just plain sickness. Sickness so thick it had its own life. Maybe the house is full of it, the sickness of memories, the sickness of meanness. Maybe whatever you felt was left in that old house from slavery, and Boog’s family inherited it when they moved in. Or, maybe it followed Boog’s family’s troubles the way a hound follows a scent. Whatever it was, seems like it only wanted you and Boog to know it was there. It wanted to be reckoned with.”
So, Lucas had been eight years old, two years younger than Jared, when he’d accepted this firsthand knowledge of evil. Not just the threat of the storybook evil he’d heard about in Sunday school with the story of Eve being tricked by the serpent, but real proof of everyday, here-and-now evil. Furious, bullying evil. It was something hidden in thin air, maybe even in the air he breathed.
Much later, as an adult, Lucas would realize his grandmother had probably been speaking figuratively about the invisible force as sickness. She’d meant the sickness of alcoholism, violence, fear, sexual abuse, or whatever else lived in that house with Boog’s family. Most likely, he realized, she probably hadn’t believed his story a lick and had only said what she did to encourage him to keep his distance from Boog. (Which, incidentally, he did with pleasure all the way through high school.) Lucas had even begun to wonder, in the long years since, whether his imagination had created the bumping thing under the bed to mask over something else he might have seen or experienced that night, something human in origin that was even more unimaginable, somehow. In truth, he would never know, not really.