My Soul to Keep (28 page)

David was smiling at her. She was convinced by now that his image was part of some cruel, elaborate dream, so she did not smile back. Or, had the blood and moaning all been part of an equally elaborate nightmare? She didn’t know which.

“Almost time to go, Jess. The boat will be here soon. We’ll go pick up Kira, okay? Won’t you be glad to see Kira?”

Kira. Oh, yes. Thinking of Kira, Jessica felt her mind emerging from its protective clouds. Kira was at her mother’s. The weekend was over. It was time to go back home.

Jessica reached over to David and lifted his T-shirt so she could see his stomach. She saw a crooked path of hairlessness under the cluster of wiry hairs growing around his navel, nothing more. Nothing. She blinked, waiting to feel something. Whatever it was didn’t come.

“You didn’t have to do it that way,” she said. David leaned closer. He hadn’t heard her. She struggled to raise her voice slightly. “I wish you hadn’t done it this way, David.”

David gazed at her and nodded solemnly. “Okay,” he said, “I’m sorry.” He kissed her open palm. “I’m really sorry.”

“You said there’s more.”

“Yes,” he said. “Later. We don’t have time now. Wait until we get back to Ochopee. I’ll talk to you in the car.”

David tried to stand up straight, but she held tight to his hand, pulling him back down toward her. Her words came without thought. “You have to say thank you to God, David. You told me we’d both see a miracle, and we did. You can’t see a miracle without saying thank you. That’s all He asks. That’s all.”

David stared at her tenderly and touched her cheek with his index finger. She saw a struggle in his face, words wanting to come, but he didn’t speak at all. Then, he gently pulled his fingers from her grasp and stood up, walking away.

“Daddy! Mommy!” Kira cried, flinging the front door open to run out to the van as they drove into Bea’s driveway. Jessica’s heart surged to see her daughter dressed up in new matching purple shorts and a tanktop, her hair parted into two puffballs secured with purple barrettes.

Bea followed closely behind Kira, laughing. Bea was always overjoyed to see Jessica come home from vacation in one piece. And Alex would be next, Jessica knew. Her BMW was parked beneath the shade of the front yard ficus tree. Jessica was so glad to see them all, and yet it was a strain to pull the latch to try to open her door.

“Just stay in the car,” David said, patting her knee, before opening his own door and climbing out. He called to Kira. “Come here, Duchess. What did Grandma do to your hair?”

Kira giggled as David lifted her into the air, hoisted her over his shoulders, and began to spin her around. Her laughs sounded nearly hysterical—half joy, half fright.

“David, you’re going to drop that child,” Bea muttered, walking past him to lean into Jessica’s window. “Get your lazy behind out of this car. Dinner’s waiting. How was the swamp?”

Before Jessica could open her mouth to answer, David walked behind Bea and knelt down, easing Kira to the ground. “The swamp was great, but poor Jess came down with something. She’s not feeling well.”

“Mommy’s sick?” Kira asked.

“Just a little cold or something.”

Bea reached over to touch Jessica’s forehead. The gesture was so familiar, so warm, that Jessica longed to tell David she wanted to stay at her mother’s house tonight. Just for one night, that was all.

“You’ve got a temperature. Snake didn’t bite you, did it?” Bea asked. “You look worn out, Jessica. I don’t know about this camping out in the swamplands. That’s for white folks.”

Weakly, Jessica shook her head and smiled. “No snakebite,” she said, “but worn out, yes. Definitely.”

Alex appeared next in her window, wearing a smart mauve dress from church. “Hey, girl. What’s wrong?”

Jessica wanted to shrink from their stares. What would they see in her face? So much had happened. So much had changed. How could people go through changes and not show it on their faces? How could soldiers leave battlefields and simply go home to their families, after all they had seen?

“I’m just tired,” Jessica said.

“Go get your bag, Kira,” David said, playfully swatting her backside. “We need to get Mommy home to bed.”

“Lord, well at least let me fix you some plates. Don’t you leave me with all this food. Come help me, David,” Bea said.

Alex stayed by the van window, smelling of Giorgio, the scent she saved for Sundays. She looked worried, gazing into Jessica’s eyes. Jessica glanced away from her sister.

“Everything okay?” Alex asked.

“I don’t think I’m cut out for camping,” Jessica said.

“That bad, huh?”

Jessica nodded. When would her brain wake up?

“Well, I’m just glad you two are back. I couldn’t believe it when Mom told me you were off to some island somewhere without a telephone. I just think of those slasher movies. I don’t think I could go for that.”

Jessica couldn’t think of a response.

“You sure you’re okay? Everything okay with David?”

“Why would you ask that?” Jessica asked, looking at her.

“Just asking, that’s all. He seems like he’s in a big hurry to go home. And he’s smiling too much. He only smiles when something’s wrong.”

“There’s nothing wrong,” Jessica said, wondering how convincing she sounded to someone as insightful as Alex. She realized what a profound burden David’s secret would be. She kept very few secrets from Bea, and none from her sister. Theirs was not a family of secrets. She’d even mentioned the incident with Mahmoud to Alex, and David’s explanation. Now, there would be a barrier between them.

“Call me later if you feel like it. I met somebody last night. No big deal yet, but he’s an immigration lawyer…. Well, I’ll tell you later,” Alex said, smiling.

Ordinarily, a love interest would have been big news to Jessica. Now, she had to force herself to feign a reaction. Nothing in her life, she began to realize, would ever be able to affect her the way it had before. Everything would seem trite and inconsequential compared to the past twenty-four hours.

During the drive home, Jessica tried hard to listen to Kira’s excited chatter about how she’d spent her weekend. How the little boy next door was a meanie, how he’d broken the toy she got in her McDonald’s Happy Meal. How Grandma watched
The Lion King
on video with her for the hundredth time. David filled up Jessica’s silences, telling Kira about the woods and the cabin and the airboat.

Jessica’s thoughts could not drift far away from the extraordinary story David had told her during the ninety-minute drive from Ochopee to her mother’s house. He’d begun after taking a deep breath, and his tale had been barely punctuated by any pauses as he spoke, his eyes hidden behind his sunglasses as he stared straight ahead at the road.

My name is DAH-weet. I was bom in what is now called Ethiopia nearly five hundred years ago. I am an immortal. There are fifty-eight others like me. Our blood lives forever, and our bodies heal. We do not age. We were not bom this way, and our condition is not genetic. We underwent a Ritual.

We do not have extraordinary strength, and it is not our purpose to harm others. We are merely a race of scholars. Most of us choose not to mingle among mortals, but some of us do. We love, and we have families. I have had wives and children before you. I have either outlived them or been forced to abandon them.

We have a Covenant that forbids us to reveal our truth. For what I am telling you, I expect someday to be punished. I take that risk because I love you. I have been told that it is time for me to leave you, and I cannot. I hope we can all leave together.

David had also said much more frightening things while she sat and listened to his words. He told her that Mahmoud had been sent to spy on their family, that he had been watching them, probably for many months. He might even have wiretaps or monitors in the house, David said, so they could not speak any further of this unless they were somewhere private, like the cave.

Mahmoud may suspect what I have told you, so you must be very, very careful, Jessica. Our Covenant dictates that no one can know. You are a reporter, and therefore he would consider you highly dangerous to the safety of our entire Brotherhood. I am afraid he might try to hurt you. That is why we must go very soon. And we must watch Kira at all times. Our lives will be different now, but until we go we must behave as though nothing has changed.

Jessica had asked questions: Where would they go? Could they ever come back? What was the Ritual they underwent?

David said he was no longer sure about going to France, and he suggested Senegal, saying he considered the nation and its people among the most beautiful in Africa. There, Kira could refine her French and learn Wolof at the same time.

About the Ritual, he said nothing. But she sensed, in a way she had learned from living with him for so many years, that he had purposely chosen to keep silent on that point. So far, her questions far outnumbered David’s answers.

What was in their blood? If he had not been born immortal, did that mean that anyone could become immortal?

Thinking of this as she rode with Kira and David in the van, Jessica felt her pulse quicken. She tried to let the thought go. She knew she would need time to absorb everything, so she couldn’t dwell too much on any one aspect. She couldn’t allow herself to think too much at all, or her fear would drown her. She wondered how she hadn’t lost her mind already.

“Are we almost home, Mommy?” Kira’s question drew Jessica out of her thoughts, but she felt dazed.

Where were they? David had just coasted off of the 1-95 expressway ramp to Biscayne Boulevard, so they were ten minutes from home. Jessica was comforted to see all the signs of stable life she’d known—the Shell gas station, the convenience store, the empty glass office buildings glaring in the Sunday twilight. She was mesmerized by the normalcy passing her window.

“We’re just about there, Duchess,” David answered for her.

Jessica was anxious to return home, to crawl into bed, but she wondered if it might overwhelm her to suddenly compare who she was now to the person she had been only two days before, living in the same house. Would the idea of wiretaps in the bedroom make it impossible for her to sleep, to hold her husband?

And who was her husband, really? Who was he?

As usual, their secluded neighborhood calmed the fever in Jessica’s mind. The shaded roadway was a sedative. She saw the DeNights’ ten-year-old grandson riding his bicycle, and she could hear the jangling music of a nearby ice-cream truck. Her life might spin out of control soon, but for today, at least, she was returning to the sanctuary of what she had known before.

“Yayy! Look, Mommy. He’s back!”

Jessica followed Kira’s pointing finger as the van pulled into their driveway, and she smiled gratefully.

Teacake was posted on the front porch, his elegant tail curled around his front paws, waiting for them to come home.

After the night Raymond Jacobs never came home from Burger King, mornings were the worst time in the Jacobs house. In the mornings, Jessica woke up and heard muffled sobs through her mother’s door. Bea seemed too tired to be sad as the day wore on, after she picked up Jessica from their neighbor’s house and asked her how school went (although her eyes strayed somewhere else when Jessica tried to tell her, and for a long time Jessica knew her mother wasn’t really listening). Bea cooked dinner, the family thought private thoughts in front of the television set, and then everyone went to bed, usually without tears.

Tears came in the mornings.

One morning, fifteen days after her father died, Jessica went into hysterics. The funeral was over. The hams and macaroni casseroles and sweet-potato pies people had brought to the house were mostly gone. The flowers had wilted. His death was an old thing, not a new thing. But, for some reason, Jessica woke up from a dream about riding on her father’s bouncing knee, and a certain part of her didn’t remember he was dead. She didn’t remember as she looked at her Raggedy Ann and Andy clock and saw that it was only a little after six. She didn’t remember as she slipped into her powder-blue house shoes and padded out of her room.

But when she passed the living room window on her way to the kitchen, where she planned to fix herself a bowl of Captain Crunch, she noticed a white car in their driveway. Whose car was that?

The memory, worse than any nightmare, stunned her: It was the car their neighbor, Mrs. Houston, was lending to them. The blue station wagon was gone now. The station wagon got wrecked when Daddy was killed in the accident.

Jessica cried so hard, her mother let her stay home from school that day.

Years later, the morning syndrome was repeating itself with Jessica. One morning, she woke up and saw David’s bath towel tossed across the bedspread near her feet. She called out, “David, come hang up this wet towel before you get the room all musty!” She felt annoyed, just like she would have before. That was all.

For five whole minutes, sometimes staring straight at his face, she wouldn’t think about it. Then, her stomach would plunge as she relived her bloody night with him. And she would gaze into his eyes and realize that those eyes were five hundred years old, that they belonged to a man she barely knew, and her heart would drop. Her husband, the father of her child, was a man she barely knew.

The first few nights, which Jessica hardly remembered, she couldn’t bear to share a bed with him. She sat on the sofa downstairs, pretending to watch TV with Teacake on her lap, and she stayed wide awake each night. At bedtime, David stood on the stairs and tried to call her to him, but she only shook her head. Even talking to him was a struggle now, and she stopped trying once Kira was asleep. He knew to leave her alone.

So Jessica held herself, shivering sporadically in the warm room that was hers and yet no longer hers. She felt a deadness, a paralysis; a strange dream had enveloped her, leaving her frozen in this fog that used to be her life. Her mind was offering rational answers, trying to free her. Had it all been an illusion? Had David’s horrible wound been less serious than it looked? Was David trying to trick her? But why?

Jessica couldn’t even bring herself to pray about it, not at first, because her prayers seemed like empty rituals. David flew in the face of everything she’d known or believed.

The only real answer, the consistent answer, was that David was who he said he was, and she had seen what she had seen. He had died and come back. He would never die, ever.

Once she decided to try to accept this, Jessica felt the paralysis fading. She could even lie with David at night; she just couldn’t touch him. Not yet. Even though she could feel how much he wanted her to in his cautious silence across the expanse of their bed.

“See here? This is me,” David said after he took the damp towel away, slipping an old photograph into her hand. (He must have been relieved to hear her bitch at him, she realized; irritation was better than silence.) He raised his finger to his lips, a reminder that she couldn’t respond out loud because of a spy. Real conversation had to wait.

The browning old photograph was ragged on the edges, but the image was almost startlingly clear: six black musicians in tuxedos, posing with their instruments at The Jazz Brigade’s Summer Stomp, 1926. David’s hair was cut shorter than he wore it now, slicked down, but she recognized him standing in the center of the photo with his clarinet, posing beside a man who wasn’t dressed like the others, maybe a bystander or a fan. This was really David. In a photograph that was seventy years old. The thought was a kick in her stomach, and she cradled herself in the bed.

David looked alarmed. “What’s wrong?”

She shook her head. “Nothing,” she said.

Jessica had tried, in the past week, not to be shocked by David’s mementos, or at least not to show it. She wanted to encourage his reminiscences because she knew she needed to hear them. This was a journey, David had said; and she was taking it with him whether she liked it or not. She tried to enjoy the moments they stole away to the cave after Kira was in bed, when he would sit beside her and begin to talk. If she felt overwhelmed, Jessica distanced herself by pretending she was listening to a history lesson. She’d spent enough years as a reporter encouraging sources to pour out their sorrows that she had become good at pulling back when she needed to. It was a survival tactic.

So, she didn’t lose her head when David showed her a wrinkled program from the Karntnerthor Theater in Vienna with a date reading 1824.

“Mahmoud and I got tickets by chance, through the man whose sons we tutored, a music patron,” David told her in the hush of the cave, brushing his finger across the yellowed paper. “I wasn’t happy with our seats, but it was a marvelous concert. Startling. And he was there himself, as you know. You’ve heard how he had to face the audience to see our applause. Absolutely true. He was deaf by then. He died a couple of years later.”

“Who?” Jessica asked, embarrassed by her ignorance.

David grinned. “Beethoven. This was the debut of his Ninth.”

Jessica would experience many of these moments of unreality. Another night, David showed her a faded, handwritten document inscribed with a date from the 1840s for a slave named Seth, who was the property of a Lowell Mason in Louisiana. Rust-colored fold marks crisscrossed the paper. Though the words were hard to make out, Jessica recognized David’s handwriting. “This was my pass,” he explained. “I wrote myself a pass when I ran away. The ink faded here at the top because it got wet.”

“Did you get away?” she asked. The whole while, Jessica’s brain was telling her it was all right, she was merely asking a historical question. It wasn’t like her husband, the man sitting here, had actually ever been a slave more than a hundred years ago.

“No. They caught me. And the woman who came with me.”

“What happened?” Jessica asked.

David sighed, sifting the short hair on Jessica’s forehead through his fingertips. “Well,” he began, swallowing, “we were unarmed, but we fought them. And she died.”

The sorrow in David’s voice was tangible. Jessica could feel it moving through him, throughout the cave, and it shattered her mental defenses. This was David talking. Not only had he had other wives before her, he had loved other women who lived before her great-grandparents were born. And this long-dead slave woman still lived with him, in his thoughts. His past was as real as the blood she would find if she scratched the surface of his skin. It wasn’t history. It was present still.

“What was the woman’s name?” she whispered.

“Her name …” David started to speak, but his lips clamped shut and he drew a deep, difficult breath. He shook his head and squeezed Jessica’s hand, silent.

His grief, at that moment, made her swell toward him. “And you’ve never told anybody any of this, David?”

“It isn’t permitted. You’re the first,” he breathed.

“I don’t know how you could live so many years and not tell anyone. I don’t know how you could do that.”

“I don’t know either,” he said.

“Thank you for choosing me. For trusting me.”

David moved as if to kiss her, but stopped himself. “Her name was Adele,” he said instead. He told Jessica about how the five men caught them when they stopped to take a drink at a river. And how they violated and lynched her while David watched. Afterward, for long minutes of silence, Jessica tried to think of words that wouldn’t sound small and meaningless. She couldn’t. She was horrified for him, and for her own faceless ancestors.

“For vengeance, I fought in the war, and I slaughtered men. Many men, Jessica. I died many times over,” David said in a hollow voice Jessica had never heard. “I call that time the Century of Blood. I lost my soul.”

“You can’t lose your soul, baby.”

“When you have seen enough. And done enough. Oh, yes.”

She stroked the side of his neck with her index finger. How would she ever have managed all the hate David had felt, and must be feeling still? Thinking of all the men he said he’d killed, she wondered if maybe David had really lost his soul, after all. She would have too. Jessica had read
The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass,
and she remembered how wretched he’d felt as a child, even though he’d never known anything but slavery. She’d thought it must have been worse for people like her own ancestor from Ghana, whom Bea had told her about, who was kidnapped and brought to the United States as an adult, as a man with his own life, in the 1840s.

“What year did you come here, David?” she asked.

“Eighteen forty-four.”

Jessica’s heart spun as she began to realize the weight of David’s words. “My great-, great-, great-… oh, I forget how many greats back it is—but my ancestor was brought here around that time, even though it was illegal. From Ghana. Isn’t that amazing? Think of it. You might have known him. But he was a slave in Georgia. I guess you never met.”

“No, most likely we didn’t,” David said. “But I do know him, Jessica. I know his heart. As much as I know my own.”

“How could you stay here after all you’d been through?” Jessica asked. “Couldn’t you get the money to go back to Ethiopia, to the others? At least you lived to see the end of slavery, and you had somewhere else to go, a home.”

“No, it wasn’t money. I could always find work as a tradesman, a skilled laborer, a technician. I was very advanced, understand, and wisdom has always been a precious commodity. Life was backward here. I planned to go home right after the war, and I did visit briefly in the 1890s. Ethiopia was being encroached upon by the Italians, and I went to fight, to fend them off. But I returned here.”

“Why?”

He sighed. “How can I explain? The other Africans here shared my wounds. Does that make sense to you? Just as I could never illustrate to any mortal all I have seen and felt in my lifetime, I could never expect my Life brothers in Lalibela to understand all I have seen and felt here.”

David sighed again, a ragged sound, and she realized he was going to cry soon. He went on: “I was enslaved only a brief time. Yet, that short time, in its cruelty, stands out in my memory. I have never suffered more greatly than I did watching the senseless way Adele died, like a hunted boar. When my first wife died long ago, in Ethiopia, I thought I knew grief. But until you have witnessed the death of a loved one to another man’s violence, you know nothing of grief. And when you do, it lives with you and changes everything you thought you were. When I was a boy, I watched my father lose his life, and I became a warrior in my heart. And when Adele was killed? I still don’t know what that made of me. I am afraid to know.”

Jessica blinked, rapt.

David took a long, labored breath. “Adele was the only glimpse of beauty in the midst of so much ugliness. Men who emptied their lusts inside of her still called her less than human. These same men sold their own children, and hers, as chattel. She told me these things at night, when we talked, as you and I are talking now. One by one, infants were wrested from her arms. And so, as much as Adele yearned to love a child, we did not dare create one because it would not be ours.

“I remember these events as well as I do eating breakfast this morning. It was a very short time ago. Yet, I have lived to see it buried. And Adele, and all of us, treated as though our pain was imaginary. It was not imaginary. It is with me every day.”

Even in the darkness, Jessica could see David’s frame shaking violently as he spoke. Suddenly, he sobbed and collapsed against her. For the next hour, he wept in her arms.

Maybe it was only a temporary phase, maybe it would pass, but at the times Jessica wasn’t utterly swallowed by her fears of the future, she found herself in awe of David. It was like the awe she’d felt early in their courtship, when his intellect became more plain each day. Her new awe was even more keen.

One night, he brought the old Jazz Brigade photograph to the cave and told her how he started the group with a couple of buddies who used to have jam sessions in his living room. He pointed each man out to her, telling her their names, laughing about things they said and did.

“What was your name then?” she asked.

“Still Seth. Seth Tillis. They called me Spider.”

He had this whole wonderful life as a musician, and a wife and children, and then the people from Ethiopia he called Searchers came. Just like that, he had to go. That was exactly what was happening now, he told her.

After hearing the story, Jessica began to unbutton her blouse. Then, she hooked her fingers to the fly of his jeans, resting the heel of her palm against the lump there.

“In the cave?” David asked, surprised.

She only smiled.

Standing over the bathroom sink later to shake dried leaves from her hair, Jessica wondered if this new ardor was a form of hysteria. Her eyes found the mirror; there, in her own troubled face, were the doubts. Was she clinging to David’s physical body because that was all she could possess of him, since she believed she was about to lose him? He was becoming a mirage to her, and she was a mirage herself. A stranger in her own body.