Part 30 (1/2)
No, David wasn't beating her. Far from it. He was saving her. If Kira was the beauty in her life, David was the anchor.
She felt so much guilt. For stealing the blood. For showing it to Alex. And now, she felt guilty for the fight she started with David just before the telephone rang at two A.M.-the call she'd always known would come, somehow-when Bea was screaming that Alex had fallen from her balcony.
The night had been cursed. When Jessica came home after her meeting with Alex, she met David standing on the front porch with the car keys in his hand.
”Where are you going?” she'd snapped, defensive, trying to ward off his questions.
She was much later than she'd expected, since she'd stopped at an all-night gas station and mini-mart on Biscayne Boulevard to browse the well-lighted aisles and collect her thoughts. She read half of an article in Essence on black men who won't date sisters. She finally bought the magazine and a bag of potato chips, telling herself she couldn't avoid facing David forever. And having to lie to him, the hardest part of all.
”Jesus Christ, Jess, it's almost one-thirty in the morning. Where the h.e.l.l have you been? I got a switchboard recording when I tried to call the laboratory. When I tried Alex, I got another recording. At your office, a recording. I was about to wonder if I should go look for you. I've been worried senseless.”
”What about Kira?” Jessica asked. ”Were you planning to leave a five-year-old kid sleeping in an empty house? David, that's so irresponsible!”
David looked hurt rather than angry. ”You know I wouldn't have left her alone. What's wrong with you? Can't you see why I would be worried? You hurry out of here in the middle of the night, then you disappear and don't tell me-”
”You don't have to run after me like I'm some child!” She unlocked the door to go into the living room, where Casablanca was still playing. He must have started the tape again.
David followed her. ”Jessica,” he said, speaking slowly, as though she couldn't understand English, ”it's one-thirty. What have I been telling you? Don't you realize how dangerous things can be for you? Haven't you grasped the implications of everything?” He silenced himself, obviously measuring what he would say aloud. His eyes said the rest.
”Is this what it's going to be like in Africa? I'm relying on you to make intelligent decisions and you're going to freak out over bulls.h.i.+t?”
Their fight ended when the telephone rang.
Until tonight, Jessica had forgotten about the argument with David-though, for those brief moments, she'd begun to ask herself if she could really go through with taking Kira to Africa with him, after all. And to wonder what the alternative was. Living without him? That was no alternative.
And now? Alex would need months of recuperation, and Jessica couldn't leave with her sister in the hospital. But if they didn't leave, what then? Would the others like David come after him?
Jessica felt smothered by the complications a.s.saulting her. What next? Lord, why was she being tested so severely, without reprieve? Jessica's prayers had turned into pleadings for G.o.d to make His purposes clear.
”If you don't, Lord,” Jessica said after brus.h.i.+ng her teeth, staring at her worn face in the mirror, ”Alex may make it through, but I don't know if I will. I'm telling you right now.”
David gave her a thorough backrub, helping to deaden her worries and coax sleep to her muscles. His slightly calloused hands moved across her shoulders and her rib cage, his fingers tickled her spine. She was able to close her eyes, for a time, and forget. His freshly showered skin always smelled sweet, like a child's, even without cologne. She leaned against the smell, her arms wrapped tight around his waist, and kissed his bare chest. Holding him was the only thing that felt right.
”David ... I'm sorry I went off on you on the porch the other night. You didn't deserve that. I was wrong to run out.”
She felt his chest rise and fall. His breathing sounded loose, relieved. ”You frightened me,” David said. ”I thought you had changed your mind. It would all be for nothing if I couldn't be with you and Kira. All of it.” Suddenly, his voice was a whisper licking her earlobe. ”Jess. I want to tell you more about the Life gift. About the Ritual. What I can do.”
Jessica's heartbeat quickened. She was frightened at herself, at what she'd felt when she first stared at Alex's broken body in the hospital bed. That was how Uncle Billy had looked. It was how her mother might look someday soon. And so would she, and Kira, too. Broken by mishap or age or disease. She knew death was a celebration, but that wasn't the part G.o.d let you see. She didn't believe in pink-skinned cherubs playing lutes on beds of clouds. That was an artist's imagination, it wasn't real. She knew Heaven must be more wonderful than any living artist's painting could ever capture; but she couldn't visualize it as a real place when she closed her eyes. How could she? All that was real to her now, terribly real, was the ugliness of the rocky, inevitable pa.s.sage. And if her sister had blood like David's, Jessica found herself thinking, she would have healed by now.
But they could not talk here, and Jessica was too exhausted to think about tramping outside to the cave. The mystery of David's ritual would have to wait. But not very long. Not long at all.
”Tomorrow,” Jessica said. ”I want to hear.”
As she slept, one of Jessica's prayers was answered for her, only not in any way she had imagined. The answer came in the form of knowledge as ugly as death itself. It lighted with a stunning clearness that made her eyes fly open in the deep night.
At last, she knew what Alex had said in the hospital room.
Someone pushed me.
42.
”Well, I'll tell you one thing. I don't care what the police say, I'm not leaving this bedside,” Bea said, gla.s.sy-eyed, after the boyish-faced Miami Beach police officer left Alex's room. Alex hadn't been able to do much to answer his patient questions except turn her chin up for yes and to shake her head gently for no. No, Alex had nodded, she didn't know why anyone would want to kill her.
Bea and Jessica had demanded Alex be placed under twenty-four-hour police guard, but so far it hadn't happened. Well, G.o.d-d.a.m.nit, Bea said, she would guard her child herself.
”If it was just some burglar, why would he leave that note? It makes my skin crawl to think of it. h.e.l.l, no burglar off the street knows his Scripture like that,” Bea went on. ”Somebody went after this child. That's what they had the intent to do when they went into her apartment. Only the devil himself knows why.”
Alex, tired, had closed her eyes again and drifted to sleep. Jessica hated to see Alex sleep. Sleep looked like a coma. And a coma looked like death. It was all a precursor to death, wasn't it, in the end? If Alex did get better, it would only be for a time. Then, someday, she'd be right back here.
Bea walked to the table near Alex's head to arrange the cards from well-wishers. The playful greetings pictured balloons, Far Side hospital cartoons, and cats of every variety. Either her friends refused to acknowledge how serious Alex's condition was or they figured they could heal her with smiles. Maybe they could.
”You don't know what kind of loonies we've got running around this town. Somebody could sneak in here in the middle of the night and smother her with a pillow,” Bea muttered.
”It's true. That really happens,” Jessica told her mother, before her thoughts had a chance to catch up to her. ”There was a woman in a nursing home in Chicago ...”
Suddenly, Jessica's limbs seemed to draw up against her, flinching as though a blast of cold air held the hospital room frozen.
”David, where are you going?”
”Jesus Christ, Jess, it's almost one-thirty in the morning.”
In her mind, Jessica was back on the porch with David, arriving home after Alex had told her about the blood, where she saw him there in the lamplight with his car keys gleaming in his hands. She'd naturally a.s.sumed he was on his way out somewhere.
But what if David had overheard her conversation with Alex and figured out she'd given Alex the blood sample? What if he noticed she'd moved the bag from where he kept it? (And why did he have the blood there, anyway? For her?) What if he'd waited for Alex in her apartment to make sure she wouldn't tell what she knew? What if-just suppose-when Jessica saw David on the porch, he was really on his way back in?
Would he have had time to drive across the causeway to Miami Beach, let himelf into Alex's apartment somehow, and then drive back home to beat her home?
Maybe. Oh, G.o.d. Yes.
... he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow The unexpected thoughts were making Jessica feel breathless. She stared at Alex's troubled, sleeping face, helpless against a downy white pillow. A pillow. She thought about her mother's words, the words that had triggered her floodgate of living-color memories.
A pillow. Smothered with a pillow.
That's exactly what had happened to the Chicago woman Peter had told her about. Rosalie Tillis Banks. Death and a broken nose, all in the same quiet night.
Why think of that now?
They called me Spider. Spider Tillis.