“I was holding her, feeding her from a bottle. It was sunny outside. A beautiful day.”
She waits for a moment. “Was I there?”
I’ve said too much. “I don’t know. It was brief. I’m sure you were there somewhere.”
“Yes,” she says softly, “I’m sure I was.”
In her third hour of labor, when the contractions are becoming unbearable, I tell Rolanda to squeeze my hand every time she feels pain. I stand above her as she writhes in the bed, sweating, fighting to bring Willa into the world. Her body jolts. She clenches my hand lightly. “It’s okay,” I tell her, “I’m here.” Less than a minute later, it happens again, and she squeezes harder. This goes on for some time. Eventually, she is clutching my hand so hard that it hurts. I can’t help thinking about Atlanta, about Rolanda’s birth. How did Van Owen know I was in labor? How did he sense it from wherever he was, in some other part of the city? What prescience—what inseverable link between us—allowed him to enter my mind at that moment when my contractions started in our Atlanta apartment? How did he find that hospital? My power has never been that strong, that precise. Or was it power at all? He has always had some sort of connection to me. Perhaps he has cultivated some ability to sense me not only when I use my power, but also when I am weak or scared or suffering.
“Squeeze my hand with the pain,” I repeat. “It’ll help.”
She moans with the next contraction, but her hand stays limp.
“Rolanda?”
Another contraction comes. Her body tenses, then releases. Her breathing gets more hurried, then it slows, but, again, she doesn’t squeeze my hand. “Rolanda, are you all right?” No response. “Rolanda?”
“She’s busy,” says a man’s voice. It echoes in my thoughts exactly as I remembered it.
“Where are you?” I ask Van Owen, spinning my head as if I can still see, as if he is standing here in the room with us.
“I’ll ask the questions,” he says. Where are you?”
I think about how long I have had these gifts but how few times I have had to use them in battle. Meanwhile conflict and battle have been his passions. “You won’t find me,” I tell him.
“Oh, I will, Amara. I’ll find you. I sensed your daughter’s fragility weeks ago. I sensed you worrying about her. I felt you moving, traveling. Somehow you’re keeping me in the dark. Somehow I can’t see what you see. That’s a new trick you’ve developed. I’ll have to work on that too. I’m not sure how you’re doing it, but I’ll figure it out.”
He still doesn’t know I’m blind. It was he who caused my blindness—by casting that flash of lightning into my vision during my own labor—but he doesn’t realize it. So I taunt him. “You won’t figure out this trick. And I’ve got all sorts of new tricks. You come near us, and I’ll show them to you.”
“I’m already near you, Amara.”
“Rolanda,” I ask aloud, “can you hear me?”
“Yes.” Her voice is soft, as if she’s struggling with more than the labor pains.
“Can you hear him, too?”
“Yes, Mother,” she winces. “I’ve been hearing him for several hours, ever since the contractions started.” She squeezes my hand to deflect the pain of another contraction. “I have walls up. He can’t get inside my thoughts—he can’t hear me—but I can still hear him. He won’t stop. I think he’s getting closer, Mother.” Her whole body stiffens, and she screams with the next contraction, only seconds since the last one. The baby is almost here. “But I won’t let him in this house. My walls are too strong even for him. I’m sure of it.”
Even as a baby, Rolanda was able to protect us—to keep Van Owen from being able to touch us—but I wonder how long she can maintain her barrier around the house, around us, around her mind as she’s trying to birth a child. I want to leave her side, go out in front of the house and wait for him. But without Rolanda’s eyes to see through, I wouldn’t see him coming. There are other ways to challenge him, though. “I’m going for him,” I tell her.
“No. I need you here.”
“I’m not leaving.” I start to reach out with my mind. If he can find my mind even here—if I can hear his voice in my head—then I can find him, too. I can find his mind and attack it, just as he is attacking ours. I send my thoughts beyond the walls of the cabin, past the dirt road and the trees and the pond. I feel the life teeming all around us. Farmers and children and fisherman, and others. I hear their thoughts, but I pass them by. My target is a much darker presence; that’s what I focus on—darkness. I follow its scent across miles of the thoughts and emotions of others until I hear him. "Your mother can’t protect you," he is telling Rolanda. "I’m taking your child."
“No,” I tell him. “Her mother will protect her, Van Owen. I’ve already seen the child grow into a woman, and she’s not with you.”
Using his voice as a beacon, I trace its source. I descend upon him and send my consciousness descending into his. I feel woozy as I enter his thoughts. They are as dark as ever. Dark and dank. Filthy desires. Unmitigated anger.
And then I am seeing through his eyes. Through a car window that looks out upon the narrow road rushing by. We’re passing a store: Shady Bait and Tackle. We’re in Shady. He’s found us. He’s almost here!
The sensation is so odd, being with Van Owen a mile away and yet here with Rolanda at the same time. She is grabbing my wrist, squeezing. “No, Mother, stay away from him. I need you here.”
He turns a corner, taking his car down the path along a pond. The path that leads to our cabin. With the next twist in the road, he should see a little white bridge that veers left over the pond, but I concentrate and alter his sight, painting him a different scene with my thoughts. Like an artist, I complete the foreground and the background, making the image whole. I show him a path that veers right. I fill out the picture with precise detail: it’s a dirt road but the woods that surround it are bright and lush and dotted with cherry blossoms. Chickadees and wrens soar overhead. Two possums dig a hole near the base of a century-old oak tree. I wonder if I have overdone it—made it too obvious—but he falls for the charade and takes my imaginary road. And he steers his car down a grassy embankment and directly into Shady Pond. The car belly-flops into the pond. The freezing water flows into the car. He tugs at the door handle, pushing it open and throwing himself into the murky water.
“Damn you, Amara,” he hisses, realizing what I’ve done.
Rolanda screams. She yanks my wrist. “The baby.”
“I need to fight him,” I tell her.
“No,” Rolanda shouts. I feel suddenly as if someone has struck me across my skull. Van Owen yowls in pain and falls backward into the water. My consciousness is whisked from his body and thrown back into my own, into a different kind of darkness—one I know well. Rolanda has thrown up a shield around me, dragging my mind back to the cabin and into my own body. She has become even more powerful than I knew.
She tugs on my arm, pulling me toward her. “I can’t let you fight him. I need you here.”
“I can beat him, Rolanda. Let me go.”
“No, Mother, you have to live, to raise Willa.”
“What are you saying?”
“You know you don’t kill Van Owen now. You’ve seen him in the future.” I know what she is about to say, and I try to interrupt, but she is too smart. She has known all along. “But you haven’t seen me in the future, mother, have you? You saw yourself with Willa, holding her, taking care of her, but I wasn’t there. You said it yourself.”
I stutter as I lie to her. “I meant only that you weren’t there in that one vision. That doesn’t mean that you’re not alive…”
“Mother, he already took my father. I won’t let him take my child as well. I can hold him off, but I can’t push the baby out while I’m holding him back, while I’m keeping my walls up around the house.”
“Filthy black
witches,” Van Owen shouts in both our minds. I can hear him sloshing through the pond, trudging toward the shore.
“Then let the walls down,” I tell her. “Let me fight him.”
“No. That’s not what’s supposed to happen. You have to raise Willa.”
“I’m old," I plead with her. "I can’t raise another child. I’ll be dead soon…”
“Then will yourself to live,” she says, as if telling me something obvious. “Will yourself to be strong, just as he has. Your power is natural. You were born into it. He wasn’t. He stole it from you and Kwame. Yet, somehow, he doesn’t age. Fueled by hate, he wills himself to stay alive. Do the same, Mother, but do it for something good. Will yourself to live for me and for Willa.”
I hear a pounding. I wonder if Van Owen is already here, so I listen harder. It is Van Owen, but he is not at our door yet. He’s farther away, pounding at Rolanda’s mental barrier so he can find our cabin.
“Let me in,” he cries.
“You have to take the baby out,” Rolanda tells me.
“How?”
“You have to cut her out of me.”
“I can’t…”
“It’s the only way. Don’t you understand? I can’t relax my body enough to push her out while I’m keeping Van Owen away from us.”
“I won’t…”
“You have to.”
I think of Rolanda as a baby, there in the hospital with me in Atlanta. Her first act was to protect us from Van Owen. She has remained at my side through her entire life, acting as my eyes, my lifeline to the world. She’s my child. She’s all I have. How can I cut into her?
“Do it, Mother. Take the baby out of me…” She squeezes my hand, and I find myself pulled inside her thoughts, staring out through her eyes again—one last time. I watch her other hand as it reaches beneath her mattress and withdraws a knife. She holds it out to me. She knew he was coming. She knew we might need the knife. She planted it there. She had this plan all along. “Take it, Mother.”
I can see Van Owen in her mind. He has created an image to frighten us, a manifestation of himself to distract us as he makes his way here. He’s dressed in his Civil War grays, wielding an axe, swinging it at Rolanda’s invisible wall again and again. It’s only a construct, I know—no more real than the false road that I forged—but it feels real even to me. With each blow, the wall becomes more and more visible and more penetrable, gossamer-thin cracks forming all over it. It’s beginning to crumble.
“Do it now,” Rolanda cries again. Finally, she sees that I cannot stab her, so she lifts the knife herself and thrusts it into her belly, just above the baby. She flinches but doesn’t scream. “Now,” she whispers, “barely able to speak as the blood pools across the blade’s dark hilt, “you have no choice. I’m dying anyway. Finish it or you’ll lose both of us.”
She’s right. I’ve known it all along. I’ve always known that Rolanda doesn’t survive childbirth—that I raise Willa on my own. I’ve always known what’s going to happen.
I take the knife. I feel its weight and the weight of what I know I must do. I tell myself it has already happened—it has after all. The knife moves swiftly, easily, slicing shallow along my daughter’s abdomen. The crimson black blood wells around the incision, but Rolanda keeps her eyes open, allowing me to see. She winces, but I don’t stop. She screams, but I don’t stop. I feel my own tears fall on my hand—the one holding the knife—but I don’t stop. I have no choice. Finally, done cutting, I put the knife down on the bed beside her and use my hands to draw back her skin, imagining it as a garment she wears to cover herself. I have sewn so many garments, weaved so many tapestries. I pretend I am looking at one of them now—something inanimate, something unreal, not my own daughter’s flesh. I plunge my hands inside her, reaching through her, pulling, ripping, grabbing for the baby. My hands envelop its tiny, wriggling body. Rolanda howls as I pull the child out of her. She closes her eyes, almost passing out from the pain, and, for a moment, all I can see is Van Owen’s manufactured image beating its axe against the shattering barrier.
Rolanda opens her eyes. Her voice is weak. “Let me see Willa.” I hold the child toward her. Willa is tiny, bald, covered in her mother’s blood and fluids. I place her against her mother’s face. Rolanda kisses the baby’s cheek. “Yes,” she says, “my child, my baby, newborn princess of Mkembro. And what power shall you wield, little one?”
With each swing of Van Owen’s imaginary axe, Rolanda shudders, as if she’s about to pass out. She can’t last much longer. I take up the knife again and cut the umbilical cord before drawing the blanket over Rolanda’s ragged torso. Willa is making cooing baby sounds, but she isn’t crying. Willa is too strong to cry.
“Thank you, Mother,” Rolanda whispers, barely audible. My vision has become dim, which means hers has too. She is almost gone. Her breathing is labored. There’s nothing anyone can do for her now. There never was. “You have to go now,” she tells me. “I’ll hold him back. Once I’m gone, I don’t think he’ll be able to track you. It was my labor pains that drew him to us.”
“I love you, Rolanda. I…”
“I love you, Mother. Tell Willa how much I loved her. Go…”
I squeeze her hand. I press my lips against her palm, my tears dripping onto it. Then I let it go, and I run toward the door holding the baby in one hand and the knife in the other.
“You want me, Van Owen?” Rolanda shrieks behind me, “then take me!”
I throw the door open and turn down the corridor, and suddenly everything is black. I am blind again. What will I do? Van Owen howls suddenly, strangely. I pull Willa tight against my chest, and my sight returns. The world is gray and blurry, but I can make out light and shapes. Instinctively—without even meaning to—I have linked with Willa’s mind, and I’m using her newborn eyes to see.
My first sight is Van Owen pressed up against the cabin wall, his arms pinned to it, a fly wrapped in an invisible web. He throws his head back and yelps. It’s Rolanda’s last act. She is leaving the world the same way she came into it—defending me against Van Owen, holding him at bay with her power. From within the cabin, I hear her scream. Her last gasp. And she’s gone. My daughter is gone.
I have only one chance before Van Owen recovers from Rolanda’s attack. I charge at him, raising the knife—still coated in her blood—and plant it in his chest.
He wails, his voice octaves too high, and collapses in a heap on the ground, the knife protruding from his sternum like a handle on a factory machine. Blood seeps from the wound. He seems too disoriented to counterattack. I think about invading his mind or withdrawing the knife and stabbing at him again, but I don’t. Rolanda was right: I don’t kill Van Owen now. Willa is my first priority. I must get her to safety.
William’s secondhand Model-T starts with a rumble. I pull Willa’s tiny body on my lap, propping her up so I can see the road. I press on the gas and head north, saying a silent goodbye to my daughter and to the South, neither of which I will see again.
Twenty-Seven
Marco breathed in deeply as Warren and he descended the steps outside the apartment building. The rain was still falling hard. The air was cool and wet, crisp even, like winter high up in the mountains. “Where’s your car?” he asked.
Warren was several feet ahead, examining each car parked along the narrow street. “Don’t have one,” he said. He stopped in front of a dated gray sports car. “This one looks good, though. BMW.”
“Whatever. Cars today all look like toys. Break the window.”
“It might have an alarm.”
“Oh, give me a break,” Marco sighed. “We’ll be out of here in twenty seconds.” He scanned the ground for a heavy object but then turned back toward his stoop. On the end of the banister, screwed into the stone, was a steel fixture that resembled a small globe. Marco twisted it, unscrewed it, and lifted it from its perch. “Huh,” he laughed, “th
is thing was loose forty years ago, and no one’s ever fixed it.” He took several quick steps toward the BMW and then smashed the globe into the driver-side window. The window shattered. There was no alarm, only the sound of glass shards falling to the concrete like a thousand tiny bells.
With his hat, Marco brushed the fragments from the front seat and was about to sit but then thought better of it. “I don’t know these streets anymore. You drive.”
Marco sat in the passenger seat and drew a switchblade knife from his pocket. He poked it at the ignition, but Warren, behind the wheel, held up a hand to stop him.
“You got us in,” said Warren. “I’ll do the next step.” He touched his index finger to the key slot. A tiny spark emitted from his finger, and the car gurgled to life.
Marco offered not even a hint of surprise. He turned to the road and watched it rush under their feet. Warren seemed perturbed at the non-reaction. In response, he plowed through two red lights and a stop sign on the way to the Westside Highway entrance.
“So, you’ve got it too?” Marco asked finally.
“Got what?”
“You have…abilities,” Marco said, “like your mother and your grandmother.”
Warren frowned. “My mother? What are you talking about?”
“That thing you just did…whatever you call it. You got it from your mother and from Willa. And before that, from Rolanda and from Amara. You don’t have to pretend. Willa told me everything. I know your whole family history.”
Warren cast an odd look at the old man. “You’re confused. The power comes from my father’s side. We’re the last descendants of the Merlante clan of West Africa.” He said it with pride, as if he’d been waiting all his life to reveal the secret to someone.
“The Merlante? No,” said Marco. That was the other family. You’ve got it mixed up. Your family comes from the Mkembro tribe. Amara’s father was Warrendi, the leader of the Mkembro. That’s who you were named for. Willa told me all this.”
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