Eli leaned his head closer.
“You said these people aren’t going as far as we are and …”
“And you’re wondering just how far our relationship is going to go.” This time his voice was low and sounded tender. “Is that it?”
Katie hesitated. She wasn’t sure if she liked the fact that he had the ability to read her and was willing anytime, anywhere, to address her deepest thoughts and fears. Turning to her usual defense mechanism, she tried to be humorous.
“Maybe that’s what I was wondering. Or maybe I was wondering just how far this van is going to make it on this road.”
“Are you saying you don’t like getting a free African massage?”
“A what?”
“That’s what my mom calls it when we’re on roads like this. It’s an African massage. No extra charge.”
“That’s not what I’d call it. It’s more like shock therapy, if you ask me.”
Just then, the van hit a deep rut in the road. Katie bounced off Eli’s lap, lost her balance, and fell across the legs of the woman who was using Katie’s duffel bag as a footrest. The woman’s grocery bags went up in the air, showering Katie with an assortment of vegetables.
She felt Eli’s firm hand grip her arm as the van bottomed out on another rut. A loud explosion sounded and she ducked.
“What was that? Is someone shooting at us?”
Before Eli could answer the van came to an abrupt halt. Suddenly Katie felt something sharp puncture the skin on her shoulder.
I’ve been hit!
2
Katie, are you all right?” Eli reached over to help pull her up.
“It’s my shoulder. I’ve been hit.”
“It was only a yam and a couple of onions.” Eli held up the suspected culprits and handed them back to the woman.
“No. It wasn’t that. It was something sharp. I thought it was a bullet.” Katie noticed that the driver had opened his door and gotten out. Two of the young men in the van were opening the sliding door on the side, climbing over Eli’s suitcase as they exited. Everyone was calm and moving at an even pace as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
“What’s going on?”
“It’s a flat tire. We need to get out. Come on.”
“But my shoulder …” Still dazed, Katie followed Eli’s lead and crawled out of the van. He had a hold of both his carry-on bag and hers, but he left their three large pieces of luggage in the van. Katie knew she wasn’t imagining the injury. The sharp pain was still there.
“Eli, I’m serious. I think something hit me. I’m not making this up.”
“Come around to this side. Stay close to me.”
The van was precariously parked alongside of a busy road. They walked carefully into the darkness as cars zoomed by, seeming to take little notice of the wounded vehicle. Eli ushered Katie around the front of the van and over to the side of the road, where the driver was shining a flashlight on the punctured tire. Two other guys stood beside him, taking a look at the damage.
“It’s right below my shoulder blade,” Katie told Eli. “It felt like a dart went into me.” She stretched her arm across her stomach and reached under her sweatshirt and T-shirt. She felt a warm fluid trickling down her back. “Eli, I’m bleeding!”
“You are?” Eli pulled out his key chain and turned on the small attached flashlight. “Let me see. Where is it bleeding?”
Katie was aware that several of the men who had disembarked from the shuttle bus were staring at her. She lifted up the back of her sweatshirt and T-shirt, careful to keep the front pulled down. She would never feel comfortable exposing her back like this in normal situations, but nothing about this moment was normal.
“Can you see what it is? It feels like shrapnel.”
“How would you know what shrapnel feels like? Oh, wait. I see why you’d say that. It’s the metal thing on your … on the strap of your … It went through your skin.”
If Katie weren’t so uncomfortable at the moment, she would have teased Eli for being unable to say the word bra aloud. She immediately knew what the problem was. She had worn her oldest, most mangled bra and packed all her good ones. The small metal piece that adjusted the straps must have snapped in her tumble, and the sharp edge had dug into her back.
“Can you pull it out? It really hurts.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, yank it out.”
Eli gave a tug, and Katie could feel the blood flow down her back. “Where’s my bag? I have some tissue in my shoulder bag.”
Eli held out her carry-on bag, and Katie fished around in the dark. She found a small packet with two tissues and tried to somehow stick them under the wide part of her bra band to hold the tissues in place. It wasn’t a feat she could pull off by herself. “Here. Can you try to put this on the spot where the blood is coming out?”
Katie held still while Eli attempted the sort of patch job that any one of Katie’s girlfriends would have had no difficulty accomplishing. For Eli it seemed to be a challenge, making his way around unfamiliar straps, hooks, and strips of elastic.
“How’s that? Is that better?” he asked.
“A little. Thanks.” She lowered her shirt and noticed that none of the men were staring at her any longer. They all had gone on to the task at hand, which was changing the tire. The tissues didn’t really feel good, but at least they would help to stop the bleeding. She realized that, with the strap now broken in two and with all the moving around she had done, the right side of her bra had drooped in the front. It didn’t really matter, because she was wearing a baggy sweatshirt. But it felt odd to be held up on one side and set free on the other. Katie tried to fiddle with the strap, but it was pointless. Without a safety pin, she couldn’t remedy the drooping.
“Wait right here,” Eli said. He headed toward where the other men had gathered by the flat tire.
“Did you just tell me to wait right here?” Katie called after him. “Right. Like, where am I going to go?”
She lifted both of her hands and waited for him to turn around, but he kept going. Katie stood alone in the dark with their carry-on bags at her feet. Several of the people who had been in the van were now walking down the road, carrying their belongings.
“Hello! Hey. Hello? Where are you guys going? What do you know that we should know?”
No one answered her. Eli was beside the driver, holding his flashlight to provide a better view of the jack that was being inserted under the van. One of the men had gathered some large rocks and was trying to wedge them into the right position under the back tire. As Katie watched, Eli and another man pulled off the flat tire from the rim, and like an efficient roadside service team, they put the spare tire in place.
Cars and shuttle buses maneuvered past them and picked up speed once they got by. The air felt saturated with exhaust. Katie couldn’t imagine it was safe for the people who had taken off and were walking alongside the road.
She noticed again how much Eli stuck out in the group of men beside the van. It was just as Katie had felt at the airport. His white skin made his the only face she could make out in the dark. He seemed tall. Taller than he had ever appeared to her at Rancho Corona. She knew he was at least four or five inches taller than she was, but when she met Eli, she was dating Rick Doyle, who was over six feet tall and had a commanding, large personality to match his appearance.
Rick would never help anybody change a tire. Especially in a situation like this. But then, Rick would never put himself in a situation like this. He would never come to Africa.
Two unexpected thoughts came to Katie. The first was that right now Eli was more of a man than Rick would ever be. And second was that Eli was the kind of man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with.
Whoa! Where did that come from? Slow down, Katie Girl. You’re supposed to be taking this one step at a time — one day at a time, remember? After all the emotional ups and downs you went through with Rick for the past year, you weren’t g
oing to put any expectations or projections on your relationship with Eli.
Katie tried to focus on something else. She thought about how hungry she was, how tired she was, and how uncomfortable the puncture wound in her back was. Those elemental points of discontent turned her thoughts back to the present situation.
Before long the reduced group was back in the shuttle and were on the road again. Eli and Katie had a seat this time. Their luggage was now safely stowed in the back of the van, and they continued on the bumpy roads, jostling up and down and side to side on the middle seat. Eli closed his eyes and fell asleep while Katie kept a sharp watch on the road as the driver bobbed and swerved his way up a steep incline. She was surprised to see so much traffic at this late hour. They stopped three times, and all the passengers except for two others got off.
On one of the bumps in the road, Eli woke with a start and turned to Katie in the dim light.
“Hi,” she said.
Eli blinked a few times before he seemed to recognize her. Remembering how she’d felt when she woke on the plane, she said, “And you thought this was all a dream, didn’t you?”
“No.” Eli reached for her hand and meshed his fingers with hers. “Living in California always felt like a dream. One long, surreal dream. But being here, Katie, and being here with you, this feels real. Very real. This is a dream come true sort of real for me.”
Katie felt her heart warm at his words. She’d never been anyone’s dream come true before. Yet something inside her still felt anxious and unsettled. She couldn’t think of how to reply.
In response to her lack of equal enthusiasm, Eli gave her hand a squeeze and seemed content to sit with her in silence as he looked out the side window. Eli leaned forward as if trying to see the road ahead in the headlights’ glow.
“We didn’t miss our stop, did we?” He called to the driver, “Have we come to Lemuru yet?”
“Five kilometers,” the driver called back. “You are for Brockhurst, are you?”
“Yes. Asante.”
“What does that mean?” Katie asked.
“Asante? It’s Swahili for ‘thank you.’ ”
“How did he know we want to go to Brockhurst? Did you tell him earlier?”
“No, I told him Lemuru. It’s logical that we would be going to Brockhurst since it’s a center run by westerners for westerners.”
“What does that mean?”
“It originally was built by a group from England to serve as a retreat center for missionaries from the US, Canada, and Great Britain. It’s used for a variety of services now, like the headquarters for the clean water group my dad heads up. I thought I explained a lot of this on the plane.”
“You probably did.”
Eli leaned back. He seemed to be studying her expression in the dim light. “Are you okay? How’s your back?”
“It’s okay.” Katie was aware of how gritty her teeth felt and was certain her breath was deadly. Turning her head slightly so she wouldn’t blast Eli with her breath, she said, “Thanks, by the way, for not making fun of me when I said I’d been stabbed.”
“That’s something I never take lightly.”
Katie remembered how Eli had told her several months ago that the L-shaped scar behind his left ear had been inflicted on him when he was eleven years old and had wrestled with a knife-wielding intruder.
The van turned onto a narrow road, and Katie could see that they were driving over a bridge. It was too dark to tell if a river was under the bridge or what kind of foliage grew along the roadside. They made another left turn and pulled up short in front of an imposing gate. A uniformed guard emerged from the booth next to the gate and waved to the driver before pressing the button that caused the gate to swing open.
“Is this it?” Katie wasn’t sure what to expect, but this seemed much grander than she had pictured a retreat center.
Eli shifted in his seat like a little boy filled with anticipation. “Yes, this is it. We’re here.”
The van driver pulled up in front of a small building that had a turnaround space in front. A motion-sensitive security light turned on at the front of the stone building and lit up a patch of gorgeous blue flowers lining the front of the narrow porch.
“I’ll grab the bags,” Eli said. “Can you get the two carry-ons?”
“Sure.” Katie snatched up the two smaller pieces of luggage.
As soon as Eli was out of the van with the suitcases, he went over to the driver’s open window, and the two of them entered into what seemed like a calm debate. Eli held up some Kenyan shillings, but the driver refused to take them. He spoke in English, but his accent was so heavy, Katie couldn’t tell what he was saying. In the headlights’ reflected gleam, she could see his face. He was determined. Waving the handful of money at the driver once again, Eli spoke more forcefully. Katie heard him say he would not pay a “skin tax.” Was the driver trying to charge them a higher fee because they were white?
Katie reminded herself that Eli was used to this. Such experiences were normal to him. She wasn’t sure if it would ever become normal to her.
Glancing at the unlit windows of the building, she wondered if Eli’s parents lived there. Were they inside right now, waiting for them? Or had they gone to bed long ago, knowing Eli would wake them when he arrived? What would they say when they saw her?
At the airport in San Diego when Katie surprised Eli by showing up, Eli had surprised her with something he said. He said his mom had a feeling Katie might come home with him. It was kind of cool and kind of freaky that Eli’s mom had called this even before Katie knew she was going to Kenya. Eli had said his mother was a praying woman, and she had been praying for this.
Still, she felt jittery about the meeting that was about to take place. What if Eli’s parents don’t like me? What if I don’t fit in here? Then what am I going to do?
Eli settled the bill and now the driver headed back toward the gate.
“How much did you end up paying?” Katie asked.
“The set amount. Plus a little more. Not the extra he wanted, but a little more. It’s okay. It’s how things are done here. Are you ready?”
Katie picked up her carry-on bag and felt a twinge in her shoulder, reminding her of the wound. She switched sides and asked, “Is this your parents’ house?”
“No, this is the office. We have to go up the path to where my parents are staying. Are you okay with the shoulder bag?”
“Yes, I’m fine. I can take something else. What do you want me to take?”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
They divided the luggage between them as they had at the airport and trekked up a narrow path that was dimly lit by what Katie guessed were solar-powered lanterns wedged into the ground at precise intervals. The air was cool and smelled of green grass. It was still too dark to make out much of their surroundings, but Katie could tell they were strolling past individual cottages along the trail, each of them set off just far enough from each other to provide some privacy and a buffer for noise. Which was good, because the wheeled luggage was making clicking sounds as it rolled over the uneven walkway.
Katie felt out of breath by the time Eli turned down a side path and stopped in front of a cottage. “This is it,” he said.
A lovely sight greeted them. In the front window was a single, tall candle that was lit and glowing.
“That is so beautiful,” Katie said softly.
She turned to Eli and saw that his eyes were glistening with tears. His jaw was set, his shoulders were back. The expression on his face was one Katie didn’t think she had ever seen on him. He looked content.
Katie felt a catch in her throat. She had never had the same sort of response when she went to her parents’ home in Escondido. No one had ever lit a candle and placed it in the window for her. She could only imagine what Eli was experiencing right now after the horrendously long journey, to finally be on the doorstep of the place he wanted to be.
Ho
w could she describe what she was observing right now? Then she knew.
Eli was home.
Before either of them moved forward to put a foot on the narrow entry porch, the door handle clicked, and the front door began to open.
Katie drew in her breath. This was it. This was the moment she had anticipated and dreaded. She was about to meet Eli’s parents.
3
The stone cottage’s door opened, and lights snapped on inside and out. Eli’s dad emerged, and the moment he saw his son, he shouted, “Elisha!” His arms were around him in an instant. They embraced each other with manly pats on the back, firm handshakes, and then another strong embrace.
Eli’s mom appeared in the doorway and rushed to him with no words, only a gush of tears. She kissed his face, held him, and laughed softly as Eli’s dad circled both of them with a big hug.
In the light flooding the entryway, Katie could see the expressions of pure delight on his parents’ faces. She had never seen anyone greet a grown child with such spontaneous joy. What made the homecoming even more winsome was that both of them were in their pajamas and looked as if they quickly had flung on their robes in the race to the front door when they heard the luggage wheels clacking on the walkway.
Katie had been hanging back in the shadows, not wanting to interrupt this moment. She still wasn’t sure how Eli’s parents would react when they saw her. She didn’t have to wait long to find out. Eli’s mom looked up, and the instant she saw Katie, she broke into a huge smile.
“Katie.” She spoke the name as if it were a statement. A discovery. She put her hand on her heart and drew in a short gasp. “You came.” Her exclamation was barely above a whisper.
The moment Katie heard her name spoken with such an expression of acceptance and love, she felt her fears dissipate. She knew she was welcome in this place.
Eli’s dad drew back and expressed much more surprise than his wife had at the sight of their unexpected guest. “Katie?”
“Yeah, this is Katie,” Eli said casually. “She followed me home. May I keep her?”
Finally and Forever Page 2