But Alex had done it to herself. Seven stories down. Her fall had been broken by a tall coconut palm and the thick clump of gardenia bushes near the courtyard’s fountain, where she landed. If she’d fallen closer to that fountain, the police told Bea, she’d be dead for sure. Solid concrete all around. Somebody’s watching over this lady, he said.
Bea clasped Alex’s hand first, leaning over her. “Pumpkin …” she said, nearly whispering, “I don’t know why it is that everybody in the family has to fall out of a tree this year.”
Alex’s eyes fluttered open, nearly startling them. She gazed at them with her eyelids half shut. Jessica laughed, excited, clutching her mother’s shoulders. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you. Thank you.
“Honey,” Bea went on, “you’re going to be just fine.”
Alex didn’t move, but a snake of tears crept down the side of her face. With the edge of Alex’s pillowcase, Bea wiped Alex’s face; miraculously, Bea herself was not crying. “I know. I know, Pumpkin. You’re scared. Anybody would be. But Dr. Guerra just told us some very good things about you. So you just leave it all in God’s hands, and don’t you worry about a thing.”
Alex’s lips moved, as though she wanted to speak, but Jessica and Bea both hushed her.
“You just rest,” Bea said.
“The doctor said not to talk, Alex.”
Alex worked her dry lips around, giving Jessica a glimpse of the thin metal wires holding her jaw in place. Again, she felt a gripping surge of anger. Was it Alex she was so furious with? Or only herself?
“We know you love us, Pumpkin,” Bea said, as though they were holding a conversation. “And we know you’re sorry for causing us worry. Just put that out of your head. Don’t even think like that. We just thank the Lord you’re still here with us, and the rest of it doesn’t even matter. Want to see Jessica now?”
After drying her own face, Jessica took her mother’s place and clasped Alex’s hand, careful not to disturb her IV tube. Alex squeezed her fingers with surprising strength, and Jessica smiled.
“It’s okay, Alexis,” she said. She wished she could speak to her privately, just for a moment.
Was she upset about anything in particular? the police asked when Alex was first brought in. Yes, Jessica had said, dazed. She’d just asked me to come to her office to talk to her. Did you expect her to try something like this? No, Jessica said, her face afire with guilt. Never. She didn’t understand. Yes, Alex must have been disappointed about the real origin of the blood, feeling as though something that she’d worked so hard to find was wrested away.
But suicide? She thought she knew her better than that.
Jessica leaned over the bed, estimating where Alex’s ear would be behind the thick bandage wrapped around her skull. “We’ll make it okay,” she whispered. “There’s a better way than what you did. We’ll find a way, Alex. Both of us. Together.”
Confusing sounds issued from Alex’s mouth: a whisper, a grunt. “Sun … won … put … me …” The words sounded nonsensical.
“You can tell me later, okay? I can’t understand,” Jessica told her tenderly, stroking her fingers. “Don’t talk now.”
“Putch … me …” Alex’s breathing was labored.
“What’s she saying?” Bea asked.
“I don’t know,” Jessica told her mother, frustrated. Alex sounded like she was delirious, or maybe Jessica couldn’t understand her sister’s words because of the wires and tubes.
“Does she want to write it down?”
Jessica glanced back at Alex’s face. Her sister’s eyes were closed, though her breathing hadn’t changed. She must be so weak. “You okay, honey?” Jessica asked her.
Alex squeezed her fingers in response, more feebly this time, her eyes still closed.
“We better leave her alone,” Bea said. “We’re not going far, Alexis. All right? We’ll let you rest, but we’ll be right here.”
Very faintly, Alex smiled. No one but kin would have seen it.
There was no talking Bea into leaving the hospital, even though they’d tried ever since Alex was admitted in the predawn hours on Saturday. One of Alex’s friends, a sister who was a resident at Jackson, had found a reclining chair and moved it into Alex’s room while Dr. Guerra turned a blind eye, so Bea even had a decent place to sleep.
“You all go. Just go,” Bea instructed Jessica, David, and Randall Gaines in the waiting room. She didn’t look like a woman whose daughter was critically injured, barely out of a coma after a suicide attempt. Her hair was combed, her lipstick fresh. She was in control. Jessica couldn’t remember much control at all in the awful days after her father had died. But, then again, maybe that was where Bea had learned it. Sorrows lining her pockets.
“Get some sleep, Mom,” Jessica said, hugging her.
“You too, baby. You look like someone punched you under your eyes. David isn’t beating on you, is he?”
“Oh, stop,” Jessica said, laughing despite herself.
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 hell 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 bullshit?”
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 assaulting her. What next? Lord, wh
y was she being tested so severely, without reprieve? Jessica’s prayers had turned into pleadings for God to make His purposes clear.
“If you don’t, Lord,” Jessica said after brushing 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 God 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 passage. 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, glassy-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, god-damnit, 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. Hell, 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 assumed 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, God. 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.
Rosalie Tillis Banks’s father was a jazz musician who had disappeared, Peter kept telling her. Vanished. David had been a jazz musician in Chicago in the 1920s. His name was Seth Tillis. He disappeared.
And David had been lecturing near Chicago when the old woman died, hadn’t he? At Northwestern University’s School of Music. She remembered how he called so often complaining about the cold, saying he missed her, saying he would give up lecturing after that.
Coincidence followed David. Alex had said there was no such thing as accidents.
But why? Why kill his own daughter? And could he really have tried to kill Alex? Jessica wondered if her grief was tearing a trail of outlandish imagination or equally outlandish truth. She must know.
Then, as Bea complained on about useless police, Jessica remembered how she could know, once and for all.
Sy stopped Jessica in the hallway before she could reach her desk. “The lawyers have a couple of concerns about the housing piece,” he told her. “I know this is rough, but we’re staring right at deadline. It would be a big help if we could get one more person on the record.”
Jessica stared at him with more venom than she’d intended, but she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t believe Sy was holding her up to talk about something so mundane as a newspaper story when her life was falling on top of her, crushing her.
Sy saw something in her eyes and took a step back. “Well … when you get a minute, take a look. Make a couple of calls. How’s Alexis?”
“Great,” Jessica lied, just to be through with him.
From nowhere, a headache landed against Jessica’s temples and rang beneath her skull. She knew it was here. That Chicago police report had been lost, but it found its way to her hands and she hadn’t even opened the envelope. It wasn’t until Jessica reached her desk and gaze
d at her bottom desk drawer that she realized she was only afraid. All along, she’d thought she was this great crusader for truth; but, in reality, she’d been doing nothing but running from it. Ignoring it. Well, no more. Not after today.
The manila envelope she found in her drawer was still smudged, as it had been the day the mail clerk first brought it to her desk. Cook County Police. The homicide report on Rosalie Tillis Banks.
The first time she’d seen this report, Jessica remembered, it was only a fax. All she’d seen was a composite sketch of a featureless black man, shrouded by a muddy reproduction. But this was no fax. If the composite sketch was in here—and she prayed that it was—she would see the murderer’s face. It might all finally be settled.
GOOD LUCK WITH YOUR BOOK, the sister in media relations had written on a gummed yellow note on the first page. She’d drawn a smiley face.
It was all so long ago.
Jessica flipped through the pages, one after the other, not daring to skip to the back. The life and death of Rosalie Tillis Banks, who was referred to as V for Victim, fluttered between Jessica’s fingers. S was Suspect. S, it said on page five, had asked for V’s room number at approximately four P.M. But he had not asked to see her.
One page to go. Jessica could feel her heart’s drumming resound to the joints in her toes. She turned to the last page, the composite.
“Hey, stranger,” came a woman’s voice beside her.
With a gasp, Jessica looked up. It was Em, whose hair was cut shorter than Jessica remembered and whose signs of pregnancy were beginning to show in her slightly puffy cheeks. Jessica mumbled something to her coworker, her mind dead.
Em glanced over Jessica’s shoulder to see what she held so tightly in her hands. “What happened? Bad news?”
My Soul to Keep (African Immortals) Page 33