The Living Blood

by Tananarive Due

  But stubbornness ran in Jessica’s family, so she’d learned to keep her mouth shut.

  “I have to talk to you about what’s going on at the house,” Alex said, her tone more businesslike. Her breath floated out in puffs of white mist.

  “How many families are there?” Jessica said.

  “Six. Three families from Serowe, one from the Okavango Delta, two from Harare.”

  Harare! Jessica’s heart dropped. No one had come from as far as Zimbabwe since they’d moved. This was how it had started before, when they’d been foolish enough to practically advertise their services by encouraging word of mouth to spread. Just as before, the people they healed were telling others. Despite being asked to keep the location of the house a secret and not to disclose the nature of the treatment they received here, their patients’ families raved to their husbands’ mining friends, their shopkeepers, their distant relatives. New families always found them, all of them with sick children, bringing such horrible hope in their eyes.

  Within a matter of weeks, Jessica realized, they might find themselves facing the squalor of the South African clinic, with dozens of families at a time huddled in the waiting room, lured by the promise of healing, which had brought too much attention. If they hadn’t slipped away with all of their belongings crammed into the Jeep in the middle of the night, it might have been only a matter of days before she and Bee-Bee had ended up imprisoned in some kind of science lab, or worse. As they’d driven away, Jessica had been heartbroken to see a stream of sojourners with bundles on their heads walking on the path toward the clinic, midnight pilgrims about to be gravely disappointed.

  Botswana was supposed to be different.

  “Damn,” Jessica said. “Children?”

  With a short sigh and resigned eyes, Alex nodded.

  “What’s wrong with them?” Jessica said.

  “I heard one mother mention blood cancer, so that’s probably leukemia. There’s also a girl who’s been blind since birth, a teenager. And one kid, a boy, who looks like he has CP.”

  “What should we do?”

  “Funny, I was about to ask you the same thing,” Alex said.

  Jessica gazed at the barren soil around her, which had been overgrazed for years and was parched for lack of rainfall; it was so dry that the earth at her toes crumbled when she nudged it. Maybe there was some wisdom to be learned from the soil, Jessica thought. A conservation of resources was necessary for survival, in the end. There were only so many places they could run.

  “See if anyone’s terminal. The leukemia case, maybe,” Jessica said softly. “Give the kid with CP a dose of saline so his family won’t think they wasted a trip. And we don’t cure blindness. Even if we did—”

  “Terminals only,” Alex finished. They had agreed upon this hard rule long ago, when they realized it would be impossible to heal everyone. “But, Jess . . . as much as I hate to say this, we need to send some more people home disappointed. Even terminals. At least one month with just saline, so we can slow down the word of mouth. You know?”

  Jessica looked away from her. They had sent away terminally ill children before, and when they did, it was hard for Jessica to sleep at night. But what was the alternative? The power to help people was intoxicating, but helping too many people would bring their destruction one day, and they both knew it. If the Searchers didn’t finally swoop down and force them to stop distributing the blood, a government agency might come and do a more thorough investigation. She didn’t know which would be worse.

  “Sure,” Jessica said dully. “Fine. Send them all home.”

  “Uh-huh. Look me in the face and say that,” Alex said. Jessica glanced at her sister and saw that she was grinning; the smile really softened Alex’s face, made her natural prettiness almost poignant. Jessica was so startled by her sister’s grin that she realized she hadn’t seen Alex behave playfully in a long time.

  “Right, look who’s talking. You’re no better than I am.”

  “Well,” Alex said, still smiling, “we don’t really know how the serum affects a brain disorder, but we can try the kid with CP. It might help with balance, coordination, give the kid a better shot at a normal life. He’s a real cutie, too. Just this once, I mean.”

  “Right. Sure. Just this once.”

  Suddenly, Alex’s grin was gone and the mask of worry once again crept across her face. “No,” she said somberly. “Saline. We don’t have a choice, Jess. If we’re not careful, the time may come when we can’t help anyone—and I mean soon. My skin crawls when I think about how many people know about us, and they’re not all going to come and say ‘Please.’ God has been with us so far, but we can’t be naive. Even God says not to test Him by being foolish.”

  “I know,” Jessica said. The same worry had been nagging her for weeks, but unconsciously. She’d been so preoccupied with dreading intervention by the Searchers that she hadn’t allowed herself to wonder what lengths other people might go to for access to her blood.

  Unnecessarily, Alex’s voice lowered to a near-whisper. “And we both love Sarah, but since what happened last week, I’m worried about her, too. She saw too much. And she just told me her brother is coming to visit soon. I’m afraid she might say something to him—wouldn’t you? ‘What’s new with me? Oh, nothing much, I just saw a dead girl come back to life.” ’

  Jessica felt a pang, mingled sadness and panic. Sarah had never completely lost her reticence, but she’d been a faithful employee for three years, helping them process patients and injecting the serum without asking questions about where it came from. To Bee-Bee, she was almost like an aunt. Still, Jessica knew better than to trust someone outside of the family.

  “So what do we do? Send her home?” Jessica said.

  Alex sighed, and this time her breath was a fog. “No. I hate to do that after she’s been with us all this time. But if we’re taking a chance with her, we damn sure can’t afford to take any more. Right?”

  Alex was right, but the thought of it made Jessica’s heart ache from a pool of grief deep inside her. It was bad enough to have a sick child, but how much worse when parents’ hopes had been raised? To those families, it would be better if there had been no clinic at all, no promise of miracles. For them, she thought, it would be better if she had never brought her blood to anyone.

  “Just do me a favor, Alex,” Jessica said softly. “Please just don’t tell me when you start sending terminals home.”

  Alex nodded, squeezing Jessica’s hand, a reminder to both of them that Alex was still the big sister, after all.

  • • •

  It was Blood Day. Jessica had forgotten all about it when Alex summoned her to her room later that afternoon. Blood Day was the first Sunday of every month, and there had been a time when Jessica was so mystified and enraptured by her own blood that she had woken up thinking about it each time. Today, she’d just forgotten. Maybe, more and more, she’d gotten used to who she was.

  “Bee-Bee, come on in back with us and watch,” Alex said, motioning toward her room.

  “Not Bee-Bee—Fana,” Bee-Bee said, not moving. She was standing defiantly in the hallway with a half-eaten orange dripping down her bare arm.

  “Well, whoever you are, you better bring your behind here right now,” Alex said, and Bee-Bee scrambled toward her obediently, just as Jessica had when she was a child. Alex had not lost her touch.

  Sarah was permitted to enter Alex’s room, but patients were not. All examinations and injections were given in the library, where patients sat in the reclining chair beneath the overhead light. There were only books on the library shelves, nothing out of the ordinary. By design, their home did not look like a clinic at all. Clinic, you say? What clinic?

  Alex’s bedroom was the largest in the house, the master bedroom; it doubled as a storeroom, with shelves of ground and dried herbs, bandages, rubbing alcohol, and saline IV packs hugging every inch of the walls in her good-sized walk-in closet. Still, if they were ever raided, as they had
been in South Africa, inquisitive outsiders would not see anything extraordinary on these shelves. The blood supply—the few ounces they kept in reserve for serum and in case of the Unspeakable, if Jessica and Bee-Bee somehow disappeared—was hidden beneath one of Alex’s closet floorboards, buried treasure. The blood didn’t need refrigeration, nor would it have made a difference. Even outside the body, the blood always remained at body temperature, generating its own heat, its own life.

  The blood itself, Alex had surmised, was alive. She had been studying it for nearly four years, and all her lab work boiled down to one thing: The blood wasn’t human, not fitting any known blood type. It was a regenerative, independent life source, defying all scientific laws. The cells refused to die, and the blood’s overriding purpose seemed to be to destroy toxins and to repair injuries to its host. With Jessica and Bee-Bee, its power was absolute. When it was injected into outsiders, it was remarkably potent, but the blood did not take over the body’s cells the same way, so its abilities were more limited. In rare cases—such as the time they had tried to reverse a visual impairment, and when a child had come to them with an enlarged, badly blocked heart—the blood had virtually no effect. But with blood diseases, it was unparalleled, no less than miraculous; whether it was AIDS, leukemia, sickle-cell, or any pesky virus or bacteria attacking the patient, an injection of the serum containing only a few drops of Jessica’s blood wiped it away instantly, as if it had never been.

  That was all Alex knew about the blood, and she had told Jessica she could study it for the rest of her life and she might never know why it behaved as it did. Maybe the Zulus had been right, in the end, Jessica thought; maybe the blood was simply magic, an outright gift from God.

  Jessica sat on the high stool next to Alex’s neatly made bed and offered her arm to her sister, and Alex swabbed the crook of Jessica’s arm with alcohol, all the while complaining about how much money she’d had to pay just to buy a can of Coke when she’d gone to get supplies in Serowe the day before. “He wouldn’t even bargain. I mean, these people are tripping, because no Coke is worth all that damn money,” Alex was saying, and Jessica was so busy laughing at Alex’s sister-girl affectations that she barely winced as the needle slipped beneath her skin.

  “You drink diet Coke,” Jessica reminded her.

  “Girl,” Alex said, bending over to see better as she fastened the needle in Jessica’s arm to the tube that ran to the empty plastic bag in her hands, “I was not about to stand out there in all that cold talking about, ‘Do you have any diet?’ Please.”

  Bee-Bee watched the procedure in silence, standing beneath Jessica’s knees with fascinated eyes. After a couple of taps from Alex’s finger and a brief hesitation, the tube began to fill up bright red, and the red began to crawl to the pouch in Alex’s hands, which she was cupping like a baby sparrow. They all watched the blood for a moment, not speaking, lost in their own thoughts.

  “One of these days, I’m going to run dry,” Jessica said finally, diminishing the weight of the moment with an attempt at a joke.

  “You better not,” Alex said.

  “Then I can give some. Right, Mommy?”

  “Baby, your blood would probably give somebody a coronary,” Alex teased her, and Jessica quickly shot her sister a warning look: Don’t tease Bee-Bee about that, the look said. Recognizing the unspoken words, Alex added, “But I’m sure we’ll need you someday. You can help a lot of folks, too . . . Fana.”

  At the mention of her chosen name, Bee-Bee’s face glowed with a contented row of baby teeth. She looked so precious that Jessica’s eyes nearly smarted with tears. Almost everyone who saw Bee-Bee remarked on how hard it was to remember any child who was more striking, or whose smile drew out such a nurturing instinct. Whenever Jessica took her to Francistown, white couples had a habit of trying to coax Bee-Bee to take coins from them, but Jessica had finally realized it wasn’t because they assumed she was a beggar; people just naturally wanted to be kind to her. Bee-Bee wasn’t cute, Alex said, not like an obnoxious kid from an American television sitcom; she was an outright marvel. You better watch that kid, Alex always said. If she wanted to, she could wrap you and the rest of the world around her little pinkie finger. She’ll be spoiled so rotten she’ll stink across the room.

  “Listen, sweetheart, we’ll call you Fana if you want,” Jessica told her. “But whatever you do, just don’t say anything about it to your grandmother when we go to town to call her. Okay?”

  “Oh, Lord . . . please don’t,” Alex agreed.

  “I won’t!” Bee-Bee said, promising. She was already a veteran of secrets.

  They heard scraping footsteps beyond the doorway. Without thinking, they’d left the bedroom door cracked open today, and through the slit Jessica saw Sarah walking in the hall toward them. Sarah projected an officious grace in her white uniform-style dress; she was taller than Alex, with a long neck and a beautifully rounded head she shaved nearly to her scalp. Sarah gazed at Jessica in the face for a moment—a gaze that tried too hard to seem uninterested—then her eyes dropped and she began to walk away.

  “Shit,” Alex hissed, disgusted at her oversight. “Fana, close that door, please.”

  Sarah wasn’t stupid. She knew the supplies they bought from the market in Serowe and ordered from the pharmacy in Francistown did not include the clear pinkish serum she had injected into dozens of children’s arms. Once, when Alex and Jessica had been away on a family sight-seeing tour, Sarah had even taken it upon herself to treat new children with the serum. “People came, and I used some blood,” she later explained with her luxurious Zulu accent, pronouncing each word with care so she could easily be understood. “They were quite sick, and I made the choice to save them. I hope you will not mind.” She’d called it blood because she remembered the early days in South Africa, before Alex began to dilute it, before she had disguised the serum’s potent ingredient.

  But Sarah had never actually seen its source, not until now.

  Thank God it had only been Sarah in the hall! Her heart drumming, Jessica gazed down at the current of blood draining from her arm into Alex’s pouch, trying to ponder all the promises and possibilities the fluid held. Jessica had once despised David for giving her and her baby this blood forever, especially after what had happened to Kira; in his quest to give Kira this eternal gift, David had killed her. Jessica would never understand why it was she, not Kira, who had survived that night in the motel room. Why couldn’t the police have come when David was trying to inject her with the blood instead?

  Maybe she herself could have saved Kira after David had been shot, when the hypodermic flew within her grasp on the bed. She’d had it in her hand, had ultimately hidden it away. She’d been weak and drowsy, probably out of her mind, but she could half-remember feeling a certainty beyond her own strength that she would be robbing Kira of a place in heaven if she tried to finish whatever ritual David had started to make Kira immortal; giving that blood to Kira to bring her back from the dead would have banished her own child from God’s kingdom. If she had the choice again today, knowing what Kira’s loss felt like, Jessica would not be strong enough to hesitate as she had that terrible night in the motel room. She would give Kira that blood herself, even if it meant she was stealing away her daughter’s eternal soul. Then, at least, they would all have been damned together. Her, Kira, and Bee-Bee.

  Had she done the right thing? Lord, she hoped so. She wished her faith were strong enough to give her certainty, but she wasn’t sure—and never would be. Now, it was too late.

  Kira, Jessica thought, had been her ultimate blood-price. Because her heart had not been able to forgive David, the blood had cost her both a daughter and a husband.

  And beyond her loss, there was also the loneliness. The blood gave Jessica so much power, and yet it made her a stranger to the world, forcing her to hide even from someone like Sarah, who shared her commitment to sick children and had lived with her for years. This was exactly the way David had treated Jessica
throughout their marriage, not trusting her with the truth until the end. And he had done far worse, too, all for the sake of his secret.

  Ultimately, how much more was she like David now? Was she capable of doing the sort of things he had done? She didn’t think so, but she also realized she no longer knew. In many ways, this blood had made her a stranger even to herself.

  Jessica didn’t know what to think of blood like that, if the promise was worth the price.

  5

  Fana was sorry she had ever decided to go with Moses today. Her feet were sore from the long walk to the trees behind her house, through scratchy stalks of grass that were as tall as she was. Moses was being a bad friend today. To expect her to walk so far, when he knew her legs were much smaller and it was hard for her to keep up! Fana wasn’t even tall enough to reach Moses’s thighs, and Moses’s twelve-year-old legs were long; he was nearly as tall as his father, and already taller than his older brother Luck. He knew she was little, that she was no match for those legs. Other people’s legs were always bigger than hers.

  He should have offered to carry her the way he did after they rode to Serowe on his bicycle to trick the town boys out of the pula they earned in the South African mines. Oh, she loved to fly on his bicycle! Her legs hung over his basket while the bicycle wheels bumped up and down on the dirt road, and she laughed the whole way because the bumps tickled her tummy. And the trick was so easy! Moses gave the town boys colored marbles to hide behind their backs, betting that Fana could guess which color they held in each hand. The boys teased her: What does this baby know? Can she even name her colors yet? And of course, she always could. When Fana closed her eyes, she could see the boys’ marbles as clearly as if she held them in her own hands, the rich blue or violet or bright peach the shade of a sunset. That was no work at all! Fana loved her good days with Moses, when they played games.

  But today was not a good day. Moses wasn’t being nice to her. He hadn’t carried her even when she begged him and threatened to cry, and he’d walked faster the more she complained. Fana had been a dozen steps behind him no matter how fast she tried to walk, and now her feet were sore. She’d told him that her feet hurt even though she wore the soft American sneakers her grandmother had sent her from Florida. Moses’s own feet were bare. He mostly wore shoes only when he dressed in his uniform to go to school in Serowe. Moses was wearing a sweater and shorts that reached his knees, and his legs looked dry. Her mommy would call his dry skin ashy. Fana’s mother rubbed her with lotion when her skin looked like that, but Fana knew boys didn’t care if their skin looked smooth.