by Rose, Willow
Chapter 18
She was gone when I opened my eyes. I had ended up carrying her back to my room where we had made love like two people who couldn’t get enough, like two who couldn’t seem to satisfy their hunger for one another. I could still smell her on me. Even her smell was feisty and fearless.
My alarm clock said midnight. I had fallen asleep and she must have left without me hearing it. It was too late for me to go to the swamps. My jaguar had to get by without me for once, it had to hunt for its own food tonight, which I thought it wouldn’t mind too much. So I closed my eyes and went back to sleep hoping that I would dream about Aiyana.
But I didn’t.
Instead, I had a vivid dream about a woman. An older woman in her forties, maybe. She seemed to be in some sort of trouble. She was running in the street with a child in her arms. She was screaming unbearably. The child lay lifeless in her arms. Then there was a bright white light and I saw the woman again in another place. She was calm now, she was in a house, it seemed to be her own house. She was cooking and putting a big pot of boiling water on the stove. Someone was with her. I was tossing and turning in my sleep while I saw who was with her. It seemed to be that same girl. The child she had held in her arms. Then there was a bright light again like a flash and there was a man in the house with them. He was throwing something. A plate. He was angry with the woman and now he grabbed her and started pulling her by her hair. The girl was there. She was screaming, telling him "dad please stop." But he didn’t. He pulled the mother and threw her in the corner. Then he started hitting her really hard. I saw the girl again. She was covering her face while crying. Then I saw the mother, her face was beaten, still more blows by the fist. She was begging him to stop. "No more, please no more." Another white flash and I saw the girl again. She was getting something. The father ran after her. She grabbed a knife. The father grabbed her hand. Then another flash and I saw the pot of boiling water. It was tipped over by the father’s arm. It landed on the girl. More unbearable screaming. Then there was another flash and I saw a number. 829. Then it all went quiet.
I opened my eyes; my heart was pounding in my chest. What was that? Still shivering all over I got up and went down to the kitchen to get some water. The same pictures kept coming back before my eyes. The girl burnt, the mother screaming. I tried to grab for a glass in the dishwasher, but had to bend over in agony. The pain they were feeling. It was like I was feeling it, as well. The horror of that chain of events. It was like I couldn’t escape it again. It was so incredibly painful.
I threw myself on the floor begging it to stop, screaming for it to go away and leave me alone. Please make this stop. Please! I was crying now. All the emotions, all the feelings of that dream had to come out somehow. This was the only way I knew.
I don’t know how long I was on the floor, but I must have finally fallen asleep while still lying there, because I woke up when the phone rang. The pictures, the sound of the screams and the strong painful emotions were still there, still tormenting me but they seemed to have quieted a little. I looked at the microwave. It was almost seven in the morning. Maria would be here any minute. I got on my feet and grabbed the phone on the wall.
“It’s Heather. Great news. Mom just woke up. She is doing much better. She is talking and everything. The doctors are examining her now.”
“That’s good news,” I said with great relief. “I’ll be out there later. Just need to take a shower.”
“Great. She was asking for you. Go figure,” Heather laughed. “She is as taken with you as the rest of us. You’ve made quite the impact on our little family. Even on Daddy. ”
I was surprised, to put it mildly. I thought they all thought of me as a good for nothing. But that had apparently changed. “What did she say?”
“She asked if you finished your article.” Typical mother to be concerned about that sort of thing in a situation like this.
My article! I had completely forgotten about that.
“I sent it yesterday so they should have it today. Maybe they’ll put it in tomorrow.”
“We’ll have to wait and see,” she said. “I have to get back to see if the doctors are done with mother.”
“See you later.”
I hung up. This was really great news. I was so happy to hear that Mrs. Kirk was awake again that I almost forgot about the dream.
I took a shower, keeping the voices and images out of my head by thinking about Aiyana. I got dressed and ate breakfast thinking only about Aiyana. Her stunning features, her well-shaped body, her moaning when I touched her. She was so vibrant, so alive and all I could think about was being with her again. I dreaded having to spend too long without seeing her. The very thought made my stomach clench and filled me with sadness. After having felt her this close I wasn’t sure I could go a whole day without seeing her.
To my great satisfaction it didn’t take long before I saw her again. While finishing my cereal and putting the bowl in the dishwasher, I saw her out of the corner of my eye. She leaped over the fence separating her yard from the Kirk’s. I felt a joy rise inside of me and ran towards the garden. She was waiting for me at the dock. She sat with her feet dangling in the water looking more radiant than ever. Her dress this day was yellow. She looked at me with her light brown eyes that were always filled with expectation and secrets. I was so happy to be one of her secrets now. I sat down next to her and put my feet in the warm water, as well. Pelicans were fishing next to us and a flock of seven or eight dolphins passed the dock. Aiyana pointed in their direction and we watched them for a few seconds without a word. I was stunned. I had never seen dolphins before. They were huge when you could see them this close. Some of them went hunting for fish and splashed water in the air around them. It was a spectacular sight.
Once they had passed and we could no longer see them I put my mouth near Aiyana's left ear.
“Hi,” I whispered. I closed my eyes for a second and smelled her hair.
She turned her head and looked straight at me. “Hi Howahkan,” she said with a huge smile.
“What did you call me?”
“Howahkan. It’s your new name. My mother came up with it last night. We all thought it sounded great. It means of the mysterious voice. You know, because you sing so beautiful and mysteriously.”
I laughed. “You think I sing mysteriously?”
She nodded with a timid look making me want to kiss her desperately. I leaned over and stole a kiss. It felt wonderful, like no kiss ever had before. I couldn’t stop smiling when our lips parted again. I was so filled with my love for her. I felt almost like a child again.
“I prefer Christian,” I said, hoping she would keep calling me by my birth-name like my mother had done it.
“Me, too,” she said.
“So what are you doing today?” I asked her.
“I am helping my mother do some pottery,” she said with a small childlike laugh. “Every once in a while, like once a month, she wants us to remember our roots and do stuff that our ancestors would do. Since we don’t know much about them we always end up doing the same things. Mostly cooking and dancing and sewing. Or pottery. It really is a lot of fun. Sometimes we sell them at the market, sometimes we just give them away to the mentally ill in an institution downtown. They, too, need nice things to look at, my mother always says.”
“Well, she is right.”
Aiyana’s face turned suddenly serious. “I heard you scream last night,” she said. “You were in pain, you said. You asked for the pain to go away. You didn’t want to see those pictures, you said. What kind of pictures were they?”
My heart started racing. My dream. “I don’t know what it was,” I said. “I had the strangest dream and when I woke up I couldn’t get the feeling out of me. The pain that the woman in my dream had felt, it was like I felt it, too. It was the worst feeling in the world. So desperate, so helpless, so lonely.”
Aiyana nodded. “Your gift is strong. You not only get premonitions, you also s
ense people’s emotions. Like Aponi. My grandmother.”
“You think it was a premonition?” I asked.
She nodded again. “I am certain it was. Remember how I told you about my grandmother and how she always gets premonitions while taking baths. She is shaken every time to the very brink of losing it. It is so hard on her that she stays in her bed for days afterwards. It's not only the pictures she sees that upset her. It is the feeling, all the despair she senses from these people in misery.”
“But how do you know if what you see is a dream or a premonition?” I asked. "How can you be certain?"
She shook her head. “You can’t. But let me ask you this. Has a dream ever made you feel the way you did last night? Has a dream ever made you cry out in agony like that?”
She was right. This definitely was new to me. I had never been left with a feeling like that after dreaming a normal dream or even a nightmare. Not even after my mother died. This was something completely different. This was so much more vivid and involving.
“So what are you going to do?” Aiyana asked.
“What do you mean?”
“About your premonition?”
I shook my head. “I honestly don’t know. I feel horrible for not having done anything to help out Mrs. Kirk. I am definitely not going to let that happen twice. I can’t just ignore this. But what can I do?”
Aiyana shrugged. “Don’t we always have a choice? To do something or to not do something?”
“Have you ever tried that? Have you ever done anything?” I asked and splashed water with my feet to cool me down a little. It was getting really hot in the sun.
“I don’t get premonitions like those you get,” she said.
“But you hear people’s thoughts and you hear them scream for help. Have you ever done anything about that?”
“It’s too hard, Christian. When I hear them scream and beg for help it is always too late. I have tried to locate the thoughts and voices, where they come from. But I get them mixed up with one another, and they are not necessarily near. If I don’t know where to find them, I can’t help them. That’s a pain I have to live with. I’d like to think that I am connected to them somehow, that is why I hear them. But it might as well be just a coincidence who I hear. Maybe they are just random. That’s why I was so happy when I heard your voice inside of my head and was able to actually find you. My mother thinks it will be better in time, that I will be able to distinguish the voices like I separated yours from the others, but until then I just have to live with it being this way.”
I shook my head. “I guess you’re right,” I said. “It will be hard to be able to find these people especially since I don’t know how much time I have or where to begin my search. I have these pictures and a number; that is all. Maybe I just have to learn how to live with this knowledge without being able to do anything about it.”
“No. You can’t think that,” she said. “With you it is different. Your premonitions are really strong. I think there is a reason you get these. I think it is because you need to do something about it. You have a gift, Christian, given to you by the spirits and they want you to do something about it. They want to work through you somehow. Maybe that is your answer.”
“My answer to what?” I asked.
“The question you’ve kept asking yourself over and over again. Why did you come back? Why did you get a second chance?”
I was speechless. Did she really mean that there could actually be a reason for me to have come back, to have beaten death? I had been searching for it, she was right about that. But I certainly hadn’t expected to find it.
“If you want that feeling to go away, you’ll have to do something about it,” she continued. “Don’t end up like my grandmother. She is tormented inside by what she knows. She sees almost every natural disaster and lives it like she is there and is inside every person that is present. It is slowly destroying her. Don’t be like her and not do anything. At least try.”
A blue heron was walking in the water a few feet away with its long thin legs in the shallow waters. It bent down and picked up a fish in its beak. The fish fought for its life before the heron could finally swallow it. I thought for a second about my jaguar in the swamps. I wanted badly to go out there at night and study it closely in order to write my next article. But now I felt like I had been assigned to another job. I had to find this woman before it was too late. I looked at Aiyana, who looked so ravishing in the bright sunlight. She was tilting her head.
“Would you help me? I asked. “Would you help me find this woman and warn her?”
Chapter 19
I went to see Mrs. Kirk in the hospital while Aiyana went home to do her pottery with her mother and sisters. The plan was to meet at her house for lunch and then escape to her room to talk more about how to find the woman and her child. I had no expectation of us succeeding, but at least I got to spend more time with Aiyana and I even got to have lunch at her house again. I was really excited about that. When I was about to leave the mansion, Maria called for me and said that the paper called to let me know the article would run the next day. They had loved it, she said.
I was so excited to hear that and hurried to the hospital where the Kirk family was waiting for me. Mrs. Kirk smiled and wanted to give me a hug when I came into the room. She said she couldn’t thank me enough for what I had done. "No really, it wasn’t anything big, Mrs. Kirk."
“Call me Lucy from now on,” she said.
I promised I would while Heather smiled at me, but I never could get myself to call her anything but Mrs. Kirk. It was somehow more appropriate.
“We have something we would like to talk to you about,” Mrs. Kirk said and looked at Dr. Kirk. He had regained his strength - even if he still looked tired and gray – and his posture had returned along with his attitude that demanded respect. He cleared his throat. Mrs. Kirk smiled widely.
"Yes, son," he started. "We have talked to your father and told him we are willing to pay for you to take your entire education over here. Now the education you’ve already had in Denmark isn’t quite the same as it is over here, so you might have to take some extra classes along the way, but I am sure you’ll be able to do that and I am also certain that you’ll do us proud.”
I was shocked. My father certainly wasn’t poor but I knew that he wasn’t willing to pay for more than a year of school for me over here since it was incredibly expensive. I also knew that this was his dream for me that I would get the best education available. I would certainly get that here. This was a great offer and something that could change my life. At the same time, I would get to stay in the states for even longer, and maybe in time I could even work here. This gave me a chance to be able to stay for the rest of my life. I could be close to Aiyana for the rest of my life! But it also meant that I had to drop the dream of playing music for a living.
“This is most generous of you,” I said, humbled. “I don’t know if I can accept that. It is almost too much.”
“Nonsense,” Dr. Kirk said with his usual disdain for anyone with an opinion. “Of course you can. Your father already accepted on your behalf.”
I swallowed hard. That left me with no choice. Either I accepted this as my future, or I had to go home to a father who would be overly disappointed with me and never get off my case again.
“Then thank you so much,” I said.
“Just don’t let us down, son,” the doctor said. “You need to get started next week We will hire a tutor to come and help you get updated on all you’ve missed. We’ll get you to be a doctor in no time.” Then he burst into a heavy laughter and his family joined him.
I was both shaken and thrilled by this new turn of events as I drove back towards the house. I had no idea whether to applaud this or hate it. Heather would come home for dinner, she said, while the doctor would wait till nighttime and then come home and sleep. Next morning he would go back to the clinic and Heather would go to school again. So would I in a matter of days. A week, the
doctor had said. A week to make sure I was fully recovered. That was all I had left to find this woman and help her avoid this catastrophe that was about to happen in her life. I would also have to write another article for the newspaper about my jaguar, but that wasn’t going to be too hard. I knew most of what I was going to write. All I needed was one more visit in the swamps with my camera.
The rocking chair on the porch at Aiyana’s house was still going as I passed it to get to her front door. I was really looking forward to seeing the whole family again. The low humming sound of cello music playing was gone and I remembered Aiyana had told me what they were going to do today. It was Halona who opened the door. She did it without making any sound at all. Her face was covered with brown clay and so was most of her dress. As the door opened the sound of laughter wiped away my worrisome thoughts and once again filled me with happiness and carelessness. Inside in the living room I found all of the women sitting with their own pottery wheel and a lump of clay on it. There seemed to be just as much clay on the walls and floors as on the wheels. Everybody had their faces covered with it, and as I entered they all started throwing it at me while laughing and screaming. I ducked and avoided most of it. I couldn’t help but smile at the mess they had made. Even the grandmother had it all over her dress and was laughing with brown spots in her face. Halona had her clay floating just above her wheel, of course, and was the only one who could mold it with her thoughts, without having to touch it at all. On a shelf behind the mother stood more than thirty beautiful vases and sculptures that they had made. I was absolutely stunned when I saw them.
“You could sell these and make a profit,” I said.
They all looked at me. “My dear, Howahkan,” the mother said. “Now where would the fun be in that? We don’t do this because we want to make a profit. We do this to get in touch with our roots and not forget where we came from, which was a tribe where the women made pottery among other things. Women were vital to the community. It was a society where women were so important that your social class was passed down to you by your mother. Not by your father.”