Sean almost bolted out of his seat, forgetting his belief that he was dreaming. “What the hell is that? This plane is gonna crash?”
“As surely as the sun is gonna set,” the woman said. “Got some kinda engine problem. By the time they figure it out, be too late for y’all.”
Footage of the wreckage flashed on the screen. Paramedics loaded bodies wrapped in black bags into ambulances. Corpses of the victims.
“There were a hundred and sixteen passengers,” the newsman continued. “Fewer than ten survived ...”
“A hundred people dead?” Sean asked. Numb, he looked around. All of the passengers were oblivious to what he was watching and hearing. He glanced at Mya, afraid to ask his next question, but he had to: “What about us?”
The woman cracked her gnarled knuckles. “Ah, now that’s what our bidness is about. You and your bride. I got an offer; you gots a choice.”
Remember, it’s only a dream, Sean thought. But the increasingly grave tone of this conversation had begun to sap his confidence. The horrific images on the screen had jammed up his brain. Was it true that if you died in a dream, you died in real life ... ?
“What choice?” he asked.
“Serve me,” she said. “Sign over your soul. Do that, and you and your sugar pie will be some of them survivors.”
He blinked. “You’re kidding. You want me to sign my name in blood or something, like in one of those stupid horror movies?”
But the woman didn’t smile. She opened the Bible. Except it was no longer a Bible; the facing page, instead of being full of Scriptures, had only a few lines of text, and a long, blank signature line at the bottom.
“Don’t need your name in blood.” She extended a fountain pen toward him. “This’ll do just fine.”
He didn’t accept the pen. “Who the hell are you?”
“Stop foolin’, sugar. You know the answer to that, don’t you?”
You know who dwells in the darkness.
Sean swallowed. His Adam’s apple felt stuck at the base of his throat, as if he’d swallowed a golf ball.
“Hurry up now,” she said. “I got places to go, thangs to do.”
“This is bullshit,” Sean said, the logical side of his brain struggling to reassert itself. “I don’t believe in the Devil. That’s a bunch of religious nonsense.”
The woman tapped the pen against her lips. “You believe in God?”
“I don’t have faith—”
“I ain’t asking whether you have faith in a kind, loving God,” she said. “I’m asking if you believe He exists.”
“Of course I do.”
“Thought so. You believe in Him, even though you and Him been having issues lately.” She smirked. “Right?”
“Yeah. So?”
“So there ain’t no light without dark, Sonny Boy. No hot without cold. Got joy—got pain. Everything’s got an opposite. God, too.”
Following the logic, Sean had begun to nod.
“Even if you exist,” he said. “I’m not gonna believe a word you say. The Bible says you’re the Father of Lies.”
“Ain’t you got some nerve?” the woman asked, rearing back. “Since when you start quoting Scripture? You—who can’t even humble hisself enough to say ‘Amen’? Who’d look dead in his wife’s face and tell her to have faith?”
Sean lowered his head. His gaze slid over the book in the woman’s lap. The contract. “In return for the survival of himself and his wife on Flight 463, Signee pledges to assign care of his soul to Me ...”
“No,” Sean said. “The answer to your offer is no. Get away from me. Or I’ll—”
“Ask God for help?” She smiled, but it was a terrible, cold expression, the way a snake might smile. “You’re lost, sugar. All confused, don’t know what to believe anymore. Well, believe in this.”
She placed her hand on top of his. When she had touched him before, her skin had been cold as a dead trout.
Now, it was scorching hot. His flesh sizzled and smoked.
“Believe in this!”
Sean screamed.
Sean awoke with a shriek exploding from the back of his throat. He clamped his mouth shut in time to keep from howling—the scream came out as a violent gasp.
He was sitting in his seat on the airplane. The in-flight magazine lay on his lap.
Mya sat beside him, asleep. Beyond the porthole, he saw that the aircraft tilled a field of clouds.
Above him, the flat screens had lowered from the ceiling. A Jim Carrey comedy, Bruce Almighty, was in progress. Passengers around him were giggling.
All a dream, he thought. Just a nightmare.
But his left hand ached.
Don’t you dare look at it. If you do, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.
Heart throbbing, he slid his hands from underneath the magazine.
A red burn pulsated on his left hand, between the base of his knuckles and his wrist.
It looked as if someone with scalding-hot fingers had touched him.
For the remainder of the flight to Los Angeles, Sean was wide-awake. He requested two extra cups of coffee from the flight attendants, and drank them greedily.
In the event of a crash, he had to be alert.
When Mya awoke, it required all of his self-restraint for him to resist telling her what he’d dreamt. His head felt as though it would burst from the pressure of the dream images and the old woman’s prediction of doom. But he kept his mouth shut.
Mya, after all, thought he had faith in God’s goodness.
The only thing he couldn’t hide was the burn mark. While Mya was asleep, he’d asked a flight attendant for ointment and a bandage and dressed the wound. When Mya asked about it, he told her he’d spilled coffee on himself.
As they continued to fly, Sean listened for a mechanical malfunction, any unfamiliar, wrong-sounding noise. He heard only the engine’s constant drone. But when the captain announced that they were nearing the Grand Canyon, and they hit a ripple of turbulence, Sean nearly leapt out of his seat and screamed.
They passed over the canyon, and the rest of the Arizona desert, without incident.
It was all a lie, he realized. The plane wasn’t going to crash; he and Mya weren’t going to perish in fiery wreckage. It was a lie, intended to fool him into signing his soul away.
Relief washed over him.
“You okay?” Mya asked. She lowered the novel that she was reading and looked at him. “You were looking kinda tense.”
“I’m fine,” he said. “Never felt better.”
They landed at LAX, and boarded the connecting flight to Kahalui, arriving there late in the afternoon.
Later that evening, at the Westin Maui Resort, Sean was in the bathroom applying a fresh coat of ointment to his burn when Mya called him into the bedroom.
He stuck his head out of the bathroom. Mya knelt beside the bed. She wore her nightgown, her dark hair spilling across her shoulders. Beyond the large window, surf crashed against the shore.
“Yes?” Sean asked. But he knew what she wanted, had been dreading this.
“I’m about to say my prayers,” she said. “Want to join me?”
You—who can’t even humble hisself enough to say ‘Amen’?
“You go ahead,” he said. “I’ll say mine after I’m done in here.”
Nodding, Mya turned away and bowed her head. She began to pray in a soft, fervent voice. She said Sean’s name, asking God to help him develop stronger faith.
He stepped back into the bathroom and shut the door.
Help Sean’s faith, Lord.
Sean looked at his reflection in the mirror.
Her prayer had failed, because he saw a man full of doubt.
Saturday evening, a week later, they arrived back home in Atlanta. Mya arose early the next morning to attend church. She sang a gospel hymn as she dressed. Tangled in sheets, Sean watched her from the bed with one eye cocked open.
She saw him looking. “Good morning, Sleepyhead
. Coming to church with me?”
“I don’t think so. I’m wiped out. Jetlag.”
“Humph.” She pursed her lips with disapproval. “I think you need to go. It’ll help you.”
What’ll help me is you getting the hell out of here so I can go back to sleep. I don’t want to go to any damn church. Don’t you get it?
“I’m really tired, Mya,” he said.
“Fine.” She zipped up her red dress, and placed a big red hat on her head. “But I hope our marriage isn’t going to be like this, with you sleeping in every Sunday morning missing church.”
He didn’t respond to that jab. He rolled over and feigned sleep.
He heard her moving around in the bedroom, sighing loudly, to let him know that she was annoyed. After a few minutes, she left.
But Sean was unable to drift back to sleep. The sunlight streaming through the windows—she had opened the blinds to give them sun rays at full blast, a ploy to keep him awake—spotlighted the burn mark on his hand. It had faded in the past week, but it was still there. An uncomfortable reminder of his crisis of faith.
Giving up hope for sleep, he rose out of bed and dressed. He left the house in his Nissan Sentra.
He picked up a bouquet of fresh flowers at a local Kroger grocery store. Then he drove to Magnolia Grove Cemetery.
Grandma was buried there.
Since her death, he hadn’t visited her grave once. His emotional wounds were too tender. A visit to her grave would reawaken his anguish and plunge him into another despairing fit of grief.
But this morning, for reasons that he couldn’t explain, he felt compelled to go.
He parked in the cemetery, at the crest of the gravel path. Although the graveyard was home to several hundred decedents, he found Grandma’s plot quickly. A leafy maple offered a shady respite against the bright morning sun.
Grief stung Sean as he knelt in front of the headstone.
Marlene Robinson
1924–2005
A daughter of God. A servant of God.
A daughter of God? Well, God treated his children like shit.
Tears scalded Sean’s eyes. He carefully placed the flowers in the vase.
He dipped his head. He felt as though he should pray—for Grandma’s joy in the afterlife, perhaps for the care of his own soul. But his lips felt glued together.
He absently rubbed the burn mark.
Now that I’m here, I don’t know what the hell to do. Is this what paying your respects is all about?
“I had a feeling you’d come here,” a familiar voice said.
Startled, Sean looked up. Mya moved from behind the nearby maple tree, wearing a sky blue dress. At that moment, she was so beautiful to him she might have been an angel come to comfort him in his grief.
He wiped his eyes. “What are you doing here? I thought you went to church.”
“I did,” she said. “But then something told me you would be coming here, and I wanted to be here with you.”
He never would have thought of asking Mya to accompany him to his grandmother’s grave. He’d thought it was something he’d prefer to do in solitude. But he was glad that she was there.
She came to him and took his hand. She squeezed it, reassuringly.
“Thanks for being here.” He looked at the headstone. “I don’t really know why I came here, to be honest.”
“You’re looking for answers. You want to know why God took Grandma—after letting her suffer so terribly—when she was a woman of such strong faith. You don’t think God cares about people.”
She had read his mind, as she was apt to do sometimes. He nodded, solemnly.
“You’ve been angry at Him ever since Grandma passed,” she said.
“Furious,” he said. “Grandma deserved better. Why should anyone spend their life praying and going to church and serving God just so He can abandon you when you need Him the most?”
“Good questions,” she said. “But how do you know that God abandoned your grandmother?”
Sean pulled his hand away. “Come on, Mya. You saw how Grandma suffered.”
“Sometimes, God uses suffering to teach us lessons. What if God had been preparing your grandmother to pass on?”
“Preparing her by letting her sit senile in a nursing home, drooling like a baby and pissing on herself? That doesn’t sound like a loving God to me.”
“It is harsh.” Mya took his hand again and kissed it softly, which left a tingling sensation on his skin. “But not all lessons are easy, baby.”
Her words reverberated in his thoughts. He knelt to the headstone again. He ran his fingers across the inscription.
“I’ll leave you alone for now,” Mya said. “See you at home.”
“Okay,” he mumbled.
Alone again, he contemplated the headstone for a while.
God uses suffering to teach us lessons.
He had to admit, he didn’t understand God, not one bit. But he was willing to concede that maybe the relationship between his grandmother and God was personal, and none of his business.
... not all lessons are easy, baby.
He remained at the gravesite for another fifteen minutes, then he walked back to his car and drove home.
The house was quiet. Mya must have returned to church after she’d left the cemetery. The service she attended usually ended at ten thirty. He had about a half hour before she arrived home, so he set about preparing breakfast for them.
When Mya entered the house, he embraced her.
“Thanks for being there with me at the cemetery,” he said. “I fixed breakfast for us.”
“What’re you talking about?” Her face crinkled into a frown.
“You met me at my grandma’s grave this morning, said some stuff that’s had me thinking. I was just thanking you for that.”
“Baby, I never went to the cemetery. I’ve been at church the whole time.”
He opened his mouth to disagree—and then he noticed her clothes. She wore a red dress, which she’d been wearing when she’d left the house for church; when he saw her at the cemetery, she was wearing blue.
His world tilted, and began to spin. He stumbled to a chair.
“You okay?” she asked. She knelt in front of him, took his hands in hers.
He looked at his hand. At the cemetery, Mya—or whoever it had been—had kissed it.
The burn mark was gone.
Presumed Dead
Everyone thought Michael Benson was dead.
On a chilly October night eight years ago, he’d reportedly plunged his Mustang into the frigid waters of Lake Michigan. When the police discovered the vehicle a week later, they found clothes, a collection of hip-hop CDs, a fifth of Jack Daniel’s, and a suicide note preserved in a Ziploc bag. My life is hell, and I can’t take it anymore.
Although the cops never found a corpse, Michael Benson was presumed dead. A small cluster of friends and relatives attended the funeral, mourning over a blown-up photo of him, in lieu of a body.
But while they grieved, Michael was alive and enjoying his freedom.
He’d always been fascinated by the thought of his own death, had wondered who would attend his funeral, and what would happen there. Who would cry? Who would eulogize him? What would they say?
But when it actually went down, he’d already left town. He couldn’t take any chances of being seen anywhere in Zion.
Not while Big Daddy Jay was still around.
If Big Daddy Jay knew Michael was alive, he would arrange another death for him—and that one would be real.
Afterward, Michael moved to Atlanta.
Atlanta was the place to be for a young, single, upwardly mobile black man like him. A man like him could accomplish big things in A-Town.
He changed his name to Ricky; Richard was his middle name, and his mother, who’d passed when he was a teenager, used to call him Ricky. He changed his last name to Jordan, because he’d been a longtime fan of the great basketball player. He used an undergrou
nd connection to get a new Social Security Number, too.
Carrying twenty-five thousand dollars—his life savings—in a briefcase, he moved to a one-bedroom apartment in College Park, a city on the Southside, and got a job barbering at a local barbershop. He’d learned to cut hair during a two-year stint in prison (he’d landed there due to a trumped-up burglary beef). His skills with clippers came in handy as he set up his new life.
In no time, he’d built up a list of reliable clients, and was earning good money. He met a woman, named Kisha, a thick Georgia Peach sister, and she moved in with him. She was a fabulous cook and even better in bed. Life was good.
But his old life called to him, like a sweet, forbidden lover.
Cards.
The cards had gotten him into trouble back home. The cards had made him decide to plan his death. He owed big debts to Big Daddy Jay because of those cards. Debts he couldn’t repay if he lived to be two hundred.
It took all of his self-discipline to avoid the cards’ powerful pull. But he did. He knew that if he gave in to the urge to play, he would eventually find himself in the same bind there in Atlanta. And then he might blow his cover. He couldn’t risk blowing his cover, not ever.
Big Daddy Jay’s reach extended far outside of Illinois, after all.
So he stayed away from the cards. But he satisfied his thirst to stay abreast of happenings in his hometown by studying the local metro newspaper, The News Sun, on the Internet. He missed home terribly. But he could never return for a visit, not while Big Daddy Jay was alive.
Therefore, he paid special attention to the obituaries.
Eight years later, when he was up late one night cruising the newspaper online, he read the obituary that he’d dreamt so long of finding.
Big Daddy Jay had died, of natural causes, at the age of eighty-seven. Owner of Jay’s Meats & Foods, a mom-and-pop business (which was no more than a legit front for his illegal activities), the paper included a recent photo of the great man. He wore a Kangol cocked on his bald head, his snow-white mustache trimmed to perfection. His face lean and grave, he bore a strong resemblance to the actor Lou Gossett Jr. He used to joke that people would approach the actor and ask him if he was Big Daddy Jay—not the other way around.
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