“It’s been my life. I don’t think most kids think of their life as being strange no matter how odd it looks to the rest of the world.”
“Nesta, we need to talk,” he said, and he felt her body stiffen.
“We are talking.”
“We need to talk about what’s going to happen after the party.”
“I’m hoping that my parents will be so into what’s happening around them, I can sneak into your bed or you in mine and we can make good use of the mattress.”
He felt himself harden and, he suspected, she felt it too. “You’re messing with both of my heads, right? You know what I’m talking about, do you not?”
“I don’t want to think about goodbye, not until I have to.”
“That’s my point too. There can be no goodbye. I want you to come with me. If you say you will, I’ll talk to your parents about it.”
She sat up. “Are you serious?”
“I’ve never been more serious. If it’s absolutely the only way, I’ll move here, but you’d said you would go to medical school out there, and I really hate the cold. But even if we decide that, I want you to come with me while I close out my house.”
“You’re asking me to live with you?”
He laughed. “No, my dear, I’m asking you to marry me.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes. More than ever he fought the desire to enter her thoughts.
“Do I have to give you an answer now?”
“Of course not. You never have to do anything you don’t want to, not as far as I’m concerned.”
He pulled her back to his shoulder and rubbed her arm, but his feelings were hurt. When he’d rehearsed the words in his mind, he’d heard her immediate yes. He’d pictured them using the following day to shop for a ring. He wondered briefly if the lack of ring had anything to do with her hesitation, but he knew better. She wasn’t superficial.
Her head hurt. So much was running through her thoughts, she felt as if her sinuses were about to explode. Nesta knew without a doubt she wanted to spend the rest of her life leaning against the shoulder that was currently her cushion, but the thought of leaving her home terrified her. How will my parents survive without me? she asked herself.
As an only child, she knew they were overly immersed in her life. Her mother had cried when she’d talked about getting an apartment in the city with a girlfriend. She thought about her childhood home, the place where she planned to visit often with their grandchildren. Even though her father periodically made noises about living in various warm places after retirement, she knew her mother would never willingly leave the area.
“Is there anything I can say to convince you or to allay your concerns?” he asked.
She wanted to tell him she had no concerns about their relationship, but the blood rushing in her head wouldn’t allow it. “No,” was all she could bring herself to say.
She took his hand in her and opened the tightly clinched fist. She kissed his palm.
He’d never been so confused. She was leaning on him, relaxing like nothing out of the ordinary had happened. For a moment he began to question whether he’d actually asked her to marry him.
“Will I get an answer before I leave?” he asked more as a test of his sanity than anything else.
She dropped his hand and climbed onto his lap. She pulled herself in and tucked herself in a half circle that seemed to be all over him at once. He wouldn’t have thought they had enough head room for such a move, yet she seemed quite comfortable.
Something was wrong. It got very quiet for a split second, and he had the distinct impression that somebody was in the back seat. He looked at the rearview mirror. The seat was empty. She started to speak, and he shushed her.
“Just a second. I thought I heard something.”
They both got quiet, and he felt it again. Another presence; maybe it was the beat of a third heart. Was there a cloaked immortal in the car? That made no sense. Whatever it was, he couldn’t put his finger on it.
“I don’t know if I want to hear it, but go on,” he told her.
She wondered why he didn’t want to hear it. “Ian, there’s no question that I want to be with you. I’m glad you want to marry me, but truth be told, you could have gotten me with less. I just don’t know how to make this work in a way that won’t hurt my parents.”
He mentally repeated her words and tried to find the trick in them. “Wait a minute, you’re not telling me no?”
“No what? No, I won’t marry you? Of course not!”
He froze. “Nesta, tell me what you’re saying. There were too many negatives there for me to be sure.”
“Be sure of what? This is a very strange conversation, Ian.”
He could certainly agree with that. “You do know I just asked you to marry me?”
“What?” she shouted. “You think that was the get-on-your-knees proposal?”
He looked around, for what, cameras? “I’m really confused right now, little girl.”
“So am I. I thought we were talking about how we’re going to pull this off.”
“How did you know there was an it to pull off?”
“Excuse me? Do you think I let all my clients fuck me against a hotel wall? Or anywhere else for that matter?”
He shook his head, not because he was responding to her, but to get rid of the cobwebs. “When did you plan to tell me?”
She laughed. “I thought you knew, just like I knew. If you need to hear it out loud, Ian, here it is. Yes, I will marry you and yes, we will live together somewhere on this planet. And big yes, you will get on your knee and propose to me!”
He wanted to say something profound, but words failed him. He turned her face in towards his and desperately sought her lips.
He didn’t break from her until he was sure he needed another breath to continuing living.
“I’ll never grow tired of your taste,” he told her as he let his mouth rest on the side of her neck.
“You’d better not.”
He took a deep breath. “Nesta, why did you say no?”
“No, I can’t just pack up and leave until I figure out what I’m going to do about my parents.”
“What about them?”
“I’m an only child. They’ve built this whole,” she motioned with her hands, “life around me.”
He grinned. “And you think that will stop?”
“No, but I can’t just go without preparing them for it.”
“Honey, your parents want you to be happy. They’ll be all right. And how do you know they haven’t been waiting for you to leave so they can run around naked, so they can have sex on that kitchen island?”
“Ugh, please stop, I eat there.”
“I hope our kids will be equally scandalized when their time comes.”
Maybe sooner than you think, she thought.
“Nesta, don’t forget that your parents have friends in high places.”
“Don’t forget what about it?”
“If they want to visit, all they have to do is call on Fox or LeeAna and they’ve got private transportation.”
She jumped forward. “Ian, I had forgotten about that! Uncle Ogo sent me and the car to Valparaiso. He could send them to California, couldn’t he— does it go that far?”
“Oh yeah, it’s just a thought for him.”
He felt the joy racing through her, and he took another look at the school he would never forget.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The evening was relatively uneventful. It was a quiet night at home, and it appeared to Ian that both Dot and Kingsley were preoccupied with thoughts that didn’t concern Ian and Nesta.
Dinner was Chinese take-out, Ian and Nesta cleaned the kitchen, and then the couples went their separate ways.
The younger couple started out on the deck, and when the mosquitoes got bad, they went in to watch television in the family room.
Kingsley spent his evening in his office. Dot was upstairs, presumably, in their bedroo
m.
“Is it usually this quiet around here?” Ian asked. They were curled up together on the sofa under a handmade afghan.
“At least half the time. Is it too slow for you?”
“Not at all. Actually, I like it. Nice and peaceful. What happens the other half of the time?”
“Every now and then my mother goes on a family fun jag. During those periods, she’ll have game nights or family excursions. Those periods don’t usually last long. They tend to occur when she thinks we’ve been watching too much television.”
“Where do you go as a family?”
“Out to dinner, a play, or a movie. Sometimes it’s something physical like skating, swimming, or dancing. My mother sets it up. Daddy and I just go wherever she points us.”
“Is she restless by nature?”
“Not so much that. She grew up in a big family and she gets lonely, especially around holidays.”
“Her family is mostly in the Chicago area?”
“There and Tennessee.”
He laughed. “I’m not trying to make light of her loneliness, but aren’t they close enough to visit? At least the ones in Chicago?”
“You would think that, I agree, but they act like they need to pack a lunch to come up here. I think there’s more going on than that, but I haven’t been able to figure it out.”
“Some family jealousy?”
“I believe it’s something like that. One small part of them have done very well, and we’re closest to that group. The rest only come around when somebody dies or gets married. I have a cousin my age who used to spend a lot of time up here in the summers, but we haven’t been close in years.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing that I can recall. We went in different directions. She’s a smart girl, but she only attended a few semesters of community college before she got married and started her family. I miss her. I wish we had stayed close.”
“Yeah, family is important.”
“Mama is still close to her two youngest sisters. My parents sent both of them to college. With her working down there, at least once a week she visits one of them before coming home. But they rarely come here.”
“Oh.”
“I know what you’re thinking—it’s not my father. I know he teases them, just like he teases everybody, but he makes them welcome when they’re here.”
He kissed her neck, the part of her closest to his lips. “I wasn’t thinking that at all. Actually I was just listening, not really trying to think about anything—certainly not judging. You will find that to be true of me often. It’s my own form of meditation.”
“Does it help?”
He laughed. “I guess so—I continue to do it.”
“If you don’t, do you tend to over-think things?”
“That’s exactly my problem. How did you know?”
“I can see it on your face when you look at things. You seem to want to know everything about whatever you’re seeing. I used to be like that.”
“And now?” He couldn’t help being somewhat amused, but he hoped she wouldn’t think he was being condescending.
“I let go. When I was a little girl I had trouble sleeping. I realize now that what I was feeling was real and true, but my mother used to accuse me of being nosey. She said I couldn’t sleep because I was afraid I was going to miss something. But now I know that they really did have big secrets, and they probably did talk about them when I was in bed. I realize now I was stupid too.”
He kissed her neck again. “Why would you say that?”
“Ian, more than once Aunt Ife was my babysitter, and she didn’t live in town and I knew she didn’t live nearby. How come I didn’t think about how odd it was for a woman who lived in Louisiana or California to show up to babysit me? I had a big-ass map in my bedroom.” Nesta laughed. “My mother had a miscarriage when I was about seven, and Aunt Ife stayed here the whole time my mother was in the hospital and a few days after she came home.”
“That’s not so strange.”
“It was winter, and I would come home from school and she would have pineapples and other exotic out-of-season fruit for my snack. I remember later telling my mother that I wanted to go to the store that Aunt Ife used because it had good stuff all year round.”
They both laughed.
“I was so stupid.” She playfully covered her face with her hands. He pulled them away.
“How could you possibly know? I’ve been around a long time and seen some strange things, and it’s hard for me to think about all that she and Fox must be able to do.”
“It’s scary too.”
“You’ve got that right. Has she ever given you any hint about what she is?”
“No, but I remember a story she told me that made her sad.”
“What was the story?”
“She started off by telling me that every nation has or had its own religions. Then she said, this story I’m telling you is about a little girl who comes from two separate groups, two religions.
I said, ‘Like my friend Lucie— her mother is Jewish and her father is Methodist.’ Aunt Ife nodded.
“‘Twins are very important to the Dogon religion,’ Aunt Ife continued. ‘All the gods in their pantheon were twins except Ogo. Ogo was born one hundred percent male. Even though I never called him anything but Uncle Ogo, I didn’t associate the story with the man you call Fox.
Anyway, she went on to say the fable wasn’t about him. It was about the twins Andumbulu and Yeban. Together they are the Spirit of the Underworld.’”
‘Do you mean Hell?’ the child Nesta asked.
She said, ‘No, not really Hell in the Christian sense of the word. Just that part of the world that is below ground. There are parts of the underworld that are hellish, but there are parts that are fairly normal.’
“‘There are parts that are an underworld paradise too,’ she added. ‘Anyway, Andumbulu and Yeban ruled this world, and all was well except they were lonely. Just because they were down there didn’t mean they didn’t have the same needs as men topside.’
“I didn’t know what that meant, but I nodded. I probably thought it meant food or television—something like that.
“‘There were no women down there. Not women like them. Certainly, most of the women down there were dead, and they didn’t want dead women who had already lived their vital lives.
I guess there were other types down there who were alive, but nobody close enough to what they wanted. You have to remember,’ she said, ‘the underworld is divided up into nations just like this world. The Dogon underworld shared a border with the Yoruba underworld.’ I nodded again.
“‘There was a beautiful young Yoruba goddess name Oya.
Like most gods, she had many duties, but one of them was to watch over the newly dead. It was her job to escort them to the Yoruba underworld. She’s also known as the goddess of the wind and change and even the goddess of the River Niger. Oya is said to be the mother of nine children—Egungun, who is regarded as the collective spirits of ancestors, and four sets of twins, but that’s not true. Oya met and fell in love with the twins Andumbulu and Yeban, years before she had her first of the nine.’
“‘Both of them?’ I asked.
“‘Yes, they are a unit. She fell in love with them and had her first child with them, their daughter.’”
“Wow,” Ian said.
“Right, but she had to hide her pregnancy, and when her daughter was born she had to leave her with her fathers.”
“Why?” Ian wondered aloud.
“Oya wasn’t allowed to love gods from another pantheon.”
“‘What happened to the baby?’ I asked.
She told me the fathers raised her with a lot of love, but she didn’t get to see her mother often, and they could never let any of her Dogon or Yoruba relatives know anything about her.”
“And she had to live underground?”
“No, not after she grew up. She was free to come and go, but she was
never at home anywhere.”
“Do you think she was talking about herself?” Ian asked. The blood was pounding in his head again.
Nesta nodded. “I do now.”
“Honey, of all the things you’ve learned this week, that might be the most important. You must promise me you’ll never tell anybody else that story.”
“I promise. Do I want to know why I’m making this promise?”
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