My Soul to Keep (African Immortals) Read online

  She stammered reassurances and joked that she wouldn’t file a sexual harassment suit, blurting, “I’d still like to see Godfather II. Even though it doesn’t sound like it has a happy ending.”

  David smiled at her again, but his voice was sad. “There’s no such thing as happy endings,” he said.

  Two weeks later, in David’s huge nineteenth-century teak bed, they saw each other nude. Wordlessly, he cradled her, burying his face between her thighs. He eased her legs across his shoulders and hoisted her torso high, separating her buttocks, not leaving one spot where her body parted in two untouched by his lapping, gentle tongue. His mouth found places no one’s mouth before his had ever dared, shocking her, delighting her. His moistness teased, retreated, plowed, circled. Rigid and shuddering, Jessica could only gasp as her mouth dropped into a startled, happy O.

  Until that point, she realized, she had only made love to sloppy, adult-sized children. Sex with Terry, her short-lived freshman-year boyfriend, had been furious, making her think of a piston, and she remembered wincing while she watched his clenched buttocks thrust in and out of her eyeline in a blur as she stared over his shoulder. Terry had tried to explore her with his mouth, but not like this. Not like he was thirsty for all of her body’s juices.

  Jessica was so eager to return the pleasure that she massaged David’s swollen maleness as though she could feel her own touch, and she tried, very nearly with success, to swallow its entire length whole. Like it was the most natural thing in the world.

  Then David lay on top of her, grasping her wrists and planting her arms above her head. He arched his back and nudged himself inside of her, his breath whistling softly from behind his teeth. His heat blanketed her, filled her. When his pelvis began to dance, slowly at first but then with an urgent rolling motion, Jessica became lost from her body and thrashed against his weight as though she were having convulsions. Her cries were alien, primal.

  “Damn. How are you so good?” she asked him, nearly demanding, when they finished in a bath of perspiration.

  David laughed. “You make it sound like a complaint.”

  “Oh, no. It’s not. But I wish … I could be like that. To make you feel those things.”

  He gazed at her, smiling. She could understand what people meant when they said they felt like they had known someone for years; the feeling was reflected back to her in that smile. He touched her hair. He didn’t try to patronize her by telling her that she’d been just as good. They both knew that she’d mostly been helpless to his learned mouth, to the rhythms of his hips.

  “I feel what you feel,” David said.

  “I hope I’m like that someday. Like you,” Jessica said.

  “Ah. You will be. You’re a quick study. You know that old joke? How do you get to Carnegie Hall?”

  Jessica smiled, and her fingers found him waiting, still wonderfully hard, beneath the sheets. She stroked. “Practice, practice, practice,” she said, glad to hear him moan.

  Alone while David showered, Jessica’s heartbeat didn’t slow. She realized she already felt a powerful glow in her chest, the kind that wouldn’t go away soon. What had she gotten herself into? This guy had played her like a string bass. He’d always known exactly what to say, exactly what to do, and now here she was waiting for him in his bed. Was she being a naive schoolgirl to believe there was a special weight to this encounter, that she was more than a typical Saturday night lay to him?

  But when David came back, she knew it was not typical for either of them.

  “I don’t believe in God,” he announced, snuggling his dampness beside her. It came out of nowhere. Jessica suddenly felt acutely naked; she pulled the sheet across her chest to cover her breasts. David went on: “I’m only saying that because you do, because you wear that gold cross around your neck, because I see you say grace before you eat, almost in secret. I’m not vain enough to profess to know absolute truth, but I consider myself an atheist. I’ve seen too much to believe God has any hand in what goes on in this world. I’m not an antireligion zealot, but I wanted you to know that. In case it matters to you.”

  Jessica swallowed back her confusion. She was disappointed, but his honesty touched her. He was hurting for some reason, but Christ might still find him.

  “It doesn’t matter. Not now,” she said, touching the springy curls that framed his face. Not ever? Oh, that face. David’s parents were Ethiopian, which explained a great deal; Michel, who had visited Africa, told her many Ethiopians were exceedingly handsome. If David was any proof of that, Michel was right. She could still taste David’s skin, his perspiration, on her lips. It was so strange how he’d always kept a careful distance before, not touching her even slightly when they walked or sat together, but now he was cleaved to her, cradling her against him, surrendering the whole of himself. She loved being wrapped inside him, and his confession hadn’t changed that.

  “No wonder you don’t believe in happy endings,” she said, trying to sound lighthearted.

  He kissed her forehead, and she could almost swear she felt his jaw tremble above her. “I don’t think about endings,” he said.

  The backyard, compact and on the bank of the river, was their place for special moments. This was where Jessica brought David when she knew she was pregnant, where she drew a crude stickfigure woman with a bloated belly tossing a rope into the sky, inscribing it with a variation of a line from one of his favorite movies, It’s a Wonderful Life: David lassos stork, she wrote. She’d promised to stop taking birth control pills a year after they were married, and she did on the night of their anniversary without reminding him. Within three months, she’d conceived.

  Despite the time that had passed since she’d moved in, the house still felt more like David’s than hers. They married as soon as Jessica graduated from college, and since she didn’t have any furniture of her own, she’d simply transferred herself into David’s space, with his Victorian antiques and wood-carved bowls and African mud cloths. She was still sometimes afraid to touch things, the way she’d felt in her grandmother’s house as a child. Soon after they were married, she accidentally stepped on one of David’s favorite records, a seventy-eight RPM by an old group called The Jazz Brigade. She apologized, saying she’d find him another one, but he shook his head and brushed his finger against her cheek. It’s irreplaceable, he told her, not scolding, stating a simple fact. His eyes were dim. She felt guilty about it for years.

  Unlike the rest of the house, though, the backyard seemed to belong to her too. The sound of the water licking behind them was always soothing, as was the darkness, even the eerie call of Night Song. If she heard scurrying around them in the dark, she’d learned not to panic; it might be a raccoon or a possum, or simply a blue crab. The crabs left fist-sized burrows in the soft soil around their backyard bushes. The summer before, a crab crawled into the house. This was where she hoped David could begin to heal his grief over Princess, which was worrying her. He’d been despondent throughout dinner, so distracted while he served her that he even burned his forearm on a hot saucepan, leaving a dark-red leaf-shaped mark. Now his wound was dressed with tape and gauze from their first-aid kit, Kira was in bed, and they were alone.

  “Sit down in front of me,” she said. “Time for a backrub.”

  Silently, David complied, sitting cross-legged on the grass in front of the picnic bench. He was wearing combat fatigues, but no shirt. His skin was smooth, virtually hairless. Every time Jessica touched him, she wanted to follow through with gentle tastes with her mouth. Tonight, she resisted that urge and merely kneaded his tense shoulders.

  “Relax, baby,” she coaxed.

  “I’m sorry. I’m trying.”

  The white from the bandage on David’s arm glowed in the darkness. “I hope that scar won’t be permanent. It’s bad. I almost wish we’d gone to the doctor.”

  “I’m all right,” David said. Jessica knew it would be pointless to argue. Aside from his trips with her during her pregnancy, and then during Kira�
��s asthma attack, she’d never known David to go near any hospital or doctor. He was adamant to the point of annoying her. Once, she’d argued he was selfish to refuse to take an HIV test or to have a physical before they were married. Now she was left to wonder whether David was really as healthy as he looked. Or, could he have high blood sugar? Cancer? AIDS even? He never complained of so much as a toothache, but she didn’t know. She’d decided to leave it to faith, but it was an uneasy faith.

  Jessica felt some of the tightness of David’s back melting away. He let his head dangle back, and he even moaned a soft approval. “Better?” she asked.

  He nodded, his eyes closed.

  “You know,” Jessica began carefully, “this may not be the time you want to hear this, but I think we should consider driving up to the puppy farm in Naples.” The tension returned, and David sat upright, about to speak. She cut him off. “I know it’s early now, probably too early. But I’m thinking about Kira.”

  “No,” David said, so firmly he sounded angry. “No more dogs.”

  “You’re just saying that now …”

  “It’s cruel for kids. You give them pets, and then they die one by one. Teacake is next, you just watch. He won’t stay indoors. It’ll be a fight with a raccoon or a car or something, but he won’t last much longer. I haven’t even seen him tonight.”

  “He’s sleeping in Kira’s room. And he’s fixed.”

  “That’s not the point. The point is, you know I’m right.” He sounded flustered. Jessica sighed, plying his skin with her fingers. She felt knots of stress in his muscles.

  At times like this, Jessica was reminded of the super-gifted classmates she’d met when she was a kid, so bright and yet so socially and emotionally maladjusted. She figured David’s moodiness, his tendency to tears, was part of the makeup that gave him such a capacity to love. Maybe he couldn’t have one without the other. She’d learned it was best to appeal to his reason.

  “So what you’re saying is, because we’re afraid of losing the things we cherish, we shouldn’t allow ourselves to enjoy anything. Am I following you?”

  “Something like that.”

  “But can’t you see what that means? That’s not right.”

  He didn’t answer.

  Jessica’s own childhood losses had been overshadowed by David’s, she learned soon after they began dating. His parents, sister, and brother died in a train wreck in France when he was twelve and away at boarding school. They’d all been en route to visit him as a surprise. He’d been too shattered to continue his studies and fell into state care, where he bounced between foster homes and ended up traveling with Catholic missionaries in Africa, never mind that he’d been raised a Muslim. That was how he’d come to learn Swahili and English in addition to French, Arabic, and his parents’ native language of Amharic. Spanish came in college, which he finished in Madrid by age nineteen with an accelerated master’s degree. He got his Ph.D. in music history from Harvard, and ever since he’d lived in Miami, where he learned Creole. Miami, he told her, had been his first home that felt lasting.

  Maybe losing Princess was tearing at his fabric, proving to him that his newfound family was fragile too. Jessica did understand. Some mornings she woke up, gazed at David’s sleeping form, and wondered when it would finally occur to him that he had twice her IQ and could do so much more with his life than spend it with her. She understood all too well.

  “We should go away somewhere, all of us,” David said.

  “I can’t take another vacation so soon. Not now.”

  “Not a vacation,” he said, turning around to look at her. “I mean, we should leave. We should go to Zimbabwe or France or Des Moines, Iowa, and start everything fresh again. Let’s just cash in some of my stocks, live on royalties. I can’t understand your compulsion to anchor yourself to that newspaper. I’d really like to leave, Jess. I’d like for us to enjoy each other without any distractions. Kira will be grown up before we know it.”

  Jessica bit her lip, hoping the darkness would obscure the pain on her face. The career she was trying to build didn’t mean anything to him. David had made this suggestion once before, when he was slightly tipsy, and it worried her then as it did now. Their visions for their lives were so different, how could their future possibly remain entwined?

  “Why are you saying this, David? Because Princess died?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Because she spent the last six days of her life locked up with strangers, not with us. And because if we had known she would be dead in six days, we wouldn’t have left her there. We would have done things differently. And I don’t like to go through life counting the things I’d like to have done differently. The list is getting longer.”

  “Does that list include me?” Jessica whispered.

  David’s long silence frightened her. She saw his chest rise and fall as he breathed deeply. “As a matter of fact, yes,” he said. “I wasted a year teaching you, another year courting you. I should have married you the day we met. And we should have had Kira sooner. Much sooner.”

  Jessica laughed at herself for the sentimental tears that sprang to her eyes. She should know David by now, that his words were capable of making her swell until she too was certain that it was all too good to last. David was too good to last.

  She could nearly buy into his fantasy of the three of them immersed in one another, secluded from the world. She’d already drifted from most of her friends, and her mother had only a toehold on her, though she lived just thirty minutes away. Same for her sister, Alexis, a hematologist who lived on Miami Beach. Her fellow sorors in Alpha Kappa Alpha were threatening to boot her out of the alumnae chapter if she didn’t start showing up at the meetings. All of her spare time was with David and Kira. A part of Jessica wanted to follow David wherever his dreams could take them, but then a voice whispered: What about your dreams?

  When she was with him, the Sun-News always seemed far away. She hadn’t thought of her nursing-home stories once since she’dbeen home, and only now did she remember Peter’s book proposal with a sense of discomfort. She couldn’t bring it up. To David’s ears, the idea would sound appalling. She could almost see why. Almost.

  “We don’t have to leave everything to love each other, David,” she said. “And we have plenty of time.”

  David didn’t answer. Above them, Night Song’s voice fluttered through the dry leaves, shaking them with a gentle rattling, and rose into the velvet, moonless dark.

  4

  Once again, he had killed.

  Never kill again. That had been his vow. After the Century of Blood, the years of rage, he promised himself he would never again use his hands for killing. For a hundred years, Dawit had lived by his own law. Yet, in a moment’s forgetting, he’d done it so easily. So effortlessly.

  What aberration of nature would murder his own child?

  He remembered a conversation he’d had with his Life brothers years ago, smoking opium and feeling full of themselves, when they’d compared themselves to the Yorubas’ immortal Orisha, the Spirits. You, Dawit, a brother told him, are Ogun: Iron Spirit, warrior, lonely self-exile. “Oh! I am afraid of Ogun,” they’d chanted in Yoruba, laughing in a mock prayer. “His long hands can save his children from the abyss. Save me!”

  No, he was no god. He could not save anyone, not even little Rosalie. His only power was to bring death to others, despair to himself.

  “This is damnation,” Dawit whispered into the darkness, not loud enough to awaken the woman beside him. They were not touching at this moment, their nakedness was separated by several inches. Perhaps a taste of her navel with the tip of his tongue or a quick gaze at her sleeping face would wipe his mind free. But he did not move, so his mind remained hostage.

  Never love again. That too had been his vow. How foolish he’d been to forsake it! He should have realized by now that, to him, love was much more perilous than mere killing.

  Love that which is constant, like yourself, Khaldun had told them all when th
ey consecrated themselves to the Living Blood in the underground temple in Lalibela. The body heals itself, but the mind does not.

  Now, 450 years later, Dawit knew what Khaldun had meant. His suffering, his worries, his losses, would be his living death. Nature had been poised to take his child, and for the first time he’d been a witness to nature’s inevitable triumph: his own child among the successsion of mortal lives constantly flickering out around him. In a blink of an eye, this was what became of a child. Every child. Always.

  Was it more humane that he had taken Rosalie instead? No. It had been a selfish impulse, his shock at the profanity nature had made of her.

  He should not have gone to see Rosalie. And he should not be sleeping beside this woman who had led him, again, to love, promising him a deeper abyss. Like Adele.

  Before he could fight it, the horrible image swallowed Dawit’s memories: Adele’s naked corpse swinging from a rope tied around the thick branch of a tree. Adele’s face, which had kissed his, wrenched in painful death; her fingers, which had owned his private parts, bumping lifeless against her hipbones. He hadn’t remembered, until his eyes had seen Adele’s twirling carcass, what a mortal’s death meant. An end. A silenced voice. A stolen laugh. An emptied brain. Forever gone.

  His own lynching had been sweet relief, for a precious moment. He swung beside Adele for a full day, moaning and sobbing, the rope slicing into his neck, always seeking to make him quiet. Three times, he gave the rope its victory; when his breath stopped, when he felt his cervical vertebra about to snap beneath his flesh, he did not fight. He let death come. And when he awakened, each time gasping to breathe, new tears waiting, he let death come again. And again. His last sight, always, was Adele.