My Soul to Keep (33 page)

“There are too many people hanging around for me to do much reading, if you catch my drift. I have to crash.”

“Okay. Just let me know,” Jessica said, her words clipped. Alex sounded like she thought this was some kind of game. For all Jessica knew, their phone line could be bugged. In fact, David had told her it probably was, since Mahmoud had known about their plans to leave. Of course, explaining the bugged phone to Alex would mean explaining many other things she could not.

She should tell Alex to forget it, to throw the blood away. Why was she so curious about what was in that syringe? Was she genuinely interested because David was her husband, or simply because, as a reporter, she felt a deep need to know?

It was probably a little of both. *

“We’ll talk tomorrow. Go on home and rest,” Jessica said.

”‘Night, Double-O Seven.”

Jessica cringed and sighed, hanging up. As usual, Alex wasn’t being serious. Well, she thought, her sister would probably realize very soon that there was nothing at all to joke about.

Mahmoud drew his curtains, blotting out the infernal midday sun. Then, before taking Khaldun’s letter in his hands, he burned sage and lit the candle on his table. The movements of his fingers were deft and gentle on the envelope. His teacher’s correspondences were rare, to be treasured.

The response was one line, written in Khaldun’s script in ancient Ge’ez: Redress Dawit’s grievous error, but be humane. Return with Dawit soon.

Mahmoud read the words several times over. He had expected this, but the impact of the statement was powerful. Khaldun did not intend to send additional Searchers. Khaldun expected him to contend with his friend alone. As it should be.

After this, his long friendship with Dawit would be no more.

In the candlelight, Mahmoud waited for sadness to come. It did not. He tried to revisit his earlier rage at his friend’s transgression. That, too, would not come.

Mahmoud felt nothing. He was ready.

He blew the candle out.

The white glow from the television set bounced off the towers of boxes in the living room. “Was that cannon fire? Or was it my heart pounding?” Jessica heard Ingrid Bergman’s voice say.

For the thousandth time, David was watching
Casablanca.
His face was full of such captivation that he could have been lost inside of unearthed home movies full of ghosts. His expression was the same when he watched It’s a
Wonderful Life
or
The Philadelphia Story
or any of those old flicks that bored her, frankly, because they were full of nothing but white faces. David never got sick of them. His eyes searched the glimmering screen, unblinking, half mournful, half hopeful.

David was squeezed between boxes on the sofa, his elbow propped up on one to support his head, and Kira was asleep, curled up with her head resting on his thigh. What a sight they were, Jessica thought as she stood in the entryway with a bowl of frozen yogurt. Their silent sweetness made her wish for David’s camera.

“Want to carry her up?” David asked quietly, peering back at Jessica. Her presence had broken his spell.

“I’ll let you do that later,” she said, smiling. “There’s no school tomorrow. Let her cuddle.”

“You’re going to bed already?”

“Nope. I need to write some notes to my friends I’ve been putting off. You know—we’re moving, more details to come. Just so they’ll know we didn’t vanish.”

On the television, violins swirled a romantic fury as Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman shared a fervid gaze. “I’ll turn it off if you want,” David said.

“No,” Jessica said. She leaned over David to kiss his forehead. “Watch the ending. Maybe she’ll stay with him this time instead of catching the first plane out of Dodge.”

“I’ll be up soon,” David promised, his eyes on the movie.

It was all happening so fast.

Signs of change were everywhere Jessica looked. That morning, David had repainted the bathroom, and the smell of the paint still pervaded the house. They’d taken down the picture frames and packed them away. The bookshelves in the bedroom, like the ones downstairs, were bare. Their house was in transition, and Jessica hated transitions. She wanted to be settled either here or in Senegal, but not caught somewhere in between.

What would it be like, she wondered, to live with constancy, the way David struggled so hard to live? And to live that way literally forever? Was it bliss or boredom? The three of them could freeze, like the features on David’s face or the reels of Casablanca, and time would ramble on around them, meaningless.

It was a staggering, frightening idea. But it was a reality for David. And it could be a reality for her. Jessica was sitting benumbed by the thought, occasionally scribbling a line to her college roommate in Rochester, when the phone rang. “Hello?”

“Jessica,” Alex’s voice said, tight and unfamiliar. “I have to talk to you about this blood. I really do.”

“Hello?” David’s voice broke in from downstairs.

Jessica’s heart thudded. “Honey, I’m on,” she said to David, amazed she could think of coherent words. “You can hang up.”

For long seconds, Jessica knew she hadn’t heard a click. He must still be hanging on. He had heard. He knew. He would come flying upstairs any minute to demand to know why she’d given his blood to her sister.

“Who’s this? Alexis?” David asked at last.

“Hey, David.”

“Honey, I have it,” Jessica repeated, and this time she heard a loud distortion and then a click as David rested the handset on its cradle. She waited, holding her breath. He was gone.

“Jessica?” Alex said. “I have to talk to you. I mean it.”

“Okay. Just slow down. Are you at home?”

“I’m still at the lab. Should I come over—”

“No, not here,” Jessica said. She’d better hope the line wasn’t bugged after all, because they’d dropped any pretense of speaking in a code. Not that the code had been all that brilliant to begin with, she realized. Jessica’s palm, wrapped around the receiver, felt clammy. What had her sister found?

“I’ll be right there,” Jessica said.

“You’re coming now?”

“Give me twenty minutes.” She couldn’t contain her curiosity. “So, is it an interesting book?”

Alex didn’t answer the question. She sighed. “Girl, I’m so tired. Just please bring your behind over here—
now.
”

David had been surprised Jessica wanted to run out of the house so late—”It’s almost eleven,” he pointed out, looking at his watch— but she hadn’t seen any suspicion in his face. Thank goodness. Maybe he hadn’t heard exactly what Alex said, after all. She couldn’t even remember what crazy story she’d concocted for him, something about girl talk. She hoped that David’s trust would make her lame story sound as convincing as his early stories had to her. She promised to come back soon.

Alex met her in the near-empty parking lot beyond the side entrance to the university’s hematology lab. Jessica parked the minivan next to her sister’s Beamer, which was shining under the streetlamp. The lab was two blocks away from Jackson Hospital, where Jessica could just make out the red neon sign for the emergency room. It made her think of Uncle Billy.

Alex was wearing her white coat and thin plastic gloves. She looked exhausted, her eyelids open in slits and her face oily. “Long night, huh?” Jessica asked her as they walked through the dimly lighted hall.

At first, Alex didn’t answer. “You don’t know how long,” she said finally. “Last night, too.”

“So what did—”

“Let’s wait until we get to my desk. We’ll have privacy there,” Alex said in a low tone. “There are a couple of folks still chilling here tonight. Now you’ve got
me
paranoid.”

The plate on the laboratory door was engraved
RESEARCH/HEMA-TOLOGY
. The lab, inside, was bright from fluorescent lighting. As always, Jessica wondered how in the world someone who had grown up in the same house with her could make any sense of the forbidding-looking equipment, with the various test tubes and meters and computer displays. Alex had a small desk in a midsized office behind the lab. There were three other desks in the room; Alex’s was closest to the window, which overlooked the parking lot.

The desk and rolling green chair looked old to Jessica, like furniture from the 1950s. Her sister’s desk was beneath a mound of textbooks and paperwork, but there were small touches of sentimentality: In a corner, she kept a picture of Jessica’s family taken when Kira was three. Alex also had a black-and-white photograph of their mother, from when Bea was Jessica’s age or younger. In it, longhaired Bea was a different person.

Alex swallowed the last of a Diet Coke and threw the can into her trash bin with a spinning clank. She pulled off her gloves, throwing them away also, then rubbed her eyes hard with her palms. “Lord have mercy … I am so beat,” she said.

Jessica sat across from her sister, stiff with curiosity. At first, Alex wouldn’t meet her eyes. When she did, her bleary gaze was heavy with unspoken questions.

David’s secrets, Jessica decided, must be in his blood.

“It’s miracle blood,” Jessica explained softly, unprompted.

Alex nodded so slightly that her head barely moved. “Yes,” she said in a voice equally soft. “That’s exactly what it is.”

Jessica clasped her fingers together. “You’ve never seen anything like it.”

“No,” Alex said. “And that doesn’t surprise you, I see.”

“I suspected. I didn’t know,” she said. “What’s in it?”

Alex sighed, pulling open a folder on her desk. She gazed at her notes a moment, then shook her head, overwhelmed. “If you were another hematologist, I could sit here and talk to you about it all night long. There’s just so much. I don’t even know…. Well, I’ll start at the beginning and try to make it simple. We have a machine called a Coulter counter, which basically takes a blood sample and counts the red and white cells. The red-cell count was normal, about five million. Nothing strange there. Then I saw the white-cell count.”

“White cells fight disease,” Jessica said, feeling her body awakening with both dread and exhilaration.

“Right,” Alex said, briefly meeting her gaze again. “I’m talking about
crazy.
The counter threw some figure at me that almost made me fall off the stool. An impossible number. Normally, you see fewer than ten thousand white cells—this number was in the
millions,
Jessica.

“I thought, well, this has to be off. Usually, when you see an elevated count—not that elevated, mind you—it’s because the body is fighting off an infection. So I started to wonder what in Heaven’s name this person could have. I did a blood smear to look at the sample under a microscope for myself. Of course, what I found didn’t look like any damn blood cells I’ve ever seen before. Normal white cells are very flat, discs almost. These looked healthy, but they’re much smaller and attached in threes. Like a Mickey Mouse head, if you can picture that. So I’m pulling out my books, checking out this shape, and I still can’t find them. There’s no record of them. Then, I noticed something else …”

“What?” Jessica asked, her mouth as parched as straw.

“These smears I took, these samples, don’t clot. The blood is always fluid. I pulled the tube out of the refrigerator, where I was storing it, and the damn thing was …”

“It was warm,” Jessica said. “The tube was cold at the top, but the blood was still warm.”

Alex gave Jessica the another hard gaze. “Be up front with me. Where’d you get this blood? What is it?”

Jessica shook her head. “Don’t ask me that, Alex. I can’t tell you.”

“Maybe you don’t understand what we have in our hands,” Alex said sternly, leaning closer to her.

Jessica remembered David in the bathtub, thrashing in the blood. And his vanishing wound. “Oh, I think I do,” she said.

“No, I think you don’t. But I’m going to tell you. The big problem with sickle-cell patients is their inability to fight off infection. We have a test called a serum opsonin, which helps us measure the blood’s ability to fight off bacteria. You take a patient’s serum and incubate it with bacteria. It’s sort of a coat to make the bacteria a magnet for white blood cells. Then you add healthy white cells from someone else. The point is to see if the
healthy
cells can fight the patient’s bacteria. That’s what I decided to do with this blood you gave me.”

“You mean you mixed it up with somebody else’s blood?”

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

Jessica nervously played with her fingers, twining them. By now, she could feel nervous perspiration beading in the space between her breasts. David had said something about a Ritual to pass the blood, hadn’t he? He never said anything about what would happen if his blood happened to touch another person’s.

Suddenly, Alex stood up. “Come out to the lab. I want to show you this part.”

There were specimens lined up across a counter in a far corner, near an aluminum double sink, each marked with numbers. The specimens reached from one end of the counter to the other, a dozen in all. Alex walked with Jessica to the far left end, where a slide-sized smear of blood was marked “l/8.”

“What I did,” Alex said, “was to dilute my patient’s blood. That’s a normal part of the test. I started at about an eighth of the blood’s strength. And I added the blood you gave me at full strength. I call your blood the Supercells.

“The bacteria was gone before I could even slide it under the microscope to take a look. I thought I’d made a mistake, so I did it again. Same thing. Not a trace of the bacteria in the patient’s sample. Just Supercells. So I decided to start improvising; I diluted the Supercells to one-eighth of their strength too. Then one-sixteenth. Pow. Same thing. Bacteria’s gone.”

Jessica surveyed the line of blood samples, her heart thudding as she followed the sequence of numbers: l/32, l/64, 1 /128, l/256, l/512. The numbers grew higher, scrawled in red pencil.

“You understand what I’m getting at?” Alex asked her.

“I think so …”

“No matter how minuscule the dilution, the Supercells are having a picnic on the bacteria. Just eating it. They’re somehow invigorating the patient’s serum, and I mean on instant contact. I spent two nights monitoring these samples, testing and retesting. At really small dilutions, it takes much longer to have an effect. Eventually, there’s none at all.”

“When does it stop working?” Jessica asked, inching down the counter to try to see to the end. Then, she did: 1/4096. So diluted there was hardly any of David’s blood at all.

“And this is the effect on someone else’s blood? Not just by itself?” she asked, bewildered.

“Jessica, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. I mean, I can’t even
think
about what kinds of effects those undiluted Supercells would have when circulating inside a patient. Not a trace of harmful bacteria in the body, that’s for sure. No viruses. The immune system would be beyond imagination. And this—the way this blood affects an outside sample—I can’t even express the full meaning of this. The Supercells take over. They heal. They take what’s weak and make it strong. It’s just what you said. Miracle blood. That’s exactly what it is.”

At the end, her voice was shaking. Alex was speaking in a hush, like an awestruck child. Silently, she waved Jessica back into the tiny adjoining office and closed the door behind them. For a long time, the sisters didn’t speak. The fluorescent bulbs buzzed above them, the only sound in the room.

David’s blood could heal by itself? Did that mean if Alex gave a sickle-cell patient a transfusion of David’s blood, it would wipe out the malady entirely? Would the same be true for other blood disease, like leukemia? My Lord. Or AIDS, even?

Alex, she guessed, was having the same thoughts. Alex was slumped low in her chair, as though all her strength was gone, staring at Jessica. Waiting.

“It’s artificial, isn’t it?” Alex asked finally. “I’ve read about work with artificial blood. What is it, some kind of DNA manipulation? Cloning cells?”