Savage (Daughters of the Jaguar) (17 page)

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.”

Aiyana grabbed my hand with hers that was full of wet clay and pulled me aside. Then she kissed me gently on my lips. “Don’t talk about money, okay?” she said. “It is all that is wrong with this world, my mother always says.”

I nodded. “Okay.” I was confused. How could anyone live avoiding all talk about money? It was everywhere. In everything. It wasn’t something you could just ignore. That was impossible. All adult people in my life had always talked about money. How much they had, how much they didn’t have, how much they wanted and so on. It was always about the money. Only children lived a life without thinking about money.

“Do you want to try?” she asked. “Do you want to try and make something?”

In a matter of seconds I forgot all about what had happened to me that day. I forgot about the doctor who had made this huge decision on my behalf, I forgot about my father accepting this without even asking for my consent, I forgot about the many years I was about to be locked away in med school, studying something I really didn’t care about, but someday would make me a rich man. I even forgot about the woman and her child for a few minutes while I took the clay in my hands and started turning it and molding it into something that I might have wanted to be a vase, but mostly looked like an ashtray. Afterwards, I was covered in clay but I had laughed so lightly and that was worth everything.

We cleaned ourselves up the best we could and went into the kitchen. Once again, Nadie and the grandmother made a divine lunch for us. It tasted like nothing I had tried before. I complimented them and they told me to pay them back with a song. Nina got the guitars and I sang one of my songs and afterwards the mother, Wyanet, tried to teach me how to play the flamenco.  It came naturally to me but was hard on my fingers. I enjoyed watching Aiyana dance with her sisters and once again had an enchanting afternoon with them all.

Later we went to Aiyana’s room, filled with laughter, drunken by music and dancing. I grabbed her as soon as she closed the red door to her room and pushed her against the wall while kissing her passionately, demanding, craving to touch her and smell her body again. I knew we were in her house and her entire family was right down the stairs and could probably hear everything, but I couldn’t control it. I couldn’t hold it back any longer. I wanted so badly to explore her body once again and caress her, whisper her name and cause her dark skin to shiver with pleasure. She had that affect on me like no other woman I had met. I hated to be apart from her and counted the seconds until I could hold her in my arms again. When I was with her there was nothing else. There existed nothing more than the two of us in this world.

“Easy, Christian,” she moaned while I kissed her neck. I lifted my head and gave her a disappointed look with my blue eyes. She would fall for that. All women did.

Then she laughed out loud before she let me carry her to the bed.

Chapter 20

 “So how do you propose that we find this woman?” I asked.

We were still naked on the bed and I was exploring her body by letting my fingers walk all over it. There was no better moment in my life than this. Just the two of us all tangled up, laughing, enjoying each other, rolling around on the bed while kissing and caressing one another. It was so beautiful and somehow innocent. It was pure.

“I told my mother everything you have told me and she went into her room and talked to the spirits about it. When she came out she said that the woman will find you,” Aiyana said, her beauty still astonishing me.

“Will find me? But how?” I asked and kissed her belly while closing my eyes. Her skin felt so soft and gentle beneath my lips. I inhaled her scent and felt aroused. I wanted to take her once again on the bed. The very thought drove me mad with thirst for her body.

“Your paths will cross one of these days soon and you’ll know,” Aiyana answered.

I continued kissing her till I reached her breasts. Then I lifted my head and looked at them. They were stunningly shaped, and even though one was slightly bigger than the other they were absolutely perfect. Man could never create something like that, I thought to myself. Who were we kidding? There had to be some kind of divine power. One look at Aiyana and you’d know. She most definitely wasn’t of this world.

“But I didn’t know with Mrs. Kirk,” I said. “I saw it happen in a vision, but I didn’t know it was going to happen until it was too late. And even if I had known that I could see things like that, that they might become real, I had no way of stopping it. I didn’t know anything about when it was going to take place.”

She lifted her head and looked at me. “You knew enough to be alert when you heard the noise from downstairs. You knew enough to run down there and save her life. Maybe that was all you were supposed to do. Maybe it was just a warning about something that was going to take place in your life.”

I hadn’t thought about it in that way. It was comforting. I had been so busy telling myself that it hadn’t been good enough what I had done, when it actually had been exactly enough to keep her alive. She was getting better now, and there was no way Maria could have pulled that off alone. Even with the lamp. I had actually done something with my life. Something that mattered to someone else. I felt suddenly good about myself and put my head on her belly and wrapped myself in her body. She held me tight. “So what you are saying is that I received that vision in order to know how to react when the situation presented itself. Is that it?”

She nodded. “You’ll know. Somehow. Like I said, it is like a warning, really. At least that is what mother said. She said the spirits wouldn’t give you this premonition if they didn’t somehow also provide a use for it.”

“But what about you? You have no use for what you receive. You can’t help those whom you hear.”

“I am helping you, right?”

“I guess.” I kissed the inner sides of her thighs. It made her laugh. She grabbed my head and made me look at her. I didn’t mind. I fully enjoyed looking at her. As a matter of fact I could do that all day, it was all I ever wanted out of life. Her.

“Listen, Christian. You can’t help everybody in this world and there will be times when you fail or at least feel like you’re failing. Just do the best you can. That’s all anyone can ask for. React whenever you get the chance.”

“Or I will end up like your grandmother, tortured by my visions. I hear you. How come she hasn’t done anything about her premonitions?”

“She is afraid. She was called a witch and isolated because of her knowledge when she was younger. People called her all kinds of things and were afraid of her. I don't know the entire story, but some people thought she killed someone once just by staring at them. Having powers like ours is not easy. People will reject you. They don’t like people who are different than themselves. They are scared of people like us, scared of what we can do. They don’t like the fact that they can’t explain how we are doing stuff. Take Halona. No one knows how she does all that stuff. She just does. She discovered it one day by accident, that she could move stuff when she was angry. She made a lamp float in the middle of a soundless tantrum one day. So she started practicing it and making her powers more perfect. Now she can move any object simply by the power of her mind. That kind of thing scares people. It freaks them out. They label her as a witch or a weirdo if we let her go out there. They used to burn people like us. Even today they would rather call it black magic or voodoo than see how beautiful it really is. We can never let her go to a normal school. That is why she is homeschooled by my mother. We all are. Well, that’s part of it. It is also because my mother doesn’t think that what they teach in schools is important for girls like us, especially Halona who has completely different needs. I mean, what use is it to teach her about physics, when she has broken all laws of it before she turned six? Anyway, my grandmother gave up trying to save people many years ago. She is afraid that it’ll hurt our family. She is afraid of what people will think about us.”

“But instead it ended up hurting her?”

Aiyana shrugged. “I guess she figured that was a better price to pay.”

“Better her suffering than you.”

“Poor her,” Aiyana said. “The last couple of days have been hard on her. She predicted the flooding at Bilbao in Spain two months ago and she just learned today that it had actually happened yesterday. She spent all morning in her room. She didn’t come out until Granny went through her locked door and got her to come out. She was really upset.”

Aiyana stared out the window. A flock of five pelicans flew past the window. I wrapped myself around her body again and tried to disappear into it. I wanted to escape reality. I wanted to hide here from the world for the rest of my life. I didn’t want to leave her or this magical house to go home to reality that was waiting at me like death with his scythe. Waiting to take my soul and turn me into something I didn’t want to be. Something that was so far away from this world of magic and wonders. I wanted to stay in this world inside of this house in her arms that made me feel so filled with joy and peace, this world so perfect, where I came alive. So filled with love and music.

“Now you are thinking all those sad thoughts again,” she said. “Don’t do that to yourself. It’ll be all right. You worry too much. Enjoy what you have, enjoy life.”

“But they want to make me into something I don’t even want to be,” I said. “Something that I am not. Not any longer.”

She smiled. “Then don’t do it.”

“What?”

“Tell them you’re not going to do it. Tell them thank you but it is not for you. You don’t want to become a doctor. You want to live your dream.” She looked at me like it was the most obvious solution and no problem at all. Just do it.

“I can’t do that. They’ll send me home, back to Denmark. Then I can’t be with you. They have offered to pay for my whole education. I can’t say no to that. How could I? It is a great opportunity for me.”

She shrugged. “Well, that is your choice.”

“That’s not fair. I really don’t think I have much of a choice here. I need an education to get a job and earn real money. Like real grown-ups do.”

Aiyana laughed. “You always have a choice. You just don’t like the consequences of the choice you know is right for you. You want everything to be easy. But it is never easy to follow a dream. It will be worth it in the end, but it is never easy.”

I smiled back at her. Then I crawled over her till I met her face to face. Our lips were so close they almost touched as I spoke. “How did you become so smart?” I whispered. “You should be the one named the wise one.”

Whoever said all good things must come to an end, was unfortunately right. Even if I didn’t want to I had to leave Aiyana and all the magic behind and go back to the house where dinner, as usual, was waiting in the kitchen wrapped in plastic. Heather was already eating when I stepped in. The kitchen was dark and cold.

“Hey stranger. Where have you been?” she asked with her mouth full. She was reading a magazine on the counter in front of her. Suddenly, the big mansion seemed too big and too empty. Coming from Aiyana’s spirit-filled house it seemed so quiet and indifferent to me.

“Just out,” I said, and put my plate in the microwave. I don’t know why I didn’t just tell her the truth right away. I mean I was in love with Aiyana, and Heather was going to find out about us soon enough, so I might as well have told her right away. But I didn’t. I guess I was afraid of her reaction. I didn’t want to hear her tell me how awful they were, these people that I loved so dearly.