Kindred (2 page)

I return to my quiet dorm to think things through. My “vision” has led me to one of the nicest people I’d ever met. Coincidence? If there is any chance my hallucination was real, shouldn’t I risk looking like a lunatic and tell her to sleep at my dorm tonight? It’s Friday afternoon. Assuming the messenger went by the Jewish calendar, which is what I’m going on, considering he spoke Hebrew, it will be the Sabbath in a few hours.

With my conscience pulling me, urging me on, I try calling her after lunch, but can’t get through. By four I am growing nervous. Raphael, along with neglecting to give me Tabitha’s last name, also neglected to give me a specific timeline. If “evacuate” meant to remove her from her dorm room, does that mean something bad is going to happen? The more time I spend alone in my room, the more I decide it does.

By six I am frantic. According to Jewish law, the Sabbath starts at sundown. Tonight, this means 6:57; I checked. I realize I have made a huge mistake. I’m an idiot. I should have said something at lunch, invited her to go to dinner, see a movie—anything to keep her away from her room. With a growing sense of urgency driving me, I call the student directory and ask for her room number.

I grab my coat and rush out into the darkening evening.
The evening is oddly warm and oppressive. I unbutton my coat, but still feel sweat bead on my upper lip and slide down my back. The campus is eerily quiet, and not nearly as bright as it should be. I hurry along the abandoned sidewalks, my footsteps echoing. None of the streetlights are lit. Nor are there lights in any of the dorm windows. Most students have left for spring break, but I can’t imagine that even our penny-pinching board of visitors would turn off the streetlights to save money. I break into a run.

When I arrive at Tabitha’s red-brick dorm, the sense of impending doom is so strong that I am initially relieved to find the building still standing. I half expect a
Twilight Zone
–like vanishing. There is no sign of life other than the sudden gusts of wind that grab at my coat, flapping it like awkward wings. The oak tree near Tabitha’s dorm groans as the wind bends it, while brand-new spring leaves are ripped off their branches. All the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck rise, as if a giant beast were watching me. I smell ozone, and the air pressure drops so quickly my ears pop.

Too scared to turn around and see what’s behind me, I bang on the front door of the building. It is always locked for safety reasons. My swipe card can only open my dorm, no one else’s.

There is a loud crack from a nearby lightning strike. I bruise my fists pounding on the thick wooden door.

Suddenly it occurs to me that the locks are electronic and the power is out. I try the door and it opens so quickly that I stumble inside. I race up the stairs, panting in my heavy coat, hardly able to catch my breath in the thin air.

Tabitha lives on the third floor, and once I reach it,
I sprint down the darkened hall, pausing every few seconds to squint at room numbers. I find hers and open the door without bothering to knock.

“Tabitha,” I gasp. “Run!”

She is kneeling on her bed, face pressed against the window.

“Miriam! Hi,” she says, friendly and sweet as ever. “You have got to see this incredible lightning storm. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Tabitha, we have to get out of here.”

“It’s dangerous to go out when there’s lightning like this,” she says, frowning. “We’re safer inside. Come sit with me.”

I am a woman possessed. I grab her arm, squeezing so hard it must bruise her. She instinctively pulls away. I tug her out of the door and down the hall, babbling as I go.

“Please, please come with me. I know it sounds crazy. But you have to come. I’ve had a—a premonition.”

She lets herself be dragged along but doesn’t seem to catch my panic.

“Miriam, it’s okay. You’re safe inside.”

“No, we’re not. You’re not,” I say, my hair sticking to my sweaty face. “I should have told you at lunch. I’m an idiot.”

We make it to the stairway, and either because she believes me or to humor me, she walks with me, descending the dark staircase but not exactly hurrying.

“When did you get this”—she pauses—“premonition?” She sounds skeptical.

“A few days ago.”

Which was plenty of time to get to know her and keep her out of the dorm room instead of making this panicky rescue. I
want to weep in shame. Why had I waited? The danger feels very real; my doubts have vanished.

We are on the ground floor, the door still open from when I raced inside. The wind is whipping the leaves outside into small, intense whirlwinds, and the rain has started coming down in great glooping plops.

“Miriam, we shouldn’t go outside with the storm coming,” Tabitha says, her voice calm and kind. “We can wait in the foyer until the worst passes, and then I’ll walk you to your dorm. Or you can stay with me,” she offers, seeing my mulish expression.

With a growing sense of doom, I suddenly know what’s going to happen.

“Is there anyone else staying at the dorm over spring break?” I ask sharply. My random question and my frightened voice take her aback.

“Um, I guess so,” she says. “Probably.”

Again I feel the hair on my arms rise, but this time it’s pure fear. I don’t waste any more words. I grab Tabitha around the waist, ignore her squeak of surprise and heft her up over my shoulder, rushing out of the building like a linebacker. I have a quick second to bless my biweekly weight-lifting sessions and the welcome, needed strength of an adrenaline rush before we are out of the building and in the shocking-cold pouring rain. I get us about fifty feet away, staggering against her struggling weight, when there is a horrendous, ground-shaking crash that throws me off my wobbling feet, sending both of us to the ground.

Tabitha lands on top of me, knocking the wind out of me before rolling to the side. I can’t breathe, and for a few awful moments the world goes quiet. There is no sound. I can’t hear the wind, the cars on the highway near the campus, Tabitha’s shrieks or even my own heartbeat. And then, in a whoosh, all the sounds come back and I realize Tabitha isn’t shrieking anymore.

The building we’ve just run out of has exploded. Bricks, shingles and other debris rain down around us. Curling into a tight ball, I cover my head with my arms and have a split second to think that this is the second time this week I’ve had to do that.

Several more explosions rock the building, and I cower, shaking, crying and praying to live through this. The solid thunking sounds of chunks of the building landing next to us echo like artillery. I glance at Tabitha curled next to me and realize there is blood pouring down her face. I scramble over to her and find her unconscious.

“No, no, no,” I pant with each breath. “Don’t die. Please, please. Don’t.” Another incredible boom and I sprawl over her as a second barrage of rubble lands all around us. The rain pours down so thickly it is nearly white. Despite that, I feel the heat coming off the building. Risking a quick glimpse up, I see it is engulfed in flames.

Within minutes, I hear a wail of sirens over the fire’s roar. I ease off Tabitha and touch her face. The rain mixes with her blood to form a red froth, and I cry because there is so much of it.

The flashing red and white lights of the emergency vehicles join the blue lights of police cars, the yellow of the fire and the dull gray of the rain.

“Ma’am, ma’am …” A voice bursts through my grief. “Are you all right?”

It is the dumbest question I have ever heard.

“She’s hurt,” I say. “Help her.”

Another person, barely recognizable as human under all the reflective fire-retardant gear, kneels by us, and the two of them begin stanching Tabitha’s wounds and assessing her for injuries. A third man wraps a thin silver blanket around my shoulders and forces me away from her.

“There’s still a danger of more explosions!” he shouts in my ear over the sirens of still-arriving emergency vehicles and the surprisingly loud sounds of the building burning behind us. “You must step away. They’ll take care of your friend.”

I let him lead me because I know there isn’t anything else I can do to help Tabitha. I had my chance.

They take me to the ER, but other than treating me for shock with orange juice and oxygen, and for a strained shoulder with an ice pack, I’m fine. I am barely scratched. I slip away when the nurse isn’t looking.

Tabitha isn’t as lucky. Aside from a concussion, she has a bone-deep gash that needs twenty stitches, and an orbital fracture that causes her right eye to droop lower than her left. This will affect her vision and is probably permanent, I hear the doctor say. She can’t remember much. She doesn’t know how she ended up outside her building. She doesn’t recall ever meeting me.

The two other students in the dorm building that night died. The local paper publishes long, extravagant obituaries, but the next day, I make inquiries of my own. They’d been involved in a fraternity hazing that killed a freshman the semester before. One of them had killed a mother of three in a drunk-driving accident during high school. His parents paid handsomely, and a lawyer got him off. The other had had two different rape charges brought against him and later dismissed. My mind shies away from thinking that they deserved to die. That the left hand of God killed them.

I go to the library and read about Sodom and Gomorrah. The angels say to Lot: “Take them out of this place, for we are about to destroy it, because the outcry is so great before the Lord that He has sent us to destroy it.” My face grows hot and cold, spots dance before my eyes. I keep reading. “In the morning, Abraham went to the place where he had stood before the Lord. And he looked out toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the region of the Plain, and saw the smoke from the land rising like the smoke of a furnace.” I run to the bathroom and throw up.

I want to speak with Tabitha, but each time I draw near, I can’t bring myself to walk up to her, to introduce myself again. The accident has changed her. Instead of the open, friendly look she used to have, as if someone had just told her some pleasant news, she now keeps her head down, her shoulders hunched up defensively. She was supposed to have been spared. It is all my fault.

I
N THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY
, a young peasant girl in rural France experienced a series of encounters with heavenly voices. They came first as a bright light, but over time coalesced into perfect, beautiful visions. The archangel Michael was there, along with several other saints the girl recognized. These visions were so lovely that she cried when they ended. The angel and the saints told her that she must help recover her homeland, devastated from decades of war and pillage.

She was young when these visions began, only thirteen. They continued for years. Years of visions telling her she must overcome her fears, her reluctance, her previous understanding of her place in the world. Until finally, at age seventeen, she no longer doubted.

She petitioned the local garrison commander to visit the
royal French court. Once there, she convinced the prince to let her lead his army against the British, who were holding the city of Orléans under siege. This siege had been dragging on for months when she arrived, a young medieval woman completely unversed in military strategy or tactics.

Within ten days, she ended it. This was the start of her military career. Over the course of the next eighteen months, she was severely injured several times, ignored by seasoned generals and adored by the army and the people of France.

During one retreat, she was among the last to leave the field and was captured and held for ransom. Her peasant family could not pay, and the prince, fearing her growing popularity, would not step in to help. She was sold to the British.

This story does not end well.

The girl goes on trial for heresy. Her crime was not hearing voices, but rather the sin of wearing men’s clothing. No one seems to have doubted her claim that God’s emissaries spoke to her; they were only looking for a loophole to stop her. The bishop leading the trial did not follow the laws and conventions of the ecclesiastical court. Some of the clergy on the tribunal had been coerced to serve. The girl’s answers were eloquent and correct, yet she was found guilty and burned at the stake. Concerned that her remains would be a rallying point or, worse, become holy relics, the men who had burned her insisted that her charred body be burned twice more and her ashes scattered on the Seine. The executioner later said he feared he was damned for doing such a thing.

The girl’s name was Joan of Arc. And even though she did
everything she was supposed to do, everything God wanted her to do, by the time she was nineteen, she was dead.

Never mind the fact that a mere twenty-four years later, the pope exonerated her and removed the stigma of heresy. Never mind that in 1920 she was named a saint. It’s pretty obvious that though her short life was full of glory, it was also full of agony, injustice, cruelty and, ultimately, betrayal.

I have always known the basics of Joan’s story, but it is as if I am learning it for the first time. It sickens me, the gross injustice of it all. The unfairness not just of those wicked, evil men, but of the messengers from God who started it, who set her on her path.

Where were they?

It’s clear flipping through history books and reading about the people who claim angels appeared before them (outside of the patriarchs of the Bible, and not counting poor Joan) that they aren’t exactly a who’s who of sanity or importance. Besides having a disturbing tendency to be burned at the stake—don’t think for a moment Joan was the only one—most of them were also a bunch of raving, uneducated, borderline insane, sad, pathetic losers. And now I have joined their ranks. Except I have none of Joan’s courage, her great wit, or her convictions, and I have already failed at the one task set before me.

Joan was left to suffer a brutal execution after fulfilling all her duties. God only knows what’s going to happen to me.