He ate the sausage slowly, trying to focus on the discussion and entering it as he saw fit. Helen’s hands held the utensils delicately; her short fingernails were no longer rimmed with dirt. She was a junkie, that much he could now see by a tiny pockmark on her arm. Heroin, most likely. It was a wonder she wasn’t thinner. She chewed the food with small bites, often smiling and laughing at Ivena’s antics over the differences between America and Bosnia. In some odd way they were like two peas in a pod, these two. This most unlikely pair. The mother from Bosnia and the junkie from Atlanta.
Slowly a deep sense that he’d been here before settled over him. He’d seen this somewhere. All of it. This mother and this daughter and this sorrow—he had seen it in Bosnia. It was in part the reason behind that bolt of lightning. It had to be. God was opening his mind.
“. . . this movie of yours, Janjic?”
He’d missed the question. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Ivena says that they’re making a movie of your life,” Helen said. “So when are they making it?”
“Yes, well we don’t know yet.”
“And how can they show a film of a life that is not yet lived?” Ivena asked. “Your life’s not finished, Janjic.”
Jan looked at her, tempted to ignore the comment. “Of course my life isn’t over, but the story’s finished. We have a book of it.”
“No, the book explains some events, not your entire life. You’ve seen the finger of God in your youth, but that hardly means it is gone.”
“Ivena seems to think that I’m still Moses,” Jan said. “It’s not enough for me to see the burning bush; there’s still a Red Sea to cross.”
Helen chuckled nervously. “Moses?”
Jan glanced at Ivena. “Moses. He was a man in the Bible.” He wiped his mouth with his napkin. “It was also a name given to me in prison. Did Ivena tell you about the village?”
She stared at him with round eyes and he knew that she had. “Some.”
Jan nodded. “Yes. And when I returned to Sarajevo I was arrested for war crimes. Did she tell you?”
“No.”
“Hmm. Karadzic persuaded the council to throw me in prison for five years. The warden was a relative of Karadzic’s. He called me Moses. The deliverer.” Jan took another bite of sausage, trying now to ignore the weight of the moment. “I’m surprised I survived the experience. But it was there that I first read the words of God in a Testament smuggled in by one of the other prisoners. It was after prison that I began to write my story. And now Ivena seems to think it’s not finished.” He put another bite of sausage in his mouth.
“Yes, we’ve all had difficult lives, Janjic,” Ivena said. “You don’t possess the rights to suffering. Even dear Helen has seen her grief.”
Jan looked at Helen. Twenty-nine, she’d said. “Is that so? What’s your story?”
Helen looked at him and her eyes squinted very briefly. She looked away and took a bite of sausage. “My story? You mean you’re wondering how a person ends up like me, is that it?”
“No, I didn’t say that.”
“But you meant it.”
Ivena spoke quietly. “Don’t be defensive, child. Just tell him what you told me. We all have our stories. Believe me, Jan’s is no prettier than yours.”
She seemed to consider that for a moment. “Well, my dad was an idiot and my mom was a vegetable and I became a junkie. How’s that?”
Jan let her stew.
After a few seconds she spoke again. “I was born here, in the city. My dad disappeared before I really knew him. But he was pretty well off and he left us some money; enough to last me and my mom for the rest of our lives. We were okay, you know. I went to a normal school and we were just . . . normal people.” She smiled in retrospect. “I even won an eighth-grade beauty pageant down at O’Keefe Middle School—that’s where I went.”
She sipped her tea and the smile faded. “There was this kid at my school two years ahead of me, white trash we used to call them, poor and from the dirtiest part of town back then, down by the old industry district. At least that’s where everyone said he was from, but I don’t think anyone really knew for sure. His name was Peter. He used to watch me a lot. Ugly kid too. Mean and fat and ugly. Used to just stare at me across the schoolyard with these big black eyes. I mean, I was pretty, I suppose, but this sicko had an obsession. Everyone hated Peter.”
Helen shuddered. “Even thinking about it now makes me sick. He used to follow me home, sneaking around behind me, but I knew he was there. Some of the other kids said he used to kill animals for the fun of it. I don’t know, but it scared me to death back then.”
Jan just nodded and listened to her, wondering what this childhood fright had to do with the woman sitting before him now.
“That was when my mom got sick. The doctors never could figure out what it was, but one day she was just sick. At first it was just throwing up and being weak, so that I had to take care of her. And then she started acting really strange. I didn’t know it then, but she’d started using acid. Acid and heroin. And the stuff wasn’t everywhere back then. You know where she got it? Peter! The creep from my school! Peter was supplying my mother with drugs!”
“Peter. The one who was following you home,” Jan said. “How did you know it was him?”
“I came in one afternoon—I was out getting some groceries—and he was there, in the house, selling her dope.”
“What did he do?”
“Nothing. I think he wanted to get caught. I threw him out, of course. But by then my mom was a zombie. If she didn’t have drugs in her system, she was puking from her sickness, and if she did have drugs, she was out to lunch. And the kid wouldn’t go away. He was always there, feeding my mom her drugs and staring at me. I started using within a few months, after I pulled out of school. We ran out of money about a year later. It all went for the drugs.”
“You lost it all? Just like that?” She had cared for her mother too, Janjic thought. Just as Jan had cared for his own mother before the war in Sarajevo.
“Peter was robbing us blind. I never gave in to him; I want you to know that. The whole thing was about his demented obsession to make me his girl.” Helen shifted her eyes to the wall. “My mom died from an overdose. The way I figure it, Peter killed her with his drugs. The day after my mom’s burial he and I had a huge blowup. I hit him over the head with a two-by-four and took off. Never went back. We were dead broke anyway. Honestly, I think I might’ve killed him.” She grinned and shrugged her shoulders.
“Killed him?” Jan said. “You never saw him again?”
“Never. I hitched a ride to New York that same day. Never heard a thing. Either way, if I did kill him, I figured he had it coming. One way or another he’d killed my mom and trashed my life.”
She looked up at them with her deep blue eyes, searching for a nod of approval. But it wasn’t approval that Jan felt sweeping through his bones. It was pity. It was a biting empathy for this poor child. He couldn’t understand the emotions in their entirety, but he couldn’t deny them either.
“How old were you?”
“Fifteen.”
“You see, Janjic,” Ivena said, “she’s a child of the war as well.”
“You’re right. I’m so sorry, Helen. I had no idea.”
Helen shifted in her seat. “Relax. It’s not so bad. It could be a lot worse.”
“Poor child,” Ivena said. “You have never been loved properly.”
Helen straightened. “Sure I have. Love is the only thing I’ve had my fill of. They love me and they leave me. Or I leave them. Honestly, I do
not
need your sympathy.” She held up a hand. “Please, I don’t do sympathy well.”
Neither Jan nor Ivena responded. They’d both seen enough of the wounded to know that they all needed sympathy. Especially those who had persuaded themselves they did
not
need it. But it wasn’t a gift that could be forced.
“So how did you return to Atlanta?” Jan asked.
“I came back six months ago. But that’s another story. Drugs and love don’t always mix so well, trust me. Let’s just say I needed to get out of New York, and Atlanta seemed as good a choice as any.”
“And Glenn?” Jan asked.
Helen set her glass down and turned it slowly. “Glenn. Yeah, well, I met Glenn a while back at a party. He likes to throw these big bashes. Glenn is . . . bad.” She swallowed. “I mean he’s really bad. People think of him as the powerful city councilman; that his money comes from real estate . . .” She shook her head. “Not really. It comes from drugs. Problem is, anybody who crosses him ends up hurt. Or dead.”
“And have I crossed him already?” Jan asked.
“No. I don’t think so. This was my choice. I left him. It had nothing to do with you. Besides, he’s got no clue who you are.”
“Except that you came in my car. Except that you’re now in Ivena’s house.”
She looked at him but didn’t offer an opinion.
“And he’s your . . . boyfriend, right?”
Her eyes widened briefly. “No, I wouldn’t put it that way. He puts me up in this place of his. But no. I mean no, not anymore. Absolutely not. Nobody’s gonna hit me and think they can get away with it.”
“No,” Jan said. “Of course you’re right.” Heat flared up his back. Who could strike such a person?
Karadzic could,
a small voice snickered. He shook his head at the thought.
“Helen would like to stay with me for a while,” Ivena said. “I have told her”— she looked at Jan—“that I would accept nothing less. If there’s any danger, then God will help us. And we’re no strangers to danger.”
“Of course. Yes, you should stay here where it’s safe. And perhaps Ivena can buy you some new clothes tomorrow. I’ll pay, of course. It’s the least I can do. We will put our ministry funds to good use.”
“You will trust two women with your bank account?” Ivena asked with a raised brow.
“I would trust you with my life, Ivena.”
“Yes, of course. But your money?”
“Money’s nothing. You’ve said so a thousand times, dear.”
Ivena turned to Helen with a sly smile. “There is my first insight, young woman. Always downplay the value of money; it will make it much easier for him to hand it over.”
They laughed, glad for the reprieve.
Jan left the house an hour later, his head buzzing from the day.
God had touched his heart for Helen’s sake, he decided. Maybe because she was an outcast as he himself once was. His odd enchantment with her certainly couldn’t be natural.
It had been God, although God had never touched him in such a specific way before. If only his whole ministry were filled with such direct impressions. He could touch a contract, say, and wait for a surge of current to fill his arms. If it didn’t, he would not sign.
Ha!
He could pick up a phone and know if the person on the other end was to bode well for the ministry. He could take Karen’s hand and . . . Goodness, now there was a thought.
Maybe he’d imagined the whole thing. Perhaps his emotions had gotten the best of him and caused some kind of hallucinogenic reaction, tripping him back to the weeping in Bosnia; another kind of war-trauma flashback.
But no, it had been too clear. Too real.
He drove the Cadillac toward Antoine’s where he’d agreed to meet Karen for dessert. And what should he tell her of this day? Of Helen? Nothing. Not yet. He would sleep on this business of Helen. There was plenty to talk about without muddying the waters with a strange, beautiful junkie named Helen. There was the engagement and the wedding date. There was talk of love and children. The movie deal, the book, the television appearances—all of it was enough to fill hours of talk by Antoine’s soft lights.
“What is love? Love is kind and patient and always enduring.
Love is kisses and smiles. It is warmth and ecstasy.
Love is laughter and joy.
But the greatest part of love is found in death.
No greater love hath any man.”
The Dance of the Dead, 1959
IVENA MEANDERED through her kitchen at nine the next morning, humming the tune from “Jesus, Lover of My Soul.” Helen still slept in the tiny sewing room down the hall. Poor girl must have been exhausted. What a sweet treasure she was, though. Abused and dragged down life’s roughest paths to be sure, but so very sweet. Today she would take Janjic’s signed checks—he’d given them five—and shower Helen with a little love.
Ivena turned one of four taps by the greenhouse door and the overhead misters hissed inside. She opened the door. The musty smell of dirt mixed with flower scent always seemed to strengthen with the first wetting.
She’d shown Helen the garden yesterday evening and the flowers seemed to have calmed her. Ivena had known then, seeing the spindly gray stalks of her daughter’s rosebush, that it was for all practical purposes dead, despite the strange green shoot at its base. She was still having difficulty remembering if she had—
“Huh?” Ivena caught her breath and stared at the dead bush.
But it wasn’t dead! Or was it? Green snaked up through the branches; vines wrapped around the rose stalks and spread over the plant.
Ivena stepped forward, barely breathing. It looked as though a weed had literally sprung up overnight and taken over the rosebush! But that was impossible!
The bush had seven main branches, each one as black and lifeless as they’d been yesterday. But now the green vines ran around each one in eerie symmetry. And they all came from the base of the plant; from the one shoot that had been grafted in.
But you did not graft that shoot, Ivena.
Yes, I must have. I just don’t remember it.
Ivena reached her hand out to the strange new plant and ran a finger along its stalk. How had it grown so quickly? It had appeared yesterday, no more than four inches in length and now it ran the height of the plant! The skin was very similar to that of a healthy rose stalk, but without thorns. A woody vine.
“My goodness, what on earth do we have here?” Ivena whispered to herself. Maybe it was this vine that had killed her rosebush. A parasite. Perhaps she should cut it off in the hopes of saving the rose.