Eve: A Novel (21 page)

“I don’t know. Right now I don’t feel anything at all. How do you wake up from a dream that is real? But see? I am pretty sure I’m awake.” Lilly pinched the skin on her left arm until it hurt nearly as much as her poisoned arm did.

“Just making sure?” Anita asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Yeah. Everything’s a question right now, everything.” Lilly paused and then asked, “Anita, what did you mean when you said I was too old too soon?”

The Scholar thought before answering. “We are all children, regardless of our age, and although God designed us to grow in stature and in wisdom, They also intended we should remain children at heart. Sadly, evil forces many of us to abandon our childlike ways and we become too old too soon.”

“How much do you know about my life?”

“Enough to see it deeply wounded you, and to know you are sorting through the rubble.” Again anger edged her voice, heartbreak for Lilly. “That is not the judgment of a Scholar but
the observation of a friend who loves you.”

They held hands in the quiet for a time. “My mother sold me, Anita. My mother! She sold me to her boyfriend, and then he sold me to other men.” As Lilly spoke, tears flowed down her face. Anita wept too. “How could a mother do that? She sold me for drugs. When she was high she called me Kris, ’cause that was her drug of choice, crystal meth. The men just called me Princess.”

Anita squeezed her hand and let her talk. It wasn’t a time for words from anyone else.

“You know the worst thing about rape? It’s not the pain, it’s what you’re left with after. My mom would walk me down to the neighborhood church and leave me there. Maybe I was her attempt at confession, or maybe she wanted God to fix me just enough so she could break me again. I remember sitting in a class with other kids my age, I think I was five or six, and I would think,
What is wrong with these kids? How can they laugh with me sitting right here? Don’t they know they could get my diseases?
They made fun of my ‘holy’ stockings, the same ‘holy’ stockings that men took off me before . . . before . . . you know . . .”

Lilly and Anita sighed heavily as one.

“Somebody called it soul rape. I think they’re right. You’re left with nobody and nothing ’cause that’s all that you deserve. It’s your fault if you’re cute or pretty enough to be chosen. If someone else is picked, it’s your fault because you aren’t enough.

“I ran away again and again, but more men found me. They sold me and they sold me and they operated on me so that customers would think I was a virgin, and then they operated on me
and took away the only thing that I had left. Anita, I know why I haven’t had a period. It’s because I can’t. I can’t ever have a baby. You see, I didn’t come through a tragedy. I
am
the tragedy!”

Anita leaned over Lilly and encircled her in strong arms, lifting her shoulders off the bed and protecting her with the shield of love and shared grief.

“Anita, I can’t have a baby, ever,” she sobbed. “I always thought that no matter how bad I messed things up, one day I would do something right and have a baby, someone that I could love and who would love me and call me her momma, and now I can’t, I can’t . . .”

The woman held and rocked the girl. Lilly was so lost to her own sorrow that she didn’t notice tears continuously rolling down the Scholar’s face until they soaked through her hair.

When the emotions subsided and both women wiped their faces clean once more, they hugged tight and long. Lilly now felt embarrassed that she had spewed her life onto someone else. But there was no way to retract it.

“May I share something personal and precious with you, Lilly?” Anita asked.

“Sure.”

“Gerald and I had a daughter, full-term but stillborn. It was the single worst day of my life. Her name is Nadja, which is Hope. We named her before we met her. She had the most delicate hands and feet, perfect and complete. She did have Gerald’s ears, which would have posed a challenge that I’m sure she would have overcome. But since Nadja slipped into God’s keeping, I have not been able to conceive a son or daughter, and not for lack of trying. It seems that all the mechanics were there and functioning, but the timing was illusive. And now it is gone forever.”

Anita paused and this time Lilly took her hand.

“Dear one, my story isn’t the same as yours,” the woman said. “Nothing was stolen from me, as it was from you. For me, though, it was slowly withdrawn. You and I share a certain loss in common. There is a grief that only a woman who cannot bear a child can apprehend. To make such a choice is one thing, but to have the wonder of it taken from you—that is a wound too deep to even bleed.”

“I am so sorry, Anita. Your secret is safe with me,” Lilly whispered back.

Anita whispered back, “I don’t keep secrets, Lilly. True friends don’t keep secrets, only surprises for another time.”

Lilly smiled weakly. “Look at you, hardly objective.”

“Clinical detachment is a myth, often a cover for cowardice. It is so much more arduous and risky to be authentic and present, and immeasurably more rewarding. Healers heal themselves while healing others.”

Anita stood up and held out her hand, and Lilly took it.

“Lilly, Adam’s turning crushed women, to be sure, but it was a disaster for men as well. Even so, some of them found the way out of Adam’s shadow. Believe it or not, there are many men in the world who are not like the ones you’ve known. Shall we go find some good men and see if they have prepared something to eat? All this emotion makes me hungry.”

Lilly laughed, and it was a relief of sorts. “Anita, you go ahead,” she suggested. “I need to catch my breath, but I’ll be there in a minute or two. Okay?”

“Of course, dear one.”
Anita smiled and hugged her one more time. “Thank you for letting me walk with you inside your holy ground.”

“Thanks for not leaving me alone.” Lilly held on to the woman’s arm a moment. “Anita, you said something that reminded me of someone, a man. I remembered his face a few days ago, but nothing else until today. When they shipped me and the others in that container that washed up here, he was the man who tried to save us. We were used up, see? Sick, rejected—‘No longer good for the domestic market,’ someone said. This man’s own daughter was missing and he thought she was taken in our group, so he joined the traffickers to try and find her. She wasn’t there, but I think I reminded him of her. He’s the one who put me in that compartment, but it happened so fast that I didn’t get positioned right. When the other men broke in, I think they shot him first. I heard gunfire as I was passing out; it’s the last thing I remember. His name was Abdul Baith. Somebody should know.”

Anita patted her arm. “When we get back to the surface, I will make sure that we speak for him and celebrate him properly. One day you can thank him yourself. It’s part of why we hope.”

When she left, Lilly pulled out her diary.

I’m done with secrets. I had a really rough day. I found out or, more truly, finally remembered that . . . I am scared to even write it ’cause then it would be more real. I got fixed, like I was a dog or something, sterilized, and I don’t even know who did it.

Anita told me she can’t have kids either. I guess that’s why I can write about it. I am SO SAD for her and for me, and I can’t stop crying. I am so angry, but most of the time I don’t feel anything, like I’m numb. I want to cut myself ’cause I don’t feel anything. I don’t do it but I want to feel and I get scared when I’m numb that I’m never going to feel anything again. I do feel my snakebit arm. It really hurts.

Maybe I need the ice under my feet to break so I can just fall through and disappear. Oh God, even if I am totally insane, would you come and find me? I think I really want to be found, by You, not just by the others.

I went back to the place where John stored all my belongings and that’s when all my memories came back. Maybe not all, but lots, too many all at once. Then I spilled my guts to Anita.

But I think I know what I have to do now. It seems clear for the first time. Simon is right, I can change the world. But I can’t do it as Lilly. Lilly was a little girl who died a long time ago, a weak and broken and powerless thing who deserves to be left in peace. It’s time for me to make a new truth for myself, to give myself a new name and a new destiny. So, I choose Lilith, because Simon believes in her. The truth of who I am is that I am Lilith.

O
nce
she had made up her mind, everything, including the turmoil that had been raging in her heart, settled down. When she wheeled herself into the living area, John stood leaning against a wall and staring out into the ocean, its ebb and flow hypnotically moving the sea plants in a constant dance with tides and currents. Food was on the table, waiting.

Parking herself next to him, she broke the silence. “What are you thinking?” she asked.

“Hmm?” He didn’t turn toward her. Some inner conversation played across his furrowed features. “You’ve experienced profound losses for someone so young,” he began. “I’ll probably never understand why the human soul has such an insatiable need to remember and revisit its tragedies.”

“Anita told you?”

He raised one hand to stop her and slowly lowered it again when she fell quiet.

“For my part,”
he continued, his voice heavy with sadness, “some days, I feel my duty is to add more burden to your troubles, to poke at your pain. It wears me to the bone. I don’t like it, and my dislike grows in direct proportion to my deepening affection for you.”

Lilly reached up and touched his arm, a gesture she had never made. “You care about me?”

“Yes.” He stated it matter-of-factly, still looking out at the flowing seaweed. “For me this has been completely unexpected. Apparently relationship has a life of its own and doesn’t have regard for history or agenda or necessity. It’s annoying. But it’s also a gift, a joy even. A conundrum, as they say.”

He took a deep breath and slowly let it out, a sigh of the soul. “So, yes, I care, and it clouds my judgment.” He pursed his lips as if to keep them from spilling even more.

“Then stop,” she offered, only partly sarcastically. “I’m not used to anyone caring about me. It feels weird. And like you said, it complicates everything.”

“If only it were that easy. I’ve tried to stop, to convince myself you’re just a mission I must manage. But it’s no use.”

She laughed so easily that it surprised her. “I can’t believe it. You’ve been trying to like me less?”

He glanced at her and barely smiled. “It seemed the safer road.”

“Believe me”—she laughed again—“roads are rarely what they appear to be and are not predictable. Maybe
safe
is about the company you keep and not about the road you take?”

He glanced again, surprised. “Now that is wisdom not earned easily,” he acknowledged. “Thank you for that. We’d all do better to remember that.”

Not sure how to respond, she announced with a sardonic tone, “Well, if it’s any help, I do not particularly care for you. You’re a curiosity, but I don’t like you any more than I dislike you.” She was not telling the truth and she suspected he knew.

“Hmm.” He looked up and then, a minute later, back at her. “That’s of no help whatsoever. Hasn’t diminished one iota how deeply I feel about you.”

She let go her touch as an unexpected fear ambushed her.

“You’re not trying to tell me that you’re in love with me, are you?”

“Heavens no!” he reacted. “In love? Like a romantic attraction where the knees go all buckley and you become a rather useless human being? That kind of in love? No, nothing like that.”

“Good!” She sighed. “That would have weirded me out! Not that somebody couldn’t be in love with you, but not you and me. You’re old . . . ish, at least forty or fifty, right?” She gave him a grimace to emphasize her disgust.

“Whew.” He laughed. “Glad we got that clarified,” he teased, “and you are right. I am at least forty or fifty years old, and you just a baby.”

“I’m not a baby!” she declared firmly. “I am a strong young woman!”

“And stubborn.” He smiled again, but as he returned to looking out the window, his expression faded.

“Why so sad, John?”

“Because I already knew. I knew what they did to your body but didn’t know how to tell you. The gift of bearing a child was taken from you long before the tragedy that brought you here,
and even with all our skills we were unable to restore that. I am deeply, deeply sorry.”

“Me too,” she said. “Right now I just feel numb. Probably better that way.”

“Perhaps,” agreed John. “Grief is strange. Like joy it catches us by surprise, sideways and unexpected. Part of the rhythms of this life, part of being human.”

“Is everybody broken, John? Is everybody grieving?”

“It’s hard to be in this world long and not encounter loss. It’s the thing we most have in common. Like your soul, the cosmos is broken into pieces. But listen.” John faced her and squatted next to her chair. “Lilly, if you participate in your own healing, you open possibilities for creation to be restored as well.”

“Me? My healing? Does everything depend on me?”

John seemed surprised and knelt next to her. “Everything depends on each of us, because each of us matters. We are all created in Adonai. In Him we are all connected one to the other, whether we acknowledge it or not.”

Someone cleared his throat, and when Lilly looked, she saw Simon standing near the entryway. She wondered how long he had been there, how much he had heard. John stood and nodded a greeting.

“Excuse me,” Simon said. “I was just coming to see how you were doing. I understand I missed some excitement earlier.”

“I’m feeling better, thank you!” offered Lilly. And it was true. Although she was still aware of the fever and infection, she felt it might have slowed.

She expected Simon to be glad to hear the news, but instead
he looked perplexed. Lilly turned back to John, who was still lost in his own thoughts.

“John? I think I’m ready to go back to work, to witness what I’m here to see.”