Fenzy (23 page)

David tried to yell out. “Mmmm-aaaah! Mmmm-aaaah!” His mouth would not form the word he wanted.

But the woman heard him. Apparently believing she’d been caught committing a capital crime, she turned panicked eyes on him. Her expression morphed from surprise to confusion to joy. She flipped the towel off her head.

In David’s eyes, everything blurred out of focus, everything except her face. Hazel eyes, glimmering with wetness. That smile, connected to his heart as surely as his veins and arteries. Cheeks so smooth their touch to his own cheek never failed to calm even his worst moods. All of it framed by locks of hair the color of hay and the texture of silk.

All sound faded from his ears, leaving only his heartbeat.

“Mom!” he cried, and ran into her arms.

CHAPTER
fifty-one

She swept him up like a warm breeze. Her arms squeezed him, her hands moved over his back, through his hair. “Dae . . . Dae . . . David, is it really you?” She pushed her face into his neck, then pulled away to look at him. She kissed his cheek, his forehead.

He pressed his lips to her skin, tasting her tears. He rubbed his face against her shoulder and pulled himself into her embrace. After finding out about his impending death, he had wanted nothing more than the comfort of his mother’s arms. He had believed then that he would never have that again. But here it was, the comfort of her arms, her smell, her whisper-ing love.

She leaned back for a longer gaze. “Look at you,” she said, wiping his face. He hadn’t realized he was crying. “What have you done to yourself ?” she said. “Your eye! Your cheek!” She touched his bruised skin, but it didn’t hurt at all.

He smiled and said, “You won’t believe all we’ve done, looking for you.”

“I know you’ve been looking,” she said. “I saw the Bob faces. Did you see mine?”

“You . . . where?”

“Oh, my goodness,” she said, brushing her hair off her wet cheeks. “Feudal Japan . . . World War I Germany . . . the
Titanic
. . . “

“Yes!” David said. “I saw it on the deck of the
Titanic
. That was really you? I wasn’t sure.” A tear rolled down his cheek, and he wiped it away. She pulled him into another hug, pinning his broken arm between them. “
Ow!
” he said. “Ow, ow.”

She looked at his bandaged arm. “Oh, David, what happened?”

He laughed and shook his head. “It’s a long story . . . a really, really long story.” He noticed a nasty scratch on her temple. He touched it with feather fingers. “I’ll bet you have a story too.”

“All of it moving toward this moment,” she said. “This very moment. How did you get here? Where are—“

She looked over his shoulder, and her lips parted. David glanced around. Dad was standing in the intersection of streets. His face bore the same angelic expression as Mom’s. But he seemed afraid to move, as though doing so would shat-ter a hallucination, and his wife would vanish into the shadows of the street.

Toria came down the street behind him. She spotted Mom, shrieked, and ran toward them.

“Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!” They hugged and kissed and laughed. “I
knew
I saw you! I knew it!”

Xander ran up, and Mom rose off her knees to embrace him. Xander appeared to collapse into her arms. He squeezed her and didn’t let go. His shoulders moved in time with his weeping. Finally, they parted. Xander wiped his face and nose. He grinned at David, then Toria. Still holding Mom with one arm, Xander reached out, got hold of David’s head, and pulled him to them. Toria stepped into it.

“Two family hugs in one day,” Xander said. “Wow . . . wow.”

Dad approached, and the kids moved away. All three of them kept a hand on Mom, as though afraid to let her go . . . or, David thought, as though they were drawing strength from her after being drained by her absence.

Instead of the crashing, crushing reunion David, Xander, and Toria received, Dad’s was gentle as a leaf landing on grass. He kissed her, and they stepped into each other for a hug. Dad leaned back, lifting Mom off her feet. He turned, spin-ning her slowly around. Their eyes were closed, and matching smiles stretched across their faces. He set her down, and they kissed again. She placed her hand on his face, and they stared into each other’s eyes.

Xander caught David’s attention, and he rolled his eyes. But he was grinning, and David knew his brother didn’t mind their parents’ affection at all. It was the engine that drove the family.

Toria said, “Xander just rolled his eyes.”

Dad laughed and gripped Xander’s shoulder. He looked at each of his kids and nodded. His eyes were shimmering. He whispered, “Thank you.”

CHAPTER
fifty-two

“Dad,” Toria said. She was staring at her beaded necklace from the antechamber. It was lifting off her chest, vibrating.

“The pull,” Dad said. “It’s getting stronger.”

Mom wrinkled her brow. “The what?”

“It’s how we get home,” Dad explained. “The items show us where the portal is.”

“Ah,” she said. “I know about portals. Every now and then a wind comes and blows me into one.”

“That’s the pull,” David said, though he could not imagine getting sucked into one on a regular basis. “But when it takes
you
, where do you end up—just
anywhere
?”

“I never made sense of it,” she said.

“Our items want to go home, to the house. If we follow them, we end up back there.”

“I wish I’d had one of those a week ago,” she said.

“Oh, boy,” Xander said. “I wish you had too.”

A roar of voices reached them. A mob of screaming, shout-ing people came down the street from the bend. Had the Kings not been on this side street, they would have been swept away. The horde walked backward and sideways, their anger directed at something that had not yet come into view. Soldiers appeared, clearing a path. They pushed, kicked, and struck the people with the handles of their swords. Like slow-moving lava, the crowd flowed along the street, growing ever larger.

The object of their wrath appeared. Mom drew in a sharp breath and covered her mouth. “That poor man,” she said.

“What?” David said. Then he saw. A man stumbled down the center of the street. Soldiers slapped him with whips, poked him with spears. The onlookers spat at him and stepped in to punch him. “Why are they doing that to him?” he said. His heart ached, as it had for the man on the torturer’s rack. It was inhumane, cruel . . .
evil
, no matter what the man had done.

The man was beaten and bloody, barely able to carry the heavy cross on his back. Its crossbeam rose over his head, and the vertical post dragged along the stones behind him. The man tripped and fell, and the cross tipped and thudded onto the stones. Soldiers moved in to lash him.

Mom pulled Toria close and covered her eyes. “David, Xander,” she said. “Don’t look.”

But David stepped forward. “Dad, who is he?”

“Rome conducted a lot of crucifixions,” Dad said. “Could be anyone.”

“But it’s not!” Xander said. “Look what they’ve put on his head. It’s a crown of thorns! Like . . . like . . .
The Passion of
the Christ!

”

David’s mouth dropped open. He watched as the man hefted up the cross and slipped beneath it, buckling under its weight, his back so whipped that his flesh resembled raw meat. The man gazed into the sky, his mouth gaping wide as he gasped for breath. He took a slow, agonizing step.

“Dad,” David said, hurting for the man, “what did he do?”

Dad stepped beside him and held his head. “If you’re brother’s right, Dae, he didn’t do anything.”

“What are you saying?” David said. His guts—every organ—tightened. They felt heavy, like stones jammed inside a scarecrow’s body. “Jesus? That’s
Jesus
?”

“I . . . don’t know,” Dad said.

The progression flowed passed. David began walking toward it.

“David!” Mom said.

He caught her eye. “I have to see,” he said.

She opened her mouth, meaning—he knew—to call him back. But her lips closed and she nodded.

David ran up to the backs of people who were lurching forward to hurl rocks or sharp-sounding words. He ducked under their arms and pushed through. Someone kicked him. Someone else planted a hard fist or elbow into his back. A knee came up into his face. He touched his lip and saw blood on his fingers. He was knocked left, then right. Still he shoved through, wending his way toward the front. A protester in front of him got knocked away by a passing soldier, and the people behind him surged forward. He tumbled onto the stones. He rose to his knees at the front of the crowd.

A shadow passed over him. He squinted up as the top of the cross bobbed overhead and went by. The beaten man was steps away. David stretched his hand out to him, knowing he couldn’t help, couldn’t even reach, wanting to so badly.

The strands of a whip slapped down on the back of his hand. David snapped it back, saw blood in three lines, as though a tiger had swiped at him. The soldier who’d lashed him kneed him in the side of the head and continued on.

Directly in front of him, the beaten man fell to his knees, the cross pushing down on him. Blood streamed from his face. The crown of thorns, as sharp and long as nails, pierced his head in a dozen places. The man turned his head, and David stared into his eyes. Blood had filled one eye, making it dark, the other was as bloodshot as any eye could be.

The man leaned closer to David, the cross shifting, grinding into his back. Air rushed from his mouth with a groan, with blood. The tip of his tongue ran along his bottom lip. With a voice as soft and trembling as a dove’s wing, he said, “David.”

David’s breath stuck in his chest.

A whip cracked against the man’s back—against
Jesus
’ back, David was sure now—and he flinched.

Blood splattered across David’s face. He closed his eyes and moaned. He felt something press against his hand, and he looked to find Jesus reaching out and touching it.

A comforting coolness, like plunging into a lake on a hot summer day, traveled up David’s arm, filled his chest, head, arms, and legs. He gasped at the strangeness of it. He lifted his hand. The whip marks were gone, no sign of them at all.

When he looked again, Jesus had lifted his cross and stag-gered on.

CHAPTER
fifty-three

David stayed on his knees as people streamed by. They knocked into him, kicked him. He ran his fingers over the back of his hand. Smooth skin, nothing more. He pulled off the clips on the Ace bandages and unwrapped his arm. The rulers splint-ing his bone fell away and clattered to the stones. He peeled away the remaining wrap and saw nothing but healthy flesh: no mottled, bruised skin, no bump of bone. He squeezed it. No pain. He pushed his fingers into his cheek and dabbed under his eye. The soreness was gone.

The crowd moved on, filling some other part of the city with its hate and fear.

He rubbed his shoulder, feeling no pain where the arrow had grazed it. Then he thought of something. He shifted his leg forward and pulled up his pant leg. The teeth marks were gone, but the stitches remained, tied into healthy skin. He pushed his pant leg down.

Dad kneeled beside him and put his arm around him. “You okay?” he whispered.

David nodded. He looked at the stone-paved street where Jesus had passed, and his eyes settled on the blood. He held up his arm. “It’s healed,” he said.

Dad smiled, not seeming surprised. He showed David
his
hand, the one that had been struck by a padlock when the house shook them off the antechamber doors. Since then, the hand had been swollen and bruised. Now it was perfect.

“But . . .
how
?” David said.

“Like in the Bible,” Mom said from his other side. Xander and Toria stood beside her. Mom knelt and touched his arm. “Jesus healed a man’s son, even though the boy was in another city.”

“So,” David said, “all of us?”

“Look,” Xander said. He lifted his hair to show the place on his forehead where the ladder had gouged it when Phemus and his friends came after him three days ago. “And . . . “ He turned and hiked up the back of his T-shirt. No one would have known that minutes ago his back had been badly bruised.

David looked into his mother’s eyes. “You mean, because he touched
me
, healed
me
. . . ?”

“And you love us,” Mom said. She squeezed his arm. “We’re family.”

“Dae,” Xander said, his face twisting with worry. “Your cheek.”

David wiped it and looked at the blood on his palm. “Jesus’ blood,” he said. He stared at it a long time, then said, “With that kind of power, why did he let it happen? He was
so
beat up. It was awful.” He dropped his head.

“Because he loves you,” Dad said. “And this is the price he’s willing to pay to make sure you know that.”

Sandaled feet pounded past them. David looked to see two men, a woman, and a little girl running toward a corner, around which the crowd had disappeared with Jesus. The woman spun to stare at David. Her eyes were as wild as her hair. She seemed angry and confused. He thought she wanted to say something, some pleading question, but then she turned and rushed with the others around the corner. He supposed not everyone wel-comed Jesus’ punishment, but there was nothing they could do.