Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,46

him. Marcus had looked from one of us to the other, then moved off to one side, out of the way.

“Why do you still have people living on the cliffs?” Bankole demanded. He sounded angry. Unnecessary pain and death still made him angry. “How many times does this kind of thing have to happen before you get the idea?” he asked. He shut his bag and grabbed the overnight case that I handed him. “Move the damned houses inland, for heaven’s sake. Make it a long-term community effort.”

“We’re doing what we can,” a big red-haired man said, moving toward the door. He pushed his hair out of his face with a dirty, abraded hand. “We’ve moved some. Others refuse to have their houses moved. They think they’ll be okay. We can’t force them.”

Bankole shook his head, then kissed me. “This could take two or three days,” he said. “Don’t worry, and don’t do anything foolish. Behave yourself!” And he went.

I sighed, and began to clear away the breakfast things.

“So he really is a doctor,” Marcus said.

I paused and looked at him. “Yes, and he and I really are married,” I said. “And I’m really pregnant. Did you think we were telling you lies?”

“…no. I don’t know.” He paused. “You can’t change everything in your life all at once. You just can’t.”

“You can,” I said. “We both have. It hurts. It’s terrible. But you can do it.”

He reached for the plate I was about to take, and scavenged a few crumbs of Acorn bread from it. “It tastes like Mama’s,” he said, and he looked up at me. “I didn’t believe it was you at first. Yesterday in that godforsaken shantytown, I saw you, and I thought I had finally lost my mind. I remember, I thought, ‘Good. Now I’m crazy. Now nothing matters. Maybe I’ll see Mama, too. Maybe I’m dead.’ But I could still feel the weight of the collar around my neck, so I knew I wasn’t dead. Just crazy.”

“Then you knew me,” I said. “And you looked away before Cougar could see that you knew me. I saw you.”

He swallowed. Nodded. A long time later, he shut his eyes and leaned his face into his hand. “If you still want me to,” he said, “I’ll tell you what happened.”

I managed not to sigh with relief. “Thank you.”

“I mean, you’ve got to tell me things, too. Like how you wound up here. And how you wound up married to a man older than Dad.”

“He’s a year younger than Dad. And when we had both lost almost everything else and everyone else, we found each other. Laugh if you want to, but we were damned lucky.”

“I’m not laughing. I found good people too, at first. Or rather, they found me.”

I sat down opposite him, and waited. For a time, he stared at the wall, at nothing, at the past.

“Everything was burning on that last night,” he said. His voice was low and even. “There was so much shooting… Hoards of bald, painted people, mostly kids, had rammed their dammed truck through our gate. They were everywhere. And they had their fun with Ben and Greg and Mama and me. In all the confusion, Lauren, we didn’t even know you were gone until we had almost reached the gate. Then a blue-painted guy grabbed Ben—just snatched him and tried to run off with him. I was too small to do any good fighting him one-on-one, but I was fast. I ran after him and tackled him. I might not have been able to bring him down by myself, but Mama jumped on him too. We dragged him down, and when he fell, he hit his head on the concrete and he dropped Ben. Mama grabbed Ben and I grabbed Greg. Greg had hurt his foot—stepped on a rock and twisted it—while we were running.

“This time, we made it out through the wrecked gate. I didn’t know where we were going. I was just following Mama, and we were both looking around for you.” He paused. “What happened to you?”

“I saw someone get shot,” I said, remembering, shuddering with the memory. “I shared the pain of the gunshot, got caught up in the death. Then when I could get up, I found a gun. I took it from the hand of someone who was dead. That was good because a moment later, one of the paints grabbed me, and I had to shoot him. I shared his death, and in the