“Sure. But when you used to do it at the church, could you heal anything?”
“Most things, I suppose. I couldn’t help my mother,” Memphis said, and Theta gave his hand a gentle squeeze.
She looked up into Memphis’s face. “Can you take something away with your healing?”
“What do you mean?”
Theta didn’t know how to say it without telling Memphis everything. “What if somebody had something about them that wasn’t a disease, exactly, more like a…” Theta searched for the right words. “Like a bad Diviner power. The opposite of healing. Something that could harm.”
Memphis laughed. “I never met anybody like that at the Miracle Mission.”
“No. No, I guess you wouldn’t.”
“What’s all this about, Theta?”
Theta forced a smile. Inside, she could feel herself drifting further away. Who could love somebody like her? “Just curious, Poet. That’s all.”
She should leave him. That was the noble thing to do. Before he got hurt.
Memphis kissed her on the temple, soft and sweet, and Theta knew she was far from noble, because she didn’t have the strength to give him up.
“I love you,” he said again.
“I love you, too, Memphis,” Theta whispered.
“You just made me the happiest man in Harlem.” Memphis grinned. “Now you got more than one story, Princess. This lighthouse, this moment—I reckon it’s our origin story.”
“Guess so,” she said. She hoped everything would be okay.
Memphis kissed her then, and Theta kissed back. Their kiss was warm. It traveled through Theta’s body and made her want more. They sank to the floor of the lighthouse. Memphis moved on top of her just slightly. She could feel him against her stomach and it made her go liquid inside. Without warning, Theta’s thoughts flashed back to Roy. It was Roy she saw on top of her, holding her down on the bed that last terrible night in Kansas. The uninvited memory raced through her like a swift fever. Heat pooled in her palms. It shot out to her fingers like the survival mechanism of a frightened animal, as if in that moment her body couldn’t tell the difference between Memphis and Roy, love and violence.
Terrified, Theta pushed Memphis away and sat up abruptly, breathing heavily. She tucked her hands under her thighs, feeling the warmth begin to subside.
“I do something wrong, Princess?” Memphis asked, confused and concerned.
Theta gulped down air. “No. No, I just… I just wanna slow down, Poet.”
“All right. Okay. We can be slow as you like,” Memphis said.
His gentleness made Theta want to cry. “Can we… can we just lie here?”
“If you like.”
They lay side by side on the floor of the lighthouse, and Theta rested her head on Memphis’s chest, where she could hear his heart thumping. More than anything, she wanted to keep kissing him. But in her mind, she heard Roy’s screams, saw the curls of black smoke rising from under his fingers as he clutched at his face and the room caught fire.
“Everything copacetic, Princess?” Memphis asked.
Just tell him. He’s not gonna run. Tell him. Tell him.…
“Sure. Everything’s jake,” she managed to say, and they watched the bright light sweeping back and forth, promising safety.
The moon poured through the flimsy curtains in Isaiah’s bedroom as he half woke and rose slowly from his bed, crossing to Memphis’s desk. His eyes tipped back in their sockets and his mouth mumbled old words. He grabbed the pencil and began to draw.
In a back room of a smoky gambling hall, Blind Bill bargained with two men who didn’t take well to bargains. “Tell Mr. Schultz I’ll get him his money. I promise,” Bill said.
“Mr. Schultz expects interest. Or he takes his own kind of interest, if you get my meaning,” one of the men said, and he kicked at Bill’s cane just to make the point clear.
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” Bill said. He grumbled a curse at them on his way out. They were bad men. But Bill had met much worse. The sort of men who might pay handsomely for information about truly gifted people, if it came to that.