"Cut the crap." I pulled away, still in shock from seeing Sarah so
addled. I wanted more than anything else in the world just to slug him.
"Why did you bring her here? Think about your answer. Kidnapping is a
serious crime in the States."
"I've been very concerned about her." He looked up at the groves of
Cebia trees around the square, a quiet glance, as though to inhale the
misty morning air. My legal threat had gone right past him--probably
because here he was the only law. "But now she's receiving the
treatment she needs. I expect she'll be fine before long."
"Treatment?" I was caught off guard. Okay, let's start getting things
straight. "When she was here before, somebody tried to beat her to
death. How--?"
"What happened then was beyond my control." He motioned me to join him
as he settled onto the first step of the pyramid sadness in his eyes.
We were alone in the square now, and I felt like I'd become his
personal prisoner, trapped. "Sarah was . . . is very dear to me. I care
for her deeply."
"You cared so much for her she ended up in a coma, over on the Mexican
border." I didn't sit. Instead I just bored in, hoping to stare him
down, but his eyes had grown distant, that little trick he had of
alternating between intimacy and remoteness. Again it reminded me of
that first morning we'd met, looking out over the bluffs of the Hudson.
"If you'll let me, I'd like to try and tell you something of the
circumstances surrounding that tragedy." He was gazing off in the
direction the women had gone. "You see, when Sarah first appeared at
Quetzal Manor in New York, she was a very troubled young woman. She
declared she was a person of pure spirit and she wanted to have a baby
without so much as touching a man, some procedure that would produce a
divine child created of cosmic energy."
Cosmic energy. I had a flashback, hearing the words, to the time when
she'd just turned six and we'd been sent by my mother to the hayloft to
track down nests secreted there by rogue chicken hens. When we came
across a cache of eggs, she asked if baby chicks came out of them. I
assured her they did, and then she asked if human babies came from eggs
too. My biology was pretty thin, but I told her I supposed they did,
sort of, but then the eggs were probably hatched, or something, before
babies were born. She thought about that a moment, scrunching up her
face, then declared "No!" and bitterly began smashing the eggs. Babies
and all living things came from another world, she declared, a special
place we could not see. They came directly from God. . . .
That was why she would seek out someone like Alex Goddard. For her, he
must have seemed a messenger of the Unseen. Who better to create a
child for her? The ironic part was, I'd found him for almost the same
reason, seeking a miracle when all else had failed. Were Sarah and I
even more alike than I'd realized?
"So I began trying to work with her." He was turning back to me. "But
then I discovered she'd been born with an abnormality of the uterus. It
has a medical name, but suffice to say it's very rare, and afflicts
only about one woman in twenty thousand. Even after my diagnosis,
though, she refused to give up. She was a person of enormous tenacity."