Life Blood ---XXI---Page No--67

"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."

God, I thought. Why didn't she come home to us, to Lou

and me? We loved her. I felt my guilt go out to her all over again.
        "She next declared she wanted to come here to Baalum, to
the place of miracles. I told her that, yes, miracles can sometimes
transpire here, but only at a great price. We would need to have
an agreement and she would have to keep it no matter what."

"What do you mean, an agree—?"

"Truthfully, though," he went on, ignoring me, "I immediately regretted the offer, since I realized she was far too unstable for
this . . . environment. Finally I forbade her to come, but just before my next scheduled trip she found out and booked herself on the same flight. There was literally nothing I could do to stop her."
        "She put Ninos del Mundo on her landing card." I was growing
sick to my stomach at the rehearsed way he was recounting her story. "That's this place, right? Baalum."

"My clinic here is known by that name. The village itself is

called Baalum." He was easily meeting my eye, holding his own in
our battle of wills. "Sarah was, I have to say, a very
impressionable young person. Once here, she forgot all about her
purpose for coming. She should have stayed up the hill there"—he
was pointing off to the south—"where I could care for her, but
instead she moved down here, into the compounds. Then she