Book of Judas--A Novel by Linda Stasi

Author:Linda Stasi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

20

How could this be? How could Yusef Pantera be alive? I had seen him die. Or thought I had anyway. Neither his name, nor any of the aliases (that I had learned about in our brief time together anyway) had been on the lists of survivors of the Manoppello earthquake. It was chaos, sure, and the whole Abruzzo region had been hit hard, but still.

I had managed to make it out of that cave and back down the mountain after the earthquake and finally to the Red Cross hospital tent, and had searched row after row of cots with survivors. Pantera was not there.

I went back to the rubble of the Volto Santo church and tried to crawl through the burnt-out wing where we’d been when he’d been “killed.” It was hopeless and the authorities soon forced me off. It was in ruins. What the earthquake hadn’t destroyed, the fire had. It was nothing but a charred mess of stone, wood, and stained glass.

It had been an exercise in futility in any case, because I had seen him get shot and I saw the flaming wall crumple on top of him.

Yes, I had seen it all, yet here he was and I didn’t now know whether to be relieved or remain furious.

I just couldn’t ever forgive him. What had sent me into a rage and was still infuriating me was why, if he had been alive all this time, had he not come to me when our baby was born?

It was his life’s work to know everything connected with the Demiel ben Yusef incident. I was certainly a huge part of that. No, he hadn’t been able to keep them from executing Demiel but he could have been with me when his own son was born.

I realized then that he had known not just about Terry, but about everything else as well. Being able to have the information that no one else had is what had kept him alive while living both way outside and deep inside the law.

I couldn’t comprehend how Yusef, who had raised Demiel, a cloned baby, as his own child hadn’t come to me when Terry was born. Terry was his own. Not a child made in a laboratory. Terry was Yusef Pantera’s flesh-and-blood son made the old-fashioned way. But when the baby was born, Pantera was nowhere to be found.

Then it hit me: Did he think Terry wasn’t his? Dear God. But in truth, whether he believed Terry was or was not his, like a fool, I had really believed that what we’d had together, however brief, transcended everything.

Shut your brain off, you sound weak, I told myself.

But I couldn’t. I knew there was no way that one stupid slip-up of a night with Donald my ex could have resulted in a baby when all our years together as Mr. & Mrs. hadn’t. That’s why Terry had to be Pantera’s son.

Stop doubting what you know instinctively. At least now you can stop romanticizing the days that led up to that night you had together.

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