In the intimacy of the late afternoon she told him about her dreams of two sisters, and how a voice spoke to her and said, Help them to see. She told her father she’d confided this to Sister Helen, who said it meant there was much work to be done.

Jhana-Merise told her father of another dream she had. It was of the terrorist, Abd al Hashim. He was teaching her about the signs in a butterfly’s wings.

Vincente was unnerved by this.

“My life is not my own anymore, Father. Unseen hands are guiding me. You know that. You’ve known that a long time.”

His body vibrated with a new dread.

She told him she not only had dreamt of Hashim, but also of a young boy, and that they would be part of a group to help unlock a code within a sacred tablet in the desert. A tablet buried a long time ago, waiting to be awakened.

Vincente trembled at the thought of a mystery so huge and dangerous. A mystery with which his daughter seemed to be on intimate terms.

Jhana-Merise explained the providence of Arama leading them here, and of Sister Helen’s connection to them—the convent a way-station on their way to America.

“America?” Vincente said, confused and alarmed. “How can we go to America?”

“Sister Helen will provide all that we need. She’s helped us before. We’ve been here before. You and mother taught me that. It’s what you said to her when you first met.”

He remembered joking upon meeting his future wife for the first time that the reason they were so connected was they must’ve known each other in a previous life. It was forward of him to say such a thing in a culture steeped in an insular dogma. And that his future wife hadn’t laughed, at what he thought was a brazen attempt at romance, struck him at a deep level of the possible truth in what he’d said, or at least that she believed it. And because he was falling in love with her, he believed it, too.

In the early days of their marriage Vincente and his wife had studied the history of past lives, even coming to believe the supposition with which he first flirted with her. And, after her death, he’d placed even more faith in its tenants, wanting, needing it to be real in order that he might see her again.

And now, with his daughter waiting for him to accept what she believed lie ahead, he could no longer deny that he, too, was being guided by the same unseen hands.

“What you seek will challenge all the precepts for which the religion we know has been based.”

“Yes. It will challenge all those beliefs, Father.

PART FOUR: Surrender

PART FOUR

Surrender

42

42

Wednesday, September 23