Fire Will Fall (15 page)

I laughed at how ludicrous it sounded. But the truth was equally ludicrous: Aleese could never bear my presence.

"I think if I could just find my father, I would stop being haunted by my mother."

"Haunted?" He turned to gaze at me. "Am I supposed to pull over here? Find out if you need some more therapy?"

Responses like this were why I didn't bare my soul frequently and easily. My thoughts aroused the suspicions of stable people.

"I meant that I would stop
dreaming
about her," I said quickly, though I wasn't so sure that was true. I felt haunted.

With his one arm still on the top of the wheel, he jerked to the right, having driven into the double line. He squirmed in the seat, though I didn't get the feeling it was over the concept of being haunted. Scott could not dwell for long on a thought about a spiritual realm.

Sure enough, he said after a long silence, "I've never had any desire to find my father. Owen hasn't either. However, we had a great mom. I can't discourage you, though I'm a frank and honest guy. And if you don't mind my saying so, there were probably a thousand journalists' bars your mother passed through in her travels across the continents, and I doubt she was very, um, demure."

He meant that Aleese was probably not very picky about her lovers. I had no reason to believe otherwise.

"A shadow in a bar could have left an indent on the spare pillow when she woke up in the a.m., all hung-over." He didn't look at me.

I was under no delusions there. "I just know that when I think about my father, I feel a great deal of peace," I said. "I think I'll find a more permanent peace if I can find him."

"So then ... go for it." He put his hand on my knee and squeezed. Hands on, hands off, hands on. Scott Eberman amazed me with how easily he could reach out and touch. I knew he had been up to his neck in girls in high school, and his touching girls probably came as naturally as breathing.

I gazed down at the camera balanced on my knees beside his hand, and the lens picked up fat rays of summer sun and delivered some version of Morse code into my face. It reminded me of giggles.
Aleese is giggling at my lack of experience.

I grasped for an outside thought, something not to do with dead mothers and sickness and medications and side effects. Professor Calloway's face came clear—
Henry's
face. Trying to remember to call him Henry was like calling a teacher by a first name. Henry was not what I'd call a handsome man. For one, being twenty-nine years old almost defies the thought. And his features were too delicate—not rugged like Scott's or Owen's or the other boys in school that girls went the most gaga for. But I had been so comfortable with him. Being outdoors and taking photos was the first time in months I had been able to forget, for nearly a whole hour, that I was even sick. My time with him had passed with barely a hint of my usual anxiety. I would crush on Scott Eberman until I died and hadn't meant to make a comparison. But I suddenly became aware of one ... that I had talked so easily with Henry, and everything I said to Scott came hard, like I had to blowtorch my words and present them as gold.

Scott's mind reading could drive me crazy at times, but at the moment it was downright freaky.

"Do me a favor," he said. "Don't show Mr. Professor anything we shoot today."

"Why not?"

He pinched his lips together, then let air shoot out in a blast of anxiety. "You promised me you wouldn't ask questions."

So I had. Maybe his mind reading wasn't so freaky this time; I realized I had crossed my legs when he had had his hand on my knee, which pulled it slightly out of his reach. And my anxiety built as I sensed his own filling the car. He was so fixated on getting a USIC job. This was somehow related, I just knew it. I shut my eyes, only to see myself in the ICU, a strange man standing over me who I'd thought was Jeremy Ireland. "
I am sent by Omar. You don't know him, but he knows you well. He made you ill. And now, you are about to be sacrificed. Are you afraid of dying? I hope not.
"

"Just ... assure me we're not going to run into any of
them,
" I felt the need to say.

"Nah. Don't worry about it."

I tried not to worry, in spite of him sending me glances.

"When is
he
coming over again?" He smiled in a teasing way that made me certain it was to get rid of the tension in the car.

"Henry? Tomorrow, maybe." I hoped.

"Be. Careful."

"Don't start being ridiculous again," I begged. "Don't ruin my fun."

"I've been around the block a hundred times, and right now, even I can get confused about my feelings. You're not the only one who has weird dreams. Last night I dreamed I was doing the nasty with Nurse Marg."

I giggled, laying my forehead into my hand. I managed, "She's a lot prettier than some of the nurses at St. Ann's."

"She's got to be thirty-five," he said.

I got his point.

"But my dreams are not half as confused as some of the things I think when I'm awake." He rambled on. "I was elected the family elder when I was about five years old. Mom and Owen ... they were the kids. Don't get me wrong. I loved my mom. Dearly. But she thought the saints were going to drop down and pay the electric bill if she went around doing good deeds. I was doing dishes by the time I was five years old. I've done my own laundry since I was eight. Not that I mind. I'd say I was cut out for responsibility, but..."

"But sometimes you feel overwhelmed," I guessed.

"Overwhelmed, yeah. Confused, yeah."

"By us?" I meant by Owen, Rain, and me. I tried constantly to be low maintenance for him. Of course he would be overwhelmed, but with his never having hinted at it before, I didn't know what to make of it. It was kind of like hearing that Santa Claus is confused by trains.

I squiggled sideways in the seat belt, laying my cheek on the backrest, watching him. I put my hand out and touched his shoulder, thinking, perhaps, I could send my sympathies through him for healing, sort of like his acupressure being healing to me. It seemed better for me when I was touching him, as opposed to when he was touching me.

He pinched his lips like he was hiding a grin. It finally cracked on his face in a full-blown smile.

"Cora Holman, you are so easy to manipulate."

My hand froze, then I pulled it away. He kept laughing. "Do you see how I just got you to feel sorry for me?"

I sat up. "You manipulated me? How?"

"Everything I just told you was true. But you're so naive. You're a setup waiting to happen. Listen to me. Men can be liars, but generally they're not. They just arrange the facts any way that serves them. If I want a girl's sympathy, I know how to arrange things to get it. I'm withholding from you that my mother was named Attorney of the Year twice in the state of New Jersey by a legal ethics committee. I'm not telling you how many times she hugged me in thanks, how many candles she lit for me in church when she knew I was out bagging babes left and right, drinking shots on a Saturday night, trying to forget all the decent colleges I'd been accepted to that we simply couldn't afford. I've always worked hard, but my mother was a saint. God gave me to her for one reason only. She deserved a break."

I turned and sat straight again, cursing Aleese's winking camera for putting me up to a bad joke. "Why are you telling me this?"

"I don't know," he said. "I don't need a reason for everything. Maybe I'm sensing life is nowhere near done with you, Cora Holman. You're going to pass through this. When you come out on the other side, there will be men and jobs and people ... and pirates."

"All I want to do is go to Astor College and get a condo in Trinity Falls."

"There's pirates everywhere. Watch out for yourself."

"Where are
you
going to be after we get out of here?" I asked. I hadn't meant to sound so attached. But I suddenly had trouble envisioning my life when he wasn't within calling distance, if ever I got into trouble. He got that smile on his face and cracked up all over again. He had gotten me to say that—in his mind.

I sighed, embarrassed. "Could we ... just talk about normal things?"

"Oh! You mean when you bring up trite subjects and I pretend I'm really interested?" He was laughing, not tensely. I had no answer. "Fine. Just one more thing. Don't trust any man until you're around twenty-five."

"How can you know that? You're not even twenty."

"Darlin'..." He jerked the wheel, and the car pulled into a parking space. I hadn't even noticed, but we were right under a Ferris wheel and had driven several side streets to get here. "...it ain't the years. It's the mileage."

We walked to the boardwalk ramp, and I could see several dozen high school girls ahead, along with either mothers or coaches or something. I could hear cheers in the background and wondered if this was a cheerleading convention. I felt dizzy from the conversation, dizzy and disoriented. I put the camera to my face with more gut reaction than thought.

"Catch the structure ... the front entrance ... and anyone who looks, um, out of place," Scott said.

"And ... what qualifies as out of place?" I asked.

He just walked backwards across the boardwalk, his eyes darting all over the building—up, down, side to side.

I took a full roll of the Griffith's Landing Convention Center, catching a few pairs of men who stopped and stared at the building and conversed. I tried to ignore those who stopped to study the cheerleaders. Still, since I had no idea what I was looking for, I had no idea if I was doing a good job. I only knew that the pictures were clear.

"Let's go into the amusement park," Scott said. "Just ... shoot with your instincts."

"My instincts," I repeated. I was never inclined to think about my instincts one way or the other. "You forgot your sunglasses," I noticed.

"I didn't forget them. I'm eliminating anything that's making me blind to something," he said. "I want to see ... everything."

But without his mirrored glasses, I could see the weakness in his eyes, the feeling of having to guess and suggest pictures of what would probably not mean anything to anyone.

He said flatly, "It's hard to even find your instincts in this medicinal mess that's coursing through us. We'll do our best."

I actually enjoyed shooting the amusement park. The carousel and the little children on the duckie ride were similar to things I liked to photograph in Trinity Falls. They were happy and scenic, and I couldn't wait to develop the film and see if I had captured the immortality in a child's face when a brightly colored horse takes him up and down and into imaginary places.

I didn't even feel left out shooting the bigger rides in the back. There were high school kids my age back there. Catching their faces on the roller coasters gave me flashbacks of when life had been happy. The summer after seventh grade, two years before Oma died, had been my last trip to an amusement park. And photographing it now seemed to be making up for things I missed in high school.

Scott's words, "
shoot with your instincts,
" propelled me through the entrance of the indoor water park, along with some "shoving" from my mother's annoying ghost, which now seemed to wail around me. Scott got us in with his paramedic ID card, saying at the entrance that he had business with the first aid office. The young teenager in charge simply let us through. I took picture after picture, not frantically, but very attentively.
Water, water, water ... splashing, falling, loud, musical water, water, water...

I looked up as I changed rolls to see Scott watching me.

"Is this what you call my instincts?" I asked.

He sucked in a breath and thought long before exhaling. "My instincts are so clouded right now, it's like they're drunk. It could be ... reminding us of all the water we drank last winter."

I shot picture after picture, but after he said that, I felt my spine tingling, as if I were being watched. Aleese lurked in some far-off corner. But as we left the park, she was everywhere, still. I expected to see her in the upper windows of the convention center when I shot it. Behind the glass of a drugstore, watching us. Down at the water's edge.

Then it happened, something so similar to the dream that I almost dropped the camera. As we returned to the boardwalk, I changed to the wide-angle lens that would capture the entire width of the boardwalk. When I looked through the viewfinder, at least a dozen of the hundred or so strollers were staring right at us. One here ... one there ... Adjusting the focus made the sets of eyes more frightening, more fixating, like Mrs. Kellerton's intense gaze was coming at me from a dozen places.

I shot only one picture before lowering the camera to look at all these stares. A woman smiled and came across the boardwalk to us.

"Are you ... two of the Trinity Falls victims?" she asked nicely.

People
magazine. I hadn't thought of it, and obviously, Scott hadn't either. We'd been in all the big national magazines, but we'd been on the cover of
People.
We had famous faces.

Scott had placed his hands tightly on my shoulders, maybe because he'd noticed all the stares, too. And now, he dug his fingers in defensively but lied in a nice enough voice. "Sorry. But you're not the first person today to ask us that. We must look like them or something."

"Well, whew, in that case," the woman said. "I wouldn't want to be them right now. My son goes to Pinelands. He says there's a kitty going around on whether they'll live or die, poor things. Your coloring, though. That's probably what did it. You look like you're wearing too much sunblock for May. Otherwise, sorry for the confusion."

And she turned away with a smile. I let myself lean back against Scott's chest this time, and a laugh roared out of me. I don't know why.

He mumbled a few curses as his arms crossed in front of me for comfort. "Why am I not surprised? Don't repeat that to Owen or Rain, please. And I think we should go."

I didn't want to look into any more stares, but I couldn't help it. At least four were men. And they didn't look curious. They looked—