Authors: Carol Plum-Ucci
"My humble opinion? Cora's too paranoid about her mom." Owen turned on the VHS machine manually and stuck the tape in.
"What did you pick?" I asked. All the tapes had been carefully marked by the news station that transferred them from news format to VHS.
"I was afraid of waking her up. I just grabbed what was on top and charged out again. I don't really care. I think her mother was probably more trustworthy in her glory years than Cora is thinking. It would be hard to think clearly about a mother who was chronically wasted when she was around you."
With the tape inserted,
IRAN-IRAQ WAR, JANUARY 1986
flashed up on the screen and went to sand again. I wished Owen wouldn't watch this stuff. He always had been prone to a morbid streak, but not every day, not even every week. It would hit him at the end of playoff seasons when he'd been pulled in too many directions by too many people. Now I felt like he lived in it.
We watched for half an hour as Jeremy Ireland filmed Aleese either running through battlegrounds or interviewing soldiers in languages we couldn't understand. It was nothing scandalous—a lot of corpses, a lot of soldiers, a lot of the sounds of bombs behind their voices. But the soldiers they interviewed were wearing very different uniforms and using different languages: I assumed she and Jeremy got the Iraqi and the Iranian take on things. Owen would sit forward every time she talked to the Kurds, whom you could tell by their dusty yet colorful, swirling headpieces. We'd seen a tape back in March where Aleese had filmed the Kurdish massacre. I wondered if all the Kurds she was talking to in this tape would end up being the dead ones on that other tape.
I wanted to watch something laughworthy and was just lying there staring at the screen and counting the minutes until it was my turn. The couch was long, and Owen was sitting maybe six inches past my head. As he'd seemed so alarmed this morning over the idea that I might even touch him, I was surprised when he suddenly took my chin in his hand and pulled it upward so I was staring at him. Even upside down, I could see he looked very concerned about something.
"Are you okay?" he asked.
"Fine."
"Sure?"
I looped my chin up and out of his grip. "Yeah, I'm just tired." He was still looking. I grew annoyed. "Why? Am I turning yellow or something?"
"No. You're just ... not laughing or crying. You're sort of ... unusually limp."
"You ought to be happy about that. Maybe I'm cutting you a break."
"Thanks. Just ... let me see your eyes."
Godfrey had told us one sign that your liver is acting up is that the whites of your eyes take on a yellowish tinge. I didn't know what Owen expected—me to do a back bend or something. He moved over and looked down into my face.
"They yellow?" I asked.
"I can't tell."
I felt a little washed out, but not enough that I really had to think about whether I wanted to rouse myself to go look in the mirror. I decided if my eyeballs were yellow, I really didn't want to see it right now. And he was seeping with drama from the looks of him, though I couldn't have guessed the source of it.
"Those lines you told me yesterday from Godfrey kind of freaked me out," he finally admitted.
"The ones where he told the guy from the CDC that he felt he'd lose one of us?"
"Yeah. I've been thinking about it—how I would feel if it was me. Because I know that I'm the one people would suspect. But I just started thinking, what if it's you?"
"It's a statistic, that's all, Bubba. Doesn't mean anyone's lost. Don't go morbid on me. Or if you have to, turn this tape off. I'm being double-barreled."
"Any of us ... it would be really bad. Even Cora. She's like that deaf-mute sister that you feel extra protective of. Besides, I think my brother's, like, falling in love with her."
I looked at him upside down again, watching his worried gaze. I giggled—couldn't help myself. "That could create some drama on the home front. Maybe I'm not used to thinking of Cora as attachable, to anyone. What makes you say that?"
"Just that he reads her like a book, gets her to talk, even makes her laugh. Since we've arrived here, she's replaced me as the person he's most likely to spend time with. I'm making a point here, about all of us, not just Cora. It's dangerous. We're in a game of rolling the dice. None of us should put it all out there and risk falling in love. Not until—"
"See, that's the difference between you and me," I snapped, fighting the urge to add
jerk face.
"This is when you
do
put it all out there. I haven't entirely stopped thinking of Miss Haley's speech, but today, instead of thinking about elephants, I'm thinking about how an outsider would view us."
"How is that?"
"Two brothers from Trinity Falls, in the prime of their lives before this came down, who happened to be sent away to live, kind of isolated, with two girls in the prime of their lives. We're supposed to pretend we're nine years old? Somebody's going to break down and start spreading germs around. And you know what I say? Leave your brother and her alone. Better to have loved and risked the loss."
"I disagree."
"Maybe you don't have any feelings." I sighed.
"Maybe I have the
most
feelings. Ever think of that?"
I let him gaze at the screen while I started to think about elephants again. I started to do a couch version of the Dreaded Fifteen, to the point where I was imagining clothes flying and total skin against skin. Truth? He's got chronically wet and shiny lips that always drove me mad. I was thinking about how I might get my way when I realized he was staring intently at the screen, his jaw suddenly downward.
I turned. All I could see on the screen was a rock on the ground. It was like the camera had been turned over.
"What did I miss?" I asked.
He leaped up and hit the
OFF
button. Then he stumbled backwards and plopped down on the couch all agog.
"Who was it?" I asked. "Who was she with?"
He shook his head slowly about five times. He said, "Oh my god."
Because he generally thought "Oh my god" was a curse and not a good thing to say, I just sat there waiting. I waited what I thought was an eternity while he got up and walked to the window and stared out in horror.
"Who
was
it?" I asked, which snapped him into turning around and coming back to the couch, where he stared at the floor.
"Rain. If you never promise me anything else as long as I live, promise me you will never look at that tape. Then you can never tell Cora what's on it. Maybe she'll ... never ask."
"Why would I tell?" I asked, ruffled.
"Because you tell everything."
I flipped around and stared at the blank screen, not knowing whether to be upset. It seemed like I only had two talents people would find notable: crying and talking. I turned my thoughts to Cora and how she'd been through enough hardship. She didn't need more. But I kind of thought that Owen had either misinterpreted something or was overreacting. Whatever Cora's mom had done wouldn't shock me.
I almost said as much. But Owen had worded himself funny. The usual saying is, "If you never promise anything else as long as
you
live..." He had said "as long as
I
live."
Owen secretly thought he was going to be Godfrey's statistic. He might toy with the idea that I could be it, but that's not what he really thought. I didn't know what to do with that. I promised, grabbed for the remote, and put on Nickelodeon.
CORA HOLMAN
MONDAY, MAY 6, 2002
9:00
A.M.
DINING ROOM
T
HE REALITIES
of agreeing to take the cocktail set in Monday morning when I sat at the breakfast table. We took what amounted to a handful of pills every morning—two a half hour before breakfast, one just before, one just after, and two an hour after. I was offered nothing until just after, and the one pill I took was not the cocktail. That would start Wednesday. In the interim, I was to take only a flushing agent that would get all the drugs out of my system quickly, so some of the new wouldn't react with the old.
"Promise you'll let us know if you feel weird," Rain said, watching me with concern. I felt like I was falling off a cliff. She laced her fingers through mine and kissed my hand.
"Don't worry about me," I said with my best smile, which I was determined to use for Scott's sake.
Scott told her to wipe the look of horror off her face and stop scaring me half to death. I hadn't expected her to be so understanding about my feelings toward USIC, but I supposed our game of "Russian roulette," as we decided to call our lives, was the final touch that got her to stop being mad. I smiled at Owen gratefully, but he avoided my gaze with his usual humility.
I turned to Scott. "What qualifies as weird?"
He swallowed a huge gulp of juice and laid his glass down. "Don't expect a cakewalk. Withdrawal symptoms? Let's see. Dizziness, sleeplessness, various forms of digestive-tract upset, headaches, anxiety—"
I wondered if I weren't better off not knowing, and interrupted him with fake cheeriness. "Sounds like everything we've been told to watch out for anyway!" My lips stuck to my gums.
"Dry mouth," Scott added. He didn't miss a trick. I scowled at him while sipping water. "There's only two symptoms that would be alarming, might mean we should slow down the process. One would be double vision, and, drumroll ... hallucinations."
"I thought drugs made you hallucinate, not withdrawal from drugs," Rain said, spinning her glass of orange juice round and round on the table.
After a moment, Scott added, "Learn something new every day," but it seemed mostly to break an awkward silence interrupted only by the
sh-sh-sh
of Rain's spinning glass on the tablecloth.
She finally said, "I could stand it when Owen and I were fighting. That's normal. But when I start fighting with you, Cora? That's abnormal. And I can't stand it."
"Well, I've just been abnormal since we arrived here." I pooh-poohed her guilt over attacking me last night for distrusting her father. "I'm looking forward to the absence of drugs returning me to ... to my former glory."
That made Owen and Rain smile, though I could have done without the sarcastic blast from behind Scott's smile. I made myself a firm promise that I wouldn't blurt out any more unbecoming remarks, and I bit my lip just in case, despite the absence of Aleese all morning. I was improving already. No imaginings today of Mommie Dearest.
"So you know, my dad is not mad at you. He told me you chose to talk to Hodji Montu instead of him, and he's cool with that. He says Hodji's coming here. He says you can talk to Hodji whenever you want instead of him, and he really doesn't care, so long as you're not..." She let go of my hand and held both of hers out like she had huge imaginary weights in them. "...you're not shouldering burdens too heavy for you. That's his main concern."
I nodded, trying to find words of gratitude, which simply got drowned in feelings of inadequacy. I wondered if I would ever, ever be close to people. I sensed myself coming out of a shell, being more open, more honest. But that was different from feeling a oneness with the human race—something I'd lost when Oma died and Aleese and I had been left alone. I had often blamed it on Aleese when I felt lonely. But the truth is, I hadn't felt lonely as often as most people would have. Maybe she had just ignited some part of me that had always been there—for whatever reason.
"I wish I were just ... a huggy person, who could run out there and just ... hug your father."
I must have looked awful, because in response I got three versions of, "You don't have to do that."
"Just know that he's there for you, too," Rain said.
I was glad when Owen changed the subject—he not being the world's huggiest person either. I supposed he wanted to ease my suffering, though there was no easy subject to jump to.
"Before we get too bummed out, let's talk about Tyler and the Kid. Rain mentioned to her dad that we should go to their funeral. It's going to be on Thursday, according to the latest horrendous TV report. He said no way, no funerals. But I think we should try to get him to change his mind."
We all nodded.
"I think Daddy will change his mind if the New York office tells the media the truth about them," Rain said. "If we're going to the funeral of two guys who tried hard to help save Trinity Falls, that makes a lot of sense. If we're going to the funeral of two high school dropouts who had a suicide pact, the media will wonder why. They just
have
to release the truth. That newscast Saturday night was horrid."
"I'd almost like to go either way," Owen said. "We can wear bags over our heads. But there's another problem with Thursday."
"Which is?" Rain asked.
He stared at her in amazement. "Dude, for all the times you got pissed at me for forgetting your birthday, now you can't even remember your own?"
"Ohh..." She bumped the back of her head against the chair. "...god. Can I do a funeral on my birthday? How big a person am I becoming?"
Scott's eyes went to me and stayed there. "If we don't get permission, I'm scared Cora will hitchhike. She was e-mailing with them about half an hour before their house blew."
They all watched me, waiting for me to short-circuit and smolder, I supposed. I may have, except, enter Aleese:
Don't waste your energy on grief. Save it for—
I got a sense of impending dread, knowing I would have to spend time in the darkroom today, enlarging those prints for Mr. Tiger. And unless there was some way around it, I would be expected to go to the USIC "daily meeting" that Scott was so hyped about. After all, I'd been at the last one by his bedside and I hadn't objected to being included.
"Well, we'll celebrate my birthday on Friday, which is better anyway," Rain said. "I'll start calling people. We'll turn this house into party central. It's almost a must that we have a bash. Our friends are starting to think we're losers. I've had a cracked rib before. Field hockey. It never got me down. Today? We'll go shopping, Cora. We need party attire, and all my jeans are too loose. Marg'll take us."