Authors: Carol Plum-Ucci
Life had been a gift from her, a gift that most others would not have been willing to give. I couldn't conceive how to repay her. At the same time, it was my life, and I felt pushed, exhausted by the tug-of-war games I put myself through. Or she put me through.
You're not here. You're a figment of my imagination.
"
That so?
"
You're a sedative I accepted at the wrong time.
A hand gripped my wrist and pulled. "Are you all right, Miss Cora?" Shahzad's voice whispered from the other side of me.
"Yes. Why?"
"Your fingers are in your ears, and there is no sound. And you are mumbling to yourself."
I glanced over at the bed. Owen was sleep breathing, no longer thrashing, no longer sniffing. Rain lay beside him, staring up at the ceiling. Scott sat with his back to the bed, a bloody tissue in his hand, staring at the floor. I couldn't say when the last time was that he wiped his brother's nose. It may have been a while ago, because he turned his head and watched me without seeming distracted.
"Sedatives." I sighed, patting Shahzad's knee. "Sorry."
I studied Scott so long and so hard that I didn't realize he was studying me back.
"
Don't, Cora.
"
Oh, leave me alone.
I crawled across the floor, slid under his arm, and leaned into his body heat. He rubbed my arm, and I listened to his heartbeat, rhythmic and strong for now. What we had was too mysterious to predict. Learning to live in the now was not an option.
"Cold?" he asked.
"No."
He froze in a moment of confusion ... but only a moment.
"
Dumb, stupid teenagers...
"
A few minutes later I sensed Aleese drift away. I felt released from her higher-thought obscurity, though I sensed strongly she would be back. But that would be then, and this was now. He stroked my arm, played with my elbow, and at one point when everyone's head was down, lifted my four fingers on his index finger and kissed them.
Mr. Steckerman found us in these positions an hour later. One man on the SWAT team had been wounded. Three more ShadowStrike members had been killed, six were under arrest, and every square inch of woods had been combed. We were safe to come out. Owen was still alive.
CORA HOLMAN
SUMMER 2002
KELLERTON ESTATE
O
WEN DIDN'T DIE THAT NIGHT
. But a change occurred in him, appearing first as a small shadow then extending slowly outward over what would otherwise have been a glorious summer.
Two white baby goats were delivered to the property by a Hammonton farmer who had read the news accounts, which had detailed our losing the Professor and Owen's fondness for sharing his thoughts with the goats. Owen named one Cow, and the other Champ, despite it being a girl. He took to feeding them and Sheep, and on the days he wasn't four-star, we would sneak them into his room until Marg realized their
baa-ing
was coming from within these walls.
Tyler's and Shahzad's skin cleared up by June—as much as it might ever clear. They still had white dots, a dozen on their faces and several hundred on their bodies, and their permanency remained a question. They didn't care. They spent much of each day in the basement, trying to find their enemy, Omar, turning to other international terror plots when he failed to show up every day. They scripted plans of a bombing in Britain and didn't fail to thrive.
I suggested to them once, "Why don't you come outside and get some sunshine? Maybe a tan will change things with your 'dottage.'" Tyler had dreamed up the term "our dottage."
I suggested it down in the basement, while they were poring over some new programming element they were adding to one of their famed search engines. Tyler said, "Maybe if we stay here, we'll get pale enough that our nondottage will turn white."
They seemed happy enough, so I never pushed them. Scott worked down there every morning, making USIC phone calls, typing notes, and filing papers. And if everything was done, he would sit and watch Tyler and Shahzad, understanding nothing of what they were doing but saying little.
USIC bought me a computer, and I started getting training in the program that declares matches of old and new photos. I wasn't a very fast learner, and though I eventually got the hang of it, I was not asked to use it all summer. I felt relieved USIC didn't need me.
The four of us came up for lunch and often stayed upstairs together to play cards in the parlor in the afternoon, though Tyler and Shahzad refused to watch television or even enter the TV room.
"Images without html support leave me feeling ungrounded and dizzy," Shahzad confessed once, and Tyler, I supposed, only enjoyed dramas of his own creation. Scott and I usually chose their company over the TV. For one, Owen watched a lot of TV and read less these days, his headaches being the excuse, which came no less frequently than when we first arrived. Scott spent some time with his brother every day. But, thinking of his own health, he made the tough choice not to be around a situation all day and night over which he had no control.
Tyler and Shahzad were sympathetic to every sad situation and helped Rain a lot, who still passed through periods of despondency. Having an image in her head of killing a man—even a violent man—took her down dark mental tunnels where I simply could not follow and Owen did not travel. He refused to think about it, he said, and since he felt he had nothing on his conscience, any discussions would be pointless. We respected that. Rain was still not allowed in the basement, but sometimes when we would come upstairs, we would find her sitting against the wall, waiting for us. Tyler made her laugh. Shahzad listened to her with all due respect, saying little. But when he did speak, it was gold.
One boring afternoon in July, she paced and blathered in the parlor. We were all in there, except Owen. Her topic was her friends, how they'd "stopped coming." Her May birthday had drawn a couple of hundred people out here, and I argued that they hadn't stopped. But it was nearly two months later, and we hadn't seen Dempsey, Dobbins, Tannis, or Jeanine in maybe two weeks. Rain was wondering aloud how long it might take them to call her.
"So, why not call them?" Tyler said. "I can't remember too much about having friends, but it seems to me that calling is an option."
"We bum them out," she said. "I felt removed from them when I was still in St. Ann's. Having killed a guy? That changed things, somehow. I don't feel, like, young anymore. And then there's the fact that a part of me enjoyed it. I don't know how I'll ever feel normal."
She started her sniffing routine, and we were thirty conversations past assuring her that her actions had been beyond heroic. Shahzad put in his rarity. "The CIA actually trains snipers, Miss Rain. Did you know that?"
"And?"
"Food for thought, as you say in America."
She spun, horrified. "I want to go to college, have two-point-five kids, and a house in the 'burbs ... When are you suggesting I shoot people? Between feedings? I can't get over having killed a very, very bad guy. Are you nuts?"
"Perhaps. As I recall, a strong conscience is the CIA's top criterion."
We all thought he was only looking for a good way to distract her, but he found it. He had her outside five minutes later, having brought out a gift from his Uncle Ahmer, who showed up here three hours after Shahzad and Tyler's televised funeral and stayed a few days. It was six knives in a little black bag, and Shahzad was showing her how to wing them at the trunk of an oak tree. Having played at this since age nine or something, Shahzad could actually flip one by the blade, catch it with the handle, wing it, and stick it in a tree thirty feet off.
Hodji stood behind Shahzad, arguing in Punjabi, probably about the inappropriateness of certain village games here on American soil, but Rain went gaga over it.
She smiled back at Scott and me after hitting the tree once out of her two tries. "This appeals to that awful side of me..." She hit the tree trunk with two of the remaining four.
"If it would keep her from crying, I'd order her a crate of grenades," Scott said, and we walked back to the house together.
We turned the corner, safely out of view, and I jumped in his arms, wrapping all my limbs around him, and kissing him over and over. We'd just decided to risk swapping germs, and what Marg didn't know wouldn't hurt her. After all, Rain had swapped spit with Owen in the middle of a nosebleed, and no stray germs had passed between them. Scott reasoned that carrying me around for a minute or two at a time was his only exercise outside of climbing the stairs. "Us" was a highly guarded secret that probably fooled no one, especially Marg. But the truth was, after rushing for our first private moment once we left that basement, I had probably spent more time kissing Scott than not kissing him.
Affection, toward him only, had become my drug of choice, the only thing that numbed the horrifying sensations that came with the knowledge of my roots. I wore the vest of rape child, no matter how often or how hard I tried to tear it off. It could grip me and itch and smolder, making me wonder about genetics and children of violence and the feeling I'd had since puberty of never quite belonging anywhere.
I had yet to do things like sneak into Scott's room in the middle of the night, or vice versa, as his aneurysm scared both of us into stellar behavior. But kissing him was a dream, a great escape. His lazy, loping bottom lip still drove me crazy. And he had this maddening way of planting his lips on mine and then saying something.
"How are you feeling?"
"Divine." I devoured his bottom lip, and then both at once.
"How long?"
"Twenty-one days, same as this morning."
He kissed my nose, let me slide down, and leaned back onto the house while rubbing my back. "Every hour counts. I want that cocktail soon. We
all
need that cocktail," he said, implying things about his brother, though there was nothing really to say.
The Q3 in Owen's bone marrow wreaked such havoc in his hips that he could only stand for a few minutes at a time. We had ordered him a wheelchair, which hadn't arrived yet. With him spending more and more time in bed, I often wondered if he would ever have gotten up if it weren't for Scott's insistence.
While Owen showed no evidence of false guilt about what happened that day in May, it had been a great catalyst in his downward spiral, and I was never sure whether it was brought on by the physical energy he had to exert or if the world simply became too ugly a place for him after that.
That Owen simply "wanted out" was a thought I stumbled on in private, though Rain confirmed it one day when he was too sick to feed the goats, and we'd walked across the lawn to their trough to do it.
"I know he loves me," she said. "He loves me ... as much as Owen can love anybody."
I'd never thought Owen lacked in the heart department and asked her what she meant.
"He's just not in love with this world. He's in love with ... some other world I can't begin to see. He thinks he's going to see his mom, see his favorite saints, and become, like, some superhero that, like, helps people out during disasters. Like, from the other side. I go back and forth. Sometimes I think it's pathetic. I mean, I do believe in heaven. But I think of people sitting up there like stars. Like, twinkling or something. Other times? I can't forget how even his voice was when he held that gun to Henry's head. You have to believe what you're saying to not buckle at a moment like that. At any rate. Whether he's right or he's wrong, he's going, Cora. I can't stop this anymore."
Scott couldn't accept the concept at all. He drummed on my hips.
"What would I do without you?" he asked.
He raised the question often, and it was beginning to make me uneasy. I had not sensed Aleese again, at least not close up. But as his question hung in the air, I felt afraid to look around. It wasn't exactly a new fear. I had thought lately that I would see her out my window at night or while gazing from the edge of the forest at a time like this. She was a shadow that could cloud my sunny moments. There were other shadows, too, that were like her—little summer storms that passed as quickly as they came.
We jumped apart and began innocently walking along, three feet between us, as footsteps approached quickly. Tyler and Shahzad ran past us.
"Visitor at gate," Shahzad said, and they leaped onto the porch then disappeared into the house.
We weren't expecting anyone, and the fifteen USIC agents who sometimes worked out of the basement were allowed to know about the two of them. So we watched the long driveway, hearing the crackling voice of the security officer down at the new gate via Hodji's walkie-talkie.
He and Rain caught up with us next, and he said, "It's my son."
"Twain?" Scott asked. "I thought he wasn't speaking to you."
"I thought so, too. I'm relieved as hell, though this isn't exactly the place I would like for him to see me."
I didn't see how it mattered—here, there, anywhere. I was simply relieved for Hodji, figuring his broken heart could now start to heal, and I wanted to be as nice to his son as was humanly possible. He was our age, having just graduated from a private prep school in Manhattan.
Twain parked his car out in front of the porch steps.
A beaming Hodji opened the driver-side door, and when his son got out I could see a slight family resemblance. Scott took hold of my upper arm. "Maybe we should disappear."
"Why?" Rain asked. "Maybe he'll want to hang out with us."
I agreed with her but got my first inkling of what Scott was thinking when Twain merely shook his dad's hand and didn't return the hug. Then I remembered how Shahzad had told us once that in March, Hodji had asked Mrs. Montu if a kid from Pakistan could stay with them while he was ill. I believe she was only told that Shahzad was very quiet and had done some computer work for USIC in the past. Mrs. Montu had declined quickly after hearing the symptoms, saying nothing had prepared Twain for sharing a household with someone covered in scabs.