Fire Will Fall (48 page)

Twain was taller and better looking than his father and had that ornery yet unscathed prep school look that lots of girls adore. And while we all looked fairly healthy, save Owen, I wondered what he would think of us.

Scott hauled us inside, which I thought was rude, but I said nothing. When the two of them finally came in, we were sitting in the parlor, where Marg was distributing meds to Rain and Scott with glasses of her homemade iced tea. Twain stood in the doorway and stared, first at Scott beside me, then Rain, who was lying on the floor. Hodji introduced us, and he said "hi," then simply leaned against the door frame.

"Do you want some iced tea?" Marg asked him without an introduction, something she must have sensed was right.

"No, thanks." He watched us like Shahzad's speckles had jumped from his face to ours, and multiplied. He said to his dad with noticeable acrimony, "So ... these people are your new job?"

"Yes. I'll be the training supervisor to all Washington's classified clericals," he responded before the awkwardness of it could set in. "That would be Cora and Scott for now ... There will probably be more in the fall." He gestured to the two of us on the couch, then pointed to Rain. "Rain is the daughter of the South Jersey supervisor."

He didn't even nod at Rain. "And where's
him?
"

There was no denying the hostility this time, and Hodji didn't try to jump in quickly to cover it. He stayed quiet for a minute.

"I told you in my first e-mail. He died. In a house fire."

"Oh." Twain finally came into the room, ignoring us but studying the portrait of Mrs. Kellerton and looking at some of the books on the shelves.

Hodji attempted a joke. "If you don't read my e-mails, don't you at least read the news? It was all over the papers. Even
Dateline
covered it."

"Dad, I'm out of school. Why in hell would I read the news?" He stuck his head in the library and then turned back. "Nice digs."

"Let me show you the outside," Hodji said, almost shooting toward the hallway.

Twain followed him to the doorway and stood there, I suppose realizing that to not say
something
to us would be ridiculous.

"So ... you're also the guys who drank the water, right?"

"Right," we chimed, and I went after an itch on my ankle attentively as my heart went out. He was jealous of our time with his father, though I couldn't begin to see how to mend it.

"Oh. Sorry."

Right, see ya, bye.

"
Wow,
what a fucking brat," Scott said in awe after he left.

Rain pulled Shahzad's bag of knives out from under the chair. "I was afraid he might use one on us if I let him know I had them."

Nobody stated the obvious, that there were only two parents among the six of us, and one was in jail. I said that if Twain could become grateful and supportive, maybe he could end up a CC and have more exciting time with his dad than he ever dreamed of.

Scott stared after him, shaking his head. "If that kid doesn't sell weed, then he hasn't worked a day in his life. I don't think it would have dawned on him."

The whole thing had lasted only a couple minutes, but I call it one of those shadows thrown over our summer because it served as a milestone. Trinity was an upper-middle-class community with its own population of pink-cheeked, well-dressed, car-owning, depressed people our age. I'd always shrugged before and assumed it was normal. Now it was another reminder of how far we were drifting away from our roots, though where we were going remained a mystery.

Aleese came back to me the first week of August. She appeared in a dream the day after one great thing happened and one terrible thing happened.

The great thing: I was declared to be in full remission. The cocktail had worked even better than the Minneapolis team anticipated. I could be released from the Kellerton House in a month and take up my life any way I wanted to.

The bad thing: That same afternoon, Owen failed to wake up after a Headache from Hell and was declared comatose shortly after dinner. As he had signed his DNR form a month earlier, there was nothing for us to do but sit in his room and await the inevitable.

His friends and teammates came quickly, filling his room, the corridor outside, and at one point, the entire stairway. Not wanting to risk my own newly declared remission, I finally poured myself into bed after a twenty-four-hour vigil that ended around seven o'clock in the evening.

Aleese sat on the footboard, her hiking boots on the bed, her fingers laced between her knees, while she nodded. "
Now we've got a real mess, don't we?
"

Scott and me, she meant. I told her to go away.

I've heard it said before that comatose patients often come to for one last goodbye before they die, and it was that way with Owen. He awoke several days after falling comatose, he opened a few cards, laughed at a few punch lines, and listened to Dempsey play the guitar—Jon played poorly, but the song he had written about friends was beautiful.

Owen kissed Rain, told her he loved her, then said, "I'll see you." A half hour later, he was gone.

The service was bigger than his mother's. Scott dissolved in a heap at his passing and again getting out of the limo at the church, though he gave a beautiful eulogy about courage and hope and the afterlife, which told me that Owen had left the most important part of himself in his brother's heart.

The aftershocks were something I anticipated, but their harshness was totally unexpected. Scott barely ate the following week, went back to bed several days in a row after doing his morning work for USIC, and was little comfort to Rain and me, though he tried. I measured his and Rain's agonies against my own, which were extreme. I couldn't stop seeing Owen talking to the goats. I'd overheard enough to make those conversations among my favorite memories.

"
See that butterfly?
" Owen asked.

"
Baa-aa.
"

"
That used to be an ugly ole hairy caterpillar.
"

"
Baa-aa.
"

"
That's me. I'm an ugly caterpillar. But guess what?
"

I would go into Scott's bed, and he would want to sleep with his arms around me, his face in my hair, but he didn't speak much. Tyler and Shahzad succumbed to watching TV—in Scott's room, so we could all hang out together—and Marg said she was praying this phase would pass. I was praying for a miracle. It came in the strangest of ways.

I was writing in my journal on the eleventh afternoon past the service when I heard Rain crying. I didn't run to her quickly, as this still happened two or three times daily. Scott noticed before I did that there was an echo to it—she was in our bathroom, which meant it could be a medical emergency. He stomped out of bed and down the hall, and knocked on the door.

She refused to answer, which alarmed me deeply. Back in March, one new drug had created ulcers on our intestines, and we passed blood for a week. Their graphic three-way conversations describing this phenomenon left me pulverized but thinking there was nothing we couldn't discuss.

"Rain. Open the door or I'm breaking it down," Scott said. She let him in, and by the time he reopened it thirty seconds later, Shahzad was at the top of the stairs with Tyler behind him, and Marg was at the door. Scott closed the door behind him and slid down the wall.

"Oh, Jesus," he said. "We got a pink stick."

Apparently, Rain and Owen had been withholding bigger secrets than Scott and I have. I wished it had been Marg who went in to her first instead of Scott. She entered with that compassionate and nonpanicking nurse's tone, but the argument had started. And I was more scared at that moment than I was weeks later, after the doctors had scoured her condition for the passages through this pregnancy that wouldn't kill her. The arguments she presented were so typically teenager-ish, and she would so need to start acting like an adult.

"It was his idea!"

"Now, why don't I quite believe that?" Scott shouted.

"Okay, it was nobody's idea! It just happened! Damn that Miss Haley—she started it. We did it less than ten times!"

Shahzad was simply gone, down the stairs in a whoosh of too-much-information, and Tyler and I finally moved to stifle Scott's mouth. "Is Miss Haley so stupid after all, Rain?
Why
didn't I see this coming? Are you trying to kill yourself?"

Tyler tried to pull him up. "Either get up and get dressed, or go back to bed, but you can't sit here and terrify her."

Scott got up. And he only had two two-star afternoons in the weeks that followed that kept him down. They say routine is healing, and his was etched in stone. He spent mornings doing clerical tasks for USIC. He spent afternoons waiting hand and foot on this vessel that was carrying his brother's offspring. We all did. Evenings he spent with me.

Come September, I felt like Scott had escaped death-by-Q3 twice. Once USIC saved him, and now Rain had. With a twenty to forty percent chance of the baby being born with the virus, the situation was still scary enough for him to feel needed, which had always been his greatest therapy.

He and Rain began the cocktail September 2, my birthday, and a better present I could not have had. Scott was in a contented, hopeful mood that night as we walked to the bay, where we'd been swimming a couple of nights a week. Shahzad had talked him into believing that Jersey bays had some sort of healing powers. Often they came out and swam with us at night, when the amusement pier was lit up at Griffith's Landing, an icon of American innocence that had come so close to being tarnished. We watched that Ferris wheel turn, all lit up with lights. This time they decided not to join us.

Out of view of the house, Scott patted his chest and I jumped on and let him kiss my neck and my chin.

"Don't fall," I said.

"I'm careful. Besides..." He kissed me twice, the second one endless. "...if I fell I could now use you for a cushion."

"I think I'll get down now."

"Stay. You give me strength." He meant it both ways, and I knew I could not go a minute more without confessing my sins. I'd had them planned out, starting only a week ago. I'd never thought of myself as a fast mover, nor as a nervy person. But Jeremy Ireland called
me,
his plans already in forward motion. Everything he'd wanted fell into place like some rock of ages falling from the heavens and landing at my feet. The confession had gone off very well in my head, in spite of Aleese showing up in two more dreams to tell me,
Now we've got a mess.

"Say it," I began.

"No,
you
say it. I'm always saying it."

"I love you."

My reward was a bumpy kiss while he walked and a lecture with his mouth on my lips. "That was good, Cora. You didn't even stammer over the
L
."

"Scott ... um."

"Spit it out," he said.

"Would you ever consider marrying me?"

He stopped dead in his tracks, looking into my eyes in confusion. "Funny thing. As soon as I started kissing you I stopped being able to read your mind.
What?
"

"I'm asking you a simple question."

"Are you
proposing matrimony
to me?"

"Well," I said. "I'm just saying. I'm a girl, I'm in love, and I think of it."

"Cora, I'm certainly not marrying anybody else."

"So, like, when? How many years?"

He started walking us toward the water again, though slowly. "Okay ... I'll be twenty in December, but it's an old twenty. And you're an old eighteen on this most auspicious day." He kissed me swiftly. "However, we don't live in Indiana. I'd say three. Three years. Why? What's the rush?"

"I'm not in any rush," I said. "I was thinking four years. Four years feels right for me."

He stopped again.

"Am I getting heavy?"

"No, you're getting weird. Maybe I can't read your mind anymore, but I could name a hundred girls who would bring up the M-word to their boyfriends. You are not one of them. What's up? This conversation stinks like some that went on in the break room in the hospital. A couple of guys' numbers came up to go to Afghanistan, and they got engaged really—"

We exchanged stares a long time, my heart slamming through my chest so strongly I was sure he felt it. "Oh ... no..." he breathed. "You wouldn't do that to me. Not after Owen..."

I stumbled for words about chronically wearing the yoke of rape child, of feeling the need to embrace my mother in order to get past my father, and Jeremy Ireland having offered me the perfect opportunity. But my thoughts had been too intense to be driven out in just a few sentences. I said some of it, and, "It's the perfect job. It's less than three years. But I'll come back every time there's a break on airfare—"

He dropped me fast and intentionally. I barely got my legs under myself in time.

SCOTT EBERMAN
SEPTEMBER 15, 2002
KELLERTON HOUSE

C
ORA DID TRY TO EXPLAIN
, even after my arms gave way. Jeremy Ireland had gotten a contract with PBS to produce some ongoing documentary series about female war correspondents, of which her mother would be episodes one and two. Cora blathered on about needing to be one of Jeremy's four assistant producers—to get to know her mother's life. Then more on the psychology of being a rape child.

Rape child would obviously be an uncomfortable identity—I could understand that totally, but not what she considered therapy: They would shoot three months in London and three months in Paris, where the international journalists hung and where Jeremy and Aleese got to know each other. And if Cora's blood stayed clean for those six months, she would be pronounced officially "cured." Then they would start chasing around Third World toilets, shooting Aleese's former battlegrounds and those of other female war correspondents.

With the words "Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Somalia" pouring out of her mouth, I got more angry than I'd ever been. She started to hyperventilate, sensitive to my energy, and I just stalked off.
Great. I start out thinking she wants a wedding date. I find out I can have it if she first goes to places where people get decapitated on the Internet. Am I supposed to love this? Do I need a third urn of ashes?