A Time to Die (3 page)

Kara was about to go call her mother’s office saying she’d missed her bus when Eric showed up, twenty minutes after three. He jogged up to her. “Sorry, but I had a slight mishap during English. I leaned too far back in my desk chair, and when I fell over, the teacher decided I’d done it on purpose. He gave me a detention.”

Kara felt so relieved he hadn’t stood her up that she barely heard his apology. “No problem.” She
felt a coughing fit coming on and discreetly turned her head and forced herself to take several deep breaths and swallow down the urge. She refused to give in to the building spasm, silently pleading,
Don’t do this to me, lungs
. By the time they reached Eric’s car, the sensation had passed.

“Here she is,” Eric said as they came up beside a car that badly needed a paint job.

“It’s—uh—a car, all right.” Kara fumbled for a compliment for his vehicle. To her, it simply looked old.

“I know it needs some work.” He held open the door, and she slid across a cream-color leather seat held together in places with tape. “One of my goals is to restore it to mint condition and sell it. Plenty of collectors will pay big bucks for this baby when she’s all fixed up.”

She directed him to her house and settled back, listening to the radio and watching the trees slip past. Even if the car was old and in need of work, she envied Eric. He was lucky to have such freedom. “There’s my house,” she told him, pointing to a sprawling ranch-style home, set far back on an expansive, rolling green lawn.

“Pretty nice,” he said. “You always lived here?”

“All my life. My dad’s an airline pilot, and my mom just started back to work full-time last year at an ad agency.” Eric turned into the driveway, and Kara saw Christy’s parked car. How could she have forgotten that she had a treatment that afternoon?

“Isn’t that my sister’s car?”

“Uh—yes. We’ve got a session,” Kara explained hastily. “Nothing much. No big deal.”

“Maybe I could hang around until you’re finished.”

“It’d be a drag. Besides, Christy doesn’t like people around while she works. It’s sort of distracting.”
Disgusting, too
, Kara thought, crossing her fingers, hoping he’d accept her story without questions.

“You’re probably right. Tell Christy I’ll see her back at the apartment.” He leaned across the seat and opened the door for her. His arm pressed against her felt muscular and warm. “If I can find my way home,” he added with a laugh.

“Can you?” Kara was growing fidgety, fearful that Christy might step outside and invite her brother in.

“I’ll manage,” he assured her.

She stood beside his car. “Thanks for the ride.”

“Sure.”

Kara watched him back out of the driveway, holding her books and suppressing the urge to cough. The sunlight caught on the car’s old chrome. Wistfully, she watched until he disappeared around a corner. With a sigh, Kara hoisted her books and started for the front door. Maybe she should have leveled about Christy’s role in her life. But then again, if she had, Eric might have been totally turned off. So far, Christy hadn’t said anything to him, either.

Sooner or later, he’s going to find out
, she told herself.
The later, the better
, she insisted silently. Right
now, having Eric think she was just an ordinary girl felt good. Because that’s exactly what she wanted to be. A regular, normal girl, not a sick one. Kara clung to the fantasy and hurried inside for her dreaded thumps.

A
S
E
RIC DROVE
along aimlessly, he considered his good fortune. Ever since lunch, when Kara had come up to him, he’d been on a high. He recalled her in vivid detail and smiled. She was such a beautiful girl—blond with large brown eyes that totally dominated her elfin face. She was petite, like a little doll, even if she was a bit thin. But so what, he thought. Girls were always worrying about their weight. Even her voice intrigued him. It sounded breathy, slightly hoarse, and, he thought, sexy.

He couldn’t wait to grill Christy about Kara. Maybe having Kara as a friend might take the edge of awkwardness off his relationship with his sister. It hadn’t been easy for him to move in with her after almost six years, but then, anything beat
living at home with parents who constantly hassled him.

Eric arrived at his sister’s sprawling apartment complex and parked. He let himself in and wondered how the guys back home were doing and if they missed him. “Cool it,” he told himself, forcing aside a wave of homesickness. He’d made his choice to move away, and he was sticking with it. He threw his books in the spare bedroom Christy had offered him for his own, wandered into the kitchen, stirred the contents of supper in the casserole and poured himself a bowl of cereal. He was sitting on the sofa, flipping through the TV channels, when Christy walked through the door. “No homework?” were the first words out of her mouth.

He flipped off the TV and slunk into the cushions. “I thought you weren’t going to hassle me about school.”

She dropped her car keys on the table and sighed. “You’re right. I didn’t mean to. Let’s start over. How was your first day?”

“It was all right.”

“You met Kara Fischer.”

For the first time, he brightened. “I drove her home.”

“I saw that.” There was an edge to her tone that made him uneasy.

“I would have come and said hello, but she thought you didn’t like people around when you worked.” What Christy did professionally was very vague to him. He knew a physical therapist
helped people recover from disabilities. One of his buddies back home had had a therapist help him after a football injury. For the first time all afternoon, he wondered why Christy worked with Kara. The pretty blond girl looked perfectly fine to him. More than fine.

“I’m glad the two of you met. She liked you.”

The information pleased him. “She’s one sweet babe,” Eric said candidly. “A very sweet babe.”

Christy had started for the kitchen, but turned on him the moment the comment was out of his mouth. “You be nice to her, Eric. She’s not one of your silly bimbos.”

Taken aback, Eric stared. “What are you talking about? ‘My bimbos’?”

“Mom and Dad told me you were running with some pretty wild kids back home. They said some of your girlfriends weren’t exactly high-quality. Kara’s not that type.”

Eric didn’t try to hide his anger. “Mom and Dad had no right to talk about my friends that way. All Mom and Dad did was judge everybody.”

“They said your friends were a bad influence on you. That sometimes you stayed out all night. They were worried sick about you. About what might happen to you if you remained in Houston.”

“Look, when you said I could come live with you, I thought you weren’t going to be my conscience. If I’d known I was trading one prison for another—”

“Please, I don’t want to fight with you.” Christy
held up her hand, and her voice softened. “I let you come live with me because I care about you, Eric. And believe it or not, so do Mom and Dad. We don’t want to see you throw your life away. Life is very precious.”

The seriousness of her expression made Eric feel baffled. “What’s with you? I come home and tell you I really liked the girl
you
wanted me to meet, and you act as if I’m going to drag her off into the bushes.”

“I did want the two of you to meet. But not for you to get ideas about dating her. I only wanted her to help you feel more comfortable making the transition to Central.”

“Well, thanks for the vote of confidence about my morals, Christy.” Eric’s voice dripped with sarcasm. He sighed before adding, “Kara’s a nice girl. I can tell that.”

“Yes, she is. I like her a lot. I’m concerned for her—about her. Her life’s not easy. She has CF.”

“CF?” Eric followed Christy into the kitchen, where she began to take plates from the cupboards. “What’s CF?”

“Cystic fibrosis.”

“What’s that?”

Christy turned and studied him. “You honestly don’t know anything about what I do, do you?”

Eric rummaged through his limited knowledge about medicine. “Wait … I think I saw a telethon about CF once. Is it like asthma?”

Christy carefully set the plates onto the counter. “No. CF is a genetic disorder—you’re born with it.
It’s a disease of the exocrine glands. With CF, something goes wrong, and mucus turns thick and sticky. It jams up a person’s lungs, sweat glands, and digestive tract.”

Already Eric disliked the description. Who wanted to think about body fluids? “And Kara has this disease?”

“Don’t worry. It isn’t contagious.”

“I didn’t think it was,” Eric insisted, although it wasn’t true. He
had
wondered if he could catch it. Christy busied herself with setting the table. Eric dogged her steps into the dining room. “Is that all you’re going to tell me about Kara? Is that why you give her therapy?”

“Yes. I administer her postural drainage therapy.”

To Eric, the term sounded very technical, and he waved it aside “So what’s the big deal? She has therapy to help her breathe better. I don’t see why that makes you so hyper. Is it because she’s a patient and you have some kind of hangup about me dating one of your patients?”

Christy crossed her arms and once again turned to face him. “Eric, I don’t think you truly understand the seriousness of Kara’s illness.”

“Is it incapacitating or something? She didn’t look incapacitated to me.”

“It hits some victims harder than others. Some people are plagued by lung and digestive disorders.”

“So Kara’s got it bad?”

“And there’s something else about CF you should know.”

“What’s that?”

“There is no cure.”

“So?” He swallowed, made suddenly uncomfortable by her blue-eyed gaze. “Aren’t you helping her?”

“Not only is there no cure for CF,” she said softly, ignoring his question, “it’s fatal. One hundred percent fatal. Kara’s just turned sixteen, but I doubt she’ll live to celebrate her twentieth birthday.”

K
ARA POKED AT
the food on her dinner plate. She tried to pretend she wanted it, mostly because her mother was watching like a hawk, but she wasn’t the least bit hungry. She kept thinking about Eric and how wonderful she’d felt when she’d been with him.

“Did you take your enzyme pills?” her mother asked.

“Yes, Mom.”

“Don’t nag her, Renée,” Kara’s father interjected. “It’s obvious she’s not hungry.”

Her mother ignored his reprimand. “Would you like me to fix you something else? I have a pizza in the freezer.”

“No. The meat loaf’s fine.” Kara hoped she didn’t sound as edgy as she felt. She knew her
parents meant well, but it drove her crazy when they fussed over her and talked as if she weren’t in the room. “You know that it takes a while for me to get my appetite back after a stint in the hospital.”

“I still have some Vivonex,” Mom said, naming the special food supplement that Kara sometimes drank in order to gain weight.

Kara grimaced. “I hate that stuff. Forget it. I’ll get hungry again—stop worrying.” She watched her parents exchange worried looks. “I’m
fine,”
Kara insisted, standing up. “Stop treating me like a baby.” She tossed her napkin on the table. “I’ll be in my room. I want to organize my notebook.”

In her room, she flounced on the bed. The cheerful yellow and white walls and carpet seemed to mock her bad mood, and her bed, heaped with all sizes and shapes of pillows, suddenly felt like a cage. A soft rap on her door caused her to bury her face in her pile of pillows and shriek with pent-up frustration. She knew it was her mother coming to check up on her. “Yes?” Kara called.

Her mother opened the door and peeked inside the room. “Are you all right?”

“Mom, I’m fine. Sorry I snapped at you at the dinner table.”

Her mother sat on the bed. “No … I’m the one who needs to apologize. I shouldn’t have pressed you about supper. I worry about you, that’s all.” She smoothed Kara’s hair, and Kara resisted the
urge to pull away. “Your father and I don’t mean to hound you—I’ve gotten better about not doing it, don’t you think?”

Kara sat up and looked at her mother’s anxious face. In many ways, she had gotten better, thanks to Vicki Diller, the psychologist Dr. McGee had insisted the family start seeing three years before. Before that, her mother had almost driven them all crazy trying to be responsible for Kara’s illness. In fact, her overprotectiveness had almost caused her parents to divorce. At the therapist’s suggestion, her mother was now working full-time. “Yes, you’ve gotten much better.”