"Mom" would be Cora's Oma, who had raised her. I wondered why Oma decided to raise Cora if Aleese didn't want her, after not keeping this baby. Maybe because Cora was Aleese's flesh and blood, but there were so many unanswered questions about Cora's life that I wondered sometimes how Cora could stand being Cora.
"So, today, this baby is going to his new family. The only thing I wanted was the opportunity to deliver him, play with him for an hour or two."
"And how do you feel about what you've done?" Jeremy asked.
She looked at him weirdly, blushing again. "Don't make me into a hero. The girl was the hero. In my opinion. Christ, why is it, in America, we always have to say in my opinion? One nation ...under God, in my opinion... Think there's room for in my opinion at the top of a penny?"
"I think it's In God We Trust that's on the penny," Jeremy said impatiently.
"In God We Trust, in my opinion..."
"Look. I want to keep this for my VJ of you. I don't want three minutes of cooing, I want three minutes of Aleese."
She flipped him the bird, which made me flinch—it was like she was flipping it at me. "I wanna keep this baby. I wanna keep you, I wanna keep you!" She nuzzled her nose into the baby's stomach.
"You..." I almost said "bitch" for Cora's sake.
Jeremy gave a respectful pause before asking, "So, why don't you keep him? You'd make a great mother."
"Nah, I'm not staying. This baby belongs in America. Don't you? Don't you!"
"Aleese..." Jeremy's next question was a thought provoker. "For someone who loves this country so much, you spend very little time in it. You're twenty-four, and since you were twenty, you spent two weeks here six months ago, and two weeks now, this time merely to keep a promise to a pregnant teenager and deliver a baby to a couple you've never met. If you love the place as much as you say, why not be here to enjoy it?"
VJ ... I decided the term meant "video journal," and this was a rhythm of theirs. Jeremy would act like an interviewer, pose questions, and tape what she did or said. I sensed the importance of it, though Aleese was laughing at the moment, her head up, away from the baby, while she searched the ceiling for answers.
She shrugged, laughing a little. "Most people are in America to enjoy America. The rest of us ... we make it possible for others to enjoy America. My job? I prowl the badlands, the outlands, and bring back photos that will keep Americans grateful ... and protective, and ... cognizant of their good luck in this world. It's no place for a baby. This child should have an American life. He's a symbol."
"A symbol of what?"
"Gardens ... is what I'm thinking of at the moment. I don't know why I love American gardens so much. The Swiss and the Germans are better at gardens. But this baby needs to go about in a stroller designed by JCPenney and learn to walk thinking that the world is rooms filled with giant, colorful Lego toys. The first day of kindergarten, his parents should walk him down the street to the local public school, where he'll learn from big alphabet letters and math worksheets with cartoon foxes and bears cheering him on. He needs to ride bikes and have a locker and learn to play football, soccer, and street hockey. He needs to wake up on Christmas mornings to a Walkman and a golden retriever puppy and a mountain bike. He needs to see all the Disney movies the first week they come out. He needs a dad and a mom. He needs to start each school day saying the Pledge of Allegiance... in my opinion."
She laughed, but I didn't. Aleese Holman talked kind of like she wrote. It was like an endless poem that she could spit out while cooing and joking around. It was an unusual talent, and I could see why Jeremy liked doing this.
She added, "Most people are lucky enough to get to play in America, to put the bread on the table in freedom and live off the fat of the land. The rest of us? We have other shoes to fill. We're the photographers, the journalists, the soldiers, the Peace Corps workers, the artists, the chroniclers of disaster ... We bring back perspective. We bring back the less pleasant truths. We, um, foster gratitude. We allow others to play while we do the hard stuff."
She struck the electric chord I was looking for. Scott and Cora and Rain and I obviously hadn't been sent to any badlands. We were no longer "normal people from Trinity Falls," but the rest was unclear. I could sit here and pray for people, because I'd heard of other people in St. Ann's doing that—people who wanted to do some good but were too sick to move about. I could be nice to Rain, because she was high maintenance. But I thought of Scott wanting to go to work for USIC, to actually catch those guys. I thought of what the Kid did, giving up his teenage years so that he could help intelligence agencies find cold-blooded killers.
I felt entirely useless as more truth crawled all over me: I was nothing like Aleese Holman. I was nothing like Joan of Arc. I wasn't even close to the Kid. I was Owen Eberman, decent athlete, decent student, and otherwise couch potato, who just happened to drink the wrong water at the wrong time.
I asked Dan recently about this thing he'd referred to as "a calling," because I'd kind of wanted one—sort of like Joan of Arc or St. Stephen. When you think you might die, it's time to put it all out there and get arrogant. What have you got to lose? Hadley said the apostles asked Jesus questions, toward the end of his life, about where they were going and what they'd be doing. His answer, in plain English: "If I told you the whole thing now, you'd lose your minds."
I finally drifted off to sleep, watching sand on the TV and not caring. Sand was like my life. Something was going on behind the scenes, but I wasn't privy to it. It was like the mist of my dreams, which I drifted into in the afternoon quiet while Rain was asleep and Cora and Scott were off on a road trip. Figures floated around in shadows behind the mist. But no one came out of it. No voices spoke to me.
EIGHTEEN
CORA HOLMAN
SATURDAY, MAY 4, 2002
1:30 P.M.
GRIFFITH'S LANDING BOARDWALK
SCOTT WANTED ME TO SHOOT A PICTURE of a burning building while we were standing in a crowd of people. He kept pointing insistently at the smoky flames and red brick structure, but I wasn't tall enough and could only capture the backs of men and women in the crowd, even when standing on my toes. Finally, the crowd broke a little, people moving left and right, and I raised the camera to my face. The lens had been jostled, and all was a blur. I quickly readjusted the focus, and as the image came clear, I was staring straight into my dead mother's face. Her black eyes and smile took up the lens.
"You can't escape me. Dead does not mean gone."
I jerked the thing from my eyes, expecting to see her standing two feet in front of me. But it was only the crowd again. I tried screaming, but it came out like hissing, and as I turned to flee, a seat belt jerked me into place. I was staring out the window from the passenger seat. The sun was out.
"You okay?" Scott asked.
I put a hand to my banging heart, still hearing the reverb of my yell. I could have startled him enough to drive off the road. We were just turning off Route 9 onto the Griffith's Landing causeway.
He jostled my head a little and said, "It's only a dream," in a mothering way.
"I've been having the most atrocious nightmares about my mother lately," I confessed dizzily.
His hand left me. "I'd say, 'You can come get in my bed,' but I don't think that would work out very well."
He was trying to make me laugh, and as usual, he got his wish. But the smile faded away again as I stared into the camera in my lap and it stared back. I tended to think of it as a life form sometimes. In another dream, it started to pulsate in my hands like a giant heart. I loved the thing, but only when I could forget that it had been to so many places, had seen so many atrocities, and recorded all of humanity's heartaches that Jeremy told me of. It's like I hadn't totally taken possession of it. Half of this camera still belonged to Aleese. Half of it was part of Aleese.
"I sent Jeremy Ireland an e-mail after I couldn't think of much to say in my blog, and I asked him to please persist in finding out what he can about my fat
her," I said. "I'm sure Aleese just ... got stuck in my mind after I sent it."
The narrow highway was kind of pretty, with marshes and bay streams on either side, and a small city on the horizon ahead. I could see a tall Ferris wheel looming over the buildings, and we passed a sign that read "Griffith's Landing: 6 miles." I had fond memories of Oma bringing me and some friends here for the rides when I was twelve.
Scott turned to glance at me a few times. My heart should have slowed down, but one of our meds listed heart palpitations as a side effect, and I seemed to be more susceptible to side effects than the other three.
"Ya know, if you tell your bad dreams, they tend to fade away faster."
"Did they teach you that in paramedic school?" I yawned.
"Nope. Learned it from Mom."
The differences between his mother and mine lit the car with an inflamed discomfort. For me, at least. He grabbed my hand out of my lap and did this acupressure maneuver in the center of my palm, applying pressure with his thumb, which sent some sort of white energy up my arm and throughout my body. It had a calming effect, and he'd done it to me several times at St. Ann's when he'd been in hearing distance of one of my nightmares.
I blurted out the dream, mostly because I needed to give payback for my calm.
He flinched when I got to the part of Aleese being seen in the lens but not in the real crowd. "Cora, your nightmares are really vivid. Maybe you should think of becoming a writer."
At the moment, I was an editor, per se, of our journals, but that was it. I kept them on my hard drive, planning to weave them all together someday for our memories. "I've no idea what I want to be. Right now, I guess I'm just glad to be."
"Wish I felt that, uh, content," he said, and dropped his hand back onto the steering wheel in frustration. I had kept my word by not asking him why we were coming to Griffith's Landing. I thought of ways to ask him but sensed he wouldn't like it. And he wasn't done with the other subject yet.
"I'd say it's pretty normal to have nightmares like that when you've had a mother like yours. A wild boar would have made a better parent."
As usual, his loyalty cut my anxiety in half.
"Some wild animals devour their young," he went on. "But they're not drug addicts living on Social Security and relying on their children to pick up after them..."
One memory suddenly came clear that I hadn't mentioned before. I'd been afraid of its implications. But Scott liked when I confessed things, and I was suddenly basking in the white energy of relaxation.
I went for it. "A lot of times when I would come home after school, I would see the checkbook out on the dining room table. Aleese paid the bills when I was in school. Always. I never saw her write out a check. But we never got a shutoff notice. And after she died and I looked through all the records, I also saw that she never spent on drugs any of the money that Oma had left to her or me. She used her Social Security to get her morphine."
His hand moved back to the top of the steering wheel. I took it that he was stunned that I would defend her. I wondered if I should have.
"I think..."—I stumbled with the frightening part—"... she may have been drug free every day until late afternoon."
"Oh. She only got high when she sensed it was time for you to come home."
"That's right."
"The awful, terrible, unendurable Cora Holman. Your presence would make anybody want to shoot up, darlin'. It's all your fault that your mother was a pig," he said.
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 onl
y 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."