I embraced the idea of a new home where any stranger coming up the road in a car could be heard a mile away. I felt glad to lose that constant exposure to strangers moving about the corridors. And yet I sympathize with Rain and Owen. It's my job to try to bring them some happiness.
"Matt Damon." I held the card up, shaking it slightly, my tradition. I had two interesting cards in my hand. "He says he wants to visit us when we're feeling up to it. He wants to make a movie about what happened in Trinity."
I passed the card to Rain, who opened it cautiously. Up until maybe two weeks ago, all the movie rights messages had thrilled her. She passed it to Scott.
"I knew about this. He called a couple of times," she said.
"You spoke to him?" Scott asked. She ought to have told us that much.
"No, the nurses did. My dad was going to call him back, but I told him not to. Not yet. I haven't ... I just..." She stumbled for a thought. "I don't know if I want our lives all blasted across a movie screen. People will feel sorry for us."
Nobody argued.
"I think people who get this much attention should have won the Olympics or something," she continued. "I feel like a cheat. I don't want attention this way."
So much for Matt Damon. My second note was a trump card I had set in my lap only seconds after they started bickering. I figured I would throw it down only if the first one didn't work. It was personal.
"Jeremy Ireland." I waved the card, and I could feel all eyes open and shift to me. Not a celebrity in the traditional sense, but Jeremy was interesting enough.
"What does he say?" Rain asked.
Mission accomplished. They were all watching me. But old habits die hard, and as usual when my mother became the topic of conversation, my mind went to dull gray and my voice trembled with anxiety.
"'Dear Cora,'" I started.
Thank you for your very honest portrayal of your mother in your last e-mail. I know that was hard for you. I am still trying to piece together how the Aleese I knew became the Aleese you knew. As I said to you at the end of my visit, the accident that cost your mother her arm also cost her any ability to proceed as a photographer, and photojournalism had been her life. Before that accident, she was addicted to nothing except her own adrenaline. I do wish she hadn't abused you verbally at every turn.
I do believe you. She abused all of us at times, but she was the Queen of Hearts during the years I traveled with her. We were all mesmerized by her courage, her willingness to risk her life constantly for the betterment of humanity, and we allowed for her sharp tongue, figuring she was entitled to that indulgence. This will sound like a very strange thing for me to say, but I am quite certain she loved you.
My hand floated to my throat—not that I was actually thinking of crying. My mother had done little for the four-plus years she lived with me except lie on the couch, take injections, hallucinate, and try to shock me with outspoken and vulgar comments. Even after my grandmother died, I had never spiraled into reflections on whether Aleese had loved me.
Hence, my throat was tightening over what I perceived as a lie from Jeremy Ireland. I had reached out to him two weeks ago in a blast of honesty that had left me bedridden for two complete days after I sent the e-mail.
My eyes were drawn to Scott's, as his were piercing, while Rain and Owen merely looked enthralled.
He dropped his head back. "Jesus Christ, Cora. Don't do this to yourself."
The card fell limp in my lap. I'm certain he was thinking of a couple of our group therapy sessions, when I had been put to the test of talking about my mother honestly. Dr. Hollis and the three of them would sit patiently through what words I could come up with, little more than seizurelike prattle that seemed vague and disconnected. As much as I'd hated Aleese's presence, I'd dreamed of her almost nightly at St. Ann's. In her death she had become a great lecturer, invading my dreams and telling me how useless I was, and I'd hallucinated her once when we were on too strong a narcotic for joint pain. After that, I'd asked myself if I had been better off when she was alive.
Still, I'd kept Aleese's drug addiction a secret from everyone until the day she died, and now I was reading a letter like this aloud. It made sense to say I'd made some headway. But still, when my head bumped to an honest thought, it would flutter away into some invisible mist before I could form the words. It was always torture, this business of being honest about my mother. It would have been easier, I suppose, to be honest about the terrorist beside my bed. But over the years, I'd learned to find my peace in secrets, not in blurting. I sensed I might have a better chance of breaking hard habits in the remote place where we were being sent.
Scott took the card from my hand, closed it, dropped it into his own lap, and gave me a look I often enjoyed. I called it his "knowing" look, a smirk laced with some vague affection, the look that saved me from having to form words and syllables and sense. I could visualize that smirk after some atrocious nightmare and lull myself back to sleep with the image.
His bottom lip was longer than his top lip and loped lazily on one side, whether he was smiling outright or smirking like this. Toss that smile in with unflinching brown eyes, a running back's build, and endless charm and you could see why he'd been up to his ears in girls before he graduated. But he'd been miles out of my league, as well as an upperclassman. I was out of arm's reach in this limo, or he would have followed up his look with what always satisfied me—a squeeze on the back of my neck or a swat on my hair. His feet were stretched out, reaching to my ankles, and he might have tapped me there, as a way of telling me, "You don't have to say it." I lay in wait for these moments on a daily basis. Sometimes I was rewarded; sometimes I wasn't. This time I wasn't.
But Rain reached into his lap for my card. "Let us see the rest of it!"
I felt vaguely victorious that she was distracted from her problems. Yet I ached to do my thinking in private, work on being open and honest when I had my thoughts in order and my words rehearsed.
Scott merely moved the card to his far side, out of Rain's reach, his eyes shut.
"Why not?" she demanded. "She was doing fine!"
"No, she wasn't," he said.
THREE
OWEN EBERMAN
FRIDAY, MAY 3, 2002
7:15 P.M.
ROUTE 9
GOD, I don't know what we need. Just bring it.
I'm usually better at stating requests to the Father & Friends, which is my term for God and Mom and my favorite saints, St. Joan and St. Stephen. I imagine them constantly watching over us. But I knew my brother was staring at me, and it's hard to think while waiting for him to bellow about how helpless I look. I wouldn't say he was exactly mad at God. You have to decide that divinity is real before you can target it with your anger.
Cora should read her personal stuff to herself first—I agreed. Her mom could make her nuts. But I didn't want Scott yanking Rain's chain. I knew what was really upsetting her tonight, and he didn't. He clumps all her upsets together, just because they look the same on the outside. She has been crying a lot lately. It can be exhausting, and that's being overly polite. After three days of it, you can want to tape her mouth shut and yank all her hair out. But I really felt bad for her tonight, due to her take on some things our favorite nurse, Haley Gibbs, told us when we were packing up our belongings.
Miss Haley was actually packing for me, because I'd just come out of a Headache from Hell at four thirty, and you feel like a ball of hot melting wax after one. I was half asleep in the chair. Cora and Rain came in to see what they could do, so Miss Haley sat them down.
"I've been elected by Dr. Godfrey to give you the speeches," she said with this huge smile that led us to believe it would all be good. She started with what we already knew. "We've found the means to level off this germ so that nobody is getting any worse. Hence, you're getting out of here. What we really want is for you to start trying to lead as normal lives as possible out at the Kellerton House. On days when you're not symptomatic, have your frie
nds up. You'll have a two-hour window twice a day where you don't take any medication. Go out. Take walks. Go shopping. You can go anywhere you want in the car, but the nurse goes, too, if it exceeds that two hours."
"Gee, that sounds 'normal.'" Rain chuckled, though after living two months in two rooms in St. Ann's, chronically visited by doctors and research representatives from four continents, it was a leap toward normalcy.
"You don't have to wear gloves and masks anymore. You can hug your friends." Miss Haley nudged Rain. We'd actually gotten the word last week that Q3 could not be passed through the air, though they weren't sure about bodily fluids. Rain had demanded a minute-long hug from everyone who showed up.
"But keep all that to a minimum for your own sakes," Miss Haley went on. "Your resistance is low. You could seriously compromise your health with a germ that someone else's body is fighting quite well. Don't let people sneeze on you. And don't swap spit, and certainly don't swap anything more personal—not with friends or among yourselves."
Among yourselves. Even I admit that had an incestuous ring to it, and Rain didn't want to dignify it with a response.
Rain moved past it quickly. "I just want my life back. How soon until they expect us to be back to normal?" She had asked that only yesterday. And the day before and the day before. The answer was always, "Soon, we hope!"
She didn't expect the answer to be any different, I guess, and her cheerful face suddenly fell under the weight of some thought. The words "don't swap spit" kind of hung in the air. I sensed it was related. You don't usually have to wait long to hear what Rain is thinking. Out it came.
"Miss Haley. Are you ... trying to say that what we have works sort of like an STD?"
Sexually transmitted disease. Ew. My mind doesn't twist the way Rain's does. We drank Q3 from faucets. We didn't pick it up in the back seat of a car. But Miss Haley's smile wandered around her face.
"Well, you can't think of it that way," she stumbled.
"Really? How am I supposed to think of it?" Rain's tone was edgy.
"You're supposed to think you have a germ. You'd be told the same thing if you had mono. Look, every major drug research company in the world is contributing to your cure. Whoever hits the jackpot will get major publicity, will rule the drug industry. Believe me, they're working day and night."
"But Miss Haley. Could we have this thing forever?" Rain asked.
The answer to that: Yes, yes, yes. We'd been told quite a few times: There may be no way to "cure" the germ; we might spend our lives trying to "control" the germ. It just had not been put in a sexual context before, though now that it was here, I thought, hel-lo?
Then I stood up. "I don't even care right now. Except, I'm afraid I will start caring if Rain doesn't give it a rest—"
Which got Rain started on how I can't talk about anything, and in a flash, Miss Haley was between us, pushing me toward the elevator. "You go, and let me talk to her."
Cora opted to follow me. She patted my arm while we waited for the elevator, radiating sympathy. Cora is a giant sympathy machine. She even said, "I'm sure you guys will be back to your normal lives very soon."
The way Cora talked, you would almost think this whole adventure had everything to do with us and nothing to do with her. It melted my heart usually, but now I was distracted.
Okay, so we're getting out, but we're in Convent Land, can't have sex, can't even kiss, I thought, trying the concept on for size. Nothing had really changed for any of us, except Scott, because he'd been sort of a wild man. I tried to focus on that nothing-had-changed part, but even my mind was going, Five weeks? Five years? Twenty years?
So in the limo, I was pretty upset with Miss Haley and Dr. Godfrey. Some things are better left unsaid. And I knew Rain was feeling better than me physically and if I was doing the five-weeks-five-years-twenty-years thing, then surely she was, too.
Cora had set three stacks of cards on the seat between her and me. I knew her system: One stack was "opened," the second was "unopened," and the last was "addressed to one of us instead of all four of us." Some people were nice enough to send four cards. I took a few from the "not addressed to all of us" pile. Three for me and one for Rain were right on top. I got more mail than the other three, though the reasons left me paralyzed. This first one was pretty typical.
Dear Owen,
I am fifteen and I live in Nebraska and I saw you in People mag and on the TV and Internet. I think you should be in movies. I can't believe this happened to someone hot like yourself. When you recover I will go out with you, here is my phone number—
I tossed it beside me. The first month, I got several of these a day. At first I thought, That's nice. People are trying to make us feel better, and every girl thought she was the only one to say that, I guess. But I was the only one of us who got a steady stream on this theme. They had started driving me batty, but especially right now. I dropped the other two addressed to me on top of it and picked from the "unopened/addressed to all of us" pile.
Dear Cora, Rain, Owen and Scott:
Then came the rhyming part. If we read all the Hallmark rhymes, we would never get to the bottom of our mail.
I hope they catch all the guys who did this to you. No lethal injections. They deserve to be hung. On television.
I laid that one aside, too. Quickly. If I saw a card that mentioned "the guys who did this" I almost always closed it really fast and forced my brain somewhere else. Rain and Cora and I decided we did better to think of ourselves as merely "under the weather" as opposed to "victimized." Because sometimes I would start thinking of "those guys" and something like a violent earthquake would start, though it was inside me. I'm supposed to be the guy who can put myself in anyone's shoes, including a terrorist's. I'd like to keep it that way.
Rain, Miss Talk It Out, couldn't stand her silent self any longer. Out her comment flew, like one of those squirrels that gets in your walls and shoots out from under the bed in the middle of the night, hissing at you.
"What was the point in Miss Haley saying all of that? What a bummer."
Hiss, scratch, hiss, hiss.
"All of what?" Scott murmured without opening his eyes.
"Ohhh..." she said snidely. "She basically said we're in the Clap Club. The Gonorrhea Guild. Why was I so dumb for so many years? Now I'll have no memories. I'm one of those girls who had, like, two sexual thoughts in high school. One sophomore year, and one junior year."
I smiled. She was probably exaggerating, but not by much.
Scott probably smiled on the inside. "Keep it that way."
"I think I was just getting around to my senior year thought when Danny Hall broke up with me. I was always thinking, 'I'll just ... think of it after that next big game.' When you're on four sports that win like crazy, that doesn't leave you much time. Now it'll be like telling myself, 'Don't think of an elephant.' What do you think of?"
"Are you thinking of getting laid tomorrow?" Scott asked drowsily.
"Ew."
"Next week?"
"What, do I look like Jeanine?"
"Jeanine the Machine," Scott droned, trying to smile, but he didn't quite make it.
"You're missing the point," Rain said.
"No, we're not. Nobody is missing any point. Except maybe Cora..." Scott opened one eye to gaze at Little Miss Reading Mail Like Crazy. To Cora, chickens don't lay eggs. She ignored him nicely. "Live in the now, Rain."
I agreed. "You've got your life. Worry about the rest later."
I was glad Cora was sitting between us. I was suspicious Rain had wanted to hit me a few times recently, and her energy wafted into my space, making me pull farther back into the corner.
"This is exactly what I'm talking about," she said, doing that sniffing thing again.
Just. Shut. Up. I shut my eyes to fake asleep, but that didn't silence her.
"Why is it lately that you can't feel bad about something at the same time I feel bad about it? When I'm up, you're down. When I'm down, all you can do
is make really glib statements like 'you've got your life.' Why can't you ever be on my wavelength?"
Because whatever your opinion is, you suck up all the oxygen in the room. There's nothing left to say and no air left to say it with.
"Well?" she kept going.
"I don't think that is glib, Rain," I argued, then stammered over what I'd planned to say next. It was that I went around all the time thinking of things that we had to be thankful for. I'd gotten the idea from my Young Life leader, Dan Hadley. Young Life is a church youth group that meets on Wednesdays. I'd been spiraling the day Dan came to visit me at St. Ann's. Dan had survived three bouts of leukemia as a kid.
He suggested, "When you get like this, thank God for everything you can think of that's good. Even things you might never have noticed otherwise, like that bird that just flew by your window. You'll feel your energy shift. You won't be so consumed by those negative what-ifs."
To my amazement, it honestly worked ... most of the time. It had since become a habit. But when I had tried to share this with Scott, I was accused of being "religious," like that's some sin. And Rain just wasn't there yet, wasn't thinking of God in any terms except that he had allowed her senior year to be train-wrecked.
In the past week, when Rain couldn't get what she wanted out of me, she resorted to twisting the knife. "You never talk horny. Sometimes I think you're gay."
My eyes snapped open. Last November, Rain had called me from this party, all crying, saying Jeanine had single-handedly finished off a bottle of Boone's Farm wine in fifteen minutes and had now been in the backyard "on her knees" for going on half an hour. In our neck of the woods, "on your knees" does not mean throwing up. Jeanine is one of those people who should not ever drink. So, I drove over there and pulled her away from these guys by the hair. Rain and I took her to Wawa for a cappuccino and an in-your-face fest. Some people went around school afterward saying I was gay. Sometimes I feel there is this "charming" idea in our "charming" American culture that there are no plain and simple good guys out there. If you don't line up in the backyard for the Jeanine show, it's because you're gay.