Cora, I have been agonizing over the situation with your father since I left you in St. Ann's and you'd asked if I were he. I do know something about your father, which I definitely do not want to share. However, I don't feel it is my place to keep it from you.
I rubbed my eyes wearily, thinking that if Aleese had chosen to take a few hours off from harassing me, I couldn't escape her anyway. My e-mails concerned her.
While visiting you in St. Ann's and watching your mum's video war journals with you, I noticed the dreaded one in the box marked Iran-Iraq War, January 1986. You will find some answers there. I would prefer not to be the bearer of bad news in this case, and perhaps you will understand by watching.
I stared out my window. Off in the distance I could see the pond glowing in the moonlight. It looked as lonely as I felt. I wished I were still surrounded by people instead of wondering, alone and horrified, if my mother had slept with Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. Knowing nothing of her romantic past, I wondered if she hadn't been the type to sleep with important people to get interviews and information. Nothing seemed impossible, and I couldn't imagine what other name associated with the Iran-Iraq War would make Jeremy so tightlipped and anxious. I was not exactly familiar with the names of Iraqi officials.
But Saddam Hussein had been on the news a lot lately, as there was much talk about whether America would declare war on Iraq. One news station reported he had allegedly tiled an image of President George Bush Senior onto the floor of a hotel used frequently by his dignitaries, so that they would walk on his face all day. He was among the most hated men in America.
I could remember no other Iraqi names ... or any Iranian ones. Aleese, Aleese ... what on earth did you do? Who am I?
I simply knew I could not look at that tape—not now.
But I was drawn to the box, which now sat on the floor of my closet behind my row of summer shoes. I picked numbly through it, found the tape marked IRAN-IRAQ WAR, JANUARY 1986, and stared at it. I don't know what I expected, perhaps that it would grow fangs and bite me in the face.
Mr. Steckerman knocked at my door once more, this time with the house phone. He held it out to me.
"Hodji Montu," he said.
I lay the tape on top, and my thoughts of Aleese momentarily dissolved. I must have said hello.
"Hey, kid. Long time no see." Mr. Montu sounded raspy, like he'd either lost his voice or had a stuffy head, or both.
Mr. Steckerman walked out again and shut the door. I heard his footsteps on the stairs going down, meaning he wasn't eavesdropping, which fed my guilt.
"Mr. Montu ... are you all right?"
"Car crash. I was racing from the airport to try to get to the house where my boys were. Guess you heard I didn't get there in time."
"I heard there was an explosion or something."
"Freak accident. The Kid's friend Tyler had what we call a pong bomb in his closet. He either lit it or it got too close to the heater and somehow caught fire."
"A pong bomb." I dropped down on the bed and leaned back on my pillows.
"Yeah ... size of a Ping-Pong ball. For a while, people could get them online ... thought they were like a cherry bomb. They're actually about ten times more powerful. Explosion went off upstairs. Fortunately, I was on one of those infamous delayed flights everyone's been squawking about since 9/11. We were still on the runway when their nurse put an emergency call through to the captain of our flight. Said the house was on fire ... she saw it coming back from dinner. By the time I got to the house, the firemen, the cops, even the TV crews were there, and I freaked when I saw the TV crews. Last thing anyone needed. I hit a telephone pole, and the airbags didn't inflate. Took the steering wheel in the face."
That explained his clogged voice.
"The boys ... what?" I asked, unsure if I wanted to hear this. "They couldn't get out?"
"No. They weren't in the best of health."
"What do you mean?" I sat up slowly.
He stayed silent, his breathing growing labored until he coughed and gasped. I had known that the Kid suffered from asthma. Roger O'Hare had told us that.
"Please tell me," I said.
"James Imperial is going to release the whole truth to the media anyway. The fire chief made some comments to the TV crew there about seeing a bunch of prescription drugs on the kitchen counter and maybe sick people being there, so there's no stopping it. Back when you guys were first admitted to St. Ann's, the Kid and Tyler had a run-in with some members of ShadowStrike. One guy scratched them in the face with the tularemia virus under his nails. That's another weapon of mass destruction—WMD. It infected them."
I almost dropped the phone. "You're serious?"
"Very. I'm just trying to brace you for it because you'll see it all over the news soon anyway. It probably won't be pretty. Tyler's mom was a spy for the North Koreans and she was recently jailed, so this will be the second time that house will be front and center in the news."
I'd remembered that news broadcast, how Rain and Scott had carried on that all spies ought to be given a lethal injection. To have a parent who was a spy had to be the most embarrassing of scandals these days.
"I'm telling you big secrets right now. It will be out in a couple of days," Hodji said, as I must have gasped. "Shahzad's family died, for all intents and purposes, in the Trade Center disaster, and Tyler's mother was always a single parent. In the interests of national security we had to keep their infection a secret, so we managed to get them a USIC nurse, and she agreed on her own to, let's say, 'get custody' of Tyler, but it was a big, convoluted mess. Growing bigger."
"But..." I stumbled for my thought before it struck me. "They should have been here with us! Why weren't they?"
"Some things they were doing were really dangerous. We didn't have the authority to stop them. We didn't have any further authority to help them. We didn't want to bring that sort of danger down on your house."
My guilt overwhelmed my gratitude, turning my insides sludgy. I pictured Richard Awali, hypodermic glistening between him and me ... I had a momentary flashback, how he'd intentionally pushed the thing up to my face so I would look at it. A new dimension to my horror show emerged. Suddenly Aleese showed up, floating right over the top of my head. "Don't go there. Stay focused. Ask the question."
"Well ... why are you calling it a freak accident? How do you know the dangerous men didn't come and do this?"
"It has to do with Tyler. One of our v-spies in Washington did some quick work ... found out that he had ordered a pong bomb online six months ago. We have the receipt; we have some chatter he posted on one of his hacker web boards. It said something about a kid in school who always picked on him, and about the pong bomb. He wrote, 'I only wanted to blow up Bruno's Cliffs Notes and his hard copies downloaded off antiplagiarism.com. I didn't want to blow his face off, so the pong bomb is resting in peace on my closet shelf...' Something like that." He laughed a little, sadly. "Tyler was a funny guy."
Then he coughed loudly, I was certain to cover crying. I wanted Aleese to actually materialize so I could throw the phone at her. Why is she always leading me the wrong way? She so needs me to know they didn't die as heroes. I have to get off this medication.
He collected himself fairly quickly. "Uh, Alan says you have something to tell me."
"I was e-mailing with them around five o'clock," I said stiffly. "USIC has left us in an unsafe and compromised situation, and our trust in them is severely breached—"
"How did you find them?" he asked.
"They found us."
"I told them not to do that," he said. "For what purposes?"
I didn't exactly answer. I said, "They sent me a long, long document that had been encrypted somehow, and they said to get it to you quickly."
"Can you e-mail it to me?"
"The Kid said not to trust anyone but you with the document. When it looked like it was going to fall into Mr. Steckerman's hands, I deleted it from my hard drive."
"Did yo
u save a hard copy?"
"Of course." I hopped off the bed and went to my printer. I knew the remote print function had worked while Rain was threatening to give it to her father. I had heard it clicking and spitting out pages from the other side of the wall.
"Good girl. Now listen. You have to give that hard copy to Alan. He'll fax it to New York. But don't worry about anyone understanding it. Somebody will have to type all those codes back in verbatim, then they can e-mail it to me. I've got the only copy of Shahzad's encryption program. Nobody can read it but me, but if it will make you feel better, tell Alan I said it's classified, Level Four. He's Level Three. He wouldn't dare keep a copy—"
"Shahzad."
"That was his name." Before Mr. Montu's voice could crack much more, he hurried on. "That was the only e-mail he sent?"
"No, there were a dozen others, all today, but we were, you know ... just joking around. There's nothing in them."
"Save them for when I get there. I'm coming to you as soon as I can get out of here."
"There were also some pictures that Scott and I took ... in Griffith's Landing," I confessed. "Mr. Steckerman asked for them."
"What in hell were you guys doing there?"
I clenched my teeth together, praying for Scott to wake up, get better, and take control.
"Cora, you need to show them to Mike and Alan if you think it's anything relevant," he said. "Alan's a good man, and he's not exactly in the path of my wrath right now."
But he's in the path of Scott's wrath, I thought.
"You also have bad feelings about some of the agents?" I asked.
"I don't want to get into a blame game, but I actually resigned an hour ago," he said.
I threw my head back on the pillow, feeling the swamp of isolation grow around me in the echo of unanswered questions. Like, if Tyler and Shahzad died in an accident, why did USIC feel responsible? Was it like Scott said? Should they have had round-the-clock protection, even if it was from themselves in their bad health? Had some giant paperwork mess prevented it? Was Hodji lying about the pong bomb? And was it really a murder?
"But you're coming," I said, repeating his words. "Down here, to us, to me."
"In lieu of my boys, I'll have you guys. USIC will allow me that much, I'm sure."
He sounded worn out, and I felt the same. I all but staggered downstairs to find Mr. Steckerman sitting on the bottom step, staring into space. I handed him the phone with one hand and the encrypted document in the other.
"He says to fax this to New York," I said. "He said to tell you it's classified, Level Four."
He grabbed the twenty or so pages and stared at me, seeing that it was unreadable. I started back up, and he fell in beside me, saying, "Cora, we'll talk in the morning. We have to."
I thought about the pictures and sighed. Scott picked the greatest time to be of no help.
"We'll talk in the morning," I said, enough defensiveness rising in my voice to startle even me. "So long as you don't ... crowd me."
He stopped, and I kept going. Aleese was laughing her side off.
THIRTY
OWEN EBERMAN
SATURDAY, MAY 4, 2002
10:05 P.M.
TV ROOM
OUR FRIENDS LEFT PRETTY QUICK after Rain's dad made that announcement about the Kid. We turned on her little TV. After watching a rerun of one of the funniest Seinfeld episodes ever recorded with neither of us cracking a laugh, I asked how her finger was.
"Fine," she said absently, and we started a conversation that made no sense, like, going in every direction at once.
"I'm concerned about my dad," she said. "I've never seen him look so bad."
"I want to go check on my brother. Marg's asleep on a cot outside the door. She won't let me past."
"Dude, our friends came out here tonight to find that I can't go outside and even sit at a bonfire. Then, they watched Cora and me get in an argument, and then they had to hear that two kids died. It's not going to be long. They're going to stop coming. We're a total bummer. Us. Happy and Smiley."
"Cora was sure acting weird tonight, wasn't she? If my brother were up and about, I'd ask him first thing if her medication is blitzkrieg-ing her personality. He'd know what to do."
"Am I a weak person, Owen? Because those two dead kids are surely making me feel like it. Like everything I did in school was just not good enough, like I should have been working undercover for my dad or something strange and Nancy Drew–ish like that."
Good. Feel it. I felt it. Though, if I were being realistic, I should not expect her to want to play superhero. I supposed not everybody was cut out for it. "You're normal. Or, you just want to be normal."
"What's the difference between normal and mediocre?" She turned to me.
Ah. The question I'd asked myself on and off for years. I suppose if you are born to be normal, then normal is outstanding. I was not normal. Beyond that, I didn't have much chance to pause and reflect. Rain grabbed the remote and turned up the volume.
"...home of alleged North Korean spy Cynthia Lu Ping finds itself newsworthy again tonight as a mysterious explosion and fire took the life of her son, Tyler, and a friend, Shahzad Hamdani. Cynthia Ping was arrested in March for allegedly selling secrets to the North Koreans. Tyler Ping and Hamdani were in the residence when the bomb exploded around five fifteen. They died of smoke inhalation and were pronounced dead at the scene."
Their school ID photos flashed up. They looked like juvenile delinquent hoods, and I stared long at the image of Shahzad Hamdani, as I now had a face to go with the Kid's name.
"Nobody looks good in those photos," Rain said angrily. "Couldn't they find some cute family photos?"
It got worse. "Police are investigating the possibility of a suicide pact between the two youths. Ping spent five days in the psychiatry unit of Beth Israel Medical Center in March, just before his mother was arrested, though the reasons remain confidential. Hamdani arrived from Pakistan in March and had been living with Ping after his aunt, a middle school principal, asked him to leave her home, where he had been residing, due to disrespect for authority. Apparently, both boys quit Island Trees high school in March, and drugs were found in the home."
We watched in horror as the news changed to a plane crash near Midway Airport in Chicago, and Rain screamed with her hand over her mouth.
"That's it?" she cried. "That can't be all they have to say! Daddy!"
She went stumbling out of the room, me trailing behind her. Her dad hadn't gone home yet. We found him sitting on the bottom step of the stairs like he was waiting for something or someone.
When she recited the horrible newscast, he said, "USIC has not spoken on the subject yet. That's entirely the police, firemen, and local media putting things together."
"Will USIC announce them as heroes?" Rain asked. "They ought to get, like, the Purple Heart or something."
"Yes, they ought to be named Agents of the Year," he said. I noticed for the first time how much gray hair Mr. Steckerman had. When all of this started, it had only been gray at the temples. In two months, the gray had taken over most of his head. "But they probably won't. I'm just hoping James Imperial will come clean and say all that USIC knows about them, not just that they were WMD victims. Nothing about them needs to remain classified now that they're dead—that's my humble opinion. I've got a suggestion for you. Why don't you guys watch movies on VHS until all of this passes? I know that broadcast seems grossly unfair, but Hodji told us to accept it. Before putting together a statement, USIC will sift through all it can say and all that would not violate national security. It could be a day or two, and because Tyler's mother is now infamous, it'll be more of the same on TV in the meantime. Just don't look at it."
He only wanted Rain to be as normal as possible. He didn't want her to have to look at something that would upset normal people. But the unfairness of this was astonishing. At a loss for words, I was suddenly ready to end this day quickly. We simply turned to go upstairs to sleep. Rain sa
id nothing. Neither of us had any energy.
THIRTY-ONE
CORA HOLMAN
SUNDAY, MAY 5, 2002
7 A.M.
KELLERTON HOUSE
MARG HAD SLEPT OUTSIDE SCOTT'S DOOR on a cot, and when I awoke around seven, the cot was already folded and pushed off to the side of the corridor. I stood with my ear against his door, my hand on the knob for about five minutes, but I was afraid to turn it and find the bed empty. His seemingly prophetic words, You'd be fine without me, still buzzed in my ears, though I knew we would be told immediately if he started to crash and bleed out. That was terminology which I'd only learned via overhearing the medics at St. Ann's, and I found it crude beyond comprehension. However, an ambulance might have pulled up here in the night, and with our non-creaking stairs, they might have been able to transport him out of here while I was in the throes of my strange, deep dreams.
Finally, I heard him clear his throat, and I sank into the wall, my hand flying to my eyes in relief. A groan of pain followed, and I finally wrenched myself away.
I sat alone in the dining room. Rain and Owen were still sleeping. I heard Marg on the phone with Dr. Godfrey.
"...because it's gone on so long. Their headaches generally last four hours or so, and the nosebleed concerns me greatly. Should I force a transport on him?" She went on after a pause. "He says he'll know if it bursts, and the only thing he cares about is that his brother isn't standing right there."
Nosebleed ... Our mothers died with nosebleeds. The teaspoon clattered against the cup as I forced myself to stir my tea.
Marg served me breakfast and tried to make pleasant small talk, which let me know Dr. Godfrey's response must have been to respect Scott's wishes and leave him be. After a few bites of fruit and whatever pills Marg dropped in front of me, I simply forced my legs into action—simple, everyday actions of making my bed, brushing my teeth, picking out a necklace that went with the neckline of my T-shirt, unboxing my books and putting them on the empty shelf. It felt meaningless but sane. I decided I ought to begin to develop the film I had taken in Griffith's Landing.