"Scott, after whatever medication it is you take next, you can be gone for how long?" Alan asked, and I looked at my watch.
"I've got something in twenty minutes, and then I can be gone for three hours," I said, which wasn't exactly true. I had a semiharmless dose of sulfadiazine, a simple antibiotic that prevents brain inflammation, two hours later, but I figured I could get Marg to slip it to me to take on the road. What the State didn't know wouldn't hurt it.
"We'll leave then."
Mike and Alan headed back up the stairs, and I made a show of studying prints, pulling some down as if they were of special interest. Really, I just wanted to watch Cora squirm.
THIRTY-SEVEN
CORA HOLMAN
MONDAY, MAY 6, 2002
10:02 A.M.
DARKROOM
I DIDN'T WANT TO BE A COWARD, and in my heart of hearts, I sensed it was something other than fear that made my stomach twist into knots over all the sights and sounds and phrasing of a meeting like that. My relationship with my mother had been virtually nonexistent, and yet I wondered if my aversion to a life of adventure wasn't some sort of teenage rebellion against her. That would be something so normal as to be almost ironic. But with Scott absorbed by these photos, I could only shuffle through my thoughts like a deck of cards in the middle of fifty-two pickup.
I stood there and tried not to seethe—at Scott for studying gross pictures so hungrily, and at myself for not feeling at least some of the same.
Granted, I could work mechanically, develop photos of violent men, watch the images come forth without allowing myself to look into the men's eyes. I could force myself not to wonder if they were more of our attempted killers. I could serve my country. He wasn't the only one.
But I couldn't forgive myself for grabbing hold of a delusion back in the dining room—that it was all right for me to rely on him to get filthy with danger while I sat around sipping tea with a normal other-man. As much as I yearned to hear normal talk of normal college classes and normal picture taking while drinking normal homemade American lemonade, my guilt overwhelmed me.
I was trying to put on my surgical gloves, but my hands were trembling and sweating so badly that they kept sticking. I finally tossed them on the table, laying a hand over my mouth. Scott Eberman had seen me do a lot of things. I threw up in his lap once when he answered my nurse's buzzer before the nurse could. He was adjusting my IV, never broke form, and merely muttered "oops" when it happened. But he hadn't seen me totally cry since the day I was first hospitalized. He was watching me now, frozen with a pile of prints in his hands, waiting for something entertaining to evolve.
Would you mind leaving, please? The words wouldn't form in my throat. I sensed some compassion in his sudden slump, which only made me feel worse. He put down the prints and patiently picked up one glove, blew into it until it looked like a five-fingered balloon, and let the air out again. He held it open, and my trembling fingers slid in easily.
"Even doctors get nervous and out of sorts," he said.
He blew up the other, and as my fingers slid in, my heart dissolved into a puddle. I cried loudly, and I pitched into him, grabbing him tightly around the waist and laying my head on his chest.
My Perfect Ten little head pats of the past diminished, as he wrapped me up in his arms, rubbed my back for comfort, and laid a kiss on the top of my head. I didn't deserve it, and again the picture flooded my mind of sitting idly on a porch with Henry, who suddenly had as much appeal as week-old birthday cake. Aleese cackled with joy off in the corner as I sniffed like a big baby. I merely wanted to restore my dignity, but efforts to speak charged out like a gunned engine. "Will you not touch me, please!"
He backed away with his hands in the air, like I was holding a gun, and fell back against the counter. "Women!" he whispered in awe. "I am never getting married."
"Me neither."
He put his hand down on the counter a little too hard. Now he was angry. I stood there and absorbed his lecture, a deserved payback.
"You know what, Cora? You might be right about yourself. I'll find somebody to put up with me when all of this is a spark in my memory. You? Underneath the sweetness routine, you've got this rigid pride thing going on ... god forbid you should turn out even a drop like your mother. God forbid you get close to anybody. If you so much as let some guy touch you, you might go down like a sub like she did and drop a baby you don't want into this world."
A more together person might have smacked him. But I choked on it, hiccupping and feeling ludicrous. I had to wonder what Scott's life had been like—what there was about him or people in general I didn't understand—because he simply turned and banged prints together. Like hearing a girl sniff and snort and hiccup was normal.
After an endless minute he reached for a box of tissues I'd brought down here the first day and held one out to me with two fingers.
"I'm not a child," I said, and crossed my arms.
"I'm a medic! I hand out tissues. Get over yourself."
I reached past him for my own tissue and blew intensely until I had blown away the urge to keep crying.
He kicked the ground with the toe of his sneaker. "I dragged you into this USIC stuff. I know it's not you, and you're entitled to be how you are, Cora."
I tried to not ask the question. But it flew out anyway. "Do you think any of those men in the photo recognized us from People magazine?"
"Who, that Abdul Khadisha?"
Leave it to him to remember an unfamiliar name. I'd been fixated on the face. I nodded.
"Just shoot me." He leaned down guiltily with his elbows on the table.
"I don't want you to feel guilty. I just want to know."
"Why? Can we just keep it real? We could all be dead by August. How would you like to go out, Cora? With a bang, or in a mountain of snotty tissues?"
I didn't necessarily want to go out with a bang, if going out was what I faced. I supposed I wanted to go out on my own terms. These weren't mine. They were his. In some twisted way, they were Aleese's.
He came back over to me. "Finish these photos and then go off and enjoy yourself. You need it. God. Look at you shake." He lifted my fingers under his, and they were trembling. I would have written it off to crying. "It's the Nabilone withdrawal. You'll lie down to sleep tonight and think you're on a vibrating bed. It won't hurt you, though. If that's the worst you get, consider yourself lucky."
He reached onto the table where my mask lay, offering me a lecture on not breathing the chemicals. He snapped the mask over my face. Playing father eased his conscience, so I simply let him.
"What really bad symptoms should I be looking for again?" I asked, feeling my eyes refilling. He was leaving. Whatever I'd felt for Henry was behind some gray mist.
He sighed, glancing at his watch. "Double vision and hallucinations. And I'll be back in three hours."
He pinched my cheeks affectionately and pulled his hands away again, as if expecting me to lash out. But I didn't. I reached for the sleeves of his T-shirt, twisting them in agony, and I suppose he was in the same vulnerable state. He wrapped his hands around my back again and appealed to the ceiling, saying, "I'm going to try to start being a better person, okay? Tomorrow."
His hands moved to my face and pulled it upward. He kissed me firmly on top of the mask until the fabric crumbled and I felt the pressure on my lips. The sudden desire to claw the thing away and dive into the realities beyond it was almost overwhelming. But the floor gave way, or so it seemed, and it was his arm holding me up by the small of my back that kept me from plummeting. He pulled his face away and stared, some victory smirk slowly working his lazy bottom lip as he set me on my feet. He let go of me when I was leaning firmly against the counter.
"You're horrible," I breathed, mortified at my knees for betraying me.
"No, you're horrible. You caused that." He backed away, staring at my hand on my thumping chest, which I balled into a fist so he wouldn't see it shaking. But he was silently laughing as h
e walked backwards through the door frame. I couldn't tell whether he was still congratulating himself or laughing in honest awe over the effect he could have on a girl who hadn't been kissed since some seventh grade closet game.
"Joking aside"—Scott's mature tone returned—"you'll be down here by yourself. You can't trip over anything. You can't fall. Do you want me to tell Hodji he has to come down here with you?"
"Do I look like I need a babysitter?"
I wished I'd put it as a statement instead of a question. He finally pulled the door shut after I studied the images he'd tossed on the counter for a good thirty seconds. I figured he laughed all the way upstairs.
THIRTY-EIGHT
OWEN EBERMAN
MONDAY, MAY 6, 2002
10:40 A.M.
RAIN'S BEDROOM
RAIN WENT ALONE to the CVS with Marg, but even with that short a trip I parked myself on the sofa in the parlor and waited for the car to come back. Crazy, I know. But she had left in some giddy mood, and I knew it was mostly to ward off depressing thoughts of either her liver worries or the Kid and Tyler, or Cora starting a different drug already.
I realized it was the first time in months she had been more than fifty feet from me. And with my brother off the property and Cora in the basement behind a locked door, I felt anxious, like something awful was going to happen to one of them. And I kept to my resolve to do whatever Rain wanted today without fighting with her.
But even I have my limits. Ten minutes after she came back, I was parked on her bed, and she was filing my nails. No matter how much I prayed for strength to endure, I could feel no help whatsoever to get me through ... a manicure. She was threatening to put this clear stuff on them that she swore would not show at all, though it came in a nail-polish bottle with one of those brushy things sticking straight down into it.
I bet I was standing in proxy for Cora. She owed me an apology, because at this point I was totally scared Rain would try to mascara my eyelashes next.
"Glad my hair's short right now," I noted. "No point in getting out the curling iron."
"Relax! Hands are a transgender thing right now! There's always guys in the nail salon these days."
"Yeah. And when these same guys get in car wrecks and Scott cuts their jeans off in the ambulance, they're wearing their mother's underwear."
"Don't be silly." She reached for the bottle.
"Naw!" I turned over, half on my stomach, hiding both hands under me.
"Yaw! Get up."
"Naw."
"I'll paint your toenails."
"I'll fart on your head."
She lay slowly backwards on the bed with a yawn, unwilling to wrestle for my arm. I looked. "Are you all right?"
She finished her yawn, watching me. "Stop asking me that."
I slowly leaned back on her pillows again, watching her eye-lids relaxing, feeling slightly safe. She would either take a nap or think of something else quickly to amuse herself. I wondered what was on the tube. If I lay really still, she might nap out, and then I could leave without drawing attention to myself.
Her eyes snapped open, unfortunately. "I know. Something all guys do these days."
"Oh god..."
"We can whiten your teeth."
Please, God.
"Really. I was going to do it to myself, but we can do yours now and I'll get more tomorrow, which will give me another excuse to go to the store. We really should whiten our teeth, Owen. You know how medicine makes your teeth go dull? Well, it's starting to happen to us. I've been meaning to tell you."
I'm not a vain guy, but there's something about teeth. You don't want them grody. I got up and went to the mirror over her dresser, baring my teeth to my gums. I'd had this obsession when I was eleven. I thought my teeth were turning yellow. Every time I flashed my teeth in the mirror, they would be bright yellow.
"They're white," Mom would say. "It's your imagination."
And Scott would start in all "What's her name?" which you don't want to hear, so I quit mentioning it and eventually forgot about it. But every once in a while, I would see yellow teeth in the mirror.
"See?" Rain said. "They're going dull."
I hoped she was joking. But they looked kind of yellow. Ohhhh god. I collapsed back down on her bed. "What do I have to do?"
So, two minutes later I was staring at the wall while drooling behind some Colgate football mouthpiece, praying she wouldn't think of some other way to beautify me, because I couldn't very well tell her off like this.
She sat cross-legged beside me, just talking on and on, not caring that I couldn't answer. It was easy stuff. Jeanine this, calories that, field hockey this. She'd give it a pause until another thought struck her, not bothered by the silences.
"Can I ask you a personal question?" she asked.
I almost laughed. I really had farted on her head once, and not as long ago as you might hope. Sophomore year. She kept trying to do as much to me while I was watching the Cubs versus the Phillies, tie score, bottom of the eighth. She's a White Sox fan just to goad me. She kept grunting and moaning and carrying on, then saying nothing would come out. I'd thought, I'll put "an end" to this.
I nodded hard, wondering what between us was left to be personal.
"Are you acquainted with the five girlfriends on your right hand?"
I collapsed backwards on the pillows like I'd been shot.
"Seriously." She giggled. "I want to know."
I started shaking my head slowly back and forth and back and forth. This conversation would not happen.
"I need to know!"
And back and forth.
"I know you are."
So then, why are you asking? I stopped shaking my head, and she took that as the confession she needed to continue.
"Have you been acquainted with your five girlfriends since we came up here?"
"MMMtglemtlemmemmemem." I pulled the thing out of my mouth and drooled down the front of my T-shirt. "I wouldn't tell you if I had."
"Oh. So you have."
"MMmmMM!" I could not believe she even thought that.
"It's just that yesterday afternoon and today, you're feeling pretty good, so..."
I took the thing out again, drooling ferociously in awe. "Rain! We've only been here three days."
"So? I thought boys did that at every available opportunity. Like every day."
"That's crazy. Well, maybe Dempsey does. We're all different, okay?"
"Put that back in your mouth. You're drowning my comforter."
I did, feeling eaten alive.
"So, like, what do you think about? Naked girls?" she asked.
"Mm-mm." End of discussion.
"Are they real girls? Or do you make them up, and that way you don't have to look somebody in the eye in the school corridors the next day?"
I took the thing out and tried not drooling so hard this time. "Rain, get to the punch line. Some things you just don't talk about, okay?"
"Don't be such a prude! Who else am I going to ask? Cora? Here's my problem. I tried my boyfriends on my right hand. Nothing happens. I'm doing something wrong."
I sat forward in case I laughed totally and gagged myself. I could see she was really needing to get a load off her chest, but I pounded the mattress, these laughs coming up all "Hmm hmm hmm."
I wanted to say I thought it was probably different for guys and girls, that maybe girls had to think harder or something. But I figured she would know that, and I didn't want to drool over a redundancy. And I didn't get what she wanted from me. I was not all that familiar with female anatomy. It's one thing to have "wandered downstairs" once or twice, and it's another to explain the fuse box. I felt that female anatomy was a lot like Dempsey's mom's new stovetop. It's flat and there's no huge buttons, so you can't tell where the heat is until you sit yourself up there and you realize the burner's on. (True story. Happened to Dobbins two days after Mrs. Dempsey bought that thing. I will never, ever, ever have one of those stoves in my house.) And it'
s not like I'd ever had a centerfold of some medical/sex journal shoved in my face detailing some girl's privates with everything numbered and labeled with those italic captions. What is she thinking?
And yet, she was right that she couldn't ask Cora. Cora might sympathize a moment before passing out in abject terror of a totally personal subject. It seems weird, but Jeanine probably didn't know squat. She could barely remember what happened the next day after each time she drank. Still, I probably would have told Rain to go pound sand, I was not discussing this, except this grand idea sort of went off in my head. It had to do with these new bathrooms they put in here. In my house, our bathroom had been really run-down, in need of new tiles and all this stuff. Our shower had been from the 1970s.
I glanced out into the corridor to make sure Mr. Montu wasn't waking up and standing there. But the hall was clear, and with Rain waiting for an answer without even breathing, I could hear him snoring softly on the floor above us.
I pulled the mouthpiece out. "Try that new thingermabob. The showerhead that's on the six-foot hose." I put it back in.
She looked at me like I was crazy and then collapsed over sideways on the bed, laughing in fits. It's only a riot when I get personal.
"Mmm?" Well?
"But every time I get in the shower, you will wonder what's going on!"
Mouthpiece out. I couldn't resist. "Yeah, especially if you use up all the hot water while trying to figure yourself out." Mouthpiece in. Mouthpiece out. "When we hear Marg scream 'cuz there's a thousand-dollar water bill—"
"I cannot believe you are talking to me about the shower!"
I collapsed yet again, defeated. There was no winning in this situation.
"And what if it doesn't work?"
Mouthpiece out. I didn't like her tone. "We've been over this. Don't look at me to solve your problems." I hadn't told her about the lecture I'd gotten from Dan Hadley two days before Nurse Haley. Do not touch her had been the point. He was very, very big on the do not touch lectures to our whole Young Life group, about pregnancies ruining lives, abortions hiding emotional shocks that can jump out at you, like, twenty years later. He's yet another adult who had been worried about me and Rain up here.