Owen kissed Rain, told her he loved her, then said, "I'll see you." A half hour later, he was gone.
The service was bigger than his mother's. Scott dissolved in a heap at his passing and again getting out of the limo at the church, though he gave a beautiful eulogy about courage and hope and the afterlife, which told me that Owen had left the most important part of himself in his brother's heart.
The aftershocks were something I anticipated, but their harshness was totally unexpected. Scott barely ate the following week, went back to bed several days in a row after doing his morning work for USIC, and was little comfort to Rain and me, though he tried. I measured his and Rain's agonies against my own, which were extreme. I couldn't stop seeing Owen talking to the goats. I'd overheard enough to make those conversations among my favorite memories.
"See that butterfly?" Owen asked.
"Baa-aa."
"That used to be an ugly ole hairy caterpillar."
"Baa-aa."
"That's me. I'm an ugly caterpillar. But guess what?"
I would go into Scott's bed, and he would want to sleep with his arms around me, his face in my hair, but he didn't speak much. Tyler and Shahzad succumbed to watching TV—in Scott's room, so we could all hang out together—and Marg said she was praying this phase would pass. I was praying for a miracle. It came in the strangest of ways.
I was writing in my journal on the eleventh afternoon past the service when I heard Rain crying. I didn't run to her quickly, as this still happened two or three times daily. Scott noticed before I did that there was an echo to it—she was in our bathroom, which meant it could be a medical emergency. He stomped out of bed and down the hall, and knocked on the door.
She refused to answer, which alarmed me deeply. Back in March, one new drug had created ulcers on our intestines, and we passed blood for a week. Their graphic three-way conversations describing this phenomenon left me pulverized but thinking there was nothing we couldn't discuss.
"Rain. Open the door or I'm breaking it down," Scott said. She let him in, and by the time he reopened it thirty seconds later, Shahzad was at the top of the stairs with Tyler behind him, and Marg was at the door. Scott closed the door behind him and slid down the wall.
"Oh, Jesus," he said. "We got a pink stick."
Apparently, Rain and Owen had been withholding bigger secrets than Scott and I have. I wished it had been Marg who went in to her first instead of Scott. She entered with that compassionate and nonpanicking nurse's tone, but the argument had started. And I was more scared at that moment than I was weeks later, after the doctors had scoured her condition for the passages through this pregnancy that wouldn't kill her. The arguments she presented were so typically teenager-ish, and she would so need to start acting like an adult.
"It was his idea!"
"Now, why don't I quite believe that?" Scott shouted.
"Okay, it was nobody's idea! It just happened! Damn that Miss Haley—she started it. We did it less than ten times!"
Shahzad was simply gone, down the stairs in a whoosh of too-much-information, and Tyler and I finally moved to stifle Scott's mouth. "Is Miss Haley so stupid after all, Rain? Why didn't I see this coming? Are you trying to kill yourself?"
Tyler tried to pull him up. "Either get up and get dressed, or go back to bed, but you can't sit here and terrify her."
Scott got up. And he only had two two-star afternoons in the weeks that followed that kept him down. They say routine is healing, and his was etched in stone. He spent mornings doing clerical tasks for USIC. He spent afternoons waiting hand and foot on this vessel that was carrying his brother's offspring. We all did. Evenings he spent with me.
Come September, I felt like Scott had escaped death-by-Q3 twice. Once USIC saved him, and now Rain had. With a twenty to forty percent chance of the baby being born with the virus, the situation was still scary enough for him to feel needed, which had always been his greatest therapy.
He and Rain began the cocktail September 2, my birthday, and a better present I could not have had. Scott was in a contented, hopeful mood that night as we walked to the bay, where we'd been swimming a couple of nights a week. Shahzad had talked him into believing that Jersey bays had some sort of healing powers. Often they came out and swam with us at night, when the amusement pier was lit up at Griffith's Landing, an icon of American innocence that had come so close to being tarnished. We watched that Ferris wheel turn, all lit up with lights. This time they decided not to join us.
Out of view of the house, Scott patted his chest and I jumped on and let him kiss my neck and my chin.
"Don't fall," I said.
"I'm careful. Besides..." He kissed me twice, the second one endless. "...if I fell I could now use you for a cushion."
"I think I'll get down now."
"Stay. You give me strength." He meant it both ways, and I knew I could not go a minute more without confessing my sins. I'd had them planned out, starting only a week ago. I'd never thought of myself as a fast mover, nor as a nervy person. But Jeremy Ireland called me, his plans already in forward motion. Everything he'd wanted fell into place like some rock of ages falling from the heavens and landing at my feet. The confession had gone off very well in my head, in spite of Aleese showing up in two more dreams to tell me, Now we've got a mess.
"Say it," I began.
"No, you say it. I'm always saying it."
"I love you."
My reward was a bumpy kiss while he walked and a lecture with his mouth on my lips. "That was good, Cora. You didn't even stammer over the L."
"Scott ... um."
"Spit it out," he said.
"Would you ever consider marrying me?"
He stopped dead in his tracks, looking into my eyes in confusion. "Funny thing. As soon as I started kissing you I stopped being able to read your mind. What?"
"I'm asking you a simple question."
"Are you proposing matrimony to me?"
"Well," I said. "I'm just saying. I'm a girl, I'm in love, and I think of it."
"Cora, I'm certainly not marrying anybody else."
"So, like, when? How many years?"
He started walking us toward the water again, though slowly. "Okay ... I'll be twenty in December, but it's an old twenty. And you're an old eighteen on this most auspicious day." He kissed me swiftly. "However, we don't live in Indiana. I'd say three. Three years. Why? What's the rush?"
"I'm not in any rush," I said. "I was thinking four years. Four years feels right for me."
He stopped again.
"Am I getting heavy?"
"No, you're getting weird. Maybe I can't read your mind anymore, but I could name a hundred girls who would bring up the M-word to their boyfriends. You are not one of them. What's up? This conversation stinks like some that went on in the break room in the hospital. A couple of guys' numbers came up to go to Afghanistan, and they got engaged really—"
We exchanged stares a long time, my heart slamming through my chest so strongly I was sure he felt it. "Oh ... no..." he breathed. "You wouldn't do that to me. Not after Owen..."
I stumbled for words about chronically wearing the yoke of rape child, of feeling the need to embrace my mother in order to get past my father, and Jeremy Ireland having offered me the perfect opportunity. But my thoughts had been too intense to be driven out in just a few sentences. I said some of it, and, "It's the perfect job. It's less than three years. But I'll come back every time there's a break on airfare—"
He dropped me fast and intentionally. I barely got my legs under myself in time.
FIFTY-FIVE
SCOTT EBERMAN
SEPTEMBER 15, 2002
KELLERTON HOUSE
CORA DID TRY TO EXPLAIN, even after my arms gave way. Jeremy Ireland had gotten a contract with PBS to produce some ongoing documentary series about female war correspondents, of which her mother would be episodes one and two. Cora blathered on about needing to be one of Jeremy's four assistant producers—to get to know her m
other's life. Then more on the psychology of being a rape child.
Rape child would obviously be an uncomfortable identity—I could understand that totally, but not what she considered therapy: They would shoot three months in London and three months in Paris, where the international journalists hung and where Jeremy and Aleese got to know each other. And if Cora's blood stayed clean for those six months, she would be pronounced officially "cured." Then they would start chasing around Third World toilets, shooting Aleese's former battlegrounds and those of other female war correspondents.
With the words "Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Somalia" pouring out of her mouth, I got more angry than I'd ever been. She started to hyperventilate, sensitive to my energy, and I just stalked off. Great. I start out thinking she wants a wedding date. I find out I can have it if she first goes to places where people get decapitated on the Internet. Am I supposed to love this? Do I need a third urn of ashes?
And I kept telling myself I was not being selfish—she was being totally selfish.
I had just lost a mother and a brother, and her losses were not even close. And yet I had totally been there for her. Now I had to make it through January before Godfrey would consider the surgery to remove the aneurysm from my brain, and that was only if I went into remission as quickly as she had. Rain had to deliver a baby in February without it killing her or my niece/ nephew. Cora had her health, and suddenly she wouldn't be around for either tense moment.
I got further bugged remembering how in June she penned out all these thank-you notes to the nurses on our floor at St. Ann's, because the truth was, I beat them to her room half the time when her nurse's buzzer went off. I had nursed her back to health more than any single person, and my thanks was that she was taking off with her she-devil mother's best friend.
If hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, there's got to be some counterpart for guys. I couldn't risk yelling and blowing a fuse, but I was an expert manipulator going way back, and she was a lamb led to slaughter.
I made an announcement at the breakfast table the following morning, instead of telling her my great news in private first.
"When Godfrey was here earlier, we were talking about my 4.0 in paramedic school. He told me that experience will cancel certain facts, like that I was thirty-sixth in my class at Trinity instead of valedictorian. He said that just from name recognition of being one of the Trinity Four, I could probably get a full ride in any premed program in the country. He said he'll write in his recs that not only was I one of the Trinity Four, I was pro-active in the care of the Trinity Four. With Cora's remission, he's more famous in his medical circles than we are. There is some justice in the universe. At one time, I had only the grades. Now I've got the funding, it looks like."
I turned to Alan, who was so focused on Rain lately that he was clueless about me and Cora. "You use nurses in USIC. Do you use doctors, too?"
He reminded me of their relationship with the CDC. They had six on their payroll.
Everyone applauded, Cora the loudest, bouncing in her seat and making a few highly supportive comments. I grunted. I ignored her while I filled out applications like crazy—Harvard, Penn, Georgetown, Stanford. Then she began realizing I might end up in some far corner of the country, and she'd start acting worried, all "Where will you be?" It's only funny when you take off, I wanted to say but held on to it. I made sure to accidentally leave every application on the dining room table. She asked more concerned questions. I grunted.
Whereas I'd generally spent my evenings with her, I suddenly got interested in the newspaper. I read, out on the porch, all of Hodji's five daily papers, because she'd sit beside me at that point and cry and beg me to pay attention to her. It was fun, passing her tissues, just so she'd throw them down and storm off to cry in her bed pillows.
After five nights of this, Marg told me I was being an ass. Rain felt the baby kick but said she wouldn't let me feel it until I quit my pity party. Hodji even made some comparison between me and his douche-bag ex-wife, which hurt to my core. I was risking losing Cora for good, he said, and I needed to grow up. And it irked me to no end that they could all see her side of it more than mine. Still, Hodji's words humbled me enough to be civil, at least through one conversation that first week.
It started with her versus me and the New York Times out on the porch.
"Scott?"
"Hmm."
"Uncle Jeremy says of course I can come back for your surgery. I can take as long as I want. I just spoke to him..."
Uncle Jeremy. That was rich. "Oh. Well. That's something. That's an expensive ticket, I know. Tell him I said thanks."
"I will. I wish you knew him better."
That made one of us.
"I actually set aside enough of my inheritance before donating it to the project to come back both summers for three weeks."
I already knew their production schedule went from October of 2002 through May of 2005. "Three weeks. We could do a lot in three weeks," I said sarcastically.
"He said the whole production crew could take off the entire month of June, both years. That's three whole weeks, given travel days."
Guess it's a lot of flight hours to get back to a Third World potty. "June. Not bad. It's too early to go to the beach yet—here, where the beach is everything. I'm sure we can find something to do, though."
"We could go to New York ... see some Broadway shows."
I sighed, trying not to get all worked up, but my fury just wouldn't back down. "Sounds good. I'll just spend Christmases with Rain and Alan. Or maybe I'll just stay at school and take two winter-break crash courses. Maybe I won't miss Mom and Owen so much if I pretend the whole holiday thing isn't happening."
Dead silence.
Duh-uh-uh. When all of Cora's schoolwork had been graded, even with the Q3 virus giving her hell, her class rank had only slipped from eleventh to twelfth out of over six hundred. Twelfth. And yet I had to think of details like Christmas. She hadn't even landed one of those pristine brain cells on Scott's First Christmas without Mom and Owen.
After a worthy silence, she was crying again. Guilt is good, I reasoned.
She made a tearful recovery attempt. "Scott, you know how I babble when I'm nervous, but this is really important..."
I had to listen really carefully through her jabber and fill in some holes. The gist: After sponsors bought into their PBS series, their initial investment would double back, and that money could be used for one of her mom's big dreams: To get these women out of northern Iraq who had been jailed for committing adultery—and their kids were in jail with them.
I was all Fuckin' A, would you just shut up? I suddenly felt manipulated. Kids being in jail because their mothers were there ... the concept was so inconceivable that I wondered if she'd been lied to. And something else was bothering me, but in this cyclone of business-slash-charity speak and tears, I couldn't have found my own face in a bucket. I couldn't pinpoint my problem.
"I don't quite get the big picture, either," she cried on, and grabbed a Kleenex from the box she had in her lap. She'd been carrying the box around since I refused to touch her. "But Uncle Jeremy is very smart, not just about journalism but about international laws and immigration policies, and even raising bribe money. He says you can get anybody out of jail in Iraq if—"
She stopped. I was totally staring by this point, my confused heart melting a little.
"Anyway," she went on. "I hope you can forgive me for not thinking of Christmas. That was stupid. I'm really sorry. It's just that ... I forgot what it was like on Christmas to do something besides read a book in bed. I haven't had one in four years..."
My world turned sideways. How could I have not seen that?
Cora's five years of heartache were working for her instead of against her, I realized. She could have been a drug addict, a pity party, a dropout, a suicide. She was one of those people making lemonade out of lemons. But how could she be equipped to chase around the globe, raising money for causes that would make
my mother rejoice, but she couldn't remember something far simpler, like Christmas with your boyfriend who just lost his family?
I didn't have any answers. I pulled her into my lap, kissed her all over her face, cried, and apologized my ass off. She didn't hear any of it; she was simply happy to be back where we both wanted her.
Only thing was, my forgiveness didn't stick. In the middle of the night, I started to zero in on what I couldn't pinpoint that bothered me. " He says you can get anybody out of jail in Iraq if—"
I walked across the hall, opened her door, and sat down on her mattress. She was curled up in a ball facing me, and I shook her, though I didn't have to. She woke up easily. Her radio alarm showed 4:10.
"You haven't been reading the newspapers," I said.
She cleared the sleep from her throat. "I figured you'd been reading enough for both of us."
Very funny. "Just please tell me that adventure-crazed uncle of yours isn't planning to take you into Iraq. We might be going to war with Iraq."
"Oh ... no. We haven't talked about going inside Iraq at all." She put a hand on my arm, stroking it for reassurance. Her warm touch did bad things to me. I still had an aneurysm in my head, and I stood up, reminding myself of why, when I was four-star, I never sat on her bed or let her sit on mine. Someday, if there is a God in heaven...
I kissed her swiftly on the forehead and walked out again. But I stopped dead in the hall, scratching my sleep-clogged head, and did an about-face. This time I stood in the doorway.
"What do you mean, you haven't 'talked about' it? Don't you think you ought to 'talk about' it? How's he supposed to get a million bucks in bribe money into Iraq? FedEx?"
"No ... specialists carry in bribe money. I know nothing about them and don't want to. I can assure you; a trip into Iraq is not on the production schedule."
She was saying the right things ... it just felt wrong. I decided maybe it was a general alarm bell going off, and I didn't need Iraq to make it specific. All these places were fucking dangerous. And they were germy. Had we nursed her back to health from a WMD so she could go off and catch some local plague in Africa or the Middle East? She might have book smarts, but she was an airhead at times, off in her own little world. She'd be walking down the street, bang into some warlord, forget to say "excuse me," and get herself executed online. What the fuck, Cora?