I started in again the next morning as she was helping Marg with the breakfast dishes, only this time I wasn't ignoring her. I was on a nag-rant fest. "Such charming places for the girl who never wanted to leave Trinity."
"I do just want to be normal, Scott. I just need to do this first. I swear. I'm still me," she argued tiredly. I wondered if she'd gone back to sleep after I woke her up. I hadn't. "I don't want to turn into my mother. I just would like to relate to her a little more. Really. Who else do I have?"
This was an indirect reference to her father being a face in a gang rape. I wasn't meaning to be glib, but it seemed so obvious. I took her hands, put them on my face. "Touch," I said, pressing them to my cheeks. "I'm flesh and blood" I laced all my fingers through all of hers and squeezed. "I'm here. Your mother's dead."
She wiggled her fingers away. "Weren't you the one always pushing me to be stronger? To send away my own demons? I have a chance here to get a lot stronger. Why can't you be happy about it?"
"Can't you be stronger without wandering around the world's unflushed toilets for two, almost three, years?"
"So you only want me to be stronger if you reap the benefits," she said with this cold and upright tone she'd developed recently. "Like your pushing me to do work for USIC ... because you are in USIC."
I wasn't used to thinking of myself as a selfish person. If I didn't think I could withstand another loss so soon, did that make me selfish? No, I decided. This wasn't about me. If she'd hit me up with California or Alaska, I'd have felt betrayed but would have bitten my tongue.
"You know what I think? I don't think you will be back. I think you're gonna get in some big, damn trouble. I think you're looking for trouble. Penance due for having a mystery dad, or some damn thing—"
She left the tea towel and retreated to the dining room to look out the window. Ba da bing, I made her cry again. And so soon, too. Justice is sweet.
"Don't forget to iron your burqa." I stumbled past her and paced into the parlor, where Hodji lowered his newspaper to watch me. I shouted in to her, "I hear that's all the rage in Somalia. You can get arrested there for going outside without your head covered."
"Some people need to watch their blood pressure," Hodji muttered in a singsongy voice, which I didn't want to hear, so I paced back to the dining room.
"I'll keep my head covered" She wiped a tear, and I shoved the whole box of tissues across the dining room table just because.
"And don't forget Afghanistan," I shouted over my shoulder, taking up her job beside Marg.
"Scott, honestly," Marg whispered.
"She's in remission. Let her sweat some bullets. It's good for the pores."
"I am definitely not going to Afghanistan," she hollered in, which was supposed to soothe me over, but it only said to me that the truth was, she hadn't made up her mind about Iraq—where Saddam Hufuckingssein had George Bush Senior's face tiled into the floor of his favorite hotel, so Iraqi dignitaries could wipe their shoes on him every day.
The very word Iraq left a punch in my gut. I went with my instincts.
"Listen to me." I moved to the doorway and spoke with a tremor in my voice that I was pretty sure only I could hear. "If you go into Iraq? Do not ever call me."
She spun to look at me, never a good liar. "It's the place where I was conceived, Scott."
Alas, the truth: She wanted to go. She was hoping we wouldn't go to war, so she could tread on in there with Uncle Adventure some week when the workload was extra light.
"I was conceived in a cheap one-bedroom condo in Las Vegas!" I yelled. "Has that turned me into a fucking weekend gambler?"
"Shhh!" she and Marg implored me. It was the kind of outburst I'd had to learn how to resist.
I took three deep breaths, and Cora approached me in her calmest voice. "This is temporary. Why can't I make you understand? I'm incomplete. I can never really be there for you if I don't work on myself. This is as much for you as it is for me."
"Oh, bullshit," I said. She actually meant it, I was sure. She just didn't know what she was talking about. Relationships can't withstand this kind of wear and tear. All my friends went off to college with girlfriends at home, and none made it to spring break without biting some forbidden fruit.
"All right!" She moved toward the door, holding her head like ghosts of Headaches from Hell were after her. "I won't go! I'll call Uncle Jeremy this morning, tell him you wanted me to choose between him and you, and I've chosen you. I'm half a person right now, Scott. But if you're happy with half, I guess I owe you that much."
She started to leave the room for the phone. How did I end up being the prick?
"No, stop! For god's sake!"
She cried into the door frame. I'd never been afraid before that a person would get dehydrated from crying so much. For someone who didn't used to cry, she'd done a huge turnaround this week. I dropped down into a chair, stared at the table, and let Marg tiptoe up behind me and rub the stress out of my neck. I didn't want Cora to stay with me—I wanted her to want to stay with me, or something that would sound equally stupid.
All that came out was, "This is a mess. A gigantic, major, fucking mess. Why did you break down that day in the basement and all but jump my bones? I hadn't let myself love you. I had everything under control..."
Her eyes went wide with some horror I wasn't privy to, and she simply stormed off to her room. I clomped up to mine and fell onto my bed in exhaustion. All my weirdest dreams up to that point had been sex-driven, and I'd had this recurring one that was my big secret. I'd dream I was with Cora, and the lights would change, and some rum-ridden babe from my partying past would suddenly be underneath me. I'd flip awake, wanting to hurl. Sometimes I'd still be smelling rum.
The switch to the cocktail hadn't taken away that whacked, oversensitive sense of smell. Hence, I wasn't surprised when cigarettes hit me—I decided I was dreaming again, but I was too tired to wake myself up. Cigarette smoke is a smell I hate, and I never let any girl smoke in my car or around me. So my memories of stale cigarettes are few and far between—enough that I remembered the last time I'd smelled that. It was the last day in February, after my squad got a call that we possibly had a death at the Holman residence.
The image of Aleese's dead body had always stuck in my mind—not because I hadn't seen a dozen DOAs before. But because I could see right away that this dead addict on the couch had caused some major hells for the sweet little thing who had called us, who sat in the chair beside her. Aleese had been waxy, skin-and-bones, and full of Q3, though I didn't know that last thing at the time. Cora, with her perfect posture, yet tormented, feverish eyes, did not belong in the same room with this emaciated figure, the empty hypo Phil found in the couch, or the strong smell of cigarette smoke wafting off a half-full ashtray.
Now it was like someone took that ashtray and waved it under my nose while I slept. I knew I was sleeping, knew weird things happened in my drug dreams, and my reaction lately was to be all Okay, maybe I'll get laid.
The cigarette belonged to a woman who came in and sat on the footboard of my bed with her feet on the mattress. My first thought was, Definitely not a sex dream, though how I knew that wasn't clear. My second thought was, Whew. Whoever she is, at least this won't be a dream about Aleese Holman. I'd always dreaded one. The strange woman looked only ten years older than me, tops, with shoulder-length, dark fluffy hair that flounced. Some other news lady...
It was a tomboy squat, and she had good muscles in the arms she rested on her knees. She flicked her cigarette into the middle of the bed, and I was all Set me on fire, why don't you?
That made her eyes rise, though her head was still down, and she had this ornery grin that worked mostly on one side. She was really stunning in a tough-girl way. I recognized her not from the laughing eyes or from the thin lips, but from an overall aura that made me realize all features were the same, except that Cora's lips were thick and pulpy. And I was suddenly all Shit. This is Aleese Holman. She just looked noth
ing like the corpse.
I started in right away. You can get the fuck out of my head. I was there to pick up your dead body, remember? So Cora's off to make a documentary about your life? I've done more for her in the past seven months than you did in eighteen years. I'm not asking to see my name in lights.
She blew smoke over my head in a thoughtful way, and then her eyes came back to me. Her ornery smile dimmed some, but not entirely. Thus began the strangest fight I'd had yet in any drug-induced dream. She started it.
"You know what? You whack off too much."
That's rich. Mother of the Year. You talked to Cora like that? I bet.
"And you got a lot to learn about real charity, Mr. I'm-Such-a-Giver. Grow up some before you think you're going to touch my daughter. You've no concept of what you've laid hold of."
I know her better than you ever did.
"You ain't so pretty when you cry, so stop. You'll get her back."
Oh really? Odds are against it.
She laughed, pointing the two fingers pinching the cigarette back at herself. "You're talking to me about odds? Are you forgetting something? I'm dead. I know what's coming."
I decided I should throw myself forward, one way I could always get out of dream company that freaked me out. But she got me on that line that I'd get Cora back. I lay watching.
"It's not that I dislike you, kid. You're okay in my book. Just understand that you're a pigeon with a peacock. You wanna be a doctor? Fine. Be a surgeon. Scratch your own itch. But you better learn how to play second fiddle—"
If I'm a pigeon, what are you? A turkey buzzard?
"She's going to outshine you in every conceivable way. Get used to it. 'Cuz I'm bringing her back. To you. So watch your mouth."
I couldn't control her stinky stale smoke, but I'd learned to control when annoying dreams ended. I shot up to a sitting position, and the room cleared of cigarettes and mouthy comments.
I screamed so it banged off the walls, "Marg! I want off this Nabilone now!"
Marg trudged up and reminded me I was now on the cocktail and hadn't had Nabilone in a while. I smelled Cora out in the corridor, so when Marg asked what I dreamed, I had no problem telling her slightly loudly, "I just dreamed Cora's butch-ass mother was in here. Can you imagine a worse nightmare than that?"
I was being a horse's ass. But it was a mess. I'd had this six-month crash course in being everything from the best medic out there to the best big brother to the best labor-and-delivery counselor to the best non-sex-crazed boyfriend. Add Cora leaving me, and I was beyond my lessons.
But we had no choice except to go on like the whole blowout never happened. It surely had accomplished nothing except prove to me that looking after people—the thing I do best—was not the thing needed by the girl I loved most.
We watched every sunset together like we did before. We walked, talked, hugged, kissed, played with the goats, took pictures of all the nature around here, and I applauded her images as we developed them. We avoided the immediate future at all costs. We could talk easily about what our kids might look like, being she was dark and I was blond, but we never touched on two weeks from now. We'd grown so accustomed to living in the now that it was possible to keep the future dim.
Our best moments were watching the sunsets from the porch. Cora is petite enough to fit in my lap with her feet on my knees, her arms on top of mine, and her head tucked into my neck. I figured I had grown up a little since that night Hodji and Marg let me know I was being an ass. We were sitting like that, and I could smell that faint carnation scent in her hair. I kissed her ear and took my thanks in her fingertips squeezing into my palms, as her fingers were laced through mine from on top. The sunset was red and gold and pink, and the air was perfect. There was enough breeze so that the bugs were not around. The goats kicked up grass at each other in the foreground. I let that be enough.
"Right now. Right this very minute." I searched through myself, forcing the past, the future, and any grief therein to the shadows. "I am happy."
She wasn't so easy to please. She didn't look out at those woods, like I did, and see nature's reminders that God was in charge and we would make it through our lives. She still saw ShadowStrike, I think.
I don't know if she'd ever see those woods as cleaned out and terror free. She'd been attacked twice—both times with USIC agents surrounding her. I wondered if she wasn't actually leaving because of Omar and whatever ShadowStrike operatives remained at large. I wondered if she thought she could escape her fear of them only by running as far away as was conceivably possible, burying herself in the masses of far-off lands. If so, her gut reaction defied common sense. How much easier would it be to pluck her out of a marketplace in Rwanda than it had been to get at her while surrounded by USIC?
But of course I didn't say that. I had no reason to believe we would ever turn into assassination targets. We'd just been kids in the wrong place at the wrong time. She wasn't any less safe than anyone else.
"You're happy?" She turned her head, kissed my temple, and smiled. "I'm so glad."
The statement kind of throbbed with the notion that moments of complete contentment still eluded her.
It seemed to help her to say, "I'll be back. I promise. The one thing that means more to me than anything else is making sure Scott Eberman gets his happily-ever-after."
I could not understand how anyone choosing to go as far away as possible could be sincere about coming back. I ignored the chill that swept down me as a gust blew in our faces. She will come back. We'll grow old together. We'd learned this year to walk through mine fields and not flinch when the ground rumbled. I let her presence be enough as the sun sank slowly behind the trees.
Carol Plum-Ucci, Fire Will Fall
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