He spoke so calmly, with such certainty, that I almost believed I was the other Nola. Almost, and only for a couple of seconds.
“You’ve been hurt,” he said. “It’s killed your memory.”
“I took a bad fall. I must have hit my head.”
I started shaking. If I’d let myself go, I would have fainted at his feet, but I steadied myself.
“The town’s full of soldiers and terrorists,” Cam went on. “What’s going to happen to you if you’re wandering around like this?”
“Nothing good,” I said.
“Exactly. Come back to the house. Please?”
I considered saying no. I also considered what would happen to an exhausted woman alone on the streets in a panicked town.
“Thanks,” I said. “I will. But I’m not your Nola. You’ve got to believe me. I don’t want your children heartbroken a second time.”
“Neither do I.” He hesitated, staring at my face, then winced. “You need to see a doctor.”
“It’s just a shallow cut. Cam, you don’t believe me, do you, when I say I’m not your wife?”
“Well, for crying out loud! You have her name. You know my name. You know why we got married. And you come staggering back home—” His voice choked.
He wiped tears from his eyes on his shirtsleeve. I looked down the street and saw a middle-aged Hispanic woman shepherding the children up the steps. One of the neighbors, I figured, helping out.
“Please?” Cam said. “Please come back.”
“All right,” I said. “Maybe I can think of some way to explain.”
We stared at each other for a moment more. When he held out his hand, I took one step toward him and felt the world drop away from under my feet. He caught me before I hit the pavement.
CHAPTER 11
I WOKE UP ON A COUCH in a living room that was both familiar and ridiculously strange. The long white room belonged in the Houlihan house, but the furniture didn’t match: tidy armchairs with checked blue-and-white slipcovers, plant stands complete with potted begonias, little maple end tables holding lamps with frilly shades, a pair of maple hutches filled with knickknacks. A pile of towels lay under my throbbing head. Cam knelt on the floor beside me. He was wiping the blood off my face with a washcloth that he kept dipping in a basin of warm water.
“It’s not a deep cut,” he said. “But it looks like it bled a lot. Honey, just rest. I’m going to call a doctor.”
“Don’t call me that,” I said. “I’m not your wife. I do not have amnesia.”
He put the washcloth into the basin of red water, then sat back on his heels and surveyed me with a sad little smile. Exhausted though I was, inspiration managed to strike.
“Did she have Donnie by Caesarean?” I said. “They told me I’d have to have one if I carried the baby to full term. Narrow hips.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Both kids.”
I unzipped my gray slacks, pulled them down an inch or two, and opened the fly wide.
“No scar,” I said.
He stared, then looked away. His shoulders slumped, and his eyes filled with tears again. I could tell from his SPP that he believed me, and that the belief hurt, a terrible bitter hurt of hope destroyed. I zipped up the slacks. When I tried to sit up, he put a gentle hand on my collarbone and pushed me back down.
“Don’t try to move just yet,” he said. “I don’t want that cut to reopen.”
“Thanks,” I said, “but I need to get out of here. I don’t want to make things worse for you and the kids.”
“I appreciate the concern, but I can’t turn someone away when things are so bad out there, not even a stranger.” He sounded half-sick with disappointment. “I’ll talk to the kids.”
“Can you tell them I’m just their mother’s cousin or something? Coming to visit you all, but I got hurt in the explosion, the one at the airport this morning, and my suitcase went up with it.”
“Yeah, I can do that. The story’ll pass muster. She did visit her cousins. We’ll need a name.”
“Rose. That’s my middle name.”
“Okay, Rose it is.” He hesitated, thinking. “The offer of shelter still stands, as long as you need it. I don’t care who you are. You need help. And you can’t go out there. There’s a curfew tonight, and the National Guard’s on patrol. You could get shot on sight.”
So could Ari, if he came back to hunt for me. The room shimmered as I panicked, then steadied when I got control of myself.
“Thanks.” My voice sounded like a stranger’s to me, very weak and thin. “I didn’t know that.”
“It’s horrible, isn’t it? I never thought things would get so bad. It’s like some kind of lousy movie. Fascists attacking our republic. Christ!”
Cam got up, then picked up the basin of bloodstained water and carried it out of the room. I heard children’s voices in the hall, and his voice murmur in answer, but the sound faded as they walked on to what I assumed was the kitchen. My head hurt, a slice of hot pain along the cut, a dull ache from what was probably a mild concussion, but I could think again thanks to the safety and the silence.
Sean. I sent my mind out like a beacon of agony. Sean. Please find me. Soon. Sean, find me and tell Ari. Sean, you’re my only hope. Sean, help!
I never felt an answer, but then the mental overlap had never returned anything like a clear response. It wasn’t as good as a cell phone. When that idea made me giggle, I realized that I had a bad concussion, not a mild one. Calling a doctor began to seem like a good idea.
Cam returned with gauze and adhesive tape. The children trailed behind him. Tears had streaked their faces and dried. Cam stepped back and let them come up to the couch to talk with me.
“I’m sorry,” I said to them. “I tried to tell you the truth.”
“Yeah,” Donnie said. “I didn’t want it to be true.”
“I can understand that.”
Beth took a few steps closer and stared at my face. “The blood’s gone,” she said. “You look kind of different. Real thin.”
“Thinner than your mom?”
“Yeah. But will you stay and be our mom?”
“Beth, please don’t.” Cam and Donnie spoke together. Their weary tone of voice told me Beth usually said the wrong thing at the wrong time.
“No,” I said. “I’ll stay for a little while, but no one else can ever really be your mom.”
Beth turned and ran weeping from the room. Cam dumped the first aid supplies onto the couch next to me and took off after her. He was a good father. I’d always figured he would be. Donnie sighed and sat down on the floor. He picked up the roll of adhesive tape in its plastic box for something to hold.
“I’m so scared,” he said.
“So am I,” I said. “So’s everybody.”
“Will they come blow up our house?”
I considered this possibility. It wasn’t the terrorists who wanted me dead, of course, but the Axeman’s gang. They’d find their ensorcelled goon in the park and assume that we’d all made it through to some other world level. I scanned to make doubly sure and picked up a distant trace of Ash, furious with disappointment.
“No, the terrorists won’t hurt us,” I said to Donnie. “We’re not important enough. They only want to blow up big things and get on TV.”
Donnie smiled at that. “Will the army make everything okay again?”
“Sure.” I did my best to sound confident. “They’ll catch the people who are blowing things up, sooner or later.”
Or the TWIXT team will—I grabbed a second chance at hope. Ari and our informant knew I’d been left behind. Izumi could tell them where the Axeman was hiding. Surely they’d send a team to clean things up, and Ari would demand to be on it. I could count on him for that.
If, of course, they could get through. I stared at the ceiling and wished I still believed in God. It would have been nice to pray.
“There’s blood all over your shirt,” Donnie said.
I looked down and saw th
e spatters, dried to rust. “Yeah. There sure is.”
He nodded at the flowered wall-to-wall carpet, Donald Douglas, who maybe was the child I never had. The boy I’d refused to let into my world sat on the floor and made car noises as he ran the roll of adhesive around one of the pale blue flowers on the rug. I remembered my mother’s tears and sullen rage, the things she’d said to me, the worst things she could think of to say.
If he was that boy, I wasn’t a murderess after all, I supposed, because there he was, alive, healthy. With his auburn hair and dusting of freckles, he was as handsome as his father had been, back when I was in high school. All of the girls had a crush on Mr. Douglas. Mr. Douglas, it turned out, had a crush on me.
Cam came back to the living room and managed to smile at Donnie. “Your sister’s watching cartoons in the family room,” he said. “You can go watch, too, if you want.”
Donnie beamed at him and put the roll of tape back onto the couch. He got up, then tilted his head to one side and considered me.
“Aunt Rose,” he said. “You’re not going to die, too, are you?”
“Not right now, no,” I said. “Long time from now. Way, way after you’re grown up.”
“Okay.” He turned and trotted off, heading down the long hallway.
Cam watched him go. “I told them they could call you aunt. Is that okay?”
“Sure. Good idea.”
“I did talk to the doctor, or I should say, I talked to the nurse in his office. Every doctor in town is down at the airport. The casualties are bad, she told me. A couple thousand of them. How many of those are deaths—she didn’t know.”
“Oh, my God.”
The room lurched around me. I shut my eyes to steady things. Cam waited to speak until I opened them again.
“First aid will have to do, she told me,” Cam said. “We’ll see how you feel in a couple of days. If you’re feeling okay, then we’d better not take up his time.”
He knelt down and opened the box of gauze pads. “We keep stuff like this in the house,” he said, “for the kids, y’know. Donnie had a hard time learning to ride a bike.”
Would I have watched and worried if my Donnie had been wobbling down the street on a treacherous two-wheeler? I could remember being terrified at first when Michael learned to ride a bike, but balance came easy to him. What if I’d had two children to raise, my little brother and a baby boy, and me only eighteen by then, by the time Donnie had been born and I’d recovered from the Caesarean?
“Cam,” I said, “was Nola happy with you and the kids?”
He concentrated on opening the plastic pack around the tape. “No,” he said eventually, “not at first, anyway. She was too young to marry and have a family, but—Christ forgive me—I didn’t know what else to do but marry her.”
“It was decent of you.”
“I suppose. I felt like such a—” He paused, his mouth framing soundless words. “Such a bastard, total scum, seducing a young girl, one of my students. I knew it was wrong even in the middle of it. I still don’t know what hit me. I couldn’t think of anything but her.” He glanced at me with honest anguish. “I never wanted anything in my life the way I wanted her. I’d had relationships with women my age, sure, but nothing like that. Sexual obsession, I guess you’d call it.”
“I’m willing to bet she felt it, too.”
“Yeah, but I was the adult. I should have said no.”
“That’s true.” I groped for words and found none readily available, since my headache was pounding and my world lay scrambled around me. Lies I could invent. Truth lay beyond me.
Cam picked up a gauze pad and placed it carefully over the cut on my forehead. “Don’t move,” he said. “I’ll get some tape on that.”
I lay still and let him secure the pad. The tape itched, but itching beat bleeding all over. He sat back and looked at the patch, then nodded in satisfaction.
“There were times,” Cam said abruptly, “when Nola ran off somewhere and left me with Donnie. For a couple of months once. When she came back, she wouldn’t tell me where she’d been. I was always too afraid to demand an answer. I didn’t want her running off again.”
“She was visiting her cousin Rose,” I said. “A first cousin. They were so close as girls, almost sisters.”
“Of course.” He smiled with a brief twitch of his mouth. “When she came back the last time, she was glad to be home. She told me she loved me. That’s when we had Beth. She never ran off again.”
What had kept her here, I wondered, in this house that dreamed of suburbia? Love or a sense of defeat, of talents squandered because never trained? Was she settling for safety because she couldn’t find anything better? Unlike her, I’d known upfront that marrying my Cam Douglas meant misery, but again, Michael was a factor in the decision I’d made. I wondered if she’d been raising her baby brother, too.
“What about my family?” I said. “How many of them are there on this world?”
“What?” He gave me a tentative smile. “Uh, what do you mean by that?”
Metaphorically I slapped my own wrist for the slip. “It’s kind of hard to explain. Let’s start with this house. Did you buy it from a family member?”
“Yeah, your aunt and uncle practically gave it to us—to me and my Nola—when they moved back to Ireland. We paid twenty-five thousand, dirt cheap.”
Moved back to Ireland—a major deviance.
“What about her mother?”
“Deirdre? She was a saint about the whole thing.” He paused for another twisted smile. “At least once I mentioned the magic word.”
“Marriage, that is.”
“Yeah. But your dad—that night we told them, when he slapped you like that.” He shuddered in retrospect. “I knew then I had to marry you. I had to make it right. But nothing was really going to make it right, not for you. I mean, her.”
“Cam!” I raised myself up on one elbow. “You’ve absolutely got to believe me. I’m not your wife. No scars, remember?”
“I remember. I’m sorry. This is just so hard.”
I reached out and patted him on the shoulder. The effort made the room dance. I lay back down and let the furniture stop moving.
“Her folks,” I said. “Do they live nearby?”
“No. Deirdre died two years ago. Breast cancer.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah, it was hard on my Nola. Flann went back to Ireland after it was all over. I wrote him about—” His voice caught. “I couldn’t bring myself to talk on the phone about it. He’s probably gotten the letter by now.”
“Brothers?” I said. “Did Nola have some?”
“Well, one. Pat, the one who became a priest. And she had two sisters, Caitlin and Eilas.”
“That was all?”
“Yeah. I take it you have more.”
“Oh, yes. Seven of us, all told.”
Cam mugged shock. He stood up, gathering the tape and the box of gauze, and walked away. At the entrance to the hall, he glanced back.
“I’ve got to check on the kids,” he said. “They keep trying to creep down the hall and hear what we’re saying.”
Very carefully and slowly, I sat up. Blood stained the towel that he’d put underneath my head to protect the sofa. I folded it up and set it down on the floor away from the crisp blue-and-white checks.
Her father had slapped the other Nola when he’d learned she was pregnant. He was there to do the slapping, unlike mine. And her mother had been a saint about it, a very different Deirdre, for sure, though I could imagine my father slapping me if he’d ever known about the other Donnie.
From where I sat, I could see out the front window of the room. The sunlight was fading, though gold still gleamed in the stripe of sky dead west of the house. The view outside looked so familiar that for a moment, with the concussion throbbing in my brain, I thought I was home, and that Aunt Eileen would come bustling in to tell me that dinner was ready.
I heard footsteps on the porch.
Someone knocked. Without thinking, I got up and went to the door. When I opened it, a slender white woman with gray hair smiled at me. She carried a large flat pan covered with aluminum foil. I smelled cooked chicken.
“It’s so good to see you back, Nola. We all prayed for you, but I’ll be honest, I’d just about given up hope.” She held out the pan. “All you have to do is shove this in the oven for half an hour. Four hundred, I’d say, to crisp up the skin and the potatoes.”
I automatically took the pan. “Thank you so much,” I said. “But I’m not Nola. I’m her cousin Rose.”
“Oh.” The smile disappeared. Her face sagged into deep lines, abruptly ten years older, as if the smile had been holding up the flesh.
“I’m the one she used to go visit,” I went on. “I came up from L.A. to help Cam and the kids, but I got caught in the airport bombing.”
“I see. Yes, I think I remember her mentioning you, yes. Well, thank God you’re safe, at least.”
She turned and hurried off down the steps with a little wave. Her SPP told me that she was close to tears. I turned around and saw Cam watching me from the doorway into the hall.
“We have good neighbors,” he said. “Her name’s Lucy. Here, I’ll take that.”
“I told her I was Nola’s cousin Rose from Los Angeles. Sooner or later, the story will spread around.”
“Good. Sometimes we’ve got to lie, I guess.”
When he took the pan from me, I shut the front door. I leaned against it, briefly dizzy, then returned to the couch and sat down. Cam paused at the entrance to the hallway.
“That shirt is really disgusting,” he said. “The blood, I mean. I still have all her clothes if you want to change it. I kept praying she’d come back.”
He left to put the chicken dish into the oven. The kids would be hungry soon. I thought about wearing some of those clothes. It was a bad idea to let him dress me up as his Nola, but blood and grass stains covered the front of my blue shirt. My slacks were almost as filthy.