"Oh. No...," I stammered. "Why would I ... barge in on you and your sick mother?"
His eyebrows shot up in two perfect arches while he looked sideways for a second. "Uh ... maybe because you've just had a death in the family?"
"Well, my mother, she..."
"Your mother, what?" he persisted.
"She ... didn't do much but sleep. At least not when I was here. Which wasn't much. I work in the Acme after school. My grandmother pulled some strings and got me that job right before she passed away..." Do we have to do this? He wasn't moving, and logic reminded me he was just trying to be nice. My rehearsed line flew into place and saved me from being rude. "I didn't even live with my mother until I was twelve. One day she just ... showed up on me and Oma. That was my grandmother. She died three years ago."
He said, "When I was a kid, Mom and I used to walk our dog past your house, and if she was trimming the hedges or something, your grandma would talk it up with Mom. I remember her saying a few times that she'd have had ten kids if her husband hadn't died right after—"
"—right after Aleese was born." I felt myself unwinding the slightest bit. I remembered when Oma died, people were very awkward around me. It seemed only the funeral director, doctors, and nurses—people who were used to death—knew that stupid conversations like this are all right, that they really do help.
But his normalcy was taking him places that, in this case, were not normal. "Last time I saw her, your grandma also said that your mom hurt her arm in an accident?"
"Um..." I had already lied about my age. Feeling so achy and tired, I just spilled the truth. "I'm not sure how it happened. There was an accident overseas, maybe an unsuccessful surgery, and that's when she got addicted to painkillers. She just ... never got unaddicted. I wish I had something less selfish and more interesting to say than it was easier to go to school all day and work all night. I've got a lot of money in the bank. Guess that's one good thing. Ha ha."
"That makes one of us." He didn't laugh back. "And that's not selfish at all. Morphine addicts can be extremely violent, among other things."
"You have no idea."
I forced my mouth shut by pinching my lips with my fingers. And Scott Eberman was drumming his fingers again. I could not believe he wasn't looking at me weird.
"You know what my mom does? For a living? She's a lawyer, and she wastes too much time in court with women who come crawling to her from the Rescue Mission, who need a divorce from their drunken, abusive husbands and some cashola to help raise their kids. I keep telling her, 'Mom, I could give you five personal injury clients a day with high-paying accidents,' but she won't listen to me. Consequently, I'm in paramedic school instead of medical school, and that's why our house looks like crap."
The pressure from holding in tears probably made me laugh harder than I should have.
"It's clean, real clean, but that's because of me. We got clean sheets. Come on." He stood up, put his hand down to me.
"No. No thank you."
"Yes. Come on." I could see his fingers waggling in front of me, like he wanted me to take them, and I drew back automatically from such a surreal sight.
"I don't want to!"
"I'm telling you to. Come on..."
I realized I was curled up in a little ball, peering at his waggling fingers from over the tops of my knees. His hand dropped to his work pants and he patted his palm against his leg twice.
"If you don't come with me now, my mother will show up at your door in about half an hour. If she's well enough tonight. Good days and bad days. I think it's been three weeks now. You shouldn't be alone with this thing, Cora Holman. It's not easy to get rid of, Cora Holman, who plays flute in the Trinity Regional band."
He handed me back my glass of water, which he'd put on the floor. I watched him move backward. She might come in half an hour. I needed half an hour just to be alone, to hear the normal loneliness of this house, to gather my normal thoughts.
After an eternity, it seemed, he was gone; they were all gone, and the silence hugged around me.
I circled around the living room, staring at that couch. There was a thin line of blood that had dripped down the side. I hadn't noticed Aleese's ear bleeding, but Mr. Steckerman must have been right, because I had wiped her nose after my CPR failed, and none of the blood made it to the couch.
I stared at that dark stream before going off to my room, crawling on my knees to the back of my closet and feeling around for the Nikon my mother had referred to in her last words. She wasn't so smart. She'd known I had it, but she hadn't known that I used it quite a bit.
I had gotten this strange compulsion last fall to start taking pictures around Trinity Falls on Sundays. It kept me out of the house on my day off, for one thing. For another, it made me feel like I belonged to the place instead of like some squatter, some daughter of an addict. Through a lens, the most beautiful parts of Trinity came clear. Azalea gardens in bloom in spring. Trees that lined streets in perfect, royal arches. Lawns as thick as Persian carpets and green as Ireland. People hung American flags off porches and trimmed real hedges around their swimming pools in Trinity.
There was something serene about taking pretty pictures, and that's all I had ever liked to take. Maybe it was the fever, but something possessed me, or shot into me, something that felt ... evil, or like anger, or dark knowledge. Desperation of some sort. My mother is inside of me right now.
It was a violating thought. But the moan that came out was very much mine—small and squeaky, not like the bowels of hell that had moaned out of Aleese when she was coming off a high. I raised the camera to my eye, zeroing in on that red line, thinking of Aleese's final words.
"Take a picture of me." She had always loved to make me squirm when some crude thought struck her. But she had already been in and out of consciousness when she had said it. I wondered, confused, if there wasn't something sincere about it, and I replayed the words in my head, trying to hear her tone. "Take a picture of me." "Take a picture of me" As if, maybe, she thought there was something worth capturing in truth, no matter how ugly, that made it valuable—as valuable as scenes from a quaint New Jersey town.
I looked at that thin line of blood through the lens, though I couldn't believe I was doing it. After a moment, it looked like a red tear. One red tear, silent, permanent, so symbolic of a sad life, a sad ending, a failure, a truth.
I snapped the picture, and the flash brought me back to reality. Cora, your mother just died, and you're sitting in the living room taking pictures of her blood. That is beyond sick. It's the fever. Go to bed.
One of the paramedics had left some pills—Tylenol or something—but I forgot to take them. I crawled into bed in my room, shivering from chills. Mrs. Eberman never came.
TWO
OWEN EBERMAN
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2002
7:14 P.M.
JUST BEFORE LYING down to play couch commando for the night, I pressed my face to the living room window. I was trying to see through the dark, far into the next block. I had noticed my brother's ambulance beside some house down there about half an hour ago. Usually, if Scott was just helping to check out an elderly person with palpitations, he would stop home afterward with his squad. They liked to hang out long enough to down a pitcher of Mom's mint iced tea and suck up a couple of sports highlights on ESPN.
But the street was dark, the ambulance gone. I flopped down on the couch, feeling relief that I wouldn't be faced with the noise of a squad. Call me selfish. Mom would always get mad when I called myself selfish, and yet there I was, feeling relieved, when some calamity may have happened down my street.
I reminded myself of the one time Mr. Shumaker, our neighbor, had three buddies over to play blackjack while their wives went to cavort at the casinos. The fathers were watching all the kids, and Scott said these young, hotshot attorneys were twenty hands in and three sheets to the wind when the Shumaker three-year-old took a nosedive down a flight of stairs. Scott said his squad prev
ented a lot of people from driving drunk when their kids needed a stitch, and it came with the territory.
It could have been anything, I told myself. The explanation fit my mood best.
I get in these moods I call "my moods from hell," though my mom is more cheerful and calls them my "need-to-regroup times." Maybe they weren't so terrible as all that. I mean, I didn't sit here in the house thinking that I wanted to annihilate people. I was just slightly off my gourd about how sometimes the world is a confusing place. And sometimes I feel like I don't belong here.
These days always hit me the week before the South Jerseys in wrestling and in November, too, if we made the football playoffs. I'd be pushing it to the max along with everyone else, until one day I'd just decide, I don't want to hear one more locker slam. I don't want to hear one more dumb dirty joke. I don't want to feel one more person tugging at me—and that goes for the girls, too. I'm tired of smelling my own sweat, and the sound of the phones could make me psycho.
All the guys on wrestling were gearing up for the time of their lives. I guess I was, too, but still. I felt like I would love six weeks on a deserted island, though Mom always said a weekend would balance everything out.
I reached for my two-liter of Dr Pepper and a bag of pretzels, grabbed the remote, and put my feet up on the coffee table, which always killed Scott, because he kept it clean with Windex. But he wasn't home, so I could relax without any guilt fest. Everything was cool, until the phone started in.
"I'm not home!"
My mom picked up. "This is Janice ... Hi, Stenger. Nope, not home, hon. Try Bob Dobbins's house. I'll tell him to call you when he comes in, okay?"
She hung up, and I couldn't have counted to five when my cell phone pitched in. It was in my backpack, tossed by the front door. I glared at the light that flashes green all the way through my backpack, then I went back to ESPN and hockey. Mom walked over to fix the drape I'd left cockeyed, reached a hand in the pack, and checked out the caller ID.
"It's Myra." She made a sour face.
I just shook my head. Myra McAllister broke up with me last week, and all this week she was having seller's remorse. But the memory of her words cut two feet into me sometimes. "You know what your problem is, Owen? You're a freak of nature. I have never seen anybody who can do so many things so well, and your heart is not in any of it. Including going out with me."
I said, "Myra, that is so not true." But I knew it was true.
The whole argument started after the coach pushed me up to this officer from West Point after a Horizons assembly for seniors. The officer already knew my name somehow. Well, Myra was still upset that I hadn't jumped into the lap of a Georgetown football recruiter the week before, so when I told this West Point officer, "I still don't know what I want to do," Myra told me I would end up shucking clams off the Atlantic City beaches. There wasn't too much I could say back.
Mom was holding my cell phone and bleeping through my caller ID. "Before that it was ... Dobbins, Jon Dempsey, Adrian Moran. Where's the party?"
I grabbed the remote again and climbed through the channels, away from the sports. Thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, AMC. Lawrence of Arabia. I recognized the first five minutes scrolling before my face and thought, Very, very cool.
"Dempsey's," I muttered.
"Why is he having a party on a school night?" she asked.
"It's not a school night. Teacher Development Day tomorrow," I reminded her.
"I take it you're not going." She came over behind the couch, bent over, and kissed me on the face. "You know, you don't have to play all these sports, Owen."
"It's not that." I pulled away from her.
"Then, what is it?"
I didn't know. Just noise. I never talked about my moods from hell, because who would get it? I figured I could just sit and watch something very cool like Lawrence of Arabia and not be a jerk in public.
The phone rang again as Scott came in the door. He was closer to the cordless than Mom was.
"I'm not home!" I shouted again.
Mom was tousling my hair now, which was normal, but she'd gotten even more touchy-feely lately, it seemed. Ever since she got sick a few weeks ago. "And if you want me to tell the coach to quit throwing recruiters at you, it's no problem."
"No! Just gimme ten feet. Sorry, Mom, but—"
"He caught Mom's flu. Lying down," my brother said into the phone, and I shot an evil glance at him through the kitchen doorway. "Nope, not coming. Call him tomorrow."
He hung up, parked his paramedic jacket on a hook behind the kitchen door, and came into the living room.
"Do you have to tell them I'm sick?" I griped. "Sounds wimpy."
"Sick in the head." He swatted my hair on his way past and plopped down beside me. "If I tell them you're not here, they keep calling back every five minutes. I'm not your ... lying social secretary, dig? What's up? That douche bag from over on the Gold Coast get to you worse than you're letting on?"
He grabbed my bag of pretzels, stared at the TV.
"She's not a douche bag."
"That's generous of you."
Since I couldn't exactly deny anything on Myra's long list of my weirdness traits, I sat there trying to decide why I didn't feel all that upset. She had some problems of her own, maybe that was it.
"She's all right, she just ... gets drunk. You ever been at a party with a slurring, giggling, drunk girl who totally stinks of tired booze?"
"Mm-hm." He sent his eyebrows up and down a few times. "They get even better after the party."
I grunted. "That's romantic"
He kept watching me, crunching on his pretzel way too loud. "You know, if you don't get over this notion that you're holding out for love, I'm gonna have to call up Candy Cane, have a bunch of your buddies tote her over here."
Candy Cane is this hooker from Atlantic City who had been hired by the crazier guys for parties when Scott was a senior. My friends hadn't done the Candy Cane routine yet. Whew on that one. For the most part, stuff like that had all the appeal of sticking my face in a bucketful of other people's spit.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah." I grabbed the bag of pretzels back. "I'm a freak of nature."
"No, you are not." He slapped my knee and swung it from side to side. "You are ... extraordinary, and don't forget it. Hey. Wanna watch Superman ?"
I bit into a pretzel, smiling. I used to watch the movie Super man when I was around eleven and totally related to this gigantic, spazzy kid who dropped into this perfect little American town, where everybody's great—and yet, he just can't get comfortable. And it was kind of easy for me to dream up strange ideas, like our dad was a superhero. Mom used to avoid questions about who and where our father was by joking that we came from a bolt of lightning that dropped from heaven. I used to actually hope it was true. When you're five-ten in sixth grade, already kicking field goals from the thirty-yard line—but wishing you were off in the woods with your dog—it helps to think of yourself as some mutated version of a Clark Kent.
Fortunately, I quit growing last year—at six-four. I won the South Jerseys in wrestling at 189 after pinning two guys, one from Ocean City and one from Toms River, and then I overheard a Press reporter telling another that "Owen Eberman probably just peeled ten thousand off that kid's scholarship" to some school I can't remember. He was laughing. I guess anyone else would have thought, Oh well. But I was like, That sucks ... why am I doing this?
"Nah, no Superman," I said. "You wait. Now that my phone's not ringing, somebody's going to walk through the door any minute, and then we'll have to explain why we're watching Superman."
He tossed the remote in my lap. "Your call, bro."
He got up. I could hear him in the kitchen, chasing around behind Mom with the third degree. "Did you take your temperature? Why not? Did you pick up the results of your blood work, or do I have to do everything around here?"
"No, you don't have to do everything, hon. 'Fever of Unknown Origin.'"
That didn't make Sc
ott look too happy, though it was a relief to me. I had started getting scared that Mom had leukemia or something. She had looked fine today, but for almost a month it had been three good days, two bad days, two good days, three bad days. Scott took three tubes of blood from her, after she refused to see a specialist, and left them at Saint Ann's lab. She's just not a doctor person.
"...only thing I had today was a headache," she was telling him.
"You take anything?"
"Yes."
"Did it go away?"
Silence.
"Well, why don't you go lie down? Go watch a movie with Owen? He'll give you the remote."
There went my night in front of the tube. I glanced down at this big envelope under my ankle and froze, like I did every time I noticed it. Mom had tossed it at me last week when I was complaining about all these recruiters being up my shorts already. I don't know how long ago she'd gotten it, but it landed in my lap and she said, "You're not ready to think about this now. But if I had any betting money, I would bet that in a few years, you could happily end up here."
I stared at the return address again in its dark, thick typeface. Princeton Theological Seminary.
Scott was making her sit in the kitchen chair while he took her temperature. This is what I didn't get: For all my brother probably hopping on Candy Cane and whoever else was drunk enough, and for all his foul mouth and domineering attitude, he was far less selfish than I was. He always came in here thinking about Mom first thing, and I was too wrapped up in my own noise-and-mauling damage. And she'd been talking about telling the coach to give me some breathing room, and having brochures sent to me from Princeton, like she had the time.
She never stopped working for people who can't afford to pay her, and she never had a dime extra, which explained why we only had one TV. Scott agreed with her about me and Princeton. I just didn't get it.