Fire Will Fall (14 page)

"I'm delivering him to a family..." She rubbed her nose into the baby's belly. "I am! I am! I'm delivering you! Dang. I love babies..."

I thought,
Eeek. No wonder Cora's scared to watch her mom's tapes.
Cora mentioned once in group therapy how she felt scared that she would find on the tapes drunken escapades, barroom brawls, and maybe even sex acts between what good things her mother had done. I didn't think she would be happy watching her mother coo over some baby. Aleese had passed Cora off at birth and went twelve years without trying to even see her. I was only slightly more confused than I was nauseated.

"Yes, we all know Aleese loves babies," Jeremy said, to make things worse. "I've got four minutes of tape left for your VJ—"

Aleese turned toward the camera and faced the baby toward it. It looked like a newborn, blinking at nothing and everything. It was darker—black or Hispanic or Arab.

Aleese said, "Okay. This is ... Baby X. He was born in Atlantic City Medical Center." She bounced him once and grinned. "There was this time in high school—the first time I ever got arrested for making my opinions known—when I protested the abortion clinic on New York Avenue in Atlantic City..."

She was blushing again. "Why did I protest an abortion clinic? I ... because. That's why. I'm not religious. I'm not planning on having any kids myself, at least not for the next ten years. 'Because' is a good enough reason, right? This is America. I'm allowed to protest if I want."

"Stop being defensive and tell about the baby," Jeremy interrupted.

She had to bounce him and coo a couple of times.
Cora should definitely never see this one.
I almost fast-forwarded, but Aleese started talking again.

"So, I met this pregnant fourteen-year-old six months ago when I was in the clinic in Atlantic City getting my whenever-I'm-home-and-it's-free checkup. So, this girl started confiding to me that she was going to terminate, which was making her really sad. So, I made her a deal. I said if she wanted to have the baby but couldn't raise it, I would take the baby. Not to keep the baby, but to put it up for adoption. Mom paid for the lawyer. Mom actually wanted the baby but did the right thing and decided it needed a daddy, too. Mom wanted ten kids. She's only got me, and I ain't no picnic. For the record."

"Mom" would be Cora's Oma, who had raised her. I wondered why Oma decided to raise Cora if Aleese didn't want her, after not keeping this baby. Maybe because Cora was Aleese's flesh and blood, but there were so many unanswered questions about Cora's life that I wondered sometimes how Cora could stand being Cora.

"So, today, this baby is going to his new family. The only thing I wanted was the opportunity to deliver him, play with him for an hour or two."

"And how do you feel about what you've done?" Jeremy asked.

She looked at him weirdly, blushing again. "Don't make me into a hero. The girl was the hero.
In my opinion.
Christ, why is it, in America, we always have to say
in my opinion?
One nation ...under God,
in my opinion
... Think there's room for
in my opinion
at the top of a penny?"

"I think it's
In God We Trust
that's on the penny," Jeremy said impatiently.

"In God We Trust, in my opinion..."

"Look. I want to keep this for my VJ of you. I don't want three minutes of cooing, I want three minutes of Aleese."

She flipped him the bird, which made me flinch—it was like she was flipping it at me. "I wanna keep this baby. I wanna keep you, I wanna keep you!" She nuzzled her nose into the baby's stomach.

"You..." I almost said "bitch" for Cora's sake.

Jeremy gave a respectful pause before asking, "So, why don't you keep him? You'd make a great mother."

"Nah, I'm not staying. This baby belongs in America. Don't you? Don't you!"

"Aleese..." Jeremy's next question was a thought provoker. "For someone who loves this country so much, you spend very little time in it. You're twenty-four, and since you were twenty, you spent two weeks here six months ago, and two weeks now, this time merely to keep a promise to a pregnant teenager and deliver a baby to a couple you've never met. If you love the place as much as you say, why not be here to enjoy it?"

VJ ... I decided the term meant "video journal," and this was a rhythm of theirs. Jeremy would act like an interviewer, pose questions, and tape what she did or said. I sensed the importance of it, though Aleese was laughing at the moment, her head up, away from the baby, while she searched the ceiling for answers.

She shrugged, laughing a little. "Most people are in America to enjoy America. The rest of us ... we make it possible for others to enjoy America. My job? I prowl the badlands, the outlands, and bring back photos that will keep Americans grateful ... and protective, and ... cognizant of their good luck in this world. It's no place for a baby. This child should have an American life. He's a symbol."

"A symbol of what?"

"Gardens ... is what I'm thinking of at the moment. I don't know why I love American gardens so much. The Swiss and the Germans are better at gardens. But this baby needs to go about in a stroller designed by JCPenney and learn to walk thinking that the world is rooms filled with giant, colorful Lego toys. The first day of kindergarten, his parents should walk him down the street to the local public school, where he'll learn from big alphabet letters and math worksheets with cartoon foxes and bears cheering him on. He needs to ride bikes and have a locker and learn to play football, soccer, and street hockey. He needs to wake up on Christmas mornings to a Walkman and a golden retriever puppy and a mountain bike. He needs to see all the Disney movies the first week they come out. He needs a dad and a mom. He needs to start each school day saying the Pledge of Allegiance...
in my opinion.
"

She laughed, but I didn't. Aleese Holman talked kind of like she wrote. It was like an endless poem that she could spit out while cooing and joking around. It was an unusual talent, and I could see why Jeremy liked doing this.

She added, "Most people are lucky enough to get to play in America, to put the bread on the table in freedom and live off the fat of the land. The rest of us? We have other shoes to fill. We're the photographers, the journalists, the soldiers, the Peace Corps workers, the artists, the chroniclers of disaster ... We bring back perspective. We bring back the less pleasant truths. We, um, foster gratitude. We allow others to play while we do the hard stuff."

She struck the electric chord I was looking for. Scott and Cora and Rain and I obviously hadn't been sent to any badlands. We were no longer "normal people from Trinity Falls," but the rest was unclear. I could sit here and pray for people, because I'd heard of other people in St. Ann's doing that—people who wanted to do some good but were too sick to move about. I could be nice to Rain, because she was high maintenance. But I thought of Scott wanting to go to work for USIC, to actually catch those guys. I thought of what the Kid did, giving up his teenage years so that he could help intelligence agencies find cold-blooded killers.

I felt entirely useless as more truth crawled all over me: I was nothing like Aleese Holman. I was
nothing
like Joan of Arc. I wasn't even close to the Kid. I was Owen Eberman, decent athlete, decent student, and otherwise couch potato, who just happened to drink the wrong water at the wrong time.

I asked Dan recently about this thing he'd referred to as "a calling," because I'd kind of wanted one—sort of like Joan of Arc or St. Stephen. When you think you might die, it's time to put it all out there and get arrogant. What have you got to lose? Hadley said the apostles asked Jesus questions, toward the end of his life, about where they were going and what they'd be doing. His answer, in plain English: "If I told you the whole thing now, you'd lose your minds."

I finally drifted off to sleep, watching sand on the TV and not caring. Sand was like my life. Something was going on behind the scenes, but I wasn't privy to it. It was like the mist of my dreams, which I drifted into in the afternoon quiet while Rain was asleep and Cora and Scott were off on a road trip. Figures floated around in shadows behind the mist. But no one came out of it. No voices spoke to me.

CORA HOLMAN
SATURDAY, MAY 4, 2002
1:30
P.M.
GRIFFITH'S LANDING BOARDWALK

S
COTT WANTED ME TO SHOOT A PICTURE
of a burning building while we were standing in a crowd of people. He kept pointing insistently at the smoky flames and red brick structure, but I wasn't tall enough and could only capture the backs of men and women in the crowd, even when standing on my toes. Finally, the crowd broke a little, people moving left and right, and I raised the camera to my face. The lens had been jostled, and all was a blur. I quickly readjusted the focus, and as the image came clear, I was staring straight into my dead mother's face. Her black eyes and smile took up the lens.

"
You can't escape me. Dead does not mean gone.
"

I jerked the thing from my eyes, expecting to see her standing two feet in front of me. But it was only the crowd again. I tried screaming, but it came out like hissing, and as I turned to flee, a seat belt jerked me into place. I was staring out the window from the passenger seat. The sun was out.

"You okay?" Scott asked.

I put a hand to my banging heart, still hearing the reverb of my yell. I could have startled him enough to drive off the road. We were just turning off Route 9 onto the Griffith's Landing causeway.

He jostled my head a little and said, "It's only a dream," in a mothering way.

"I've been having the most atrocious nightmares about my mother lately," I confessed dizzily.

His hand left me. "I'd say, 'You can come get in my bed,' but I don't think that would work out very well."

He was trying to make me laugh, and as usual, he got his wish. But the smile faded away again as I stared into the camera in my lap and it stared back. I tended to think of it as a life form sometimes. In another dream, it started to pulsate in my hands like a giant heart. I loved the thing, but only when I could forget that it had been to so many places, had seen so many atrocities, and recorded all of humanity's heartaches that Jeremy told me of. It's like I hadn't totally taken possession of it. Half of this camera still belonged to Aleese. Half of it
was part of
Aleese.

"I sent Jeremy Ireland an e-mail after I couldn't think of much to say in my blog, and I asked him to please persist in finding out what he can about my father," I said. "I'm sure Aleese just ... got stuck in my mind after I sent it."

The narrow highway was kind of pretty, with marshes and bay streams on either side, and a small city on the horizon ahead. I could see a tall Ferris wheel looming over the buildings, and we passed a sign that read "Griffith's Landing: 6 miles." I had fond memories of Oma bringing me and some friends here for the rides when I was twelve.

Scott turned to glance at me a few times. My heart should have slowed down, but one of our meds listed heart palpitations as a side effect, and I seemed to be more susceptible to side effects than the other three.

"Ya know, if you tell your bad dreams, they tend to fade away faster."

"Did they teach you that in paramedic school?" I yawned.

"Nope. Learned it from Mom."

The differences between his mother and mine lit the car with an inflamed discomfort. For me, at least. He grabbed my hand out of my lap and did this acupressure maneuver in the center of my palm, applying pressure with his thumb, which sent some sort of white energy up my arm and throughout my body. It had a calming effect, and he'd done it to me several times at St. Ann's when he'd been in hearing distance of one of my nightmares.

I blurted out the dream, mostly because I needed to give payback for my calm.

He flinched when I got to the part of Aleese being seen in the lens but not in the real crowd. "Cora, your nightmares are really vivid. Maybe you should think of becoming a writer."

At the moment, I was an editor, per se, of our journals, but that was it. I kept them on my hard drive, planning to weave them all together someday for our memories. "I've no idea what I want to be. Right now, I guess I'm just glad
to
be."

"Wish I felt that, uh, content," he said, and dropped his hand back onto the steering wheel in frustration. I had kept my word by not asking him why we were coming to Griffith's Landing. I thought of ways to ask him but sensed he wouldn't like it. And he wasn't done with the other subject yet.

"I'd say it's pretty normal to have nightmares like that when you've had a mother like yours. A wild boar would have made a better parent."

As usual, his loyalty cut my anxiety in half.

"Some wild animals devour their young," he went on. "But they're not drug addicts living on Social Security and relying on their children to pick up after them..."

One memory suddenly came clear that I hadn't mentioned before. I'd been afraid of its implications. But Scott liked when I confessed things, and I was suddenly basking in the white energy of relaxation.

I went for it. "A lot of times when I would come home after school, I would see the checkbook out on the dining room table. Aleese paid the bills when I was in school. Always. I never saw her write out a check. But we never got a shutoff notice. And after she died and I looked through all the records, I also saw that she never spent on drugs any of the money that Oma had left to her or me. She used her Social Security to get her morphine."

His hand moved back to the top of the steering wheel. I took it that he was stunned that I would defend her. I wondered if I should have.

"I think..."—I stumbled with the frightening part—"... she may have been drug free every day until late afternoon."

"Oh. She only got high when she sensed it was time for
you
to come home."

"That's right."

"The awful, terrible, unendurable Cora Holman. Your presence would make anybody want to shoot up, darlin'. It's all your fault that your mother was a pig," he said.