Fire Will Fall (2 page)

"Rain. I am so there," he said in loud annoyance, gesturing at the roof. "What do you want me to do? Play the violin?"

"Something like that!" She sniffed.

"I don't play the violin, Katherine!" That was Rain's real name, which she hated, and nobody ever called her that. So my brother used it only to make his most worthy points.

Frankly, I sided more with my brother. Not that kicking your sweat socks off in someone else's sheets smacks of diplomacy, but I figured Rain was asking the impossible with this "be there" line. She was laying the burden on Owen to gift-wrap her peace of mind and serve it up to her. You can only give
yourself
peace of mind.

Today, peace had been hard for me to grab hold of. I had left the hospital to visit my house and put together photos of my mom and Owen and me—from back when we thought a problem was Mom doing so many
pro bono
legal cases that the electric bill was late. Now I was catching the Throat from Hell again.

I swallowed a couple of cold gulps of my club soda, and my mouth went into let-it-rip mode. "Rain. One of these days, you have to stop crying. Find your maturity. I've heard lots of girls cry ... I've probably made some girls cry. But I feel like I've been living for the past few weeks with the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra playing three different songs at once—"

"Leave her alone, Scott," my brother kicked in. Great. I was standing up for him, and he took up for Rain. I think this is called a circle jerk.

My brother shut his eyes. I could see his lips moving, implying that he was praying again, his usual solution to our problems. You can see how well that had been working. Cora just kept reading a get-well card like mad. Rain was sniffing, sniffing, sniffing, which is a martyr's version of crying, and even more annoying. I had heard girls say her line to me before, usually when they were crying about something. "Why can't you just
be
there for me?" It was vague—intentionally so, I'd always thought—and nothing I did qualified as "being there."

We need to find a cure—for them. We need to find the terrorists who got away—for me.

I toasted the ceiling of the limo again, the raindrops falling in pellets against it, as I fought off a screechy feeling of helplessness.

CORA HOLMAN
FRIDAY, MAY 3, 2002
7:10
P.M.
ROUTE 9

W
HILE MY EYES REMAINED FOCUSED
on a stack of thirty-some get-well cards, my heart was focused on the growing distance between us and St. Ann's. I could feel the tension rolling away from me with each mile that passed. I was being freed from yet another source of anxiety.

Two months back, I'd been freed from loneliness. At least three of Rain and Owen's friends had visited every day since March, and they kept implying to me, in the nicest of ways, that I was now their friend, too. I'd been a loner in high school who'd masked my social inadequacies by being a joiner. I'd been in thirteen ECs (extracurriculars), was president of none, and worked nights at Acme. This illness had had an ironic effect; it sometimes seemed like I'd paid a price with my body to break free from my solitary confinement. I didn't mind as much as the others.

My mother's death in March helped me, too, I must confess. Aleese had shown up at our door penniless when I was twelve, and my grandmother, who'd raised me, died when I was fourteen. I spent my high school years hiding the fact that my only existing relative was a morphine addict who spoke to the walls in Middle Eastern languages, something to do with her journalism job overseas. She had refused to ever let me call her "mother." She was the first victim of the water poisoning in Trinity, and I did not miss her much. I had loved sitting in the middle of Rain and Owen's crowd at St. Ann's, saying little yet never feeling unwelcome.

And yet I live with a bad memory of the place that Rain and Owen don't have. I fell into a coma my first night there in early March, and when I came out of it, a man stood beside my bed. He was reciting beautiful poetry. Yet the man came into my cubicle with some sort of dark energy, and the only way I can describe it is that it could wake a person out of a coma. Stranger still is the memory of him pulling a hypodermic needle out of his suit pocket and telling me he was going to kill me. And suddenly my ICU pod was filled with people who wrestled the man to the wall while Scott Eberman pulled tubes from me.

Mr. Steckerman made light of the whole thing later, saying they caught a violent man out in the corridors and that he was now in jail and we have nothing to worry about. I wasn't supposed to remember that he was in my room, I guess. I knew he was a member of ShadowStrike. His face and news of him were splattered on our TV screens for weeks.

Our drugs offer us as much confusion as relief, but I sense that if I speak of that man, an assassin named Richard Awali, I will bring more of his demons down on me. He's like that bogeyman in your closet when you're a child of whom you dare not speak. Because if you do, he will hear you, feed on your fear, and materialize.

I embraced the idea of a new home where any stranger coming up the road in a car could be heard a mile away. I felt glad to lose that constant exposure to strangers moving about the corridors. And yet I sympathize with Rain and Owen. It's my job to try to bring them some happiness.

"Matt Damon." I held the card up, shaking it slightly, my tradition. I had two interesting cards in my hand. "He says he wants to visit us when we're feeling up to it. He wants to make a movie about what happened in Trinity."

I passed the card to Rain, who opened it cautiously. Up until maybe two weeks ago, all the movie rights messages had thrilled her. She passed it to Scott.

"I knew about this. He called a couple of times," she said.

"You spoke to him?" Scott asked. She ought to have told us that much.

"No, the nurses did. My dad was going to call him back, but I told him not to. Not yet. I haven't ... I just..." She stumbled for a thought. "I don't know if I want our lives all blasted across a movie screen. People will feel sorry for us."

Nobody argued.

"I think people who get this much attention should have won the Olympics or something," she continued. "I feel like a cheat. I don't want attention this way."

So much for Matt Damon. My second note was a trump card I had set in my lap only seconds after they started bickering. I figured I would throw it down only if the first one didn't work. It was personal.

"Jeremy Ireland." I waved the card, and I could feel all eyes open and shift to me. Not a celebrity in the traditional sense, but Jeremy was interesting enough.

"What does he say?" Rain asked.

Mission accomplished. They were all watching me. But old habits die hard, and as usual when my mother became the topic of conversation, my mind went to dull gray and my voice trembled with anxiety.

"'Dear Cora,'" I started.

Thank you for your very honest portrayal of your mother in your last e-mail. I know that was hard for you. I am still trying to piece together how the Aleese I knew became the Aleese you knew. As I said to you at the end of my visit, the accident that cost your mother her arm also cost her any ability to proceed as a photographer, and photojournalism had been her life. Before that accident, she was addicted to nothing except her own adrenaline. I do wish she hadn't abused you verbally at every turn.

I do believe you. She abused all of us at times, but she was the Queen of Hearts during the years I traveled with her. We were all mesmerized by her courage, her willingness to risk her life constantly for the betterment of humanity, and we allowed for her sharp tongue, figuring she was entitled to that indulgence. This will sound like a very strange thing for me to say, but
I am quite certain she loved you.

My hand floated to my throat—not that I was actually thinking of crying. My mother had done little for the four-plus years she lived with me except lie on the couch, take injections, hallucinate, and try to shock me with outspoken and vulgar comments. Even after my grandmother died, I had never spiraled into reflections on whether Aleese had loved me.

Hence, my throat was tightening over what I perceived as a lie from Jeremy Ireland. I had reached out to him two weeks ago in a blast of honesty that had left me bedridden for two complete days after I sent the e-mail.

My eyes were drawn to Scott's, as his were piercing, while Rain and Owen merely looked enthralled.

He dropped his head back. "Jesus Christ, Cora. Don't do this to yourself."

The card fell limp in my lap. I'm certain he was thinking of a couple of our group therapy sessions, when I had been put to the test of talking about my mother honestly. Dr. Hollis and the three of them would sit patiently through what words I could come up with, little more than seizurelike prattle that seemed vague and disconnected. As much as I'd hated Aleese's presence, I'd dreamed of her almost nightly at St. Ann's. In her death she had become a great lecturer, invading my dreams and telling me how useless I was, and I'd hallucinated her once when we were on too strong a narcotic for joint pain. After that, I'd asked myself if I had been better off when she was alive.

Still, I'd kept Aleese's drug addiction a secret from everyone until the day she died, and now I was reading a letter like this aloud. It made sense to say I'd made some headway. But still, when my head bumped to an honest thought, it would flutter away into some invisible mist before I could form the words. It was always torture, this business of being honest about my mother. It would have been easier, I suppose, to be honest about the terrorist beside my bed. But over the years, I'd learned to find my peace in secrets, not in blurting. I sensed I might have a better chance of breaking hard habits in the remote place where we were being sent.

Scott took the card from my hand, closed it, dropped it into his own lap, and gave me a look I often enjoyed. I called it his "knowing" look, a smirk laced with some vague affection, the look that saved me from having to form words and syllables and sense. I could visualize that smirk after some atrocious nightmare and lull myself back to sleep with the image.

His bottom lip was longer than his top lip and loped lazily on one side, whether he was smiling outright or smirking like this. Toss that smile in with unflinching brown eyes, a running back's build, and endless charm and you could see why he'd been up to his ears in girls before he graduated. But he'd been miles out of my league, as well as an upperclassman. I was out of arm's reach in this limo, or he would have followed up his look with what always satisfied me—a squeeze on the back of my neck or a swat on my hair. His feet were stretched out, reaching to my ankles, and he might have tapped me there, as a way of telling me, "You don't have to say it." I lay in wait for these moments on a daily basis. Sometimes I was rewarded; sometimes I wasn't. This time I wasn't.

But Rain reached into his lap for my card. "Let us see the rest of it!"

I felt vaguely victorious that she was distracted from her problems. Yet I ached to do my thinking in private, work on being open and honest when I had my thoughts in order and my words rehearsed.

Scott merely moved the card to his far side, out of Rain's reach, his eyes shut.

"Why not?" she demanded. "She was doing fine!"

"No, she wasn't," he said.

OWEN EBERMAN
FRIDAY, MAY 3, 2002
7:15
P.M.
ROUTE 9

G
OD,
I don't know what we need. Just bring it.

I'm usually better at stating requests to the Father & Friends, which is my term for God and Mom and my favorite saints, St. Joan and St. Stephen. I imagine them constantly watching over us. But I knew my brother was staring at me, and it's hard to think while waiting for him to bellow about how helpless I look. I wouldn't say he was exactly mad at God. You have to decide that divinity is real before you can target it with your anger.

Cora should read her personal stuff to herself first—I agreed. Her mom could make her nuts. But I didn't want Scott yanking Rain's chain. I knew what was really upsetting her tonight, and he didn't. He clumps all her upsets together, just because they look the same on the outside. She has been crying a lot lately. It can be exhausting, and that's being overly polite. After three days of it, you can want to tape her mouth shut and yank all her hair out. But I really felt bad for her tonight, due to her take on some things our favorite nurse, Haley Gibbs, told us when we were packing up our belongings.

Miss Haley was actually packing for me, because I'd just come out of a Headache from Hell at four thirty, and you feel like a ball of hot melting wax after one. I was half asleep in the chair. Cora and Rain came in to see what they could do, so Miss Haley sat them down.

"I've been elected by Dr. Godfrey to give you the speeches," she said with this huge smile that led us to believe it would all be good. She started with what we already knew. "We've found the means to level off this germ so that nobody is getting any worse. Hence, you're getting out of here. What we really want is for you to start trying to lead as normal lives as possible out at the Kellerton House. On days when you're not symptomatic, have your friends up. You'll have a two-hour window twice a day where you don't take any medication. Go out. Take walks. Go shopping. You can go anywhere you want in the car, but the nurse goes, too, if it exceeds that two hours."

"Gee, that sounds 'normal.'" Rain chuckled, though after living two months in two rooms in St. Ann's, chronically visited by doctors and research representatives from four continents, it was a leap toward normalcy.

"You don't have to wear gloves and masks anymore. You can hug your friends." Miss Haley nudged Rain. We'd actually gotten the word last week that Q3 could not be passed through the air, though they weren't sure about bodily fluids. Rain had demanded a minute-long hug from everyone who showed up.