Fire Will Fall (49 page)

And I kept telling myself I was not being selfish—she was being
totally
selfish.

I had just lost a mother and a brother, and her losses were not even close. And yet I had totally been there for her. Now I had to make it through January before Godfrey would consider the surgery to remove the aneurysm from my brain, and that was only if I went into remission as quickly as she had. Rain had to deliver a baby in February without it killing her or my niece/ nephew. Cora had her health, and suddenly she wouldn't be around for either tense moment.

I got further bugged remembering how in June she penned out all these thank-you notes to the nurses on our floor at St. Ann's, because the truth was,
I
beat them to her room half the time when her nurse's buzzer went off.
I
had nursed her back to health more than any single person, and my thanks was that she was taking off with her she-devil mother's best friend.

If hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, there's got to be some counterpart for guys. I couldn't risk yelling and blowing a fuse, but I was an expert manipulator going way back, and she was a lamb led to slaughter.

I made an announcement at the breakfast table the following morning, instead of telling her my great news in private first.

"When Godfrey was here earlier, we were talking about my 4.0 in paramedic school. He told me that experience will cancel certain facts, like that I was thirty-sixth in my class at Trinity instead of valedictorian. He said that just from name recognition of being one of the Trinity Four, I could probably get a full ride in any premed program in the country. He said he'll write in his recs that not only was I
one
of the Trinity Four, I was
pro-active in the care of
the Trinity Four. With Cora's remission, he's more famous in his medical circles than we are. There is some justice in the universe. At one time, I had only the grades. Now I've got the funding, it looks like."

I turned to Alan, who was so focused on Rain lately that he was clueless about me and Cora. "You use nurses in USIC. Do you use doctors, too?"

He reminded me of their relationship with the CDC. They had six on their payroll.

Everyone applauded, Cora the loudest, bouncing in her seat and making a few highly supportive comments. I grunted. I ignored her while I filled out applications like crazy—Harvard, Penn, Georgetown, Stanford. Then she began realizing
I
might end up in some far corner of the country, and she'd start acting worried, all "Where will you be?"
It's only funny when you take off,
I wanted to say but held on to it. I made sure to accidentally leave every application on the dining room table. She asked more concerned questions. I grunted.

Whereas I'd generally spent my evenings with her, I suddenly got interested in the newspaper. I read, out on the porch, all of Hodji's five daily papers, because she'd sit beside me at that point and cry and beg me to pay attention to her. It was fun, passing her tissues, just so she'd throw them down and storm off to cry in her bed pillows.

After five nights of this, Marg told me I was being an ass. Rain felt the baby kick but said she wouldn't let me feel it until I quit my pity party. Hodji even made some comparison between me and his douche-bag ex-wife, which hurt to my core. I was risking losing Cora for good, he said, and I needed to grow up. And it irked me to no end that they could all see her side of it more than mine. Still, Hodji's words humbled me enough to be civil, at least through one conversation that first week.

It started with her versus me and the
New York Times
out on the porch.

"Scott?"

"Hmm."

"Uncle Jeremy says of course I can come back for your surgery. I can take as long as I want. I just spoke to him..."

Uncle
Jeremy. That was rich. "Oh. Well. That's something. That's an expensive ticket, I know. Tell him I said thanks."

"I will. I wish you knew him better."

That made one of us.

"I actually set aside enough of my inheritance before donating it to the project to come back both summers for three weeks."

I already knew their production schedule went from October of 2002 through May of 2005. "Three weeks. We could do a lot in three weeks," I said sarcastically.

"He said the whole production crew could take off the entire month of June, both years. That's three whole weeks, given travel days."

Guess it's a lot of flight hours to get back to a Third World potty.
"June. Not bad. It's too early to go to the beach yet—here, where the beach is everything. I'm sure we can find something to do, though."

"We could go to New York ... see some Broadway shows."

I sighed, trying not to get all worked up, but my fury just wouldn't back down. "Sounds good. I'll just spend Christmases with Rain and Alan. Or maybe I'll just stay at school and take two winter-break crash courses. Maybe I won't miss Mom and Owen so much if I pretend the whole holiday thing isn't happening."

Dead silence.

Duh-uh-uh.
When all of Cora's schoolwork had been graded, even with the Q3 virus giving her hell, her class rank had only slipped from eleventh to twelfth out of over six hundred.
Twelfth.
And yet
I
had to think of details like Christmas. She hadn't even landed one of those pristine brain cells on Scott's First Christmas without Mom and Owen.

After a worthy silence, she was crying again. Guilt is good, I reasoned.

She made a tearful recovery attempt. "Scott, you know how I babble when I'm nervous, but this is really important..."

I had to listen really carefully through her jabber and fill in some holes. The gist: After sponsors bought into their PBS series, their initial investment would double back, and that money could be used for one of her mom's big dreams: To get these women out of northern Iraq who had been jailed for committing adultery—and their kids were in jail with them.

I was all
Fuckin' A, would you just shut up? I
suddenly felt manipulated. Kids being in jail because their mothers were there ... the concept was so inconceivable that I wondered if she'd been lied to. And something else was bothering me, but in this cyclone of business-slash-charity speak and tears, I couldn't have found my own face in a bucket. I couldn't pinpoint my problem.

"I don't quite get the big picture, either," she cried on, and grabbed a Kleenex from the box she had in her lap. She'd been carrying the box around since I refused to touch her. "But Uncle Jeremy is very smart, not just about journalism but about international laws and immigration policies, and even raising bribe money. He says you can get anybody out of jail in Iraq if—"

She stopped. I was totally staring by this point, my confused heart melting a little.

"Anyway," she went on. "I hope you can forgive me for not thinking of Christmas. That was stupid. I'm really sorry. It's just that ... I forgot what it was like on Christmas to do something besides read a book in bed. I haven't had one in four years..."

My world turned sideways.
How could I have not seen that?

Cora's five years of heartache were working
for
her instead of against her, I realized. She could have been a drug addict, a pity party, a dropout, a suicide. She was one of those people making lemonade out of lemons. But how could she be equipped to chase around the globe, raising money for causes that would make my mother rejoice, but she couldn't remember something far simpler, like Christmas with your boyfriend who just lost his family?

I didn't have any answers. I pulled her into my lap, kissed her all over her face, cried, and apologized my ass off. She didn't hear any of it; she was simply happy to be back where we both wanted her.

Only thing was, my forgiveness didn't stick. In the middle of the night, I started to zero in on what I couldn't pinpoint that bothered me. "
He says you can get anybody out of jail in Iraq if—
"

I walked across the hall, opened her door, and sat down on her mattress. She was curled up in a ball facing me, and I shook her, though I didn't have to. She woke up easily. Her radio alarm showed 4:10.

"You haven't been reading the newspapers," I said.

She cleared the sleep from her throat. "I figured you'd been reading enough for both of us."

Very funny. "Just please tell me that adventure-crazed uncle of yours isn't planning to take you into Iraq. We might be going to war with Iraq."

"Oh ... no. We haven't talked about going inside Iraq at all." She put a hand on my arm, stroking it for reassurance. Her warm touch did bad things to me. I still had an aneurysm in my head, and I stood up, reminding myself of why, when I was four-star, I never sat on her bed or let her sit on mine.
Someday, if there is a God in heaven...

I kissed her swiftly on the forehead and walked out again. But I stopped dead in the hall, scratching my sleep-clogged head, and did an about-face. This time I stood in the doorway.

"What do you mean, you haven't 'talked about' it? Don't you think you ought to 'talk about' it? How's he supposed to get a million bucks in bribe money into Iraq? FedEx?"

"No ... specialists carry in bribe money. I know nothing about them and don't want to. I can assure you; a trip into Iraq is not on the production schedule."

She was saying the right things ... it just felt
wrong.
I decided maybe it was a general alarm bell going off, and I didn't need Iraq to make it specific.
All
these places were fucking dangerous. And they were germy. Had we nursed her back to health from a WMD so she could go off and catch some local plague in Africa or the Middle East? She might have book smarts, but she was an airhead at times, off in her own little world. She'd be walking down the street, bang into some warlord, forget to say "excuse me," and get herself executed online.
What the fuck, Cora?

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.
"