Streams of Babel (15 page)

"Cora?" I realized it was the second time he called my name, so I tried to snap to, but I could only sit up slowly and glance at my fingers that, clutching a tissue, refused to let go of the bottom of his jacket, too. "Who's Jeremy? Is that someone I can get for you?"

"No, he's dead." An awful silence swayed in the reverb of my truth. Six of Scott Eberman became four.

"What are you doing sitting here by yourself? Huh? Don't you know that's not good for you?" It was a comforting tone, like Oma's: "
Awww, skinned knees? Let's get them cleaned up.
"

"I'm ... sorry," I stammered, still thinking I had called to him.

"Sorry for what? Yeesh. After we get you better, we're going to find you a support group. One of those twelve-step things for the, uh, victims."

He yanked on his jacket until I let go, then retrieved a dinette chair, spun it around in front of me, and plopped into it with his hands in his jacket pockets. He stared at my face, then my shoulders.

"Relax. It's just me. Do you always sit like that?"

It's just me...
I would have laughed incredulously if I hadn't been pulling from a couple years back to remember how to slouch. It only made me more uncomfortable, more out of breath, so I simply hung my head between us like a puppy dog hoping to get petted.

"Cora Holman, I would love to hug you," he said. "If anyone needs hugging, it's you. But I'm in a quandary here. I'm a paramedic, and I can imagine germ behavior most people couldn't conceive of, so ... we're going to be really practical—"

He reached around the tissue for my wrist, rambling about wishing he had gloves. I thought he was checking my pulse, and maybe he had been, but then he was shaking my wrist, telling me to drop the tissue. I had blown my nose into it, so I shook my head.

"...just want to see if we have Christmas colors..."

He put some strange pressure on my wrist that made my fingers open. He pulled a pen out of his pocket and poked the tissue open on the floor rather than touching it himself. The thought roared through me:
I have something serious, I have something contagious, or he wouldn't be acting like this. What killed Aleese?

A few tears erupted. "Um, what's Christmas colors?"

"Red and green." He stared downward, obviously not bothered by my outburst or my tissues. "But all you have is white. White is good. May all your Christmases be white."

He reached to the box of tissues and handed me another. Then he sat there watching me, his hands stuffed in his pockets again.

"So. What hurts?"

I pointed a shaky finger to my eye.

"Headache?" He reached for my eye, then thought the better of it, putting his hands back in his pockets.

"Yes."

"Bad?"

All this crying actually seemed to have cut the pain way down—or maybe it was the relief of human company. It had been years since I'd been asked to describe something bothering me. I wasn't quite sure what
bad
was, whether I qualified...

"
Bad?
" He asked louder, as if it was important for me to confess.

"Yes, but ... I took Tylenol. About twenty minutes ago. Maybe it's starting to help some."

He put his hands up emphatically, like he wanted to pull my face up to his to say something important, but he opted to drum on his knees instead.

"Can I ask for a favor?" he said.

"Sure."

"My brother's outside. Can I bring him in here?"

"Sure..." But my eyes rolled as I went through wrenching visions of trying to hold a conversation. "Truthfully, I don't want to see anyone right now—"

"Neither does he. He's sick, too." Despite Scott's attempt at a casual expression, I saw the fuming hells behind his eyes.

"I've got about fifty people in my house right now for him to contaminate, if Rain hasn't already done so. She's with him. I'd like to bring her in, too."

My eyes flew around. My three-day cleaning job, which had looked so spic-and-span this morning, suddenly showed all its flaws. I hadn't cleaned the windows ... Aleese's box of videos was in the middle of the floor.

"Cora, don't stress out. You know how badly you don't want to talk to people right now? Trust me: You'll be in there with the champ. I'll just bring Owen in, and he can lie on the couch while I run down to my house and see if Dr. O'Dell or Tom Hennessey, my boss, is in there and can come look at you guys. I'll tell Rain to keep quiet for once."

And before I could object, he was out the door again. I sat there blinking, relieved that this headache actually did seem better, enough so that I wouldn't be moaning aloud. I knew my heart ought to be slamming—
Rain Steckerman and Owen Eberman in my house?
But the overwhelmed look on Scott's face melted it down to mush.
He's too young for all this ... his mother is not even buried yet...
and yet I sensed it kept him sane somehow, this looking out for the sick. Maybe it was good that I hadn't argued.

Owen appeared in the doorway, then Rain, then Scott, and I could sense Owen's anxiety in his huge, stiffened frame. It flared from his blue eyes, but with something else ...
relief?

"Cora, thank you very much," he said, reminding me of Prince William taking the flowers from strangers after his mother, Princess Diana, passed away. It was sincere but awkward,
wrapped in grief, that a thoughtful person wouldn't want to spew all over strangers.

"You got one of those bad headaches?" Rain asked, drawing near to me in concern.

I stonewalled her, again trying to decide what "bad" meant.

"I've had two," she went right on. "You feel like you're gonna die, but then it starts going away faster than other headaches I've had. Very, very weird headaches."

"Yes. Very weird." I don't know what drove me to my feet, except that I felt like I ought to do something. "May I get you anything? Would you like tea? Ice water?"

"How about a pair of socks?"

Rain reached up under her skirt and stepped out of her badly run stockings right in front of Owen. She stretched and cracked her toes. Owen didn't seem to notice, and when my eyes met hers, her fingers flew to her lips as if she had done something wrong.

I knew I occasionally had this effect on people. With all my trying not to be like Aleese, I had shot myself in the foot. I made people my age uncomfortable. Rain would have asked my questions entirely differently—
You guys want soda?
—instead of my prissy little tea speech. But it was too late now, so I made my way to the laundry room. I didn't wear sweat socks, but figured Rain would be happiest in a pair of Aleese's that I had just bleached and washed and, fortunately, had not yet sent to Goodwill.

Scott had visited the bedrooms and pulled pillows off my bed. He tossed one to each of them and tossed mine on Oma's chair. He had moved Aleese's pictures over to the fireplace mantel, and Owen was flopping down in her place on the couch.

With a finger still pointed at me, Scott said to them, "Don't let her get you anything. Don't let her be polite. Everybody, go to sleep. I'll be back."

He stepped over Rain, who sat on the floor with a pillow in her lap, and as if his first advice would be lost on her, he said, "You keep quiet."

And he was gone.

I slithered into the chair and squashed the pillow into my neck slowly, not wanting to shut my eyes for fear of looking rude, but not wanting to be the first to speak. Scott surely knew his brother well. Owen said nothing. I could only see the top of his head over the pillow, but I assumed he hadn't fallen asleep that fast.

"You guys want to watch cartoons?" Rain crawled on all fours to Aleese's television set, turned it on, and pressed the channel button until cartoons appeared. I hadn't watched cartoons in years and didn't recognize the characters.

My head still hurt enough to keep me from sleeping, so I just lay perfectly still, stewing in my little hells, the worst of which was that they had found me here alone. Surely, there was no other way to find me, but at the strangest times I could get an all-too-weird outsider's sense of my so-called life.
Cora, you're like the Grinch who stole Christmas: all by yourself at the most inappropriate times.

The thought could have brought on sleep, just to escape it. But it was like an invisible presence kept shaking my shoulder—maybe Oma, maybe Aleese or my father—maybe five thousand dead souls. Maybe the earth rumbled so far down that the surface stayed silent. I just felt like a megatsunami rolling across the Atlantic, still far from shore but about to make impact with places the ocean had never seen.

If that sounds weird, I cannot tell you how weird it felt to see Owen Eberman's head sticking up from Aleese's usual place on the couch, while Rain Steckerman sat in Aleese's white sweat socks and a black dress. We sat and watched some tiny cartoon kid in huge glasses fight a bad guy trying to take over the whole world. I watched Owen and Rain turn almost to silhouette as the sun dropped low outside.

SCOTT EBERMAN
MONDAY, MARCH 4, 2002
5:02
P.M.

I SPOTTED DR. O'DELL right off. He was standing just inside our kitchen talking to Mr. Glenn, an attorney buddy of Mom's. But as I made my way through the living room, I was stopped by neighbors, coworkers, my two entrepreneur uncles who had flown down from New York—they all wanted to hug me. It brought me to life.

But with the idle chitchat, I sensed that everyone thought my mom's and Aleese Holman's similar deaths were a freaky coincidence—and I was not about to tell them otherwise. Until I had some idea what had made this handful of people sick, I couldn't see the point in scaring them half to death. While I chatted it up and lied about where Owen was, I didn't see a single raw nose, hear a single cough, or see a single hand rub a single sore gut. Nobody even sneezed, for Christ's sake.

I finally pulled Dr. O'Dell into the kitchen.

"How are you doing?" he asked.

"I'm okay. My brother's not." I watched him raise his eyebrows, and I supposed my tenderhearted brother might give the impression of needing a Valium. I leaned close. "He's got Mom's flu. And the Holman girl had a relapse this afternoon."

He groaned quietly. "Symptoms?"

"Same as Mom's, only they're split up right now. Owen's got the stomach-fever part. Cora Holman has the fever and sinus headache. And Rain Steckerman's had it all, though it's reduced to a stuffed nose right now."

While he searched his head for a response, I asked, "Have you had any more patients in your office complaining of a flu that couldn't make up its mind between sinus or intestines?"

He shook his head. "Believe me. I've got my eyes wide open for something unusual like that. So does Doug Godfrey, so does..." He named four or five family doctors associated with the hospital. "Considering it's flu season, I've seen very little flu, what with the warm weather."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah..." I rubbed the bridge of my nose in frustration.

He gave the predictable response: "Unless one of these kids exhibits a few symptoms we wouldn't assess as common flu, I don't think we have enough to hospitalize them. We'd have to hear something definitive from the CDC first. That'll be a week from today. Who knows? Maybe they'll all be better by then, Scott."

"Or maybe they'll be worse."

He raised and lowered his eyebrows. "Where are they?"

"Down at Cora Holman's house. Whatever it is they have, if
it's the least bit airborne, I didn't want to risk having Owen down here breathing on everyone."

"I figured you'd have them cordoned off somewhere." He squeezed my arm with sympathy and a sad grin. "That might be the best place for them, given what germs can be around an emergency room this time of year, and I
know
I don't have enough to get them quarantined. How about if I ask Doug Godfrey to stop by the Holman place and get some blood samples and anything else he feels is relevant?"

"Why not?" I muttered. Maybe an extra blood test or two thrown in for good measure wouldn't turn up "Fever of Unknown Origin."

"I'll call Doug," he said. "He's stitching up a car accident tonight—torn sinus cavity—or he would be here now. But I'll get him to stop over on his way home. You get what you think your brother might need to stay put ... We'll keep it between us for the time being. God forbid, but if it's some ferocious new germ, I'll shout how you did your part to keep it contained."

"Thanks," I muttered, though heroics were not what I wanted to be known for. I climbed the stairs to our room and found Bob Dobbins and that whole gaggle of Owen's friends stretched out on the floor and the beds, waiting for him.

"Where's the man? How's Cora Holman?" Adrian Moran asked, lying on my bed.

Lest they blab and the town be thrown into a panic, I just said, "He's lagging along with Rain. Cora Holman is ... Cora Holman. What can I say?"

"Did she look like a million dollars, even at her mother's funeral?" Jon Dempsey asked as I stepped over him and Dobbins
and yanked off my tie. "I'm telling you, the girl's a statue. She's got no feelings."

"She didn't come apart at the seams, though I don't think she's as frigid as you guys make her out to be."

"She had a lot of friends show up, at least?" Dobbins asked. Bob Dobbins was the one among them who seemed most like Owen—most human in his approach to people—and I detected genuine concern in his voice. Before I could say something, Dempsey cast Dobbins a confused look.

"Who
does
that girl hang out with, anyway?"

Nobody seemed able to answer. I stuck a pair of Owen's sweatpants into a gym bag.

"You know what? Maybe you guys should catch up with Owen tomorrow. He's kinda ... you know..." I pretended I was tearing my hair out. I didn't feel I should let them wait around for Owen all night.

I was met with a stony silence I pretended not to notice. My brother wasn't loud or the life of the party, but he was more or less the heart of this group, and they'd probably follow him over a cliff. I went into the bathroom and swiped Owen's toothbrush quickly, and Dobbins almost banged into me on the way out.