Streams of Babel (14 page)

CORA HOLMAN
MONDAY, MARCH 4, 2002
4:10
P.M.

I FOLDED MY ARMS across my woolly sweater as I paced into my living room and tried rubbing the chills out. The sweater was never worn before. It had been one of Oma's last gifts before she realized I no longer liked to wear oversized clothing. Despite the turtleneck beneath, the wool itched, and the rubbing didn't stop my teeth from chattering. This relapse of flu came over me during Aleese's service, about the time Reverend McNaughton was showing off her photographs. And while it hit me quickly and furiously, I could only think that Scott Eberman sat three rows behind me, and it was my solemn duty not to give him anything else to worry about. I don't think I let myself move a muscle until the service had ended.

Now I stared out my living room window, maybe half an hour after the Blumbergs dropped me off. Cars were parked all the way to the corner. Every spot was taken, except the one where the huge puddle spread outward in front of my house.
All the people were mourners. But they were all down at the Ebermans'.

Are you proud of yourself? Congratulations. You're alone again ... and sick.

I knew I had sent out a thousand little "messages" at the service to those who wanted to come here afterward—thank you, but no thank you. It had all been an autopilot routine, easy as crossing my legs, and at the moment, autopilot was all I'd had.

A couple that had just parked at the corner walked by on the other side of the street in nothing but light sweaters.
It's like summer out there. What's wrong with my body? What in hell killed Aleese?

All my intense staring was not helping my headache, and I moved toward the kitchen. On the windowsill, I saw the sample packet of Tylenol the paramedic had left with me four nights ago. I had put it there when cleaning, not really having a place for medicine. Oma and I simply never took any. Aleese always referred to her morphine as a "cure-all," and anything of lesser strength as "a fart in a windstorm."

I tore open the packet and swallowed the Tylenol with a large glass of water from the spigot, then went more slowly to the living room. Reverend McNaughton had given me the photos he'd shown at the service. I had perched them on the couch in the same place where Aleese had lain, without really thinking about what I was doing. The little child stared soulfully at me ...
Stunning shot. Where did Aleese get her nerve—to love this strange child enough to capture her aura and immortalize it, while I was forever the brat? Was I born with cloven hooves?

The eyes of the dead foot soldier seemed more focused on
Aleese than me—toward heaven. My amateur photographer's mind couldn't help seeing the situation needed to take this photo. My mother had run through some third world battleground. She had stopped by this corpse, perhaps many others, and she studied this one long enough to relive the man's last moments. She smelled the blood, heard the buzzing flies, maybe even endangered her life by not running. But she had felt instinctively for the sun's angles, moved until they were across the corpse's face, raised the camera, and focused.
She probably bent over with one foot on either side of this corpse's left knee. The smell must have been unbearable.

She had loved this dead man, too. That she couldn't love me was both ludicrous and factual, and the only answers drifted into my mind in the form of a box full of videotapes—somewhere in the crawl space or the attic.

I found the box fifteen minutes later, having crawled all the way to the back of Aleese's closet, which covered the length of the room. I staggered back to the living room and dropped it with a thud, though I knew it would be anywhere from fifteen days to fifteen years before I could look at these tapes. I sensed some deep, black horror built into what secrets they held. And I didn't know what had possessed me to drag the box out while my head was splitting. I pressed my palms to my temples as the pain grew worse, and I stumbled to the window again, reaching out for the glass.

Oma had died in the street. Aleese made her Profound Statement of the Year later that night, and now it rushed through my head like a hissing snake: "
Even the steeliest nerves will flail for a hand to grab on to when they sense death coming. That's why she ran outside.
"

Three blurry figures were coming around the corner, walking slowly, going to the Ebermans', surely. I pressed my palm hard on the cold glass, feeling the urge to break through it and yell.

But when the three got close, I stepped backward out of view. I stared from behind the drape as the Eberman brothers and Rain walked slowly toward my house, on the far side of the street. They must have walked home from the service—getting some air or relief from the crowds in the Eberman house. Rain had her shoes in her hand and walked along in black stockings that were run badly.
Her father probably made her wear a dress to my service ... heels hurt her feet ... I'm an annoying nuisance ... Almost warm enough for bare feet, thank god...

Owen walked in the middle, his arms around their shoulders, his face looking down. He was bent over in something different from anguish.
Physical pain?
My eyes went to Scott, his firm hand on his brother's shoulder, his determined jaw working up words obviously meant to assure him of something. A part of me wanted to run out there to get some of that reassurance, also.

But if I ran outside, I would
die in the street,
too. I backed away and eased down in Oma's TV chair, somehow deciding that it was more important to make a liar out of my mother. If I died in the chair, Oma would come for me, and maybe Jeremy Brandruff Ireland would be there, all smiles, saying, "Hello there, Cora. I'm your father..."

OWEN EBERMAN
MONDAY, MARCH 4, 2002
4:22
P.M.

THE WALK FROM the service didn't clear my head, and I couldn't wait to be home and get comatose under a blanket. I guess that catching some flu less than a day before my mother's own funeral ought to have made me insane, but it only made my numbness worse. I remembered hearing Mr. Steckerman talk sometimes about when his wife died. He would say, "My grief was
complete,
" and I never really knew what that meant until now. It means that you could get smacked by a truck, or your house could burn down, and you couldn't possibly feel any more messed up. Whether I felt like throwing up or just slightly poisoned all over, or whether the funeral was tomorrow or in an hour—none of that mattered.

Even being slammed with a nasty reality—I probably had what my mom had—didn't make me feel any worse. It seemed like I had one foot in an old world and one foot in a new, as we
walked past Cora's house, and I wondered out loud, "Am I going to die, too?"

Rain's laugh was part of the old world, where nobody dies around here except of old age and car accidents. Her reminder that she'd had an on-and-off battle with this flu and she was still cruising around town—that made me nod.
Mom died of a strange flu because she was run-down and overworked. Rain and I are in the prime of our health.

With the exception of where the huge puddle was in front of the Holmans', the rest of the street was lined with cars. Most were familiar, and the owners of them were probably at my house. There had been at least fifteen people there since about twenty minutes after Mom passed away—to make us feel better, and to make each other feel better,
even when we weren't there.
If you think I tend to be a recluse when I'm well, you haven't seen me when I'm sick. I stopped dead in my tracks, then pulled Scott and Rain behind the Endicotts' hedges.

Rain read my mind. "Just smile and say hi, and you'll be in your room with the door shut before you know it."

She was rubbing my arm to encourage me, but with chills it felt like thorns on my skin, and it shot more visions into my head of being accosted by ladies trying to feel my forehead and forcing me to eat this or drink that, all in my face with forks and spoons. I held on to my gut as an imagined plateful of lasagna turned to hairy spiders and cockroaches.

Now
my grief was complete. "I can't," I said.

"You got a headache?" Scott asked. He'd already told me that people in shock run fevers, and that he'd expected me to feel like
hurling after seeing that bloody foot soldier in the photo. I'm not a blood person. But still, he was making me jumpy.

"No! But one might start if I have to sit with a thousand people and fake normal and eat casserole, and..." I stopped, realizing how I sounded. "What is wrong with me? Why can't I just feel normal in a crowd of nice people who are only trying to help?"

Scott mumbled something about no one liking to be around people when they felt sick. But he'd already told me to savor each moment of our house being full of people, because in about a week, this level of compassion would be gone, and we'd be expected to get a grip.

Rain tugged on my arm, and it caused an "equal and opposite reaction," according to Newton's laws of motion, and I jerked away from her and started walking back up the street.

She caught up. "Where are you going?"

I halted briefly, staring at Cora Holman's house, and that's when I knew I was having a nervous breakdown, the real thing.
The place looked good, inviting.
The fact that the grass was mostly weeds and bald patches with no shrubs, and the house was peeling paint—it helped. The puddle out front almost cordoned it off from the rest of the street, and the place seemed to be calling my name:
Welcome! Come be where it's quiet!

The girl was aloof, but I didn't think she had it in her to be nasty. She would let me sit in the quiet and be sad with her, and, definitely, she would not impose food and drinks on my baking flesh.

But then, my sanity popped up—or maybe I should call it my small streak of normalcy. I'd had long talks with Rain about my abnormal tendencies, like some days wishing I were home-schooled. She also heard me confess to saying silent prayers before anything and everything—from the top of a football game, to the end of the evening news, with all its murdered, convicted, sentenced, and dying people. In one junior psych assignment, I read about some psychologist guy blathering on about people like me having a "God complex."

Usually, Rain's answer was that I was perfectly normal and to quit worrying about myself, and every once in a while she said something that totally was outstanding. Like before this one college interview, she said without thinking, "Just avoid all your natural instincts and you'll do fine!"

"Come on. You want to go see Cora?" Scott asked.

I walked backward. "No! Why would I want to see Cora?"

I plopped down behind the Endicotts' hedges, trying to ignore my cold sweats. Rain's stockings were now full of holes, because she'd walked from the church with her heeled shoes in her hand. She was going to catch her death.

"This is crazy," I muttered. "I am full-throttle nuts."

"Will you cut yourself a break, please? Whatever you think this week—this month—it's all right," she said.

A sigh sounded above Scott's suede lace-up shoes that he almost never wore. "I always thought the best thing about getting out of high school would be going off to college and playing football. Well, that didn't happen, but it's okay. Because there's something even better about getting out of high school. You quit giving a shit what other people think. You guys sit here, and while you're being utterly petrified of Little Miss Perfect, I will go make sure she is all right."

He strolled across the street, tried to jump the puddle, and missed, cursing over one soggy suede shoe. But then he just knocked on Cora Holman's door. After a minute, she still hadn't answered, so he opened the door, stepped right in, then closed it behind him. Rain and I gawked at each other, and I felt as dumb as she looked.

SCOTT EBERMAN
MONDAY, MARCH 4, 2002
4:37
P.M.

TRUTHFULLY, I WASN'T thrilled about trying another can-opener routine on Cora Holman. I was too worried about Owen. I kept telling myself his queasiness and fever could be stress, though I found that hard to believe.

But I forced myself up to the door with the thoughts that were keeping me going lately—keep checking on Rain, make it a point to check on Cora, read all my CDC memos, finally, and figure out what had really happened to Mom.

I didn't want to put off checking on Cora. As I had said good - bye to her at the altar, her please - leave - me - alone shtick had almost lacked the please part. I had gone to hug her, but she had her left hand on my shoulder and her right hand stuck out to me. So, I shook hands and listened to her overly gracious prattle about how nice it was for us to come. She turned back to the minister without giving me a chance to say more than "See you tomorrow."

Owen and Rain had a point: The girl was a prickly pear, coated over with the gleam of magic manners—even when she was sick. My squad doesn't call me Mr. Observant for nothing.

She let a few people hug her
after
me. She didn't want
me
hugging her, probably realizing the too-much-body-heat would register with me. It had registered just from shaking her hand and looking into her glassy eyes.

I could see her plainly through the window, curled up in a chair beyond the kitchen. I had no idea why she didn't respond to my loud knocking, but the door opened easily.

Halfway through the kitchen, I got scared. She was looking right at me, almost through me, and it's not like I expect every person in town to know my name, but I sort of remembered her doing the underclassman doe-eyed look in my general direction at a lot of football games. So, I was a little suspicious of a serious problem when she looked me dead in the eye and said, "Jeremy?"

CORA HOLMAN
MONDAY, MARCH 4, 2002
4:39
P.M.

JEREMY IRELAND APPEARED with a face so familiar, it was like I had known him for years. So, transferring the correct name of Scott Eberman to it flung me back to reality with gasps....
I must have called to him out there on the sidewalk in
some psychotic moment that I can't remember. How could I do that to him?