Streams of Babel (17 page)

But the comforting feeling only lasted until her thought finally spilled out: "Wow, I can't believe we found you here alone."

Ta-da.
It took all my energy not to withdraw my hand, and I found the right words with my autopilot.

"I asked people to let me sleep after the funeral, what with feeling like this."

"Yeah, but..." She stopped.

Owen, the angel, roused and sat up. Rain turned, and as soon as she quit petting me, I pulled my fist to my chest.

"Where's the bathroom?" he asked.

"Uh-oh," Rain said. "Which exit door?"

He finally put a thumbs-up around his stomach and gestured to his throat.

"You want some help getting there?"

He shook his head, got to his feet, and even managed a plastic smile before turning into the hall where I'd pointed. I felt agog at the girl's warmth and went slowly to the kitchen, thinking of what to do for him. One of the people who had dropped
off food had been thoughtful enough to bring a liter of Pepsi, also, and I had put it in the refrigerator. I remembered Oma from when I'd had one of my few stomachaches. She used to give me Pepsi with no ice and the bubbles stirred out. I put just Pepsi in a glass and then poured another glass for Rain with ice.

I met Owen coming out of the hallway and handed him the glass. "Here. No ice."

He said "thanks" nicely, but as if he was used to people doing things for him.
Prince.
He looked like one, acted like one ... He plopped back down on the couch, but didn't lie down. He stared into space.

"Scott said you're not supposed to do anything for us," Rain said, taking her glass as I held it out. She grinned easily, which I thought was courageous, considering her friend looked so despondent. She looked very accustomed to him, as if nothing he did would seem mysterious or confusing. But since I didn't know what to make of him, I looked for something else.

"Owen, would you like a blanket?"

"Sit down!" they chimed, so I climbed back into my chair. Rain crunched ice, and Owen stared past the television. In a minute he popped out of his stupor, and I mean it was a "pop," with a shaking of his head. His gaze jerked my way.

"So, Cora. How are you?"

"Fine. Thanks."

Rain quit chewing, and they stared, though I didn't quite get what I had said wrong. Owen's eyes started to get that far-off look and he popped again.

"So ... do you have a dad?"

Ta-da.
Rain's eyes went back to the television, too innocently, I thought.

"Um ... yes. He lives ... in Belfast."

Or should I have said Dublin? Jeremy Brandruff Ireland.
Ireland doesn't mean he's Irish! What if he's from China?
Until I said it, I could not even remember that he had died. And I wasn't even sure he was my father.
September 1, 1957–September 10, 1996.
Well, it was too late to take it back.

"Belfast. S'pretty cool," Owen muttered as I died a thousand deaths. "At least you know where your dad is from. Mom once told me our dad was from Five-Card Stud, and she got all tears in her eyes, so I left it alone."

His honesty gave me a jolting, outsider view of myself.
Why not say I didn't know Jeremy until I read his name the other day? What had I been thinking would happen?

"When I was a little kid, I used to pretend my dad was a superhero," he went on dreamily.

Rain looked at him, then me, with a raised eyebrow. I opened my mouth to be equally honest in some way. But my head just went blank like ...
like most people's might if they were trying to think up a lie?

"I pretended that he had to take care of the whole universe, and that was more important than us, so ... we had to take a backseat."

I forced out, "It's good to think those things. Little kids don't need to be bothered with harsh truths."

"Yeah." He looked right at me. "So ... what now?"

I realized again that he thought I was feeling the same mired grief that he was. Out of the shadows, though, came my out-of-control feelings from when Oma passed, so I knew exactly how he felt. The flashback jarred me out of the chair, and I found myself easing down on the couch beside him.

"Don't touch him," Rain muttered. "He doesn't like being touched sometimes."

Owen cast her a little smile and his already flushed cheeks turned deep red. "You'll get used to me. I'm just really weird sometimes."

"Sometimes?" Rain grinned.

"Okay, usually. But ... you know what I could go for right now?"

"What?" I asked, anxious to do anything but sit this close to his anguish.

"Cora, did you ever do the 'group hug' thing in your family?"

At least I wasn't too sick to misunderstand the concept. They each put an arm out for me, and I came into them like you walk into a dark fun house, with your eyes half flinched. I got twisted around, trying to fit into the swaying and jostling of two other people, each pushing or pulling slightly to find their gravity center. It was not a great feeling—sort of like your first kiss in sixth grade—and probably that feeling came from this loud thought:
You don't belong here, not in this hug with Rain Steckerman and Owen Eberman ... How did this happen? How did they get into your house?

SCOTT EBERMAN
MONDAY, MARCH 4, 2002
5:31
P.M.

AS DOBBINS DROVE us to the vacated store, I had a couple moments of sanity.
Couldn't I have put this off until after the service tomorrow?
Dobbins looked over at me a few times, and I guess he was wondering the same thing.

The place was in Surrey, the next town over, which was about as quaint as Trinity Falls, only Surrey had a liquor store. Across the street was a small row of storefronts that probably used to be real stores before anyone dreamed up malls. Now they held an insurance office, the former discount shoe place, and an art gallery that probably stayed in business thanks to eBay.

We got there right around sunset, and I stared at the soaped-over windows as Dobbins pulled into a spot directly in front. The place had an ominous feel, with the setting sun reflecting off the soap instead of letting you see in. Maybe any deserted place with soaped-over windows feels ominous.

I opened the passenger door. Dobbins came around beside me, sniffing the air like it might smell of clues.

"I don't suppose you've ever broken into a place," I said.

He didn't answer, which meant no. I wondered lots of things, like who owned the building to rent it to the shoe people, and what in hell a legit shoe store was doing here when there wasn't a mall within fifteen miles. Sometimes an exclusive clothing store can survive away from a mall, I reasoned, but discount shoes are not exclusive. I was assuming it had been open less than a year, because I had never noticed it, and I remember just about everything after oh-so-many ambulance runs.

We skulked around to the back through the narrow passage between it and the art gallery. A back door stood closed, with cracked glass in one of the smaller panes down near the knob.

"Those gloves I gave you, for when you go near Owen ... You got 'em?" I asked.

Dobbins pulled them out, and I thought it was very decent of him not to mention the football scholarship he had accepted at Miami of Ohio and what a breaking-and-entering gig would do to that.

I put my pair on, saying, "I'll do the break-in. You just hang back."

"Don't cut yourself" was all he said.

I pulled the sleeve of my goose-down jacket over my fist, realizing how badly I was sweating. I laid a square punch into the cracked pane. It clattered loudly, and three decent-sized pieces fell inward. "You tried to talk me out of it, if anyone ever asks.
Capisci?
"

He put his gloved fingers around one loose shard and pulled. I reached my hand in and worked the doorknob, studying the situation over my shoulder after the door swung open. There were lots of houses in this neighborhood, but fortunately, the back of the store was screened by a row of trees.

Inside was almost pitch-black, but Dobbins muttered about having a flashlight in his glove box, and he went after it. The beam turned out to be not very bright. It threw a dull, filmy glow onto the walls but only fully illuminated patches about as round and small as itself. We decided this back room was completely empty and went through a narrow hall with a broom closet on the left and an empty storage closet on the right.

"They didn't leave a damn thing," Dobbins muttered, spraying the light across the empty shelves.

I actually saw an empty plastic champagne glass—the kind you'd take on a picnic—back in the corner.

We came to the big front display room, which was brighter, lit in a dim orange as the setting sun tried to break through the soap on the windows. The room was as neat as the storage closet and contained only a few shelves built into the walls, which had been wiped clean. A black metal desk sat off in the far left corner, the only piece of furniture there.

"What kind of shoes did they sell?" I asked.

"Just sneakers, I think," Dobbins said. "But by the time I saw the wannabe Pradas up close, some illiterate was staring at me, like 'Leave now, jerk.'"

"Discount shoe store," I repeated, because the situation just wasn't adding up. Sneakers are mostly worn by younger people. Kids would simply go to the mall. They wouldn't think about stores in a small town.

Beyond the shelves, the walls were mostly those dark, plastic panels that are supposed to look like wood. They were
pocked with holes from hanging decorations or where more shelves had been added. They shone like they had been wiped down. I focused on the desk itself, which looked kind of new. I brushed my fingers on it and realized it had this sort of gray rubber top to it.

"Top isn't metal," I noted.

"Meaning?" Dobbins asked.

I wasn't sure. I took the flashlight and studied a few pencil scribblings on the desktop. The pencil lead shone but was still impossible to read. It didn't look like English.

Dobbins noted, "Hieroglyphics."

Yeah, it felt kind of like being in a mummy's tomb, what with the soap on the windows keeping the light levels low. But among the letters in some foreign language, I spotted what looked like phone numbers.

"Probably suppliers," I said, sane enough to accept that we weren't going to find the answers to our problems scrawled out in marker on the top of the desk.

Dobbins's gloved hand reached for a drawer and pulled it out. Nothing was inside, not even a penny. He reached for the thicker file drawer beneath. Again, nothing. A pen and pencil lay in the middle drawer. I reached in, felt around the back, felt some sheets of paper, and pulled them out. But they were blank.

A car came down the street, its headlights illuminating the office. We both dropped quickly, and I wondered how smart it was for us to have parked right out front after the other two businesses were closed. The lights dissolved as the car went on. But in the brief seconds of illumination, the rubbery desktop had flashed, and I noticed dents in it.

I put one of the blank pieces of paper down on the spot that would have been right in front of the desk chair. I picked up the pencil we just found and ran it in long, light lines over the paper. The indents from the desk started showing through.

Dobbins watched so closely his eyes got within inches of the paper. I was picking up a lot of gibberish in the indents and hoped, what with the desk looking almost new, that they were from the last owners. I realized, as I colored lightly over the paper, that I was capturing a few more "hieroglyphics." After doing this with all three sheets in different spots on the desktop, I had a few phone numbers, some doodles, and a couple of English words.

One doodle looked like a water goblet, or like the Holy Grail or something. It was surrounded in foreign language characters. A few English characters looked half-baked, like the writer hadn't been scribbling hard enough. Two lines looked obviously like phone numbers. One was followed by the English words "Englewood Dist.," and I gathered the second word was short for
distributors.
Then in the upper left-hand corner came a whole name, Uri Gulav, and an 800 number, wherein I couldn't make out the end. In the lower corner came up the name Omar Hokiem with numbers beside it. Another phone number, perhaps? Only the last four numbers were legible—0324.

Dobbins put his finger under a scratch that could have been the first three numbers and grunted in frustration. Then, he pointed to the doodle.

"What does that look like to you?" he asked me.

"Water goblet?" I guessed.

He kept shaking his head. "Don't you think it looks more like a water
tower
?"

Our eyes met after searching the doodle. Yeah, I supposed it looked like a water tower. There were eight lines running out the bottom of it in a semicircle, and one of them had another thicker line running through the middle of it, as if to cut it in half. That line was really dark.

So then? We both cracked up. This was nuts. I supposed you could make an elephant doodle look like tic-tac-toe if it suited your needs.

Suddenly, I didn't know what the hell I was doing there. I was a responsible older brother. I was a paramedic, or at least I was more than halfway there, and this sort of behavior was not up my alley.

"Dobbins, we're fucking breaking and entering," I noted.

He said nothing at first, but then, "It's for Owen and Rain. Cora, too."

Whatever. I didn't really think, after that sudden burst of sanity, that we would find anything in this scribble except doodles and phone numbers important to any retail store ... and the name Omar Hokiem was probably their choice of shoe box distributors.

"Let's get out of here," I suggested. I stuffed the penciled sheets of paper into my pocket, and we beat it through the dark corridor and came around to the car just as the sun set.

CORA HOLMAN
MONDAY, MARCH 4, 2002
6:10
P.M.

MY EYES WANDERED halfway open. There was Aleese, staring right at me with her black pirate eyes. "It still stinks like garlic and apples around here. Jesus, that's awful—"