Streams of Babel (3 page)

All the guys on wrestling were gearing up for the time of their lives. I guess I was, too, but still. I felt like I would love six weeks on a deserted island, though Mom always said a weekend would balance everything out.

I reached for my two-liter of Dr Pepper and a bag of pretzels, grabbed the remote, and put my feet up on the coffee table, which always killed Scott, because he kept it clean with Windex. But he wasn't home, so I could relax without any guilt fest. Everything was cool, until the phone started in.

"I'm not home!"

My mom picked up. "This is Janice ... Hi, Stenger. Nope, not home, hon. Try Bob Dobbins's house. I'll tell him to call you when he comes in, okay?"

She hung up, and I couldn't have counted to five when my cell phone pitched in. It was in my backpack, tossed by the front door. I glared at the light that flashes green all the way through my backpack, then I went back to ESPN and hockey. Mom walked over to fix the drape I'd left cockeyed, reached a hand in the pack, and checked out the caller ID.

"It's Myra." She made a sour face.

I just shook my head. Myra McAllister broke up with me last week, and all this week she was having seller's remorse. But the memory of her words cut two feet into me sometimes. "
You know what your problem is, Owen? You're a freak of nature. I have never seen anybody who can do so many things so well, and your heart is not in any of it. Including going out with me.
"

I said, "Myra, that is so not true." But I knew it
was
true.

The whole argument started after the coach pushed me up to this officer from West Point after a Horizons assembly for seniors. The officer already knew my name somehow. Well, Myra was still upset that I hadn't jumped into the lap of a Georgetown football recruiter the week before, so when I told this West Point officer, "I still don't know what I want to do,"
Myra told me I would end up shucking clams off the Atlantic City beaches. There wasn't too much I could say back.

Mom was holding my cell phone and bleeping through my caller ID. "Before that it was ... Dobbins, Jon Dempsey, Adrian Moran. Where's the party?"

I grabbed the remote again and climbed through the channels, away from the sports. Thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, AMC.
Lawrence of Arabia.
I recognized the first five minutes scrolling before my face and thought,
Very, very cool.

"Dempsey's," I muttered.

"Why is he having a party on a school night?" she asked.

"It's not a school night. Teacher Development Day tomorrow," I reminded her.

"I take it you're not going." She came over behind the couch, bent over, and kissed me on the face. "You know, you don't have to play all these sports, Owen."

"It's not that." I pulled away from her.

"Then, what is it?"

I didn't know. Just
noise.
I never talked about my moods from hell, because who would get it? I figured I could just sit and watch something very cool like
Lawrence of Arabia
and not be a jerk in public.

The phone rang again as Scott came in the door. He was closer to the cordless than Mom was.

"
I'm not home!
" I shouted again.

Mom was tousling my hair now, which was normal, but she'd gotten even more touchy-feely lately, it seemed. Ever since she got sick a few weeks ago. "And if you want me to tell the coach to quit throwing recruiters at you, it's no problem."

"No! Just gimme ten feet. Sorry, Mom, but—"

"He caught Mom's flu. Lying down," my brother said into the phone, and I shot an evil glance at him through the kitchen doorway. "Nope, not coming. Call him tomorrow."

He hung up, parked his paramedic jacket on a hook behind the kitchen door, and came into the living room.

"Do you have to tell them I'm sick?" I griped. "Sounds wimpy."

"Sick in the head." He swatted my hair on his way past and plopped down beside me. "If I tell them you're not here, they keep calling back every five minutes. I'm not your ... lying social secretary, dig? What's up? That douche bag from over on the Gold Coast get to you worse than you're letting on?"

He grabbed my bag of pretzels, stared at the TV.

"She's not a douche bag."

"That's generous of you."

Since I couldn't exactly deny anything on Myra's long list of my weirdness traits, I sat there trying to decide why I didn't feel all that upset. She had some problems of her own, maybe that was it.

"She's all right, she just ... gets drunk. You ever been at a party with a slurring, giggling, drunk girl who totally stinks of tired booze?"

"
Mm-hm.
" He sent his eyebrows up and down a few times. "They get even better after the party."

I grunted. "That's romantic"

He kept watching me, crunching on his pretzel way too loud. "You know, if you don't get over this notion that you're holding out for love, I'm gonna have to call up Candy Cane, have a bunch of your buddies tote her over here."

Candy Cane is this hooker from Atlantic City who had been
hired by the crazier guys for parties when Scott was a senior. My friends hadn't done the Candy Cane routine yet.
Whew
on that one. For the most part, stuff like that had all the appeal of sticking my face in a bucketful of other people's spit.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah." I grabbed the bag of pretzels back. "I'm a freak of nature."

"No, you are not." He slapped my knee and swung it from side to side. "You are ...
extraordinary,
and don't forget it. Hey. Wanna watch
Superman
?"

I bit into a pretzel, smiling. I used to watch the movie
Super man
when I was around eleven and totally related to this gigantic, spazzy kid who dropped into this perfect little American town, where everybody's great—and yet, he just can't get comfortable. And it was kind of easy for me to dream up strange ideas, like our dad was a superhero. Mom used to avoid questions about who and where our father was by joking that we came from a bolt of lightning that dropped from heaven. I used to actually hope it was true. When you're five-ten in sixth grade, already kicking field goals from the thirty-yard line—
but wishing you were off in the woods with your dog
—it helps to think of yourself as some mutated version of a Clark Kent.

Fortunately, I quit growing last year—at six-four. I won the South Jerseys in wrestling at 189 after pinning two guys, one from Ocean City and one from Toms River, and then I overheard a
Press
reporter telling another that "Owen Eberman probably just peeled ten thousand off that kid's scholarship" to some school I can't remember. He was laughing. I guess anyone else would have thought,
Oh well.
But I was like,
That sucks ... why am I doing this?

"Nah, no
Superman,
" I said. "You wait. Now that my phone's
not ringing, somebody's going to walk through the door any minute, and then we'll have to explain why we're watching
Superman.
"

He tossed the remote in my lap. "Your call, bro."

He got up. I could hear him in the kitchen, chasing around behind Mom with the third degree. "Did you take your temperature? Why not? Did you pick up the results of your blood work, or do I have to do everything around here?"

"No, you don't have to do everything, hon. 'Fever of Unknown Origin.'"

That didn't make Scott look too happy, though it was a relief to me. I had started getting scared that Mom had leukemia or something. She had looked fine today, but for almost a month it had been three good days, two bad days, two good days, three bad days. Scott took three tubes of blood from her, after she refused to see a specialist, and left them at Saint Ann's lab. She's just not a doctor person.

"...only thing I had today was a headache," she was telling him.

"You take anything?"

"Yes."

"Did it go away?"

Silence.

"Well, why don't you go lie down? Go watch a movie with Owen? He'll give you the remote."

There went my night in front of the tube. I glanced down at this big envelope under my ankle and froze, like I did every time I noticed it. Mom had tossed it at me last week when I was complaining about all these recruiters being up my shorts already. I don't know how long ago she'd gotten it, but it landed in my lap and she said, "You're not ready to think about this now. But if I had any betting money, I would bet that in a few years, you could happily end up here."

I stared at the return address again in its dark, thick typeface.
Princeton Theological Seminary.

Scott was making her sit in the kitchen chair while he took her temperature. This is what I didn't get: For all my brother probably hopping on Candy Cane and whoever else was drunk enough, and for all his foul mouth and domineering attitude, he was far less selfish than I was. He always came in here thinking about Mom first thing, and I was too wrapped up in my own noise-and-mauling damage. And she'd been talking about telling the coach to give me some breathing room, and having brochures sent to me from Princeton, like she had the time.

She never stopped working for people who can't afford to pay her, and she never had a dime extra, which explained why we only had one TV. Scott agreed with her about me and Princeton. I just didn't get it.

"Here, Mom. Watch what you want." I held the remote out to her as she zoomed away from Scott's evil paramedic meddling. He went rooting for a cold pack he'd said he would crack for her headache.

"I'll watch what you want, Owen."

"No. I'll watch what you want." I had to force it out, but the major sacrifice got me feeling somewhat in their league of unselfishness.

"I finally rented
Joan of Arc,
thinking you'd be doing homework."

Joan of Arc. A Mom special. A female-superhero-superdeluxo-the-woman-saves-the-day chick flick. Double, triple, quadruple damn.
"That's fine, Mom."

Then, there was a knock at the door, and I lost it. Took the Lord's name in vain, which makes Mom really unhappy. And just to make me feel worse, she said to Scott, "And whoever it is, we have finished lying tonight. I can't stand lying, even to keep my boys out of a party, where surely there is trouble to be found. If you don't want to see somebody, Owen, don't run up to your room and think I'll tell somebody you're not here."

Mom patted my cheek on the way past, and I could feel her hand was all too warm, now that I was paying attention. I just chucked the envelope back on the table, listening to Scott peal off with the truth to the person at the back door.

"You don't wanna come in here, Rain. He's in one of his moods. Yeah, one of those watch-TV, don't-touch-me, don't-talk-to-me, I'm-not-home things."

"Oh, he'll talk to
me.
" Rain's ski jacket rustled as she tried to push past him, and I shut my eyes.

Rain Steckerman lived kitty-corner to us, and if you were in the mood to see no one, she was about the last person you'd want to have over. Rain was a captain on two of her four sports, was the life of every party, and never had my social breakdowns. She had a car but couldn't drive it half the time because her dad was chronically taking the keys from her for breaking curfew. She didn't do much wrong while she was out, but she just couldn't stand to leave a party until it had fizzled down to the loadies, herself, and whomever she drove.

Fortunately, she knew about my moods and never busted my stones. I think she was so popular because she didn't know how to pass judgment.

"Owen?" she shouted in the door. "Please let me in. I won't touch you, I promise. It's an emergency, and this time I really mean it!"

"Emergency" meant she still didn't have a date to the prom, and it was nearly March.

"At your own risk," Scott muttered, and she came barreling in as Mom put the video in the machine.

"Hey, Mrs. E, sorry to bust in when you're sick, but I didn't know where else to come." She threw off her ski jacket and flopped down beside me. Her hair was still wet from swimming, and her cheeks were all red like she'd lost her car keys again and walked it from school.

"You're going to catch pneumonia," I lectured. "You got individual championships tomorrow, right?"

"Right."

"You gonna do us proud?" I asked as she put a hand on her chest, out of breath.

"It's in the bag. Fifty yard, at any rate. I was losing air on the butterfly, which is a truly frightening experience if your nickname happens to be Iron Lung. Listen to this wheeze."

She breathed in, and I stuck my head closer to her neck. Definitely a wheeze. "How'd you get sick at a time like this? Danny Hall keeping you up all night?"

"We had a fight on Monday. He told me I'm domineering, which is so not true. I haven't talked to him since. Can't blame this on him."

"Well, this time you kept a boyfriend for ... three weeks?
Maybe you're getting a little handle on that domineering thing, Rain." I cracked up.

She balled up her fist at my humor. "Mrs. E, I said I wouldn't touch your son, so don't let me hit him!"

I put an arm up, just in case she came through.

"You probably caught it from me," Mom said, and Rain dropped her fist, distracted.

"This is bad, Mrs. E. Dad won't let me swim if he hears my death rattle. He's got those FBI detective ears, you know? I know I can talk in front of you. You've covered for us before, right?"

Mom groaned and dropped into the chair with her hand over her eyes.

Rain turned to Scott. "Dude, I need a miracle drug and a place to lay low until it kicks in. Can you guys help me out?"

He laughed, cracking the cold pack and holding it up as he moved toward Mom.

"Does this look like a miracle drug?" He laid it on Mom's forehead and held up his hands, waggling his fingers. "These are just ... normal hands, darling. Take two aspirins and go to bed."

"I can't go home! All the lights are on, which means my dad's over there. I'll never get past his eagle eyes. And I know I said I wouldn't touch you, Owen, but check this out."

She took my hand and laid it on her forehead. That's when I realized her red face wasn't from walking home. She was burning up. I made the hatchet sign on my neck and raised my hands helplessly at Scott.