Fire Will Fall (3 page)

"But keep all that to a minimum for your own sakes," Miss Haley went on. "Your resistance is low. You could seriously compromise your health with a germ that someone else's body is fighting quite well. Don't let people sneeze on you. And
don't
swap spit, and certainly
don't
swap anything more personal—not with friends or among yourselves."

Among yourselves.
Even I admit that had an incestuous ring to it, and Rain didn't want to dignify it with a response.

Rain moved past it quickly. "I just want my life back. How soon until they expect us to be back to normal?" She had asked that only yesterday. And the day before and the day before. The answer was always, "Soon, we hope!"

She didn't expect the answer to be any different, I guess, and her cheerful face suddenly fell under the weight of some thought. The words "don't swap spit" kind of hung in the air. I sensed it was related. You don't usually have to wait long to hear what Rain is thinking. Out it came.

"Miss Haley. Are you ... trying to say that what we have works sort of like an STD?"

Sexually transmitted disease. Ew.
My mind doesn't twist the way Rain's does. We drank Q3 from faucets. We didn't pick it up in the back seat of a car. But Miss Haley's smile wandered around her face.

"Well, you can't think of it that way," she stumbled.

"Really? How am I supposed to think of it?" Rain's tone was edgy.

"You're supposed to think you have a
germ.
You'd be told the same thing if you had mono. Look, every major drug research company in the world is contributing to your cure. Whoever hits the jackpot will get major publicity, will rule the drug industry. Believe me, they're working day and night."

"But Miss Haley. Could we have this thing forever?" Rain asked.

The answer to that:
Yes, yes, yes.
We'd been told quite a few times: There may be no way to "cure" the germ; we might spend our lives trying to "control" the germ. It just had not been put in a sexual context before, though now that it was here, I thought,
hel-lo?

Then I stood up. "I don't even care right now. Except, I'm afraid I
will
start caring if Rain doesn't give it a rest—"

Which got Rain started on how I can't talk about anything, and in a flash, Miss Haley was between us, pushing me toward the elevator. "You go, and let me talk to her."

Cora opted to follow me. She patted my arm while we waited for the elevator, radiating sympathy. Cora is a giant sympathy machine. She even said, "I'm sure you guys will be back to your normal lives very soon."

The way Cora talked, you would almost think this whole adventure had everything to do with us and nothing to do with her. It melted my heart usually, but now I was distracted.

Okay, so we're getting out, but we're in Convent Land, can't have sex, can't even kiss,
I thought, trying the concept on for size. Nothing had really changed for any of us, except Scott, because he'd been sort of a wild man. I tried to focus on that nothing-had-changed part, but even
my
mind was going,
Five weeks? Five years? Twenty years?

So in the limo, I was pretty upset with Miss Haley and Dr. Godfrey. Some things are better left unsaid. And I knew Rain was feeling better than me physically and if I was doing the five-weeks-five-years-twenty-years thing, then surely she was, too.

Cora had set three stacks of cards on the seat between her and me. I knew her system: One stack was "opened," the second was "unopened," and the last was "addressed to one of us instead of all four of us." Some people were nice enough to send four cards. I took a few from the "not addressed to all of us" pile. Three for me and one for Rain were right on top. I got more mail than the other three, though the reasons left me paralyzed. This first one was pretty typical.

Dear Owen,

I am fifteen and I live in Nebraska and I saw you in People mag and on the TV and Internet. I think you should be in movies. I can't believe this happened to someone hot like yourself. When you recover I will go out with you, here is my phone number—

I tossed it beside me. The first month, I got several of these a day. At first I thought,
That's nice. People are trying to make us feel better,
and every girl thought she was the only one to say that, I guess. But I was the only one of us who got a steady stream on this theme. They had started driving me batty, but especially right now. I dropped the other two addressed to me on top of it and picked from the "unopened/addressed to all of us" pile.

Dear Cora, Rain, Owen and Scott:

Then came the rhyming part. If we read all the Hallmark rhymes, we would never get to the bottom of our mail.

I hope they catch all the guys who did this to you. No lethal injections. They deserve to be hung. On television.

I laid that one aside, too. Quickly. If I saw a card that mentioned "the guys who did this" I almost always closed it really fast and forced my brain somewhere else. Rain and Cora and I decided we did better to think of ourselves as merely "under the weather" as opposed to "victimized." Because sometimes I would start thinking of "those guys" and something like a violent earthquake would start, though it was inside me. I'm supposed to be the guy who can put myself in anyone's shoes, including a terrorist's. I'd like to keep it that way.

Rain, Miss Talk It Out, couldn't stand her silent self any longer. Out her comment flew, like one of those squirrels that gets in your walls and shoots out from under the bed in the middle of the night, hissing at you.

"What was the point in Miss Haley saying all of that? What a bummer."

Hiss, scratch, hiss, hiss.

"All of what?" Scott murmured without opening his eyes.

"Ohhh..." she said snidely. "She basically said we're in the Clap Club. The Gonorrhea Guild. Why was I so dumb for so many years? Now I'll have no memories. I'm one of those girls who had, like, two sexual thoughts in high school. One sophomore year, and one junior year."

I smiled. She was probably exaggerating, but not by much.

Scott probably smiled on the inside. "Keep it that way."

"I think I was just getting around to my senior year thought when Danny Hall broke up with me. I was always thinking, 'I'll just ... think of it after that next big game.' When you're on four sports that win like crazy, that doesn't leave you much time. Now it'll be like telling myself, 'Don't think of an elephant.' What do you think of?"

"Are you thinking of getting laid tomorrow?" Scott asked drowsily.

"
Ew.
"

"Next week?"

"What, do I look like Jeanine?"

"Jeanine the Machine," Scott droned, trying to smile, but he didn't quite make it.

"You're missing the point," Rain said.

"No, we're not. Nobody is missing any point. Except maybe Cora..." Scott opened one eye to gaze at Little Miss Reading Mail Like Crazy. To Cora, chickens don't lay eggs. She ignored him nicely. "Live in the now, Rain."

I agreed. "You've got your life. Worry about the rest later."

I was glad Cora was sitting between us. I was suspicious Rain had wanted to hit me a few times recently, and her energy wafted into my space, making me pull farther back into the corner.

"This is exactly what I'm talking about," she said, doing that sniffing thing again.

Just. Shut. Up.
I shut my eyes to fake asleep, but that didn't silence her.

"Why is it lately that you can't feel bad about something at the same time I feel bad about it? When I'm up, you're down. When I'm down, all you can do is make really glib statements like 'you've got your life.' Why can't you ever be on my wavelength?"

Because whatever your opinion is, you suck up all the oxygen in the room. There's nothing left to say and no air left to say it with.

"Well?" she kept going.

"I don't think that
is
glib, Rain," I argued, then stammered over what I'd planned to say next. It was that I went around all the time thinking of things that we had to be thankful for. I'd gotten the idea from my Young Life leader, Dan Hadley. Young Life is a church youth group that meets on Wednesdays. I'd been spiraling the day Dan came to visit me at St. Ann's. Dan had survived three bouts of leukemia as a kid.

He suggested, "When you get like this, thank God for everything you can think of that's good. Even things you might never have noticed otherwise, like that bird that just flew by your window. You'll feel your energy shift. You won't be so consumed by those negative what-ifs."

To my amazement, it honestly worked ... most of the time. It had since become a habit. But when I had tried to share this with Scott, I was accused of being "religious," like that's some sin. And Rain just wasn't there yet, wasn't thinking of God in any terms except that he had allowed her senior year to be train-wrecked.

In the past week, when Rain couldn't get what she wanted out of me, she resorted to twisting the knife. "You never talk horny. Sometimes I think you're gay."

My eyes snapped open. Last November, Rain had called me from this party, all crying, saying Jeanine had single-handedly finished off a bottle of Boone's Farm wine in fifteen minutes and had now been in the backyard "on her knees" for going on half an hour. In our neck of the woods, "on your knees" does not mean throwing up. Jeanine is one of those people who should not ever drink. So, I drove over there and pulled her away from these guys by the hair. Rain and I took her to Wawa for a cappuccino and an in-your-face fest. Some people went around school afterward saying I was gay. Sometimes I feel there is this "charming" idea in our "charming" American culture that there are no plain and simple good guys out there. If you don't line up in the backyard for the Jeanine show, it's because you're gay.

Scott came to life, and I had to admire him for handling this so well. He used to get angry all the time. Now he couldn't afford to. He had an aneurysm in his head that could blow under too much stress.

He simply said, "Rain. Stop calling names. Stop torturing my brother. I can get you a shrink tomorrow if you want to talk about this, but the fact is ... nobody in this car wants to talk about it. If you can't button it up, go sit in the front."

He laid his head back, letting out a long breath of pent-up energy. He obviously had something on his mind, and this was all a big distraction.

My brother can be intense. Even his jokes have a kind of backhanded feel to them. But any subject change had to be a good one. "What's up, bro?"

SCOTT EBERMAN
FRIDAY, MAY 3, 2002
7:22
P.M.
ROUTE 9

"
I
NEED ... A JOB
," I said.

Rain picked up her yearbook and stared at a page. Her friends had gotten everyone in the class of around six hundred kids to sign it, and the rule was, "You can't put 'get well soon.' You have to be original." Every page was literally covered with pen scrawl.

"You mean ... a paycheck?" she asked impatiently, obviously still steaming. "You don't need money, not until you get better."

I ignored the limitations of her vision. "How can I talk your dad into letting me work for USIC? Whatever it is they're doing, I bet it's not all that hard. Making phone calls ... checking up on leads about where those guys are hiding..."

She let the book drop down and stared at me, torn between her natural sympathy and her desire to get even for my pushing the pause button on her sore subject of we-may-never-have-sex, ever. Her tone wasn't spiteful. "In all the years my dad was in the FBI, I never, ever heard him spill one work-related secret. How likely do you think it is that he's going to spill USIC secrets about terrorists to you?"

That was putting it bluntly. "Thanks for your help and support."

Score: Even. She broke into a smile. "Meagan Monahan wrote, 'Thanks for always being the designated driver. When you come back, the whole hockey team is taking you out and being
your
designated driver!' Dang. Why did I waste all of high school being the designated driver?"

"Must be nice to have nothing to think about except high school." I shouldn't have said it, but blurting had replaced yelling in my life by necessity.

I was reminded of one strange miracle: Having already had one aneurysm removed from my heart while another lived on in my head, I had fewer of our weird headaches than the other three. I believe the reason is that I'd found ways to be a fighter. I was proactive in the medication we were being given, and even did online research on drug cocktails that might better restore us to our former selves. But I had gone about as far as I could with all of that. A cocktail was being designed, but wouldn't be ready until September—or that was the first promised date from any of the research teams.

I shut my eyes and lay my head back. I had not been in a limo before, ever. My girlfriend of the hour around my senior prom, Sandy Copeland, was the daughter of the fire chief. The two of us and Ronnie Dobbins and his date thought it would be a riot to go on the back of the fire truck. We were not the most elegant folks to arrive, but we'd been the loudest. So, the limo was cool. Under the circumstances. But while I tried to pretend we were rich, I'm not a great pretender.

The car turned, finally. I lowered the window a couple of inches, just to smell the reality. Branches swished against the car, flinging raindrops onto my face.
My god, this is out in the sticks,
my head echoed, and with each passing minute I felt a little more sorry for Rain. I had been out here once recently with Mr. Steckerman on a four-star day, but the drive itself was now gone from me. Meds.

Finally, the road opened up very wide, and beyond it was a pile of black boxes that reached up to the treetops, with little orange dots in the windows suggesting candles, though this was modern times and you had to infer they were the plug-in types of candles. It looked like a small city of candlelit windows in some sort of castle. It was to be home for god knows how long. Or how short.