Fire Will Fall (30 page)

"Henry?"

He turned. My normal ease with adults became twisted with the concept of him being attracted to me. My jaw bobbed. I'd only wanted to plan something with him for tomorrow. But I couldn't find the words. He smiled, looking relieved, surprisingly. I wondered if I could possibly have been making him nervous.

"I will call you," he said. "And if you're feeling better tomorrow, maybe you can help me find the perfect new darkroom on the property. I've got plenty of equipment."

That made me realize that all the equipment in the current darkroom, the one he could no longer enter, probably belonged to him. He was a nice person. USIC was putting on airs of superiority and assumption. Still, he left with a smile.

A thirty-year-old man.
I lay there performing an exercise I'd heard other girls discuss when they thought a teacher was hot. They tried to decide what the teacher had looked like and acted like in high school. A chronic subject was Mr. Duran, the physics teacher, who had been in his second year of teaching last year. He was twenty-three.

"He teaches physics! Definitely, he was a dork," Merrillee Witherspoon had decided. "Math Club material."

"Nah, he looks more to me like the invisible student. Not dorky, not cool," Rachel Mathers replied. "But once people get through college, they're not dorks or cool. So it doesn't matter. He's
hot
."

I tried to think about what Henry was like when he was in high school and came up with the same diagnosis as Rachel. He hadn't been a dork, just invisible. Like me. But I was not accustomed to looking even at Mr. Duran as
hot.
Henry was slender but not rail thin. He had dark wavy hair and blue eyes that ran close together over a straight nose, which gave his gaze intelligence and perception.
Thirty years old.

People
had done a special section on my mother's adventures across four continents, and I remembered the answer I had given when asked, "Do you want to follow in her footsteps?" I had said, "I've no desire to leave Trinity Falls. I'm going to Astor College, and after that, I just want to be normal." But to have a friend who was
thirty years old.
It cut into some adventurous side I wasn't even aware I had, almost making me forget about our health problems and how no easy answers were in sight.

I was like a hot-air balloon, rising, rising, until a strong hand clutched my door, and I heard voices in the corridor. I would know Scott Eberman's fingers anywhere, and they left me hovering but confused and anxious, like I was expected to jump from one hot-air balloon to another midflight.

"No, I'll talk to her," he was saying.

"Do you want me to come in, too?" Marg asked.

"No."

He pushed the door open and locked gazes with me as he walked to the foot of the bed. His eyes were still swollen, his expression flat. The lines under his eyes smacked of exhaustion, but he'd managed to come out of his bed in the past six hours while I had slept, and, just recently, to shower. His hair was half wet, half shiny and dry.

Scott had never knocked on our door at the hospital, assuming more a role of medic than fellow patient, but it felt a bit odd up here, like he was violating boundaries. Not that it mattered. His easy entrance smacked of entitlement.

His gaze was drawn away from mine only by the flowers, which caused him to fake a whiplash with his neck. I felt slightly horrified as he changed direction, grabbed the card, and read it. I had jumped hot-air balloons, I suppose, as I waited almost hopefully for some sign of jealousy. But he just gave me a slight pinch on the cheek that made me feel childish again, far more childish than having spent time with a thirty-year-old man had.

He passed slowly around the bed and dropped into the chair, staring at me. Staring and staring. I thought his sore throat may have returned.

"That was quite a show you put on last night and today," I said quietly, realizing it was a terribly backhanded remark—yet another that was more like Aleese, whom I suddenly imagined sitting square in the middle of my chest and staring at me. "
Don't you love him. Don't you dare.
" She had been nowhere when Henry was here.

He brought a bottle of water to his mouth, I sensed, to cover a smile. "That's what you call my brush with death? Quite a show?"

His eyes lit with humor as he swallowed. He liked my gremlin side. But it wasn't me. It was some "possessed" me. I wanted to reach out, take his strong hand, and tell him if he ever died I'd have no option but to follow. But Aleese sat firmly on my chest and refused to budge. I had a dawning revelation.

"
Was
it really a brush with death?"

His eyebrows went up and down, and his face turned serious. "Obviously, it wasn't. But it really, really hurt."

"So ... it was just a bad headache."

"Let's hope. My throat thing had moved up to my sinuses. That helped, too."

"It's just that ... our talk yesterday ... I thought you might be doing something to manipulate Mr. Steckerman into giving you a job."

"I told you men generally don't lie. On the Richter scale, that headache was a nine. I would not have let anyone shoot me full of morphine if I didn't need it."

"And signing the DNR form?"

"I hoped I hadn't signed my death warrant. I just knew Alan would catch wind of it."

He put the bottle to his lips again, looking totally serious, not like he expected me to laugh, which made me laugh. Men were forever confusing.

"So ... how'd you do the bloody nose?"

"How do most people get a bloody nose?" he asked impatiently, like he was suddenly sick of the subject. "I picked my boogers."

I threw the spare pillow over my face, and he waited patiently until I pulled it away again. It was a sharp contrast—entertaining a neat-as-a-pin professor, then a former quarterback donned in sweatpants and a sweatshirt with the sleeves cut out. Somehow, their age difference didn't show.

"We have news," he said finally, in a voice that was soft but not raspy.

"Good news?" I asked as the silence lingered.

He laughed. "I haven't decided yet. But ... it's news, and we have to make a decision, so I think we should keep it simple. The medical team in Minneapolis—the one that designed the drug protocol we're on—they've come up with a cocktail."

I felt my eyebrows rise in surprise. A cocktail was a familiar word, something we'd all been hoping for, which meant that many of the drugs we were taking could be administered once daily, with time-released substances doing the work of a nurse. It meant we could live a more normal life, perhaps go to school, or at least be free to take day trips.

"So soon?" I asked. "I thought you had said maybe in the fall."

"That's what the Tallahassee guys were telling Dr. Godfrey. The Minneapolis team says they've got it." He put his arms out and shrugged, looking less exuberant than I would have thought.

"So, what's wrong?"

"They ... want
one
of us to try it."

I lay waiting, and it wasn't until a half minute into the silence that I realized how haunting a decision this might be.

"Is it dangerous?" I asked.

He kept staring at the floor, and I marveled at how he could tackle a problem like this six hours after a headache so severe he'd been put on morphine. He still had a Band-Aid on his tricep that did little to hide the silver-dollar-size bruise left from the drip.

"I haven't talked to them on the phone yet to run them through the third degree, but obviously they are not going to send something over to us that they don't believe could vastly improve our quality of life, maybe even send that person into remission. However, the idea that they're insisting on sending it for
one
of us, and not all, smacks of risk factors. It's experimental, of course. Generally speaking, with cocktails there are fewer side effects, but there's also less efficacy. Some of the drugs we need the most might not work as well, and Dr. Godfrey's been saying for weeks that it's the drugs that are keeping us alive. It's like we're four soldiers in a foxhole, and we're deciding if one of us should run for reinforcements."

"It's like Russian..." I stopped myself, but he got my drift.

"Roulette." He stood up, walked to the window, and turned around to walk back again. His eyes stopped on my roses like he was seeing them for the first time, and he shook his head in what appeared to me to be annoyance.

"At the same time, if it
does
work the way the Minneapolis team hopes, then that person gets better faster." He grinned, and the positive energy actually made it to his eyes. "That person might be moving about freely in a month. That person might be able to start college in the fall and begin to forget all of this ever happened. And since we have this saying among us right now—'Keep it simple'—let's not go round and round about who's going to take it. I'm thinking it should be you."

We exchanged stares as I waited for him to say more, but he didn't.

"Why me?" It seemed to me I had less of a life to get back to than any one of them. "Why not Owen? He's the biggest health risk. Maybe he would benefit."

"He's
too
big a health risk. Same with me."

"But ... if it worked, your arteries would strengthen. You could get the surgery," I said. "I know how stir-crazy you are."

"Well, it looks like Alan is really serious, and I'm going to work for USIC. Don't worry about me right now. Besides, if something happened to me, Owen would have suffered a double loss. I honestly don't think he would live through that."

"What about Rain?" I asked.

"She's been taken off bed rest already, but they are trying to ignore questions that might not have great answers. You heard those guys this morning. She's out for the next thirty days. Let's say that she touched a WMD. They don't have an incubation period that's reliable, so they'll have to keep watching her. As for you, you've had addictions in your family. I'm concerned about you being on all these drugs for too long. The narcotics especially could be hot-wiring you for problems down the road."

I had tried so hard in life not to be like Aleese that I almost took offense. I could hear her laughing all over the place. I might have argued, except I thought of the flip side of this. If something were to happen to the person who took the new drug, I would be the least likely one to be missed. I glanced at my flowers, glanced at him, and found myself imagining any of those three having lost each other.

"I'll do it," I said.

He had been resting his forehead on his hand, and he continued to stare at the floor.
Such a brooder.
I turned sideways on the mattress, trying to position myself under his gaze, but he was still lower.

"Hel-lo? I said I'll do it. Be happy now."

He sat up, watching me half upside down, but without a sign of a smile yet. "If anything happens to you, I'll feel responsible. I'll never get over it."

"You're not responsible," I said, certain that all the implications had not hit me yet, but there was no point in worrying. I shut my eyes, waiting for one of his Perfect Ten head pats that never came. He got up and crossed the room, the flowers catching his gaze again.

He rolled his eyes and sighed. "Be careful," he said. "Mr. Professor. He's still a guy, and guys think only of one thing. Unless they're perverts who never came through the Oedipus stage of potty training."

"You're being silly again," I said. "And you're generalizing."

His eyes stopped on the framed photo, which had lain face inward against the side of the bed. He picked it up and looked at it. I bit my lip. I don't think he blinked or breathed for five seconds. Then he put it down again.

He stuck a finger out at me on his way out the door, but dropped it again with a sigh. "Just go back to sleep."

"Oh, for Pete's sake," I mumbled to myself after he closed the door. I was now straddling two hot-air balloons at four hundred feet up. But there was no point in getting out of bed to follow him, as I was certain he would find some USIC files to read before he burst with morbid curiosity.

RAIN STECKERMAN
SUNDAY, MAY 5, 2002
3:30
P.M.
TV ROOM

I
T WAS THE MOST BORING OF DAYS
. I wasn't allowed outside to wander and overexert myself, and we weren't supposed to watch TV, according to Dad. I almost decided to read a book. Owen spent the morning in the TV room reading
Searching for Eternity: A Scientist's Spiritual Journey to Overcome Death Anxiety,
which sounded like a total downer. Marg had let me downstairs to lie on the couch in the TV room, and I ended up merely flipping through channels to shows that used to make me laugh and turning the channel if a commercial break looked like it could break into news.

After lunch, Owen and I were back in the TV room yet again. Neither of us had bothered to discuss yesterday's almost-a-kiss. I'd noticed him sending a few defensive glances my way in the morning when I got too close to him—like he wanted to make sure I wasn't going into attack mode. I looked at the bad ending yesterday with some superstition. You try something, and a minute later you get bit by an invisible snake—that means the gods are against you. And the antivenin had done what Dempsey promised. I was half seasick, very tired, and not the least interested in thinking about elephants today. I hoped yesterday was just an initial reaction to Miss Haley, and now I was back to normal.

Owen had made a trip upstairs right after lunch, sticking to some promise he'd made to Scott about trying to climb the stairs at least four times a day. Now he gripped a video and huffed, out of breath.

"Cora was sleeping. I just walked in and took this. Think she'll be mad?"

"Who knows? All I can gather is that she really doesn't want to look at them herself. She's still afraid she'll catch her mother tap-dancing on a bar, drunk out of her tree, and flashing people. Supposedly the woman taped everything, like it was some compulsive tic. I wouldn't be surprised if she taped her own sex life."