Part 27 (2/2)
”I'm going to play with Crystal, Daddy. We'll be okay.”
”Don't lose track of your little sister.”
”I'm not going to get lost,” Britney said, annoyed.
The four of us crowded into the McCains' foyer, our numbers, my height, and Scott Donovan's girth making the rooms smaller. The last time I'd been here, Joel had looked like a CPR dummy, but today Mary was so buoyant and confident, I began to get my hopes up.
Mary escorted us into the stripped-down living room, where Joel lay on a tall hospital bed. His eyes were open, but other than that he looked like a man who'd just been thrown by a bull elephant, limp, dazed, broken. He wore a white T-s.h.i.+rt, a bedsheet obscuring whatever else he might have had on. To my great disappointment, he was pretty much the same gla.s.sy-eyed Joel we'd left four days ago.
Stephanie walked over and spoke his name, took his pulse, temperature, blood pressure, felt his brow, and began checking his extremities for signs of conscious or reflexive movement. I thought about trying to speak to him but couldn't get myself to do it in front of this many people. Anything I said would only make me look fatuous and show Joel off for the zombie he'd become. In fact, all I could think about was how full of life and humor Joel had been only weeks earlier.
I slipped out of the room and stepped onto the front porch, gently snicking the front door closed behind me. Across the street my girls were running in circles with two other children. Coming so soon after Stan's funeral, seeing Joel again had been ruinous, his twisted body dressed by somebody else, his facial muscles slack, the part in his hair crooked.
It would be a good many years before Joel got a funeral or the accolades Stan had received that morning. Not unless his mother-in-law fed him another apple. By the time they buried him, he would have spent a decade, perhaps several decades, lying in musty rooms by himself. It was the worst way to die.
A day at a time.
Alone.
Forgotten.
Joel and I had joined the fire department the same year. After my divorce he used to tease me about my dating habits, joking that I'd never met a woman I didn't want to dump. He claimed I had a pathological need to make each woman in the room fall in love with me so I could break her heart. It wasn't true. At least, not to the extent he claimed.
Standing alone on his porch, I thought about what he'd been trying to tell me. Joel had been relentless in trying to force me to see myself from a different perspective.
What hurt was that all those years I'd treated his comments as jokes and all those years he'd been right.
Joel had seen through me.
He'd said once I must have been a lonely child. How he'd come up with that diagnosis was beyond me, because everybody else in the department thought I was a happy-go-lucky guy, a.s.sumed I always had been.
Now, standing on his front porch, for the first time in years, perhaps ever, I was able to look at myself as an outsider might. I had had been a sad kid. Life at Six Points had been infinitely depressing and had worn me down physically, while suppressing my spirit, too. One only had to look at my choice of reading material during those years. been a sad kid. Life at Six Points had been infinitely depressing and had worn me down physically, while suppressing my spirit, too. One only had to look at my choice of reading material during those years.
I'd spent hours each day in the school library or the downtown Seattle Public Library, usually when I was supposed to be out on the streets proselytizing. The Sixth Element and William P. Markham had the longest list of banned books on earth, essentially any book Markham hadn't written, yet once I broke the tenet and began reading from outside sources, once I discovered the library, I found a whole new world. Hundreds, if not thousands, of new worlds.
I absorbed as much information about the universe outside our religion as possible.
I loved reading about war pilots, from the First World War right through Vietnam. There was something immensely compelling about the thought of being up in the wild blue while the rest of the world fought like barbarians below.
In addition to flying stories, I read every WW II escape memoir I could lay my hands on. I read about fliers slipping out of POW camps, about soldiers escaping from the Wehrmacht, about Jews, Communists, and gays escaping from the Gestapo. I read with relish and identified completely with men and women relating tortures at the hands of the n.a.z.is, and swore that if I was ever tortured, I would do everything in my power to survive and exact my revenge. What I hadn't realized until years later was that I had been tortured every day of my young life, and that my pitiful reprisals would eventually be launched against an old man in a nursing home.
Ironic that I should identify with prisoners of war so completely. Ironic also that I should dream incessantly of escape from a prison camp. It was my spirit that had been in prison.
Cultists lived in a fantasy world, and according to Joel I'd fallen into a fantasy world after my divorce, too, seducing and discarding women like a fisherman seducing and discarding trout in a ”catch-and-release only” stream. What an incredible b.a.s.t.a.r.d I was. It had probably been one of my exes who'd made the anonymous call to Shad and Stevenson accusing me of blowing up Caputo's trailer.
I was still thinking about all my exes when the front door opened behind me and Achara stepped outside. ”He was like that when you saw him before?”
”Yes.”
”Exactly like that?”
”Not exactly. When we saw him, he was choking on an apple.”
”Oh, G.o.d. How many others are there?”
”Two still alive in Tennessee that we know about and two more up here. Stephanie's sister and a woman over in the nursing home. Joel makes three. I'll be the fourth. Karrie? The young woman at the fire station? I don't know if you saw her. She'll be the fifth, although I doubt she'll talk to you about it.”
”I suppose it's possible Joel is the way he is because of his fall?”
”It's possible, but that's not what happened.”
”So you expect to be . . . ?”
”By Sunday.” I dropped my hands limply, made my facial muscles go slack, and feigned brain death. It was fun to watch the look of horror in Achara's eyes. Then, in case one of the neighbors thought I was mocking Joel, I relaxed the pose.
”That's not funny.”
”I thought it was hilarious.” Her brown eyes held my gaze. Somehow during our explanations yesterday at Canyon View, the magnitude of the tragedy had not impressed her. For all of his scientific distance, Donovan actually seemed more attuned to the personal impact of the syndrome, perhaps because he'd seen it up close in Tennessee. I'd sensed all along that he knew my pain.
”I feel dreadful about this.”
”Join the club.”
”No, I mean . . . If there was something we could do right now, this minute. I just . . .” She was whispering now and the ringing in my ears forced me to lower my head to hear.
”What are you two conspiring about?” Donovan had opened the door without a sound.
”I was just telling Jim I've turned down two offers to teach at Stanford.”
”Don't worry, Jimbo. We'll figure this out.”
Donovan's arrogance was almost as comforting as Achara's deception was puzzling. Why lie to Donovan? Weren't we all working on this together? I was beginning to wonder if she had her own agenda, if she was really committed to this quest.
”How can you say we're going to figure this out when there's so little time?” Achara said.
”Don't you worry. You're good at what you do. I'm good at what I do. Don't forget. I went through this once before and got stumped. It's not going to happen again.”
Gazing across the immaculate lawn at the black Suburban, I said, ”Nice rig. You stop to get it washed on the way into town?”
Donovan said, ”On the drive out here some idiot teenage kid threw a tomato across three lanes of freeway and just about took out our winds.h.i.+eld. I tried to get his license, but they took the exit to Highway 18 right after that.”
When she spotted me watching her from across the cul-de-sac, Allyson jogged halfway across the quiet street and shouted, ”Do we have to go now?”
”Not yet.”
She ran back to the game, laughing. I found myself looking to see whether her hands were clear, but my vision was blurred, and at this distance I would have needed binoculars even if it wasn't. Jesus. My kids might have it. Somebody was responsible for this. I didn't know who, but somebody had to be. Thinking about my kids getting it made me want to kill whoever was responsible.
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