Salvation City (16 page)

Even making faces, even with the silly colander on her head, she looked beautiful. She was almost sixteen, and a head taller than Cole. She had rapture-child blond hair and gray eyes with gold dust in them, and her cheeks had the kind of plump round freshness you don’t see much except on babies. It had never occurred to Cole before that a nose could be beautiful, in the same way it hadn’t occurred to him that ears or feet could be beautiful. Nor could he have said what it was about Starlyn’s nose that made it beautiful, but he could have stared at her profile for hours. It confused him, this attraction to, of all things, a girl’s nose, and it shamed him, as did the bizarre desire that seemed to have come from the same confusing place, a place he hadn’t known existed in him before: the desire to suck her earlobes.

Darlin’ Starlyn. Cole did not have the courage to call her that, even if everyone else did. Mason had other names for her as well: Peaches ’n’ Cream (those cheeks). Sweet Little Sixteen. Her birthday was just a few weeks away, and a surprise party was planned.

In the kitchen Starlyn glanced in his direction and, as usual, appeared not to see him. Tracy wiped the tears from her eyes and smiled in a way Cole knew was meant to make him feel he wasn’t intruding. But his feeling of intruding was in fact too much for him; he dropped his plate clatteringly into the sink and immediately left the room again.

Anyway, as he thought later, he would have felt guilty joining them in making fun of Boots. Cole knew that a lot of people besides Tracy had problems with Boots, and that he tried even PW’s patience. But of all the people in Salvation City who’d been kind to Cole, Boots Ludwig may have been the kindest. He was a little deaf, Boots, and like many people who don’t hear well he sometimes forgot that others hear just fine. In the beginning, when Cole first arrived, he got used to hearing Boots murmur “tragic, tragic” whenever Cole happened to be around.

He’s my nineteenth grandchild, Boots told everyone. Whenever he came to the house he blessed Cole with something, and it was always something good, like a new video game, something he’d made sure Cole really wanted. And he called Cole “my dear,” as if Cole were a girl. Except that Boots didn’t like girls. Girls and women were not his dears; girls and women chafed him. He didn’t appear to like Tracy much, he was the only person in Salvation City not smitten with Starlyn, and he seemed angry with his wife most of the time.

“Poor Heidi,” Tracy said. “If it wasn’t for her, I’m not sure I could go on being nice to that man. All this nonsense about some innocent little candy! And frankly, if bad breath isn’t from the devil I don’t know what is.”

 

 

 

Cole agreed to be on the radio even though he didn’t want to do it, and even though he’d been told several times he didn’t have to do it. He agreed because he wanted to please Boots, and he wanted to please PW. But no sooner had he agreed than he began to regret it, afraid that he was going to let them down. But then he couldn’t bring himself to say he’d changed his mind, afraid it would make him look like a coward.

He knew all about how this could happen, how your intentions could be not just good but noble, and still somehow you end up disgracing yourself and disappointing others. People you loved, people you wanted to make happy, people you wanted so badly to think well of you.

And now he would be forced to remember a time he had been trying to forget. He’d be forced to talk about things he didn’t want, or even know how, to talk about.

His father used to accuse his mother of not being able to let anything go. She needed to learn to put the past behind her, instead of dwelling on what couldn’t be changed. “Don’t be like your mother,” he warned Cole, “unless you want to be depressed.”

And wasn’t PW forever saying that letting go of the past was an important part of being a Christian?

“You take Paul. He had to learn to forget the bad things that had happened to him, forget the bad things he himself had done as Saul. ‘Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the heavenly prize to which God in Christ Jesus is calling us upward
.
’ That’s how he tells it in Philippians. Forget and press on. That’s what we’ve all got to do.”

But now they were asking Cole to
remember
.

 

 

 

He remembered being allowed to stay in bed for days after he arrived, even though he wasn’t sick anymore. So many cots were packed into the room, you had to walk sideways. All through the night you’d be wakened by noise: a boy shouting in his sleep, a boy sobbing, two boys having a fight.

All day long boys came and went, some approaching Cole’s bed to stare but rarely addressing him, and he’d watched one of them steal another one’s sneakers, shaking a silencing fist at Cole before making off with them.

He wasn’t sick anymore, but it still hurt sometimes just to think. He still zoned out, momentarily forgetting what he was doing or where he was; he still had memory gaps. He felt like a man in a spy movie he’d seen, whose enemy injects him with drugs to skew his mind. But Cole knew his own mind was actually getting better.

In the hospital, after his first bout of fever, he’d had to be told all over again that his father was dead. Pause. His mother was dead, too.

Passed
, they said.
Your mother passed a week ago.

Immediately, his temperature had shot up again.

He knew, of course, that it was a lie, for when he was alone she came to him. She was working on a plan to get him out. His job for now was to go along with his captors, to play dumb. He must understand, they were in serious danger: these aliens were capable of anything. He must be vigilant. One slip on his part could doom them both.

But he did slip. He panicked one day and bit one of them, the one he saw most often, a woman, tall and green, like a spear of asparagus. Always frowning. She and her evil syringe. After he bit her he was put in restraints. He cursed and cursed. To punish him they loosed stinging insects between his sheets. Because of the restraints he was at their mercy. He screamed and howled. He didn’t care anymore what the aliens knew, or what they would do to him, he kept calling for his mother. She came one last time. It was no good, no good, she said, twisting her hands; she couldn’t attempt a rescue now, it was too risky. She had to go meet his father. Not a word about coming back.

He had never been so frightened, he had never known that kind of pain. And when it was over, when the fever and the delirium had left him for good, it was as if part of his identity had vanished, too. As if half his life had never happened.

He was told that, after his relapse, he had not been expected to recover. “But you put up such a fight!” said the doctor, pumping his fist. Dr. Hassan was unmistakably proud of him, though Cole didn’t see how a sick person deserved credit for getting better. Dr. Hassan and other members of the hospital staff were gathered around Cole’s bed. Except for Dr. Hassan, they were all in green. They all beamed down at him, they were all proud, and after Dr. Hassan spoke, everyone clapped and the nurse Cole had bitten cuffed his cheek playfully with her bandaged hand.

Cole hadn’t been able to look any of them in the face. He hadn’t been able to say anything, either. He would never have said what he was thinking, and he was angry with Dr. Hassan, he was angry with all of them. How could they not know how he felt?

Eden knew. “Sometimes when things turn out this way, survival can feel like betrayal.”

She told him that his parents were together now, they were together in heaven, from where they were able at all times to look down and see him. He knew the story, knew that this was all it was, a story: his parents themselves had told him so. He knew that they were not able to see him, and that he would never see them again. This was what their being dead meant. And yet his mind could not take it in, that they had been here on earth—never a time in his life when they had not been here—but now they were
nowhere
. They had become
nothing
.

But you can’t be angry at nothing, can you? And he was most definitely angry at them.

None of it had had to happen, he believed. His parents had not had to die. He had not had to get sick himself. He refused to accept that nothing could have been done. His parents had been stupid, careless. His father was right: they had blown it.
The whole world had blown it.
He remembered all those warning articles he’d read. Why hadn’t they been prepared? Someone was responsible. Someone had to be to blame. And indeed, now that the virus had passed, this was what
everyone
was saying.

“Now is not the time for accusations and finger pointing. We would do better to join hands and look not back but ahead. Let us take up the vast work before us, let us pull together, as one nation, bound in sorrow by this terrible tragedy but full of hope for our future.”

When the president appeared for the first time after her illness, thin, hollow-eyed, and still so frail that she had to support herself on two canes, even among those who hadn’t voted for her—even among those who hated her—there was an outpouring of emotion. America’s mother had been brought to the brink of death, but she had survived. And America would survive, too.

 

 

 

In memory, it was as if he’d never left Chicago. The move to Little Leap and the house he lived in briefly there and the school he so briefly attended—all this he remembered hardly at all. Ironically, some of his most distinct memories turned out to be false. His father had brought home a new dog, a stray he’d almost hit with his car. A feisty young sheepdog that chased a cat under the porch of the house across the street and got into a fight with another dog, an old Labrador.

Zeppo, he’d named the new dog.

Only there was no Zeppo.

Dr. Hassan promised that, in time, his mind would return to normal. “Maybe you won’t be able to remember everything you want to remember
when
you want to remember it, but for all practical purposes your memory should function just fine.”

No one said anything, though, about what recovering certain memories might do to him.

For the first time in his life, he had migraines. He had ringing in his ears. He had constant nightmares and episodes of sleepwalking.

Occasionally, when he spoke to someone, the person would look at him blankly. Rather than what Cole had intended to (and heard himself) say, out came gibberish.

Once when he tried to stand up from a chair, his legs would not obey.

If people hadn’t kept telling him such things were also happening to other flu victims, he might have gone out of his mind for good.

Nurse Asparagus told him about a famous writer who’d been a child math prodigy until he came down with a case of common flu and mysteriously lost his gift. “We can’t explain it, but we know a fever high enough to cause delirium can scorch things right out of the brain.”

The boy in the bed next to Cole’s had spoken both Spanish and English before he got sick but now could speak only Spanish. Another nurse translated: “Where are my parents?” “I see cockroaches!” “No more needles, they hurt!”

And Cole would hear many other stories like this, including stories of people who’d come through the flu blind or paralyzed or mentally retarded, or who’d go on to develop symptoms of parkinsonism. And the more he heard, the more he understood that he had been lucky.

 

 

 

It was Tracy who said putting Cole on a live radio show might not be such a good idea.

“Why not?” demanded Boots, bean eyes jumping with irritation, and when Tracy replied that she wasn’t quite sure: “In other words, no reason at all? Just women’s intuition or some like nonsense?”

Tracy knew better than to argue with Boots. And since she believed firmly in a wife’s biblical duty to submit to her husband’s authority in all things, she did not challenge PW’s view that she was just being an anxious mother hen.

But as late as the day of the broadcast—that morning—she reminded Cole that no one was forcing him; he could still change his mind.

“Maybe it’s just me, Cole-cakes, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen you look so pale. And I know you haven’t been sleeping so good.”

But Cole couldn’t imagine surviving the shame if he backed out now.

It was true he’d been sleeping poorly all week, but it was not just at night that his mind was unrestful. The thought of the upcoming show—“We’ll keep it real easy and relaxed. Just you and me for about fifteen minutes, then we open up the phones to questions”—had naturally got Cole wondering what he might be asked and how he was going to answer. And it was as if a fissure had opened in him out of which more and more of his past life seeped through.

Now that his memory was so much better, he was able to see how the false had got mixed in with the true. No dog named Zeppo, but his father
had
hit a dog with his car one time. And Cole remembered lying to his new classmates about wanting a sheepdog, and then wondering why he’d lied. He remembered the first day of school and the last day of school and all the chaos in between. Dogs: the chocolate Lab that belonged to the man who lived on their street, the old man who’d helped his mother carry Cole’s father to the car but refused to go with her to the hospital—he remembered all that. He remembered wanting to hurt that man.

Cough, cough, cough, cough, cough
. That sound lived so deep in him he didn’t see how he could ever have forgotten it, even for a while. But then, forgetting your own name—how unlikely was that?—and he had done that, too.

His mother at the kitchen table, buttoned up in her winter coat—had she ever finished writing that message to Addy?

I’m sorry for your loss.
A man—not a doctor or a nurse—a man dressed in street clothes. Visitor’s badge, hair-choked nostrils, crooked brown teeth. A man with a laptop.
We need to talk about next of kin.