The Rising: Antichrist Is Born (31 page)

Rayford could have had no idea how prophetic that was. Within six months of their wedding Irene was pregnant. Rayford was logging as many hours in the air as he could every day at a small air force installation, near O’Hare Airport in Chicago.

And then he and Irene were invited to his parents’ thirtieth wedding anniversary. What a sad event that turned out to be. Distant family members unable to attend his wedding somehow made the effort to get to Belvidere for this, some curious about Rayford’s wife but most—he was sure—believing they were seeing the last of the elder Mr. Steele as they knew him.

Saddest for Rayford was watching his parents sit for their formal photo. He read panic on his mother’s face, as she was already burdened with not letting her husband out of her sight. He had deteriorated even since the wedding. Having married

late and waiting to have Rayford, his parents were already pushing seventy and looked older than that—nothing like the youngish parents of Rayford’s contemporaries. The best photo showed Mr. Steele with a childlike smile of wonder, and Rayford knew he would not likely remember posing for it.

If Rayford heard it once, he heard dozens of times that day his father asking lifetime friends and relatives, “Tell me your name again.” Mr. Steele greeted his own younger sister three times as if she had just walked through the door. “I know you!” he said. “So glad you could come.”

The anniversary cake had thirty candles, of course, and Rayford’s father watched with curious glee as his wife blew them out in three great puffs. “How old are you?” he asked. “Aren’t we going to sing the birthday song?”

The party was almost over. Rayford’s father had gone to take a nap even before some of the guests began leaving. Rayford’s mother pulled her son into a corner. “There’s something I want you to pray with me about, Son,” she said.

His eyes darted. This was not like her. Surely she wasn’t going to ask him to pray right then and there.

“You still pray, don’t you, Rayford?”

“Uh, yeah. Sure. ‘Course I do.” He couldn’t remember the last time. And what God was allowing to happen to his father wasn’t likely to change that. Irene resented God for allowing her father to be killed. Well, this was worse. It would have been easier to hear that his father had been hit by a car or died in his sleep. “Just don’t ask me to pray for Dad’s healing, because that’s not going to hap—”

“That’s not it,” she said, fighting to keep her composure. “It’s just that Daddy and I had a goal. The odds were against us because of how old we were when we married, but we’ve talked about it since the day we fell in love.”

Rayford was already uncomfortable with this, whatever it was. He had never heard his parents talk about being in love. They were nice enough to each other, didn’t argue or fight much, but neither had they ever been terribly affectionate.

Rayford and his mother kept being interrupted by people saying their goodbyes. “Mom, we’re being rude. Can this wait?”

“I shouldn’t burden you with it anyway,” she said.

“You’re the hostess. You should—”

  “Fine,” she said, abruptly moving toward the door.

Irene slipped her hand into his. “What was that all about?” When he told her, she said, “Rafe, you must pursue it. She won’t get back to it. Convince her it’s your top priority. You’re all she has left. She has to know she can unburden herself to you.”

  “Irene, whatever it is is going to require something I don’t have to give. You and I are trying to get established. I want a house, a decent car or two, a good job…”

“Don’t you believe in karma?”

“Karma? Hardly.”

“Sure you do. We agree that what goes around comes around, don’t we?”

He backed away and squinted at her.

“Don’t look at me that way, Rafe. I’m just saying that if you don’t do right by your parents, the same thing is bound to happen to you someday.”

When everyone else had left, Rayford noticed his mother pointedly ignoring him. He approached her and said, “Mom, I want to get back to that conversation.”

“No, you don’t.”

He looked at Irene, who nodded at him and pointed to the other room.

“Yes, I do. Now come sit down. You were telling me what was so important to you and Dad.”

He could see in her eyes that his lie had convinced her. He wanted to have this conversation the way he wanted to spend an afternoon at the mall when the Bears were on television.

She took his hands in hers and led him to the couch in the living room. “Here’s what I want you to pray about, Rayford. Though it’s clear Daddy’s mind is going and it’s likely Alzheimer’s, the doctor says he is otherwise healthy as a horse. I don’t know why they always say it that way, like horses are healthier than other animals. They aren’t, are they? I never heard that they were.”

“I don’t know, Mom. Back to your story.”

“Sorry. Anyway, Daddy and I always said we wanted to celebrate fifty years together.”

“Fifty years?”

She nodded.

“He probably can’t even remember wanting that,” Rayford said, regretting it as soon as it was out of his mouth.

“Don’t be cruel.”

“No, I’m just saying… if there’s a benefit to this malady, it’s that he will not likely be disappointed by missing those things he can’t even remember hoping for.”

“Well, Ym hoping for it, okay?”

That was so like her. And it made Rayford feel bad.

“The doctor says it’s possible he will live another twenty years,” she said. “We’ll have to institutionalize him eventually, which should make it easier for me to last twenty more years.”

“Why is that so important, Mom? I’m not disparaging it. I really want to know.”

She dabbed at her eyes. “Besides raising a fine son and wishing for all the best for you, being married fifty years was our

life’s goal. I’d still like to make it, whether he’s aware of it or not.”

Rayford could only imagine their fiftieth anniversary photograph.

“So will you pray with me about that?” she said. “Maybe when you go to bed at night.”

He nodded, not wanting to put this lie into words.

“You still pray when you go to bed, don’t you, Rayford?”

“Sometimes.”

“I believe in prayer,” she said.

I don’t.

It wasn’t that Rayford begrudged helping. But his own dreams were on hold. How would he ever afford a house, cars, all the things that made life worth living?

As thrilling as the birth of their daughter, Chloe, was, Rayford had to admit that even that glow didn’t last. He was flooded with love for her, but he had envisioned more fatherly things than just helping Irene with chores, changing the baby, and fetching her in the night so Irene could nurse her. Rayford hated himself for feeling that way. He still loved his daughter and his wife, of course, but the fact was that his life was not yet what he dreamed it would be.

Then there was Irene’s eagerness to start going to church again.

“I thought you had learned your lesson about all that,” Rayford said.

“All I’ve learned is that I don’t know so much,” she said. “I miss the best things about it, and I told you years ago I didn’t want to raise a child without religion in her life.”

And so they began attending a big church where Rayford could easily get lost in the crowd and slip out ; as soon as it was over.

Irene seemed pleased enough. She appeared to enjoy being a wife and mother, spending time with Rayford and helping him

in his career. But that wasn’t enough for him. Rayford applied to all the major airlines and devoted himself to qualifying on bigger and bigger jets.

The bottom line was that life was not as fun as he thought it would be. Money, he was convinced, would change that.

Prestige, which went with captaining an airliner, would too.

The happiest day of Rayford Steele’s life—though he didn’t admit to Irene that it superseded even their ‘ wedding day, their honeymoon night, or the birth of their daughter—came when he got the offer from Pan-Continental Airlines to become a flight engineer in the cockpit for flying 747-200s. He had trained on the monsters in the air force and impressed the Pan-Con brass.

Standing before the mirror in his new dress blues with Irene and Chloe, then four, admiring him and cooing over him, Rayford could not stop grinning. At six-four and two hundred and twenty pounds, his gold braid and buttons gleaming, all he could think of was a house in the suburbs and a great new car. Within a month he was dreamily, satisfyingly, as deep in debt as he could afford.

Irene cautioned that they had bought more house than they needed, but Rayford could see in her eyes that she loved the place. She had been a fastidious housekeeper in their dingy apartment, but now she was a woman on a mission..Creative and precise, she made their new home neat and gorgeous—a haven.

Complicating Rayford’s life, however, was the fact that his father was now altogether incapacitated. He was in the full-care unit, nearly twice as expensive as the normal residence had been. Rayford’s mother had deteriorated as well. She seemed older and more fragile than ever. That her husband did not recognize or even acknowledge her seemed to crush her spirit.

Worse, though Rayford tried to convince himself otherwise, he detected symptoms in his mother he had noticed in his dad before he was diagnosed. “Tell me it’s just normal aging, Irene,” he said.

“I wish I could.”

“I don’t need this,” Irene said. “Can we afford it?”

“Of course,” he said. “Don’t deny me the privilege of buying you something nice.”

Though it racked him with guilt, Rayford began wishing his parents would die. He told himself it would be better for them. His father had long since been virtually gone, unaware of his surroundings, enjoying hardly anything resembling quality of life. And his mother was hard on his heels. They would be better off, and so would Rayford and his family.

Nick Carpathia somehow avoided the typical travails of preadolescence. He never went through a gangly or awkward stage. His glowing skin never broke out. By the time he was sixteen he was so far ahead of his peers that he could have tested out of high school. But he wanted to be valedictorian first. Once that was accomplished, he enrolled at the University of Romania at Bucharest, determined to graduate in two years.

“I want to stay at the Intercontinental,” he told Aunt Viv.

“That would be exorbitant,” she said.

“And I want Star Diamond boarded as close by as possible.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Of course she would. She had apparently been put on earth to do Nick’s bidding. He found her amusing. He loved going to her classes and beating her to the punch. The netherworld seemed to communicate with him first, and it was not beyond him to clarify messages for her or even shout them out before they reached her.

Irene Steele had talked of having another child, but Rayford wouldn’t hear of it. He didn’t want to tell her how delicate their financial situation had become, but she had to have an idea. When Chloe was seven years old, Irene carefully broke the news to Rayford: another baby was on the way.

He tried to act excited, but he couldn’t muster the requisite enthusiasm. That threw Irene into a funk that lasted until she was able to announce that it was a boy and that she hoped Rayford would agree to name him after himself. Rayford’s ego was stroked, and he even looked into moving to a better neighborhood—until Irene put the kibosh on that. “You think I can’t read our bank statements?” she said. “I admire what you’re doing for your parents, but as long as that continues, this is going to be our lot.”

Rayford enjoyed striding through the corridors of the country’s major airports. He was already graying, but he liked the new look, and Irene said it only made him more distinguished.

When he was nineteen Nick Carpathia demanded a meeting with Reiche Planchette. “It is time for me to know my natural history,” he said.

“Meaning?”

“You know what I mean, Reiche.” He could tell Planchette didn’t like to be referred to by his first name, especially by a teenager. “I want to know who my father is.”

“Impossible. Thoroughly confidential.”

“By tomorrow,” Nick said.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

The next day Planchette arrived at Nick’s suite with a thick folder. “I need not remind you how highly classified this information is.”

“Then why remind me, Reiche? Just let me see it.”

“I can’t leave it with you. It is not to leave my—”

“You have copies.”

“Of course, but—”

“I will return these to you tomorrow.”

“Very well.”

The next day Nick showed up at Planchette’s tiny office in a dingy building in downtown Bucharest. “This place is an embarrassment to the association,” Nick said,

“All our money goes to your lodging and whims, Nick.”

Young Carpathia stared at him. “Do I detect resentment, Reiche?”

“Maybe. Are you familiar with the phrase high maintenance.”

Nick rubbed his eyes and let his head roll back. “Oh, Reiche. Are you familiar with the term unemployment?”

Planchette stood. “I’ve been a loyal employee of the association long enough to not have to be subjected—”

“Oh, sit down. I have questions about this file.”

“I can’t imagine, Nick. Everything is there.”

“So I am a freak. I have two fathers.”

“Correct. Well, not the freak part, but yes.”

“And they have been given all this money?”

“By Mr. Stonagal, yes.”

“And you complain about my expenses?”

“Well—”

“Stonagal has a sea of money, Reiche. I would say that, so far, I am a bargain. I want two things: a stake in an international import/export business. Say ten million euros to start.”

“Ten million!”

“And I want these two opportunists off the payroll.”

“Impossible.”

“Not if they are eliminated.”

“They are your fathers. We can’t just—”

“Am I having trouble making myself understood, Reiche?”

  “I’ll pass the word along, Nick.”

Carpathia tossed the folder onto Planchette’s desk, and it pushed other papers onto the floor as it slid to him. “That reminds me. I guess I want a third thing: to be referred to by my given name.”