Hero (29 page)

The gardenia bush was Mom's favorite, and she taught me to take special care of it. On warm summer days, I still had vivid memories of lying on the carpet in the family room, the fresh-cut gardenias floating in tiny glass bowls of water, their scent wafting into my nostrils. The smell always made me sleepy, at peace, and some days Dad would come home from work and stop short of tripping over me in a deep sleep on the floor.

The first time I'd been old enough to save enough money from doing chores around the house and yard, I bought my mother a special birthday gift, a vial of drugstore perfume, gardenia scented. Mom unwrapped the lumpy paper, delighted at what she saw. (I think Dad had given her a waffle iron that year.) She hugged me and wrapped her pinky around mine, our secret shake. She sprayed a thin mist into the air and stepped through it. She'd worn only that brand ever since.

"Thorn?"

I turned around and thought I was imagining things. Maybe I'd finally lost it. I'd been through so much that day, it wouldn't have been such a stretch to start hallucinating. I couldn't remember when I'd last had something to eat or drink.

I turned back to the suitcase and began laying my underwear in neatly stacked piles.

"Thorn?" the voice called again.

This time I knew I wasn't hallucinating. I felt her hand on my cheek. I knew that voice. And I knew the smell of that perfume.

"Mom?"

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

WHAT A BABY, I kept thinking to myself, but I didn't really care. I couldn't stop crying. Mom held on to me tight, and I kept my eyes closed, my head resting on her shoulder as I sobbed quietly. She stroked my hair and kept telling me in soothing tones that everything would be okay.

If I'd been thinking straight, I would have launched into the hundreds of questions I had always planned to ask in the event I ever saw her again. The questions suddenly seemed silly and stupid, and the only thing that mattered was that I felt her right there in front of me.

Even if I couldn't see her.

"Mom." I caught my breath. "Can't you, you know, turn it off for a minute?"

I felt Mom pull away, and I heard the floorboards creak over by the window. I saw a spark by the floorboards, and then I watched a match light itself in the air. The tiny flame met with a cigarette floating beside it. I saw a stream of smoke coming out of where her mouth would be, but I still couldn't see her.

"I missed you," she said.

There was something sad about the way she said it.

"I found the pictures," I said, proud of my discovery. I wondered if it was possible to hear someone smile.

"I know," she said, and another stream of smoke shot down, this time I figured through her nostrils. "I've been watching you."

Of course she knew. Mothers know everything. But it did make me wonder exactly how she knew. I remembered the night Justice had told me he'd known Mom, that she'd been a crucial member of the League's espionage squad. She probably knew lots of things. She'd probably seen me on the news.

"How long have you been watching me?"

"Don't worry about that right now, it's not important." She said it quickly, like she'd been ready for the question and had no intention of giving me the real answer.

"Mom?" There were so many things to ask, but I started with one question. "Where have you been?"

I heard the distinct sound of ice cubes clank and tinkle against a glass. Then I turned and saw a glass filled with brown liquid floating in the air. I sniffed and noticed the faint aroma of Scotch and soda on top of the gardenias and cigarette smoke.

I think Mom saw me sniff at the air. An old electric fan floated out of the closet, perched itself on the window ledge,plugged itself into the socket, and clicked on to blow the smoke out the window.

"Promise me one thing, Thom," she said. Then I felt her heavy breath on my neck as she whispered the one thing. "Promise you won't judge me."

I thought about that for a while and decided she was right. She had her reasons for leaving, and even if they didn't sound great to me, I shouldn't judge her. Hard as it was to put into practice, that much I'd learned.

"Dad's asleep," I said. "You want me to wake him up?" I walked over to the door to go get him.

"No, no, no," she said. "Don't do that."

I stopped with my fingers on the doorknob. I turned around and faced the open window, the fan whirring on its ledge.

"Why did you leave?"

Okay, maybe I wasn't done with the questions yet.

Mom didn't say anything right away. This was a question I was sure she had expected, so I knew she must have had some sort of answer rehearsed. Why the hesitation? Was she cooking up something else? Was she considering telling me from her heart, not from a scripted explanation?

"Meet me tomorrow," she said, "at the Wilson Memorial."

A glass of water floated into my hand, and I saw the pill Larry had given me resting on the windowsill. How long, exactly, had she been following me?

Then I felt a kiss on my cheek, and just like that, the fan clicked off and I knew the time to ask questions was over. She was gone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

THE NEXT MORNING I put on a baseball cap and pulled it down to eye level before I got on the bus. The last place on earth I wanted to be recognized was at the Wilson Memorial.

Especially after what I'd found when I stepped out of the front door. Our yard had been rolled. Long streamers of toilet paper dipped and swayed in the breeze, which made our tree look like a synthetic weeping willow. I was in such a hurry that I stepped on the morning paper, which turned out to have a big ol' picture of me on the front page making my confession. In a small corner was an old, extremely unattractive picture of my father. It was shot lit from below, giving him the sinister look of a kid shining a flashlight under his chin while telling a ghost story.

What bothered me the most, though, was the certified overnight delivery envelope that I found wedged in the screen door. The return address said it was from the League's human resources department. My heart sank. I tucked it under my arm, unopened, and ran to the bus.

I arrived shortly before the 10:15 tour, and the girl in the ticket booth sneezed on my tickets as she handed them to me. I wasn't thinking when I bought two tickets. Invisible people usually get in for free.

I sat on a bench and looked for a sign of Mom, but I didn't notice anything. Two teenage girls sat down beside me and spilled a bag of M&M's out into their laps and began separating them by color while they gossiped.

I looked at the envelope in my hands, rubbed my fingers around the sharp corners, and wished it would just disappear. But I'd decided I was tired of running away from things, so I bit down and tore open the pouch with my teeth.

One of the girls did a double take when she noticed me.

"Hey," she said. "Aren't you—"

Then she stopped like she'd lost her train of thought, and popped a green M&M in her mouth as if it would help jog her memory.

God, this is exactly what I wanted to avoid. I tried to pull my cap even lower, but it couldn't swallow my face. Where was Mom?

Inside the pouch was a notarized letter from the League's human resources director, with their legal counsel copied at the bottom of the page. The letter was short but not sweet. It was notice of my termination from the League's probationary team. I folded it carefully, slipped it into my back pocket, and tried not to think about it.

"Aren't you in my English class?" the girl said through a mouthful of M&M's, chocolate and colorful candy bits stuck between her teeth.

"No," I said.

I got up and asked the girl at the ticket counter when the tour was supposed to begin. She pointed to a group that had already started toward the entrance of the site and told me I'd been waiting with the wrong group. I rushed over and positioned myself on the outskirts of the group.

"Excuse me? You, in the back, do you have a ticket?" the tour guide asked.

I pulled both tickets out of my pocket and held them in the air for her to see.

"Marvelous," she said. "Now, if you'll follow me. Please remember, there's no smoking, chewing gum, or food or beverages of any kind allowed. You'll notice a number of people here paying respects, so please keep your voices down and your cell phones off, thank you."

She smiled tightly through bleached teeth. "This is, after all, a shrine to the dead."

We passed by three students who were meditating by the entrance. They'd pasted together a banner that read NEVER FORGET out of death certificates and held it spread out between them. I was the last to go inside, and I was careful not to let my foot catch on one of their candles as I stepped past them.

"Built in the early seventies," the tour guide began, "the Wilson Tower became the tallest building in the world, and stood as a monument to technological advancement and economic prosperity."

I was bored already. I'd come here on a field trip once when I was in the fourth grade. After the rambunctious hour-long bus ride into the city, our class quickly discovered this tour was anything but fun. I remember it even made Angel Stanton, the toughest girl in our class, cry because she'd lost her aunt in the tragedy. Before the trip, I'd been afraid to show my dad the permission slip because of where we were going, so I forged it myself. I wished I'd stayed home from school.

We entered the Corridor of Names, a well-intentioned but tacky holographic memorial that listed the names of all the innocent people who'd perished that day. I stood there and felt conspicuously lit up, the glow of the names reflected off my face.

"We lost approximately nineteen thousand citizens that day, perhaps more." The tour guide gestured to the lists upon lists with a flick of her wrist. "It was impossible to tell, given the degree of devastation."

"What'd I miss?" my mother whispered in my ear.

"Where have you been?"

A family of tourists with matching oversize T-shirts and fanny packs that read THE EVIL SHALL BE PUNISHED turned around and glared at me. The mother of the group held her finger to her lips and hissed, "SHHHH!"

The tour guide continued walking, and I hung a few lengths back with Mom so we could talk.

"Look at this place," Mom said. "They keep it like a tomb. No air."

Well, I thought, a whole load of people tragically died here. At least it wasn't a McDonald's or a Wal-Mart. Yet. I heard the tour guide's voice echo down the tunnel, and both Mom and I stopped on her words: "Major Might."

"Sounds like the tour is just about to get interesting," Mom said. I saw the strike of a match and then I smelled cigarette smoke.

"You're not supposed to smoke in here," I reminded her.

"Who's going to see?"

"They'll smell it and think it's me."

I saw her take a sip of something out of a flask. What was she drinking? Suddenly it really annoyed me that she wasn't visible.

"Mom, why won't you let me see you?"

I heard her take another swallow. "It's not that simple."

"Sure it is, just make yourself visible."

I heard another gulp. That flask must have been endless. Maybe there were two.

"I can't," she snapped at me. Then she changed her tone back to the one I remembered. "Let's catch up with the tour, I want to show you something."

She took hold of my hand and led me forward. "Besides, we don't want to miss the part where they start trashing your father."

We caught up with the tour a couple of flights up in the memorial tower, built after the tragedy in a space directly across from the site, so you could still see the crack in the earth where the top half of the Wilson Tower had landed.

"As a result of Major Might's failure," the tour guide said, "the government drafted the ban on non-superpowered champions, which outlawed so-called 'heroic' acts by people like Major Might, who lacked the necessary powers. If it hadn't been for the major's hubris that day, some argue we could have averted all casualties entirely. Can anyone tell me in which branch of the U.S. military Major Might earned the rank of major?"

Silence from the audience.

I wanted to raise my hand. Dad was in the army, and he won a Bronze Star for Valor the night his camp in Vietnam was overrun, and he was only my age at the time.

Some goober with a trucker's hat affixed just so over his two hundred dollar haircut raised his hand and took a stab. "Coast Guard?"

What an idiot.

"No," the tour guide responded slowly. She relished the chance to play teacher.

The youngest kid from the fanny-pack family stuck her plump ham hock high into the air.

"The Boy Scouts!"

Her family snickered at such a cute response. I didn't think she meant it to be cute. I think she was just plain dumb.

I felt Mom let go of my hand, and someone smacked the top of the chubby little girl's head.

"Ow!" She turned around and scowled at her brother. "Mom, he hit me!"

"No, I didn't," her brother squealed.

Their mother admonished the brother despite his declarations of innocence. When he wouldn't shut up about it, she finally had to slip him a Twinkie while the tour guide wasn't looking.

"No, not the Boy Scouts, silly," the tour guide said. "You may find it interesting to know that his wasn't a military rank at all; his rank was self-appointed." She raised her eyebrows and dragged out those last two words, as if to say, Yep, you heard it here first.

"That's not true," I said. What about the war? What about the Bronze Star? "He was in Vietnam."

Mom squeezed my hand. The crowd whipped around and stared at me like I was a lunatic.

The tour guide sneered; she wasn't used to being challenged. "Actually, although he did serve a tour of duty in the army," she continued, "he was only a sergeant. Major Might was a moniker he gave himself before he'd ever joined the armed forces." She gave me a look of false sympathy, like it was a nice but pathetic attempt to correct her.

Well, no shit, he made it up—it was just a name. That's what people did when they became superheroes. They gave themselves catchy names bigger than life, to intimidate criminals into thinking twice before they robbed that liquor store or snatched a purse. What about Captain Victory? He'd been in the navy in World War II, but he was never a captain. Was this woman also going to attack Captain Kangaroo? What about Cap'n Crunch?