Streams of Babel (2 page)

I am hallucinating. Just let me die, too.
I prayed for this face to change into one I didn't know so well. Scott Eberman was cracking gum, looking somewhere around my waist and not my face, thank god. I had been worried about somebody's dad showing up, not somebody who graduated my sophomore year, and certainly, beyond all people, not one of the Ebermans. He had a brother, Owen, in my grade who was even taller—and better looking if you listen to the way most girls carry on. I'd always thought Owen was just sweeter.

An image flashed of marching band, my first game freshman year, lining up to go on the field at halftime while the team was coming off. Scott Eberman pulled his helmet off his sweaty head about fifteen feet in front of me, and my jaw dropped just at the sight of him.

Another halftime, I was so busy staring at him that I forgot to move with the band. So he bumped into me in all this heavy equipment, took me by both shoulders, and moved me, saying, "Sorry, excuse me." Only he kept looking right over the top of my head and talking to the running back. He never even saw me. I don't think he even knew he touched me. But I walked around for three days, rubbing my shoulders in a haze, saying, "Sorry, excuse me."

Even now, Scott Eberman was not seeing me—just my stomach or knees or something, while he was thinking of his sick mother. I could feel my eyes filling up, finally. An Eberman in my house was too much.

"Phil, take some blood from her," he told the older paramedic. "I took some from my mom last night ... keeps saying she's too busy at work to go to the doctor, so I have a choice between kicking her in the butt to go there or nailing her to the chair just long enough for me to take blood..." and so on and so forth. I was trying to rub tears out of my eyes before they spilled. It was another bizarre attempt not to attract any more attention to myself.

This Phil was pulling a vial and a needle out of some orange case, quietly joking about how it was still illegal for Scott to take blood. I was grateful for their idle chatter about Scott only having half a year to go in paramedic training, and what the lab doesn't know won't hurt anything.

I endured the pinch without moving as this needle pierced my arm. I played Invisible Girl pretty well until Phil muttered, "What the hell..."

I glanced down and could see a purple spot grow quickly to the size of a dime under my skin. He pulled the needle out and pushed down on a cotton ball, having captured only a few drops.

"Strike one." Scott squatted down in the space Mr. Steckerman had left when he went to the kitchen again.

"I never miss," Phil said. "That's weird."

"You know what?" Scott pressed on the purple spot, now about the size of a quarter. He jerked the rubber tie off my bicep. "This is why my mom wouldn't go to the specialist this week. The nurse in Dr. O'Dell's did this to her arm last week."

He wrapped the rubber tie on my other arm and started pressing on the crook of my elbow. He still hadn't looked at my face, thank god, because now I could only think,
He's touching me. Why can't I wake up?

The older paramedic made praying hands in his rubber gloves. I couldn't tell whether he was joking or not. "You don't have to trust this man," he said, and I thought his eyes were smiling a little. "This
boy...
"

"Boy, schmoy. I'll be twenty. One of these months" With a smile, Scott finally looked into my eyes. For a moment, I was a person. Not a vein, not a stuffed dummy on the sidelines, flute in hand. He said, "Not to worry. I didn't gouge my mother, and I won't gouge you, either."

He took new supplies from Phil, stuck me with a new needle. The tube started filling up, and my skin stayed flesh-colored this time.

"Voilà," he said to Phil, who was grumbling about beginner's luck as he opened a Band-Aid.

He pulled the needle out of my arm and pressed a cotton ball on it as Phil wrote something on the vial. I glanced up to see Scott's brown eyes cutting right through me again. They were the worst of his great features—small and round. But they fit perfectly with his chiseled face, elflike nose. I looked away, but he didn't.

"So. Do you still play the flute in the band?" he asked.

"How did you know I was in the band?"

He stuck the Band-Aid on and pulled one side of his mouth up funny. "What do you think you are, the invisible person?"

For lack of something better, I nodded.

"It's a special gift of his," Phil put in, "along with finding dead center of a small vein. This kid never, ever forgets a face or a fact. It's ridiculous."

I could not think of a more logical reason for Scott Eberman to remember me. But he cast the guy a dirty look over his
shoulder, dropped to his knees, and drummed the arms of the chair on either side of me. I couldn't meet his eyes anymore, and it seemed the longer I stared into my lap, the longer he stared back.

"You know what I wish?" he asked. "You know my mom, right? Well, she's got the flu, too, which means she's contaminated already. Probably my brother and I are, too, so ... I wish you would come over to our house and sleep there. She would like the company. Honestly."

"Oh. No...," I stammered. "Why would I ... barge in on you and your sick mother?"

His eyebrows shot up in two perfect arches while he looked sideways for a second. "Uh ... maybe because you've just had a death in the family?"

"Well, my mother, she..."

"Your mother, what?" he persisted.

"She ... didn't do much but sleep. At least not when I was here. Which wasn't much. I work in the Acme after school. My grandmother pulled some strings and got me that job right before she passed away..."
Do we have to do this?
He wasn't moving, and logic reminded me he was just trying to be nice. My rehearsed line flew into place and saved me from being rude. "I didn't even live with my mother until I was twelve. One day she just ... showed up on me and Oma. That was my grandmother. She died three years ago."

He said, "When I was a kid, Mom and I used to walk our dog past your house, and if she was trimming the hedges or something, your grandma would talk it up with Mom. I remember her saying a few times that she'd have had ten kids if her husband hadn't died right after—"

"—right after Aleese was born." I felt myself unwinding the slightest bit. I remembered when Oma died, people were very awkward around me. It seemed only the funeral director, doctors, and nurses—people who were used to death—knew that stupid conversations like this are all right, that they really do help.

But his normalcy was taking him places that, in this case, were not normal. "Last time I saw her, your grandma also said that your mom hurt her arm in an accident?"

"Um..." I had already lied about my age. Feeling so achy and tired, I just spilled the truth. "I'm not sure how it happened. There was an accident overseas, maybe an unsuccessful surgery, and that's when she got addicted to painkillers. She just ... never got unaddicted. I wish I had something less selfish and more interesting to say than it was easier to go to school all day and work all night. I've got a lot of money in the bank. Guess that's one good thing. Ha ha."

"That makes one of us." He didn't laugh back. "And that's not selfish at all. Morphine addicts can be extremely violent, among other things."

"You have no idea."

I forced my mouth shut by pinching my lips with my fingers. And Scott Eberman was drumming his fingers again. I could not believe he wasn't looking at me weird.

"You know what my mom does? For a living? She's a lawyer, and she wastes too much time in court with women who come crawling to her from the Rescue Mission, who need a divorce from their drunken, abusive husbands and some cashola to help raise their kids. I keep telling her, 'Mom, I could give you five personal injury clients a day with high-paying accidents,' but she won't listen to me. Consequently, I'm in paramedic school instead of medical school, and that's why our house looks like crap."

The pressure from holding in tears probably made me laugh harder than I should have.

"It's clean, real clean, but that's because of me. We got clean sheets. Come on." He stood up, put his hand down to me.

"No. No thank you."

"Yes. Come on." I could see his fingers waggling in front of me, like he wanted me to take them, and I drew back automatically from such a surreal sight.

"I don't want to!"

"I'm telling you to. Come on..."

I realized I was curled up in a little ball, peering at his waggling fingers from over the tops of my knees. His hand dropped to his work pants and he patted his palm against his leg twice.

"If you don't come with me now, my mother will show up at your door in about half an hour. If she's well enough tonight. Good days and bad days. I think it's been three weeks now. You shouldn't be alone with this thing, Cora Holman. It's not easy to get rid of, Cora Holman, who plays flute in the Trinity Regional band."

He handed me back my glass of water, which he'd put on the floor. I watched him move backward. She might come in half an hour. I needed half an hour just to be alone, to hear the normal loneliness of this house, to gather my normal thoughts.

After an eternity, it seemed, he was gone; they were all gone, and the silence hugged around me.

I circled around the living room, staring at that couch. There was a thin line of blood that had dripped down the side.
I hadn't noticed Aleese's ear bleeding, but Mr. Steckerman must have been right, because I had wiped her nose after my CPR failed, and none of the blood made it to the couch.

I stared at that dark stream before going off to my room, crawling on my knees to the back of my closet and feeling around for the Nikon my mother had referred to in her last words. She wasn't so smart. She'd known I had it, but she hadn't known that I used it quite a bit.

I had gotten this strange compulsion last fall to start taking pictures around Trinity Falls on Sundays. It kept me out of the house on my day off, for one thing. For another, it made me feel like I belonged to the place instead of like some squatter, some daughter of an addict. Through a lens, the most beautiful parts of Trinity came clear. Azalea gardens in bloom in spring. Trees that lined streets in perfect, royal arches. Lawns as thick as Persian carpets and green as Ireland. People hung American flags off porches and trimmed real hedges around their swimming pools in Trinity.

There was something serene about taking pretty pictures, and that's all I had ever liked to take. Maybe it was the fever, but something possessed me, or shot into me, something that felt ... evil, or like anger, or dark knowledge. Desperation of some sort.
My mother is inside of me right now.

It was a violating thought. But the moan that came out was very much mine—small and squeaky, not like the bowels of hell that had moaned out of Aleese when she was coming off a high. I raised the camera to my eye, zeroing in on that red line, thinking of Aleese's final words.

"
Take a picture of me.
" She had always loved to make me squirm when some crude thought struck her. But she had already been in and out of consciousness when she had said it. I wondered, confused, if there wasn't something sincere about it, and I replayed the words in my head, trying to hear her tone. "
Take a
picture
of me.
" "
Take a
picture
of me
" As if, maybe, she thought there was something worth capturing in truth, no matter how ugly, that made it valuable—as valuable as scenes from a quaint New Jersey town.

I looked at that thin line of blood through the lens, though I couldn't believe I was doing it. After a moment, it looked like a red tear. One red tear, silent, permanent, so symbolic of a sad life, a sad ending, a failure, a
truth.

I snapped the picture, and the flash brought me back to reality.
Cora, your mother just died, and you're sitting in the living room taking pictures of her blood. That is beyond sick. It's the fever. Go to bed.

One of the paramedics had left some pills—Tylenol or something—but I forgot to take them. I crawled into bed in my room, shivering from chills. Mrs. Eberman never came.

OWEN EBERMAN
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2002
7:14
P.M.

JUST BEFORE LYING down to play couch commando for the night, I pressed my face to the living room window. I was trying to see through the dark, far into the next block. I had noticed my brother's ambulance beside some house down there about half an hour ago. Usually, if Scott was just helping to check out an elderly person with palpitations, he would stop home afterward with his squad. They liked to hang out long enough to down a pitcher of Mom's mint iced tea and suck up a couple of sports highlights on ESPN.

But the street was dark, the ambulance gone. I flopped down on the couch, feeling relief that I wouldn't be faced with the noise of a squad. Call me selfish. Mom would always get mad when I called myself selfish, and yet there I was, feeling relieved, when some calamity may have happened down my street.

I reminded myself of the one time Mr. Shumaker, our neighbor, had three buddies over to play blackjack while their wives went to cavort at the casinos. The fathers were watching all the kids, and Scott said these young, hotshot attorneys were twenty hands in and three sheets to the wind when the Shumaker three-year-old took a nosedive down a flight of stairs. Scott said his squad prevented a lot of people from driving drunk when their kids needed a stitch, and it came with the territory.

It could have been anything,
I told myself. The explanation fit my mood best.

I get in these moods I call "my moods from hell," though my mom is more cheerful and calls them my "need-to-regroup times." Maybe they weren't so terrible as all that. I mean, I didn't sit here in the house thinking that I wanted to annihilate people. I was just slightly off my gourd about how sometimes the world is a confusing place. And sometimes I feel like I don't belong here.

These days always hit me the week before the South Jerseys in wrestling and in November, too, if we made the football playoffs. I'd be pushing it to the max along with everyone else, until one day I'd just decide,
I don't want to hear one more locker slam. I don't want to hear one more dumb dirty joke. I don't want to feel one more person tugging at me—and that goes for the girls, too. I'm tired of smelling my own sweat, and the sound of the phones could make me psycho.