“He looks so peaceful,” Eric said. “Just like he was taking a nap.”
“There’s less than a ten percent chance that he’ll revive,” said Dr. Bettye Freeling, the physician in charge of the ward.
“He might surprise you,” Minas Nolan told her. “He’s got something in him that won’t let go. He might be the strongest person I’ve ever met.”
“Do you know his family?” Freeling asked. She was a younger doctor, handsome. “I see that he’s uninsured.”
“I’ll pay for him, Doctor,” Minas said. “I owe him at least that.”
Michael and Raela came to Christie’s funeral. Michael wore a medium-brown suit because that’s all he owned. Raela wore an elegant black dress, flat black shoes, and a tasteful ebony tam, and carried a small black purse. When she touched Eric’s forearm in sympathy, there was a loud and painful crackle of static electricity.
By then everyone knew about the tryst between Drew and Christie. Drew had told his father about the affair in their brief conversation before he stole the Luger. And the doorman of the Tennyson saw them coming in late at night and watched them groping each other through the video eye in the elevator.
Almost everyone felt sorry for Eric. He was a poor cuckold, an innocent bystander. He grieved for his dead girlfriend and held their tearful daughter in his arms. Only Ahn wondered how Eric’s fateful aura had caused the hapless college dropout to murder Christie. She watched him closely. When she saw the teenage girl stand near him, she knew. It was time for him to lose his lover, Ahn thought, and so the stars conspired to kill her. The Vietnamese woman shivered under her thin silk shawl.
Christie’s parents hugged Eric and kissed their sweet granddaughter. Half of Christie’s class from Hensley showed up to express their sorrow.
Drew would be buried three days later. Only his parents and Eric came to that ceremony. Drew’s father shook Eric’s hand, thanking him for coming and apologizing for his son.
“He just never grew into a man,” Mr. Peters said. “I hope that you can one day forgive him.”
Eric didn’t answer, but he felt no enmity toward Drew. He believed that it was his own inability to love Christie that had driven the lovers together, and then his attempt to make himself love her was what destroyed them both.
Eric moved back into his father’s house so that Ahn could help with Mona. He went to the hospital every day and sat next to his comatose brother.
Thomas was surrounded by an oxygen tent that was meant to help his punctured lung heal. The doctors didn’t have much hope for him, but Eric came each morning and sat for hours in silence at his brother’s side.
One morning, after Eric’s father went to work and Ahn and Mona had gone to the stone animal park, the doorbell rang. Eric was getting ready to go to the hospital. He was on leave from his classes and had no intention of going back to school.
He opened the door to find Raela standing there. She seemed taller and more beautiful than before. It was as if she had been a child when last he saw her, Eric thought, and now she was a woman. He wondered if she had grown or if he had diminished since losing Christie.
“Hi,” she said.
Eric felt his heart skip and hated himself for an instant.
“I can’t know you, Raela,” he said.
“It’s too late for that now,” she replied, her bearing both solemn and serene.
She walked into the house, and he closed the door behind her.
She went into the living room as if she had always lived there. She sat and so did he.
“We killed them,” he said.
“We aren’t gods,” she retorted.
“I didn’t love her, but I asked her to marry me.”
“You had a child together. What else could you do?”
“I could have been a man and done what was right.”
“What’s right?” she asked him. “What can anybody do?”
“My brother did what was right,” Eric said with conviction.
“Maybe. But he’s special. You aren’t him.”
“I don’t love you, Raela.”
“I know that. I don’t care about love. I just know that we have to be together. We have to be. You know it.”
“You don’t even know me.”
“I do.”
“What about Michael? What will happen with him?”
“He’s my brother and he loves me,” the raven-haired beauty answered. “Show me upstairs.”
Eric and Raela became lovers that afternoon. He wasn’t worried about getting into trouble. He wasn’t concerned that she was too young. Staying away from her had killed Drew and Christie. Maybe even Thomas would die because of his refusal to be with her.
Raela had felt alone for her entire life. Her stepmother was more like a servant than a relative. Her brother loved her, but he couldn’t comprehend what was in her heart. And Kronin was just a big bear who wanted her to pay attention to him. No one had ever gotten close to understanding her until she met Eric.
He too was alone and unable to love. His heart was as disconnected as hers. They could at least understand each other. Maybe there could be more.
In the weeks that followed, Eric found himself laughing often and intrigued by the way the woman-child thought. She beat him at swimming, though he was her master at tennis. She could sprint past him in any short race, but he could run for miles and she couldn’t or wouldn’t — he was never sure which.
After her last class in the afternoon, she would meet him in Thomas’s hospital room, and they’d sit together holding hands and waiting.
Meanwhile, Thomas traveled among the dead. In the depths of his coma he convened with Tremont, the drug dealer, and Bruno, his best friend. The lost puppy, Skully, scampered about at his heels while Alicia (whom he had never known in life) made them all tea and biscuits served on her tomb in the alley valley that he always thought of as his one true home. They all spoke different languages and used signs to make themselves understood. Sometimes other guests would come. RayRay shambled in one day and asked — with wordless, elaborate apologies — Thomas to forgive him. Pedro climbed down from the fire escape and handed Thomas his gun. By this he meant that he would never kill himself again.
One day Thomas said good-bye to Tremont and Bruno. Then he and Alicia started out on a walk to the far end of the alley valley. It seemed to Thomas that he had never gone to the absolute end. The valley stretched for miles and became very wide. Trees grew tall and full above them. There were strawberry fields and orange groves along the way. Skully brought them beautiful stones and fish and tools when they needed them.
Alicia and he made love in the evenings. It was the way it had been with Monique, only instead of Lily they had Skully the dog, and because they were the same age they could have sex. The sun was bright, but Thomas didn’t mind it. The valley seemed endless, but neither one of them cared.
One day Thomas woke up to find that Alicia was gone. He knew that she was off taking care of her own unfinished business, something about the people that killed her and dumped her in Thomas’s valley. He didn’t worry about her; they would be together again.
The next day Skully didn’t come when Thomas whistled. But that didn’t bother him either. Traveling alone down the wide valley that started behind his father’s home, Thomas knew that he was getting somewhere.
One day — after many, many days of walking — Thomas heard a strange bird cry. It was a high, burplike noise. The call intrigued him, and so he began to climb up out of the valley because that was where the birdsong came from. Climbing up the slope, he began breathing hard. He fell to his knees and struggled through the brush. The bird’s odd song got louder and louder. And the louder it got, the more he wanted to see the animal that made that sound.