Superpowers (28 page)

"You don't love me," Charlie said.

"What?"

"Go away." He stepped away from the door, hugging the wall. He made it to his bedroom and shut the door, found the bottle of Bacardi.

Mary Beth kept knocking, but Charlie knew she would give up soon. He forced down a couple more swallows of rum and pulled the sheets up around his ears.

_______

From the air it looked like Manhattan was burning. The smoke rose hundreds of feet into the air, drifting slowly out to sea, dissipating gradually in the fading light.

Caroline had landed in Pennsylvania to get her bearings. She'd walked into a gas station and studied the map there, ignored the small black-and-white television the attendant had set up on the counter. She'd bought a Gatorade and a package of beef jerky and consumed them in the woods behind the gas station, then launched herself into the sky again.

Just a compass heading and a cell phone to navigate by, and the cell signal had been fading in and out for the last hour. Still, it didn't seem likely she could have missed the smoke, even if she'd been a thousand miles off course.

She tried the line at her mother's apartment again, but it was busy. Was her mother there, trying to call her at home? Or was it Arturo, calling the police and the fire department and the Port Authority?

The towers weren't there. She circled for a few moments, spiralingin toward the wreckage, twisted metal, and heaped rubble trailing floating braids of smoke and dust. She was coughing and shaking. Her phone didn't ring, so she dove for the ruins.

She landed where there were no rescuers, in a barren field of fallen steel. She wondered what floor her mother worked on, and then a cry of raw emotion went through her, painfully scraping through her dry throat. It was an ugly, hopeless sound, and she stopped it as soon as she realized she was making it—but an echo rolled through the terrible canyon and lingered in her ears.

She was too late—if she'd been here a few hours ago, she could have done something. If only she were as fast as Jack. Now she couldn't do a thing—the girders were too large, the rubble too unstable. If only she were as strong as Mary Beth. She didn't even know where to look, had no way of knowing if moving one piece of wreckage would free a survivor or bury one farther. If only she could hear their thoughts like Charlie.

"Hey!" Someone had climbed onto the plain of ruins with her, a firefighter with a rope tied around his waist. "Don't move," he said. "I'll come to you."

She tried to say that it was OK, she would be fine, he shouldn't endanger himself on her account when she could fly to safety with a thought. (If only she could turn invisible, like Harriet.) The words wouldn't come; she was shaky and cold.

She didn't move, just waited, watching her hands tremble and the firefighter pick his way slowly toward her. She looked at her phone, but there was no signal. Above her there was just smoke and the distant sound of fighter jets.

"How did you get up here?" asked the firefighter as he wrapped a blanket around her shoulders.

"My mother works here," Caroline said, and slumped, sobbing, into his arms.

_______

A little before dusk Scott left the Union and walked through Library Mall. The TV lounge had been crowded with students and workers and faculty members, most of them silent, absorbing information more intently than most of them had ever done at a lecture. Still, after more than three hours watching coverage of the attacks, Scott felt like he understood less than ever.

There was a bottleneck of words inside him that he didn't know how to break, and he was grateful when a tall Asian woman in the Mall asked him if he was there for the vigil. Someone had come through the Union to announce a candlelight vigil, but Scott had forgotten all about it.

"Yes." A bit of tension drained from his shoulders.

"Great." The woman smiled. "Hey, do you mind helping with the candles? Most of the organizers aren't here yet."

"Sure." Scott set his backpack down beside the concrete stage. "I'm Scott."

"I'm Stella." She shook his hand. "How are you?"

He let out a ragged breath. "I'm a little shook up."

"Me, too," she said. "I'm hoping this will help a little. Sometimes just being around people makes me feel better."

Scott couldn't say the same; but he unpacked candles, slid paper rings over them, and handed them to the people who arrived, first in a trickle, then in a steady stream. It felt good to be doing something, small as it was. He didn't even mind the crowd.

After a while they ran out of candles, and only then did Scott realize that night had fallen. Above him the city lights reflected off the night sky, while around him the Mall was illuminated by a few hundred low-orbit stars shining up into worried faces. Stella produced one last candle, and he found himself huddling around it with her and some of the other organizers.

Later, as he was walking home, Scott felt like two connected but separate people whose feet were falling on the same spots on the concrete, but a fraction of a second apart—overlapping, kin to each other, but not the same. The Scott he had been tonight and most of the day was not the Scott he had been for a long time. But he knew that Scott, the one who could interact with people without anxiety, the one who could share something without fear of words. How long had it been since he'd been that person? Since before he'd come to Madison, he was sure of that. There'd been the shock of coming to a place where he knew no one, and then there'd been Cecilia, and somewhere in there he'd become someone he didn't like very much. It was bizarre and disturbing that it should take something like today to remind him of that.

He quickened his steps, hoping to outdistance himself.

WEDNESDAY

When she walked into the kitchen Fern thought she was seeing a ghost. There was Zeke reading the paper in a flannel shirt and jeans, with the same crew cut he'd had until 1997, when Grace had bet him the Packers would beat the Patriots. She'd always wanted to see her dad with hair, and although the bet was only for two months, Zeke had kept his hair longer from then on, until the chemo made it all fall out.

"Hi, Ma," said the ghost, and she realized it was Morty. "I made coffee."

Fern took down a cup, looked at the coffeepot, then went to the bread box instead and pulled a loaf of wheat bread out. The twister gave her trouble, and she had to concentrate to keep her breathing under control.

When the bread was in the toaster she managed to pour a cup of coffee without splashing it all over herself.

"I've been trying to call you," she said.

"I've been gone. I'm sorry."

"Gone where?"

"All over. Machu Picchu, the Yucatan, the Grand Canyon, Lake Louise, Yellowstone, Rio, Angel Falls, the Amazon, the Great Smoky Mountains—"

"Not in that order, I hope."

Morty smiled. "No."

"Did you have a good time?"

"It was all right. It would have been better if I could have brought someone along."

Fern motioned at the paper. "You know what happened."

He nodded. "I saw a copy of
USA Today
in Buenos Aires."

The toast popped up, and Fern turned. "How are you?" she asked, leaning on the counter for support.

"I found out something, Ma. We went to see a man named Bert O'Brien. He was part of a group in World War II, of people who had powers like us, and he told us something that... I should have figured out myself."

"Figured out what?" Fern asked.

"There was a guy like me, Ma. A guy named Jacques, who was fast like me. He . . . something happened with him. He didn't just move fast. His metabolism and everything—the physics of it don't make a lot of sense. But then, I guess nothing does right now."

"Goddammit, Mortimer!" Fern clenched her jaw shut to get back her control. "Please, just tell me what it is."

"Ma. I'm dying. I'm aging something like fifty times faster than everyone else, and I don't know how long I've got left."

Fern gripped the counter. Her legs threatened to give way. She couldn't catch her breath, but Morty kept talking. "I should have told you. I went away—I told myself I wanted to see all those things before I died. But I should be spending the rest of my time here with you—"

Fern's grip failed, and her knees buckled. Of course Morty was there to catch her before she hit the floor, and she couldn't hold back her sobs any longer. She lost all self-awareness, all shame. Snot ran from her nose, and her wails were animal sounds, and she clutched at Morty and flailed at him with her fists and cried.

_______

Harriet slipped into the house when the son—his name was Isaiah; he was eleven; he liked Kid Rock and Randy Moss—opened the door to bring in the newspaper. Everything inside, from the bright white carpeting to the deep mahogany of the staircase banister, was clean and bright, like a model house, or a sitcom set. She followed Isaiah carefully up the stairs.

Nathan Statz was still in bed. He had lost weight since that night in the pizza parlor. It had taken him some time after the shooting to get back his appetite, and since he couldn't drive with one arm, he'd gotten into the habit of walking. He looked good, but there was a wariness about his eyes that hadn't been there before.

His arm was no longer in a sling, but a bandage bulged beneath his T-shirt at the shoulder. He thanked Isaiah and tousled the boy's hair with his good arm.

"Dad?" Isaiah asked.

"Mmm-hmm?"

"Why don't they like America?"

Nathan looked at the picture on the front page, of the twin towers smoldering. "That's not an easy question to answer," he said. "You might say that some of their reasons aren't all wrong. But there's no justification for what they did."

"How many people died?"

"I don't know, Isaiah. Too many. Hey, listen," he said, and put his good hand on Isaiah's shoulder, "you know that you're safe here. Nothing's going to happen to us. Don't worry, OK?"

"OK." Isaiah nodded.

"OK. Do you have more questions?"

"I guess not."

"Then get downstairs and eat your breakfast. The bus'll be here in ten minutes."

"OK, Dad."

After Isaiah left, Nathan sat looking at the paper. Harriet knew that he usually pulled out the sports section and read it first, but today he started with the front page. At one point he whispered something to himself, set the paper down, and put his hands to his face. His breath was ragged. When he moved his hands away his eyes were bright and wet.

"Bye, Dad!" came Isaiah's voice from downstairs, and he slammed the door behind him as he left. Nathan called after him and smiled, then let the smile fade into thoughtfulness.

He had moved on to the local section when his wife—Tamara, age thirty-four, nursing student, church volunteer—came upstairs. She yanked the paper out of Nathan's hands and flung it onto the floor. Then she lay on the bed with her head in his lap.

"I don't know how you can read that," she said.

Nathan ran his fingers through Tamara's long hair. "I want to understand why it happened."

"You never will," she said. "No one can understand fanaticism except fanatics."

"I want to understand the politics," he said. "I want to understand why they're so angry."

"Why?" She sat up abruptly, her back to him. "How's that going to help you? You work in a pizza shop, for Christ's sake. How are you going to make it better?"

Nathan winced and rubbed at his shoulder. There was a long moment of silence, and Harriet's breath sounded thunderous to her own ears. "I'm sorry," Tamara said. "I just can't stand to think about it."

Nathan pressed a hand against his wife's back. "Do you feel better this morning?"

She nodded. "I made an appointment with the doctor already. If that was a panic attack, I never want it to happen again."

"Did you talk to Isaiah?"

"He didn't want to talk about it. I think he was more scared than I was."

"I don't think that's possible."

Harriet pretended she wasn't there, that she was just part of the furniture. If she admitted to herself that she was there watching then she would have to ask herself why, and asking herself would mean acknowledging herself. She wasn't a voyeur. She wasn't here. She wasn't anywhere.

_______

Prudence managed a half hour of alone time in the tape room before Bill found her.

"Go home," he told her.

"I was home," she said. "I was home last night, and I couldn't fall asleep because I couldn't turn the TV off, and when I did fall asleep I had nightmares, and when I woke up I was still having them."

"You need sleep. The baby needs sleep."

"The baby is quite capable of telling me what it needs on its own. I wouldn't have thought up peanut butter and oranges on my own, I can assure you."

"What are you working on?"

"The All-Stars story. Anything to get those damn towers out of my head."

The tape she was viewing held interviews of people who had been saved by the All-Stars throughout their three-month career. There was another tape of people with grievances against the All-Stars, but she was pretending for the moment that the other tape didn't exist.

"Where do you think they are?" Bill asked.

"I don't know," she said. "I don't know if it matters. They couldn't have done much. Superman couldn't have stopped it."

"Maybe not. But it would make me feel better to know they were out there."

Prudence laughed. "Bill, you surprise me! All this time I've been taking you for a cynic."

"A cynic is just a fallen optimist," Bill said.

Prudence shook her head. "Bill, I'm scared. Scared for this baby."

"You're not talking about your health, are you?"

"I'm talking about—there's going to be a war, Bill. And I understand that. It's what happens next that scares me."

"Me too," said Bill. "The question is, are we going to let that fear make us stupid as well?"

"What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about giving up. You know how easy it is to become jaded on this job. How difficult it is to keep your sense of outrage from becoming dulled. You start to see patterns in how events unfold, and you start to think those patterns will never change, and you'll always be reporting the same depressing things. We're not even supposed to want it to change. We're just supposed to report it.

"Something like this happens, it takes a lot out of the profession. You feel like nothing you do matters. We lose good people that way."

"Are you afraid I'm going to quit?"

"You might," said Bill. "You could take your leave and decide not to come back. You could do voice-over work or go into radio or something more low-key. I wouldn't even blame you. But it would be a shame. You're good at this. You believe in it. Most people don't."

"Do you?"

"On my good days."

"Well, I wasn't thinking about quitting until you brought it up. Now I'll have to seriously consider it."

"Fine," said Bill. "Go home and sleep on it."

"After I finish this edit."

"Leave it on my desk when you go."

_______

It was a fine morning, and it was going to be a hot day. Bert O'Brien stood on the lawn outside Shady Meadows Retirement Home in his sweatpants and a Brewers T-shirt. He wasn't wearing shoes. He wouldn't need them where he was going.

When he was younger and more prone to melodrama he used to imagine what would happen if he kept flying up until he hit the ionosphere. Maybe he wouldn't even make it that far, he wasn't sure. Whatever it was that had given him this gift of flight had equipped him with the resilience to withstand the stresses of flight, but he didn't know how high it would let him go.

"Mr. O'Brien?" One of the orderlies—they called themselves residence coordinators, but they were equal parts nurse, social worker and guard—was standing near the door. "Good morning, Mr. O'Brien."

Bert didn't say anything. He took a deep breath.

"How are you?" The man sauntered toward Bert. "Would you like some breakfast?"

"I don't think so," said Bert and took off into the sky.

He was tired of people asking him how he was, as if old age were a chronic disease. Perhaps it was, but that didn't make everyone who didn't suffer from it any less insufferable.

His eyes started watering almost immediately, and he spent the first two thousand feet blinking them clear. His legs, though, were free of soreness for the first time in months—since the last time he'd flown.

He felt young again until he passed through the clouds and had to fight for breath. He coughed up what air he had managed to gulp down, but willed himself to keep climbing. Up, up and away.

He started to sweat, and his pants started to feel tight. He wondered if his body was starting to swell with altitude, like he'd heard people's feet tended to do on airplanes. Then he realized that he had an erection, something that hadn't happened outside of the early mornings in almost ten years. His coughs turned to laughter, and then his lungs cleared, as if he'd finally become acclimated to the thin air.

This was always how he'd planned to go out. Back during the Cuban Missile Crisis he'd decided that given the choice between this and the bomb, the choice was easy. It would be on his terms, at least. He could fly above the mushroom clouds and the drifting radiation and the retaliatory strikes, and never have to see the earth that was left behind after they'd finished scorching it. Things were going to hell, like he'd always known they would, and he wasn't going to wait to see what happened next.

He wondered if the orderly would have called someone, if there would be fighter jets scrambling to shoot him out of the sky. The idea made him laugh again, but it came out as a thin cackling, and he had to stop to catch his breath. His heart beat in his forehead, but it felt weak, overworked. He was light-headed. He could pass out at any second. Just a little higher, he thought. It's better to burn out than to fade away.

If he could survive the ionosphere, maybe he could make orbit, or even escape velocity. If he could just go a little faster, a little higher.

He should have left those kids a note or something. He hated for them to take this to heart. Just because he'd lost hope didn't mean he wanted to take away theirs. Ah, hell, who was he kidding? He was just an old man. They wouldn't know—they probably hadn't given him a second thought. He felt for those kids. He felt for all the kids.

It was too late for regrets. He was leaving all that behind. If he could just make it a little higher . . .

_______

Caroline didn't know her mother's real hair color. She'd dyed her hair blond until Caroline was twelve, and then they'd both gone through a long period of experimentation. Every couple of months they would color their hair—flax, burgundy, ebony, auburn. For St. Patrick's Day they went green, and for the Fourth of July Caroline went blue and her mother a bright red, with tiaras full of stars.