A Gentle Rain, Page 2

  I put my forehead against the clear dome that separated him from me, and I cried. It was the first and last time I'd let him see me shed tears over him. That's when I realized: He's a Cracker horse. I have to see him as special, and that means tivorth saving.

  Pa came in eventually, looked the baby over without a word, then finally spread one big, callused hand on the crib's dome. He put the other hand on my shoulder. I felt a tremor in it. "What d'ya think, Ben?"

  "He's a Cracker," I said hoarsely. "If we don't give him a chance to prove hisself, who's gonna?"

  Pa squeezed my shoulder. "Then we're agreed. Your Mama'll be proud of you. Proud of us both. She loves him."

  "Then so do we," I said.

  "There are places you can send this baby, Mr. Thocco," the doctor said behind us. "The state runs some institutions where he'll be cared for. There's no cost, if you put him there. Would you like to discuss a place for him to ..."

  "His name's Joseph," Pa said. "It was my granddaddy's name."

  "A place for Joseph . . . "

  "Joey," I said. "He's got enough to do without toting a long name. Don'cha think, Pa?"

  "Joey," Pa agreed. Pa and me traded another nod. Joey would need all the help we could give him. It'd take two men and a Mama to carry Joey along. I steeled my spine. We could do it. It was the cowboy way.

  The doc kept trying. "A place ..."

  "Yeah," Pa said. He turned to the doc with a face that could set concrete. "We call that place 'home."'

  We took Joey and Mama home to Ocala the next day. We made the best of it. And you know what? Joey was worth the best. Even though me and Joey would end up alone in the world a lot sooner than I knew. Even though finding a home for us would take more sacrifice than I realized.

  I never again wished he hadn't been born.

  But sometimes, I wished I hadn't.

  Part One

  "Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns-or dollars. Take your choice-there is no other."

  -Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

  Chapter 1

  Kara Dos Rios Preserve, Brazil

  I loved the story of my birth. Mother and Dad told it to me so many times, it became a fable. The fairytale of my own life.

  There they were, Charles and Elizabeth Whittenbrook, a wealthy and esteemed couple, two of the world's most acclaimed environmentalists, credited with saving large sections of the rainforest.

  They'd married "late in our youth," as Dad liked to say, and they were finally pregnant with their long-awaited and much anticipated first child, yours truly. They were extraordinarily happy at their Brazilian refuge, Dos Rios, deep in the heart of the Amazon, awaiting the birth.

  A radio call came to the preserve's office. The child of a local Indian family had been injured. Could my parents help? Naturally, though Mother was nine months' pregnant, she and Dad packed medical supplies and set out on horseback. They saved the child's life and prepared to return home.

  Suddenly, Mother went into labor. The tribe made her comfortable on a woven reed mat in the shaman's hut, and there, beneath an Amazon moon, I was born. As Mother lay holding me in her naked arms, a tribal elder presented her and Dad with the rarest of gifts in honor of my birth-a baby hyacinth macaw.

  Mother, in her impeccable English voice, with her love for the novels of Jane Austen, announced that I would be named Karaja, in honor of Brazil's best-knowtl native tribe, but that the honorary bird would be named Mr. Darcy, as per Jane Austen's famous character in Pride and Prejudice.

  My delighted father carried the placenta of my birth to a nearby river and ceremoniously presented it to the river gods, as instructed by the shaman.

  "It was a blessing ofthe gods that neither I nor the shaman were eaten by piranhas during the ceremony," Dad always said with a smile.

  With a melodramatic story like that as a launching pad, I should have grown up to be the leader of a brave resistance or the demi- god of some powerful cult. But I didn't. Imagine if Marilyn Monroe had had a daughter, and that daughter grew up to be a perfectly nice, accomplished, smart, well-adjusted person, and yet ... the daughter knew she would always be a dim bulb compared to her mother's shining star.

  That's how it felt to be my parents' daughter.

  Brilliance is always relative.

  I grew up stuttering and chubby. It didn't help that Mother and Dad were famous environmentalists, and it didn't matter how rich they were. Not even fame and family fortune protects those of us who start out being perceived as different from the majority.

  At boarding school I was known as P-P-Porky Whittenbrook. Later, when I overcame the stutter, I was k nowm merely as Porky. At Yale I became a semi-vegetarian. Fin was fine. Fur was foul. I lost most of the weight and was then known as Carrot Whittenbrook. Did I mention my frizzy red hair?

  I was grown before my peers called me only by my given name, Kara Whittenbrook. By then, the psychic damage was done. I had become one of the world's few shy heiresses, and a bona fide recluse who preferred the rainforest to the so-called realworld.

  Plus I hated both pork and carrots.

  Mother and Dad didn't quite know what to make of me. They'd hoped I be a queen bee, not a reclusive worker bee. "Where's your passion for leadership?" they asked. "What is your grandest dream?"

  "To earn two doctorates and re-invent the Dewey Decimal System before I'm thirty-five?" I had no grand dreams. And I always posed my goals like a question.

  "That's not what we mean."

  What did they mean? I never understood. Goals that seemed so easy and off hand to them required all my devotion. I slaved as an undergrad and even harder as a graduate student. At the preserve, where I catalogued the customs, language and rituals of Amazon tribes, I was a frenetic little sponge of over-achievement, absorbing, relating, and meeting goals with feverish determination.

  I didn't have time to be a dreamer.

  I was an accomplisher.

  Didn't my dual masters degrees in library science, world cultures and language matter? And what about my Juilliard-trained harp playing, and my skill at cooking? All seemed to be no more than precocious cartoon drawings Mother and Dad patiently displayed on their refrigerator door.

  In their minds, librarians, harpists and cooks don't save the world. Unless you count writing harp solos and creating culinary masterpieces with soy cheese as milestones of human achievement, I hadn't been put to any real tests.

  Until now.

  aaa

  The human body looks so alien in charred pieces.

  I stared numbly at the carnage of my parents' small plane among the giant trees and ferns of Dos Rios' most remote region. Mother and Dad could not be dead. They were immortal. At least, I had always thought so. I was wrong.

  "What would you like us to do first, Kara?" a guide asked gently.

  "Collect the remains gently," I told him. I spoke to the tough gauchos and Indian trackers in soft Portuguese, the language of Brazil.

  "Turn away, don't look anymore. We will do this for you. And for your parents. An honor for us."

  "Thank you, but I have to help. I'm their daughter."

  The strong, bronzed men nodded. For a moment I turned my face toward the sweaty brown neck of the small horse I'd ridden to the crash site. Inside, I fractured into a thousand grieving parts.

  Connecticut

  Mother and Dad's memorial service

  "Let us b-begin," I said. My voice shook. Abject shame rose inside me. My stutter was back. It surfaced occasionally and with no warning, but I hadn't suffered an outbreak since grad school, and I was thirty-two now. I thought I'd finally outgrown it. But no.

  I took my place at the front of a historic Connecticut church filled with several hundred of the world's richest mourners, many of them my relatives. I felt awkward and unnatural in an impeccably respectable bla
ck wool dress with matching pumps and demure heirloom pearls. I tried a second time. "Let us begin."

  What was that odd scent? Grief Grief and fear? No, just the synthetic fragrance of white winter funeral roses flown in from Holland by the thousands. Just the raw tang of blood in my sinuses after weeks of tears.

  Stop thinking so hard. Take a breath. Don't stutter. Don't.

  Bodyguards and Secret Service agents lined the church's back walls. Two former presidents, several former vice presidents, and one member of England's royal family-a cousin on my mother's side-occupied a front pew near Dad's older brother, my uncle, Senator William Whittenbrook.

  Uncle William smiled at me beneath puffy eyes. He, at least, mourned along with me. But all the rest-those rich, powerful and mostly conservative people-stared up at me sternly. I could hear their collective thoughts.

  My did Zara bring that bird?

  "Boink," Mr. Darcy said, loud enough for the mike to pick up. The memorial congregation stared at Mr. Darcy and waited for me to take command of his irreverence. Connecticut is not comfortable with large, unpredictable macaws. I covered the microphone. "Control yourself," I whispered to Mr. Darcy. He cackled.

  My pre-recorded harp solo filled the large sanctuary. 0 Coracfio da Terra. Portuguese for Heart of the Earth. Photographs of Mother and Dad began to appear on two large screens that flanked me. They were tall and elegant. In one picture, I stood between them, a stocky little redhead in hiking shorts and organically tie-dyed native t-shirts, all freckles and squinty grins.

  When the memorial slide show faded to black, Mr. Darcy uttered another rakish cackle. "Ho, Ho, Ho," he said loudly. Macaws are among the smartest of the large, Amazonian birds. He'd picked up a rich variety of lingo from the preserve's staff and visitors. I shushed him. He made a burping sound.

  "Welcome, friends and f-family," I began again, my voice quivering harder. "I'd like to start by quoting one my mother's favorite sentiments, from Jane Austen: `They are much to be pitied who have not been given a taste for nature early in life.'

  "Mother's life was d-defined by her love for nature-nature of so many kinds, not just the obvious magnificence of our green Earth, b but human nature, intellectual nature, and the nature of love between a man and a woman. She adored my father, and he adored her, and I'm happy to say the two of them adored me, their only child. For which I feel blessed."

  Mr. Darcy snuggled his head against my upswept red hair, as if trying to comfort me. I cleared my throat. "One of my Dad's favorite quotes came from our distant cousin, Theodore Roosevelt. `To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the ddays of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and d-developed."'

  The crowd remained grimly patient. "Or, as Dad would have me tell you," I went on, "`Sentiment without action is the r-ruin of the soul.' A quote from the famed environmentalist, Edward Abbey."

  More patient silence. Leaders of industry don't smile at nature-loving lectures. Uncle William looked sympathetic yet impatient. Enough, he mouthed. He patted his heart. Affection, yes. Tolerance, no.

  But I couldn't stop. "Perhaps nothing represents my parents' love for the rainforest better than the way they lived their 1-lives," I rattled on, my voice breaking. "This one s-story illustrates that beautifully. The story of my birth. There they were, my mother and dad, a wealthy and esteemed couple ..."

  I couldn't do it. I couldn't share that personal story with people who might only roll their eyes at the melodrama or tsk-tsk at Mother and Dad's recklessness.

  Mr. Darcy took my devastated silence as some sort of signal. He leaned down from my shoulder. He cocked his neon-blue head at the mike, nibbled it with his large, frightening beak, then sang a lyric from one of Mother and Dad's favorite comic songs, a little Monty Python ditty.

  "I'm a lumberjack, and I'm okay," he warbled in an eerie approximation of a British drag-queen accent. "I put on women's clothing, and hang around in bars."

  Everyone but Uncle William gasped. Uncle William hid his smile behind a hand.

  I bent my head to Mr. Darcy's. Then I laughed until tears streamed down my freckled cheeks. Then I sobbed.

  Then I said firmly into the microphone, "Mother and Dad are dead, you understand? Dead. I helped pick up the pieces of their bodies. I was honored to be there for that duty, no matter how much the memory haunts me."

  "But what will the world do without them? What will people like you do without people like them to remind you that there are higher callings that demand the courage to say, `No, this will not be a matter of making money?'

  "Why don't you cry? Why do you all just sit here politely, pretending that you cared about Charles and Elizabeth Whittenbrook when most of you barely knew them and didn't respect their work? Oh, yes, I know you give lip service to the environment, you make donations and write them off your taxes, but when push comes to shove you always choose to make money, first.

  "If you really want to honor my mother and dad, you'll find some way to save even one small part of this good, green Earth and the people who love it as much as they did. Save something precious from the short-sighted selfishness that pervades our lives. That's what I intend to do. And if any ofyou think I'm a foolish dreamer, just like Mother and Dad, you can just ... " I bit my tongue. I wouldn't lower myself to be that crude.

  But Mr. Darcy would. "Kiss my ass," he finished.

  Grief has a sound. It's a shout of rage and the song of a promise. It's the ringing call of passion. It's capable of transforming us, even when it stutters.

  I wanted to be transformed.

  Ben Jacksonville, Florida

  "Ben, you've kept your brother alive all these years," the cardiologist said. That's amazing, considering his odds. But this time, there's nothing else you, I or medical science can do for him."

  "Doc, that's not true, dammit, and you and me both know it."

  The doc sighed. "Heart surgeons won't even consider a Down Syndrome patient for a transplant. Insurance companies? Forget it."

  "If I could find some way to get the money-"

  "It's not about money, Ben."

  "Doc, everything in this world's about money, one way or the other. It's what greases the wheels. It's the system. Look, I've read that a heart transplant for my brother could cost a quarter-million. I can sell a piece of my ranch, raise that much cash-"

  "It wouldn't matter ifyou were the richest man on the planet. Joey's not a good candidate for a transplant. It really isn't about the money."

  I'm a hard ass. Hard man. They say. Pa died in a ranch accident when we were kids, then Mania when I was sixteen and Joey just seven. I had to run off to Mexico with Joey to keep him out of an institution.

  We spent ten years in Mexico, and I saved enough money to come back home and buy a ranch. What I did to earn that kind of money was honest labor but an embarrassment that haunted me still. What I said about working the system? Yeah. It's all in how you play the game, and how the games play you.

  Now the nest egg from Mexico was running out, time was running out, and Joey was running out. I wanted to smash the doc's window with a fist. Instead, I looked out that skyscraper window over downtown Jacksonville.

  Just stared east at the broad, sunny promise of the St. John's River, Florida's Mississippi, some call it. Like I might take Joey fishing in the tidal marsh one more time. Like maybe he'd die happy if he caught another flounder.

  I felt like my heart was dryin' up inside me. I wished I could take it out and trade it to Joey. "How long has he got, Doc?"

  "I hate to tell you this, but patients with his test results don't live more than six months to a year."

  I looked out the window for a long time before I could trust myself to speak, again. The doc let me be. Finally, I said, "Joey coulda had surgery when he was a kid. His heart coulda been fixed, if it'd been diagnosed early enough." I paused, gritting my tee
th. "If he hadn't been the son of poor people."

  The doc sighed. "Yes, that's true. I'm sorry."

  "See, Doc? It's always about money, some way or other."

  "Point taken."

  I faced him. "Make me a promise. Don't tell him what you just told me. I don't want him to know."

  "All right, Ben. You have my word. But you need to share this diagnosis with someone you trust. Don't try to deal with it, alone."

  I gave him a thin smile. "I've had a lot of practice dealing with things alone."

  The doc wrote out some new prescriptions and told me to up Joey's oxygen as needed. He also slipped a pamphlet about hospice care in my hand, but I threw that in the trash on my way to the waitin' room.

  "Chocolate turtle caramel with peanut butter sprilldes," Joey said happily, as I rolled him through the parking deck. "That's what I want today, Benji."

  Benji. Like that dog in the movie. He'd called me Benji since he was six years old. My name was the first word he spoke.

  "You got it, bro." Whatever he wanted. We always stopped for ice cream after a doctor's visit. A thought hit me: This time next spring, Joey tivon't be here to eat ice cream.

  "What's wrong, Benji?"

  I stopped the wheelchair. "Aw, I got something in my eye. Gimme a second. I'm rubbin' it out."

  Sometimes you get help from unlikely angels. I needed angel-help right then, and it came. Across the parking deck, the back doors popped open on my big-ass red truck. Mac and Lily had spotted us.

  Maybe angels don't look like tall, middle-aged cowboys with jowly faces or short, middle-aged housekeepers with a bum left leg, but that's what Mac and Lily looked like. They'd worked for me ten years, and they were like family. They loved Joey, and Joey loved them.

  "Now, you're all better, aren't you, Joey! " Lily called, throwing out her arms. She limped our way through a flock of seagulls and pigeons pecking at some suburbanite's thrownn-out french fries. The birds didn't even spook. They recognized kindred spirits.