Later the night of the dinner party, while his parents had fought (“You humiliated me!” “You humiliated yourself!”), he’d logged on to YouTube and watched a video about the man, whose name was Wesley Autrey—the first of many views. Cole had even used Wesley Autrey’s story to create one of his first comic strips. But like everything else that had once belonged to him, it had somehow been lost. In fact, he’d forgotten all about it.
Not just Wesley Autrey’s story but other true-life stories of heroism obsessed him.
In Iowa, a group of Boy Scouts is caught in a tornado. Though injured and in severe pain, one boy struggles to pull his scout mates from under the rubble. Why couldn’t something like that happen to him? For there seemed no end of such stories on the Net, and the population of heroes his own age was surprisingly large. Here a boy rescued not one but two people from drowning. There a boy helped his mother to give birth. In his neighborhood in Chicago there’d been a boy called Major who’d stopped a whole gang of kids from torturing a dog. The dog, scarred and lame from its ordeal, dragged everywhere behind Major like a broken tail.
A few days after her visit to Salvation City, Addy e-mailed Cole some pictures. One of them showed the light-colored six-story building where she had her apartment in Berlin, in a neighborhood called Prenzlauer Berg. It was the only picture in the group Cole hadn’t seen before. Most of the others were copies of photos his mother had sent to Addy over the years. There were some baby pictures, including one taken by his father immediately after Cole was born, and there were several school pictures. In some of the photos he was by himself and in others he was with friends or parents or grandparents. There was a picture of him with Sadie when she was a puppy, another of him and his dad at a Cubs game. In the most recent photo, he and his parents were standing outside their building in Chicago. It was snowing. It was their last Christmas together and Addy was visiting; that would have been Addy behind the camera. There were also pictures of his parents without him (more of his mother than of his father), some taken years before Cole was born. It was a picture of his mother when she was a little girl (same eyes, much curlier hair) that brought him the greatest emotion.
It wasn’t until he saw these photographs that Cole understood his fear was real: he was starting to forget what his parents had looked like. Recently he had tried drawing them from memory but had given up in frustration. He was thrilled to have the photos now—for one thing, he could use them for drawings—though every time he looked at them he suffered fresh pain. He would never see his parents alive again. There had been no mistake—they would not rise from the dead as he and Addy had done. But something had changed. Disturbing as Addy’s visit had been, it seemed to have quieted some storm in him. It was as if in some way she had given his parents back to him. At least, they felt closer than they had before. He was still their son. They were gone, but they were still his parents. He did not need any others.
He did not care so much about the photographs of himself. He didn’t like looking at pictures of himself, and he’d always hated having his picture taken. He could not recall a time in his life when he hadn’t thought there was something (either big or ginormous, depending on his age) about his looks that was wrong. In fact, he was surprised anew each time he recalled how Addy had described him: like a young man now, so handsome and so serious.
Alone in his room, he stared bravely and hopefully at the young man in the full-length mirror hanging inside his closet door. So handsome and so serious. Yes, maybe. Sometimes he thought he could see it, too.
PART FIVE
It began as a small thing: a red round mark on the right shoulder blade, as if a hot dime had been pressed there.
“It’s nothing,” said PW. “It just itches.” He asked Tracy to dab the spot with some calamine lotion. But the next day the itch was worse, and all up and down his spine he had