He’d thought he was prepared for this. Should have been. Hell, he’d talked to the guy on the phone two or three times since the day Wade had called him from the hospital to tell him the Angel he’d always thought was a figment of his childhood imagination was real.
“You look like Wade,” he said, feeling like he needed to unclog his throat. “A little bit—around the eyes.”
“Well, we both got the blue ones, I guess.”
This brother’s eyes were darker than Wade’s, Matt noticed. And looked like they’d seen a whole lot more of what was bad in the world. Which was saying something, considering Wade was a homicide cop.
“Yeah? Whose did I get?”
“Mom’s. You got Mom’s eyes.”
About then, Matt realized he was still holding his brother’s hand, and evidently it occurred to Cory about the same time. There was a mutual rush of breath, and he got his arms up about the same time Cory’s arms came around him.
Matt had gotten over being shy about showing emotions five years ago, so he shouldn’t be ashamed to be tearing up now. And he wasn’t.
He could hear some hoots and whistles coming from the court, though, so after some throat-clearings and coughs and a backslap or two, he and Cory let go of each other. Dee-Jon, Frankie and Ray had gotten Vincent picked up off the floor, and all four were churning across the floor toward them, along with Dog and Wayans in their regular chairs, moving in from the far sidelines.
“Woo hoo, look at Teach, I think he got him a girlfriend!”
“Hey, Teach, I didn’t know you was—”
“Yo, Teach, who the ugly bi—”
At which point Matt held up his hand and put on his fierce-coach look and hollered, “Whoa, guys—I won’t have any of that trash talk about my brother.”
By this time he and Cory were surrounded, and the exclamations came at him from all sides.
“Brother!”
“He yo brothah?”
“Hey, you told us your bro was a cop. He don’t look like no cop.”
“Yeah, he look like a wuss.”
Matt glanced up at Cory to see how he was taking this, but Cory was grinning, so he did, too. “Nah, this is my other brother. He’s a reporter.”
“You got a othah brothah? How come you never—”
“Reporter—like on CNN?”
“How come I never seen you on TV?”
“Yeah, Dee-Jon, like you watch the news.”
Cory waited for the chorus to die down, then said, “I’m the other kind of reporter. A journalist—you know, a writer.”
The kids didn’t have too much to say about that. The chairs rocked and swiveled a little bit, and some heads nodded. Shoulders shrugged.
“Huh. A writer…”
“A writer—okay, that’s cool.”
“He’s been in more war zones than you guys have,” Matt said, which got the kids going again.
Dee-Jon shot his chin up. “Yeah? You ever been shot?”
“I have, actually,” Cory said.
Obviously thrown a little bit by that, Dee-Jon hesitated, then said, “Yeah, well, I have, too. That’s what put me in this chair. I was just walkin’ down the street, doin’ ma’ thing, not botherin’ nobody, know what I’m sayin’? And this car comes cruisin’, and this dude starts in shootin’—like, eh-eh-eh-eh—an’ next thing I know I’m down on the sidewalk lookin’ up at the sky, and I don’t feel nothin’. Still don’t. But, hey, I can still satisfy my woman, don’t think I can’t.”
That brought a whole barrage of hoots and comments, most of them in the kind of language Matt had pretty much gotten used to and given up trying to ban entirely. He wasn’t sure about how his big brother was taking it, though.
But Cory hadn’t batted an eye, just started asking questions, asking the kids how they’d gotten hurt, what had happened to them that put them in the chairs. In about ten seconds he had them all pulled in close around him, and was listening while each one told his story, sometimes yelling over the other eager voices, sometimes almost whispering in a respectful silence.
Ray, describing how his dad liked to beat up on him and throw him up against a wall when he was crazy drunk, and one day missed the wall and threw him through a third-floor apartment window instead.
And Dog, admitting how he’d been living up to his nickname hotdogging it on his dirt bike out on the Mojave Desert, showing off for his friends the day he’d flipped over and broken his neck. “I was stupid,” Dog said with a shrug. “Now I gots to pay.”
Wayans wasn’t stupid, just unlucky, having been born with spina bifida. And Vincent hadn’t had much to do with the automobile accident that had injured him, either, just happened to be in the wrong intersection at the exact time when a corporate lawyer on his way home from entertaining a client at a Beverly Hills nightclub failed to notice the light was red.
Frankie tried to get away with his favorite story about getting attacked by a shark, but the others shouted him down, so he had to admit he’d gotten his injury skateboarding illegally in the Los Angeles River’s concrete bed.
Matt hung back and watched his brother, the way the kids responded to him, the way he listened, not with sugary sympathy, but with his complete attention, interest that was focused and genuine, and that made people want to open up and spill things they wouldn’t normally think about telling a stranger. He could see what had made his brother a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, although the whole war-correspondent thing was still hard for him to grasp. He’d been prepared to like this newfound long-lost brother—particularly since he’d had those dreamlike memories of him protecting him from the bad scary stuff of his nightmares. What he hadn’t expected to feel was respect. Maybe even awe.
“Hey, guys,” he said, breaking into the chorus of questions now being fired at Cory from all sides, “you want to know about my brother, go home and do an Internet search on Cory Pearson. That’s P-E-A-R-S-O-N for you semiliterates. Now get out of here so he and I can spend some time together. We’ve got a lot to catch up on. Go on, hit the showers.”
The response was predictable.
“Ah, man.”
“Hey, it’s early—how come we gotta quit now?”
“Yeah, I wanna hit something.”
“You can’t hit nothin’—you a wussy.”
“I’m ‘a show you wussy—you hit like a little girl.”
The noise drifted off across the court as the six kids headed for the locker room. Matt and Cory followed, slowly.
“I see what you meant when you said it’s not each other they’re mad at. That game they were playing—it’s what they call Murderball, right?”
“Officially,” Matt said, pausing to scoop up the forgotten volleyball, “it’s called quad rugby. It’s been an official sport of the Paralympics since…I think, Atlanta.”
Cory nodded. “I’ve done some reading up on it. The rules allow them to do just about anything they can to the chairs, right? But they can’t go after the occupant. Whoever thought up that game was a genius. Gives them a chance to beat up on the thing they hate most and can’t live without. One thing, though. Doesn’t the ‘quad’ stand for—”
“Quadriplegic—yeah, it does. And most people think the same thing, which is that quads can’t