A Time to Die

  “Kevin was a creep,” Elyse muttered darkly.

  With a swig of milk, Kara washed down the enzyme pills that she had to take before every meal to help her body digest food properly. “I made up my mind a long time ago not to let this illness get in my way. Only a few people know the secrets of my soul—”

  “You mean Christy and Vince.”

  “Yes. And you understand plenty about me, too.” She didn’t add that because Elyse was healthy, she could never truly understand. “I want people to treat me as if I’m just a regular person.” Kara leaned forward. “I think Eric just walked into the cafeteria. Look, over there by the side door.”

  Elyse followed Kara’s gaze. “The guy does look lost. But then, on the first day, who doesn’t?”

  “I’ll be back if he doesn’t want to be bothered.” Kara stood abruptly. She wove her way through the maze of tables and noisy groups of juniors who had the same lunch period. The closer she got, the more nervous she became and the more ridiculous she felt. Eric Lawrence was tall, probably over six feet. His hair was shaggier than in the photo she’d seen, but his eyes were the same startling bright blue.

  He was standing, looking bored. “Are you Eric?” Kara asked.

  He looked down at her and without smiling asked, “How’d you know my name?”

  She tipped her head up toward him and, grinning, said, “I’m one of Central’s ‘it’s-the-first-day-of-school-and-I-don’t-know-a-living-soul-patrol.’ I’m here to give you a friendly warning about the cafeteria food.”

  “You’re too late,” he said. “I’ve already had the food. Now how else can you be friendly? You aren’t in any of my classes. I would have remembered. So back to question number one: How do you know my name?”

  Kara glanced around. “We’ve got fifteen minutes before the end of lunch. Let’s go outside, and we can talk.”

  Three

  THE WARM SEPTEMBER sunshine felt good to Kara. She found an empty bench and plopped down. The air was fragrant with the scent of flowers, which she silently hoped wouldn’t irritate her lungs and cause her to start coughing.

  Eric sat beside her. “Is your mission really to ferret out loners and make them feel welcome?”

  “I lied,” she admitted, suddenly feeling nervous. “I know your sister, Christy.”

  “You’re the one she told me about.”

  For a moment Kara’s heart constricted. Had Christy mentioned that she had CF? Would it turn Eric off before she ever had a chance to get to know him? “Did she tell you that I’m really a princess under the spell of a wicked math teacher?”

  He grinned at her. “She said she was paying you big bucks to be nice to me and check out what I’m up to. Believe me—” He fumbled for her name.

  “Kara,” she supplied. “Kara Fischer.”

  “Believe me, Kara, whatever she’s paying isn’t enough.”

  She laughed. Eric had appealed to her from the moment she’d seen his picture, and now, sitting next to him, she felt that her first instincts about him had been right. Eric was quick and fun and very good-looking. “Tell me, how does Nashville compare to Houston so far?”

  “I’ve only been here four days. I haven’t seen too much of the city. There are more hills than in Texas, and it’s a lot greener, too.” His gaze skimmed over her body. “Girls here are pretty, and so far, I like what I see.”

  She cleared her throat self-consciously. “And school?”

  “School’s school,” he said with a shrug. “One’s like any other to me.”

  “Was it hard to move right here in the middle of high school? Wasn’t it hard to leave your friends?”

  “Let’s say I was highly motivated.” He glanced away. “So, how do you know my sister?”

  “I’ve had some health problems, and she’s been my therapist.” She hoped he wouldn’t probe for details. She hoped he didn’t care about her health problems.

  “Is Christy any good?”

  “The best. Your sister’s totally terrific, but you must know that, or you wouldn’t have moved in with her.”

  “Actually, Christy’s a little too serious for me these days. We weren’t all that close because of the eight years between us, but when she lived at home, we did have some good times together. I remember she used to take first aid courses, and she’d use me to practice on. She’d pretend I was an accident victim and bandage me from head to toe.” He smiled as he remembered. “It was fun for a kid my age. She’s really a frustrated doctor, you know. Too bad she could never go to medical school.”

  “You’re staying then?” Kara asked.

  “I plan to stick around and see how it goes between us.” Eric eyed Kara and added, “If it gets too boring, you can help make my life more interesting.”

  His sexy gaze made Kara squirm self-consciously. “Central’s one of the biggest schools in the city, so there’s something for everyone. You’ll like it here.”

  “Okay,” he said with a shrug. “Because you said so, I’ll give it a try.” He plucked a flower from one of the planters. “How do you get home from school?”

  “Usually, I take the bus.”

  “Why don’t I give you a ride today?”

  No boy had ever given her a ride home before. “You have a horse, or a car?” Kara kidded, because she didn’t want him to guess she had so little experience with boys.

  He laughed. “A fifty-seven Chevy. I drove it up from Houston, packed to the top with all my worldly goods.”

  She heard a sense of pride in his voice and determination, too. She felt a twinge of envy. She couldn’t imagine having the freedom to climb into a car and drive alone through three states. She hated her CF and the prisoner it made of her. “I would like a ride home,” she told him. “I could meet you here at three.”

  “Suits me.” Eric stood just as the bell rang. “According to my class schedule, I have English last period.”

  “I have art,” Kara said.

  “Until three o’clock.” He handed her the flower and walked away. Kara watched him, happier than she’d felt in weeks. Maybe it was going to be a good year after all. Maybe, for once, things might go her way—if she could stay healthy. She trotted off to retrieve her books and hurry to class.

  Kara was about to go call her mother’s office saying she’d missed her bus when Eric showed up, twenty minutes after three. He jogged up to her. “Sorry, but I had a slight mishap during English. I leaned too far back in my desk chair, and when I fell over, the teacher decided I’d done it on purpose. He gave me a detention.”

  Kara felt so relieved he hadn’t stood her up that she barely heard his apology. “No problem.” She felt a coughing fit coming on and discreetly turned her head and forced herself to take several deep breaths and swallow down the urge. She refused to give in to the building spasm, silently pleading, Don’t do this to me, lungs. By the time they reached Eric’s car, the sensation had passed.

  “Here she is,” Eric said as they came up beside a car that badly needed a paint job.

  “It’s—uh—a car, all right.” Kara fumbled for a compliment for his vehicle. To her, it simply looked old.

  “I know it needs some work.” He held open the door, and she slid across a cream-color leather seat held together in places with tape. “One of my goals is to restore it to mint condition and sell it. Plenty of collectors will pay big bucks for this baby when she’s all fixed up.”

  She directed him to her house and settled back, listening to the radio and watching the trees slip past. Even if the car was old and in need of work, she envied Eric. He was lucky to have such freedom. “There’s my house,” she told him, pointing to a sprawling ranch-style home, set far back on an expansive, rolling green lawn.

  “Pretty nice,” he said. “You always lived here?”

  “All my life. My dad’s an airline pilot, and my mom just started back to work full-time last year at an ad agency.” Eric turned into the driveway, and Kara saw Christy’s parked car. How could she have forgotten that she ha
d a treatment that afternoon?

  “Isn’t that my sister’s car?”

  “Uh—yes. We’ve got a session,” Kara explained hastily. “Nothing much. No big deal.”

  “Maybe I could hang around until you’re finished.”

  “It’d be a drag. Besides, Christy doesn’t like people around while she works. It’s sort of distracting.” Disgusting, too, Kara thought, crossing her fingers, hoping he’d accept her story without questions.

  “You’re probably right. Tell Christy I’ll see her back at the apartment.” He leaned across the seat and opened the door for her. His arm pressed against her felt muscular and warm. “If I can find my way home,” he added with a laugh.

  “Can you?” Kara was growing fidgety, fearful that Christy might step outside and invite her brother in.

  “I’ll manage,” he assured her.

  She stood beside his car. “Thanks for the ride.”

  “Sure.”

  Kara watched him back out of the driveway, holding her books and suppressing the urge to cough. The sunlight caught on the car’s old chrome. Wistfully, she watched until he disappeared around a corner. With a sigh, Kara hoisted her books and started for the front door. Maybe she should have leveled about Christy’s role in her life. But then again, if she had, Eric might have been totally turned off. So far, Christy hadn’t said anything to him, either.

  Sooner or later, he’s going to find out, she told herself. The later, the better, she insisted silently. Right now, having Eric think she was just an ordinary girl felt good. Because that’s exactly what she wanted to be. A regular, normal girl, not a sick one. Kara clung to the fantasy and hurried inside for her dreaded thumps.

  Four

  AS ERIC DROVE along aimlessly, he considered his good fortune. Ever since lunch, when Kara had come up to him, he’d been on a high. He recalled her in vivid detail and smiled. She was such a beautiful girl—blond with large brown eyes that totally dominated her elfin face. She was petite, like a little doll, even if she was a bit thin. But so what, he thought. Girls were always worrying about their weight. Even her voice intrigued him. It sounded breathy, slightly hoarse, and, he thought, sexy.

  He couldn’t wait to grill Christy about Kara. Maybe having Kara as a friend might take the edge of awkwardness off his relationship with his sister. It hadn’t been easy for him to move in with her after almost six years, but then, anything beat living at home with parents who constantly hassled him.

  Eric arrived at his sister’s sprawling apartment complex and parked. He let himself in and wondered how the guys back home were doing and if they missed him. “Cool it,” he told himself, forcing aside a wave of homesickness. He’d made his choice to move away, and he was sticking with it. He threw his books in the spare bedroom Christy had offered him for his own, wandered into the kitchen, stirred the contents of supper in the casserole and poured himself a bowl of cereal. He was sitting on the sofa, flipping through the TV channels, when Christy walked through the door. “No homework?” were the first words out of her mouth.

  He flipped off the TV and slunk into the cushions. “I thought you weren’t going to hassle me about school.”

  She dropped her car keys on the table and sighed. “You’re right. I didn’t mean to. Let’s start over. How was your first day?”

  “It was all right.”

  “You met Kara Fischer.”

  For the first time, he brightened. “I drove her home.”

  “I saw that.” There was an edge to her tone that made him uneasy.

  “I would have come and said hello, but she thought you didn’t like people around when you worked.” What Christy did professionally was very vague to him. He knew a physical therapist helped people recover from disabilities. One of his buddies back home had had a therapist help him after a football injury. For the first time all afternoon, he wondered why Christy worked with Kara. The pretty blond girl looked perfectly fine to him. More than fine.

  “I’m glad the two of you met. She liked you.”

  The information pleased him. “She’s one sweet babe,” Eric said candidly. “A very sweet babe.”

  Christy had started for the kitchen, but turned on him the moment the comment was out of his mouth. “You be nice to her, Eric. She’s not one of your silly bimbos.”

  Taken aback, Eric stared. “What are you talking about? ‘My bimbos’?”

  “Mom and Dad told me you were running with some pretty wild kids back home. They said some of your girlfriends weren’t exactly high-quality. Kara’s not that type.”

  Eric didn’t try to hide his anger. “Mom and Dad had no right to talk about my friends that way. All Mom and Dad did was judge everybody.”

  “They said your friends were a bad influence on you. That sometimes you stayed out all night. They were worried sick about you. About what might happen to you if you remained in Houston.”

  “Look, when you said I could come live with you, I thought you weren’t going to be my conscience. If I’d known I was trading one prison for another—”

  “Please, I don’t want to fight with you.” Christy held up her hand, and her voice softened. “I let you come live with me because I care about you, Eric. And believe it or not, so do Mom and Dad. We don’t want to see you throw your life away. Life is very precious.”

  The seriousness of her expression made Eric feel baffled. “What’s with you? I come home and tell you I really liked the girl you wanted me to meet, and you act as if I’m going to drag her off into the bushes.”

  “I did want the two of you to meet. But not for you to get ideas about dating her. I only wanted her to help you feel more comfortable making the transition to Central.”

  “Well, thanks for the vote of confidence about my morals, Christy.” Eric’s voice dripped with sarcasm. He sighed before adding, “Kara’s a nice girl. I can tell that.”

  “Yes, she is. I like her a lot. I’m concerned for her—about her. Her life’s not easy. She has CF.”

  “CF?” Eric followed Christy into the kitchen, where she began to take plates from the cupboards. “What’s CF?”

  “Cystic fibrosis.”

  “What’s that?”

  Christy turned and studied him. “You honestly don’t know anything about what I do, do you?”

  Eric rummaged through his limited knowledge about medicine. “Wait … I think I saw a telethon about CF once. Is it like asthma?”

  Christy carefully set the plates onto the counter. “No. CF is a genetic disorder—you’re born with it. It’s a disease of the exocrine glands. With CF, something goes wrong, and mucus turns thick and sticky. It jams up a person’s lungs, sweat glands, and digestive tract.”

  Already Eric disliked the description. Who wanted to think about body fluids? “And Kara has this disease?”

  “Don’t worry. It isn’t contagious.”

  “I didn’t think it was,” Eric insisted, although it wasn’t true. He had wondered if he could catch it. Christy busied herself with setting the table. Eric dogged her steps into the dining room. “Is that all you’re going to tell me about Kara? Is that why you give her therapy?”

  “Yes. I administer her postural drainage therapy.”

  To Eric, the term sounded very technical, and he waved it aside “So what’s the big deal? She has therapy to help her breathe better. I don’t see why that makes you so hyper. Is it because she’s a patient and you have some kind of hangup about me dating one of your patients?”

  Christy crossed her arms and once again turned to face him. “Eric, I don’t think you truly understand the seriousness of Kara’s illness.”

  “Is it incapacitating or something? She didn’t look incapacitated to me.”

  “It hits some victims harder than others. Some people are plagued by lung and digestive disorders.”

  “So Kara’s got it bad?”

  “And there’s something else about CF you should know.”

  “What’s that?”

  “There is no cure.?
??

  “So?” He swallowed, made suddenly uncomfortable by her blue-eyed gaze. “Aren’t you helping her?”

  “Not only is there no cure for CF,” she said softly, ignoring his question, “it’s fatal. One hundred percent fatal. Kara’s just turned sixteen, but I doubt she’ll live to celebrate her twentieth birthday.”

  Five

  KARA POKED AT the food on her dinner plate. She tried to pretend she wanted it, mostly because her mother was watching like a hawk, but she wasn’t the least bit hungry. She kept thinking about Eric and how wonderful she’d felt when she’d been with him.

  “Did you take your enzyme pills?” her mother asked.

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “Don’t nag her, Renée,” Kara’s father interjected. “It’s obvious she’s not hungry.”

  Her mother ignored his reprimand. “Would you like me to fix you something else? I have a pizza in the freezer.”

  “No. The meat loaf’s fine.” Kara hoped she didn’t sound as edgy as she felt. She knew her parents meant well, but it drove her crazy when they fussed over her and talked as if she weren’t in the room. “You know that it takes a while for me to get my appetite back after a stint in the hospital.”

  “I still have some Vivonex,” Mom said, naming the special food supplement that Kara sometimes drank in order to gain weight.

  Kara grimaced. “I hate that stuff. Forget it. I’ll get hungry again—stop worrying.” She watched her parents exchange worried looks. “I’m fine,” Kara insisted, standing up. “Stop treating me like a baby.” She tossed her napkin on the table. “I’ll be in my room. I want to organize my notebook.”