The Host - After the Rain

Chapter 3 - Ian and Kyle

Each person in the caves carried his or her own share of pain and Ian would say that I tried to carry everybody else's. Perhaps he was right, but the truth is that I liked to think about others, hear about their anxieties and hopes. Now the after-dinner talks looked much more like conversations than before. I'd talk less and listen to everything they'd say. I loved hearing the stories my human friends used to tell. But I knew better not to ask questions, I just let them speak as much as they wished. Like mine, those were stories from another life.

I only felt comfortable asking about Ian's life, like when I wondered why he and Kyle were so different. "It's because of my mother," he said, with eyes that broke my heart.

"When she died, he was about Jamie's age. He couldn't deal very well with the loss and my father didn't know how to deal with his own pain and Kyle's altogether. As for me, thinking about the good memories, about all the things she had taught me... It helped me to survive. That alone was enough for me, but I couldn't help my father, or Kyle."

We were sitting in the middle of the cornfield and he rested his head on my shoulder. I stroked his face and felt sorry, because I realized I could not ease the burden of this sorrow. So I asked for the good memories:

"Tell me more about her."

Ian's mother was a very sweet woman who loved arts and dance. She was a great housewife and a handful cook and only she could soften the harshness of her husband. Ian inherited her beautiful sapphire eyes and her compassion. Alice, that was her name, liked to take good care of everyone she loved.

"Sometimes you remind me of her", he said looking somewhere else, at another time.

She died of a heart condition, "a heart too good for this world," Ian said, and it devastated the family. I could imagine it, because of the memories I shared with Melanie from when she lost her parents, but also because I felt that inexplicable longing for the woman who mothered Pet. That made me understand a little of Kyle's revolt. In the rare moments when Ian lost control I also had a glimpse of that pain on him.

The strength and hardness shared between him and Kyle were molded by the years that followed the death of their mother, living in a house that could no longer be a home, where these three men, two of them just boys, suffered each in his own way, without being able to divide or ease the pain of one another. But Ian's father always found strength enough to protect his children and never ceased to be interested in them. He never gave up trying to restructure things, never gave up trying to get Ian to open his heart or get Kyle to make good judgment. He had been so happy when the oldest son introduced him to Jodi, hopeful that a new woman in Kyle's life could make him more sensitive and affable.

That's why when their father came home one night, all disinterested and "acting like a TV off the air", they soon were surprised. They noted the strange gleam in his eyes and a scar on the back of the neck that looked old, but had not been there the day before. In the neighborhood and at work — all three worked in construction — they had already noticed those strange eyes before. Everyday, one of their colleagues came to work complaining that a wife, mother or boss were acting strange and then a day or two later, they acted as if they had taken "a shot of the rainbow", as Ian said. I couldn't help noticing his ability to find interesting and strange metaphors, but I had to force myself to return my focus to the rest of the story. After all, I was interested.

The two brothers talked a lot that night and could not understand what was causing all those changes, but they had seen things and heard rumors. They knew it was just a matter of time until they were "infected" by that too, whatever it was. Then they took some backpacks with clothes, food and water and left without saying anything to their father. Their intention was to find someone who was still normal, maybe a doctor, and try to find a "cure" before returning home.

Kyle went with Ian to Jodi's house, but when the headlights reflected the silver in her eyes while she was in the front yard taking some shopping from her car, Kyle kept driving and did not speak for many hours, his face stiffened with pain and anger. In the two days that followed, they watched everybody intently: the clerks from the convenience store where they stopped, the waiters in roadside diners where they made their meals, reps of the cheap hotels where they slept, they all had the same eyes.

Radio and television conveyed strange news, everything seemed in perfect order in the world, and that simply wasn't the order of the world. So they decided to no longer trust what they heard on the car radio or read in the headlines they saw at newsstands.

On the morning of the third day, they observed horrified when silver eyed police officers, guns hanging discretely in their holsters, took away a frightened man who had fallen asleep on a park bench. The man yelled about his family and his friends being "possessed", but no one seemed surprised, watching the scene with their listless eyes. They knew that they couldn't do anything to help him, then they held back their impulses and simply went back into the car and to their trip.

Without knowing what to do, because they would not dare go into a hospital to look for doctors, much less to seek help at a police station, they concluded it was best to avoid the others as much as they could. They would sleep in the car, buy food always at dawn, when few people were around, and continue traveling until they get to a city without contamination. If you were traveling, your best bet, they concluded, was to stay close to the desert, probably fewer people would travel by these roads, and there they followed.

Exhausted from traveling, they left the road at night and looked for a discreet place to park and sleep. They trusted that the darkness would protect them and that with the dawning of the sun they would wake up and keep traveling without arousing more suspicion. Tired as they were, however, they did not realize that the first light of day brought a visitor, who had been accompanying them since they parked there, according to what they knew later that morning.