The Fireman: A Novel Part 4

"No," she said.

"Why don't you turn off the shower," he told her.

Harper shut off the water, picked up her towel, and went back to drying her hair. As long as she concentrated on breathing slowly and steadily, and did all the things she would normally do after a shower, she felt she could put off the urge to burst into tears again. Or to begin screaming. If she started to scream, she wasn't sure she could stop.

Harper wrapped the towel around her hair and walked back into the gloomy swelter of the bedroom.

Jakob sat on the edge of the bed, in his jeans again, but holding his T-s.h.i.+rt in his lap. His feet were bare. She had always loved his feet, tan and bony and almost architectural in their delicate, angular lines.

"I'm sorry I got sick," she said to him, and suddenly was struggling not to cry again. "I swear, I had a good look at myself yesterday, and I didn't see any of this. Maybe you don't have it. Maybe you're okay."

Harper almost choked on the last word. Her throat was clutching up convulsively, sobs forcing their way out from deep in her hitching lungs. Her thoughts were too awful to think, but she thought them anyway.

She was dead and so was he. She had gone and infected them both and they were going to burn to death like all the others. She knew it, and his face told her he knew it, too.

"You had to be Florence f.u.c.king Nightingale," he said.

"I'm sorry."

She wished he would cry with her. She wished she could see some feeling in his face, could see him struggling to restrain the kind of emotions she felt in herself. But there was only blankness, and the odd, clinical look in his gaze, and the way he sat there with his wrists hanging limply over his knees.

"Look on the bright side," he said, glancing at her stomach. "At least we don't have to figure out what to name it if it's a girl."

It was as bad as if he had struck her. She flinched, looked away. She was going to say she was sorry again, but what came out was a choked, hopeless sob.

They had known about the baby for just over a week. Jakob had smiled slightly when Harper showed him the blurred blue cross on the home pregnancy pee-stick, but when she'd asked him how he felt, he'd said, Like I need time to get my head around it.

The day after, the Verizon Arena burned to the ground in Manchester, twelve hundred homeless refugees inside-not one got out alive-and Jakob was loaned to the Public Works Department there, to help organize the clearing of the wreckage and the collection of bodies. He was gone thirteen hours a day, and when he came home, filthy with soot and quiet from the things he had seen, it seemed wrong to discuss the baby. When they slept, though, he would spoon her from behind and cup her stomach with one hand and she had hoped this meant there was some happiness-some sense of purpose-stirring inside him.

He pulled his T-s.h.i.+rt on, in no hurry now.

"Get dressed," he said. "It'll be easier to think if I don't have to look at it all over you."

She walked to her closet, crying hard. She felt she could not bear the lack of feeling in his voice. It was almost worse than the idea of being contaminated, of being poisoned.

It was going to be in the seventies today-it was already seventy in the bedroom and would soon be warmer, the bright day glowing around the edges of the shades-and she fumbled through the coat hangers for a sundress. She picked out the white dress, because she liked how she felt in it, liked how it made her feel clean and simple and fresh, and she wanted that now. Then it came to her that if she wore a dress, Jakob would still be able to see the stripe on the back of her leg, and she wanted to spare him. Shorts were out, too. She found a tatty old robe the color of cheap margarine.

"You have to go," she said, without turning to face him. "You have to get out of the house and away from me."

"I think it's too late for that."

"We don't know you're carrying." She belted the robe but didn't turn around. "Until we know for sure, we have to take precautions. You should pack some clothes and get out of the house."

"You touched all the clothes. You washed them in the sink. Then you hung them on the line across the deck. You folded them and put them away."

"Then go someplace and buy new things. Target might be open."

"Sure. Maybe I can give a hot little case of Dragonscale to the girl at the cash register while I'm there."

"I told you. They don't know if you can catch it from people before they're visibly marked up."

"That's right. They don't know. They don't know s.h.i.+t. Whoever they are. If anyone really understood how transmission works, we wouldn't be in this situation, would we, babygirl?"

She didn't like the wry, ironic way he said babygirl. That tone was very close to contempt.

"I was careful. I was really careful," she said.

She remembered-with a kind of exhausted resentment-boiling inside her full-body Tyvek outfit all day, the material sticking to her flushed, sweaty skin. It took twenty minutes to put it on, another twenty to take it off, following the required five-minute shower in a bleach solution. After, she remembered the way she'd stink of rubber, bleach, and sweat. She carried that stench on her the whole time she worked at Portsmouth Hospital, an odor like an industrial accident, and she got infected anyway, and it seemed like a real bad joke.

"Don't worry about it. I've got stuff in my gym bag I can wear," he said. "Stuff you haven't had your hands all over."

"Where will you go?"

"How the f.u.c.k do I know? Do you know what you've done?"

"I'm sorry."

"Well, that makes it better. I don't feel so bad about both of us burning to death now."

She decided if being angry made him feel less scared, then it was all right. She wanted him to be all right.

"Can you sleep at Public Works?" she asked. "Without coming in contact with the other guys?"

"No," he said. "But Johnny Deepenau is dead, and the keys to his little s.h.i.+tbox trailer are hanging up in his locker. I could stay there. You remember Johnny? He drove the number three Freightliner."

"I didn't know he was sick."

"He wasn't. His daughter got it and burned to death and he jumped off the Piscataqua Bridge."

"I didn't know."

"You were working. You were at the hospital. You never came home. It wasn't the kind of thing I was going to tell you in a text message." He was quiet. His head was down and his eyes were in shadow. "I sort of admire him. For understanding he had seen all the best his life was going to offer him and recognizing there was no point in hanging around for the last s.h.i.+tty little bit. Johnny Deepenau was a Budweiser-drinking, football-watching, Donald Trumpvoting, stone-cold bozo who never read anything deeper than Penthouse magazine, but he understood that much. I think I have to throw up," he said, without changing his tone of voice, and he rose to his feet.

Harper followed him through the den and into the front hall. He didn't use the bathroom attached to their master bedroom, which Harper supposed was now off-limits, as she had recently occupied it. He went into the little bathroom under the stairs. She stood in the hall and listened to him retching through the closed door and she practiced not crying. She wanted to stop being weepy around him, didn't want to burden him with her emotions. At the same time, she wanted Jakob to say something kind to her, to look anguished for her.

The toilet flushed, and Harper backed away into the den to give him s.p.a.ce. She stood beside his desk, where he sat to write in the evening. Jakob had wound up a deputy manager with the Portsmouth Department of Public Works almost by accident; he had intended to be a novelist. He had dropped out of college to write, had been working on the book ever since, six years now. He had 130 pages he had never let anyone read, not even Harper. It was called Desolation's Plough. Harper had never told him she hated the t.i.tle.

He came out of the bathroom, came as far as the entrance to the den, and then held up there. At some point he had found his baseball cap, the one that said FREIGHTLINER on it, which she always thought he wore ironically, the way Brooklyn hipsters wore John Deere caps. If they still did that. If they had ever really done that.

The eyes below the brim were bloodshot and unfocused. She wondered if he had been crying in the bathroom. The idea that he had been weeping for her made her feel a little better.

"I want you to wait," he said.

She didn't understand, looked a question at him.

"How long until we'll know for sure if I have it?" he asked.

"Eight weeks," she said. "If you don't have anything by the end of October, you don't have anything."

"Okay. Eight weeks. I think it's a farce-we both know if you have it, I have it, too-but we'll wait eight weeks. If we both have it, we'll do it together, like we said." He was silent for a moment, staring down at his feet, and then he nodded. "If I don't have it, I'll be here for you when you do it."

"Do what?"

He looked up at her, real surprise in his face. "Kill ourselves. Jesus. We talked about this. About what we would do if we caught it. We agreed it's better to just-go to sleep. Than to wait around and burn to death."

She felt a hard constriction in her throat, wasn't sure she could force words past it, then found she could. "But I'm pregnant."

"You're never going to have the baby now."

Harper's own reaction surprised her; for the first time, Jakob's dull, angry certainty offended her.

"No, you've got that wrong," she said. "I'm not an expert, but I know more about the spore than you do. There are studies, good studies, that show it can't cross the placental barrier. It goes everywhere else, the brain, the lungs . . . everywhere but there."

"That's bulls.h.i.+t. There isn't any study that says that. Not one that's worth the paper it's printed on. The CDC in Atlanta is a pile of cinders. No one is studying this s.h.i.+t anymore. The time to do science is over. Now it's time to run for cover and hope the thing burns itself out before it burns us off the face of the planet." He laughed at this, a dry, humorless sound.

"They are studying it, though. Still. In Belgium. In Argentina. But fine, if you don't want to believe me, that's fine. But believe this. In July, at the hospital, we delivered a healthy infant to a woman who was contaminated. They had a party in the lounge off pediatrics. We ate half-melted cherry ice cream and we all took turns holding the baby." She did not say that the medical team had spent a lot more time with the baby than the mother had. The doctor wouldn't allow her to touch him, had carried the child out of the room while the mother screamed for him to come back, to let her have one more look.

Jakob's face wasn't such a blank now. His mouth was a pinched white line.

"So what? This s.h.i.+t-how long do people last? Best-case scenario? After the stripes show up?"

"It's different for everyone. There are a few long-term cases, people who have been around since the beginning. I might last-"

"Three months? Four? What's the average? I don't think the average is even two months. You only learned you're pregnant ten days ago." He shook his head in disbelief. "What did you get to take care of us?"

"What do you mean?" She was having trouble keeping up with the run of his thoughts.

"What did you get to do it with? You said you were going to get that stuff-the stuff my dentist gave me after my root ca.n.a.l."

"Vicodin."

"And we can crush it up, right?"

Her robe had come unbelted and hung open, but it seemed like too much effort to fix it, and she had forgotten she wanted to spare him the sight of her infected body.

"Yes. That's probably one of the more painless ways to kill yourself. Twenty or so Vicodin, all crushed up."

"So that's how we'll do it. If we both have the 'scale."

"But I don't have any Vicodin. I never got it."

"Why? We talked. You said you would. You said you'd lift some from the hospital and if we got sick, we'd have wine and listen to some music and then take our pills and sail on."

"I forgot to grab some on my way out of the hospital. At the time, I was in a hurry not to burn alive." Although, she thought, given her current condition, she hadn't escaped anything.

"You brought home Dragonscale but couldn't bother to get us something so we could take care of each other. And then on top of it you get yourself pregnant. Christ, Harper. You've had yourself one h.e.l.l of a month." He laughed, a short, breathless bark. After a moment he said, "Maybe I can get us something to do it with. A gun, if necessary. Deepenau had NRA stickers plastered all over his piece-of-s.h.i.+t pickup. He must have something."

"Jakob. I'm not going to kill myself," she said. "Whatever we talked about before I got pregnant doesn't matter now. I am carrying Dragonscale, but I am also carrying a baby, and that changes things. Can't you see it changes things?"

"Jesus f.u.c.king Christ. It isn't even a baby yet. It's a cl.u.s.ter of unthinking cells. Besides, I know you. If it had a defect, you'd get an abortion. You worked in a G.o.dd.a.m.n clinic once, for chrissake. You'd walk in every morning, past the people screaming you were a murderer, calling you a baby killer."

"The baby doesn't have a defect, and even if he did I wouldn't-that doesn't mean I'd-"

"I think cooking to death in the womb is kind of a defect. Don't you?"

He stood holding himself. She saw he was trembling.

"Let's wait. Let's give it some time and see if I've got this s.h.i.+t, too," he said at last. "Maybe at some point in the next eight weeks we'll find ourselves on the same page again. Maybe at some point here, you'll be seeing things a little less selfishly."

She had told him he needed to get out of the house, but she hadn't wanted him to go, not really. She had hoped he would offer to stay close, maybe sleep in the bas.e.m.e.nt. It scared her, to imagine being all alone with her infection, and she had wanted his calm, his steadiness, even if she couldn't have his arms around her.

But something had changed in the last sixty seconds. Now she was ready for him to leave. She thought it would be better for both of them if he went, so she could have the dark, quiet house to herself for a while-to think, or not think, or be still, or cry, or do whatever she had to do-clear of his terror and angry disgust.

He said, "I'm going to ride my bicycle down to Public Works. Get the key to Johnny Deepenau's trailer out of his locker. I'll call you this afternoon."

"Don't worry if I don't pick up. I might turn my phone off so I can go back to bed." She laughed then, bitter, unhappy laughter. "Maybe I'll wake up and it'll all be a bad dream."

"Yeah. We can hope for that, babygirl. Except if it's a bad dream, we're both dreaming it." He smiled then-a small, nervous smile-and for a moment he was her Jake again, her old friend.

He was on his way to the door when she said, "Don't tell anyone."

He paused, a hand on the latch. "No. I won't."

"I'm not going to Concord. I've heard stories about the facility there."

"Yeah. That it's a death camp."

"You don't believe it?"

"Of course I believe it. Everyone who goes there is infected with this s.h.i.+t. They're all going to die. So of course it's a death camp. By definition." He opened the door onto the hot, smoky day. "I wouldn't send you there. You and me are in this together. I'm not giving you up to some faceless agency. We'll handle this ourselves."

Harper thought he meant this statement to be rea.s.suring, yet, curiously, she was not rea.s.sured.

He walked down the steps and onto the curving path that took him out of sight in the direction of the garage. He left the door open, as if he expected her to come outside to watch him go. As if this were required of her. Maybe it was. She belted the robe, crossed the short length of the foyer, and stood in the doorway. He carried his bike out into the drive, hauling it over one shoulder. He didn't look back.

Harper lifted her head to peer into Portsmouth. A filthy sky lowered above the white steeple of North Church. Smoke had hovered over town all summer long. Harper had read somewhere that 12 percent of New Hamps.h.i.+re was on fire, but didn't see how that could be true. Of course that was pretty good compared to Maine. Maine was all the local news talked about. The blaze that had started in Canada had finally reached I-95, effectively cutting the state in two, a burning wasteland almost a hundred miles across at its widest point. They needed rain to put it out, but the last weather system to move that way had evaporated in the face of the heat. A meteorologist on NPR said the rain had fried like spit on the surface of a hot stove.

Coils of smoke rose here and there, brown, dirty loops climbing from the Strawbery Banke. There was always something burning: a house, a shop, a car, a person. It was surprising how much smoke a human body could throw when it was engulfed in flame.

From her spot on the front step, she could see down the road, toward South Street Cemetery. A car rolled slowly through the graveyard, along one of the narrow gravel lanes, trundling ahead the way a person will when trying to find an open s.p.a.ce in a crowded parking lot. But the pa.s.senger-side window was down, and fire was gus.h.i.+ng out. The interior was so filled with flames, Harper could not see the person who must've been sitting behind the wheel.

Harper watched the car roll off the road and into the gra.s.s, until it thunked gently to a stop against a headstone. Then she remembered she had come out to watch Jakob ride away. She looked around for him, but he was already gone.

SEPTEMBER.