But the last letter had made him only dizzy. Dr. Pierce—along with all the other young, intelligent doctors, it seemed—had been assigned to medical military duty at the start of the war. Pierce was one of the physicians in charge of Fort Devens, a large cantonment outside of Boston. His letter had been written on September 20, and Banes could tell by the uncharacteristic waver in the script that Pierce had written it late at night, after too many hours of work and too many nights without sleep. The camp had been hit by some new plague, Pierce wrote. The highest health officials and the most esteemed minds had already come to Devens to offer their aid, and they had walked away shaking their heads. First Pierce had thought it was cerebrospinal meningitis, but then the cases worsened and spread, and men were dying. They were dying of bronchopneumonia, it now seemed, pneumonic infection perhaps caused by influenza. But it was an influenza unlike any he had seen.
The first sign of danger was the speed of contagion. But the symptoms rivaled the breadth of the epidemic in their horror. Even if only a few people had suffered this disease, it still would have been a terror to be scarcely believed. Men bled from the nose, from the ears, some even from their eyes. Autopsies of dead soldiers revealed that their lungs were blue and heavy, thick with fluid, sometimes thick with blood. Victims became cyanotic, starved of oxygen—parts or all of their bodies turned blue, sometimes such a dark hue that the corpses of white men were indistinguishable from those of coloreds. They were literally drowning to death in their own fluids. And so quickly! More than one soldier had died within twenty-four hours of his first reported symptoms.
The camp was a madhouse, Pierce wrote. Against army regulations, the soldiers had been crammed into too-tight quarters as a result of the scale of the draft, and their dwellings provided the perfect powder kegs for an influenza spark to ignite. Men were sick in top bunks, coughing and bleeding onto healthy men below. Healthy men tracked in patients’ spilled blood on their boots, their bare feet. Dozens of nurses and physicians were sick, and some had died; the call for more nurses had already gone out to the surrounding counties. Some soldiers—healthy at the time, but who knew for how long?—already had been transferred elsewhere. Surely this would spread illness to bases in other states.
Of course, by the time the letter had escaped military censors and wound its way across the country to Washington State, by the time the small post office in Timber Falls had received it and Banes had journeyed to town for it, weeks had passed and the flu had spread across the land, making Pierce’s prediction both prophetic and pathetically useless. It was already too late.
Banes knew it was possible that the mysterious soldier was healthy, possessing some resistance to the same disease that, according to rumor, had infected a majority of those at the nearest camp, Fort Jenkins. But he also knew there was an equal chance that the soldier had brought the disease with him, symptomless for now but present nonetheless. Evil spirits or invisible germs? A decaying jaundice of the air itself or a microscopic agent of death? Miasma or germ? The two schools of thought warred in Banes’s mind, and though he accepted the new theory now, he had believed the other for so long that it seemed more natural to him, despite what those medical journals were saying. Regardless, the solution was the same: keep it contained. Keep Philip and the soldier locked away, count the hours. Pray.
Was forty-eight hours long enough? That was what Banes remembered having heard in the past, but he found nothing in his piles of journals to confirm it. This flu seemed so different, so much more powerful, than any before. Perhaps it could incubate for longer periods of time. Sitting at his desk, Banes knew that if the person trapped with the soldier hadn’t been his friend’s son—if he’d been anyone else in town—Banes probably would have chosen to quarantine him for longer. Lock him up for four days, maybe even a week. Why not? Where was the harm in inconveniencing two men, one of them a stranger? But he knew Philip, knew how young he was, knew what the experience would do to Charles and Rebecca. So he had said forty-eight hours and would stand by it and hope to God that he would not regret it.
Banes read through his journals and through all of Pierce’s letters, dating back so many years. He read and read until he wasn’t sure if his incomprehension was due to the lateness of the hour or the density of the prose or the second Scotch he had drunk, perhaps ill advisedly, at half past four. He looked up when he felt the sunlight creeping through the gap in his drawn curtains, breaking through the clouds of pipe smoke he’d been exhaling. Dawn. Surely Charles would head out to speak with Philip first thing in the morning. Banes would wait to give them a moment of privacy, then go out and survey the situation.
A whistle sounded—six o’clock. The night had escaped him, and he felt no more the wiser. He must sleep, even if he only had two hours. Just enough to stay alert.
The bed was cold. He thought of Margaret, then of the soldiers bleeding through their eyes. Please let that scourge leave this town untouched, he prayed. But if it were to come here, at least Margaret wouldn’t have to see it; at least he wouldn’t have to see her turn blue.
No, he thought, succumbing to superstition. Don’t think that way—never regard a past death as welcome. That thought can serve as an invitation to death, allowing it to visit again, make itself at home.
IV
After bringing food to the storage building, along with a lamp, blankets, and two pillows, Charles and Rebecca had returned home in silence. While Rebecca cleaned the kitchen, Charles had escaped to his small desk in the bedroom, writing a letter he planned on delivering to Philip the next morning, something he hoped would soothe the boy during his internment.
Charles had been sitting there for thirty minutes and had written two sentences. He put down his pencil as Rebecca carefully closed the door behind her. She stood against it silently.
“This has to stop,” she told him.
Confused, he asked, “What has to stop?”
“The quarantine. First closing the town, and now locking Philip away? Charles, this can’t continue. You must see this.”
“You heard what the doctor said. You heard how—”
“Charles, this is wrong,” she interrupted, her eyes pleading.
“Why is it wrong to try and protect the town? Rebecca, I’m…” He trailed off, exasperated at having to fight the same argument with his wife that he was already having in his own head. “I don’t like Philip being in there any more than you do, and I hope to God he forgives me for this, but…I’m doing what I can to protect everyone in town.”
“This is our son, Charles.” She held out her hands to him.
“Other people in this town have sons!” Charles slammed a fist onto the desk and stood. “Is ours more important than theirs? How can you say we should put everyone else at risk just so Philip can sleep in his own bed tonight? How is that a solution?”
He paced past her, and Rebecca was quiet. He did not often raise his voice, and even more rarely did he do so with her.
“I am only trying to do what’s right,” he said, turning to face her again. “What’s right for the people in this town, the people who have sacrificed for us. The people who have given everything to make this town work. There is nothing I can do”—his voice wavered—“nothing I can do for anyone in any other town that is sick. But there are things I can do for the people in this town, and I am trying to do them as best I can.”
He was breathing heavily, more riled up than he could remember being since the Everett strike. When he turned back to Rebecca, he saw that the imploring look on her face had faded, and in its place was a muted caution that suggested resignation or restrained anger.
“I understand what you’re trying to do, and your intentions are good.” She spoke slowly. Her voice, too, was shaking, and her eyes were wet. “But I am finding it harder and harder to stand by these decisions.”
“This is not easy for me, either,” he said. “I am barely holding on, Rebecca.” He wanted to tell her how much he needed her to support this decision and
help him through it. But instead of admitting that weakness, he said, “This town was as much your idea as mine. This was your dream, too.”
She started at that, then backed up, shaking her head. “I never wanted this to be something so apart from the world. I wanted to show the world what it could do, what we could do. I didn’t want to stand back and spit on them. And now we’re spitting on our own son.” She opened the door.
“Rebecca, don’t—”
“I’m sorry. I need to be alone.” She descended the stairs, Charles watching her disappear.
He paced for a while before sitting down at his desk. Philip was in a dark building right now; he would sleep on a cold floor beside a stranger. A stranger who might be sick. And if he was, that would mean Charles was being asked to sacrifice his son for the town. He put his hand flat on the desk to steady himself as he sat there. Suddenly dizzy, he closed his eyes for a moment and breathed.
It had been barely five years since the morning that had changed Charles’s life, when he had been driving out of Everett for a morning meeting and discovered the tire tracks that ran off the side of the road and down a steep ravine. Later, when he’d learned how Philip had been abandoned by his father, Charles had vowed that he would never repeat that transgression. But if Charles’s and the doctor’s decision looked like abandonment to Rebecca, it must look even worse to Philip.
Charles opened his eyes. He stared at the letter he had started, then crumpled it and threw it in the wastebasket. He would start again. He needed to start again.
V
Sometimes in dreams Philip would remember that feeling of being suspended in the air, of taking flight, of losing all contact with the earth. As bad as the crash was, it was the instant before impact that was all the more terrifying, the realization that he had been released from the calm embrace of his normal life and was hurtling toward something unknowable.
Not that his life before the crash had been entirely normal. By the time Philip turned eleven, he had lived in more towns than most of the grown men in Commonwealth. He had no memory of his father—whether or not he had ever met the man was unclear, as his mother, Fiona, had given him so many conflicting answers that he finally stopped asking. His earliest memories were of sharing a bed with Fiona in the house of one of her cousins in Los Angeles. There, he would play with the cousin’s many children while Fiona was out working for their keep, or so she told him. But the brief idyll was interrupted by an argument, the cousin outraged—Philip dimly remembered accusations of theft—and he and Fiona were tossed out of the house. When Philip told Fiona he missed his playmates, she warned him never to speak their dirty names again. It’s a big world, she told him. You’ll find other friends.
The pattern repeated itself with other cousins, second cousins, and even further removed relatives until Fiona had all but burned down the family tree. Philip’s questions about why Cousin Shelly had thrown them out or why Uncle Ike’s wife had called Fiona a tramp were never answered, and not until years later did he fit things together, forming a picture that was no less disconcerting than the pile of pieces that had confounded him for so many years.
Once their family options were exhausted, the travels continued. They would find a cheap room to let, Philip would sleep beside her in their thin bed, and Fiona would find some kindly lady who felt sorry for her and said she could use a maid, or a cook, or anything. Philip would start classes at a new school while Fiona would catch the eye of a leading man about town, single or otherwise, and their courtship would mean that Philip got the bed all to himself many nights, something Fiona assured him was a privilege for which he should be thankful. He often woke alone, hoping she was only in the bathroom. He would close his eyes and imagine her there.
Just when he was starting to feel at home, his home would dissipate like a much-cherished mirage. One night she’d wake him up—sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes at the fragile moment before sunrise—and she’d anxiously tell him to pack all his clothes. He would barely be able to do so (many were the favorite shirts and books he left behind, realizing only when he was a hundred miles away), and then they’d be at a train station. Fiona would smile at the old man in the ticket window, her right hand tightly grasping her son’s wrist. Off to a new town.
Whenever he complained, she would remind him he was lucky she took him with her at all, that most other women in her situation would throw him into an orphanage or leave him behind. That kept his complaining to a minimum.
Fiona promised him that their home in Redmond, Washington, would be their last. And she proved to be correct, though not in the way she had imagined. They had moved into the home of a paper mill foreman named Carl Jasper, living with him for just over a year—the longest tenancy in any one place that Philip could remember. Despite this new, tantalizing feeling of permanence, Philip was uncomfortable around Carl. A looming presence whose head nearly scraped against the top of the small house’s doorways, Carl seemed immediately untrustworthy, his house often filled with late-night card games and cigar smoke, bottles clanging while Philip tried to sleep.
Many were the nights when Philip would walk into the kitchen to find the couple huddled over some papers, watching his every move, their voices hushed. Just wanted to get some water, he’d say, and after he’d taken the glass back to his room, the whispering would begin again. He didn’t ask what they were talking about, and he didn’t really want to know, but he was hurt by their suspicious glances.
A few weeks after the whispering had begun, Philip came home from school and saw Fiona and Carl hastily packing their bags. Grab your clothes, they told him, we need to leave. He started to protest, reminding her of her promise. He’d made friends—one boy’s father had even offered him a job delivering newspapers and running errands—and there was a girl he had a crush on, Anna, with green eyes and freckles. Fiona yelled back, saying she didn’t want to do this, either, but they needed to go, now. They would explain later. Philip refused, arms crossed, until Carl knocked him to the floor with one blow. The man’s hand had been open, but it still bloodied Philip’s nose, and he lay on the floor stunned and looking to Fiona for aid. She merely softened her voice and told him to pack—and hurry.
They drove a nice new Ford that Carl had bought the day before. It was a beautiful car, the sides and hood so shiny that Philip saw his tear-streaked reflection as he walked up to the door. It was less bumpy than a carriage but colder than a train car, and the air whistled as it came in through the tops of the windows. They drove all through the night, and Philip sat there seething, angry at Fiona for betraying him, furious at Carl for the blow, and enraged at himself for being stupid enough to have thought this wouldn’t happen again. Eventually, he slept, his head leaning back against the seat that smelled like melted rubber and bobbing every time the wheels hit a hole in the unpaved roads.
He awoke sometime in the middle of the night, shivering with cold, to find the world outside turned white, as if some pillow the size of the moon had burst above them, showering its celestial feathers all around. They were almost there, Carl said, yawning. He was driving very slowly, muttering something about so much snow and how maybe they should stop at the next town, wherever that was. Fiona looked at Philip in the backseat and gave him a slight smile, one that was different from any he’d seen on her face before. It looked more adult, the kind of expression parents didn’t normally direct at their children, and the smile might have been an apology and might have been a sign of affection and might have been, finally, an acknowledgment that this was who she was and he would have to learn to accept her, flaws and all.
Carl had been steering the Ford downhill around a sharp bend when Fiona had offered Philip that smile, and the smile disappeared when the Ford lurched sideways. Philip remembered hearing Fiona start to scream something; he remembered a sudden force pulling him deeper into his seat and then that unreal feeling of flight. An instant of weightlessness followed by its opposite, tumbling through the snow and into the blackn
ess beneath them.
Later, he didn’t remember what he saw, whether the world spun in circles, whether he found himself staring at the roof of the Ford or its floor—just the feeling of being tossed and slammed and beaten while trapped inside a steel box that seemed to be shrinking with every blow, collapsing upon him as if it were being hammered into the shape of his coffin.
From there his memories were sharp but discrete, an occasional stark image propped up amid long stretches of nothing but shadow. There was snow on his eyelids when he opened them; he remembered this because he wanted to wipe the snow away but couldn’t move his arms. They were trapped by something, or they were broken, and so were his legs. He felt upside down, his head lower than his chest; maybe that’s why it throbbed so much, but he could barely see, so he wasn’t sure. I’m not dead I’m not dead I’m not dead, he told himself. This realization was almost as shocking as it had been to find himself flying through the air a moment ago. How long ago? What about his mother? He called for her, and his voice was so stripped away by terror into a tiny, jagged sliver that the sound of it scared him all the more. Without waiting long for a reply, he called for her again and heard her moan.
He called again and again, her first name for some reason, louder and louder, even though the sound of his voice was making the situation seem more horribly real. He screamed for her to wake up, because he couldn’t move and he was frightened and cold and didn’t know where she was and she couldn’t talk and he needed her then and she needed to wake up. He screamed and screamed if for no other reason than he couldn’t bear to hear the sound of her moaning. He remembered how white his voice sounded, remembers screaming himself into exhaustion or some weird kind of trance, because that was where the memory ended, interrupted by a long black space until he opened his eyes again.
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