The Fireman
Page 15
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6
After a breakfast of soft, milky oatmeal and bitter coffee, it was time for services.
Ben Patchett was her crutch again and helped her along, out into the unseasonably warm October night. Dragonflies whisked through the perfumed dark. The buzz of excitement and pleasure, rising from the crowd around her, brought to mind small country carnivals, Ferris wheels and fried dough.
They filed into the narrow, high-ceilinged chapel, beneath splintery exposed rafters. The nave was a long cabinet of shadows, windows boarded up against the night, the enormous space lit by just a few candles. Giant shadows twitched restlessly against the walls, more distinct than the people that threw them.
Harper had an arm across Ben Patchett’s shoulder as he led her to a pew midway up the aisle. Another man squeezed in on her right side, a small, tubby fellow, a little older than Ben, with pink cheeks and the smooth complexion of an infant. Ben introduced him as Nelson Heinrich, who in a former life had owned a shop called Christmas-Mart, which perhaps explained why he was wearing a sweater with reindeer on it when it was just turning Halloween.
The merry chatter died as Father Storey stepped to the podium. He moved his spectacles up his nose and peered owlishly at his own songbook, then announced: “If you’ll open to page 332, we begin tonight with a plain but honorable hymn, beloved by the Pilgrims in the early days of America.”
This was met by a smattering of laughs, although Harper didn’t understand why until Nelson opened the songbook to the right place. It was a camp songbook, for little boys and girls, not a true hymnal, and the song on page 332 turned out to be “Holly Holy” by Neil Diamond. Harper approved. If anyone could save her soul, it was probably him.
Carol rose from the bench behind the organ and came to the front of the stage. She lifted her ukulele to acknowledge a little flurry of applause.
Nelson bent toward Harper’s ear and, rather loudly, said, “It’s easy, you’ll see! Nothing to it! Just lay back and enjoy it!” An unfortunate statement with unfortunate connotations, Harper thought.
Ben winced, then added, “It doesn’t always come right away. Don’t worry if nothing happens to you tonight. It would be amazing if anything did! Like bowling a strike the first time you pick up a—”
But he didn’t have a chance to finish. Carol began to play, belting out that melody that sounded as much like a marching song as a gospel. When they all began to sing—over a hundred voices resonating in the gloom—a pigeon was startled off one of the rafters above.
Allie and Nick were in the row directly ahead of her and the first Harper knew anything was happening was when the boy turned his head and smiled at her and his normally aquamarine eyes were rings of gold light.
Wires of Dragonscale on the back of Ben Patchett’s hand lit up, like fiber-optic threads filling with brightness.
A glow built from all directions, overpowering the dim red illumination of the candles. Harper thought of an atomic flash rising in a desert. The sound of the song mounted along with the light, until Harper could hear all those voices in her chest.
Onstage, Carol’s belted white gown was rendered diaphanous, the body beneath painted with light. She didn’t seem to mind or notice. Harper thought, helplessly, of the hallucinatory nudes who pirouetted through the credits of the James Bond movies.
Harper felt she was being swallowed by all their noise. The brightness was not beautiful but awful, like being caught in headlights hurtling madly toward her.
Ben had an arm around her waist and was unconsciously kneading her hip, a gesture she found revolting but could not seem to break away from. She glanced at Nelson and found him wearing a choker of light. When he opened his mouth to bellow out the next line, Harper saw his tongue glowing a toxic shade of green.
She wondered whether, if she began to scream, anyone would hear her over all the other voices. Not that she was going to scream—she had lost her breath, could not even sing. If not for her fractured ankle, she might’ve run.
The only thing that got her to the end of the song was Renée and Don Lewiston. They were across the aisle and a little closer to the stage, but Harper could see them through a gap in the crowd. Renée’s head was turned to look back at her and she smiled sympathetically. The loops of ’scale around her neck shone, but it was a faded sort of glow, and the light had not reached her kind, clear eyes. More important, she was still there, still present, paying attention. And that was when Harper understood what so unnerved her about the others.
In some way Ben and Nelson, Allie and Nick, and all the rest of them had left the room, leaving behind lamps made of human skin. Thought had been replaced by light, and personality by harmony, but Renée at least was still there . . . and so was Don Lewiston, who sang dutifully, but did not glow at all. Later, Harper learned that Don was only sometimes able to shine with the others. When he turned on, he turned on intensely, but more often he was completely untouched by their song. Don said it was because he had a tin ear, but Harper was unconvinced. His rumbling, rough bass was perfectly in tune, and he sang with a casual, disinterested confidence.
Harper smiled weakly for Renée, but felt unsteady and sick. She had to close her eyes to withstand the assault of the last thunderous verse—her Dragonscale crawled unpleasantly, and the only thought she could manage was stop, stop, stop—and when it was over, and the room erupted into stamping feet and whistles and applause, it was all she could do not to cry.
Ben absently stroked her hip. She was sure he didn’t know he was doing it. The threads of light on his exposed ’scale were fading, but a brassy sheen remained in his eyes. He regarded her with affection, but not much recognition.
“Mmnothing?” he asked. His voice had a drifting, musical quality, as if he had just woken from a restorative nap. “No luck? I wasn’t paying attention. Kind of lost myself for a minute there.”
“No luck,” Harper said. “It might be my ankle. It’s been achy all morning and it’s a little distracting. Maybe I’ll just sit for the next song and rest it.”
And she did sit the next time. She sat and closed her eyes to shut out the bright glare that so felt like oncoming headlights.
She sat and waited to be run down.
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NOVEMBER • 7
Harper woke the night of Thanksgiving from a dream about Jakob and Desolation’s Plough. She smelled smoke and couldn’t figure out what was burning and then she realized it was her.
Harper wasn’t in flames, but the stripe across her throat had charred the collar of her Coldplay T-shirt, causing it to blacken and smoke. Beneath the shirt, she felt a sensation like bug spray on a scrape, only all over.
She threw aside her sheets with a cry and yanked off her shirt. The stripe marked her skin in inky lines flecked with grains of poisonous red light. The jellyfish sting intensified, made thought impossible.
The sound that went up all around her, from the other women stirring in their beds, made her think uncharitably of pigeons startled into flight: a nervous cooing. Then Allie was with her. Allie put her legs around Harper’s waist and clasped her from behind. She sang, in a soft, barely audible whisper, lips close to Harper’s ear. In the next moment Renée was beside her, holding her hand in the dark, lacing her fingers through Harper’s.
Renée said, “You’re not going to burn. No one burns here, that’s one of the rules. You want to break the rules and get us all in trouble with Carol Storey? Deep breaths, Nurse Willowes. Big deep breaths. With me, now: Innn. Out. Innnn.”
And Allie sang that old Oasis song. She sang that Harper was her Wonderwall, in a sweet, unafraid voice. She even did it in her Fireman voice, in a darling faux-
snotty English accent of the sort best known as Mockney.
Harper didn’t start to cry until the Dragonscale dimmed and went out and the pain began to pass. It left behind an achy, sunburnt feeling, all through the spore.
Allie stopped singing, but went on holding her. Her bony chin rested comfortably on Harper’s shoulder. Renée rubbed her thumb over Harper’s knuckles in a loving, motherly way.
Nick Storey stood in the dark, four paces from Harper’s cot, watching her uneasily. Nick was the only boy who slept in the girls’ dorm, splitting a cot with his big sister. He clutched a slide whistle to his chest with one hand. He couldn’t hear it, but he knew he could blow through it and call the Fireman. And what good would that do? Maybe the Fireman would’ve brought a hose to douse her ashes.
“Attagirl,” Renée said. “You’re okay. All over. Could’ve been worse.”
“Could’ve been better, too,” Allie said. “You just missed a perfectly good opportunity to toast an awful Coldplay T-shirt. If I ever spontaneously combust, I hope I’m holding a whole stack of their CDs.”
Harper made sounds that might’ve been laughter or might’ve been sobs; even she wasn’t sure. Maybe a bit of both.
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8
Harper filed into the night in her singed Coldplay shirt, moving along toward the cafeteria and breakfast with all the rest of them. She walked without seeing where she was going, letting the human tide carry her along.
A dream. A dream had almost killed her. She had never imagined that going to sleep might be as dangerous as a glass of wine with Jakob over a loaded gun.
In the dream, she was enormously pregnant, so huge it was both horrible and comic. She was trying to run, but the best she could manage was a tragic, hilarious waddle. She was clutching Desolation’s Plough to her sore and swollen breasts and the pages were sticky with blood. There were bloody handprints all over it. She had the confused idea that she had beaten Jakob to death with it and now she had to hide the evidence.
She was running across the road to bury it, as if it were a corpse. An icy wind sheared up the highway, caught the manuscript, and dashed it to the blacktop.
Harper got down on the frozen asphalt, grabbing pages and trying to collect the manuscript there in the dark and the cold. In the logic of the dream it was necessary not to lose a single page. She had gathered up about a third when a pair of headlights snapped on, three hundred feet down the road. A two-ton Freightliner with a plow the size of an airplane wing was parked along the curb.
“Oh, you bitch,” Jakob called from behind the wheel. “Do you know how hard I worked on that? Where is your respect for literature?”
The gears ground. The Freightliner began to roll. Jakob flicked the beams to high, pinning her to the road with a blinding blue light. He accelerated, crunched up into second gear, the noise of the engine rising to a diesel scream, and the headlights were piercing her right through, the headlights were hot on her skin, the headlights were cooking her—
Just remembering it made her Dragonscale prickle with an unwholesome heat.
She walked with her head down, so lost in her hopeless, dismal thoughts that she was startled when someone planted a cold gentle kiss on her cheek. She looked up in time to be kissed again, on her right eyelid.
It was snowing. Great fat white flakes as big as feathers floated aimlessly down from the darkness, so soft and light, they barely seemed to be descending at all. She closed her eyes. Opened her mouth. Tasted a snowdrop.
The cafeteria was steamy and smelled of seared Spam and white gravy. Harper shuffled through a din of shouts, laughter, and clattering utensils.
The children had made paper placemats shaped like turkeys and colored them in. All the kids were working as waiters that evening, and wore Pilgrim hats made out of construction paper.
Renée steered Harper to one of the long tables and they sat down together. Ben Patchett glided in from the other side, bumping Harper’s hip with his own as he settled on the bench.
“Did you want to sit with us, Ben?” Renée asked, although he had already plopped himself down.
In the last three weeks, Ben had developed a habit of hovering. When Harper walked toward a door, it seemed like he was always there to hold it open for her. If she was limping, he slipped up against her, unasked, to put an arm around her waist and serve as her crutch. His fat, warm hands reminded her of yeasty, uncooked dough. He was harmless and he was trying to be useful and she wanted to be grateful, but instead she often found herself wearied by the sight of him.
“You okay, Harper?” Ben narrowed his eyes at her. “You look flushed. Drink something.”
“I’m fine. I already had some water and you wouldn’t believe how much I’m peeing these days.”
“I said drink.” He pushed a paper cup of cranberry juice at her. “Dr. Ben’s orders.”
She took the cup and drank, mostly to shut him up. She knew he was kidding, trying to have fun with her in his clumsy way, but she found herself even more irritable with him than usual. It was no problem for him to join the Bright. Ben Patchett always lit right up in chapel, from the first chords Carol played on the pipe organ. He was never going to wake up burning. He didn’t have to be afraid of going to sleep.
Harper’s bad dreams of being run down in the road didn’t surprise her in the least. She felt trapped in the path of oncoming headlights at least once a day, when all the rest of them sang. More and more, she dreaded entering the chapel for services. She had been in camp all month and had not been able to join the Bright, not a single time. In chapel, she was the one dead bulb on the Christmas tree. She clenched her fists in her lap throughout each day’s ceremony, a white-knuckled flier gritting her teeth through a battering stretch of turbulence.
Recently, even Ben had stopped reassuring her it was just a matter of time before she connected, before she plugged in, joined up . . . all those phrases that made it sound like a matter of getting online with some modem of the soul. When services were over, and they all filed out, Harper saw people avoiding eye contact with her. Those who did meet her gaze, did so with small, cramped, pitying smiles.
There was a stir of commotion halfway across the room as Carol helped Father Storey up onto a chair. He raised both hands for quiet, smiling down at the almost full room and blinking through his gold-rimmed bifocals.
“I—” he began, in a mumbly, muffled sort of way, and then he reached into his mouth and plucked out a white stone. His audience responded with a rumble of adoring laughter.
Someone—it sounded like Don Lewiston—shouted, “Hey, Fadder, is that what’s for dinner? Christ, the food in this joint is bad.”
Norma Heald glowered in the direction of whoever had been yelling, then called out, “No snacking before meals, Father.”
Father Storey smiled and said, “I thought this being the day of Thanksgiving, I should say something before we dig in. You can put your hands together if you want, or hold hands with whoever is next to you, or tune me out and listen to the wind, as it suits you.”
Throats cleared and chair legs thumped. Ben Patchett took Harper’s hand in his, his palm moist and doughy. Renée gave Harper a sidelong glance that was full of sardonic sympathy—Look who has a boyfriend! Lucky you!—and took the other hand.
“All of us together are a chorus of praise, saved by song and light,” Father Storey began. “We are grateful to have this chance to come together in harmony, saved by our love for each other. We have so much to be thankful for. I know I am thankful for biscuits and white gravy. It smells great. We all sing our thanks for Norma Heald, who busted her butt making this amazing Thanksgiving dinner with very limited supplies. We sing our thanks for the girls who sweated puddles assisting her in the kitchen. We sing for Renée Gilmonton, who helped the kids wi
th their Pilgrim hats and taught them how to be an ace wait staff. We sing for John Rookwood, who isn’t here tonight, but who miraculously provided us with the cocoa and marshmallows I’m not supposed to mention, because we don’t want the kids to get excited.”
A shriek of happiness went up around the room, followed by an indulgent murmur of adult laughter. Father Storey smiled, then shut his eyes. His brow furrowed in thought.
“When we sing together, we sing for all the people who loved us but who aren’t here tonight. We sing in memory of every minute we got to have with them. I had a daughter—a beautiful, smart, funny, combative, difficult, inspiring daughter—and I couldn’t miss her any more than I do. I know other people here feel just the same about the ones they lost. I sing for what I had with my Sarah. And when we raise our voices in harmony, I feel her still. I find her spirit in the Bright. I hear her singing for me, as I sing for her.”
The wind shrilled beneath the eaves. Someone took a choked breath. Harper could feel the silence in her nerve endings, a sweet, painful throb.
Father Storey opened his wet eyes and swept a grateful, affectionate look across the room. “The rest of us, we’re still here, and it feels pretty good. One more night on Earth, with a little music and some fresh biscuits and some good conversation. That’s about all I ever wanted. I don’t know about anyone else. And now I think everyone would just about sing with joy if I’d shut up so we can get to eating.”
A cheer went up, a loud yell of pleasure, followed by applause. Don Lewiston stood. Then others were standing with him, pushing back their benches and chairs, so they could clap for the old man, who told them it was all right to still sometimes be happy, even now. As Father Storey came down out of his chair, they rose from theirs, whistling and clapping, and Harper whistled and clapped with them, glad for him. For one moment, anyway, she was not sick at heart about waking up to the smell of smoke.