by Hill,Joe
Out beyond the wrecks was a wide sandy pit, some kind of wreckage or debris piled into it, hidden under overlapping brown plastic tarps. Allie parked the truck between the hole and a Pontiac Firebird that had cooked down to the frame. She hunted around under the steering wheel, found a couple of bare wires twisted together, and pulled them apart, with a buzzing snap of electricity. The fire engine chugged, thudded, and died.
They sat in the stillness. Through the oaks at the rear of the park, Harper could see a flat bay, a pebbly strand, and some darkened buildings on the far side of the water. Come to South Street Cemetery. Beachside views available. Quiet neighbors.
“This is only good until the sun comes up. Then this truck will be visible from the air,” Renée said.
Harper looked at the garage doors of the building for the grounds crew and wondered if there was enough room in there for an antique fire truck. Nick let himself out of her lap again, throwing open the door. He hopped into blowing mist.
“I don’t think this is far enough from Camp Wyndham, either,” Renée went on. Her voice had a dull, disinterested quality. She sat on Harper’s left, holding Gilbert in her arms. He was between her legs, his head lolling against her shoulder, and her arms were around his waist. “There’s a path in the woods. It’s only fifteen minutes from here to the archery range. I walked here once or twice myself last summer.”
“But it’s almost four miles by the road,” Allie said. “And they’d expect us to keep driving. No. I think this might do if we can get the truck under—what’s he up to?” Unbuckling and letting herself out.
Nick had clambered into the sandy pit. He pulled back one flap of a tarp to reveal a midden heap of shriveled flowers, blackened wreaths, and mildewed teddy bears. Even grief, it seemed, had an expiration date. Allie caught up to him, found another corner of the tarp, and helped him drag it toward the fire truck. They would only need a couple of them to hide the engine completely.
Harper got down, put her hands in the small of her back, and stretched, popping her spine. She ached as if she were recovering from flu, every muscle sore, every joint achy.
She looked back into the truck at Renée. “We’re going to cover the truck and go inside.” When Renée didn’t reply, Harper added, “I think you should get out now.”
Renée lifted her shoulders in a weary sigh. “All right. Will Allie help me carry Gil inside?”
Allie and Nick had by then dragged the tarp to the side of the truck. Allie stiffened and darted an uneasy look at Harper. Harper nodded to her, just slightly.
“Of course I will, Ms. Gilmonton,” Allie said, in a tone of insouciance that didn’t jibe with her pale look of dismay.
Easing the heavy corpse of Gilbert Cline out of the fire truck was a clumsy bit of business. Renée held him under the armpits and heaved and gasped, nudging him toward the passenger door a few inches at a time. Allie got him by the ankles and they began to shift him out, but Renée bumped her head and lost her grip, and the top half of his body dropped all of a sudden. His head bonged against the step up into the cab. Renée made a shrill yelp of horror and almost fell out after him.
“Oh no!” she said. “Oh no, oh no, oh, Gil I’m so weak. I’m so useless.”
“Hush now,” Harper said, moving past Renée and bending to get Gilunder the arms herself.
“You can’t,” Renée said. “Don’t, Harper. You’re nine months pregnant.”
“It’s no trouble at all,” Harper said, although when she straightened up, her ankles blazed and her back twinged.
They walked Gilbert through high weeds, wet grass shushing against his back. His head lolled. He wore a stoic, almost patient look, his clear, quite blue eyes seeming to watch Harper the whole time.
They had to put the dead man down when they reached the corner of the garage, so Harper could rest her back and Allie could look for a way in. The door was locked and there was no key under the mat or beneath either of the ceramic flowerpots on the front step (pots full of dirt and a flourishing crop of decorative weeds). But Nick didn’t mean to enter by way of the door. He made his way along the side of the building, peering up under the eaves. At last he stopped and gestured to one of the windows. It was a good five feet over his head, so high up under the eaves it was hard to imagine it let in any daylight. The window was a long narrow slot, and a triangular piece of glass was missing from one smashed pane. No man could put his hand through the gap, but a child’s arm just might fit.
Nick needed Allie to hunch down, so he could climb onto her shoulders. Even when she rose to her full height, he could barely reach the glass. He had to stretch to get a hand in through the window and turn the lock. He pushed it open, grabbed the sill, hoisted himself up, and disappeared headfirst into the darkness.
There must’ve been something just inside the window to climb down on—some shelving perhaps—because Harper didn’t hear him drop. He was gone without a sound.
“I wonder who helped him get in there last time,” Harper said, and when Allie gave her a questioning look, she nodded at the high window. “He’s obviously done this before, but he’s too short to reach the window on his own.”
Allie frowned.
The front door popped open and Nick stuck his head out and waved for them to come along, come in, his house was their house.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollinsPublishers
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2
When day broke, the engine was completely covered by a pair of tarps, one over the front, another over the rear. Harper had imagined they might be able to put the fire truck inside, but the garage already contained a John Deere and a backhoe. An orderly if cobwebbed collection of rakes and shovels hung from hooks on one wall. An expansive worktable ran the length of the other. That was where they put Gilbert, covering him with a third tarp.
At the back of the garage, a bank of windows looked into a cluttered office: two desks, a corkboard on the wall, an empty water cooler, and a couch the creamy green hue of snot. That was where they slept. Harper took the couch. Allie and Nick slept in each other’s arms on the floor, wrapped in a gray blanket that Allie found in a back compartment of the fire truck. Renée didn’t join them. She sat on a stool beside the worktable, holding Gilbert’s hand. Sometimes she talked to him. Sometimes she laughed, as if he had said something clever. Often she just moved her thumb across his knuckles, or pressed his cold hand to her cheek.
Nick had told Harper he was the thief and promised to take her to where he had stashed the loot. But the Portable Mother was nowhere in sight. The same went for all the other little valuables that had gone missing from camp. Harper assumed Nick would explain when he was ready.
She curled up on her side under a black Windbreaker. The jacket had a print of Death himself on the back, one skeletal hand clutching a scythe . . . and the other raising a lacy bra. gravediggers local 13—bad to the bone, it said. The Windbreaker smelled of coffee and menthol and made her think of her father, who was always smearing Bengay on his bad neck. She cried herself to sleep, thinking about her dad, who might be dead now and who she doubted she would ever see again in her life. But she wept quietly, not wanting to disturb anyone else.
When she woke, the children were yet asleep. Was Allie still a child? Looking at her smooth cheek and long eyelashes, Harper wanted to think so. Even in sleep, though, she had a whittled-down quality that made her look very much like a young woman, worn by her cares and worries, too busy to think the things that made children happy.
Harper gazed through one of the picture windows facing the garage and saw Renée had climbed up onto the plywood table and dozed off against Gil, one plump hand resting on his chest. The high windows under the eaves looked out on featureless darkness. Harper had slumbered through the day, and might’ve slept through much of the next night if she weren’t so hungry. They would have to do
something about food soon.
The office had a Formica counter with a sink, a microwave, a Mr. Coffee, and a radio that was so old, it had a cassette player built into the front. It was plugged into a wall socket, but of course there was no power. There was a fridge, but Harper didn’t look inside, didn’t want to smell what might be in there. She turned the radio around and found a battery compartment in the back. It required six big D batteries. There was a package of fresh D-cells in the third drawer she tried.
Harper carried the radio out of the office and into the cool, stony quiet of the garage. She paused at the workbench, beside Renée and Gil. The tarp had slipped down to their waists. Gil’s shirt was unbuttoned slightly and Renée’s hand was curled on his chest, her cheek against his shoulder.
Written in faded blue letters, ornate, almost gothic, across Gil’s chest, were two lines:
It is impossible to go through life without trust:
that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
—G. Greene
Harper lifted the tarp up, smoothing it over their shoulders, and left them to each other.
She settled on the cement step in a night of surprising, almost liquid warmth, filled with cricket song. She flexed her toes in the damp, gritty loam. When she tipped back her head and looked into the sky, she saw so many stars, it made her ache with love for the world. And what a thing: that she still loved the world, even now. The face of the radio glowed a lightning bug green. What was better than a warm spring night, bare feet in the warm dirt, the smell of budding trees in the air, and a little music on the radio? All she was missing was a cold beer.
She dialed through the FM bands, hoping to hear Martha Quinn and knowing she wouldn’t. She didn’t. Through a hiss of static she brought in a station playing archival recordings of black gospel, but after a few songs it faded out. Farther down the dial she found a young man—or was it a kid? His voice had the high-pitched, strained quality that Harper associated with incipient puberty—reporting from Red Sox spring training in Fort Myers. She stuck there for a while, pulse thudding heavily, shaken by the thought that baseball was going on somewhere in the world.
But after half an inning she began to suspect the kid of making it all up as he went along. Bill Buckner was playing first base again, over twenty-five years since his last game, and every single ball went between his legs. Vin Diesel was batting as the Red Sox’s designated hitter and stroked a ball right at a shortstop named Kermit deFrock. When deFrock caught it, the force of the hit pulled his arm out of its socket. The Sox were playing a team called the Heretics, largely made up of Muppets, monsters, and madmen, who erupted into flames and died on the field whenever they made an error. Harper listened, smiling, for another inning. The Sox were up 3½ to 1 when she changed the station. She wasn’t sure how they had scored half a run. The kid doing the announcing sounded about eleven and like he was having the time of his life.
Down at the very bottom of the dial she found a boys’ choir singing “O Come All Ye Faithful” and stopped to listen, and at some point she realized she was crying. She had not wanted any of them to die. Not a single one, and it didn’t matter how hard it had been to live with them.
When the song faded out, a woman began a report, “Today in Blessings.” It was news, of a sort. She said word had come in that J. K. Rowling, author of the godless Harry Potter novels, had been killed by firing squad in Edinburgh. Her execution had been televised on what remained of the Web. She was scribbled all over with the devil’s handwriting and had used her money and status to protect and transport others who were sick. When offered the chance to ask forgiveness for her many sins—deluding children, hiding the contaminated—she scorned the opportunity and said she would not apologize for a single adverb. The announcer accounted it a blessing that she would burn eternally in hell, praise Jesus.
In local blessings, the National Guard, supported by the Seacoast Incinerators—a volunteer militia—had discovered six hundred infected sinners hiding on the grounds of Camp Wyndham. A brief firefight ensued, ending when the sick burned to death in a church they had converted to a heavily armed compound, say hallelujah.
Further north, new fires had started in the south of Maine, but in a sign of the Lord’s mercy, the blaze was contained to a mere twenty-mile swath. The New Hampshire Soldiers for Christ had pledged to send more than a hundred men and a dozen fire trucks within the week. Grand Corporal Ian Judaskiller was in close communication with the Maine forest services and stood ready to help any who heard and accepted the truth of his own divine revelations, glory be. Grand Corporal? His former title had been Governor, but then, his former name had been Ian Judd-Skiller.
The boys’ choir returned to sing something in Latin.
When Harper lifted her gaze, Nick sat on the other end of the step, squeezing his knees to his chest.
“Nice out,” she said, but with gestures, not her voice. “I love a warm night. Almost like summer.”
He nodded, just a little, his chin hovering right above his knees.
“Eat we have to,” she said, knowing she wasn’t getting it quite right. “I’ll find eat. Bring here. Don’t worry if me not back soon.”
He shook his head.
“I know where there’s food,” he told her with his eloquent, expressive hands. “Come on.”
He pushed himself up and led her into the graveyard.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollinsPublishers
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3
For a while they followed the road that ran along the back of the cemetery. Then Nick turned in among the headstones, through the waist high grass. The boy paused at an old, rough, grayish slab of rock with the name mcdaniels upon it. He squatted down and touched the edge. Harper saw a dash of bright red paint.
He turned and went on and she followed. At a blue marble slab commemorating the life of one ernest grapeseed, Nick bent, pointed to another little red line, then looked meaningfully back at her.
Nick finger-spelled: “Nail polish.”
Harper remembered, then, one of the first things to go missing: a bottle of red nail polish that had belonged to the Neighbors sisters. Each believed the other had swiped it and there had been a nasty fight.
He led her up and down the rumpled green earth. The grass was growing long throughout the cemetery. Harper thought by mid-June, all but the highest plinths would be sunk deep beneath a riot of wild green. That didn’t seem so bad to her. She thought there was more beauty in wildflowers and tufts of beach grass than there was in a whole park of groomed lawn.
They came to a crypt, the walls of white stone buried under vines of ivy and oily green leaves. A captain’s wheel had been stamped into the lead door, above the name o’brian. A chunk of rock, with another little dash of fingernail polish on it, held the door slightly ajar.
Nick put a shoulder to. The door slid inward with a grinding shriek.
There was no light to see by and Harper wished she had brought a flashlight—there had to be one back in the garage—but Nick moved quickly around to one of the stone caskets against the wall. His fingertip ignited, spilling a ribbon of bluish-green fire. He touched it to a series of candles, most of which had been melted down to deformed stubs, then shook the flame out.
Harper’s carpetbag sat on one of the caskets. Allie’s gold locket hung from the handle. Harper felt funny all through her middle, seeing the Portable Mother again. It was like running into someone she had fancied a long time ago—in high school perhaps—and discovering he was just as good looking as she remembered.
A giant teacup, the size of a soup bowl, sat on another stone coffin lid. Emily Waterman’s special cup of stars. The inside was crusted with ancient gobbets of dried meat. Stacked against the wall were three cans of Spam, three cans of condensed milk.
The boy hitched himself up t
o sit with candles on either side of him. Harper sat across from him, inclined her head, and waited.
“I was trying to catch the cat,” he said with his hands. “A big cat with stripes like a tiger. When I stroked him, I could feel him humming, like a small motor. I can’t hear purring, but I can feel it, and nothing feels better. But when I tried to capture him, he always got away. Once I had him trapped in a box and carried him halfway back to camp. But he pushed his head out through the bottom and jumped away.”
She nodded to show she was with him so far.
“Michael said he’d help me catch it. It was supposed to be a secret. We’d catch him together and bring him back to camp and I could keep it. Mike told me to sneak Spam and milk out of the cafeteria. He met me with things he took out of camp, like soda and candy bars. I asked if we’d get in trouble and he said not if no one found out. I knew we were being bad kids. I felt sorry—sometimes.”
“But it was nice, too—Michael was paying attention to you,” Harper said, moving her hands very deliberately to be sure she said exactly what she meant.
Nick nodded, with an eagerness that broke her heart a little. “Most of the other kids never seemed to even notice I was there. None of them understood sign language—and I can’t follow spoken conversation. I’d sit with them in the cafeteria, but most of the time I couldn’t figure out what they were talking about. If they all laughed, I’d smile, like I knew what was funny, even though I didn’t. They could’ve been making jokes about me, for all I knew.”
He lowered his head, looked at his hands. They twitched, made little motions, and Harper thought, with a flush of surprise and pleasure and sadness, that he was talking to himself, and those little finger-wiggles were his version of a whisper. At last he lifted his chin and met her gaze and began to speak again.