The Fireman (5 page)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

....................................

AUGUST • 7

Harper was in the shower when she saw the stripe on the inside of her left leg.

She knew what the stripe meant in one look and her insides squirmed with fear, but she wiped cool water from her face and scolded herself. “Don’t start with me, lady. That’s a goddamn bruise.”

It didn’t look like a bruise, though. It looked like Dragonscale, a dark, almost inky line, dusted with a few oddly mineral flecks of gold. When she bent close, she saw another mark, on the back of her calf—same leg—and she jerked upright. She put a hand over her mouth because she was making little miserable sounds, almost sobs, and she didn’t want Jakob to hear.

She climbed out, neglecting to turn off the shower. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t like she was wasting the hot water. There wasn’t any. The power had been out for two days. She had gone in the shower to wash the sticky feeling off her. The air in the house was smothering, like being trapped under a pile of blankets all day long.

The part of her that was five years a nurse—the part that remained calm, almost aloof, even when the floor was sticky with blood and a patient was shrieking in pain—asserted itself. She choked down the little sobs she was making and composed herself. She decided she needed to dry off and have another look at it. It could be a bruise. She had always been someone who bruised easily, who would discover a great black mark on her hip or the back of her arm with no idea how she had injured herself.

She toweled herself almost dry and put her left foot up on the counter. She looked at the leg and then looked at it in the mirror. She felt the need to cry rising behind her eyes again. She knew what it was. They put down
Draco incendia trychophyton
on the death certificates, but even the surgeon general called it Dragonscale. Or he had, until he burned to death.

The band on the back of her leg was a delicate ray of black, blacker than any bruise, silted with grains of brightness. On closer inspection, the line on her thigh looked less like a stripe, more like a question mark or a sickle. Harper saw a shadow she didn’t like, where her neck met her shoulder, and she brushed aside her hair. There was another dark line there, flaked with the mica-specks of Dragonscale.

She was trying to regulate her breathing, trying to exhale a feeling of wooziness, when Jakob opened the door.

“Hey, babe, they need me down to the Works. There’s no—” he said, then fell silent, looking at her in the mirror.

At the sight of his face, she felt her composure going. She put her foot on the floor and turned to him. She wanted him to put his arms around her and squeeze her and she knew he couldn’t touch her and she wasn’t going to let him.

He staggered back a step and stared at her with blind, bright, scared eyes. “Oh, Harp. Oh, baby girl.” Usually he said it as one word—
babygirl
—but this time it was distinctly two. “You’ve got it all over you. It’s on your legs. It’s on your back.”

“No,” she said, a helpless reaction. “No. No no
no
.” It nauseated her, to imagine it streaked across her skin where she couldn’t see.

“Just stay there,” he said, holding a hand out, fingers spread, although she hadn’t taken a step toward him. “Stay in the bathroom.”

“Jakob,” she said. “I want to look and see if there’s any on you.”

He stared at her without comprehension, a bright bewilderment in his gaze, and then he understood and something went out of his eyes. His shoulders sank. Beneath his tan he looked wan and gray and bloodless, as if he had been out in the cold for a long time.

“What’s the point?” he asked.

“The point is to see if you’ve got it.”

He shook his head. “Of course I have it. If you have it, I have it. We fucked. Just last night. And two days ago. If I’m not showing now, I will later.”

“Jakob. I want to look at you. I didn’t see any marks on me yesterday. Not before we made love. Not after. They don’t understand everything about transmission, but a lot of doctors think a person isn’t contagious until they’re showing visible marks.”

“It was dark. We were in candlelight. If either of us saw those marks on you, we would’ve thought it was a shadow,” he said. He spoke in a leaden monotone. The terror she had seen on his face had been like a flicker of heat lightning, there and gone. In its place was something worse, a listless resignation.

“Take off your clothes,” she said.

He stripped his T-shirt off over his head and dropped it on the floor. He regarded her steadily with eyes that were almost amber in the dimness of the room. He held out his arms to either side, stood there with his feet crossed and his chin lifted, unconsciously posing like Christ on the cross.

“Do you see any?”

She shook her head.

He turned, arms still outstretched, and looked back over his shoulder. “On my back?”

“No,” she said. “Take off your pants.”

He revolved again and unbuttoned his jeans. They faced each other, a yard of open space between them. There was a kind of cruel erotic fascination in the slow, patient way he stripped for her, pulling out his belt, pushing down the jeans and the underwear, too, all in one go. He never broke eye contact. His face was masklike, almost disinterested.

“Nothing,” she said.

He turned. She took in his limber brown thighs, his pale backside, the sunken hollows in his hips.

“No,” she said.

“Why don’t you turn off the shower,” he told her.

Harper returned to the bathroom and turned off the water. She 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-shirt 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 fucking 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-shirt on, in no hurry now.

“Please put some clothes on,” 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 some 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 someone before they’re visibly marked up.”

“That’s right.
They
don’t know.
They
don’t know shit. 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, after 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 for two months, 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 fuck 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 shitbox 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 shitty little bit. Johnny Deepenau was a Budweiser-drinking, football-watching, Donald Trump–voting, 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 space. 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 title.

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.