The Fireman: A Novel Part 7

"Hey!" she shouted, her heart clouting against the inside of her chest, as if she had just run a few laps around the house.

The guy looked back over his shoulder at her and she saw he was wearing a Hillary Clinton mask. For the first time she noticed he was wearing slightly reflective yellow pants, like the sort firemen wore.

"Hey, come back here!" she yelled.

The man walked the children swiftly away down the sidewalk, disappearing behind a hedge. The boy was practically skipping.

Harper crossed the yellowing gra.s.s, still clutching the bag with the slide whistle in it. She reached the sidewalk and looked around for them, blinking in the haze that drifted perpetually along the street. It was thicker than usual today, a pale ma.s.s that gradually erased the road, so that she couldn't see to the end of the block. The smoke swallowed houses, lawns, telephone poles, and the sky itself. It had swallowed the man and his children, too. Harper stared after them, eyes watering.

When Harper was back in her house, she put the chain on the door again. If a Quarantine Patrol showed up, that chain might buy her enough time to get down into the bas.e.m.e.nt, out the back door, and into the woods. With her carpetbag. And her slide whistle.

She was turning the whistle over in her hands, wondering how loud it was, when she realized the house had gone perfectly still. No music and no Marlboro Man. Somewhere in the last few minutes, the batteries had died in her h.e.l.lo Kitty radio. The twenty-first century-like her masked visitors-had briskly and unapologetically slipped away from her, leaving her all on her own again.

Trick and treat, she thought.

12.

When her cell phone was close to dead, she knew it was time to make the call she had been putting off-that if she waited one more day she might not be able to make the call at all. She had a gla.s.s of white wine to loosen herself up and she rang her brother. Her sister-in-law Lindy answered.

In her early twenties, Lindy had parlayed her hobby of f.u.c.king the ba.s.sists in second-string rock bands into a job at a recording studio in Woodstock, which was what she was doing when she met Connor. He was playing ba.s.s for a prog-metal band called Unbreakable. They weren't. Connor wound up with a bald spot the size of a tea saucer and a job installing hot tubs. Lindy became an instructor at an upscale gym, where she taught aerobic pole dancing to housewives, which she likened to being an animal trainer working with walruses: "You want to throw sardines at them just for turning in a complete circle without falling down." Not long afterward, Harper let her own gym membership lapse. She couldn't stop worrying about what the trainers said about her in private.

"How are you, Lindy?" Harper asked.

"I don't know. I have a three-year-old. I'm too tired to think about how I'm doing. Ask me again in twenty years, if any of us are still around then. You must want Con." She lowered the phone and screamed, "Con! The Sis!"

Connor picked up. "Hey! It's the Sis! What's up?"

"I've got big news," she said.

"Is it the monk? The monk in London?"

"No. What monk?"

"The one they shot trying to walk into the BBC. You don't know about the monk? Him and three others. They were all sick. Long-term sick-this monk has been walking around with the junk since February. They think he might've infected literally thousands. They think he wanted to infect the newsroom staff to make a political point. Terrorism by way of disease. Crazy motherf.u.c.ker. He was glowing like a lightbulb when they cut him down."

"It's not a disease, you know. Not in the traditional sense. It's not a germ. It's a spore."

"Uh-huh. They talked to his followers when they rounded them up. He was telling them they could learn to control the infection and not to infect others. That they could go home, live among normal people. And if they did infect someone they loved, well, they could just teach them how not to be sick, too. He probably had a brain full of sickness. You had some patients like that in the hospital, didn't you? Crazies with spore all over their brain?"

"It gets all over the brain, but I don't know if that's why some people go crazy after they're infected. Hearing you could explode into flames at any second will put a lot of mental strain on a person. Maybe the real surprise is that anyone stays sane." She thought she would know pretty soon if the 'scale had any effect on a person's mental state. It was probably beginning to coat her brain right now.

"Is there something happening besides the terrorist monk?" Connor asked.

She said, "I'm pregnant."

"You're-" he said. "OhmiG.o.d, Harpo! Oh my G.o.d! Lindy! Lindy! Harpo and Jake got pregnant!"

In the background, Harper heard Lindy say, "She's pregnant," in a flat tone that carried no note of celebration. Then she said something else, in a lower tone; it sounded like a question.

"Harpo!" Connor said. He was trying to sound joyous, but she heard the strain in his voice, and she knew Lindy was being unpleasant somehow. "I'm so, so happy for you. We didn't even know you were trying. We thought-"

In the background, but perfectly audible, Lindy said, "We thought you'd be crazy to get pregnant in the middle of a plague, after you spent months in constant contact with infectious people."

"Do Mom and Dad know?" Connor asked, his voice fl.u.s.tered. Then, before she could answer, he said, "Hang on."

She heard him press the phone to his chest to m.u.f.fle it, something she had seen him do dozens of times. She waited for him to come back to her. Finally he did.

"Hey," he said, out of breath, as if he had just run up a flight of stairs. Maybe he had jogged upstairs to get away from Lindy. "Where were we? I'm so happy for you. Do you know the s.e.x?"

"It's too early for that." She took a deep breath and said, "What would you think if I came to visit for a while?"

"I think I would try to talk you out of it. You don't want to go on the road the way things are now. You can't go thirty miles without hitting a roadblock, and that's the least of what's out there. If something happened to you, I'd never forgive myself."

"If I could come, though-speaking hypothetically-what would happen if I turned up on your doorstep tomorrow?"

"I would start with a hug and we'd go from there. Is Jakob on board with this plan? Does he know a guy with a private plane or something? Put him on, I want to say congratulations."

"I can't put him on. Jakob and I aren't living together anymore."

"What do you mean, you aren't-what happened?" Connor asked. He was silent for a moment. Then he said, "Oh Jesus. He's sick, isn't he? That's why you want to come. Jesus, I knew you were being weird, but I thought-well, you're pregnant, you're ent.i.tled."

"I don't know if he's sick," she said softly. "But I am. That's the bad news, Connor. I came down with it six weeks ago. If I turned up on your doorstep, the last thing you'd want to do is hug me."

"What do you mean?" His voice sounded small and frightened. "How?"

"I don't know. I was careful. It can't have happened in the hospital. They had us in rubber head to foot." She was again surprised at the calm she felt, staring the fact of her sickness in the face. "Connor. The womb isn't a good host for the spore. There's a strong chance the baby will be born healthy."

"Hang on. Hangonhangon. I mean. Oh G.o.d." He sounded like he was trying not to cry. "You're just a kid. Why'd you have to work in that hospital? Why'd you have to f.u.c.king go in there?"

"They needed nurses. That's what I am. Connor. I could live with this for months. Months. Long enough to have the baby by C-section. I want you and Lindy to have him after I'm gone." The thought of Lindy being mother to her unborn child was a bad one, but she forced herself not to think about it. Connor, at least, would be a good dad: loving, and patient, and funny, and a bit square. And her child would have The Portable Mother for the tough times.

"Harper. Harper. I'm sorry." His voice was strained and close to a whisper. "It's not fair. All you ever are is nice to people. It's just not fair."

"Shh. Shh, Connor. This baby is going to need you. And I'm going to need you."

"Yeah. No. I mean-wouldn't it be better if you went to a hospital?"

"I can't. I don't know what it's like in New York, but here in New Hampshire they're sending the sick to a quarantine camp in Concord. It's not a good place. There's no medical treatment there. Even if the baby lives, I don't know what they'll do with him. Where they'll place him. I want the baby to be with you, Connor. You and Lindy." Just saying Lindy's name was hard. "Besides. People with the spore, when they congregate, they sometimes set each other off. We know that now. We saw it in the hospital. Going to a camp crowded with other people who have this thing is a death sentence. For me and probably the baby, too."

"So what about our baby, Harper?" said Lindy, her voice sharp and loud in Harper's ear. She had picked up an extension. "I'm sorry. I am so f.u.c.king sorry I feel ill. I can't imagine what you're going through. But, Harper. We have a three-year-old. And you want us to hide you? You want us to take you in and risk you pa.s.sing this infection to our child? To us?"

"I could stay in your garage," Harper whispered, but she doubted Lindy heard her.

"Even if you don't pa.s.s it to us, what happens if someone finds out? What happens to Connor? To me? They're locking people up, Harper. We're probably breaking six federal laws even talking about this," Lindy said.

Connor said, "Lindy, get off the phone. Let me talk to my sister."

"I am not getting off the phone. You are not making this decision without me. I am not going to let her talk you into risking all of our lives. You want to see our f.u.c.king little boy burn to death? No. No. NOT happening."

"Lindy. This is a private conversation," Connor said-whined, really. "This business is between me and Harp."

"When it comes to decisions that could affect the safety of our child, it stops being private business and starts being Lindy business," she said. "I would risk my life for either one of you, but I will not risk my son's life, and it isn't right to ask me to. Being a hero isn't an option anymore when you have a little kid. I know it, and Harper, you know it, too. If you didn't know it before you got pregnant, you know it now. You want your baby to be okay. I understand, because I feel the same way about mine. I am sorry, Harper. I am. But you made your choices. We have to make ours. They aren't heroic choices, but they'll keep our little boy alive until this is all over."

"Lindy," Connor pleaded, although what he was pleading for, Harper couldn't guess.

Because Lindy was awful, an awful person, someone who liked being a mother because it gave her a child and a husband to bully. Everything about her was horrible, from her pointy nose to her pointy little t.i.ts to her pointed, shrill voice . . . but she was right. Harper was a loaded gun now, and you didn't leave a loaded gun where a child could come upon it. The thought crossed Harper's mind, not for the first time, that choosing to try to live was, in some ways, a monstrous act, an act of towering, possibly homicidal selfishness. Her death was a certainty now and she felt everything depended on not taking anyone else with her, in not putting anyone at risk.

But someone is already at risk. The baby is at risk.

Harper shut her eyes. A pair of candles burned on the coffee table, and she could dimly apprehend their light through her eyelids, a sickly red glow.

"Connor," Harper said. "Lindy is right. I wasn't thinking. I'm just scared."

"Of course you are," Lindy said. "Oh, of course you are, Harper."

"It was wrong to ask. I've been knocking around by myself for too long-Jakob left last month, so he wouldn't get it, too. You spend too much time alone, you can talk yourself into some really rotten ideas."

"You ought to call your father," Lindy said. "Fill him in on what's happening."

"What?" Connor cried. "Jesus, Dad can't know about this! It'll kill him. He had a heart attack last year, Lindy. You want him to have another?"

"He's a smart man. He might have some ideas. Besides, your parents have a right to know. Harper ought to be the one to explain to them the situation she's put us all in."

Connor was sputtering. "If it doesn't stop his heart, it'll break it. Lindy, Lindy."

"You might be right, Lindy," Harper said. "You're the most practical of any of us. I might have to call Mom and Dad at some point. But not tonight. I've only got three percent charge left on my phone, and I don't want to give them the bad news and then get disconnected. I want you to promise you'll let me tell them. I don't want them to hear it from you and not be able to get in touch with me. Besides, like you said: I made this situation, I'm the one who has to bear the responsibility."

Harper didn't have any intention of calling her parents and telling them she would likely be dead within a year. There would be no good in it. They were in their late sixties, stranded in G.o.d's waiting room, a.k.a. Florida. They couldn't help her from there and they couldn't come to her; all they could do was get an early start on mourning her, and Harper didn't see the point.

Nothing mollified Lindy faster than someone telling her she was right, however, and when she spoke again, a kind of hushed calm had come into her voice. "Of course I'll let you be the one to tell them. You speak to them when you can, and when you're ready. If they need someone to talk to, we'll do what we can to comfort them from our end." In a distraught, distracted voice, she added: "Maybe this is the thing that will finally bring your mother and me together."

There was a silver lining, Harper thought. Maybe she was going to burn to death, but at least it would give Lindy a chance to bond with her mother-in-law.

"Lindy? Connor? My phone is about to die and I don't know when I'll be able to call again. I haven't had power in the house for days. Can I say good night to Connor Jr.? It must almost be his bedtime."

"Ah, Harper," Connor said. "I don't know."

"Of course she can say good night to him," Lindy said, on Harper's side now.

"Harp, you aren't going to tell the little guy you're sick, are you?"

"Of course she won't," Lindy said.

"I-I don't think you should tell him about the baby, either. I don't want him to get the idea in his head that he's going to have a- Jesus, Harper. This is really hard." He sounded like he was trying not to cry. "I want to put my arms around you, Sis."

She said, "I love you, Con," because whatever Jakob believed about those three words, they still mattered to Harper. They were as close to an incantation as any she knew, had power other words lacked.

"I'll put Junior on," Lindy said, her voice gentle, hushed, as if she were speaking in a church. There was a plasticky clatter as she put her extension down.

Her brother said, "Don't be mad. Don't hate us, Harper." He was speaking in a whisper, too, his voice hitching with grief.

"I would never," she said to her brother. "You have to take care of each other. What Lindy said is just right. You're doing the right thing."

"Oh, Harp," Connor said. He inhaled deeply, a wet, choked breath, and said, "Here comes the kid."

There followed a moment of silence as he pa.s.sed the phone over. Perhaps because it was so quiet, Harper caught a noise in the street, the gravelly rumble and crash of a big truck moving along the road. She was unused to hearing traffic after dark, these days. There was a curfew.

Connor Jr. said, "Hi, Harper," bringing her thoughts back to the world on the other end of the line.

"Hi, Connor Jr."

"Daddy is crying. He says he hit his head on sumpin'."

"You have to give him a kiss and make it better."

"Okay. Are you crying? Why are you crying, too? Did you hit your head?"

"Yes."

"Everyone is. .h.i.tting their head!"

"It's that kind of night."

Something thumped. Connor Jr. cried, "I just hit my head!"

"Don't do that," Harper said.

Harper noticed, in a distracted, half-conscious way, that the big truck she had heard earlier was still out in the street, still rumbling.

The thump thumped again.

"I hit my head again!" Connor Jr. said happily. "We all hit our heads!"

"No more," Harper said. "You'll give yourself a headache."

"I did give myself a headache," he announced with great cheer.

She kissed the phone with a loud wet smack. "I kissed the phone. Did you feel it?"

"Uh-huh! I did. Thank you. I feel better already."