کتاب 02-11

11

She dreamt she wore a gown of wasps and woke when they began to sting.

The basement was stuffy and dim in the late morning and she lay motionless, still feeling wasp-stung: on her collarbone, on the inside of her left thigh, between two of her toes.

Harper pressed her chin into her chest, looking down, and saw a red spot burning through her T-shirt above her left breast, as if someone were pressing the tip of a cigarette into the cotton . . . from the inside. A silky thread of white smoke trickled up from the growing burn. Harper watched, in a state of horrible lassitude, as the hole expanded, the edges a bright orange lacework. At last she rubbed it out with her thumb and brushed the sparks off her chest.

Her body throbbed from nearly a dozen of those wasp-sting burns. She flapped back her blanket, to see if her clothes were burning anywhere else, and a gush of black smoke drifted toward the ceiling. She was reminded of her childhood fascination with smoke signals. What would this message translate to? Probably: Help, I am going to be burned alive.

Enough, she thought.

She sat up, very carefully, iron bedsprings creaking. She did not want to wake anyone, did not want to cause any trouble. In those first moments, she was not clear about what she meant to do, only that she didn’t want to have to talk to anyone about it. That enough indicated some kind of decision, but it was not immediately clear to her what she had decided.

In the next bed, Renée slept on her side, deep in her own dreams, smiling at some imagined event. Harper half had an urge to lean over and kiss her forehead, to have one final moment of physical contact. Final moment? Harper found she couldn’t look at Renée for long. Enough represented some kind of betrayal of their friendship. Enough was going to hurt Renée, would leave her—what? Bereft was the word that came to mind. Bereft and enough went together like bride and groom.

Harper considered packing The Portable Mother and her clothes into her carpetbag, but enough was a destination that required no baggage. Enough was a reverberation deep inside her, a kind of ringing emptiness, as if she were a steeple in which a bell had been solemnly struck. Ask not for whom it tolls.

She rose and paced across the cool, dusty concrete. Harper paused at the bottom of the steps for a look back at the maze of cots, a labyrinth of sleeping women. In that moment she loved them all, even awful Jamie Close with her ugly mouth and upturned nose. Harper had always wanted a tough friend like Jamie, someone rude and mouthy, who would cut a bitch for talking smack. She loved Renée and the Neighbors girls and little Emily Waterman and Allie and Nick. Nick most of all, with his bottle-glass-green eyes and articulate hands, which drew words on the air like a boy wizard sketching spells.

She climbed three steps to the door, eased the latch up with a click, and slipped out. She blinked at the watery sunlight. She hadn’t seen any in a while and it hurt her eyes.

The sky was high and pale, like the dingy canvas roof of a circus tent. She went up more steps, trailing wisps of smoke behind her. The ’scale had burned holes in her sweats, holes all through her Rent T-shirt. She had seen Rent with Jakob and he had held her hand while she wept at the end. She was surprised to find herself longing for Jakob now, for the wiry strength of his arms when he held her around the waist. It didn’t seem to matter that the last time she had seen him he had been waving a gun at her.

She supposed Jakob had been right. It would’ve been much easier to do things his way. He had known how awful it would be to burn to death. He had only wanted to spare her. For that she had carved open his face with a broken glass and wasted their special bottle of wine.

Harper had told herself she was staying alive for the baby, but the baby never had anything to do with it, not really. She was holding on because she could not bear to say good-bye to her life and every good thing in it. She had selfishly wanted more. She had wanted to hold her father again and smell his Eight & Bob cologne, which always made her think of sea-soaked rope. She had wanted to sit by a swimming pool somewhere, with the sun glowing on her mostly bare skin, drifting half awake while her mother gabbed on and on about all the funny things Stephen Colbert had said on TV the night before. She had wanted to read her favorite books again and revisit her best friends one more time: Harry and Ron, Bilbo and Gandalf, Hazel and Bigwig, Mary and Bert. She had wanted another good hard lonely cry and another pee-your-pants laughing fit. She had wanted a whole bunch more sex, although, looking back, most of her sexual history involved sleeping with men she didn’t much like.

She had told herself she was going on with her life because she wanted her son (she was curiously certain it was a boy, had been almost since the beginning) to experience some of those good things, too; so he could meet her parents, read some good books, have a girl. But in reality, her son was never going to do any of those things. He was going to die before he was even born. He was going to roast in her womb. She had lived on only to murder him. She wanted to apologize to the baby for ever conceiving him. She felt like she had already failed to keep the only promise she had ever made him.

When Harper reached the top of the steps, she realized she had forgotten her shoes. But it didn’t matter. The thin crust of the first snow had melted away, except for a few lumps under the pines. The wind lashed the high tangles of dead grass and ruffled the sea into sharp-edged wavelets.

Harper wasn’t sure she could bear the wind off the water for long, not in her thin, raggedy things, but for a few moments, anyway, she thought she could use a blast of sea air. She wasn’t supposed to be out in the daytime—Ben Patchett would be upset if he knew—but Camp Wyndham was sere and cold and empty, and no one was around to see.

Harper set out for the shoreline, tramping across damp, rotten grass. She paused once, to inspect a white rock the size of a baby’s skull, streaked with black, mica-flecked seams in a way that made her think of Dragonscale. With some effort, she was able to force the large stone into one pocket of her sweats.

She made her way through a band of evergreens, past the boathouse, collecting a few more interesting-looking rocks as she descended to the waterfront.

Harper crooned to herself disconsolately, chanting the words to a song she had overheard some of the smaller kids shouting at each other. She wondered if they even knew the tune it was parodying, “Hey Jude.” Probably not.

’ey yooooou,

don’t start to cry

if you fry now

it will be shiiiiiity,

A pity!

If you turn into a heap!

Cos it’s my turn to sweep!

And take out the ashes.

She smiled without any pleasure at all.

She had wanted to believe in Aunt Carol’s miracle, had wanted so badly to believe she could sing her way out of trouble. It worked for all the others, kept them safe and filled them with contentment, and it should have worked for her, too, but it didn’t, and she couldn’t help it: she resented them for doing what she couldn’t. She resented them for pitying her.

Out here, alone in the bitterly cold clear light of the morning, she could admit to herself that she found them repugnant when they all lit up in church. To stand among them when their eyes shone and their Dragonscale pulsed was almost as awful as being fondled in a crowd by a strange hand. Of all the things she wanted over, she wanted an end to morning chapel, to the sound and the fury, the song and the light.

Harper padded to the splintery expanse of the dock. Here at the open ocean, the salty air came at her in battering, cleansing strokes. The boards, worn soft by a decade of spray and damp, felt good under her feet. She walked to the end and sat down. The stones in her pockets clunked on the pine.

Harper stared out at the Fireman’s island, her toes trailing over the water. She dipped a big toe in and gasped, the water so cold it made the knuckles in her feet throb with pain.

Someone had left a length of fraying green twine wrapped around one of the posts. She began, almost idly, to unwind it. She felt it was important not to think too closely about what she was out on the dock to do. If she looked at it straight on, she might lose her nerve.

On some half-conscious level, though, she knew the cold of the ocean would be almost as unbearable as the wasp-sting sensation of the Dragonscale going hot, and instinct would drive her back to the shore. But if she tied her wrists, she wouldn’t be able to swim, and the cold would ease from pain to dullness soon enough. She thought she would open her eyes while she was underwater. She had always liked the blurred darkness of the aquatic world.

The overcast haze thinned to the east and she could see a streak of pale blue. She felt as clear and open as that blue sky. She felt all right. She began to loop the twine around her wrists.

The breeze carried a distant cry.

She hesitated and cocked her head to listen.

At one end of the little island was the ruin of a single-room cottage. Only two walls still stood. The other two had collapsed along with the roof. Charred beams crisscrossed within.

A second, smaller building, some kind of windowless shed—painted green with a white door—had been built on the crescent of sand that faced Camp Wyndham. It had a turf roof, and a dune had blown into a high drift against the far wall, so it half resembled a hobbit hole burrowed into the side of a hill. A tin chimney pipe vented a trickle of smoke all day and all night, but as far as Harper knew it had never drawn any attention from the outside world. You could not scan the shoreline without seeing a dozen little coils of smoke just like it.

Now, though, the chimney carried the echo of a strained, small, faraway voice.

“No! No, you won’t! You can’t!” the Fireman shouted. “You don’t get to give up!”

Her heart sprang like a trap. For one alarming moment, she was sure he was speaking to her.

But of course he couldn’t see her from inside his shed. He didn’t have any idea she was there.

“Haven’t I done everything you wanted?” he cried, the wind catching his voice and carrying it to her clearly by some perverse trick of acoustics. “Haven’t I done everything you asked? Don’t you think I want to quit? But I’m still here. If I don’t get to go, you don’t.”

She felt she should run—she had no right to be hearing any of this—but couldn’t move. The fury she heard in his voice ran through her like a pole, holding her in place.

A great iron clang crashed inside the shed. The door shook in its frame. She waited, helplessly, to see what would come next, hoping with all her heart he was not about to step outside and see her.

He didn’t and there was no more. Smoke trickled peacefully from the chimney, thinning quickly as it rose into the general haze. The wind thrashed the wiry tufts of sea grass on the island.

Harper listened and waited and watched until she realized she was shivering from the cold. She dropped the twine she had been winding around her wrists. A gust snatched it, floated it into the air, flipped it into the sea. Harper drew her knees to her chest, hugging them for warmth. The stone like a baby’s skull was digging painfully into her hip, so she worked it out of her pocket and set it on the edge of the dock.

Too close to the edge. The stone toppled over the side. Bloosh, went the sea, as it swallowed the rock.

It was such an agreeable sound, Harper dropped in all the other stones she had collected, one by one, just to hear that sound again and again.

Norma Heald said there were ghosts out there, ghosts made of smoke. Maybe John had been yelling at one of them. Maybe he was yelling at shadows. Or at himself.

Ghosts carried messages from beyond, but they didn’t seem like they would be terribly good listeners. John sounded so wretched and hurt, Harper thought someone ought to listen to him. If the ghosts wouldn’t, she would.

Besides, Jakob had always thought he knew what was better for her than she did, and if she killed herself, it would be admitting he was right. That alone was reason to persist—just to stick it to him. Now that she was more awake, she was feeling less forgiving about the gun.

No one heard Harper letting herself back into the basement of the chapel. Her blankets smelled like a campfire, but they were so cozy she was asleep in minutes . . . and this time there were no dreams.