کتاب 04-04

4

She swatted her thigh with the notebook and looked out the window. Goosedown flakes of snow floated about, couldn’t decide if they wanted to fall or rise. Camp was a snow globe and some God-child had given it a shake.

Harper had been awake for fifteen minutes and still wasn’t sure if it was morning or afternoon. The light was diffuse and gray, as if the whole world were hidden under a bedsheet. She sat on the edge of Father Storey’s cot. Every once in a while he would draw a sudden, startled-sounding breath, as if he had just read something terrible in the newspaper. The obituary of a friend, maybe. His own obituary.

One thing that had been true in the summer of Harold Cross was even more true now. The infirmary was out of asshole patches and everything else. She had disinfected Father Storey’s trepanation with a splash of port and had treated John Rookwood’s mauled arm with a weak dose of good intentions. She wasn’t sure good intentions always paved the road to hell, but they for sure weren’t the highest standard of medical care.

She stood on the chair and reached up to put Harold’s notebook behind the ceiling panel. Some little movement or gesture at the edge of her vision caught her attention. She looked around and discovered she and Father Storey had company that morning.

Nick was in the cot closest to the door, sheets pulled to his chest. His hair was a pretty black tousle. He gazed at her as if he had forgotten how to blink. He must’ve crept in while she was asleep and quietly settled into the first empty bed.

She pushed the notebook up out of sight, deciding to act as if this were a perfectly normal thing to do. When the ceiling tile was back in place she climbed down off the chair and stood at the foot of Nick’s cot. Harper moved her hands carefully, using what he had taught her so far to ask why he was here.

He reached for the notepad and pen he carried with him everywhere he went, and wrote: My stomach hurts. Allie walked me over. She had to come to the infirmery anyway because she’s stashioned here today. Harper sat beside him on the cot, took his notepad, and wrote: Have you been vomiting? Diarrhea?

He shook his head. She suspected anxiety for Father Storey, not food poisoning.

What do you mean, Allie is stationed here? Harper wrote and passed him his pad and pen.

She’s in the other room, Nick scrawled.

Harper raised her shoulders in an exaggerated shrug, hands out, palms turned up: Why?

Allie’s here for protecshun. Aunt Carol wants to make shure granddad is safe. What did you just stick in the ceiling? Before she could formulate a reply, he added, I promise if you tell me I won’t SAY A WORD. She had to smile at that. Of course he wouldn’t.

Just some notes I’m keeping, she said, which was true, even if it was leaving out a detail or two.

Notes on what?

If you don’t ask about that, she wrote, I won’t ask if you really have a stomachache.

He smacked the heel of his hand into his forehead, a gesture he must’ve picked up from television. She didn’t judge. Harper sometimes felt she spent half her life playing Julie Andrews in the movie version of her life. The problem with role models is they teach you roles.

Harper used her finger-spelling to say S-L-E-E-P.

He nodded and said, “You too, right?” Speaking in silence, hands moving precisely through the air, as if he were adjusting the gears of an invisible machine.

“I go,” she said with her own, less fluent hands. “Be soon back.”

“Be careful,” said Nick’s hands.

Allie was in the waiting room, curled on the couch. Not asleep, not reading—just lying there with the knuckles of one hand pressed to her lips. She blinked and glanced up. For a moment her eyes were unfocused and she seemed to look upon Harper without recognition.

“Nick says you’ve been stationed here.”

“Looks like. You’ve got Ben and Aunt Carol thinking someone in camp might be out to kill Granddad. I think that’s nuts—everyone knows it was that guy the Mazz—but I don’t call the shots.”

“And Ben does?”

“He’s just doing what Aunt Carol wants. And she wants Granddad safe. You can’t blame her. Someone did try to kill him. Aunt Carol wants you to stay here from now on, too. So there’s always medical staff on hand, in case he has a seizure or whatever.”

“Am I going to start eating here, too?”

Harper was joking, but Allie said, “Yeah. She was really upset when she heard you wandered off yesterday to get something to snack on and left him all alone. His heart could’ve stopped. Or someone could’ve walked in and put a pillow over his face.”

“I can’t stay here. Not full-time. As a matter of fact, I have to step out right now. John’s pretty banged up. I want to head over to his island and get a compression bandage and a brace on him.”

Harper was not carrying either item but was counting on Allie not to notice, and she didn’t.

“Can’t,” Allie said. “Even if you were allowed to leave the infirmary, it’s the middle of the day. No one goes out during the day.”

“What do you mean, even if I was allowed? Is that from Carol? Who put her in charge?”

“We did.”

“Who?”

“All of us. We voted. You weren’t there. You were sleeping. We gathered in the church and we sang for Father Storey. We sang to everyone we’ve ever lost to show us what to do. I swear I could hear them singing with us. There were only a hundred and forty people in church, but it was like a thousand people singing all at once.” Allie’s bare arms pebbled with goose bumps at the memory of it. She hugged herself. “It felt like being rescued . . . from every bad feeling you ever had. I think it was just what we needed. Afterward, we settled down, and held hands, and talked. We talked about the things we were still glad for. We said thanks. Like you do before a meal. And we made plans. That was when we voted to give Ben final authority on all security matters. And we voted to make Aunt Carol head of the chapel services and daily planning, which is what Father Storey used to do. At first she didn’t want to. She said she couldn’t take on any more work. She said she needed to look after her dad. So we took another vote and everyone voted for Carol all over again. So then she said we were making a mistake. She said she wasn’t strong like her father. That he was better than her in every way. Kinder and more thoughtful and patient. But we took a third vote and she won that one, too, unanimously. It was funny. It was so funny. Even Carol laughed. She was kind of crying-laughing.”

Harper thought of something in Harold’s diary—THE FUNGUS STIMULATES FLOCK BEHAVIOR TO PRESERVE ITS OWN WELL-BEING, THE SAME GROUP-THINK THAT MAKES A CROWD OF SPARROWS TURN ON A DIME—but she didn’t like where that thought led her and pushed it aside.

Allie said, “I don’t think I ought to let you go. The last time I was on duty in the infirmary and didn’t do my job, a kid got killed.” She gave Harper a crooked smile that had no real happiness in it.

“What are you going to do to me if I walk out? You going to tackle a pregnant woman?”

“No,” Allie said. “I’d probably just shoot you in the leg or something.”

She was smirking when she said it and Harper almost laughed. Then she saw the Winchester leaning in one corner of the room.

“Why in God’s name do you have a gun?” she cried.

“Mr. Patchett decided the Lookouts on guard should have rifles,” Allie said. “He said we should’ve passed out the guns a long time ago. If a Cremation Crew turns up, a little bit of shooting would—”

“—would get a lot more people killed, is what it would do. None of you ought to be carrying rifles. Allie, some of the Lookouts are all of fourteen years old.” Harper did not mention that Allie herself was not yet seventeen. The idea of the kids stalking around in the snow with loaded guns agitated her, made her want to give Ben Patchett a hard poke in his soft gut.

“It’s only the older kids,” Allie said, but for the first time she sounded defensive.

“I’m going,” Harper said.

“No. Don’t. Please? Let’s wait until dark and we can talk to Carol. Going out in the daytime is pretty much the most important rule in camp. It’ll be dark soon.”

“In this snow it might as well be dark already.”

“We pulled the boards up. You’d leave tracks.”

“Not for long. It’s snowing now. My tracks will fill in. Allie. Would you let anyone tell you that you couldn’t go?”

She had her there.

Allie stared into a blue dimness silted with a billion diamond flecks of flying snow. The muscles at the corners of her jaw bunched up.

“Shit,” she said, at last. “This is so stupid. I shouldn’t.”

“Thank you,” Harper said.

“You need to be back in two hours or less. If you’re not back in two hours, I’m going to feed you to the wolves.”

“If I’m not back in two hours, you ought to get Don Lewiston anyway, just to check on Father Storey’s condition, see how he’s doing.”

Allie glared at Harper. “You have no idea how fucked this is. All us Lookouts met after chapel. Ben Patchett said too many people have been putting themselves ahead of the well-being of camp, doing what they like. He said we need to make some examples out of people who can’t follow our rules. We all voted. We agreed. We made a pact.”

“Mr. Patchett can worry about the well-being of the camp,” Harper said. “I need to worry about the well-being of my patients. If he finds out, you tell him you tried to make me stay and you couldn’t stop me. But he’s not going to find out, because I’ll be back before you know it.”

“Go if you’re going to go, then. Before I change my mind.”

Harper had her hand on the latch when Allie spoke again.

“I’m glad he likes you,” Allie said. “John is the loneliest person I know.”

She glanced back, but Allie wasn’t looking at her anymore. She was flopped on her side, curling up on the couch once more.

Harper thought the gentle blessings of children were often as unprovoked, unexpected, and uncalled for as their cruelties. Camp Wyndham that winter was neither Hogwarts nor the island in Lord of the Flies, after all, but a place of wandering, damaged orphans, kids who were willing to forgo eating lunch so there was enough food for others.

“I’ll be back soon,” Harper said, and when she said it, she believed it.

But she did not return until long, long after dark fell, and by then everything in camp had changed again.