کتاب 07-22

22

He was aghast at the idea that she would row them into shore alone.

“I’ll sit on the left,” he said. “It doesn’t hurt to use my left arm. You sit on the right. We’ll row together.”

“It’ll never work. The two of us will never be in sync. We’ll just go around and around in circles together.”

“Oh, it won’t be so bad. We’ve been doing that for months.”

She glared at him, thought he was having a laugh at her, but then he was bending to the bow of the boat, shoving it into the water, and she had to get beside him to help. A woman eight months pregnant and a man recovering from a chest full of busted ribs. To think Carol was afraid of either of them.

When they were out in the shallows she fell in over the side and then reached across the gunwale to take his hands and pull him in after her. His fireman boots squealed on the hull, grabbing for traction, and he thumped his lousy wrist, and his face went white. He squirmed onto the thwart beside her and she pretended she didn’t see him thumbing tears out of his eyes. She reached over and gently straightened his helmet.

They rowed, leaning forward and back, slowly and carefully, shoulders touching. The boat creaked and slid through the water in the night.

“Tell me about Harold Cross,” the Fireman said.

He listened with head inclined while she went through it again. When she was done, he said, “Harold didn’t have many friends in this camp, but I agree—when word gets out about what Carol did, calling the Cremation Crew on him and all, well. That’ll be the end for her. Sending her away with you is a great act of mercy, really. It’s easy to imagine it could be much worse.”

“She’ll come with me,” Harper said. “And you’ll stay here.”

“Yes. I’ll have to. Father Storey will be too weak to look after camp alone. I expect that’s why I’m being summoned to his bedside. I’m being enlisted.” His mouth twisted in a sour frown.

“You wouldn’t leave anyway. You have to tend your private fire.”

“No one else would understand.”

“You should let her go out, and come away with me.” Harper found she could not look at him when she said this. She had to turn her face toward the ocean. The wind was spooning the foam off the tops of the waves and she could pretend the water on her face was spray. “It isn’t safe here. It hasn’t been safe for a long time. They’re going to find Camp Wyndham. The Marlboro Man and my husband, or men like them. Sooner or later.” She thought of the dreams, of Nelson Heinrich in a bloodstained candy-cane-print sweater, grinning out of a skinless face, and shuddered.

She didn’t believe in a fixed future, didn’t believe in precognition. Didn’t even believe in the Marlboro Man’s psychic radio station, although it seemed like awfully good luck, him turning up on the exact day she returned home. But she believed in the subconscious and she believed in paying attention when it started waving red flags. She had left Nelson alive—she was almost sure of it now—and that was bad news for all of them. And even if Nelson never recovered to lead the Seacoast Incinerators to camp, then it would be something else. You could hide a small village only for so long.

They drifted, had stopped rowing. After a moment, at some silent, unspoken signal between them, they took up the oars and began to move again.

“I’ll be taking Nick and Allie with me,” she told him. “No matter how things shake out with Carol. I love that little boy. I’m going to take him someplace safe—safer than here.”

“Good.”

“Sarah would want you to come with them, you know. She’d want you to look after them.”

“You know I can’t. The old man is going to need my help around here.”

“Then come as soon as he’s better.”

“We’ll see,” he said, in a way that meant no.

“John. Her life is over. Yours is not.”

“Her life isn’t—”

“It is. She told you so herself. You’ve been keeping her a prisoner. Trapped in a rusted can. You aren’t any different than Carol, keeping me locked up in the infirmary all winter.”

He turned on her suddenly, his face rippling with pain. “What pestilent, flyblown bullshit. I am nothing like—and how could Sarah tell me anything? She’s a creature of flame. She can’t tell me what she wants or feels. She lost her power of speech when she lost her body.”

“No she didn’t. I don’t know what’s worse, you lying to me or you lying to yourself. I heard you screaming at her. All the way back in the fall. She’s already asked you to let her go out.”

“And how—”

“Sign language. She’s at least as fluent as you.”

They had both stopped rowing, although the dock was in sight.

John Rookwood was trembling. “You little spy. Listening in on my—”

“Spare me your paranoid insinuations. You were drunk at the time. I could hear it in your voice. Anyone could’ve heard it in your voice, from half a mile off, the way you were shouting.”

Some terrible struggle was taking place in the muscles beneath his face. He kept tightening and untightening his jaw, and breathing strangely.

“It’s time to let that fire go out, John. Time to leave your island behind. Allie and Nick are still in this world and they need you. I do, too. I can never be her—I can never be what she meant to you—but I can still try to be worth your time.”

“Shh,” he said, looking away and blinking at his tears. “That’s an awful thing to say. Don’t you dare put yourself down. You think I don’t love you to pieces, Nurse Willowes? You and your ridiculous, pregnant belly and weird yen for Julie Andrews? I just hate—hate—the disloyalty of it. The sickening disloyalty of—of—”

“Being alive when she isn’t,” Harper said. “Of going on.”

“Yes. Exactly,” he said and lowered his chin to his chest. Tears dripped off the end of his nose. “Falling in love: what a horrible thing. For what it’s worth, I tried to have as little to do with you as possible. To see you as little as possible. Not just because I didn’t want to fall in love. I didn’t want you to fall in love, either. I was aware just how difficult it might be for you to resist my abundant charms.”

“You do grow on a girl,” Harper said. “Kind of like the spore.”