کتاب 07-07

7

But in the end Nick didn’t want to go.

When the hour came, he was sitting in the worn-out chair beside Father Storey’s cot, reading a comic book: a man made of flame did battle with an enormous yellow-and-orange robot that resembled a walking Freightliner, headlights for eyes and shovels for hands. He said he wanted to stay with Tom.

“What if he wakes up and we’re gone?” Nick asked her in sign. “There ought to be someone here if he opens his eyes.”

“Michael will be here,” Harper said.

Nick shook his head, his face solemn. “That’s not the same.” Then he added, “Grandfather’s been moving a lot. He could wake up anytime.”

It was true. Sometimes Tom Storey took a deep breath and heaved a great, satisfied-sounding sigh . . . or he would produce a sudden humming noise, as if he had just had a quite surprising thought. Other times his right hand would drift up to rub his breastbone for a moment or two before falling back to his side. What Harper liked best was the way, sometimes, Tom would lift one finger to his lips, in the shh gesture, and smile. It was an expression that made Harper think of one child inviting another to share a hiding place during a game of hide-and-seek. Tom had been in his hiding place for months but maybe was almost ready to reveal himself.

Harper nodded, smoothed down Nick’s hair, and left him to the company of his comic book and the silent old man. Michael was in the waiting room . . . and Don Lewiston was with him, had turned up to escort Harper down to the water. Don wore a plaid winter coat and a cap with earflaps, and his nose was pink from the cold. He stood in the half-open door. Michael was on his feet, too, didn’t seem able to sit down, but instead paced the waiting area, twisting a Ranger Rick in his hands. The magazine was rolled into a tight, crooked tube.

“Nick’s not coming,” Harper said. “Maybe it’s just as well. If Ben Patchett comes by on a spot inspection, he won’t think anything of it if you tell him I’m napping. Us pregnant ladies sleep whenever they can. But if he doesn’t see any sign of me or Nick, that’s going to make him suspicious.” When she mentioned the possibility of a spot inspection, Michael seemed to visibly sicken, so much color leaving his face that even his lips looked gray. She wondered if he was having second thoughts, now that the moment had come. She asked, “How we doing?”

She was asking about Michael’s state of mind, but Don answered instead as if she had inquired about the evening’s acts of subterfuge. “The others are already on their way to the island. I met Allie and Renée in the woods with the prisoners. Chuck Cargill is shut into the meat locker. He hollered his head off and kicked the door a bunch of times, but Renée says after you get halfway across the basement, it just blends with the noise from upstairs in the cafeteria.”

“Go if you’re going,” Michael said. “I’ve got things covered here. You don’t have to worry, Ms. Willowes, and you don’t have to rush. I can cover for you until the shift change, just before the sun comes up. But those others don’t have much time. If the prisoners aren’t back across the water in forty-five minutes, we’re all cooked.”

Harper stepped toward Michael and put her hands on his, to make him stop twisting his Ranger Rick. She leaned in and kissed his cold, dry brow.

“You are very brave, Michael,” Harper said. “You are one of the bravest people I know. Thank you.”

Some of the tension went out of his shoulders. “Don’t overrate me, ma’am. I don’t see I have a lot of choice. If you love someone, you have to do what you can to keep ’em safe. I wouldn’t want to look back later and think I could’ve been of use, I could’ve helped, but I was too scared.”

Harper cupped his pink cheek. Michael couldn’t meet her eyes. “You ever tell Allie this? That you love her?”

He shuffled his feet. “Not in so many words, ma’am.” He risked a glance into Harper’s face. “You aren’t going to say anything to her, are you? I’d appreciate it if you’d kind of keep what I said between you and me.”

“Of course I won’t say anything,” Harper said. “But don’t leave it too long, Mike. These days, I’m not sure it’s ever a good idea to leave anything important for tomorrow.”

Don held the door for her and she stepped out into the dark and sharp, stinging cold. Every star stood out with a bitter clarity, a needle-tip brightness. Pine boards still zigzagged between buildings, providing walkways, but the snow was gone, and now the planks crossed a humped wasteland of mud.

They stepped off the boards to make their way down the hill, through the trees. There was no chance of leaving tracks. At that arctic hour, the earth was frozen solid, a billion flecks of opalescent ice gleaming in the dirt. Don Lewiston offered her his arm and she took it, and they made their way like an old married couple over the frozen ground.

Halfway to the beach, they paused. A girl was singing, from the steeple of the church, her voice sweet and sure. Harper thought it might be one of the Neighbors twins. They both had sung a cappella in high school. Her song carried on the cold, clear air, and the melody was so innocent and sweet it raised gooseflesh on Harper’s arms. It was an early Taylor Swift tune, a bit of fluff about Romeo and Juliet . . . which reminded Harper of another, older song about those unhappy, luckless lovers.

“There are a lot of good people in this camp,” Harper said to Don. “Maybe they’ve gone along with some bad ideas, but only because they’re scared.”

Don narrowed his eyes, squinted toward the steeple. “She has a lovely voice, sure. I could listen to that all night. But I wonder if you’d still think so well of this camp if you had heard everyone singin’ together in chapel a couple hours ago. Or at least, it was singin’ when they started out. But after a while everyone was just hummin’, this one long idiot note. You feel like you’re inside of the world’s biggest beehive and everyone around you looks like they’re burnin’ from the inside. Their eyes just fackin’ . . . blaze. They don’t smoke, but they throw heat, so much heat you could just about pass out from it. Sometimes they all get hummin’ so loud I feel like my skull is vibratin’ and I just about have to stick a fist in my mouth to keep from screamin’.”

They resumed walking, the stones and dirt crunching under their feet.

“And you can’t join in? You don’t shine with them?”

“Once or twice. But it ain’t treated me right. It’s not how hard it hits you—though when I come up out of it, my skull is always ringin’ so fackin’ hard it’s like I slammed down a quart of Jack. The worst part isn’t forgettin’ who I am, either. That’s bad, though . . . but thinking I might be Carol is worse. It’s like your own thoughts are a faraway radio station, and Carol’s station is closer, broadcasting her music right over yours. Hers gets louder and clearer and yours gets fainter and thinner. You start thinkin’ Father Storey is your own dear dad lyin’ in the infirmary with his head mashed in, and the idea that whoever done it hasn’t been punished will make you so sick and angry you feel like you’re boilin’. You’ll wonder if someone is goin’ to come bash your head in next, if there are secret forces and whatnot workin’ against you. What you feel in your heart is that if you have to die, you want to die singin’, with the whole camp around you. Everyone holdin’ hands. You almost hope it will happen . . . that a Cremation Crew will come. ’Cause it’d be a relief to get it over with, and you aren’t scared of the end, because you’ll be burnin’ up with all the people you love right close beside you.”

Harper shuddered and leaned into Don for warmth.

They made their way out onto the dock and Don helped Harper into the rowboat. She was glad to have his hand clutching her arm and she stepped down from the dock. She had made the trip across the water often enough over the last few months, but now, for the first time, she felt unsteady on her legs and uncertain of her own balance.

In a few deep, steady strokes, they had left the beach behind. Don sat on the thwart between the oars, leaning into each pull and rocking back, his whole body extending into a straight line. He was old, but like beef jerky: knotty and tough.

Would the eye in the steeple (which sees all the people) observe them now? Don had mentioned to Ben that he might take the boat out to fish tonight. Hopefully their movements on the water this evening would be accepted as Don Lewiston paddling around, looking for flounder . . . if they were spotted at all.

Without any prompting, Don seemed to pick up where he had left off a few minutes before.

“It’s bad, having a head full of Carol. It’s bad not knowin’ my own name, not knowin’ my mother’s name. But I’ll tell you. A month back, we all had a big hard sing, like we do. And then Carol gave a kind of sermon, about how there is no history before we got Dragonscale. That a new history started for each of us when we got sick. That the only life that matters is the life we have now, together, as a community, not the life we had before. And then we sang again and we all lit up—even me—and we hummed real hard, and afterward we staggered out of there like drunk sailors on New Year’s Eve. And I forgot”—his breath hitched as he leaned forward to pull against the oars once more—“I forgot my mate, Bill Ellroy, what fished with me for thirty years. He was snatched right out of my head. Not just for hours. For days. I had the best years of my life out on the boat with Billy. It’s hard to tell you how good they were. We’d fish three weeks hard, come back and unload our catch in Portsmouth, then take the boat out to the Harbor Islands, drop anchor, and drink beer. I’d hate goin’ home. I liked every minute of bein’ with Billy. I liked who I was when I was by his side.” He had stopped rowing for a moment. The boat rocked in the swell. “Bein’ with him was like havin’ the whole ocean under you. We didn’t talk much, you know. We didn’t need to. You don’t talk to an ocean and it don’t talk back. You just . . . let it carry you.” He began to stroke the oars again. “Well. When I suddenly realized I had lost him for a while—that he had been wiped out—that was when I decided I had enough of this place. No one gets to take Bill Ellroy from me. Nobody. Not for no reason. No one gets to take our friendship. There was a thief workin’ in this camp last fall, and if Carol had ever caught her, she would’ve fed her piece by bloody piece to wild dogs. I’ll tell you what, though. The things that are stolen from us every night, when we all sing together, those are a lot more important than most of what the thief took. And we know who’s takin’ ’em, and instead of lockin’ her up, we elected her head of camp.”

He fell silent. He had taken the extra precaution of rowing them around the northern tip of the island, to the far side of the rock, so he could beach the rowboat where it couldn’t be seen from shore by the casual observer. Harper spied two canoes already pulled up on the gravel. Beyond, set back from the water, was the thirty-three-foot cruising sloop, sitting in its steel carriage and covered by its taut white tarp.

“What do you think happened to the thief, anyway?” Harper asked. “I don’t think there’s been a theft all winter.”

“Maybe she ran out of things to steal,” Don said. “Or maybe she just finally got what she wanted.”

Harper watched Don lean and pull, lean and pull, and thought the power of the Bright couldn’t compete with being close to someone you loved with all your heart. One took away; the other gave you access to your best, happiest self. I liked who I was when I was by his side, Don Lewiston said, and Harper wondered if there had ever been anyone in her life who made her feel that way about herself, and at that moment the boat ground onto the sand with a wet crunch, and Don said, “Let’s go see the Fireman, huh?”