کتاب 09-19

19

Renée wedged a crowbar under one corner of the windshield and pried it free. It flopped into the road all in one piece, a jingling blanket of blue safety glass with a thousand fissures in it, impossibly holding together. Harper and Renée squeezed into the cab together and stood below John, who hung suspended above them, strapped in by his seat belt. A drop of blood fell into Harper’s right eye, and for a moment she was seeing the world through red-stained glass.

The two of them did their best to get him down to the ground without jostling him, but when his right foot struck the blacktop, his eyes flew open and he cried out in a thin voice. They dragged him from the wreck of the truck. Renée went to get something to put under his head and came back with the Portable Mother, which served well enough as a pillow.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh, my leg. It’s bad, isn’t it? I can’t look.”

Harper moved her hands over his thigh, feeling the break in his femur through the thick rubber of his fireman pants. She didn’t think it had punched through the skin and was certain it hadn’t nicked a major artery. If it had, he wouldn’t be asking her about his leg. He’d be unconscious from blood loss, or dead.

“I can deal with it. I’ll have to set it and splint it, and without painkillers, that’s going to hurt.” She probed his chest. Once he gasped and shut his eyes and pressed his head hard back into the carpetbag beneath it. “I’m more worried about the ribs. They’re broken again. I’ll have to scratch around, see what I have to set your leg.” She felt a heat at her back and knew who was standing behind her. “There’s someone here to keep you company while I’m rummaging around.”

She kissed him on the cheek, rose, and stepped aside.

Sarah stood blazing over him. She lowered herself to one knee and looked into his face, and Harper thought she was smiling. It was hard to tell. Her face was little more than rags of flame. When Sarah had first appeared she had been a shroud of white fire with a core of almost blinding heat at her very center. Now, though, her dominant hue was a dull, deep red, and she had diminished to childlike proportions, was about the size of Nick.

“Oh. Sarah. Oh, look at you,” John said. “Just hold on. We’ll collect up some wood. We’ll keep you going.” He lifted his hands, trying to say it in gestures.

She shook her head. Harper was sure now she was smiling. The lady of fire lifted her chin, the breeze gently blowing the last tatters of her hair, and she seemed to stare right into Harper—to stare at her in the dreamy way Harper herself had often stared into moving flames. At the last, Harper thought Sarah winked at her.

When she went out, it happened all at once. The girl of flame collapsed into herself in a rattling drizzle of cinders. A thousand green sparks whirled up into the afternoon. Harper raised one hand to protect her eyes and was stung all over—gently stung—as they rained into her, touching her bare arms and brow and neck and cheeks. She flinched, but the light prickling was gone in a moment. She wiped at her cheeks and came away with a palm of smeared ash.

Harper rubbed it between thumb and finger, watching the pale grime drift off on the light breeze, thinking of what they said at funerals, the bit about ashes to ashes, which went along with something about the certainty of resurrection.