کتاب 09-08

8

The mourners crossed the wild grass of the cemetery beneath a star-flooded sky. The Fireman led them, one hand burning blue. Nick walked in the middle, trailing green fire from his fingers. Harper brought up the rear, her own hand a candelabra of gold flame.

The Fireman had converted the shopping cart to a makeshift bier. He had placed two planks across the length of it and secured them with bungee cords. The dead man had been set on top in the tarp that served as his shroud. Renée pushed it along and Allie followed, carrying the tape deck, the music already playing, turned low.

Allie looked good, in her top hat and a black duster that swooshed about her ankles. Nick had ultimately passed on the opera gloves, but he wore a canary yellow tuxedo jacket with tails and his mother’s locket. Somewhere the Fireman had come up with an enormous black Patriots hoodie for Harper, an XXXXL. For an enormously pregnant woman, it was the best that could be managed for proper mourning weeds. Renée crossed the graveyard in a midnight blue velvet dress, slit high enough to show the dimples in her knees. She had very sleek, very nice legs. Harper hoped Gilbert had properly appreciated them.

Who knew where the Fireman had got what he was wearing: a kilt that showed his bony, hairy legs, a black beret, and a short black suit jacket. Harper didn’t believe he was making fun of the occasion. She had an idea this represented his most heartfelt effort to look respectable.

The Fireman pushed open the door of O’Brian’s tomb with his burning hand. The flame lit a tidy marble cube, the shadows hovering, seeming to sway to the melody. He had found a copy of Dire Straits’ Making Movies, and they were listening to “Romeo and Juliet.” It sounded good, mixed with cricket-song.

He extinguished his right hand before he walked the shopping cart in. Renée followed, and on the count of three they moved the shroud off the cart and onto one of the stone caskets. Nick lit candles with his fingertip. Allie joined with the tape recorder, but Harper remained just outside, her own hand burning without any sensation of heat at all. It comforted her. That bright blaze seemed to her, that evening, to be her own soul made visible.

The song echoed in the little stone cabinet and in a soft voice, Harper began to sing along. The Fireman joined her, and as he began to sing, he reached back to take one of Renée’s hands. Nick took another. The little boy reached for his sister and his sister reached for Harper, joining them in a swaying human chain. Renée lowered her head and shut her eyes, perhaps to cry, perhaps to pray. Only when she looked up at last her irises were threaded with light. The coils of Dragonscale around her bare arms lit a deep shade of plum, traveling down to her wrists. The glow leapt from her hand to the Fireman’s and to Nick’s. Harper felt her own ’scale respond, a rush of light and warmth.

They glowed in the darkness, all of them: pale shining wisps with rings of light where their eyes belonged, as if they were the dead—ghosts risen from their graves—not Gilbert Cline. Harper felt their grief as a slow current of cold water, and herself as a leaf revolving upon it.

As she moved to the music she felt her own self slip away, her own particular Harper-ness. Her identity wouldn’t float and was swallowed by the stream flowing through all of them. She was no longer Harper. She was Renée, recollecting Gil’s sandpapery cheek against her neck and the sawdust smell of his hair. She recalled the first time Gil had kissed her in a corner of the basement, one hand firmly against the small of her back, as if she had experienced it firsthand. Cobwebs on the bare dead lightbulb overhead. Smell of dust and old brick, the pressure of his dry lips on hers. She was adrift on Renée’s memories, rushing along over the surface of them, carried over a drop and into—

—a memory of Carol holding her and rocking her the night her mother died. Carol had held her and rocked her back and forth and been wise enough to say nothing, to offer not a single false word of comfort. Carol was crying, too, and their tears fell together and Harper could taste them right now, standing in the tomb, could taste what Allie had tasted the night Sarah Storey burned. Her perceptions were a leaf, turning rapidly now, spilling again over another fall into—

—a remembrance of being thrown. Gail Neighbors had grabbed her by the ankles and Gillian had held her wrists, and they swung her back and forth like a hammock and chucked her into a giddy silence and she fell soundlessly onto a cot, her lungs convulsing with laughter she couldn’t hear. In the awesome quiet of Nick’s deafworld, colors seemed to shout. How he had loved the way they tossed him again and again, how he had loved their happiness, and how he missed them and wished he could have them back. But Harper’s consciousness was rushing on, plunging over the highest fall yet, into a grief so deep it was almost impossible to see to the bottom of it, cascading into—

—John’s head and what thoughts he kept there of Sarah. Harper felt Sarah sitting in her lap, and her nose was in Sarah’s hair, savoring the delicate sugar-cookie smell of her. She was working on a crossword, nibbling on her ballpoint pen in thought, and what grace, what confidence it required to do the puzzle in pen! A perfect square of sun was on the curve of her slender brown shoulder. Harper had never been so acutely aware of light and stillness without being high on mushrooms. She thought, with a kind of savage joy, of her father, that brilliant, literary, distant, resentful drunk. I get to be happy, Harper thought, in an English accent, and that means I beat you. That means I won. Sarah pressed herself back against Harper’s bony chest. Five-letter word for abiding joy, she asked, and Harper touched her hair, pushing a strand of it behind her pink, delicate ear, and whispered today. To have had such contentment and lost it was like a burn that never healed. To think of her was like picking up a hot brand, was being seared afresh.

And on at last into her own smooth pool of hurt, of homesickness for all the good things that had once been hers and were gone now: coffee in Starbucks while the cold drizzle hit the windows, vacuuming in her underwear and singing along to Bruce Springsteen, letting her gaze wander over the spines of books in a little bookstore with high shelves, eating a cold apple in the front yard and raking, hallways full of babbling laughing scuffling children at school, Coca-Cola in a glass bottle. So much of what was best in life went unnoticed in the moments you had it.

The fading current turned her little leaf around and around and slid her away from all memory, away from pain, and on finally to a firm, sandy shore. The cassette player clicked off. The song was over.