The Fireman (10 page)

“I would never,” she said to her brother. “You have to take care of each other. What Lindy said is just right. You’re doing the right thing.”

“Oh, Harp,” Connor said. He inhaled deeply, a wet, choked breath, and said, “Here comes the kid.”

There followed a moment of silence as he passed the phone over. Perhaps because it was so quiet, Harper caught a noise in the street, the gravelly rumble and crash of a big truck moving along the road. She was unused to hearing traffic after dark, these days. There was a curfew.

Connor Junior said, “Hi, Harper,” bringing her thoughts back to the world on the other end of the line.

“Hi, Connor Junior.”

“Daddy is crying. He says he hit his head on sumpin’.”

“You have to give him a kiss and make it better.”

“Okay. Are you crying? Why are you crying, too? Did you hit
your
head?”

“Yes.”

“Everyone is hitting their head!”

“It’s that kind of night.”

Something thumped. Connor Junior cried, “I just hit
my
head!”

“Don’t do that,” Harper said.

Harper noticed, in a distracted, half-conscious way, that the big truck she had heard earlier was still out in the street, still rumbling.

The thump thumped again.

“I hit my head again!” Connor Junior said happily. “We all hit our heads!”

“No more,” Harper said. “You’ll give yourself a headache.”

“I did give myself a headache,” he announced with great cheer.

She kissed the phone with a loud wet smack. “I kissed the phone. Did you feel it?”

“Uh-huh! I did. Thank you. I feel better already.”

“Good,” she said.

The knocker slammed on the front door. Harper came up off the couch, as startled as if she had heard a shot in the street.

“Did you just thump your head again?” Connor asked. “I heard you thump it real hard!”

Harper took a step toward the front hall. The thought was in her that she was walking in the wrong direction—she ought to be headed for the bedroom to get her carpetbag. She couldn’t think of a single person who might be at the door this time of the evening that she would want to see.

“Do
you
want a kiss to make it better?” Connor said.

“Sure. A kiss to make it better and a kiss good night,” she said.

She heard a damp smooch, and then, in a soft, almost shy tone, Connor said, “There. That should do it.”

“It did.”

“I have to go now. I got to brush my teeth. Then I get my story.”

“Go have your story, Connor Junior,” she said. “Good night.”

Out in the hall she heard a sound she didn’t recognize: a rattling-rasping click-and-clack. A muted bang. She waited for Connor to say good night back to her, but he never did, and at last it came to her that there was something different about the silence on the other end of the line. When she lowered her phone she discovered it was dead, had lost the last of its charge. It was just a paperweight now.

The raspy
click-clack-bang
came once more.

Harper stepped into the front hall but held up, two yards from the door, listening to the stillness.

“Hello?” she asked.

The door opened four inches before the chain caught it with another loud rattly bang. Jakob peered through the open space into the hallway.

“Harper,” he said. “Hey, wanna let me in? I want to talk.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

....................................

13

She stood just beyond the entrance to the den, looking down the hall at the piece of Jakob she could see through the gap between door and frame. He had a four-day growth on his long, hollow-eyed face. They had talked, the way people do, about who would play them in the movie version of their lives (why anyone would want to make a movie about an elementary school nurse and a man who answered phones for the Public Works Department was another question). She had thought Jason Patric, or maybe young Johnny Depp for him, someone dark and wiry who looked like he could do a handstand and who might occasionally write poetry. Right now he looked like Jason Patric or Johnny Depp in a movie about heroin addiction. His face was damp with sweat, and his eyes glittered with a fever brightness. (Casting Harper had been easier—Julie Andrews, obviously, Julie Andrews at twenty-eight, not because they looked anything alike, but because Harper wouldn’t consider anyone else for the part. If they couldn’t get Julie Andrews at twenty-eight, then they’d just have to call the movie off.)

He had not come home on his bike. Beyond him, idling alongside the curb, was one of the town trucks, a pumpkin-colored 2.5-ton Freightliner with a big snow-wing plow on the front, battered and blackened from hard use. They had kept the plows running day and night, clearing wreckage out of the roads. There was always a car burning somewhere that had to be moved.

She started down the hallway, hugging herself. The air coming through the open slot of the door was cool and smelled of fall, that spicy-sweet odor of apples and crushed autumn leaves and distant smoke. Always smoke.

“You should’ve called,” she said. “I didn’t know you were coming over. I was going to sleep soon. I probably wouldn’t have heard you.”

“I would’ve got in somehow. Kicked a window in.”

“I’m glad you didn’t. There’s no oil in the boiler. It’s hard enough keeping this house warm without windows bashed in. It’s getting cold out there.”

“You aren’t kidding. Want to let me in?”

She didn’t much care to answer that question, not even to herself.

Harper wished he had come during the day. She could readily imagine unthreading the chain for him on a bright, sunny afternoon. But with the October darkness behind him, and the October chill coming through the gap between door and frame, it was impossible not to think about the last time they’d talked, and how he had made coming home sound like a threat.

She pushed out a deep breath and said, “How are you?”

“Better. A lot better, Harp. I’m sorry I freaked you out.” He gave her a hangdog look from beneath his long, almost girlish eyelashes.

“What about the spore? You were worried you were infected. Have you seen any other marks on you?”

“No. Nope. I panicked. I lost it. No excuses. I’m all right—except for an incurable case of shame. You’ve got the Dragonscale, but I’m the one who has been acting like—like—” He looked away, back toward his Freightliner, then said, “
Shit
. Should I go? Come back tomorrow? I just—wanted to talk about stuff. I was overcome with a sudden late-night desire to convince my wife I’m not a hysterical piece of shit.”

“I want to talk, too. I think we need to.”

“Right?” he said. “About the baby? If we’re going to do this thing—if we’re going to have this kid—we’re going to need a plan. Next March is a long way off. You want to unlock this gun, though? I’m cold.”

“Hang on,” she said. She pushed the door shut and put her hand on the chain. She slid it down the slot, to the open hole, then caught herself, playing back what he had just said. She had misheard him, she thought. Her ears had played a trick on her.

“Jakob,” she said, holding the chain in place. “Did you say something about a gun?”

“What? No.
No.
I don’t—would you let me in? I’m freezing my narrow little ass off out here.”

She looked through the peephole. He stood very close to it, so she could only see his right ear, part of his face.

“Jakob,” she said. “You’re scaring me a little. Will you show me your hands?”

“Okay. I think you’re the one being paranoid now, but okay. Now watch. Here are my hands.” He took a step back from the door and held out his hands to either side of his body.

His left foot shot up and into the door. The chain flew loose. The door smashed her in the face and drove her stumbling back and then down onto her ass.

His right hand came up with the gun, a small revolver, pulling it from one deep pocket of his track pants. He did not point it at her. He stepped in through the door and elbowed it shut behind him.

“I want things to be nice,” he said. He held his free hand up, palm out, in a placating gesture.

She got up on all fours and started to scramble away, trying to stand.

“Stop,” he said.

She didn’t stop. She thought she could get around the corner and into the kitchen, make it down the stairs to the basement and out the back door. When she stood, though, he kicked the back of her left leg, behind the knee, and she went down again.

“Babygirl, stop,” he said. “Don’t.”

She rolled onto her side. He stood over her with the gun, giving her a perplexed look.

“Stop,”
he repeated. “I don’t want it to be like this. I want things to be like we talked about. I want things to be nice.”

She began to crawl again. When he took a step toward her, she grabbed at the side table, the one with the driftwood lamp on it, and twisted it, trying to throw it at him. He batted it aside, hardly glanced at it, his gaze fixed on her.

“Please,”
he said. “I don’t want to hurt you. The thought makes me sick.”

He reached out with his left hand, offering to help her up. When she didn’t take it, he bent forward and grabbed her upper arm and dragged her to her feet. She struggled to pull her arm loose but he yanked her off balance so she fell against him, into his chest. Then he wrapped her in an embrace, holding her against him.

“Please,” he said, rocking back and forth with her. “Please. I know you’re scared. I’m scared, too. We have a right to be scared. We’ve both got this thing and we’re dying.” The gun was there, against the small of her back. Her shirt was hiked up and she could feel cold metal against her spine. “I want it to be like we talked about. I want it to be nice. I want it to be good and easy. I don’t want to go out desperate and scared and crying, and I don’t want you to die that way, either. I adore you too much for that.”

“Don’t touch me,” she said. “We don’t know if you’re sick. I don’t want to pass it to you.”

“
I
know it. I
know
I have it. I know I’m going to die. We both are. It’s just a matter of how.”

He loosened his grip on her. He was kissing her—sweetly, devoutly. He kissed her hair. He kissed her forehead. When she shut her eyes, he kissed her eyelids, each one, and she shivered.

“You shouldn’t kiss me,” she whispered.

“How am I supposed to keep from kissing you? It was the sweetest thing I ever had.”

She opened her eyes and looked into his face. “Jakob. I can feel you’re hot, but I don’t see any marks on you. How can you be sure you’re infected?”

He shook his head. “My hip. It started yesterday and it’s got worse and worse. My whole hip is on fire.”

Jakob had his right arm loosely around her waist, the gun grazing her spine. He reached up with his other hand and drew his knuckles along her cheek in a gentle, smoothing gesture. She shivered helplessly.

“Let’s go sit down. Let’s have it like we talked about. Let’s have it nice, just like we both wanted.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

....................................

14

He steered her into the den, where, half a year before, they had sat together drinking white wine and watching people jump from the top of the Space Needle. He gripped her upper arm like he was preparing to disjoint it, twist it loose from her body the way a person might wrench a drumstick off a roast chicken. Then he seemed to realize he was hurting her and he let go and slipped his palm—gently, almost tenderly—along her biceps.

The shadows in the room shifted this way and that in the red candlelight.

“Let’s sit,” said the shadow beside her, one among the many. “Let’s talk.”

Jakob sank into his favorite chair, the Great Egg of Jakob . . . a chair made of wicker with an egg-shaped frame and a hole in the side, a cushion nestled within. He was a small man and he could cross his legs Indian-style and still fit himself entirely within the wicker teardrop. He put the gun in his lap.

She perched on the edge of the coffee table to face him. “I want to look at your hip. I want to see the ’scale.”

“You want to tell me I don’t have it, but I know I have it.”

“Will you show me your hip?”

He paused, then stretched one leg out through the egg, and rolled a little onto his side. Jakob pushed down the elastic waistband of his track pants, to show her the hollow of his right hip, which was a bloody, abraded mess. The flesh was yellowish-black beneath a cross-hatching of deep scratches. It appalled her to look at it.

“Oh, Jakob. What did you do? I told you, if you find a mark on you, leave it alone.”

“I can’t stand to look at it. I can’t stand to have it on me. I don’t know how you can bear it. I get a little nuts. I tried scraping it off with a razor.” He made a choked, ragged noise that could not quite pass for laughter.

Harper narrowed her eyes, looking it over, “The ’scale calcifies into bright flecks. I don’t see any flecks.”

“It’s yellow. All around the edges.”

“That’s bruise. That’s just bruise. Jakob . . . is this the only mark on you?”

“On the inside of my knee. And an elbow. Don’t ask to see them. I’m not here for a medical exam.” He turned to sit properly and allowed the waistband of his track pants to snap back into place.

“Are they all like that?”

“I scratched them up the same. I got hysterical. I’m ashamed of that now, but it’s true.”

“I don’t think that’s Dragonscale. I’ve seen a lot of it, I should know. And Jakob: you’ve been out of this house six weeks. Almost seven. If you don’t have it yet, that probably means—”

“It means you’ll say anything to stop what happens next. I knew you’d try and tell me I wasn’t sick. I could’ve scripted this entire conversation. You think I don’t know what a burn feels like? It hurts all the time.”

“It’s infected, Jakob, but not with the
trychophyton
. It’s infected because you clawed yourself up and it hasn’t been treated or dressed. Jakob. Please. You’re healthy. You should leave. You should go right now.”

“Stop it. Stop bargaining and stop lying. I don’t want to hate you right now, but every time you tell me another lie, to try and save yourself, I just want to shut you up.”

“When was the last time you ate?”

“I don’t know how you can even talk about food. Maybe I should just do it right now. This is awful. This isn’t like we talked about. We talked about making love and having music and reading our favorite poems to each other. We talked about making it nice, a little party for two. But you’re just scared, and if I didn’t have this gun you’d run away. You’d run and let me die by myself. Without a shred of guilt about what you did to me. About passing it to me. That’s the real reason you keep telling me I’m okay, I think. You’re not just lying to me. You’re lying to yourself. You can’t face it. What you did.”

His voice was serene, without the slightest trace of the hysteria she had heard when they talked on the phone. His gaze was serene, too. He watched her with the sort of glassy calm Harper associated with the mentally ill, people who sat on park benches chatting gaily with invisible friends.

His newfound calm did not entirely surprise her. Terror was a fire that held you trapped in the top floor of a burning building; the only way to escape it was to jump. He had been building himself up to this last leap for weeks. She had heard it in his voice, every time they talked on the phone, even if she didn’t recognize it at the time. He had made his choice at last and it had brought him the peace he was looking for. He was ready to go out the window; he wanted only to be holding her hand on the way down.

What did surprise her was her
own
calm. She wondered at it. In the days before the Earth began to burn, she had carried anxiety with her to work every morning and brought it home with her every night; a nameless, inconsiderate companion that had a habit of poking her in the ribs whenever she was trying to relax. And yet in those days there was nothing really to be anxious about. Her head would spin at the thought of defaulting on her student loans, of getting into another yelling match with her neighbor about his dog’s habit of tearing open garbage and spreading it all over her lawn. And now she had a baby in her, and sickness crawling on her skin, and Jakob was crazy, sitting there watching her with his gun, and there was only this quiet readiness, which she irrationally believed had been waiting for her all her life.

At the end, I get to be the person I always wanted to be,
she thought.

“Is that really so terrible?” she asked. “Is it really so awful that I wanted to believe you didn’t have it? I wanted you and the baby to make it. I wanted that more than I ever wanted anything, Jake.”

Something seemed to dim in his eyes. His shoulders drooped.

“Well, that was stupid. No one is going to make it. The whole world is toast. Literally. The planet is going to be a cinder by the time we’re done with it. Everyone is going to die. This is the last generation. I think we always knew that. Even before Dragonscale. We knew we were going to choke on our pollution and run out of food and air and all the rest of it.”

He could not resist lecturing her, even in the last minutes of her life, and it came to her then that she hadn’t been in love with him for years. He was a tiresome know-it-all. This was followed by a second, startling notion that she wasn’t quite ready to process, which was that she hadn’t gone to work in the hospital hoping to be Florence Nightingale, no matter what he said. She had gone to work there because she wasn’t interested in her own life anymore. She had never felt she was putting anything of great value at risk.

This was followed by a slow throb of anger, which she felt as a hot prickle in her Dragonscale.
Jakob
had done that to her—plunged his philosophical syringe into her life and tried to suck all the simple happiness out of it. In a sense, he had been trying to kill her for years.

She felt herself getting ready. She didn’t even know for what. She was gathering her courage for some act that was as yet unclear to her, but which she felt was coming, rushing toward her.

“I read your book,” she said.

And there, she saw a flicker of something human, something besides his patient, beatific, dangerous calm. Behaviorists talked about micro-expressions, emotions that jumped to the surface, revealing all, in a flicker almost too fast to catch. For the briefest instant he regarded her with uncertainty and a blanch of discomfort. It was a wonder, how much information could pass between two people in a single glance, without a word being said. He had, after all, really cheated on her with any number of their friends. That momentary look of shame was as good as a confession.

“Pretty dirty, dude,” she said. “I was getting hot flashes that don’t have anything to do with Dragonscale.”

“I asked you not to read it,” he said.

“So shoot me.”

He made a harsh barking sound. It took her a moment to identify this noise as laughter.

She exhaled again and threw her hands down and shook them, as if they were wet and she were air-drying them. “
Whoo
. All right. The world is going to have to burn out without us. I want something good before I go.”

He gave her a dull, hopeless look.

“Please. I’ll try,” she said. “I’ll try to make it nice.”

“I don’t know if it’ll do any good. I’m not in the mood anymore. I think maybe I just want to get it over with.”

“But
I’m
not ready. And you want it to feel right for
me
, don’t you? Besides. I’m not going without getting laid once more.” And she laughed and tried to smile. “You’ve got no one to blame but yourself, Jakob Grayson. Leaving a bored and lonely woman all alone with that pile of shameless filth.” Gesturing with her head at the manuscript on the desk.

He smiled himself, although it looked forced. “Sex means more to you than it does to me. I know that turns the stereotype on its head. You really live in your body more than I do. It’s one of the things I always found exciting about you. But now—at the moment, I suppose I regard the sexual act with a certain amount of disgust.”

She turned and crossed to the Hello Kitty boombox on the shelf. She had brought it in here the other day after discovering fresh batteries in the basement.

“What are you doing?” Jakob asked.

“Music.”

“I don’t need music. I’d rather just talk.”

“
I
need music. And a drink. You need a drink, too.”

Finally, something got through to him. He said, “I’d
kill
for a drink.” He made the harsh barking sound again, the one that seemed to stand for laughter.

He could’ve shot her already, if her death was all he wanted, but it wasn’t. Part of him wanted more: a last kiss, a last fuck, a last drink, or maybe something deeper, forgiveness, absolution. Harper wasn’t inclined to let him have any of it, but was happy to let him hope. It was keeping her alive. She turned on the FM. The classic rock station was playing an oldie but a goodie. A lovestruck Romeo was getting ready to start the serenade, you and me babe, how ’bout it, , and for no reason at all, Harper thought of Hillary Clinton.

She stood in front of the sound box, moving her hips from side to side. She didn’t doubt that Jakob currently regarded sex with disgust, but he wasn’t the only one who had taken some psychology courses in college. She hadn’t forgotten what lay just across the border from disgust.

She kept her back to him for maybe ten seconds, pretending to be lost in the music, then cast a slow look over her shoulder. His gaze was fixed raptly upon her.

“You hurt me,” she said. “You threw me down.”

“I’m sorry. That was across the line.”

“Except in the bedroom,” she said.

He narrowed his eyes, and she knew she had pushed it too far, had strained his credulity—she
never
talked that way about sex—but before he could speak, she said, “Our bottle!” As if she were just remembering. “I want to have that bottle of wine we brought back from France. Remember? You said it was the best you ever had and we should save it for something important.” She gave him what she hoped was a wry look and said, “Is this important enough?”

The wines were all there in the study with them, the whites in the cooler that wasn’t keeping them cool anymore, the reds in the cupboard. Whenever they went somewhere, they bought a bottle of wine, the way other people bought fridge magnets. They hadn’t gone so many places, though, in the last few years. She grabbed for the honeymoon French Bordeaux, and her palm was so damp with sweat, it almost slipped out of her grasp and flew across the room at him. She imagined him jumping in surprise and shooting her in the stomach, just out of reflex. Killing her
and
the baby in one shot, which, when she thought about it, would be perfectly in keeping with Jakob’s character. He was parsimonious by nature, hated waste; he had often scolded her for using too much milk in her cereal.

She pinned the bottle between her body and her right arm, and took two wine goblets from where they hung under one of the bookshelves. The deep crystal glasses clinked musically together, while her hands trembled. She got the corkscrew.

Her plan was to use it to pull the cork, then ask him to pour the wine. And while he was pouring it, she would wiggle the cork off the screw and stab him in the face. Or, if she didn’t have the stomach for that, she would at least try to impale him in the back of the hand that held the gun.

She sat down on the edge of the coffee table, facing him and the Great Egg. The gun rested on his knee, the barrel pointing at her, but without any particular intention. She had the corkscrew in her right hand, the twisted point sticking between her middle and ring fingers. He was a long way off—she would have to throw herself at him to get the corkscrew into his face. But maybe he would be closer when he poured the wine. Maybe.

Then she shifted her gaze to his eyes and saw him staring at her with icy speculation. His face was pale and still and nearly expressionless.

“Do you think if you get me drunk and fuck me, it’ll change my mind about what has to happen?” he asked her.

She said, “I thought getting drunk and making love and having a good time was the whole idea. Doing it on our terms. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“It is. But I’m still not clear that’s what
you
want. I don’t know if that’s what you
ever
wanted. Maybe in some vapid, Lifetime movie sense, you liked the idea of pulling a Romeo and Juliet, and dying side by side, but you were never really committed. You never thought it would happen. Now it’s time, and you’ll do anything to get out of it. Including whore yourself.” He rocked back and forth and then said, “I know it’s politically incorrect to say, but what the hell, we’re both about to die: I’ve never thought much of the intelligence of women. I’ve never once met a woman who had any true intellectual rigor. There’s a reason things like Facebook and airplanes and all the other great inventions of our time were made by men.”