The Fireman (14 page)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

4

The cafeteria was perched on top of the hill, overlooking the soccer pitch and the pebbly beach below. Moss and strands of yellowing dead grass grew on the shingled roof and the windows were boarded up, giving it a look of long disuse.

The impression of abandonment was dispelled the moment Carol pushed open the door and led them into the seating area, a dim cavernous space with exposed beams of red pine. Plates clattered in the kitchen and the air was fragrant with the odor of marinara sauce and stewed pork.

Lunch appeared to be over and done, but they didn’t have the place entirely to themselves. Renée Gilmonton sat at table for two, across from an old fella in a Greek fisherman’s cap, both of them hunched over steaming coffees. A boy sat alone at the next table over, the kid who looked like a Viking. Michael, Harper remembered. He was forking up noodles in red sauce and turning the pages of an ancient
Ranger Rick,
reading by the light of a candle in a jelly jar. The evening before, Michael had come across as maybe seventeen. Now, bent over an article on “Miami’s Marvelous Manatees,” his eyes wide with fascination, he looked like a ten-year-old in a fake beard.

Renée lifted her chin and caught Harper’s eye. It was a pleasure and a relief to have a friend here, to not be completely alone among strangers. Harper flashed back to other lunches in other cafeterias, and the anxiety that came with not seeing a familiar face and not knowing where to sit. She suspected Renée had waited around in hopes of meeting up with Harper and helping her to settle in . . . a small act of consideration for which Harper was indecently grateful.

The serving counter was manned by Norma Heald, a mountainous pile of flesh with the broad, sloping shoulders of a silverback gorilla. The postmeal cleanup was under way—Harper saw a couple of teenage boys in the kitchen, plunging dishes into soapy water by the light of an oil lamp—but Norma had reserved some pasta in a steel warming pan and a couple of ladles of sauce. There was coffee and a can of condensed milk for cream.

“We had sugar for a while and it was full of ants. Ants in the coffee, ants in the muffins, ants in the peach cobbler,” Carol said. “For a few weeks, ants were my primary source of protein. No sugar now, though! Just syrup. Sorry! Welcome to the Last Days!”

“The sugar is gone and the milk will follow,” Norma said. “I put out two cans of milk for the coffee, but there’s only one left.”

“The other got used up?” Carol asked. “So quickly?”

“Nope. Stole.”

“I’m sure no one stole a can of milk.”

“Stole,” Norma repeated, her tone of voice closer to satisfaction than outrage. She sat behind the counter, occupied with a pair of silver knitting needles that raced back and forth, clicking and clacking, all the time she spoke. She was working on a giant shapeless tube of black yarn that might’ve been a prophylactic for King Kong.

Harper and Carol made their way to Michael’s table, Carol making a come-on-over gesture to Renée and the old fella. “Sit with us, you two. We can all share Harper! There’s enough to go around.”

They arranged themselves around the table, bumping knees. Harper lifted her hand for her fork, but Carol grasped her fingers before she could reach it.

“
Before we eat, we go around the circle and say one thing we’re glad for,” Carol said, leaning into Harper and speaking in a confidential tone of voice. “Sometimes it’s the best part of the meal. Which will make more sense after you’ve tried the food.”

“We snacked already, but I don’t mind bowing the head with you,” said the old man, who hadn’t yet been introduced.

Renée squeezed Harper’s other hand and then they were all sitting in a ring, leaning in toward the light of the single candle, like a group assembled for a séance.

“I’ll start us off,” Carol said. “I’m glad for the woman sitting next to me, who saved my nephew when he had appendicitis. I’m glad she’s here and I have a chance to show her how grateful I am. I’m glad for her baby, because babies are exciting! Like fat little sausages with faces!”

The old fella spoke with lowered head and half-shut eyes. “I’m glad for the nurse myself, because a hundred and twenty-four people need a lot of lookin’ after, and I’ve been over my head for months. I’m all this camp’s had for medical care since the end of August, and all I know is what I larnt in the navy. I don’t want to say how long it’s been since I studied as a hospital corpsman, but at the time they had only just phased out the use of leeches.”

“Me, I guess I’m mostly just glad to be in a place where people love me,” Michael told them. “People like Aunt Carol and Father Storey. I’d do anything for them, to keep this place safe. I lost one family. I’d rather die myself than lose another.”

“I’m glad to have had a hot lunch,” Renée said, “even if it was fried Spam in Ragú. I’m also glad this camp has an ace fisherman in Don Lewiston, and I’ll be gladder still the next time it’s my turn for fish.” Nodding at the old fella. Then she looked sidelong at Harper and said, “And I’m
so
glad to see my friend from Portsmouth Hospital, who marched around eighteen hours a day, whistling Disney tunes and trying to keep up the spirits of a thousand sick and terrified patients. Every time she came in the room, it felt like a break in a month of clouds. She made me want to keep going when there wasn’t any other reason.”

Harper wasn’t sure she’d be able to find her own voice, was ambushed by unexpected emotion. In her days at Portsmouth Hospital, she had felt about as useful as Renée’s potted mint, and it caught her unprepared to hear someone tell her differently. Finally, she managed, “I’m just glad not to be alone anymore.”

Carol squeezed her fingers. “I am so glad to be part of this circle. We are all voices in the same chorus and we sing our thanks.”

And for a moment it was there again: Carol’s eyes pulsed with brightness, her irises becoming rings of fey green light. Michael’s eyes flashed as well, and Harper saw a prickle of red and gold flicker across the whorls of Dragonscale on his bare arms.

Harper let go of Carol’s hand as if at a physical shock. But then the weird sheen was gone and Carol was eyeing her mischievously.

“Freaked you out, didn’t I? Sorry. You’ll get used to it, though. Eventually it’ll happen to you, too.”

“It’s a little frightening,” Harper said. “But also . . . well, like magic.”

“It’s not magic. It’s a miracle,” Carol said, like someone identifying the make of their new car:
it’s a Miata
.

“What’s happening when you shine like that?” Harper asked. Something came back to her then and she looked, almost accusingly, at Renée. “It’s the same thing that happened to you in the hospital. You ran out covered in light. Everyone thought you were going to explode.”

“So did I,” Renée said. “I stumbled onto it by accident. They call it joining the Bright.”

Michael said, “Or the Network. But I guess that’s only people my age. A lot of my friends joke that it’s just another social network. Only they’re kind of not joking.”

“You probably understand that the Dragonscale responds badly to stress,” Carol said.

The old fella, Don Lewiston, laughed. “That’s one way a puttin’ it.”

“That’s because it feels what you feel,” Carol continued. “That’s such a powerful concept. I’m surprised more people haven’t followed the thread of that idea to see where it goes. If you can create a feeling of security and well-being and acceptance, the Dragonscale will react in a very different way: by making you feel more alive than you’ve ever felt before. It will make colors deeper and tastes richer and emotions stronger. It’s like being set on fire with
happiness
. And you don’t just feel
your
happiness. You feel everyone
else’s,
too. Everyone around you. Like we’re all notes being played together in a single perfect chord.”

“And you don’t burn,” Michael said, twisting the orange coil of his beard.

“And you don’t burn,” Carol repeated.

“It doesn’t seem possible,” Harper said. “How does it work?”

“Harmony,” Carol said.

“Harmony?”

“Connection, anyway,” Renée said. “Strong social connection. John has some interesting theories about it, if you can draw him out. He told me once—”

Carol’s face darkened. An artery, squiggling in her right temple, thickened. “John Rookwood isn’t here and he doesn’t
want
to be here. He prefers to keep his distance. It’s easier to maintain his own personal myth that way. I think he looks down on us, honestly.”

“Do you really think that?” Renée asked. “I’ve never had that impression. I would’ve said he looks
out
for us. If he does have a condescending view of camp, he has a peculiar way of showing it. He’s the person who led most of us here in the first place.”

There was an uneasy silence. Renée gazed at Carol with an innocent curiosity. For her part, Carol would not meet her stare. Instead she took a long swallow of coffee, a benign, easygoing gesture that Harper saw through. For an instant, there had been hate in her face. John had made it clear the night before, in the woods, that he was no fan of Carol Storey; the feeling, it seemed, was mutual.

Michael was the first to speak and smooth over the awkward moment. “The easiest way to join the Bright is to sing. The whole mess of us, the entire camp, get together in church every day after breakfast and have a big sing and we always shine. You’ll shine, too. It might not happen right away, but stick with it. When it comes over you, it’s like someone plugged you in to a giant battery. It’s like all the lights are turning on in your soul for the first time in your life.” His eyes had a bright, hot look that made Harper want to check him for fever.

“I had no idea what was happening to me, the first time I went into the Bright,” Renée said. “To say I was surprised doesn’t do it justice, Mrs. Grayson.”

“You better start calling me Harper,” Harper said. She didn’t add that she thought she was all done being Mrs. Grayson. That name belonged to Jakob, and she felt she had left everything of Jakob’s behind in the woods. Her maiden name had been Willowes. She missed the way it rolled off her tongue, and the thought of having her old name returned to her felt like another escape—a far more satisfying and peaceful escape than her leap out the bedroom window.

“Harper,” Renée said, trying it out. She smiled. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to get used to it, but I’ll try. Well,
Harper
. I was reading to the children. We were working our way through
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,
and I stopped to sing ‘The Candy Man’ song from the film. A few of them knew the words and sang along with me. It was such a nice, peaceful moment, I forgot we were all sick. I got that melty, tranced-out feeling that comes over you when you’re in front of a fire and you’ve had a couple drinks. And suddenly the kids began screaming. Time began to run thick and slow. I remember one of the children knocked my potted mint off my little end table and it seemed like I had half an hour to reach out and catch it. And when I did, I realized my whole arm was splattered with light. I thought it was so glorious looking, I couldn’t find it in me to be terrified. But then someone shrieked,
Get away from her, she’s going to explode!
And right away, I thought,
I am! I’m going to go off like a grenade!
Sometimes I think people are a bit more suggestible when they enter that state. The Bright. So I ran for my life, with my potted mint. Straight past two sets of guards and half a dozen doctors and nurses, across the parking lot and into the meadow south of the hospital. I thought I would set the grass on fire when I waded into it, but I didn’t. It took a while for the light to die out, and afterwards I was shivery and drunk.”

“Drunk?”

“Oh yuh,” said Don Lewiston. “You wind up pretty pickled after you go into the Bright. Especially the first couple times. You forget your own name.”

“You—what?”

Carol said, “A
lot
of people forget their own name the first time. I think that’s the most beautiful part of it. All the stuff you think defines you—it peels off like Christmas wrapping. The Bright winnows you down to your truest, best self, the version of you that goes deeper than a name or what football team you root for. And you become aware of yourself as just one leaf on a tree, and everyone you know and love, they’re all the other leaves.”

A willow,
Harper Willowes thought, and shivered.

“First time I ever joint the Chorus,” Don Lewiston said, “I forgot the face of my father, the sound of my mother’s voice, and the name of the ship I spent the last twenty years on. I wanted to kiss everyone I saw. Oh, and I got real goddamn generous. I remember this was in chapel, after a good hard sing. I was sittin’ next to a couple young fellas, and I was just burstin’ to tell ’em how much I loved ’em, and all I could think to do was take off my boots and try to give them away. One boot for each of them, so they’d always have somethin’ to remember me by. They laughed at me, like grown-ups havin’ a yuk at some kid who just drank his first beer.”

“Why didn’t you come back to the hospital?” Harper asked Renée. “After you . . . went Bright?”

“At first it never occurred to me. I was just too out of my right mind. I was still holding my mint and it came to me that it didn’t belong in a pot, that it was
cruel
to keep it in a pot. I was ashamed of myself for all the months I had held it prisoner. I drifted deep into the woods and had myself a nice quiet planting ceremony. Then I sat with my mint, with my face turned up to the sun, feeling about as content as I’ve ever felt in my life. I believe I thought I was going to photosynthesize, along with my plant. At some point I heard a branch snap and opened my eyes and there was Captain America and Tony the Tiger. And you know what? I wasn’t the least surprised to see them. A superhero and a tiger-boy just seemed like the next logical part of my day.”