The night of the hospital fire, she rose from the water, and he handed her a glass of red wine and then wrapped a hot towel around her. He helped her out of the tub. He walked her into the bedroom, where there were more candles burning. He dried her and guided her to the bed and she climbed across it on all fours, wanting him to pull off his clothes and push himself into her, but he put a hand on the small of her back and made her lie flat. He liked to make her wait; to be honest, she liked to be made to wait, liked him to be in charge. He had strawberry-scented cream and he rubbed it into her. He was naked beside her, his body dusky and fit in the low light, his chest matted with black fur.
And when he rolled her over and got inside her, she made a sobbing sound of pleasure, because it was so sudden, and he was so intent about it. He had hardly started when the condom slipped off. He stopped his motion for a moment, frowning, but she reached down and flung it aside, and then took his ass and pushed him down on her again. Her nurse greens were on the floor, stinking of smoke. She would never wear them again. A hundred square miles of French wine country were on fire and more than two million people had burned to death in Calcutta, and all she wanted was to feel him inside her. She wanted to see his face when he finished. She thought there was a good chance they’d be dead by the end of the year anyway, and he had never been inside her this way before.
On the night of the hospital fire, they made love by candlelight, and, later, a baby began.
AUGUST
7
Harper was in the shower when she saw the stripe on the inside of her left leg.
She knew what the stripe meant in one look and her insides squirmed with fear, but she wiped cool water from her face and scolded herself. “Don’t start with me, lady. That’s a goddamn bruise.”
It didn’t look like a bruise, though. It looked like Dragonscale, a dark, almost inky line, dusted with a few oddly mineral flecks of gold. When she bent close, she saw another mark, on the back of her calf—same leg—and she jerked upright. She put a hand over her mouth because she was making little miserable sounds, almost sobs, and she didn’t want Jakob to hear.
She climbed out, neglecting to turn off the shower. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t like she was wasting the hot water. There wasn’t any. The power had been out for two days. She had gone in the shower to wash the sticky feeling off her. The air in the house was smothering, like being trapped under a pile of blankets all day long.
The part of her that was five years a nurse—the part that remained calm, almost aloof, even when the floor was sticky with blood and a patient was shrieking in pain—asserted itself. She choked down the little sobs she was making and composed herself. She decided she needed to dry off and have another look at it. It could be a bruise. She had always been someone who bruised easily, who would discover a great black mark on her hip or the back of her arm with no idea how she had injured herself.
She toweled herself almost dry and put her left foot up on the counter. She looked at the leg and then looked at it in the mirror. She felt the need to cry rising behind her eyes again. She knew what it was. They put down Draco incendia trychophyton on the death certificates, but even the surgeon general called it Dragonscale. Or he had, until he burned to death.
The band on the back of her leg was a delicate ray of black, blacker than any bruise, silted with grains of brightness. On closer inspection, the line on her thigh looked less like a stripe, more like a question mark or a sickle. Harper saw a shadow she didn’t like, where her neck met her shoulder, and she brushed aside her hair. There was another dark line there, flaked with the mica-specks of Dragonscale.
She was trying to regulate her breathing, trying to exhale a feeling of wooziness, when Jakob opened the door.
“Hey, babe, they need me down to the Works. There’s no—” he said, then fell silent, looking at her in the mirror.
At the sight of his face, she felt her composure going. She set her foot on the floor and turned to him. She wanted him to put his arms around her and squeeze her and she knew he couldn’t touch her and she wasn’t going to let him.
He staggered back a step and stared at her with blind, bright, scared eyes. “Oh, Harp. Oh, baby girl.” Usually he said it as one word—babygirl—but this time it was distinctly two. “You’ve got it all over you. It’s on your legs. It’s on your back.”
“No,” she said, a helpless reaction. “No. No no no.” It nauseated her, to imagine it streaked across her skin where she couldn’t see.
“Just stay there,” he said, holding a hand out, fingers spread, although she hadn’t taken a step toward him. “Stay in the bathroom.”
“Jakob,” she said. “I want to look and see if there’s any on you.”
He stared at her without comprehension, a bright bewilderment in his gaze, and then he understood and something went out of his eyes. His shoulders sank. Beneath his tan he looked wan and gray and bloodless, as if he had been out in the cold for a long time.
“What’s the point?” he asked.
“The point is to see if you’ve got it.”
He shook his head. “Of course I have it. If you have it, I have it. We fucked. Just last night. And two days ago. If I’m not showing now, I will later.”
“Jakob. I want to look at you. I didn’t see any marks on me yesterday. Not before we made love. Not after. They don’t understand everything about transmission, but a lot of doctors think a person isn’t contagious until they’re showing visible marks.”
“It was dark. We were in candlelight. If either of us saw those marks on you, we would’ve thought it was a shadow,” he said. He spoke in a leaden monotone. The terror she had seen on his face had been like a flicker of heat lightning, there and gone. In its place was something worse, a listless resignation.
“Take off your clothes,” she said.
He stripped his T-shirt off over his head and dropped it on the floor. He regarded her steadily with eyes that were almost amber in the dimness of the room. He held out his arms to either side, stood there with his feet crossed and his chin lifted, unconsciously posing like Christ on the cross.
“Do you see any?”
She shook her head.
He turned, arms still outstretched, and looked back over his shoulder. “On my back?”
“No,” she said. “Take off your pants.”
He revolved again and unbuttoned his jeans. They faced each other, a yard of open space between them. There was a kind of cruel erotic fascination in the slow, patient way he stripped for her, pulling out his belt, pushing down the jeans and the un derwear, too, all in one go. He never broke eye contact. His face was masklike, almost disinterested.
“Nothing,” she said.
He turned. She took in his limber brown thighs, his pale backside, the sunken hollows in his hips.
“No,” she said.
“Why don’t you turn off the shower,” he told her.
Harper shut off the water, picked up her towel, and went back to drying her hair. As long as she concentrated on breathing slowly and steadily, and did all the things she would normally do after a shower, she felt she could put off the urge to burst into tears again. Or to begin screaming. If she started to scream, she wasn’t sure she could stop.
Harper wrapped the towel around her hair and walked back into the gloomy swelter of the bedroom.
Jakob sat on the edge of the bed, in his jeans again, but holding his T-shirt in his lap. His feet were bare. She had always loved his feet, tan and bony and almost architectural in their delicate, angular lines.
“I’m sorry I got sick,” she said to him, and suddenly was struggling not to cry again. “I swear, I had a good look at myself yesterday, and I didn’t see any of this. Maybe you don’t have it. Maybe you’re okay.”
Harper almost choked on the last word. Her throat was clutching up convulsively, sobs forcing their way out from deep in her hitching lungs. Her thoughts were too awful to think, but she thought them anyway.
She was dead and so was he. She had gone and infected them both and they were going to burn to death like all the others. She knew it, and his face told her he knew it, too.
“You had to be Florence fucking Nightingale,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”