She wished he would cry with her. She wished she could see some feeling in his face, could see him struggling to restrain the kind of emotions she felt in herself. But there was only blankness, and the odd, clinical look in his gaze, and the way he sat there with his wrists hanging limply over his knees.
“Look on the bright side,” he said, glancing at her stomach. “At least we don’t have to figure out what to name it if it’s a girl.”
It was as bad as if he had struck her. She flinched, looked away. She was going to say she was sorry again, but what came out was a choked, hopeless sob.
They had known about the baby for just over a week. Jakob had smiled slightly when Harper showed him the blurred blue cross on the home pregnancy pee-stick, but when she’d asked him how he felt, he’d said, Like I need time to get my head around it.
The day after, the Verizon Arena burned to the ground in Manchester, twelve hundred homeless refugees inside—not one got out alive—and Jakob was loaned to the Public Works Department there, to help organize the clearing of the wreckage and the collection of bodies. He was gone thirteen hours a day, and when he came home, filthy with soot and quiet from the things he had seen, it seemed wrong to discuss the baby. When they slept, though, he would spoon her from behind and cup her stomach with one hand and she had hoped this meant there was some happiness—some sense of purpose—stirring inside him.
He pulled his T-shirt on, in no hurry now.
“Get dressed,” he said. “It’ll be easier to think if I don’t have to look at it all over you.”
She walked to her closet, crying hard. She felt she could not bear the lack of feeling in his voice. It was almost worse than the idea of being contaminated, of being poisoned.
It was going to be in the seventies today—it was already seventy in the bedroom and would soon be warmer, the bright day glowing around the edges of the shades—and she fumbled through the coat hangers for a sundress. She picked out the white dress, because she liked how she felt in it, liked how it made her feel clean and simple and fresh, and she wanted that now. Then it came to her that if she wore a dress, Jakob would still be able to see the stripe on the back of her leg, and she wanted to spare him. Shorts were out, too. She found a tatty old robe the color of cheap margarine.
“You have to go,” she said, without turning to face him. “You have to get out of the house and away from me.”
“I think it’s too late for that.”
“We don’t know you’re carrying.” She belted the robe but didn’t turn around. “Until we know for sure, we have to take precautions. You should pack some clothes and get out of the house.”
“You touched all the clothes. You washed them in the sink. Then you hung them on the line across the deck. You folded them and put them away.”
“Then go someplace and buy new things. Target might be open.”
“Sure. Maybe I can give a hot little case of Dragonscale to the girl at the cash register while I’m there.”
“I told you. They don’t know if you can catch it from people before they’re visibly marked up.”
“That’s right. They don’t know. They don’t know shit. Whoever they are. If anyone really understood how transmission works, we wouldn’t be in this situation, would we, babygirl?”
She didn’t like the wry, ironic way he said babygirl. That tone was very close to contempt.
“I was careful. I was really careful,” she said.
She remembered—with a kind of exhausted resentment—boiling inside her full-body Tyvek outfit all day, the material sticking to her flushed, sweaty skin. It took twenty minutes to put it on, another twenty to take it off, following the required five-minute shower in a bleach solution. After, she remembered the way she’d stink of rubber, bleach, and sweat. She carried that stench on her the whole time she worked at Portsmouth Hospital, an odor like an industrial accident, and she got infected anyway, and it seemed like a real bad joke.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve got stuff in my gym bag I can wear,” he said. “Stuff you haven’t had your hands all over.”
“Where will you go?”
“How the fuck do I know? Do you know what you’ve done?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Well, that makes it better. I don’t feel so bad about both of us burning to death now.”
She decided if being angry made him feel less scared, then it was all right. She wanted him to be all right.
“Can you sleep at Public Works?” she asked. “Without coming in contact with the other guys?”
“No,” he said. “But Johnny Deepenau is dead, and the keys to his little shitbox trailer are hanging up in his locker. I could stay there. You remember Johnny? He drove the number three Freightliner.”
“I didn’t know he was sick.”
“He wasn’t. His daughter got it and burned to death and he jumped off the Piscataqua Bridge.”
“I didn’t know.”
“You were working. You were at the hospital. You never came home. It wasn’t the kind of thing I was going to tell you in a text message.” He was quiet. His head was down and his eyes were in shadow. “I sort of admire him. For understanding he had seen all the best his life was going to offer him and recognizing there was no point in hanging around for the last shitty little bit. Johnny Deepenau was a Budweiser-drinking, football-watching, Donald Trump–voting, stone-cold bozo who never read anything deeper than Penthouse magazine, but he understood that much. I think I have to throw up,” he said, without changing his tone of voice, and he rose to his feet.
Harper followed him through the den and into the front hall. He didn’t use the bathroom attached to their master bedroom, which Harper supposed was now off-limits, as she had recently occupied it. He went into the little bathroom under the stairs. She stood in the hall and listened to him retching through the closed door and she practiced not crying. She wanted to stop being weepy around him, didn’t want to burden him with her emotions. At the same time, she wanted Jakob to say something kind to her, to look anguished for her.
The toilet flushed, and Harper backed away into the den to give him space. She stood beside his desk, where he sat to write in the evening. Jakob had wound up a deputy manager with the Portsmouth Department of Public Works almost by accident; he had intended to be a novelist. He had dropped out of college to write, had been working on the book ever since, six years now. He had 130 pages he had never let anyone read, not even Harper. It was called Desolation’s Plough. Harper had never told him she hated the title.
He came out of the bathroom, came as far as the entrance to the den, and then held up there. At some point he had found his baseball cap, the one that said FREIGHTLINER on it, which she always thought he wore ironically, the way Brooklyn hipsters wore John Deere caps. If they still did that. If they had ever really done that.
The eyes below the brim were bloodshot and unfocused. She wondered if he had been crying in the bathroom. The idea that he had been weeping for her made her feel a little better.
“I want you to wait,” he said.
She didn’t understand, looked a question at him.
“How long until we’ll know for sure if I have it?” he asked.
“Eight weeks,” she said. “If you don’t have anything by the end of October, you don’t have anything.”
“Okay. Eight weeks. I think it’s a farce—we both know if you have it, I have it, too—but we’ll wait eight weeks. If we both have it, we’ll do it together, like we said.” He was silent for a moment, staring down at his feet, and then he nodded. “If I don’t have it, I’ll be here for you when you do it.”
“Do what?”
He looked up at her, real surprise in his face. “Kill ourselves. Jesus. We talked about this. About what we would do if we caught it. We agreed it’s better to just—go to sleep. Than to wait around and burn to death.”
She felt a hard constriction in her throat, wasn’t sure she could force words past it, then found she could. “But I’m pregnant.”
“You’re never going to have the baby now.”