Harper’s own reaction surprised her; for the first time, Jakob’s dull, angry certainty offended her.
“No, you’ve got that wrong,” she said. “I’m not an expert, but I know more about the spore than you do. There are studies, good studies, that show it can’t cross the placental barrier. It goes everywhere else, the brain, the lungs . . . everywhere but there.”
“That’s bullshit. There isn’t any study that says that. Not one that’s worth the paper it’s printed on. The CDC in Atlanta is a pile of cinders. No one is studying this shit anymore. The time to do science is over. Now it’s time to run for cover and hope the thing burns itself out before it burns us off the face of the planet.” He laughed at this, a dry, humorless sound.
“They are studying it, though. Still. In Belgium. In Argentina. But fine, if you don’t want to believe me, that’s fine. But believe this. In July, at the hospital, we delivered a healthy infant to a woman who was contaminated. They had a party in the lounge off pediatrics. We ate half-melted cherry ice cream and we all took turns holding the baby.” She did not say that the medical team had spent a lot more time with the baby than the mother had. The doctor wouldn’t allow her to touch him, had carried the child out of the room while the mother screamed for him to come back, to let her have one more look.
Jakob’s face wasn’t such a blank now. His mouth was a pinched white line.
“So what? This shit—how long do people last? Best-case scenario? After the stripes show up?”
“It’s different for everyone. There are a few long-term cases, people who have been around since the beginning. I might last—”
“Three months? Four? What’s the average? I don’t think the average is even two months. You only learned you’re pregnant ten days ago.” He shook his head in disbelief. “What did you get to take care of us?”
“What do you mean?” She was having trouble keeping up with the run of his thoughts.
“What did you get to do it with? You said you were going to get that stuff—the stuff my dentist gave me after my root canal.”
“Vicodin.”
“And we can crush it up, right?”
Her robe had come unbelted and hung open, but it seemed like too much effort to fix it, and she had forgotten she wanted to spare him the sight of her infected body.
“Yes. That’s probably one of the more painless ways to kill yourself. Twenty or so Vicodin, all crushed up.”
“So that’s how we’ll do it. If we both have the ’scale.”
“But I don’t have any Vicodin. I never got it.”
“Why? We talked. You said you would. You said you’d lift some from the hospital and if we got sick, we’d have wine and listen to some music and then take our pills and sail on.”
“I forgot to grab some on my way out of the hospital. At the time, I was in a hurry not to burn alive.” Although, she thought, given her current condition, she hadn’t escaped anything.
“You brought home Dragonscale but couldn’t bother to get us something so we could take care of each other. And then on top of it you get yourself pregnant. Christ, Harper. You’ve had yourself one hell of a month.” He laughed, a short, breathless bark. After a moment he said, “Maybe I can get us something to do it with. A gun, if necessary. Deepenau had NRA stickers plastered all over his piece-of-shit pickup. He must have something.”
“Jakob. I’m not going to kill myself,” she said. “Whatever we talked about before I got pregnant doesn’t matter now. I am carrying Dragonscale, but I am also carrying a baby, and that changes things. Can’t you see it changes things?”
“Jesus fucking Christ. It isn’t even a baby yet. It’s a cluster of unthinking cells. Besides, I know you. If it had a defect, you’d get an abortion. You worked in a goddamn clinic once, for chrissake. You’d walk in every morning, past the people screaming you were a murderer, calling you a baby killer.”
“The baby doesn’t have a defect, and even if he did I wouldn’t—that doesn’t mean I’d—”
“I think cooking to death in the womb is kind of a defect. Don’t you?”
He stood holding himself. She saw he was trembling.
“Let’s wait. Let’s give it some time and see if I’ve got this shit, too,” he said at last. “Maybe at some point in the next eight weeks we’ll find ourselves on the same page again. Maybe at some point here, you’ll be seeing things a little less selfishly.”
She had told him he needed to get out of the house, but she hadn’t wanted him to go, not really. She had hoped he would offer to stay close, maybe sleep in the basement. It scared her, to imagine being all alone with her infection, and she had wanted his calm, his steadiness, even if she couldn’t have his arms around her.
But something had changed in the last sixty seconds. Now she was ready for him to leave. She thought it would be better for both of them if he went, so she could have the dark, quiet house to herself for a while—to think, or not think, or be still, or cry, or do whatever she had to do—clear of his terror and angry disgust.
He said, “I’m going to ride my bicycle down to Public Works. Get the key to Johnny Deepenau’s trailer out of his locker. I’ll call you this afternoon.”
“Don’t worry if I don’t pick up. I might turn my phone off so I can go back to bed.” She laughed then, bitter, unhappy laughter. “Maybe I’ll wake up and it’ll all be a bad dream.”
“Yeah. We can hope for that, babygirl. Except if it’s a bad dream, we’re both dreaming it.” He smiled then—a small, nervous smile—and for a moment he was her Jake again, her old friend.
He was on his way to the door when she said, “Don’t tell anyone.”
He paused, a hand on the latch. “No. I won’t.”
“I’m not going to Concord. I’ve heard stories about the facility there.”
“Yeah. That it’s a death camp.”
“You don’t believe it?”
“Of course I believe it. Everyone who goes there is infected with this shit. They’re all going to die. So of course it’s a death camp. By definition.” He opened the door onto the hot, smoky day. “I wouldn’t send you there. You and me are in this together. I’m not giving you up to some faceless agency. We’ll handle this ourselves.”
Harper thought he meant this statement to be reassuring, yet, curiously, she was not reassured.
He walked down the steps and onto the curving path that took him out of sight in the direction of the garage. He left the door open, as if he expected her to come outside to watch him go. As if this were required of her. Maybe it was. She belted the robe, crossed the short length of the foyer, and stood in the doorway. He carried his bike out into the drive, hauling it over one shoulder. He didn’t look back.
Harper lifted her head to peer into Portsmouth. A filthy sky lowered above the white steeple of North Church. Smoke had hovered over town all summer long. Harper had read somewhere that 12 percent of New Hampshire was on fire, but didn’t see how that could be true. Of course that was pretty good compared to Maine. Maine was all the local news talked about. The blaze that had started in Canada had finally reached I-95, effectively cutting the state in two, a burning wasteland almost a hundred miles across at its widest point. They needed rain to put it out, but the last weather system to move that way had evaporated in the face of the heat. A meteorologist on NPR said the rain had fried like spit on the surface of a hot stove.
Coils of smoke rose here and there, brown, dirty loops climbing from the Strawbery Banke. There was always something burning: a house, a shop, a car, a person. It was surprising how much smoke a human body could throw when it was engulfed in flame.