He extinguished his right hand before he walked the shopping cart in. Renée followed, and on the count of three they moved the shroud off the cart and onto one of the stone caskets. Nick lit candles with his fingertip. Allie joined with the tape recorder, but Harper remained just outside, her own hand burning without any sensation of heat at all. It comforted her. That bright blaze seemed to her, that evening, to be her own soul made visible.
The song echoed in the little stone cabinet and in a soft voice, Harper began to sing along. The Fireman joined her, and as he began to sing, he reached back to take one of Renée’s hands. Nick took another. The little boy reached for his sister and his sister reached for Harper, joining them in a swaying human chain. Renée lowered her head and shut her eyes, perhaps to cry, perhaps to pray. Only when she looked up at last her irises were threaded with light. The coils of Dragonscale around her bare arms lit a deep shade of plum, traveling down to her wrists. The glow leapt from her hand to the Fireman’s and to Nick’s. Harper felt her own ’scale respond, a rush of light and warmth.
They glowed in the darkness, all of them: pale shining wisps with rings of light where their eyes belonged, as if they were the dead—ghosts risen from their graves—not Gilbert Cline. Harper felt their grief as a slow current of cold water, and herself as a leaf revolving upon it.
As she moved to the music she felt her own self slip away, her own particular Harper-ness. Her identity wouldn’t float and was swallowed by the stream flowing through all of them. She was no longer Harper. She was Renée, recollecting Gil’s sandpapery cheek against her neck and the sawdust smell of his hair. She recalled the first time Gil had kissed her in a corner of the basement, one hand firmly against the small of her back, as if she had experienced it firsthand. Cobwebs on the bare dead lightbulb overhead. Smell of dust and old brick, the pressure of his dry lips on hers. She was adrift on Renée’s memories, rushing along over the surface of them, carried over a drop and into—
—a memory of Carol holding her and rocking her the night her mother died. Carol had held her and rocked her back and forth and been wise enough to say nothing, to offer not a single false word of comfort. Carol was crying, too, and their tears fell together and Harper could taste them right now, standing in the tomb, could taste what Allie had tasted the night Sarah Storey burned. Her perceptions were a leaf, turning rapidly now, spilling again over another fall into—
—a remembrance of being thrown. Gail Neighbors had grabbed her by the ankles and Gillian had held her wrists, and they swung her back and forth like a hammock and chucked her into a giddy silence and she fell soundlessly onto a cot, her lungs convulsing with laughter she couldn’t hear. In the awesome quiet of Nick’s deafworld, colors seemed to shout. How he had loved the way they tossed him again and again, how he had loved their happiness, and how he missed them and wished he could have them back. But Harper’s consciousness was rushing on, plunging over the highest fall yet, into a grief so deep it was almost impossible to see to the bottom of it, cascading into—
—John’s head and what thoughts he kept there of Sarah. Harper felt Sarah sitting in her lap, and her nose was in Sarah’s hair, savoring the delicate sugar-cookie smell of her. She was working on a crossword, nibbling on her ballpoint pen in thought, and what grace, what confidence it required to do the puzzle in pen! A perfect square of sun was on the curve of her slender brown shoulder. Harper had never been so acutely aware of light and stillness without being high on mushrooms. She thought, with a kind of savage joy, of her father, that brilliant, literary, distant, resentful drunk. I get to be happy, Harper thought, in an English accent, and that means I beat you. That means I won. Sarah pressed herself back against Harper’s bony chest. Five-letter word for abiding joy, she asked, and Harper touched her hair, pushing a strand of it behind her pink, delicate ear, and whispered today. To have had such contentment and lost it was like a burn that never healed. To think of her was like picking up a hot brand, was being seared afresh.
And on at last into her own smooth pool of hurt, of homesickness for all the good things that had once been hers and were gone now: coffee in Starbucks while the cold drizzle hit the windows, vacuuming in her underwear and singing along to Bruce Springsteen, letting her gaze wander over the spines of books in a little bookstore with high shelves, eating a cold apple in the front yard and raking, hallways full of babbling laughing scuffling children at school, Coca-Cola in a glass bottle. So much of what was best in life went unnoticed in the moments you had it.
The fading current turned her little leaf around and around and slid her away from all memory, away from pain, and on finally to a firm, sandy shore. The cassette player clicked off. The song was over.
9
She sat on a sandy bank, her shoulders resting against the grooved stone wall of the tomb. The Fireman sat next to her. Somehow they had wound up holding hands. He had brought the radio outside and it was tuned to the FM. A choir chanted a ringing, mournful plainsong. Stars gritted the night.
Harper had the light, flowing sensation of being just mildly drunk. She was relaxed and it felt good to put her head on his shoulder.
“What’s Renée doing?” she asked.
“Still inside. Talking to her man. Going over the things she loved best about him. And what they would’ve done if they had more time.”
“The kids?”
“Walked back to the garage. I found a bag of marshmallows. They’re going to roast them, I believe.”
“Do you think it’s . . . safe? For them to cook marshmallows?”
“Well, when you consider all they’ve been through, I don’t think there’s much to fear from hot marshmallows. Worst-case scenario, someone burns the roof of their mouth.”
“I was thinking of what they might see in the fire.”
“Oh.” He pursed his lips. “I don’t think she’d reveal herself to them casually. And perhaps Sarah would like to see them. We aren’t the only ones who feel sick about all the good things that are gone now. We aren’t the only ones who need to grieve.”
She ran her thumb over his knuckles, squeezed his hand.
“I haven’t been so drunk on the Bright . . . well, I haven’t even been part of the Bright in six months.” He sighed. “I haven’t really needed the protective benefits of harmony since I learned to communicate with the spore directly. I forgot how good it feels. Even when what’s being shared is painful, it’s a good pain.”
Had they really shared memories and thoughts, after all? Harper was of two minds about it. The kids of Camp Wyndham had always believed the spore was a kind of network, a sort of hive mind worn right on the skin, an organic web that anyone who was infected could plug into. There wasn’t any doubt that it could carry ideas and feelings. Then again, when one was riding high on the Bright, one was prone to fantasy. The gift of telepathy sounded nice, but Harper thought possessing an imagination was good enough.
A star fell. She wished for him not to move, to stay right where he was, with her head on his shoulder. If time were ever to snag in place, she wished for it to snag there, with John pressed against her and spring breathing in their faces.
He sat up so quickly she almost fell over. He reached across her and fiddled with the volume.
The crazy woman was talking about Grand Panjandrum Ian Judaskiller.
“Oh, this nutty bitch,” Harper said. She wouldn’t toss around the word bitch sober, but she was a lot less prim when she was drunk, which was how she felt now. “You know, every time she mentions this guy Ian Judaskiller, she gives him a different title. One minute he’s grand marshal, the next minute he’s field general. One of these days she’s going to say he’s been anointed the mighty muffsucker—”
“Shh,” he said, holding up one hand.
She listened. The woman on the radio said His Honor had promised to send twelve fully manned trucks into Maine to fight the resurgent wildfires, with the crews ordered to depart at noon Friday, praise Jesus and the holy host—
“We’ll go with them,” the Fireman said.