They spent the night in a public campground that had been marked specifically for the use of the infected. The dirt road in was flanked by a pair of enormous wooden heads, carved to look like noble Indian chieftains, complete with sad, wise eyes and feathered headdresses. Hung above the entrance was a banner that proclaimed SICK STAY HERE WATER FOOD TOILETS.
They slept under picnic tables, rain plopping on the wooden planks and dripping down on top of them. But there were port-a-potties, an inconceivable luxury after over a week of using rags to wipe, and John surprised Harper by sleeping through the night, his chest rising and falling deeply and his lean, lined face set in an expression of dreaming calm. He woke just once, when she put the syringe in his mouth to give him another squirt of the antibiotic, and even then he only made a small sound, an amused sort of snort, and slipped away again.
They stayed in the campground most of the morning, waiting for the rain to pass. It quit around lunch and the afternoon was fine for walking. A cool breeze shushed in the big-leafed oaks. The daylight glittered on every wet surface, made spiderwebs into nets studded with diamonds.
They followed THIS WAY SICK signs north and east—mostly north—past forest and lake. Once they passed a folding table by the side of the road where someone had set out a bowl filled with individually wrapped Oreo cookies, a steel jug with blessedly cold milk in it, and Dixie cups. There were no houses in sight. The table stood alone at the end of a dirt lane that led back into trees.
“This is fresh,” Harper said. She shut her eyes to savor an icy swallow. “It can’t have been sitting outside for long.”
“No. ’Course not. They know we’re coming,” the Fireman croaked from his stretcher.
Harper almost coughed milk up her nose.
In the next moment they were all on their knees around the travois. John looked at them from half-shut eyes, his chin bristly and his cheeks caved in from all the weight he had lost. His color was ghastly. His smile was fond but weak.
“I wouldn’t say no to some of that milk myself, Nurse Willowes,” he said. “If it won’t interfere with my recovery.”
“Not at all. But I want you to take some aspirin with it.”
She put a hand behind his head, propping it up, and gave him slow sips from her own cup. She didn’t say a thing. For the next ten minutes, Allie and Renée were talking over each other while Nick gestured furiously with his hands, all of them trying to tell the story of the last week and a half at the same time. The Fireman looked this way and that and nodded sometimes, making a drowsy effort to attend to each of them. Harper wasn’t sure how much he was getting, although his brow furrowed when Allie told him they had left Bucksport behind that morning.
“The four of you carried me all the way to Bucksport?”
“No,” Harper said. “Just Allie.”
“Lucky your bony English ass is light,” Allie said.
“Lucky you don’t know how to quit,” John said to her. “Lucky for me. Thank you, Allie. I love you, girl.”
Allie wasn’t good at the emotional stuff. She looked away into the trees, clenching her jaw and clamping down on some intense upswell of feeling.
“Try not to get nearly killed again,” she said, when she was able to speak.
They all seemed to run out of things to say at the same time, and then there was a pleasant silence, no sound except for the swish of the cool wind in the trees and the twittering of the birds. Harper found herself holding John’s hand.
“Perhaps we can procure me a crutch,” he said. “Or fashion one. I wouldn’t like to burden you all any longer.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Harper said. “Yesterday this time, I wasn’t sure you’d live to see another morning.”
“That bad?”
“Buddy,” Harper said, “I thought you were smoked.”
“Ha ha,” he said. “Good one, Willowes.”
28
He slept through most of the next twenty-four hours, waking only to eat meals. Dinner was cold beef stew, left out on the side of the road in a deep steel pot. There were no bowls, so they took turns drinking right from the ladle.
It was rich—so rich it made Harper a little light-headed—and salty and gluey in consistency. Big carrots and buttery pieces of beef and a smoky undertaste of bourbon. Harper didn’t care that it was cold. She could not remember a better meal in all her life. John couldn’t manage the big pieces, but he was able to get down some peas and a few of the smaller bits of beef, and when he dozed off again, Harper thought his color was better.
Early on the afternoon of the following day, they found themselves at the bottom of a long rise, the sides of the road crowded with leafy oaks, so that the two-lane blacktop passed beneath a canopy of pale green. Sunlight flashed and winked through the waving branches and a dappled brightness danced across the road. It was a long, sweaty trudge to the top of the hill, but the climb was worth it. At the top, the trees parted to the right, to reveal a view that went for miles, across meadows and dense bands of forest. Harper saw grazing cows and the roofs of a few farmhouses. And beyond it all was a dark blue reach of ocean. When Harper breathed deeply, she thought she could almost smell it.
John had missed their glimpse of the sea when they crossed through Bucksport and asked Allie to turn him so he could admire the scenery. She held him tilted almost upright in the drag sled while he stared out across the fields, drenched in golden midafternoon light, and on to the deep blue water. The wind whisked his hair back from his smooth brow. Every time Harper looked at his forehead she wanted to kiss it.
“Is that a sailboat?” John said, narrowing his eyes. “Does anyone else see a sail?”
All of them stood there squinting.
“I don’t see anything,” Renée said.
“Me neither,” Harper said.
Allie pointed. “Yeah. There.”
John said, “Do you see something on the sail? A little splash of red?”
Allie peered into the distance. “Nnnoooo. Why?”
But John had turned his head and asked Nick with a few gestures what he saw. Nick nodded and replied. Harper didn’t catch it.
“What’d he say?”
“Nick’s eyes are best,” John replied, in a slightly irritating tone of satisfaction. “He sees the little splash of red too.”
“So what?” Harper asked.
“You never saw the Bobbie Shaw out on the water,” he told her. “The boat. But I did. I was out in it a time or two, the year I was a counselor at Camp Wyndham. There’s a picture of a large red crab on the sail.”
“No,” Renée said. “I know what you’re saying, John, but it can’t be Don Lewiston. It can’t. It’s been four weeks. I don’t know how long it would take to get from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to Machias by sail, but not almost a month.”
“We ran into a few setbacks along the way,” he said mildly. “Maybe Don did, too.”
They stood there a while longer and then without a word Allie turned the travois and began to tramp on. One by one the others fell in behind her, until only Harper remained. Squinting hard into the distance.
There. On the very line of the horizon. A tiny white splinter against all that blue.
With a little red fleck upon it.
29
They were perhaps fifty miles from Machias the morning they found the crutch.
It was, by then, two days since John had woken and asked for a glass of milk. Allie had gone on hauling the drag sled—there was no other reasonable option—and John had rediscovered his voice, which he used to complain about being shaken and bumped. He kvetched about itches he couldn’t reach, a sore back, and the sun in his eyes.
“I liked it better when you were dying,” Allie said. “You didn’t bitch so much.”
“Look sharp, Allie. I think you missed a pothole back there. You don’t want to break up your streak of dragging me over every one.”
Allie slowed, straightened up, and stretched her back. “You want a break from me? Be careful what you wish for, smartass. You just might get one. Is that what I think it is?”