“I am not getting off the phone. You are not making this decision without me. I am not going to let her talk you into risking all of our lives. You want to see our fucking little boy burn to death? No. No. NOT happening.”
“Lindy. This is a private conversation,” Connor said—whined, really. “This business is between me and Harp.”
“When it comes to decisions that could affect the safety of our child, it stops being private business and starts being Lindy business,” she said. “I would risk my life for either one of you, but I will not risk my son’s life, and it isn’t right to ask me to. Being a hero isn’t an option anymore when you have a little kid. I know it, and Harper, you know it, too. If you didn’t know it before you got pregnant, you know it now. You want your baby to be okay. I understand, because I feel the same way about mine. I am sorry, Harper. I am. But you made your choices. We have to make ours. They aren’t heroic choices, but they’ll keep our little boy alive until this is all over.”
“Lindy,” Connor pleaded, although what he was pleading for, Harper couldn’t guess.
Because Lindy was awful, an awful person, someone who liked being a mother because it gave her a child and a husband to bully. Everything about her was horrible, from her pointy nose to her pointy little tits to her pointed, shrill voice . . . but she was right. Harper was a loaded gun now, and you didn’t leave a loaded gun where a child could come upon it. The thought crossed Harper’s mind, not for the first time, that choosing to try to live was, in some ways, a monstrous act, an act of towering, possibly homicidal selfishness. Her death was a certainty now and she felt everything depended on not taking anyone else with her, in not putting anyone at risk.
But someone is already at risk. The baby is at risk.
Harper shut her eyes. A pair of candles burned on the coffee table, and she could dimly apprehend their light through her eyelids, a sickly red glow.
“Connor,” Harper said. “Lindy is right. I wasn’t thinking. I’m just scared.”
“Of course you are,” Lindy said. “Oh, of course you are, Harper.”
“It was wrong to ask. I’ve been knocking around by myself for too long—Jakob left last month, so he wouldn’t get it, too. You spend too much time alone, you can talk yourself into some really rotten ideas.”
“You ought to call your father,” Lindy said. “Fill him in on what’s happening.”
“What?” Connor cried. “Jesus, Dad can’t know about this! It’ll kill him. He had a heart attack last year, Lindy. You want him to have another?”
“He’s a smart man. He might have some ideas. Besides, your parents have a right to know. Harper ought to be the one to explain to them the situation she’s put us all in.”
Connor was sputtering. “If it doesn’t stop his heart, it’ll break it. Lindy, Lindy.”
“You might be right, Lindy,” Harper said. “You’re the most practical of any of us. I might have to call Mom and Dad at some point. But not tonight. I’ve only got three percent charge left on my phone, and I don’t want to give them the bad news and then get disconnected. I want you to promise you’ll let me tell them. I don’t want them to hear it from you and not be able to get in touch with me. Besides, like you said: I made this situation, I’m the one who has to bear the responsibility.”
Harper didn’t have any intention of calling her parents and telling them she would likely be dead within a year. There would be no good in it. They were in their late sixties, stranded in God’s waiting room, a.k.a. Florida. They couldn’t help her from there and they couldn’t come to her; all they could do was get an early start on mourning her, and Harper didn’t see the point.
Nothing mollified Lindy faster than someone telling her she was right, however, and when she spoke again, a kind of hushed calm had come into her voice. “Of course I’ll let you be the one to tell them. You speak to them when you can, and when you’re ready. If they need someone to talk to, we’ll do what we can to comfort them from our end.” In a distraught, distracted voice, she added: “Maybe this is the thing that will finally bring your mother and me together.”
There was a silver lining, Harper thought. Maybe she was going to burn to death, but at least it would give Lindy a chance to bond with her mother-in-law.
“Lindy? Connor? My phone is about to die and I don’t know when I’ll be able to call again. I haven’t had power in the house for days. Can I say good night to Connor Jr.? It must almost be his bedtime.”
“Ah, Harper,” Connor said. “I don’t know.”
“Of course she can say good night to him,” Lindy said, on Harper’s side now.
“Harp, you aren’t going to tell the little guy you’re sick, are you?”
“Of course she won’t,” Lindy said.
“I—I don’t think you should tell him about the baby, either. I don’t want him to get the idea in his head that he’s going to have a— Jesus, Harper. This is really hard.” He sounded like he was trying not to cry. “I want to put my arms around you, Sis.”
She said, “I love you, Con,” because whatever Jakob believed about those three words, they still mattered to Harper. They were as close to an incantation as any she knew, had power other words lacked.
“I’ll put Junior on,” Lindy said, her voice gentle, hushed, as if she were speaking in a church. There was a plasticky clatter as she put her extension down.
Her brother said, “Don’t be mad. Don’t hate us, Harper.” He was speaking in a whisper, too, his voice hitching with grief.
“I would never,” she said to her brother. “You have to take care of each other. What Lindy said is just right. You’re doing the right thing.”
“Oh, Harp,” Connor said. He inhaled deeply, a wet, choked breath, and said, “Here comes the kid.”
There followed a moment of silence as he passed the phone over. Perhaps because it was so quiet, Harper caught a noise in the street, the gravelly rumble and crash of a big truck moving along the road. She was unused to hearing traffic after dark, these days. There was a curfew.
Connor Jr. said, “Hi, Harper,” bringing her thoughts back to the world on the other end of the line.
“Hi, Connor Jr.”
“Daddy is crying. He says he hit his head on sumpin’.”
“You have to give him a kiss and make it better.”
“Okay. Are you crying? Why are you crying, too? Did you hit your head?”
“Yes.”
“Everyone is hitting their head!”
“It’s that kind of night.”
Something thumped. Connor Jr. cried, “I just hit my head!”
“Don’t do that,” Harper said.
Harper noticed, in a distracted, half-conscious way, that the big truck she had heard earlier was still out in the street, still rumbling.
The thump thumped again.
“I hit my head again!” Connor Jr. said happily. “We all hit our heads!”
“No more,” Harper said. “You’ll give yourself a headache.”
“I did give myself a headache,” he announced with great cheer.
She kissed the phone with a loud wet smack. “I kissed the phone. Did you feel it?”
“Uh-huh! I did. Thank you. I feel better already.”
“Good,” she said.
The knocker slammed on the front door. Harper came up off the couch, as startled as if she had heard a shot in the street.
“Did you just thump your head again?” Connor Jr. asked. “I heard you thump it real hard!”
Harper took a step toward the front hall. The thought was in her that she was walking in the wrong direction—she ought to be headed for the bedroom to get her carpetbag. She couldn’t think of a single person who might be at the door this time of the evening that she would want to see.
“Do you want a kiss to make it better?” Connor Jr. said.
“Sure. A kiss to make it better and a kiss good night,” she said.
She heard a damp smooch, and then, in a soft, almost shy tone, Connor Jr. said, “There. That should do it.”
“It did.”
“I have to go now. I got to brush my teeth. Then I get my story.”