After she shut off the lights in the nurse’s office, she stood at the window and looked out into the playground. There was a black spot by the jungle gym where the fire department had hosed away the charred bits that couldn’t be scraped up. She had a premonition she would never return to her office and look out this window again, and she was right. School was suspended statewide that evening, with assurances they would reopen when the crisis passed. As it happened, it never passed.
Harper imagined she would have the house to herself, but when she got home, Jakob was already there. He had the TV on, turned low, and was on the phone with someone. From his tone—calm, steady, almost lazy—a person would never guess Jakob was in a state of excitement. You had to see him pacing to know he was keyed up.
“No, I didn’t see it myself. Johnny Deepenau was down there in one of the town trucks, pushing the debris out of the road, and he sent us pictures from his cell phone. It looked like a bomb went off inside. It looked like terrorism, like . . . hang on. Harp just walked in.” Her husband lowered the phone, pressed it to his chest, and said, “You came home the back way, didn’t you? I know you didn’t come through downtown. They’ve got the roads all sewed up from North Church to the library. The whole town is crawling with cops and National Guard. A bus exploded into flames and crashed into a telephone pole. It was full of Chinese people infected with that shit, the Dragonscale shit.” He let out a long, unsteady breath and shook his head—as if it shocked him, the nerve of some people, igniting in the middle of Portsmouth on such a nice day—and turned from her, put the phone back to his ear. “She’s fine. Didn’t know a thing about it. She’s home and we’re going to have a good old shouting match if she thinks I’m letting her go back to work anytime soon.”
Harper sat on the edge of the couch and looked at the TV. It was tuned to the local news. They were showing footage from last night’s Celtic game, just like nothing was happening. Isaiah Thomas rose up on his toes, fell backward, and let go of the basketball, hit a shot from nearly half court. They didn’t know it then, but by the end of the following week, the basketball season would be over. Come summer, most of the Celtics would be dead, by incineration or suicide.
Jakob paced in his rope sandals.
“What? No. No one got off,” he said into the phone. “And it may sound harsh, but there’s a part of me that’s glad. No one to pass it on.” He listened for a bit and then, unexpectedly, laughed and said, “Who ordered the flaming pupu platter, right?”
His pacing had taken him all the way across the room to the bookshelf, where there was nothing to do but circle around and come back. As he turned, his gaze drifted to Harper again and this time he saw something that stiffened his back.
“Hey, babygirl, are you all right?” he asked her.
She stared at him. She couldn’t think how to reply. It was a curiously difficult question, one that required a certain amount of introspection.
“Hey, Danny? I have to go. I want to sit with Harper for a minute. You did the right thing, going to pick up your kids.” He paused, then added, “Yes, all right. I’ll send you and Claudia the pictures, but you didn’t get them from me. Love to you both.”
He ended the call, lowered the phone, and looked at her. “What’s wrong? Why are you home?”
“There was a man behind the school,” Harper said, and then a wedge of something—an emotion like a physical mass—stuck in her throat.
He sat down with her and put a hand on her back.
“Okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”
The pressure on her windpipe relaxed and she found her voice, was able to start again. “He was in the playground, staggering around like a drunk. Then he fell down and caught fire. He burned up like he was made of straw. Half the kids in school saw it. You can see into the playground from almost every classroom. I’ve been treating kids in shock all afternoon.”
“You should’ve told me. You should’ve made me get off the phone.”
She turned to him and rested her head on his chest while he held her.
“At one point I had forty kids in the gym, and a few teachers, and the principal, and some were crying, and some were shivering, and some were throwing up, and I felt like doing all three at the same time.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No. I passed out juice boxes. Cutting-edge medical treatment, right there.”
“You did what you could,” he said. “You got who knows how many kids through the most awful thing they’ll ever see in their lives. You know that, don’t you? They’re going to remember the way you looked after them the rest of their lives. And you did it and now it’s behind you and you’re here with me.”
For a while she was quiet and motionless inside the circle of his arms, inhaling his particular odor of sandalwood cologne and coffee.
“When did it happen?” He let go of her, regarded her steadily with his almond-colored eyes.
“First period.”
“It’s going on three. Did you eat lunch?”
“Uhn-uh.”
“Light-headed?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Let’s get some food into you. I don’t know what’s in the fridge. I can order us something, maybe.”
Who ordered the flaming pupu platter? Harper thought, and the room tilted like the deck of a ship. She steadied herself on the back of the couch.
“Maybe just some water,” she said.
“How about wine?”
“Even better.”
He got up and crossed to the little six-bottle wine cooler on the shelf. As he looked at one bottle, then another—what kind of wine did you pair with a fatal contagion?—he said, “I thought this stuff was only in countries where the pollution is so thick you can’t breathe the air and the rivers are open sewers. China. Russia. The Former Communist Republic of Turdistan.”
“Rachel Maddow said there’s almost a hundred cases in Detroit. She was talking about it last night.”
“That’s what I mean. I thought it was only in filthy places no one wants to go, like Chernobyl and Detroit.” A cork popped. “I don’t understand why someone carrying it would get on a bus. Or a plane.”
“Maybe they were afraid of being quarantined. The idea of being kept from your loved ones is scarier than the sickness for a lot of people. No one wants to die alone.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Why die alone when you can have company? Nothing says ‘I love you’ like passing along a horrible fucking fatal infection to your nearest and dearest.” He brought her a glass of golden wine, like a cup of distilled sunshine. “If I had it I’d rather die than give it to you. Than put you at risk. I think it would actually be easier to end my own life, knowing I was doing it to keep other people safe. I can’t imagine anything more irresponsible than going around with something like that.” He gave her the glass, stroking one of her fingers as he passed it to her. He had a kind touch, a knowing touch; it was the best thing about him, his intuitive feel for just when to push a strand of her hair behind her ear, or smooth the fine down on the nape of her neck. “How easy is it to catch this stuff? It’s transmitted like athlete’s foot, isn’t it? As long as you wash your hands and don’t walk around the gym in bare feet, you’re fine? Hey. Hey. You didn’t go close to the dead guy, did you?”
“No.” Harper did not bother to stick her nose in the glass and inhale the French bouquet as Jakob had taught her, when she was twenty-three and freshly laid and more drunk on him than she would ever be on wine. She polished off her sauvignon blanc in two swallows.
He sank down next to her with a sigh and shut his eyes. “Good. That’s good. You have a horrible need to look after people, Harper, which is fine in ordinary circumstances, but in some situations a girl has to look after—”
But she wasn’t listening. She had frozen, leaning forward to set her wineglass on the coffee table. On the TV, the program had cut away from hockey highlights to an old man in a gray suit, a newscaster with shy blue eyes behind his bifocals. The banner across the bottom of the screen said BREAKING NEWS SPACE NEEDLE ON FIRE.