“I’m sorry.” Sweat crawled at the Fireman’s temples. “You don’t understand. This boy—”
“What’s wrong with him? Besides the same thing that is wrong with everyone else?” Nurse Lean said.
The boy was more or less the most beautiful child Harper had ever seen. His dark, curly hair was a delightful tangle above eyes the lucid pale green of an empty Coke bottle. He had on shorts and everyone could see the marks on the back of his calves: black, curving stripes, tattoolike, delicate and almost ornate.
Without any trace of concern in her voice, Nurse Lean added, “If you aren’t infected, you shouldn’t be holding him. Are you infected?”
“I’m not here about me,” said the Fireman. It only came to Harper much later that this was a neat way of not answering. “He’s not touching me.”
It was true. The boy in his arms had his head turned and his cheek plumped against the Fireman’s turnout jacket. Still: if the Fireman wasn’t sick, he was either idiotically fearless or just idiotic.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“His stomach,” the Fireman said. “There’s something wrong with his stomach. He can barely stand—”
“It’s very hot in here,” Nurse Lean said. “I’m sure he’s not the only child with a stomachache. Go to the end of the line and—”
“No. No. Please. This child recently lost his mother. She was in a building collapse a few days ago.”
Nurse Lean’s shoulders slumped and for a moment a kind of glum sympathy was visible on her features. For the first and only time she seemed to look not at the Fireman but at the boy curled in his arms.
“Ah. That’s rotten. Listen, sweetheart, that’s just rotten.” If the boy was listening, though, he gave no sign. Nurse Lean lifted her gaze to the Fireman and was abruptly glaring again. “Something like that, who wouldn’t have a stomachache?”
“Hang on, now. Let me finish. A building fell and killed her and he was there, he was right there—”
“There are trained counselors who can talk to this boy about what happened to him and maybe even get him something fizzy and sweet for his dyspepsia.”
“Dyspepsia? Are you listening to me? He doesn’t need a Coke and a smile, he needs a doctor.”
“And he’ll get one, when it’s his turn.”
“I picked him up an hour ago and he screamed. Does that sound like dyspepsia to you, you incurious twat?”
“Hey,” said Albert Holmes. “No one needs that mouth—”
Nurse Lean’s face darkened to a scalding shade of red. She spread her arms out to either side, like a small child playing airplane.
“YOU AND THAT BOY WILL GO TO THE BACK OF THE LINE, OR YOU WILL BE ADMITTED TO THE EMERGENCY ROOM WITH THAT STEEL ROD OF YOURS JAMMED UP YOUR NARROW LIMEY ASS! DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?”
If Nurse Lean had shouted this way at Harper, she would’ve burst into tears. It was staggering—like walking into a gale. Children in line covered their ears, hid their faces against their mothers’ legs.
The Englishman didn’t so much as buckle. He glared. Harper was only faintly conscious of the fact that the boy didn’t flinch either. In fact, he was staring at Harper, his eyes dreamy and damp, a little adrift. She assumed he was just faint from the heat, but it turned out there was more to it than that.
Harper tried again. “Sir? I’m sure I can help you. We can discuss the boy’s symptoms at the back of the line and if he needs immediate attention, I’ll bring a doctor right to him. If his stomach is bothering him, we don’t want to upset him with a lot of yelling. Let’s take this down the hall. Please. You and me . . . how ’bout it?”
All the anger went out of his face in an instant and he looked at her with the flicker of a weary smile. The boy might have lost his mother, but Harper saw then, for the first time, that the Fireman was in grief himself. She could see it in his eyes, a kind of exhausted glaze that she associated with loss.
“Do you fancy the Dire Straits too? A kid like you? You must’ve been chewing your blocks the last time they had a hit.”
“I don’t follow,” she said.
“You and me . . . how ’bout it? Dire Straits?” he said, cocking his head and giving her an inquisitive look.
She didn’t know what to say, wasn’t sure what he was talking about. He stared for a half instant longer, then gave up. The Fireman squeezed the boy gently, then set him on his feet with great care, as if he were handling a fragile vase filled to the brim with water. “His name is Nick. Do you want to walk Nick to the back of the line?” he asked Harper. “And then I can carry on my conversation with this lot?”
“I think you should both come with me,” she said to the Fire man, but she took the boy’s hand. Her rubber glove squeaked softly.
She could see the child wasn’t well. His face was waxy beneath his freckles and he swayed on his feet. Also she could feel a troubling heat in his soft, child-chubby fingers. But then a lot of people with the spore ran fevers, and the spore itself was often two to three degrees above body temperature. No sooner, though, had the Fireman set him down than the child bent at the waist with a pained grimace.
The Fireman crouched before the child and leaned his halligan against his shoulder. He did an odd thing then: he closed his hands into fists, showed them to the boy, then made an odd patting gesture, as if he were imitating a dog pawing at the air. The boy made the grimacing face and a funny teakettle sound, unlike anything Harper had ever heard from a child in distress; it sounded more like a squeak toy.
The Fireman craned his head to look back at Harper, but before he had a chance to speak, Albert Holmes moved, closed a hand around one end of the halligan.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the Fireman said.
“Sir? Let go of the weapon.”
The Fireman tugged on it. Al tugged back, harder, pulling him off balance, and then he had an arm around his throat. The Fireman’s bootheels squealed on the tiles as he kicked for purchase, tried to get his feet under him.
Harper observed their wrestling match the way she might’ve glimpsed the passing scenery on an accelerating carousel. She was playing back what she had just seen—not only the odd way the Fireman had swatted at the air, but the way it looked as if the boy were straining to lift a weight beyond the limits of his strength.
“You’re deaf,” she said to the child, but of course she was really only talking to herself. Because he was deaf.
She had, at some point in nursing school, had a single day of instruction in American Sign Language, of which she remembered nothing. Or at least, she didn’t think she remembered anything of what they had taught her. But then she found herself pointing her fingers at her ribs and twisting them, as if she were hand-screwing something into her own sides. She patted low on her abdomen. Does it hurt here?
Nick nodded uncertainly. But when she reached to feel beneath the hands cupped over his abdomen, he stumbled back a step, shaking his head frantically.
“It’s all right,” she said, enunciating slowly and with great care, on the off chance he could read lips. She had picked up, somewhere—maybe in that one-day class on ASL—that the very best lip-readers could only understand about 70 percent of what they saw, and the majority of deaf fell far short of that. “I’ll be careful.”
She reached once more, to probe his midsection, and he covered up again, backing away, a fresh sweat glowing on his upper lip. He keened softly. And then she knew. Then she was sure.