Al tightened his arm across the Fireman’s windpipe, cutting off the air, choking him out. The same move had killed Eric Garner in New York City only a few years before, but it had never gone out of style. His other hand had pulled the halligan down and in, trapping it against the Fireman’s chest.
If Harper had been able to focus, she might’ve found the Fireman’s reaction peculiar. He didn’t let go of the halligan, but he wasn’t struggling to free himself from Albert’s choke hold, either. Instead, he was biting the fingers of the black glove on his left hand. He was pulling the glove off with his teeth when Harper spoke, in a clear, ringing voice that caused them both to go still.
“Nurse Lean? We need a gurney to get this child into a CAT scan. We should prep for abdominal surgery. Maybe there’s someone in pediatrics who can handle it?”
Nurse Lean looked past the Fireman, her face stony, her gaze distant and distracted. “What’s your name? You’re one of the new girls.”
“Yes, ma’am. I was brought in three weeks ago. When they put out the call for volunteers. Harper. Harper Grayson.”
“Nurse Grayson, this isn’t the time or place—”
“It is. It has to be. He has either a burst appendix or one that is about to burst. Also, do we have a nurse who knows sign language? This child can’t hear.”
The Fireman was staring at her. Al was staring, too, gaping at her over the Fireman’s shoulder. By then Al had relaxed his arm, letting the other man breathe. The Fireman rubbed his throat with his left hand—he had quit trying to pull his glove off—and beamed at her with a mix of appreciation and relief.
Nurse Lean’s face had darkened again, but she seemed flustered. “You can’t make that diagnosis without a CAT scan.”
“I can’t make that diagnosis at all,” Harper said. “But I’m just—I’m sure. I used to be a school nurse and I had a boy with this last year. Look, do you see the way he’s covering up?” She glanced at the Fireman, frowned, locked into something else he had been trying to tell them. “Building collapse—you said he was ‘right there.’ Did you mean he was in the building, with his mother, when it fell?”
“Yes. That is exactly what I was trying to explain. She was killed. He was struck by some debris. We pulled him out and at the time he seemed physically, well, a little battered, but nothing serious. And when he stopped eating and responding to people, we put that down to the shock. Then, this morning, he came up with sweats and couldn’t sit up without pain.”
“If he took a blow to the abdomen it could’ve damaged his appendix. When was his last bowel movement?”
“I can’t say I keep track of when the kids go poo. I reckon I can ask, though, if this gentleman wanted to let me go.”
Harper shifted her gaze to Albert, who stood there baffled, mouth hanging slightly open.
“Well,” she said, and for the first time her voice was cross. “Let him go. Spit spot.” Spit spot was a favorite of Mary Poppins, and Harper had, since childhood, liked to substitute Julie Andrews–isms for profanity whenever possible. It gave her a steely feeling of control and reminded her of her best self at the same time.
“Sorry, ma’am,” Al mumbled, and not only removed his arm from the area of the Fireman’s throat but carefully helped to steady him before stepping back.
“Lucky for me you let go when you did,” the Fireman said to him, no anger or dislike in his voice at all. “Another minute and instead of dropping off a patient, I would’ve been one myself.” The Fireman crouched down next to the boy, but paused to offer Harper another smile. “You’re good. I like you. Spit spot!” He said it as if the words really meant well done!
He turned to face Nick, who was brushing tears away with his thumb. The Fireman moved his hands in a series of brisk gestures: closed fists, a pointed finger, a hand squeezed shut and another hand flying open from it. Harper thought of a man playing with a butterfly knife, or running through scales on some fantastic but invisible musical instrument.
Nick held out three fingers and pinched them together, as if he were grabbing for a fly in the air. Harper knew that one. Most people knew it. No. There was a little more after that she couldn’t catch, his hands, arms, and face all in motion.
“He says he can’t go to the bathroom. That he tried and it hurts. He hasn’t gone to the bathroom since the accident.”
Nurse Lean blew a hard puff of air, as if to remind everyone who was in charge. “Right. We’ll have your son looked at . . . spit spot. Albert, will you radio for a gurney?”
“I told you already—he’s not my son,” the Fireman said. “I auditioned for the part, but the play was canceled.”
“You aren’t family, then,” Nurse Lean said.
“No.”
“That means I won’t be able to let you go with him while he’s examined. I’m—I’m very sorry,” Nurse Lean said, sounding, for the first time all day, not just uncertain but also exhausted. “Family only.”
“He’ll be afraid. He can’t understand you. He understands me. He can talk to me.”
“We’ll find someone who can communicate with him,” Nurse Lean said. “Besides. Once he goes through these doors he’s in quarantine. The only people who go in there have Dragonscale or work for me. I can’t make any exceptions on that, sir. You told us about the mother. Does he have any other family?”
“He has—” the Fireman began, paused, frowned, and shook his head. “No. There isn’t anyone left. No one who could come and be with him.”
“All right. Thanks—thank you for bringing him to our attention. We’ll take care of him from here. We’ll get him all sorted out.”
“Give me a moment?” he asked her, and looked back at Nick, who was blinking at fresh tears. The Fireman seemed to salute him, then to milk an imaginary cow, and finished by pointing at the boy’s chest. Nick’s response required no translation. He leaned into the Fireman and let himself be hugged: gently, gently.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that, sir,” Nurse Lean said. “You don’t want to get what he has.”
The Fireman didn’t reply—and he didn’t let go until the double doors batted open and a nurse pushed a gurney into the hall.
“I’ll be back to check on him.” The Fireman lifted the boy in both arms and set him on the rolling cot.
Nurse Lean said, “You won’t be able to see him anymore. Not once he’s in quarantine.”
“Just to inquire about his welfare at the front desk,” the Fireman said. He offered Albert and Nurse Lean a sardonic but not ill-humored nod of appreciation and turned back to Harper. “I am in your debt. I take that very seriously. The next time you need someone to put out a fire, I hope I’m lucky enough to get the call.”
Forty minutes later, the kid was under the gas, and Dr. Knab, the pediatric surgeon, was cutting him open to remove an inflamed appendix the size of an apricot. The boy was in recovery for three days. On the fourth day he was gone.
The nurses in recovery were sure he had not walked out of his room. The window was wide open and a theory made the rounds that he had jumped. But that was crazy—the recovery room was on the third floor. He would’ve shattered both legs in the fall.
“Maybe someone brought a ladder,” Albert Holmes said, when the subject was being batted around over bowls of American chop suey in the staff room.
“There’s no ladder that can reach to the third floor,” Nurse Lean said in a huffy, aggrieved voice.
“There is on a fire truck,” Al said around a mouthful of French roll.
4
In those stifling, overheated days of high summer, when a manageable crisis was teetering on the edge of an unmanageable disaster, the deaf child was not the only patient to vanish from Portsmouth Hospital. There was one other among the contaminated who escaped with her life, in the last days before everything went—not metaphorically, but literally—up in smoke.