She took a deep breath to tell him about going home—and then sidetracked herself again, saying, “Did you always want to be a fireman? How long have you been dressing like one? Since childhood?” That was the adrenaline talking. She wondered if this was how people felt after skydiving. Her hands had a tremor.
“Not at all. I wanted to be a rock star. I wanted to wear leather pants and spend weekends in bed with stoned fashion models and write songs full of pretentious riddles.”
“I didn’t know you were musical. What instrument did you play?”
“Oh, I never got around to learning an instrument. Seemed like too much work. Also, as my mother was deaf and my father a bully, musical education wasn’t a priority in my family. The closest I ever got to the rock-star life was selling drugs.”
“You were a drug dealer? I don’t think I like that. What drugs?”
“Hallucinogenic mushrooms. Seemed a sensible way to turn a profit on my degree in botany. Mycology had always been my field of study. I sold a form of psilocybin called Smurfpecker that was quite blue, quite popular, and quite delicious with eggs. Do you want to split a Smurfpecker omelet with me sometime, Nurse Willowes?”
She turned her back on him, to give him privacy so he could pull on his pants. “The Dragonscale—that’s a kind of spore. A fungus. You must know a lot about it.”
He didn’t reply. She glanced back and his face was composed into a look of benign innocence. He wasn’t even trying to pick up his pants. They were still snarled around his feet. It irritated her that he wouldn’t get dressed. It made him more of a creep than she had hoped he would be. She looked away once more.
“Is that why you can control it? Use it? Keep from burning alive like you’re coated in asbestos? Is it because you understand something about it other people don’t understand?”
He made a soft humming sound and said, “I’m not sure I understand the ’scale so much as I’ve helped it to understand me. The pans are in the box under the furnace.”
“Why do I need a pan?”
“Aren’t you going to make us eggs?”
“You have eggs?”
“No. Don’t you? In that grocery bag of yours? For God’s sake, Nurse Willowes, you must’ve brought me some goodies!”
“I am sorry to say I did not bring you eggs or French roast or morphine. Instead I hiked three miles and nearly walked right into a Cremation Crew to get a brace for your elbow and tape for your wrist. My ex-husband among them.” She felt an unexpected prickle in the back of her eyes that she refused to let become anything more. “I also brought you some great loose tea because I’m nice and I thought it would cheer you up and I haven’t even asked for thanks. All I’ve asked is for you to put on your pants, but you won’t even do that, because I assume you get off on being naked and seeing if it rattles me.”
“I can’t.”
“Can’t what? Can’t say thanks? Can’t apologize? Can’t show basic human courtesy?”
“I can’t put on my pants. I can’t bend over and pick them up. It hurts too much. And you’ve been very kind and of course I should’ve said thanks. I’m saying it now. Thank you, Nurse Willowes.”
The contrition in his voice deflated her in some way. She was coming down off her adrenaline buzz now, a tide receding to reveal the fatigue beneath.
“I’m sorry. It has been a long couple of days. And I just got through the worst part of it. I went back home to salvage some supplies and Jakob turned up, with a crowd of new friends. One of them was that bully on the radio, the Marlboro Man, the one who’s always bragging about all the burners he’s executed. I had to hide. For a long time.”
“You went home? Alone? Why didn’t you send someone?”
“Who? The Lookouts are all kids. Starved, overtired kids. I didn’t feel like putting one of them at risk. I couldn’t send you, not with your ribs like they are. Besides, I knew where to look for the things I wanted. It just seemed to make more sense to go myself. You didn’t tell me what happened to my house.”
“That your ex decided to remodel with a two-ton snowplow? I felt like you had lost enough for one week. Why pile on? Are you all right?”
“I was . . . scared. I heard them talking about me. They talked about you, too.”
“You don’t say!” he said. He sounded pleased.
“Yes. They talked about a man with weaponized Dragonscale, someone who can throw flame, and who goes around dressed as a fireman. They couldn’t decide if you were real or an urban legend.”
“Ah! Halfway to being a rock star at last!”
“Mostly they talked about things they’ve done to people who are sick. The Marlboro Man keeps track of the numbers for the whole Cremation Crew, was talking about who’s killed the most overall, who’s murdered the most in one day, who killed the ugliest girl, who killed the hottest girl. It was like he was talking about the stats for his fantasy baseball team.”
The Marlboro Man had praised Jakob for “busting his nut” on New Year’s Day. It was several minutes before Harper realized the Marlboro Man was not talking about sex, but murder. Jakob had used his Freightliner to T-bone a Nissan with a sick family in it, a man, a woman, and their two children. The car had been pancaked. The bodies came squeezing out of the wreckage like toothpaste, or so the Marlboro Man said. Jakob had accepted the Marlboro Man’s praise without comment, expressing neither pride nor horror.
What a curious thing: to think the man she had married, a man she had loved and been devoted to, had gone on to commit murders. Had killed and meant to kill again. Eighteen months ago, they had spent their nights cuddled on the couch, watching Master of None.
“I was scared I’d start shaking and they’d hear me. They’d hear my teeth chattering. Then they left, and when I knew I was okay—that I was going to leave the house alive—I—I felt—like someone threw a grenade at me and then for some reason it didn’t explode. I walked out of there with my head full of cotton fluff and my legs all rubber. Aren’t you going to give me a talking-to?”
“For being an idiot and blithely walking right into trouble?”
“Yes.”
“Naw. I can’t think of two qualities I admire more in a person. Glad you came back, though. I haven’t had coffee in days.”
When she turned around, the Fireman was yawning, a fist covering his mouth and his eyes squeezed shut, and the sheet had dropped to show the line of his hip. Harper was surprised by her own reaction to the sight of his scrawny, hairy self, the dense pelt of hair on his sunken and battered chest. She felt an immediate twitch of physical want, florid and absurd, where there had been none a minute before.
She marched to the bed, feeling there was safety in briskness. “Raise your legs.”
He lifted his feet. She tugged his fireman pants up to the knees, then sat down beside him and slipped an arm under his armpits.
“On three, lift your skinny ass.” But she did most of the lifting and when she scooped him up, she heard it: the whistling inhalation, the shuddering start of a gasp, quickly bitten off. What little color was in his face drained away.
“The worst bit isn’t the pain when I move. It’s the itch in my chest. After every breath. Can’t sleep the way it itches.”
“Itch is good. We like itch, Mr. Rookwood. Bones itch when they’re knitting back together.”
“I suppose it will feel better after you tape up my chest.”