“Mm, no, I’m sorry, that isn’t done anymore. We don’t want to constrict lungs that need to breathe. But I would like to strap up that wrist of yours and slip this brace on your elbow.”
She inched the elastic brace up his forearm, shifted it into place, then went to work on his swollen, hideously bruised wrist. Harper pressed cotton pads to either side of the wrist, then wound medical tape around and around, up the wrist and down it, creating an almost stiff but comfortable cast around the joint. After, she lifted the right arm for a look at his discolored side. Harper traced her fingers over his ribs, carefully seeking out each fracture. She tried not to take any pleasure at all in the knuckles of his spine or the scrollwork of Dragonscale on his skin. He looked like an illustrated man from a carnival. There was no guessing how many people the Dragonscale had killed, but for all that, she could not help thinking it was very beautiful. Of course she was desperately horny. That didn’t help.
“You might be in for worse than a tongue-lashing from Ben Patchett,” the Fireman said. “And you might receive a very unhappy look and some great sad sighs from Tom Storey. Nothing makes a person feel more low and ashamed than disappointing the old man. It’s like telling a department-store Santa you know his beard is fake.”
“I don’t think I’ll be in trouble with Father Storey.”
He gave her a sharp, searching look and all the humor dropped from his expression. “Better let me have it, then.”
She told him about trepanning Father Storey’s skull with a power drill and disinfecting it with port. She told him about Ben in the meat locker and the handcuffed prisoners and the dish towel full of rocks. Then she had to go back in time to tell him about her last talk with Father Storey, in the canoe.
The Fireman did not ask many questions . . . not until she recounted her final conversation with the old man.
“He was going to exile some poor girl for stealing a teacup and cans of Spam?”
“And a locket. And the Portable Mother.”
He shook his head. “Still. That doesn’t seem like Tom.”
“He wasn’t going to exile her because she stole. He was going to exile her because she was dangerous.”
“And he knew this because he had confronted her over her thefts and she—what? Threatened him?”
“Something like that,” Harper said.
But she frowned. It was hard to remember now precisely what Tom had said and how he had said it. It seemed like a conversation that had happened months, not days, ago. She found it maddeningly difficult to recall what he had told her about the thief; there were moments when it seemed to her he had never mentioned theft at all.
“And for some reason he decided he needed to go into exile with this thief?”
“To look after her. He was going to search for Martha Quinn’s island.”
“Ah, Martha Quinn’s island. I like to imagine it’s crowded with refugees from the eighties, wandering about in spandex and leopard fur. I hope Tawny Kitaen is there. She was at the center of all my earliest sexual fantasies. Who was Tom going to leave in charge of camp?”
“You.”
“Me!” He laughed. “Are you sure he didn’t say all this after getting conked in the head? I can’t imagine anyone worse for the job.”
“How about Carol?”
He had been smiling, but at this his look became unhappy again. “I like Carol for high holy priest about as much as I’d like another kick in the ribs.”
“You don’t think she means well?”
“I’m certain she means well. When your government was waterboarding poor sods to find bin Laden, they meant well. Carol’s father was a moderating influence on her, a calming force on a brittle personality. Without him, well. Carol has Quarantine Patrols, the police, and Cremation Crews threatening her from the outside. She has the thief and those two prisoners to create pressure from the inside. Fear does not incline people to be moderate in their use of extreme tactics. Especially not people like Carol.”
“I don’t know. She didn’t even want the job. She turned it down three times before she accepted.”
“So did Caesar. I only wish Sarah—” He broke off and cast a frustrated look toward the furnace. Then he dropped his gaze and tried again. “It’s not that Sarah would’ve kept Carol in check, or tried to wrest the camp from her, or any of that. But she would’ve tried to throw her little sister a line if she saw her drowning. That’s what I’m worried about, you know. Bad enough that Carol might drown in her own paranoia. But what’s worse is that drowning victims will pull others down with them, and right now she has her arms around the entire camp.”
A knot snapped in the furnace with a dry, roasted crack.
“What was Sarah like? Not like Carol, I guess. More like Tom?”
“She had Tom’s sense of humor. She also had more steel than anyone I’ve ever met. She threw herself at things like a bowling ball. You see some of that in Allie, you know. Sarah always made me feel like one of the ten pins.” He cast a long, slow, considering look at the flames leaping in the furnace . . . then turned his head and gave Harper a sweet, almost boyish smile. “Which I guess is a fairly accurate description of a certain kind of love, innit?”
7
“What is there to say about Sarah before she met me? Pregnant at seventeen by her piano instructor, an angelically beautiful Lithuanian only a few years older than her. Cast out of the private academy where her father was a professor. Tom, her best friend in the entire world, and the most forgiving man she knows, says terrible things to her and sends her off to live with relatives. Finishes her senior year in disgrace at a public high school, baby bump under her sweaters. She gets married in a town office the day after she accepts her diploma. Her Lithuanian, humiliated and unable to get a job teaching, returns to private lessons, which is when Sarah discovers that screwing his students is one of his nervous tics. No matter—she stays married because if she left him she’d have to go home, and she’s promised herself she’ll never ask her father for another single thing in her life. Instead she decides the only way to save the relationship is to have another baby. Am I going too quickly? I promise we’ll get to the interesting part in a moment.”
“Which part is that?” Harper asked.
“The part where I come into the story. Nick is born. Nick is deaf. The father suggests putting him up for adoption, since he can never have a relationship with a defective brat who can’t appreciate his music. Sarah suggests her husband find a new place to live and throws him out. He kicks through the screen door at four A.M. one October night and threatens the whole family with a badminton racquet. Sarah has a restraining order leveled against him. He responds by showing up at Allie’s elementary school, supposedly to take his daughter to a dental appointment, and promptly disappears with the kid.”
“Jesus.”
“He was arrested four long days later, in a motel near the Canadian border, where he was trying to figure out how to reach Toronto without a passport for his daughter. I gather he had notions of getting to the Lithuanian embassy and trying to scuttle back to Europe with her. He was out on bail when he hung himself.”
“Sounds like Sarah and me both picked our husbands in the same shop,” Harper said.
“There was one good thing to come out of the piano tutor’s last waltz. In those terrible days when Sarah didn’t know where Allie was, her father showed up on her doorstep to do what he could for her. He made sure Sarah ate and slept, held her when she cried, saw to Nick’s needs. It was his chance, you see—to be the father she wanted, the father Sarah had believed he was before he so completely, colossally failed her. I know Tom, and I doubt he ever completely forgave himself for turning away from her when she was a frightened pregnant kid.