He had not looked at her once while he recounted the story of his courtship. Instead he stared at his own shadow, which rose and fell in an almost tidal motion as the firelight pulsed in the open furnace. “I spend more time thinking about the things I wish we had done than I do thinking about the things we did do. It was like we opened the perfect bottle of wine and each shared a sip . . . and then a clumsy waiter knocked the bottle to the floor before we got to have any more.
“The first time I saw the spore was at a luncheon presentation at the Boston Mycology Society, three months before Seattle.” He didn’t need to explain what he meant by Seattle. She knew he was talking about the Space Needle. “A fellow named Hawkins who’d just returned from Russia gave a forty-minute PowerPoint on it. I don’t know what scared me more, the photos or Hawkins himself. His mouth kept drying out. He drank half a pitcher of water while he was standing behind the podium. And he spoke in such a low voice you had to strain to hear what he was saying. We were all just catching little bits: ‘disease vectors,’ ‘contagion points,’ ‘cellular combustion.’ Meanwhile he’s flashing these horror-movie pictures of charred corpses, all teeth and blackened meat. I can tell you, no one went back to the buffet for seconds, but the bar sure was busy. This guy, Hawkins, said in closing that while there were only seventy-six known deaths in Kamchatka as a direct result of the spore, this had resulted in wildfires that had ended the lives of 530 other people. There had been almost eighty million dollars of damage to urban areas and the Russians had lost forty-three hundred acres of the richest timberland in the world. Hawkins said that three recent cases in Alaska suggested the pathogen might have a mode of transmission different than traditional viruses and that further study was urgently required. Based on his math, a quarter million sick in the United States would easily lead to the deaths of more than twenty million people and would turn over six million acres into an ashtray.”
“How much is that?”
“About the size of Massachusetts. I have to say, he scared the hell out of us at the time, but in retrospect, he was far too conservative. I suppose his calculations didn’t consider a social breakdown so severe there would be no one left to fight the fires.
“But, you know . . . by dinnertime, I had mostly quit thinking about it. It didn’t take long to feel like just one more of this century’s possible but unlikely apocalypses, like an epidemic of bird flu wiping out billions or an asteroid cracking the planet in half. You can’t do anything about it, and it’s happening to poor people on the other side of the world, and the kids need help with homework, so you just stop thinking about it.
“As much as I could stop. It was in the subject header of every e-mail and the top thirty threads on every message board in the mycology community. There were webinars and conferences and a presidential committee. There was a report to the Senate. For a while I followed along out of academic interest. Also, you know me, Nurse Willowes, how I do like to show off. What I learned about the spore gave me great cachet at backyard barbecues. I don’t think it hit me, on a human level, that this thing was ever going to reach our backyard until Manitoba started burning and no one could put it out. That was about a month before the first Boston cases.
“But what good was it knowing? If it was a plague like other plagues, you’d hide. Head for the woods. Take the people you love, hole up somewhere, bolt the door, and wait for the infection to burn itself out. This, though. One person carrying the spore could start a fire that would wipe out half a state. Hiding in the woods would be like hiding in a match factory. At least cities have fire departments.
“I can tell you exactly when and how I caught it. I can tell you where we all were when we caught it, because of course we were together. We had a little party for Carol’s thirtieth birthday at the very beginning of May. Sarah and I had just moved in together. We had a little pool, though it was so cold no one wanted to go in except Sarah. It wasn’t much of a party, just Tom and the kids and Sarah and Carol and myself and a gluten-free cake for the birthday girl.
“Sarah and I often had late-night debates as to whether or not Carol had ever been laid. She had been engaged, as a younger woman, for five years, to a very devout young man who everyone knew was a homosexual except, apparently, Carol. He was, I think, one of these decent, haunted young queers who are drawn to religion because they’re hoping to pray the gay away. Sarah told me she didn’t believe they had ever slept together, although they exchanged some very passionate e-mails. Carol dropped in on her fiancé by surprise, while the boy was doing a residency at a theological institute in New York, and discovered him in bed with a nineteen-year-old Cuban dance student.
“I asked Sarah once if she thought Carol herself might be gay, and she frowned about it for a long time and finally said she thought Carol mostly just hated the idea of sex itself. She hated the idea of mess. Carol wanted love to be like a bar of soap: a purifying, hygienic scrub. She also said that Carol had full possession of their father and that was the only man who had ever really mattered to her.
“Carol and Sarah could be quite wary of each other. When Sarah was teenage and pregnant, Carol sent her a scolding letter about breaking their father’s heart and promised never to speak to her again. And she did, in fact, stop talking to her until Nick was born. Sarah made a place for her little sister back in her life, but things were always uneasy between them. Carol could compete for attention in a way that was so childish it was sort of funny. If Sarah was winning at Scrabble, Carol would put on a coughing fit, say she had come in contact with an allergen, and make her father drive her to the hospital. If Sarah and Tom started talking about Victor Hugo, Carol would insist Sarah couldn’t really appreciate his novels because she hadn’t read them in the original French. Sarah just laughed that sort of thing off. I think she felt too sorry for Carol to compete with her and went out of her way to do nice things for her. Like the birthday party.
“I was just building up the energy to go inside and get another beer when there was a big thud—like something heavy falling off a truck a long way off, something so heavy it made the water shudder in the pool. Everyone glanced around—even Nick, who felt the vibration through his feet.
“Sarah stood in the shallow end, looking goose-bumpy and blue in the lips and very pretty, listening to hear if there was going to be something more. Nick saw it first—a black, oily tower of smoke, coming from the end of the block. There was another thud and another and then several close together, loud enough to shake the windows and make the silverware jump.
“Sirens wailed. Sarah said she thought it was the CVS drugstore on the corner and asked if I would look down the street and see.
“A lot of the neighbors had come out onto the sidewalks and were standing under the trees. The breeze turned and blew the smoke down the street. Oh, it stank. Like roasting tires and foul eggs.
“I made my way down the block until I could see the CVS. One side was a roiling wall of red flame. A woman wept on the curb, using her T-shirt to mop up her tears. I had a hanky, so I handed it to her and asked if she was all right. She said she had never seen anyone die before. She told me a guy on a motorcycle had slid into the wire cabinet outside the drugstore, the one full of propane cans. They went off like a string of the world’s largest firecrackers. Someone said it was a hell of an accident, and she said it wasn’t just an accident. She said the guy was on fire even before he hit the propane tanks. She said it was like Ghost Rider. She said his helmet visor was up and there was a burning skull in there—flame and grinning teeth.