Harper looked sidelong at Nick, who was bent to his bowl of oatmeal, paying them no mind, and for the moment showing no sign at all of the tummyache that had brought him to the infirmary.
“That would sound better if a Cremation Crew didn’t turn up while I was home,” Harper said. “If they had found me, they would’ve made me talk before they killed me. My husband was with them. My ex. He would’ve made me talk. I can see it in my head. I can picture him asking me questions in a very calm, reasonable voice, while he uses a pair of garden shears to take off my fingers.”
“Yeah. Well. That part is—I don’t know what to make of that part. I mean, what are the odds they’d show up at your house when you were there? That’s like being struck by lightning.”
Harper considered telling Renée about the Marlboro Man and his secret broadcast—the radio station he claimed to hear in his thoughts, his psychic transmission from the future—then decided she didn’t want to think about it. She ate her biscuit instead. In the honey, she tasted jasmine, molasses, and summer. Her stomach rumbled, a sound as loud as someone sliding furniture across the floor, and the two women traded looks of comic surprise.
“I wish I could do something to tell Allie I’m sorry,” Harper said.
“Did you try telling her you’re sorry?”
“Yes.”
“Then that’s over and done. That should be enough. She’s—she’s not herself, Harp. Allie and I never got along all that well, but now she’s like someone I don’t even know.”
Harper would’ve replied but for the moment was swiftly tucking away the last of the biscuit. It had looked big in her palm but had vanished with disappointing haste.
“Things are going bad here,” Renée said. Harper half thought she was kidding and was caught off guard by the unease she saw in the other woman’s eyes. Renée offered her a tired, crooked smile and went on: “You missed a good scene in the school this morning. I give the kids a twenty-minute recess after our little history class. They can’t go outside, but we block off half the chapel with pews to give them some space to run wild. I noticed Emily Waterman and Janet Cursory whispering together in one corner. Once or twice Ogden Leavitt wandered toward them and the two girls shooed him away. Well, I brought everyone together after recess for storytime, but I could tell Ogden was feeling blue, trying not to cry. He’s only seven and he saw his parents die—killed trying to run from a Quarantine Patrol. He only recently started talking again. I had him in my lap and I asked him what was wrong, and he said Emily and Janet were superheroes and he wanted to be a superhero, too, but they wouldn’t tell him the magic rhyme and he thought secrets were against the rules. Janet was angry and called him a tattletale, but Emily went pale. I told Ogden I knew a rhyme for superpowers: Be-bop-a-loo-loo, You have superpowers, too! He cheered right up and said now he could fly and I thought, Good job, Renée Gilmonton, you’ve saved the day again! I tried to steer things back to story time, but then Emily stood up and asked if she could carry a stone in her mouth to make up for keeping secrets. I said that rule was only for serious secrets, grown-up secrets, but Emily looked ill and said if she didn’t atone, she wouldn’t be able to sing along in chapel, and if you didn’t sing and join the Bright you could catch fire. That scared Janet, who started begging for a stone, too.
“I tried to reassure them. I told them they hadn’t done anything they needed to atone for. Harper—they were just being kids. But then Chuck Cargill heard the commotion and wandered over. He’s one of Allie’s friends, about Allie’s age. In the Lookouts, of course. And he said it was really cool they wanted to do penance like big kids and if they each had a stone in their mouths for ten minutes, it would clean the slate. He got them both stones and they sucked on them all through storytime, looking like Cargill gave each of them a lollipop.
“You want to know the worst part, Harp? As soon as story time was over, Ogden ran over to Chuck Cargill and announced he had been hiding comic books under his bed and asked if he could do penance, too. By the end of school half the kids had stones in their mouths . . . and Harp. They were shining. Their eyes were shining. Just like they were all singing together.”
“Oxytocin,” Harper muttered.
“OxyContin? Isn’t that a pain medicine?”
“What? No. Nothing. Forget it.”
“You missed morning chapel today,” Renée said.
“I was rigging up a feeding line for Father Storey.” She nodded back at the old man. A plastic pouch of apple juice hung from the armature of a floor lamp next to the cot. The tubing did two loop-de-loops before disappearing up his nostril.
Renée said, “It’s different now, without Father Storey.”
“Different how?”
“Before, when everyone joined the Bright, it was like—well, everyone compares it to being a little drunk, right? Like having a few swallows of a really good red wine. Now it’s like the congregation is throwing down jars of cheap, filthy moonshine. They sing themselves hoarse and then after they just . . . hum for a while. Stand there swaying and humming, with their eyes burning.”
“Humming?” Harper asked.
“Like bees in a hive. Or—or like flies around roadkill.” Renée shuddered.
“This happens to you, too?”
“No,” Renée said. “I’ve had trouble joining in. Don Lewiston, too. And a few others. I don’t know why.”
But Harper thought she did. When she had first read Harold Cross’s notes about oxytocin she had thought, randomly, of soldiers in the desert and burning crosses in the night. She hadn’t seen the connection then, but she did now. Oxytocin was the drug the body used to reward people for winning the approval of their tribe . . . even if their tribe was the KKK, or a squad of marines humiliating prisoners in Abu Ghraib. If you weren’t part of the tribe, you didn’t get the payoff. Camp was dividing itself, organically, naturally, into those who were in—and those who were threats.
Renée gazed disconsolately across the room, and in a drifting, absentminded voice, said, “Sometimes I think it would be better if one of these days we just . . .”
Her voice trailed off.
“We just—what?” Harper asked.
“Just helped ourselves to one of the cars and some supplies and took off. Gather up the last few sensible people in camp and run. Ben Patchett has all the car keys hidden somewhere, but we wouldn’t have to worry about that. We’d have Gil, and he can—” She caught herself, went silent.
“Gil?”
“Gilbert. Mr. Cline.”
Her face was a studied, falsely innocent blank. Harper wasn’t fooled for a moment. Something teased her memory, a terrible tickling in the mind, and then it came back to her. In the summer, when Renée Gilmonton was a patient at Portsmouth Hospital, she had told Harper about volunteering at the state prison, where she had organized and led a reading group.
“Do you two know each other?” Harper asked, but the answer was in Renée’s bright, startled eyes.
Renée glanced at Nick, who sat now with the empty bowl in his lap, watching them both attentively.
“He doesn’t read lips,” Harper said. “Not really.”
Renée smiled at Nick and mussed his hair and said, “Glad to see he’s recovering from that stomachache.” She lifted her chin, met Harper’s stare, and said, “Yes, I knew him straightaway, the moment I saw him. Well, New Hampshire is a small state. It would be a shock if some of us didn’t know each other from our former lives. He was part of the book club I led, up in Concord. I’m sure most of the men there joined the reading group just for a chance to talk to a woman. Standards drop after you’ve been locked up awhile, and even someone almost fifty and built like Mr. Potato Head starts to look good.”
“Oh, Renée!”
Renée laughed and added, “But Gil cared about the stories. I know he did. He made me nervous at first, because he kept a notebook and wrote down everything I said. But eventually we got comfortable with each other.”