I didn’t know if I said the word or only thought it.
The shriek of another shutter grating through its metal slats was followed by a muted wallop. A single flash of light issued from the garages and evaporated into the daylight outside. My feet slid out from under me, and I was falling as an ice-blue flare roared from the low entrance. Then orange fire mushroomed out and broke apart to dance in eddies up to the sky.
As I scrambled up, reaching for Charlie, whose mouth was already shouting, I dragged him backward across the gravel by his shirt, cannon booms echoing inside my ears, and saw his lips press together and apart as he yelled, “Pe-ter!”
I crashed onto my backside and pressed my hands over my face. Through my filthy fingers I watched a broiling torch dart from the low entrance and run, shrieking, straight toward us.
Chapter Fourteen
Buzzing. Somewhere nearby there was the buzz. I had my hand under Peter’s head as he lay, limp and submerged, in a claw-footed cast-iron bath, the cows’ drinking trough in the field next to the shed. I tried not to disturb him as I cast around to see where the body lay, where the buzz was coming from. I screamed at Charlie to get back to the car, but he didn’t seem to hear me. Joni came running across the stackyard, and I screamed at her to find the buzz. “It’s near here,” I screamed. “It’s right here somewhere.” Joni reached us and stopped a few feet away, staring down into the bath. She raised her shoulders to her ears and folded her arms across her breasts. Shaking her head, she turned away. “No,” I saw her mouth saying, “no, no.”
“The buzz, Joni!” I screamed again. “There’s a body here; where is it?” I was possessed with the idea that it was hidden on the other side of the bath, that I’d failed to notice it when I ran behind Charlie with Peter in my arms and flung him into the cold water. Charlie must be right by it, he might touch it, and the plague will get him. But I couldn’t reach him, and I couldn’t let Peter go or he would sink under the water. “Joni! Joni, for fuck’s sake, is it there? Is the body there? There’s buzz every-fucking-where.” It was loud, so loud in my ears.
Joni was still shaking her head and clutching herself, but she seemed to come to. She took a couple of steps around the bath before inching closer, looking at Peter all the time.
There’s no body, she said. There’s no buzz.
“There’s buzz!”
“It’s in your ears.” She pointed at her ears. I realized I was lipreading. The buzz was in my ears. It pulsed in time with my rabid heartbeat. I lifted my free hand to my right ear, but when it came away I couldn’t tell if the fingers were bloody from me or from Peter’s burnt skin. In the bath, his body tensed rigid, his eyes opened, and he began to shriek again.
Make it stop. Make it stop. Make it stop. In the twilight of the yurt, I pulled Charlie close to me as his muscles contracted in response to his friend’s screaming. Billy seemed to have opted into a fitful sleep. Maggie was hiding under her hair, scribbling with crayons on a piece of paper alongside the Lost Boy. The yurt offered no escape from the sounds of pain. Peter’s fit went on until our muscles reached exhaustion. Charlie let out a sob, and I kissed his head over and over, as though I could suck up his anguish and swallow it with my own. Make it stop. Make it stop. Make it stop. Peter stopped, but only for a few minutes. Then he started screaming again.
“Enough,” I said, out loud. My voice still sounded far away, though the buzzing had faded. I almost wished for it back.
Inside the food tent, we had covered the trestle table with cling film and laid Peter on it. He writhed when the fits came, presumably from the discomfort of lying on his burnt back. The slightest movement hurt him so much, it was impossible to imagine driving him around to look for a hospital: that much pain would surely kill him. Besides, what state would the hospitals be in?
So we stayed put. I feared he could slip off the cling film table, but Joni said we had to stop the burns from getting dirty as he had no protection against infection. Already, the skin where we had cut away his clothes was raw and glistening. His limbs were a butcher’s counter of pink flesh.
My hand hung in the air over his body. I thought I could look at him, that I could bear it—that I must bear it—but like I had when we stripped him earlier, I turned away. I stood close by, to catch him if he should fall, but I turned away from the sight of him.
He stopped screaming, but he tried to raise his head, as though looking for me.
“Mama?” he said, his voice soot dry. “Sorry, Mama. I hurt myself.”
He raised his drooling hand toward me.
Make it stop. Make it stop.
I took the hand as gently as I could, letting the less-burnt palm rest in mine, without touching the raw back.
“Mama’s here, Peter,” I lied. “Mama loves you. Sleep now.”
Make it stop.
Joni sat on the cooler beside his head. She hadn’t looked at me even once since I came into the tent. She had on a pair of latex gloves from the first-aid kit. Next to her on the trestle table was a tube of calendula cream, unopened. It didn’t look like she had done anything but sit there since I left her, as she had requested, to see to him. Peter fell still, and even his eyelids stopped moving. I bent to check the slight rise and fall of his chest that showed he was breathing, then I laid his ruined hand back onto the table.
“What do we need, Joni?”
She rotated her head up to me, as though she were the one having trouble hearing.
“What do we need to treat Peter, Joni?”
“Help,” she said. “We need help.” She dropped her gaze to the table, to a spot off to the side of Peter’s head where the cling film was smeared with a runny yellow mucus.
“And failing that? What do we need to treat him ourselves?”
She held up the tube of cream. “I only know calendula,” she said. “‘A topical herbal remedy for the symptomatic relief of sore and rough skin, including light abrasions, chafing, minor burns, or sunburn.’ That’s what it says right here.” She waved the tube at me. “What do you reckon, Marlene, should I rub it into his sunburn, huh? Apply three times a day and hope he doesn’t die of shock first?”
Peter still had his shoes on. The synthetic fabric of his socks had so burnt into the skin around his ankles that we dared not pull them off. But I could see that his legs were swelling, so I reached down to release the Velcro tabs to ease the pressure. Even that slight movement set him off, turning his head and moaning, and I knew it would be just seconds before he started screaming again.
“He needs something for the pain, Joni. Where will I find morphine? Would a GP stock morphine, do you think?”
She didn’t answer but just leaned close by Peter’s ear and started humming a low tune.