“I’m not going to Concord. I’ve heard stories about the facility there.”
“Yeah. That it’s a death camp.”
“You don’t believe it?”
“Of course I believe it. Everyone who goes there is infected with this shit. They’re all going to die. So of course it’s a death camp. By definition.” He opened the door onto the hot, smoky day. “I wouldn’t send you there. You and me are in this together. I’m not giving you up to some faceless agency. We’ll handle this ourselves.”
Harper thought he meant this statement to be reassuring, yet, curiously, she was not reassured.
He walked down the steps and onto the curving path that took him out of sight in the direction of the garage. He left the door open, as if he expected her to come outside to watch him go. As if this were required of her. Maybe it was. She belted the robe, crossed the short length of the foyer, and stood in the doorway. He carried his bike out into the drive, hauling it over one shoulder. He didn’t look back.
Harper lifted her head to peer into Portsmouth. A filthy sky lowered above the white steeple of North Church. Smoke had hovered over town all summer long. Harper had read somewhere that 12 percent of New Hampshire was on fire, but didn’t see how that could be true. Of course that was pretty good compared to Maine. Maine was all the local news talked about. The blaze that had started in Canada had finally reached I-95, effectively cutting the state in two, a burning wasteland almost a hundred miles across at its widest point. They needed rain to put it out, but the last weather system to move that way had evaporated in the face of the heat. A meteorologist on NPR said the rain had fried like spit on the surface of a hot stove.
Coils of smoke rose here and there, brown, dirty loops climbing from the Strawbery Banke. There was always something burning: a house, a shop, a car, a person. It was surprising how much smoke a human body could throw when it was engulfed in flame.
From her spot on the front step, she could see down the road, toward South Street Cemetery. A car rolled slowly through the graveyard, along one of the narrow gravel lanes, trundling ahead the way a person will when trying to find an open space in a crowded parking lot. But the passenger-side window was down, and fire was gushing out. The interior was so filled with flames, Harper could not see the person who must’ve been sitting behind the wheel.
Harper watched the car roll off the road and into the grass, until it thunked gently to a stop against a headstone. Then she remembered she had come out to watch Jakob ride away. She looked around for him, but he was already gone.
SEPTEMBER
8
Two days later her left arm was sheet music. Delicate black lines spooled around and around her forearm, bars as thin as the strands of a spiderweb, with what looked like golden notes scattered across them. She found herself pulling her sleeve back to look at it every few minutes. By the end of the following week, she was sketched in Dragonscale from wrist to shoulder.
One day she pulled her shirt off and glanced at herself in the mirror on the back of her armoire and saw a belt riding just above her hips, a tattoo in gold and black. When she got over feeling winded and sick, she had to admit to herself that it was curiously beautiful.
Sometimes she took off all her clothes except her underwear and examined her new illustrated skin by candlelight. She wasn’t sleeping much, and these inspections usually took place a little after midnight. Much as it was possible to imagine a visage in a flickering fire, or a figure in the grain of a wooden surface, she thought she saw half-finished images scrawled in the ’scale.
That was usually when Jakob called, from the dead man’s trailer. He wasn’t sleeping, either.
“Thought I ought to check in,” he said. “See what you did with yourself today.”
“Puttered around the house. Ate the last of the pasta. Made an effort not to turn into a heap of coals. How are you?”
“Hot. It’s hot here. It’s always hot.”
“Open a window. It’s cool out. I’ve got them all open and I’m fine.”
“I’ve got them all open, too, and I’m roasting. It’s like trying to sleep in an oven.”
She didn’t like the angry way he talked about not being able to cool off or the way he fixated on it, like the heat was a personal affront.
Harper distracted him by talking about her condition in a languid, almost breezy tone. “I’ve got a swirl of ’scale on the inside of my left arm that looks like an open umbrella. An umbrella sailing away on the wind. Do you think the spore has an artistic impulse? Do you think it reacts to the stuff you’ve got in your subconscious and tries to ink your skin with pictures you might like?”
“I don’t want to talk about the shit you’ve got on you. I get shaky thinking about it, about that disgusting shit all over you.”
“That makes me feel nice. Thank you.”
He let out a harsh, angry breath. “I’m sorry. I’m—I’m not unsympathetic.”
She laughed—surprising not just him, but herself. Good old Jakob used such smart, picky words sometimes. Unsympathetic. Before he dropped out of college he had been a philosophy major, and he still had the habit of hunting through his vocabulary for exactly the right term, which, somehow, inexplicably, always made it the wrong term. He corrected her spelling sometimes, too.
Harper wondered, idly, why it took getting contaminated to notice the marriage itself was sick.
He tried again. “I’m sorry. I am. I’m boiling. It’s hard to be—thoughtful.”
A cross-breeze fanned through the room, cool on her bare tummy. She didn’t know how he could possibly be hot, wherever he was.
“I was wondering if the Dragonscale started doodling Mary Poppins’s umbrella on my arm. You know how many times I’ve seen Mary Poppins?”
“The Dragonscale isn’t reacting to your subconscious. You are. You’re seeing the kinds of things you’re already primed to see.”
“That makes sense,” she said. “But you know what? There was a gardener in the hospital who had swirls of this stuff up his legs that looked just like tattoos of crawling vines. You could see delicate individual leaves and everything. Everyone agreed it looked like ivy. Like the Dragonscale was making an artistic commentary on his life’s work.”
“That’s just how it looks. Like strands of thorns. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I guess it couldn’t be in my brain yet, so it couldn’t really know anything about me. It takes weeks to pass up the sinuses to the brain. We’re still in the getting-to-know-each-other phase of the relationship.”
“Christ,” he said. “I’m burning alive over here.”
“Boy, did you call the wrong person for sympathy,” she said.
9
A couple of nights later she poured herself a glass of red wine and read the first page of Jakob’s book. She told herself if his novel was any good at all, the next time she talked to him she would admit she had looked at some of it and tell him how much she loved it. He couldn’t be angry at her for breaking her promise never to look at the manuscript without permission. She had a fatal illness. That had to change the rules.
But after one page she knew it wasn’t going to be any good and she left it, feeling bad again, as if she had wronged him somehow.
A while later, after a second glass of wine—two weren’t going to do any harm to the baby—she read thirty pages. She had to quit there. She couldn’t go any further and still be in love with him. In truth, maybe thirty pages had been three too many.