“Maybe someone brought a ladder,” Albert Holmes said, when the subject was being batted around over bowls of American chop suey in the staff room.
“There’s no ladder that can reach to the third floor,” Nurse Lean said in a huffy, aggrieved voice.
“There is on a fire truck,” Al said around a mouthful of French roll.
4
In those stifling, overheated days of high summer, when a manageable crisis was teetering on the edge of an unmanageable disaster, the deaf child was not the only patient to vanish from Portsmouth Hospital. There was one other among the contaminated who escaped with her life, in the last days before everything went—not metaphorically, but literally—up in smoke.
All that month the wind blew from the north and a dismal brown fog settled over the coast of New Hampshire, swept down from the fires in Maine. Maine was burning from the Canadian border to Skowhegan, a hundred miles of blue spruce and fragrant pine. There was nowhere to go to escape the stink of it, a sweet-harsh odor of burnt evergreens.
The smell followed Harper into sleep, where every night she dreamt of campfires on the beach, roasting hot dogs with her brother, Connor. Sometimes it would turn out there were heads charring on the ends of their sticks instead of wieners. Occasionally, Harper woke shouting. Other times she woke to the sound of someone else crying out. The nurses slept in shifts, sharing a crash room in the basement, and they were all having bad dreams.
In the hospital, the infected were divided into two groups: “symptomatic normals” and “smolderers.” Smolderers smoked on and off, always ready to ignite. Smoke curled from their hair, from their nostrils, and their eyes streamed with water. The stripes on their bodies got so hot they could melt latex gloves. They left char marks on their hospital johnnies, on their beds. They were dangerous, too. Understandably, perhaps, the smolderers were always wavering on the edge of hysteria. Although there was a chicken-and-egg aspect to it: Did they panic because their bodies were constantly smoking, or did they smoke because their minds were constantly in a state of panic? Harper wasn’t sure. She only knew you had to be careful around them. They bit and they screamed. They made ingenious plans to grab the sun out of the sky. They decided they were actual dragons and tried to jump out the windows to fly. They came to believe their doctors were holding back limited quantities of a cure, and attempted to take them hostage. They formed armies, congresses, religions; plotted rebellions, fomented treasons, practiced heresies.
The rest of the patients were marked with ’scale, but were otherwise physically and emotionally normal, right until the moment they incinerated themselves. They were frightened and had no place to go and wanted to believe someone might develop a cure before their time ran out. A lot of them came to Portsmouth because even then there were rumors that the other local hospitals were simply trucking cases to the camp in Concord, a place that had turned back a Red Cross inspection team a few weeks before, and that had a tank parked by the gate.
The hospital filled every ward and the infected kept coming. The first-floor cafeteria was converted to an immense dormitory for the healthiest of the sick. That was where Harper met Renée Gilmonton, who stood out among all the others by virtue of being the only black person in a room of two hundred other patients. Renée said it was easier to spot a moose in New Hampshire than a black person. She said she was used to being stared at as if her head were on fire, people had been staring that way for years.
The cots made a kind of labyrinth, spread out across the entirety of the cafeteria, with Renée Gilmonton at the exact center. She was there before Harper came to work at the hospital at the end of June, had been there longer than anyone else walking around with the ’scale. She was fortyish, pleasantly rounded and bespectacled, gray showing in her neat cornrows, and she had not come alone: she had brought a potted mint with her, named Daniel, and a photo of her cat, Mr. Truffaut. When she had no one to talk to, she talked to them.
But Renée didn’t often lack for human company. In a former life, she had been a professional do-gooder: organized a weekly pancake breakfast for a local orphanage, taught English to felons in the state prison, and managed an independent bookstore that lost money by the bucketload while hosting poetry slams. Old habits died hard. Not long after she came to the hospital, she organized two daily reading sessions for the littlest kids and a book group for the older patients. She had a dozen lightly toasted copies of The Bridge of San Luis Rey that had been widely passed around.
“Why The Bridge of San Luis Rey?” Harper asked.
“Partly because it’s about why inexplicable tragedies occur,” Renée said. “But also it’s short. I feel like most folks want a book they feel like they have time to finish. You don’t want to start A Game of Thrones when you might catch fire all of a sudden. There’s something horribly unfair about dying in the middle of a good story, before you have a chance to see how it all comes out. Of course, I suppose everyone always dies in the middle of a good story, in a sense. Your own story. Or the story of your children. Or your grandchildren. Death is a raw deal for narrative junkies.”
Around the cafeteria, Renée was known as Mrs. Asbestos, because she didn’t have fevers, didn’t smoke, and when someone went up in flames, Renée ran toward them to try and put them out, when most people ran away. Running toward the flames was, in fact, against doctors’ advice, and she was often scolded for it. There was ample evidence that the simple stress of seeing one person ignite was enough to set off others. Chain reactions were a daily occurrence in Portsmouth Hospital.
Harper tried her best not to get attached. It was the only way to face the job at all, to keep working day after day. If she let herself care too much for any of them it would shatter her inside, the daily harvest of the dead. It would smash all the best parts of herself, her silliness and her sense of play and her belief that the kindnesses you showed others added up to something.
The full-body Tyvek protection suit wasn’t the only armor she put on to do her job. She also dressed herself in an air of glassy, professional calm. Sometimes she pretended she was in an immersive simulation, the faceplate of her mask a virtual reality screen. It also helped not to learn anyone’s name and to rotate from ward to ward, so she was always seeing different faces.
And even so, at the end of her shift she needed a half hour alone, in a stall in the women’s room, to sob herself sick. She never lacked company. A lot of nurses had a post-shift cry penciled into their daily routine. The basement ladies’ room, at 9 P.M., was a concrete box filled with grief, a vault that echoed with sniffles and shuddering breath.
But Harper fell for Renée. She couldn’t help herself. Maybe because Renée gave herself permission to do all the things Harper couldn’t. Renée learned everyone’s name and spent all day getting attached. She let kids crawling with contamination and dribbling smoke sit in her lap while she read to them. And Renée worried over the nurses at least as much as any of the nurses worried about her.
“You won’t do anyone any good if you drop dead of exhaustion,” she said to Harper once.
I won’t do anyone any good if I don’t, Harper imagined saying back. I’m not doing anyone any good, one way or another. But she didn’t say it. It would’ve been grief talking, and it was unfair to unload her sadness on someone who might not live to see another day.