Free The Fireman by Joe Hill Page B

looked like before I was a book.

    She had taped a picture of herself directly beneath. It was a photograph her father had taken of her, when she was nineteen years old and teaching archery for the Exeter Rec. Department. The kid in the photograph was a gangly girl with pale hair, ears that stuck out, bony boyish knees, and scrapes on the insides of her arms from accidents with the bowstring. Pretty, though. In the photo, the sun was behind her, lighting her hair in a brilliant ring of gold. Jakob said it was her teen angel picture.
    Below it she had taped a reflective silver square, something she had clipped out of a magazine ad. Beneath it she wrote: Do we look alike? She had a lot of ideas about what belonged in the book. Recipes. Instructions. At least one game. The lyrics of her favorite songs, which she would’ve sung to the baby if she’d had a chance: “Love Me Do,” “My Favorite Things,” “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.”
    There would be no girly-girly tragic stuff if she could help it. As a school nurse, she had always modeled herself on Mary Poppins, aiming for an air of good-tempered calm, self-assurance, a tolerance for play, but an expectation that the medicine would go down along with the spoonful of sugar. If the kids thought it was possible she might break into song and shoot fireworks from the tip of her umbrella, that was all right with her.
    Such was the tone she was trying to nail in the baby book. The question was what a child wanted from his mother; her answer was Band-Aids for scrapes, a song at bedtime, kindness, something sweet to eat after school, someone to help with homework, someone to cuddle with. She hadn’t figured out how to make the book cuddly yet, but she had stapled a dozen Band-Aids into the inside cover, along with four prepackaged alcohol swabs. She felt the book— The Portable Mother —was off to a roaring good start.
    When the phone rang, she was in front of the TV. The TV was always on. It had not been off in six months, except in the occasional spells when there was no power. She had electric at the moment and was parked in front of the screen, although she was working on the book, not really paying attention.
    There was nothing to watch anyway. FOX was still broadcasting, but from Boston, not New York. NBC was on the air, but from Orlando. CNN was on the air, too, in Atlanta, but the evening news anchor was a man named Jim Joe Carter, a Baptist preacher, and his reports were always about people who had been saved from the spore by Jesus. All the rest of the channels were HSB, the Homeland Security Broadcast, or local news programs, or static. The HSB was broadcast from Quantico, Virginia. Washington, D.C., was still burning. So was Manhattan. She had the TV tuned to FOX. The phone rang and she picked it up. She knew it was Jakob even before he spoke. His breath was strange and a little choked and he didn’t say anything, not at first.
    “Jakob,” she said. “Jakob, talk to me. Say something.”
    “Do you have the TV on?”
    She put down her pen. “What’s wrong?”
    Harper had not known how she would be with him, the next time they spoke. She worried she would not be able to keep the resentment out of her voice. If Jakob thought she sounded hostile, he would want to know why, and she would have to tell him. She could never keep anything from him. And Harper didn’t want to talk about his book. She didn’t even want to think about it. She was pregnant and crawling with a flammable fungus and she had recently learned Venice was burning, so now she was never going to get to see it by gondola. With all that going on, it was a bit much to expect her to provide a literary critique of his shitty novel.
    But he laughed—roughly and unhappily—and the sound of it rattled her and caused her to forget her resentment, at least for the moment. A part of her thought, calmly, clinically: hysteria . God knew she had seen enough of it in the last half a