“I told you to turn off that porch light,” says their father.
Sara spends the rest of the evening up in the widow’s walk, practicing her lines from Our Town, coming back again and again to that part near the end, when she’s dead and speaking from some sort of heaven, and telling Emily, the pretty one, freshly dead from childbirth, not to try to revisit her life. “When you’ve been here longer,” she says now to her reflection, slow and deep the way Mrs. Campbell has taught her, “you’ll see that our life here is to forget all that.” She looks out over the lights of the neighborhood as she speaks, the pumpkins glowing on the porches, the college buildings in dark silhouette, and the bulk of the hospital in the distance, where the sick kids lie sleeping their strange sleep. She likes the way Mrs. Campbell has explained the meaning of her last line, how the living can’t see the good in life while they’re living it. She says the line slowly now, as if she herself possesses all the wisdom in its words: “No, dear,” she says softly, buzzing with a vague nostalgia. “They don’t understand.”
She does not see who it is who picks the squash from their front yard and smashes it on the side of their house, or who writes in shaving cream on their driveway: WEIRDOS.
* * *
—
When the doorbell stops ringing and a quiet falls over the neighborhood, she finds her father hunched over the old computer, waiting, as always, for a page to load.
That computer is too slow for the girls to use it the way the other kids do. The other kids are always mentioning events that have transpired online, the flirtations and the fights, a vast second society that echoes mysteriously through the one she knows.
“I was wondering,” she says to her father. “What about the play?”
“What play?” he says.
From behind, he looks older than he is, his shoulders bony through his T-shirt, the balding spot on the top of his head.
“At school,” she says. “The one I’ve been telling you about.”
He’s typing now. He works slowly at it, as always, using only one finger and spending long seconds searching the keyboard between words, as if the letters get reshuffled each time he looks away.
“This is the first I’ve heard of it,” he says.
“It’s this Friday,” says Sara. “Remember?”
He stops typing.
“A theater full of people?” he says. “Are you kidding? Do you know how fast this thing would spread in a room like that?”
The sting of tears surprises her. It’s just a stupid play. And hers isn’t even the best part. She wipes her eyes fast. She bites down hard on her lip. The slow tap of her father’s typing resumes. Then, suddenly, Daisy the cat is beside her, rubbing her face against her shin—it seems the cats can sense it in Sara, the sadness that sometimes comes into her.
Later, Libby will do her the favor of not commenting on her tears.
“No way,” says her father. “The only safe place is right here.”
14.
On her fourth visit to Santa Lora, as she is leaving the hospital parking lot, Catherine gets a call from one of the nurses inside.
“It’s one of those sick college kids,” the nurse is saying again and again. She is out of breath. “One of those kids,” she says. Catherine can hear a commotion in the background. “One of them—he woke up.”
* * *
—
The boy is found wandering the hall in his hospital gown, IVs trailing behind him. He is barefoot on the linoleum, eyes squinting in the fluorescent lights, while in the rooms around him, the other sick go on sleeping.
But the parents: the parents jump up from their chairs and crowd out into the hall, to watch this boy walk, as if he has risen from the dead. Catherine can feel the hope radiating out of their bodies.
But he doesn’t look right, this boy. He is eighteen years old, but he is walking like an old man. His gait is slow, his limbs stiff. There’s a slight stoop in his posture.
He keeps shaking his head, as if trying to figure something out. When he speaks, his voice comes out in a whisper.
“This doesn’t make sense,” he says. He is looking around. He fingers the stubble on his chin.
“You’re in the hospital,” says Catherine, the one psychiatrist in the building. “You’ve been unconscious for four days.”
A skepticism flashes on the boy’s face.
“It’s been a lot longer than that,” he says.
You have to be gentle with delusions. It can be better not to argue.
It’s natural, she tells him, to feel confused. But confusion—this is not quite the right word. This boy’s words hum with a strange confidence.
“It’s been a long time since I was here,” he says. There’s a weariness in his face.
“What do you mean?” says Catherine.
But he stops talking. She has the feeling as he speaks that he is only thinking out loud. An odd sensation comes to her: he is treating her as if she is a hallucination, some figment of a dream.
She guides him back to his room. He asks for water. One of the nurses brings a cup.
For now, he sits calmly on his bed.
Catherine steps out of the room to call home. A change of plans: she won’t be home tonight, she tells the babysitter, who is accustomed to this kind of thing, Catherine’s overnight shifts a part of their arrangement. Her daughter gets on the phone: “When are you coming home, Mama?” Her voice is so sweet and so clear. A surge of longing comes into Catherine, her eyes blurring with unexpected tears. This boy’s parents, she remembers—someone should call his parents.
The other doctors are conferring in a cluster down the hall.
When she comes back, the boy’s room is empty.
“I asked you to watch the door,” she says to the orderly at the nursing station. She is used to the protocols of the psychiatric ward, but this is a regular hospital, not set up for supervision.
“I did,” says the orderly. “He didn’t come out of that room.”
In the boy’s room, a sudden breeze is rustling the blinds—the window is open. This room, she remembers, is on the third floor.
A terrible certainty comes into her mind, as the other doctors flood into the room behind her: whatever was happening inside that boy’s mind will remain locked forever beyond anyone else’s reach.
She pauses at the window, afraid of what she will see, knowing without knowing: and there he is, three floors below, facedown on the sidewalk, his hospital gown pooling out around his body.
The soles of his bare feet are as white as the moon. His blood shines beneath the streetlight. And his neck—obvious even from this height—is broken.
15.
Some will say later that the official response was too slow. But certain procedures are being followed. Lists are being made. Calculations. There is, after all, a mathematics of disease: how one case grows to three or four, and each of those four to four more.
A quiet arithmetic, a naming of names—this is how it comes to be that thirteen days after the first girl fell sick a nurse’s gloved finger is pressing the doorbell at the house where Annie and Ben and their baby live.
Have they heard, the nurse wants to know, about the sick kids at the college?
A burst of adrenaline comes into Ben’s blood.
She seems nervous, standing there, this young nurse in green scrubs and fresh gloves.
She is holding a clipboard under one arm. She is asking about their baby.
“Is she here?” she says. “Your daughter?”
“Why?” he says, but the details are rushing into his mind, all those reports he has only half heard. An infant can do that: shrink the world to the circumference of her throat.
“We’re taking every precaution,” the nurse says. “We’re monitoring everyone who’s had contact with the sick.” She spe
aks as if reciting the words of a script, newly learned.
“But who do we know who’s sick?” asks Ben. There’s a sudden tightness in his throat.
The nurse looks away, as if the truth embarrasses her.
“No one called you?” she says. She is tugging at the chain of her necklace; a tiny silver cross catches the light.
He’s been having nightmares about losing the baby. He wakes with a physical sensation, a terrible emptiness in his arms.
It’s the milk, says the nurse. It’s the donated milk from the hospital.
“Jesus,” says Ben. They have a freezer full of it, rows and rows of bottles, pumped from the bodies of other women. And a bag full of old bottles that Grace has already drunk.
“One of the donors,” says the nurse. “One of them might have been exposed.”
He will remember, later, the look on Annie’s face as she walks down the stairs, that last moment before she knows to be worried—that open look, flat, smooth-cheeked.
She is holding Grace in her arms, one hand on the back of her little head—that head. You can still feel the soft spots between the plates in her skull, not yet fused. Fear feels different, so much sharper, with a baby.
“Has she been feeling all right?” asks the nurse.
“Oh my God,” says Annie, bringing her hand to her mouth. “Oh my God.”
She is so sorry to bother them, says the nurse, and she’s never done this before. Her charm bracelet is clinking against the clipboard. But they’re just trying to be really careful.
“I’m supposed to ask if she’s been sleeping more than usual?” the nurse says.
“What do you mean?” asks Annie. She tries to say more, but already she is crying, this new silent cry she’s been doing so much of lately and has almost never done before—she is usually the sane one between them. She is the even keel. But now, Ben is the one who keeps having to take over, like a translator.
“She sleeps a lot,” he says.
Even then, the baby is dozing in a sunsuit, mouth open, in Annie’s arms.
“I need to take her temperature,” says the nurse.
She does not have children, this woman—he is sure of it. It’s in the way she speaks to them so carefully, as if from some great distance. He’s been seeing everyone that way, lately, sensing who has had children and who has not, as if he can suddenly see all the strings that bind one person to another.
Soon the nurse is holding a wand a few inches from Grace’s forehead, no contact. It’s the same kind of thermometer they used in the hospital in those first few hours of her life when her body was still learning to regulate its own temperature, and her limbs, so accustomed to life underwater, were squirming slowly, like a jellyfish moving in a current.
“They said it was sterilized,” says Ben. “I thought the milk was supposed to be sterilized.”
The nurse’s hands are shaking as she holds the thermometer over Grace’s head. She is standing as far away as she can. She keeps having to start over.
“There was some kind of mistake,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
Behind her, the porch swing is rocking lightly in the wind. A dog is barking somewhere. Grace begins to open and close her lips like a fish.
Finally the beeping: no fever. A tiny ping of relief.
But someone will be back to do it again in the morning, says the nurse. They’ll have to do it twice a day.
In the meantime, they should stop using the milk. They should throw out whatever they have left, and switch to formula.
And there is one more thing: “We have to ask that you keep her at home for now,” she says. She is peeling off her gloves. She is already backing away. “And also,” she says, “please don’t leave town.”
* * *
—
For weeks, they’ve been learning to coax Grace to sleep. There is a certain way to swaddle her, a certain rhythm at which she likes to be rocked. They have a turtle that projects lights through its shell and a seahorse that plays soothing music. But she sleeps best to the beating of their hearts, which is why they’ve spent so many hours, both of them, with the tiny heft of her head pressed against their chests, her back curved, her fists clenched, the one bringing the other water or coffee or a few bites of grilled cheese, while the other moves as little as possible for fear of waking Grace up.
But now, they are afraid to let her close her eyes.
Ben skims in an hour all the stories they haven’t read, the two weeks of coverage of the sickness so far. The reports conflict, how serious it is or not. He can’t figure out how many have died. It is hard to find the real facts.
But the warmth of Grace’s body in his lap—this is a fact. And the way her eyes drift between his face and the glow of his laptop—this is a fact, too. The rising and falling of her chest is a fact, and the knowing every second that air is moving in and out of her lungs.
“It’s my fault,” says Annie. “This is my fault.”
“It’s the hospital’s fault,” says Ben.
He is reading the directions on the formula they’ve been keeping in the cupboard, just in case they ever ran out of the donor milk.
Annie is trying to nurse her. There is magic in human milk—that’s what they’ve been told. Antibodies and hormones, secret messages, even. Any drop Annie can give is a drop she should give. But her milk, as usual, runs out quickly, and Grace is soon pulling away from her chest, rooting around for some other source.
She soon sucks down the formula, and there is an animal comfort in knowing that their baby’s belly is full.
She is a quiet baby. Everyone says so. But is she quieter than usual tonight? Maybe this thing is already hiding in her bloodstream. Maybe it’s slipping into her little brain, even now.
They do not wear gloves when they touch her. They do not keep a distance from her breaths. They do not even think of it that night: that their baby might be a threat to them. Why say it, this truth that is implicit between them after only three weeks: that if anything ever happened to her, well, what would it matter what happened to them after that?
* * *
—
In the morning, Annie takes Grace’s temperature right away: normal. She looks normal, too. Eyes wide, cheeks pink. Her legs wag as usual on the changing table. What a perfect little being—in knit cap and footed pajamas, and those miniature fingers perched in her mouth. How is it possible that their bodies knew how to make her?
But soon Grace is screaming in Ben’s ear. It’s a mood that sometimes rolls through her, and only Annie can soothe her when she gets like this.
After a while—and he feels guilty thinking it—he wants to get away. Here is what he has learned about loving a baby: the time away from her is vital to the pleasure of being with her.
“How about I go get her more formula,” he says to Annie. His keys are already jingling in his hand.
Annie is examining her little forehead. “Did they say anything about a rash?”
“She’s always had that,” says Ben. He remembers those dots from the first time he held her, in the white light of the operating room, that startled look on her face, Annie’s blood on the linoleum.
There’s an urgency in the way he is tying his shoes, in the way he is searching for a hat to cover the hair he hasn’t washed in a week. He hasn’t left the house in two days.
But then the door is closing behind him, and he’s out. And there it is: the rush of those first minutes alone, the smooth glide of the car backing out of the driveway—even that is a part of it, the satisfaction of something moving according to his will. How quiet it is out in the world—that’s what he’s noticed since the baby was born—and how orderly. A flock of black birds is drifting over the mountains in formation. A serene voice on public radio is introducing a piece of jazz. A lightness comes into him as he drives, like a first sip of whisky n
umbing his throat, a quickly spreading calm.
This town, these neighbors walking their dogs on the streets—this does not look like a place where a plague is right now unfolding. You can draw a lot of comfort from the normalcy of others—if this thing were really spreading, would the neighbors be raking their lawns? Would the mailman be delivering catalogues?
He takes the long way, along the lake. He stops for a coffee and feels the wonder of it, this thing he hasn’t done since Grace was born: to drink a whole cup while it’s hot.
But by the time he is standing in the baby aisle of the drugstore, he is starting to worry again. He is beginning to miss her. At three weeks old, their book has said, her mind cannot grasp the idea that an object continues to exist even after it leaves her sight. But Ben feels that way, too, as if whenever his daughter is out of his view, she might easily slip out of the world.
16.
By now, certain alternate theories are beginning to circulate online. It’s the government, they say. Or it’s Big Pharma. Some kind of germ must have gotten loose from a lab at the college.
Think about it, they say: Do you really believe that a completely new virus could show up in the most powerful country on earth without scientists knowing exactly what it is? They probably engineered it themselves. They might be spreading this thing on purpose, testing out a biological weapon. They might be withholding the cure.
Or maybe there’s no sickness at all—that’s what some have begun posting online. Isn’t Santa Lora the perfect location for a hoax? An isolated town, surrounded by forest, only one road in and one road out. And those people you see on TV? Those could be hired victims. Those could be crisis actors paid to play their parts. And the supposedly sick? Come on, how hard is it to pretend you’re asleep?
Maybe, a few begin to say, Santa Lora is not even a real town. Has anyone ever heard of this place? And look it up: there’s no such saint as Santa Lora. It’s made-up. The whole damn place is probably just a set on some back lot in Culver City. Don’t those houses look a little too quaint?
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