A tide of protest goes up in the gym. They can hear the wind growing outside. There’s a need to see what is happening out there, how near or far that fire might be.
Some of the kids begin to crowd near the front door. The guard backs away. “You need to obey the perimeter,” he says.
But the smell of the smoke is getting stronger.
“What do they care if we burn alive?” says Matthew, as Mei slips her shoes on, her backpack.
Matthew tries it first. He walks quickly toward the guard.
“Stop,” says the guard, but it is suddenly obvious to everyone watching: that guard is afraid to touch him. Matthew keeps going—he walks right out the front door.
And then the crowd realizes it, too. Never before has Mei felt so connected to these other kids, to the force of them all walking out the door, quick and firm, on only the strength of their minds, as if crossing hot coals. There is a terror and a thrill, that sudden sense of purpose. She can hear the guard calling for help on his radio.
When the wind hits their faces, some tear off their masks right away, let them float off behind them like freed birds. Who knows how many of these kids carry the sickness already, the thing multiplying in their bloodstreams, even now, awaiting its moment to bloom?
But for now, on this night, they feel fine—fine!—and what they do is they run. All of them. Even Mei, her backpack pounding against her spine, and the air, slightly smoky, rushing into her throat. The wind is so violent it swallows her breath—a Santa Ana.
If the guard is calling after them, not one of them can hear his voice, too loud is the weather in their ears.
Matthew will know what to do next—this is the idea that propels her toward him in the dark. She stops where he stops, which is in the shadows of the back entrance to the library, a boy, tall and skinny, a stranger, really, leaning against a wall.
“Where can we go?” she says. Her breaths are coming fast from the sprint.
The fire is more distant than she had imagined: a slight glow, tended by helicopters, way up high in the woods. It seems suddenly clear that the fire is not what is making them run.
“I don’t know,” says Matthew. He keeps looking around. His face is half hidden in the shadows cast by the streetlights. “I don’t know.”
The other kids are streaming past, footsteps crunching quickly in the dark.
“This was stupid,” says Matthew. He is rubbing his hands together. “They’ll send a SWAT team here any second.”
But a surprising idea is forming in Mei’s head. The start of a whisper is coming up from her throat: “I think I know a place,” she says.
“What?” he calls in the wind.
Louder this time: “I know where we can go.”
She will never know the meaning of that flash of surprise on his face—the same way the boys sometimes looked at her as a child, when she revealed how fast she could run across a soccer field.
He asks no questions.
The two of them just go.
What a rush it is to provide this boy with the exact thing that is needed.
The lawn, when they get there, is wet beneath their shoes; this grass always so much healthier than the grass in other yards, no matter the drought. A row of white roses is blowing in the wind, the petals a confetti on the grass.
“I babysit here,” says Mei. The Mercedes is gone from the driveway, but the porch light is on. “They’re out of town.”
It is surprising how easy this is: as easy as turning that key, as quick as one finger punching the code for the alarm system.
Inside, the air smells like clean laundry—and like safety, too, as if no trouble can come to a home so well kept. The feeling is in the marble countertops of that enormous white kitchen, the abundance of copper pots. It’s in the miniature succulents arranged in mason jars, one in each windowsill. It’s the way the wood floors shine beneath the overhead lights, which run on a timer to make it look like the house is occupied, which, for now, it is.
“We have to take off our shoes,” says Mei.
Matthew looks skeptical, but he kicks off his sandals, one held together by tape—none of the other boys wear sandals like his. She tries not to notice how dirty his feet are as they sink into the creamy white rug in the living room.
“Where are they, anyway?” he says, while she sets his sandals on a rack in the closet, as if to say in tableau: At least we kept our shoes in the proper place. “Maybe they knew something we didn’t.”
“They’re just on a cruise,” says Mei.
Matthew laughs a private laugh. His mask now gone from his face, it’s the first time that she has really noticed his mouth, the thin lips, the beginnings of a mustache, his teeth packed tight as tile, the overcorrection of braces.
“Do you ever wonder why they need such a huge house?” he says. “I mean, what do they do with all these things?”
He lifts a small sculpture of a bird from its spot on the piano. He flies it around like a kid.
“Be careful,” she says.
Maybe they shouldn’t have come here.
Over the fireplace hangs a gleaming honey-colored guitar, someone’s signature laced across the belly. It’s not for touching—this is what she’s been telling the little girl who lives here, two years old, just beginning to understand what you can and cannot do. No touching, repeats the girl whenever she passes that guitar, no touching. But here is Matthew, reaching up for a strum.
“Oh,” says Mei. “Um, can you leave that alone?”
It’s the wrong thing to say. How embarrassing, this concern for material objects, but also: the way her voice goes up at the end, like a question, like maybe he shouldn’t be touching it?
“Relax,” he says. “Aren’t they in the middle of the ocean?”
His whole body is moving. His fingers are snapping. His feet are tapping. There is a feeling of adventure in the way he pauses to play drums on the coffee table like it’s a dashboard, the way he climbs onto the little girl’s rocking horse, the absurd bend of his long legs at the sides. And it’s a little contagious—it is—his wildness.
“I just want to close the curtains,” says Mei. “So the neighbors won’t see us.”
There are a lot of windows.
Afterward, she finds Matthew in the kitchen—with a bottle of wine in one hand, a corkscrew in the other.
“You really can’t do that,” she says.
But a moment later comes the soft pop of cork leaving bottle. A tenseness spreads through her—who knows what else this boy will do?
“It isn’t right that they have so much when some people have so little,” says Matthew. “We could pour all this down the drain as a protest.”
Instead, he pours the wine into two coffee mugs and slides one across the counter toward Mei.
“No thanks,” she says.
He laughs. It was a mistake, she knows now, to bring him here.
“Come on,” he says.
He is just standing there, staring, so she takes a tiny sip. The taste is a surprise: fresh and cool in her mouth, not at all like the heavy red wine she has tried once or twice at Katrina’s, never enough to feel more than a slight warmth on her tongue—it seemed so important, back then, not to mess with her mind. But it sounds juvenile now, like bullshit—that would be Matthew’s word.
“We have to remember to take the bottle with us when we leave,” she says. “So they don’t know we drank it.”
“That’s the least of our worries,” he says.
She takes a few more sips. Maybe she doesn’t want to be this girl anymore, this girl who follows the rules.
Now and then, the call of sirens in the distance. The chop of helicopters.
Matthew turns on the television. They sink into the couch, the cool of real leather beneath her palms.
“Look,”
says Matthew. “We’re on TV.”
On the screen is the campus, as seen from a helicopter, ringed with the flashing of police cars. Unconfirmed reports, says the reporter, suggest that as many as twenty students have left quarantine.
From this couch, the situation seems less and less urgent. It seems a little funny, actually. Matthew keeps refilling her mug.
He is saying something about American history. He is saying something about the fucked-up ethics of quarantine, civil liberties.
At a certain point, she has the urge to close her eyes. A few seconds later comes the sound of strumming. The autographed guitar from the mantel is now stretched across Matthew’s lap.
“I think that’s just for decoration,” Mei says, but she is melting into the couch.
The bottle of wine stands nearly empty on the coffee table.
“This thing is totally out of tune,” says Matthew.
Somewhere in that room is the idea that he should not be playing that guitar, but it is a concept and not a feeling, like something theoretical and not at all connected to her.
She’s getting tired, too, so tired—maybe she’s never felt so sleepy in her life. A flicker of fear makes her wince: What if this is it, the sickness finally taking over her body? But this concern quickly floats away. Something is dulling every possibility but this one: the cool calm of the leather couch beneath her palms, the softness of the cushion beneath her head.
“Hey, wait,” Matthew says. “Maybe you should drink some water before you go to sleep.”
But it’s too late. She falls asleep right there, sitting up on the couch beside Matthew. It’s a dark, oceanic sleep: deep and still, and empty of dreams.
21.
The girls: from the gym, some sprint to the parking lot, barefoot or in flip-flops, hair flying in the wind. They pack into their cars, in threes and fours, zooming toward the main road. One car is stopped by the police right away. One is found parked outside a boyfriend’s house, the girls eating pizza inside. But one car makes it through, flies right out of town, undetected. Inside that car buzzes a familiar exhilaration, a free-floating fun bubbling beneath everything. It’s in the sound of their voices, singing loud to the radio, the flashes of forest in the headlights as the road turns and turns at high speed. What a story they’ll be telling someday. The high of the near miss. They zip past cabins and campsites until there is nothing but woods in all directions. They swerve to miss a deer, headlights gleaming in its eyes. How they feel is invincible. And also, suddenly: in love—with each other, with themselves, with life! Everything is a part of it. The stars. The woods. The smell of smoke in the air. The proximity of danger—or the idea of it, anyway—is only heightening the pleasure of being eighteen years old in a fast car on a dark road on this particular night.
They make it twenty miles to the next town over, a tiny roadside place, population 250. They stop at a gas station, buy gum. One girl uses a fake ID to buy a six-pack of vodka lemonade. Money slides from her bare hands to the bare hands of the clerk. One of the other girls whispers something flirtatious into a stranger’s ear, her breath mixing with his. Their palms glide across the counter. Their hands touch the handles of the coolers as they pull out the ice cream and the wine. They finger the key chains that hang near the register.
They cannot at this moment conceive of it—the danger they present. It is impossible (impossible!) on this night and in this mood to imagine that just one day later, they will all succumb to the sleep in a room in the retro motel they will soon find down the road, or that, a few days after that, the clerk will be found slumped on this same counter late in the graveyard shift. The sleep will come for that stranger, too, who, after a few days backpacking alone, will fall asleep in his sleeping bag, deep in a remote part of these woods, and will lie there, undiscovered, for two years.
22.
You never know at the start how much damage a wildfire will do, but the following sunrise reveals only a few acres of dead trees, black and stark against the sky, the branches stripped of needles, as if winter has finally come for the evergreens.
Much later, officials will trace the spread of the sickness to this night, to the tainted exhalations of those twenty-six students as they poured down the hill through the woods into town.
But here the timeline grows murky, the chain of transmission unclear. Always, there are gaps in these narratives. A limit to what can be known. In some kinds of cracks, speculation is the one thing that takes root.
* * *
—
In the first minutes of morning, on the day after the fire, Sara is stretched out on a wooden floor, her head turning slightly in her sleep.
One of the kittens is licking up something from the floor. That’s what she wakes to, the white of those paws at eye level, the ticking of eager claws. Otherwise, the house is quiet. Sunlight.
Their father, in his bed, seems the same as before, still deep and silent in sleep.
“Dad,” she whispers. No answer.
The panic from the night before comes back in a different form: congealed. Her father has the sickness—he must.
Sara feels a swell of something else, too: that she has seen all this coming in advance, has been expecting it for years, not this disaster exactly, but some inevitable loss, some sudden coming apart, as if all those nights she lay awake worrying were all of them rehearsal for this.
Their father looks calm in his bed, and young, or younger than usual, anyway, his forehead as smooth as a sheet. How rare it is to catch that body at rest, those eyes closed.
His eyelids, Sara notices, are fluttering.
She wonders what it is he dreams of in that head. Of catastrophe, or its absence? Of a different life, or their own?
When they pull the covers back from his body, the smell of urine wafts up from his sheets.
“I think we should call someone,” says Sara. “Maybe 911.”
“No,” says Libby. “He wouldn’t want that.”
And it’s true. They know what he would say: the police are a bunch of liars, the doctors are just in it for the money, the whole system is rigged against them.
“And they’ll take us away,” says Libby. “We’ll be foster kids and never get to see each other.”
These visions have been deposited into their heads by their father. How many times has he warned them what would happen if social services took them away?
There is no grandmother to call. No aunt. There is no friend of the family who would know what to do. Always it has been just the three of them in this house, and in life. And now, in a way, it’s just the two.
In the end, it comes back to water. His body needs water, doesn’t it? They have no way of getting it into him.
Sara is the one who finally calls for help. She is the one who tells the lies that need telling. She is calling from Minnesota, she says, from her grandmother’s house, she tells the dispatcher. Her dad, back home, he might be sick, she says into the phone, with that thing, she says, that sleeping sickness. Could someone go check on him?
* * *
—
Later, the girls watch their house from the woods, the little hill at the edge of the street, knees pressed tight to their chests, as if they are only the neighbors sitting there in that dry dirt, picking at pinecones while they wait, just someone else’s girls. Sara sees now how their house must look to the neighbors, those windows boarded up, those rain gutters rusting away.
“So what,” says Libby. She is squinting in the late afternoon sun. “I don’t care what they think.”
A breeze comes up from the lake. It is colder out there than they thought, after so many days inside.
In the air: the scent of pine sap, the buzz of insects, the cries of the baby who lives next door. The mother is out front with her, pacing the porch. She has put her face up close to the baby’s cheek. Her mouth is moving, like
singing.
“That’s the smallest baby I’ve ever seen,” says Libby.
The baby’s face is red. Her eyes are squinty. She is bundled in a white knit blanket.
Before leaving the house, the girls corralled the cats down into the basement and locked it. They left the front door open for the rescuers. Their plan stretches only a few hours into the future. They will hide outside for a while. Tomorrow is a darkness. The next day unknown.
When a siren finally calls out in the distance, Sara squeezes her sister’s hand—help has come for their father. But when the double doors of the ambulance swing open, it looks like something else.
Libby gasps: four figures are descending from the van in full-body blue suits. Like astronauts, thinks Sara. Men or women—the girls can’t say which, not with those goggles and those masks, the hoods that cover their heads. They wear green rubber gloves that stretch over their hands and all the way up past their elbows. Even their shoes are encased in plastic. And aprons—each one wears a clear plastic apron over his or her suit, as if these people are butchers, here to cut up some meat.
“What are they going to do to him?” Libby asks.
“They’ll help him,” says Sara, but she isn’t so sure. Their father’s fears suddenly flower in her own mind. A surge of guilt tightens her stomach.
“I told you,” says Libby. “You shouldn’t have called.”
But it is too late. Already, these strangers in suits are crossing through the front door, soon to reappear as flashes of blue in the upstairs windows, their suits just visible above the boards on the glass.
The baby is crying again next door, but the mother has stopped rocking her. Instead, she is standing perfectly still, staring at what is happening at the girls’ house. She is holding one hand over her mouth, like someone receiving bad news. Or a shock. She has let the baby’s blanket fall loose, little pink feet sticking out in the air.
When the girls’ front door swings open again, there he is—their father—spread out on a stretcher, which swings like a coffin in the arms of the workers.
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