The Dreamers

by Karen Thompson Walker

  He looks so exposed on that stretcher, his bare chest and his boxers. She doesn’t like the way his head bobs as they carry the stretcher down to the sidewalk.

  Not everything that happens in a life can be digested. Some events stay forever whole. Some images never leave the mind.

  “He wouldn’t want this,” says Libby. She throws a pinecone into the woods. Her boyish little arms. “He would hate this.”

  “What else could we have done?” says Sara. But a tenseness is moving through her body, regret traveling the length of it, one muscle at a time.

  The soles of their father’s feet are dirty as usual and callused, and now disappearing into the white of the ambulance. One of the workers is spraying the other workers down with some kind of mist.

  The woman next door has disappeared with the baby.

  Before the van leaves, one of the suits returns to the porch with a can of something in his hand. The girls can hear the metallic rattle as he shakes the can in the air, and then the long shush-shush of spray paint gushing through a nozzle.

  “Hey,” Libby whispers. “What are they doing to our house?”

  A giant black X is now dripping down the splintered wood of the front door. They hear the rattling again, more spraying, as the worker draws a second X, this time on the side of the house.

  It takes the girls a long time to know that they are hungry. Once the sun sets over the hill, and the crickets begin to call to one another and the street is almost dark, the girls creep back into their house, quiet as criminals, and afraid to turn on the lights. They are eleven and twelve years old. They are all alone in a big house.

  23.

  Ben is waiting in the drive-through line, the car full of diapers and groceries, when he thinks to check his phone. Maybe he senses, somehow, the trouble he will find there: two missed calls from Annie, a message. “It’s me,” she says in the recording. “Come home right now.”

  He calls her from the parking lot. No answer.

  He drives home fast, baby toys rolling around in the backseat. A sensation of floating.

  The night before this day, he dreamed that he was floating in the ocean with the baby. No raft. No land. He was holding her with one arm, paddling with the other. Her head kept slumping forward into the water. That’s what the dream was about: the keeping of her nose above the swells. But she soon fell away, and the rest of the dream was just the thrashing of his arms in search of her in that dark, cold water. It went on for hours, this thrashing, but what do we know about the physics of dreams? Perhaps, in the room where he was sleeping on the floor beside her crib, only a few seconds ticked by on the baby’s whale-shaped clock.

  He speeds through town, hugging the lake.

  At a stoplight, he calls Annie again. Nothing.

  When he finally reaches his driveway, he leaves the groceries in the trunk, the car unlocked. He rushes up the stairs.

  He hears his wife’s voice before he sees her: urgent and curt. He doesn’t notice the markings on the house next door.

  “Finally,” she says from upstairs. “I’ve been calling and calling.”

  “Where is she?” he says. But the baby is right there as usual, lying on her side in her crib: blue eyes open, alive. He holds her warm head to his face. “Is she okay?” he says. She is still so small that her hands keep disappearing inside her sleeves.

  It scares him, sometimes, to remember that he did not want to have a child, as if time can sometimes run backward toward a reckoning, in which whatever is will be revoked and replaced with whatever might otherwise have been.

  “The neighbors have it,” says Annie. “They have the sickness.”

  A tenseness comes into his stomach.

  “What do you mean?” he says. But he knows what she means.

  “They brought the father out on a stretcher, just now,” she says. “Unconscious.”

  Could it waft through the air through one open window and into another? Or could it float up from the throat of a girl who so recently stood on their porch, only a few feet away from the baby?

  “And the men who came were wearing those suits,” says Annie. “You know, all plastic, no skin showing. The kind they wear for Ebola.”

  “Jesus,” he says.

  On any other day, he might have worried more for the daughters of that man, but today he can think only of his own, who right then is squirming against his chest, her immune system not yet fully formed. What an adult’s body would quickly discard might flower in the body of a newborn. He rocks her in his arms, as if she is the one who needs comfort.

  “Let’s leave,” says Annie. “Let’s just get in the car and go.” Maybe she won’t get it from the milk, she keeps saying, but if they stay in this town, she is sure to catch it some other way.

  She is stacking Grace’s clothes in a little pile on the bed, packing.

  “But they said we’re not supposed to leave town,” he says.

  Annie sighs, hard and deliberate, as if she’s been arguing with him all day.

  “I knew you would say that,” she says.

  There is something mean in her voice, something new.

  “Stay if you want to,” she says. “But I’m taking her away from here.”

  Only Annie can say a thing like that, as if she and the baby are still housed together inside one body.

  She is pulling a suitcase down from the top of the closet.

  “Let me do that,” he says. She isn’t supposed to be lifting anything yet. “If we’re going to go,” says Ben, “we better do it soon.” There is only an hour before the nurse will be back to take the baby’s temperature.

  But it takes a long time to gather up what they need. By the time the bassinet and the diapers, the clean bottles and the formula, the swaddle blankets and the pacifiers and the pump—by the time they are all lodged together in the trunk of the car, it’s time to feed her again, which means the doorbell is ringing just as Grace is finishing a bottle of formula, her eyes going droopy with the last of it, then to sleep in Annie’s arms.

  Ben feels his face radiating with the secret of their leaving.

  “Just be normal,” whispers Annie as the doorbell rings again.

  The lie is in the way Ben makes sure to take off his shoes before opening the door so that he answers it barefoot, like a man who is in for the night.

  On the doorstep stands the same nurse as before, but she’s wearing more gear: full green scrubs and a paper mask, blue gloves that stretch to her elbows.

  “The procedures keep changing,” she says through the muffle of the mask. With the back of her wrist, she nudges a strand of hair from her eyes. “Ready?” she says.

  When she sees their daughter, still dozing in Annie’s arms, a little gasp comes up from her throat.

  “How long has she been sleeping?” she says.

  “She always does this after she eats,” says Annie.

  The nurse writes something on her clipboard.

  Annie starts to get up from the couch.

  “Just stay there,” says the nurse. She holds her hand out in the air, firm, like a push. “I can take her temperature from here.”

  None of them speak while she holds the thermometer out toward Grace’s forehead. The only sound is the wind blowing through the trees, and, much closer, in parallel: the air moving in and out of their daughter’s lungs.

  Finally, the wand beeps. “No fever yet,” says the nurse.

  Ben doesn’t like the way she says it, that one word, yet, as if she can see the future in that thermometer.

  “And still no other symptoms?” says the nurse.

  Already she’s moving toward the door, her scrubs swishing as she moves. Even with the gloves, she uses as few fingers as possible to touch the doorknob, as if grasping it with pincers.

  “I’ll be back tomorrow at nine,” she
says.

  “Of course,” they say, and they nod. “See you then.”

  But by tomorrow, they’ll be a hundred miles away, in San Diego with Annie’s sister.

  * * *

  —

  Annie rides beside the baby, in the backseat—that’s the way they’ve been doing it since the start. More than anything else, these two agree on this one thing: for their daughter to ever feel alone in the world seems the worst possible thing.

  “I think she’d be sick by now if she were going to get it from the milk,” says Annie. It sounds true as she says it, as certain as science. You can’t always distinguish between reason and hope.

  She is looking for Ben’s eyes in the rearview. She is holding their baby’s hand. His little family.

  “Don’t you think?” she says.

  By the time they pass the college, Grace is asleep again. They see now, for the first time, the news vans that have been lined up on College Avenue for a week, their broad sides turning pink in the sunset while grim news flies invisibly up from their spires, some of it pouring out through the speakers in Ben and Annie’s car: thirty-nine cases, a local reporter is saying, which is almost twice the total of the day before, and still no word on what is causing it.

  Ben turns off the radio.

  They leave town the only way you can, on the road that twists up over the mountains and then down again to the valley on the other side. The houses are fewer and fewer as the road rises. And for a few minutes, in the shade of those old woods, they feel free of this thing.

  “We’ll be in San Diego by eight,” says Ben, as if the danger comes from the land itself, and all they need is a geographic cure.

  But a turn in the road reveals a long line of brake lights. A trail of cars is waiting in the dusky light.

  “I don’t see an accident,” says Ben. His hands begin to sweat on the steering wheel.

  “Let’s not get paranoid,” says Annie.

  The possibility floats between them for a moment, a quiet whiff of hope: that this is an ordinary calamity, one that can be cleared away with tow trucks while the drivers trade insurance information.

  Yes, they agree, an accident.

  But they’ve never seen so much traffic on this road.

  Ten minutes pass. Twenty. Their wheels roll so rarely that the speedometer detects no movement at all. Some of the other drivers have turned their engines off.

  The sun is sinking fast. Grace is snoring her little snores.

  In sleep, she always looks lifeless. And he is just as likely as Annie is to drop his head down close to her chest and listen for the workings of her lungs. Don’t bug her, they say to one another as she sleeps, don’t bug her, don’t bug her, but then they do it anyway, one or the other, a compulsion they have shared since her birth.

  “I want to wake her up,” says Annie. “Just to make sure. Can I wake her up?”

  Many cars ahead, two doors swing open. A man and a small boy emerge and begin to walk together along the side of the road. They stop near Ben’s car and the man points at the woods, and then the boy is walking into the woods alone. You can tell what is happening, the boy pausing to unzip his pants near a tree, his back turned to the road.

  The father, arms crossed, nods at Ben. “He couldn’t hold it,” he says, a small smile.

  There’s a camaraderie among parents that Ben didn’t recognize before. Strangers with children are not so much like strangers—he doesn’t need to know them to know a lot about their lives.

  Ben calls to the man: “Can you tell what’s going on up there?”

  The man comes a few steps closer, the sound of his shoes crunching on the dirt.

  “There’s a checkpoint up there,” he says. “They’re searching for those kids. The ones they had in quarantine or whatever at the college. The ones that got out.”

  They’re probably hiding in the woods, says the man, looking around, as if they might be watching. But he doesn’t blame them, he says. “We’re trying to get out ourselves.”

  The man notices Grace in the backseat.

  “How old?” he says.

  “Three weeks,” says Ben.

  The man shakes his head, as if Ben has said something painful.

  “Enjoy it,” he says, glancing back at his son. “You won’t believe how fast it goes.”

  Ben nods. A polite smile. But he rolls up his window—it doesn’t need to be said, how efficiently an infant proves the relentlessness of time.

  * * *

  —

  When finally they can see the front of the line, it’s dark. Real darkness, a deep sea, not like the nights they knew in New York. They can see the constellations in this black sky, but the glow of the stars is not as bright as the klieg lights that shine from the tops of the police cars, or as the flashlights that wave in their hands.

  A group of college students is standing around on the side of the road, while a police officer points a flashlight into their trunk.

  “Do you think that’s them?” says Ben. “Those kids?”

  But the backseat has gone quiet. He turns. That’s when he sees her: his wife’s head is slumped against the window, eyes closed.

  “Annie,” he says.

  Nothing.

  “Annie!” he says again. “Wake up.”

  Then he’s out of the car, and he’s swinging the back door open. He is shouting her name in the dark. A clarity of focus. He shakes her and shakes her. Her head falls forward against her seatbelt.

  The people in the car behind him are watching him now, a man and a woman. Does he need help, they are asking, but he does not hear them, and he does not see them. He sees only Annie, her face slack, her eyes closed—and their baby still sleeping in the car seat beside her.

  “Annie!” he shouts again.

  Now the baby wakes up and begins to cry—and it is her voice, and not his, that finally wakes his wife.

  “What?” she says. “What’s wrong?”

  Relief comes to him in the form of his heart beating too fast. A difficulty speaking.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” says Annie, but a sudden understanding flashes across her face. “I’m fine,” she says. She’s yawning. “I’m just exhausted.”

  It’s true that for weeks her sleep has been landing like this—sudden and unannounced, no matter the hour. Sleep when your baby sleeps—that’s what all the books advise. But right now, Ben is not thinking of all those times these past weeks when Annie has fallen asleep sitting up in a chair or when he himself has dozed off in his clothes and his shoes and without eating any dinner.

  His movements are angry as he goes back to the driver’s seat. He has an urge to slam the door—a feeling more than a thought.

  “I couldn’t do this without you,” he says, facing forward. He doesn’t need to explain what he means.

  In the rearview, he sees Annie holding a bottle up to Grace’s mouth.

  “Yes, you could,” she says, their daughter’s lips smacking against the plastic of the bottle. “You’d have to,” she says. “So you would.”

  * * *

  —

  At the front of the line, a policeman asks for their driver’s licenses.

  “What about the baby?” he says.

  Ben feels his face flush.

  “She’s only three weeks old,” he says.

  “I need every passenger’s name,” says the policeman, and so Ben gives him her name—first name, middle name, last, which still sounds new in his mouth, and weird, like something invented, which, in a way, it is.

  “Wait here,” says the policeman.

  When he looks down at his clipboard, something changes. He steps away from their car. He puts on a paper mask.

  Ben is not prepared for this. The feeling of getting caught. He wants to apologize or explain, like
a teenager trying to buy beer. But Annie touches his shoulder from behind. Don’t say anything, says her hand.

  The next time the policeman speaks, he is talking through a mask: “She’s on this list,” he says, nodding in the baby’s direction.

  Annie takes over, leaning out the passenger window.

  “What list?” she says. “She’s fine. See?”

  At that moment, Grace is staring at the warning label on the inside cushion of her car seat: a diagram of an infant’s head flying forward in response to the force of an airbag—you are never allowed to forget all the terrible things that can happen to a child if you make some kind of mistake.

  “You need to turn around, sir,” he says, as if speaking to criminals. He points to the other lane, eastbound. “You need to go home.”

  They’ve seen no other car turn around in this way, but here they are, Ben twisting the wheel, hard to the left, backing up and twisting it again. He can feel the other drivers watching him.

  “I told you we shouldn’t leave,” he says, as they ease back down the hill in the dark. “We should have stayed home.”

  A slice of moon has appeared on the horizon, but it’s not enough to light the woods.

  “If it had been up to me,” says Annie, rigid in her seat, “we wouldn’t be here at all.”

  And there it is: the thing unsaid for all these months.

  He does not speak right away, afraid of what he might say. She had a job offer in New York, but it had seemed so vital to get away from the place where things had gone wrong between them.

  Now she is talking to the baby.

  “Daddy wanted to punish me,” she says.

  This is the opening of a jar. Months of restraint give way: it turns out that all the things they haven’t said—whether from kindness or fear or something else—are still sitting there, just waiting to jump from their throats.

  But haven’t they been happy here?

  “We were so sick of New York,” he says.