He dismisses it, of course. Of course. It’s a crazy idea, like some kind of hallucination, he figures. An idea from the old stories he assigns to his students, where angels carry messages and witches speak in riddles, where kings and princes are visited by ghosts in their dreams.
Something is happening to his memory. For example, if his mind were working properly, would he have forgotten to clear the silverware from the kitchen sink before using the sink as a bathtub for the baby?
The serrated edge of a knife comes suddenly bobbing up in the soapy water near the baby’s thigh. His horror comes in the shape of Annie’s voice in his head: Ben, he hears her say, what the hell?
And this, too, didn’t this, or something like it, happen once before, in a dream?
A symptom of delusion, he recalls, is the inability to distinguish between reality and dream.
* * *
—
One afternoon, Ben discovers what everyone else in town already knows: the two gas stations have run out of gas. More is coming, the soldiers keep saying, but they won’t let the gas trucks through.
“Think about it,” says the guy in front of Ben in line at the gas station, as Grace begins to cry in her seat. “Why would they want us to have gas in our cars? This way, we stay put, like sheep in a pen.”
* * *
—
That Ben, he dreams of a beautiful sunny morning. They sleep late, he and Annie, luxuriously late. She goes out for chocolate croissants and strawberries. They spend the morning in bed, reading the paper and drinking coffee, the strap of her camisole sliding down her shoulder. What should we do today? she asks, stretching slowly, and the question comes with a feeling that they could do anything, anything at all. Time: that’s what the dream is really about. There is so much time in this dream, endless hours to spend however they like. An intense feeling of leisure.
How painful it is when the dream slips away, the bed empty beside him, but in the wake of its leaving comes that odd feeling again, that this exact morning lies somewhere up ahead.
It takes a moment to remember what is missing from that dream: the baby.
Now he wants to check on her. He is suddenly desperate to see the baby.
When he gets to the crib, he sees right away that something is wrong. Her blanket—it has come undone. Her face is completely covered. What relief it is when he sees that she’s fine under there, a little hot, maybe, but fine, and still asleep. But could she have suffocated? What if he hadn’t woken up?
* * *
—
An outlandish idea is beginning to bubble in his mind. Or is it only a wish? That these dreams really are a sort of travel, a kind of vision of a time yet to come.
It isn’t like him to think this way. He would never say it out loud, but he is different than he used to be, different from who he was before the baby. He believes in more—or is it less? It is so much harder to say, these days, what is true and what is not true. After all, the most unbelievable thing has already occurred—what could be more uncanny than an infant? Hadn’t it required a certain magical thinking to believe that what was swelling beneath Annie’s skin all those months really was a human being? And wasn’t she a little otherworldly when she came? A criatura. That’s the word that came to him, the Spanish word for a newborn, according to their book. A creature. She was born with a silky layer of hair all over her body. Fur, said Annie in delight. Lanugo, the doctor called it. Our baby has fur, she liked to say, as if Grace really had traveled from some supernatural realm. She knew exactly how to breathe without ever having done it. She knew exactly how to grasp a human finger. And isn’t it true that even now, whenever Ben wakes in the night, worried about the baby in her crib, she answers right away—as if by some midnight telepathy—with a small and reassuring cry? The point is this: after all that, who is he to say what is possible and what is not?
Morning: there’s a sudden dripping sound, and he cannot at first make sense of what he sees—coffee streaming across the kitchen counter and down the linoleum. He has turned on the coffeemaker while the carafe is still in the sink.
As he warms another bottle for the baby, his most recent dream still clinging to him, he begins to believe that maybe—he would never say it out loud, but maybe, maybe, like collective unconscious, like ESP, maybe—he really is seeing the future in his dreams.
40.
It is easy to mistake a wish for a fact, a hope for a lie, a better world for the one that is. For example, our children: we don’t expect we’ll ever lose them.
And so, when Ben finds his baby girl in her crib, sleeping late into the morning, it is hard for him to believe that anything might be wrong. She looks so much like she always does in sleep, those peach cheeks, those fat lips. Her eyelids are fluttering like they always do. Her little legs are pumping slightly as she snores. Nothing seems amiss, except for this: no matter what Ben does, she will not open her eyes.
“Come on,” he says. She is so warm in his arms, and, if he puts his thumb in her palm, her fingers still close around it. “Come on, little nut.”
But no tickling of her feet, no brushing of her cheek, no splashing of water on her face—none of it will rouse his daughter.
No matter that he has imagined this exact scenario constantly for weeks—all those visions turn out to be useless now, his worst fears proved flimsy by the real experience. This, this is ghastly: a sudden draining of meaning from the world.
Later, he will think of all the ways he might have saved her from this: maybe they should have stayed inside all this time, or left town earlier, broken the barricades—anything.
But for now, he just kneels down on the floor as if to pray or to beg.
“Please,” he says, his hands on her chest like he might still find some magic there. “Please, wake up.”
There is a reason that time seems to slow down in moments like these, a neurological process, discovered through experiment: in times of shock, the brain works faster—it takes more in. And so, some might say that this—the increased rate at which his neurons are firing—makes these first few seconds even more excruciating than they might otherwise be.
But forget all that. The only way to tell some stories is with the oldest, most familiar words: this here, this is the breaking of a heart.
41.
That night, something wakes Sara up.
Maybe it’s the creak of the hinge in the front gate. Maybe it’s the crunch of footsteps on the gravel of the driveway. Or the quick clearing of a man’s throat on the front porch.
But these are possibilities that predate her awareness. The only thing she knows is that she is suddenly awake in the dark.
All she can hear, for now, is the drip-drip of a faucet, and the small stirrings of the kittens in their sleep, and one more slow metronome: the steady rhythm of her sister’s breathing in the bed beside hers.
The room is warm from their bodies, and she can see her sister’s face in the moonlight. But a strange sensation keeps creeping into her body, the feeling that she is alone in the room, that her sister is not there at all.
It’s her sister’s breathing—that’s what it is: too slow. The possibility hits her with the heft of a fact: her sleep is too deep.
Maybe ten seconds pass between the moment this thought surfaces and the one when she’s poking Libby’s shoulder.
Libby wakes up right away.
“What are you doing?” says Libby. Her voice is scratchy and grouchy, and the most wonderful noise Sara has ever heard. It is hard to remember in the dark that every worry is more worrisome in the middle of the night.
Libby turns over in her sheets, already bobbing back to sleep.
The clock glows midnight, and Sara aims for sleep, too. She is close to a doze, dipping in, when the kittens suddenly pop up from their box. Sara sees them in silhouette, eight ears twitching in the same directio
n, as if they have caught some ominous sound, too low for the girls to hear.
But then comes another noise, much louder: the tinkle of breaking glass.
Now she is up and out of bed. The cats are running everywhere. She is shaking Libby’s shoulder.
“Get up,” Sara whispers. “There’s someone in the house.”
* * *
—
This house is a hundred years old. The floor shudders whenever anyone takes a step. Huddled in a closet, the girls listen through the vent. Someone is moving around downstairs.
Her sister is so close she can feel her warm breath against her shoulder. She is so close she can feel her shaking.
Now the creak of the wood is replaced by the sticky smack of linoleum. Someone has passed into the kitchen.
The refrigerator swooshes open. It suctions closed. Open again. More steps. And then a crashing sound, as if someone has overturned the table. From the backyard, Charlie begins to bark.
“Maybe it’s Daddy?” whispers Libby, a sudden blast of optimism.
“I don’t think so,” says Sara.
Now they hear the squeaking of hinges as the kitchen cabinets swing open and slam shut. There is a scraping sound. There is the clatter of dishes.
A few seconds of silence precede a terrible new noise: the creak of the stairs. Whoever it is—he is coming up. And he is coming quick.
Now the bedroom door clicks open. They hear the cats scurry away, their claws sliding on the wood.
In the closet, Libby is squeezing Sara’s hand so hard it hurts. Her little nails are digging into her palm.
On the other side of the closet door, drawers are opening and closing. Things are crashing onto the floor. There’s another sound, too, an intermittent static, like a radio or a walkie-talkie.
Every dark scene her father has ever painted comes flashing into Sara’s mind: someone has come to hurt them. Maybe it’s the government, like in that movie their father likes. Maybe they’re killing everyone in town to stop the epidemic.
She begins to cry. Her sister reaches over to cover her mouth.
And then it happens: the closet door swings open.
By the low light of Libby’s night-light, they can see the outline of a man.
“Are you in here?” he says. There is panic in his voice. “Are you here?”
The girls keep quiet.
They do not imagine what he might see at this moment, the faces of two little girls in nightgowns, squeezed together among their sweaters and their coats, one crying, the other burying her head into the other’s shoulder. But that is the thing: he does not seem to see them at all.
They can see his feet now—no shoes. And his chest—no shirt.
He parts the coats in the closet like curtains.
“Please,” he keeps saying. “Please tell me where you are.”
That’s when Sara recognizes him. It’s their neighbor. This guy is their neighbor, that professor with the baby.
It is a relief to know that this man is a father, as if one parent will always look out for the children of others.
Now she sees that he is bleeding. His hands are running with blood. Bits of glass sparkle on his bare feet.
“Where is my baby?” he says. “I can’t find my baby.”
There is something about his eyes, seeing but not seeing, as if, it comes to her suddenly, as if he is dreaming.
There’s that sound again, the windy swish of some kind of electronic device. He holds it up to his ear. A baby monitor. The noise comes in like an old recording, or a radio station losing its signal. A surge of noise, but no baby sounds.
And then he rushes out of the house as suddenly as he came.
He does not flinch or shout out, when his bare feet step on broken glass. He never makes it home. From the widow’s walk, the girls spot him passed out on his porch.
Libby runs out to put a blanket over him. Sara calls the police. Only late the next day does an ambulance come to take him away. Those suited-up workers spend a long time in the house and then mark it with an X. If they find the baby in there, the girls do not see her.
In the morning, they discover that among the things he shattered in his sleep are their mother’s black ceramic birds from Portugal. There they are, in pieces on the floor. Libby spends all day trying to glue them back together. But time moves in only the one direction. Not everything that breaks can be repaired.
* * *
—
That night, Sara wakes again, gripped by another ominous feeling. This time, her sister’s bed is empty. Sara rushes for the lights. And this is how she discovers Libby, lying perfectly still on the wood floor. But worse than that: her brown eyes are wide open.
For five seconds, Sara knows she is alone in the world—only the dead lie like that.
But then an odd mumbling begins to come from Libby’s mouth, singsong, as if she is speaking in her sleep, eyes still open. Not so uncommon, she will later learn, in the youngest victims of the virus.
Sara puts a hand on her back, gentle at first. “Wake up,” she says.
But she knows already that the thing she has been dreading for weeks has finally come to pass: the sleep has come for Libby.
42.
They carry her sister in their arms, these strangers, college kids in college sweatshirts. A boy and a girl who seem to know what to do. They wear white masks and green gloves.
“I kept calling 911,” says Sara. Her voice is shaking with a desperate gratitude—it feels like some kind of love. “I kept calling, but they never came.”
“They don’t have enough ambulances,” says the boy.
He is lifting her sister up from the wood floor, where she has been lying all day. Libby—green pajamas, bare feet, her cheek creased from the knots in the wood. Her lips, Sara worries, are beginning to chap.
“Are you guys staying here alone?” asks the college girl through her mask.
An urge keeps rising up in Sara: to apologize for the trouble.
The boy is holding Libby as if he has never held a child, careful and stiff and way out in front of him, as if her body were an heirloom, a thing that might break.
But he walks quickly once he has her, in running shoes, skinny legs, long strides down the staircase, quick steps across the living room and out the front door.
“The hospital is full,” he says, squinting on the sidewalk. “But they can help her on campus.”
His mask has fallen down over his chin, and the girl works to fix it—she is tender as she pulls the elastic back over his ears. But the boy wants to rush.
“That’s good enough,” he says, and he turns away from the girl.
“You should put some shoes on,” the girl says to Sara.
“No,” says the boy. “She should stay here. She’ll just slow us down.”
Their eyes conduct a brief argument. The girl wins.
She hands Sara a fresh pair of green latex gloves.
“Put these on,” she says. They are too big on her fingers, but she wears them anyway—she will do whatever these people say.
And then the three of them start walking, Libby in the boy’s arms.
The sky is loud with helicopters. But down here, the streets are empty. Here and there, a distant voice comes through, or sometimes a face in a window. But mostly it is only the sun and the woods, the birds on their branches, the soundless shuffling of the pine needles in the wind.
It is warm for December, but a breeze reminds Sara that she has left the house in only a flannel nightgown and sandals.
Libby’s eyelids keep shuddering, as if she is dreaming, even then, even as her head bobs in the crook of this boy’s elbow; even now, she is dreaming some secret dream. There is something unsettling about it, to see so clearly this fact: how unreachable the inside of even her sister’s mind.
The front door of the Garabaldi house stands wide open—no Garabaldis. Sara spots a bird flapping around inside.
Her father was right about everything.
When an ambulance swings around the corner, the college girl waves it down. But the paramedics, in their goggles and full-body suits, shake their heads through the windshield.
“We can’t take anyone else,” they call through their masks. All you can see are their eyes. “We’re full.”
This is the moment—as that ambulance fades like a dream in the distance—when something begins to happen inside Sara’s chest. A sudden tightening, a resistance to the task of breathing.
She stops where she is on the sidewalk. She bends over, feels faint. Someone’s hand is rubbing her back.
“Have you eaten anything today?” asks the college girl.
Food—the whole idea is surprising. And water, too. The information comes to her suddenly: how dry her mouth is.
“We don’t have time for this,” says the boy. “Her sister is the one who needs help.”
“Have this,” says the girl. She pulls a few things from the pocket of her sweatshirt.
A few gulps of water and a granola bar put Sara back on her feet. Or maybe it’s something else: to be cared for like this.
A Hummer whooshes by without stopping. A policeman rushes past them on foot.
The boy shifts Libby’s weight in his arms, so that her head rests on his shoulder, her hair on his neck, the way a father might carry a toddler. The boy’s mask has fallen down again—and again, the girl tries to fix it, but he shakes his head.
“Just leave it,” he says.
You can see she wants to say something but doesn’t. Instead she drips a little water into Libby’s mouth, and Libby coughs a tiny cough as the water runs down her chin.
“She needs an IV,” says the boy.
That’s when the college girl takes Sara’s hand in hers, which feels weird at first—Sara is not that young, and it’s strange through the gloves. But the longer they walk, the more it feels like a good idea.
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