The Dreamers

13.

On the twelfth day, Halloween, the weather finally turns, the first rain in three months. Big fat drops in the woods, a murmur in the trees, the unfamiliar smell of it soaking the pavement. And the California ground—it’s too dry to absorb it.

So rare is rain that it seems somehow ominous to Sara as she watches it from the widow’s walk of their house, the way it pools in that nurse’s bathtub across the street, which stands oddly intact amid the wreckage of the explosion, exposed to the air and the sky, the yellow caution tape glistening in the wind.

Sara has added to her worries this new one: a house can spontaneously blow up. “That nurse probably had the sickness,” her father keeps saying. She and Libby watched the firefighters pull her body, beneath a sheet, from what was left of the house. “She probably had the stove on when she fell asleep.”

But no one else is talking about the sickness.

Outside, life on the street flows on. A woman in a blue windbreaker is walking her poodle. The man next door, the one with the baby, is dragging his trash cans across the driveway. Sara’s school bus has already drifted past her window without her, packed with kids in costumes, like any other Halloween.

“Put this pot up in your room,” says her father, in the red flannel shirt he’s been wearing for three days, his old jeans, no shoes. Their house is full of leaks.

In their bedroom, Libby is hunched over the floor. A wet spot is blooming in the ceiling above her head. She slides the pot beneath the leak.

“It’s dripping all over your script,” says Libby.

Already the pages of Our Town are sticking together with rain, the yellow highlighter bleeding across the front page. Sara had been spending her lunch periods at rehearsal instead of sitting alone on the quad.

Libby helps her spread the pages of the script out to dry.

The phone begins to ring

A face comes into Sara’s mind: Akil. But it’s stupid to think of him calling her now. It is ten in the morning on a Tuesday. She knows right where Akil will be—she can see him without being there: chewing on his pencil in pre-algebra, one foot bouncing on the carpet beneath his desk, three rows over from hers, always finished with his work before anyone else.

The phone rings again. She answers it.

“Is this Sara?” says a woman on the line. Voices like this make her nervous. That crispness.

“Who’s calling?” she says.

Libby is watching her from the doorway, mouthing to her: Who is it?

“Is your mother or father at home?” says the voice on the phone. It’s the attendance office from school.

“Dad,” she calls. “You forgot to call the school.”

She can feel it like a heartbeat, the distant buzz of the school bell ringing through the day. She senses her shadow self moving through her school hours: the daily quizzes in pre-algebra, the shouting in the cafeteria line, the hiding out in the bathroom during the break between classes. Three rehearsals of Our Town have taken place without her.

It bothers her to think of Amelia, the understudy, speaking the lines that Sara has memorized. “Her?” Amelia had said when they found out Sara had gotten the part. “Seriously?” she said out loud to her friends. A terrible thought had flashed in Sara’s mind at that moment—that Mrs. Campbell might have given Sara the part because she felt sorry for her.

Downstairs, she can hear her father talking to the woman on the phone.

“I don’t have to explain myself to you,” he says.

He is not allowed on campus anymore because of a misunderstanding the year before. It’s not illegal to carry a gun, he always says, but it’s not allowed on school grounds. Mrs. Chu noticed it beneath his coat during a parent-teacher conference. From the slip of that gun into her teacher’s view grew a sequence of visits from a social worker.

“You should all watch out,” her father is saying now to the woman on the phone, his voice louder than before. “You’re going to be lucky if you survive this thing.”

After that, Sara hears the phone click into its cradle.

“No one in this town knows a goddamn thing about what’s coming,” he says to himself or maybe to the girls. His mind is like that: always mired in a terrible future.

He has laid them out like laundry: the three gas masks that usually hang in the basement. One for each of them—Sara, Libby, and their father. They haven’t left the house in a week.

A germ, their father has told them, can float free in the air. It could be anywhere. All you have to do is breathe it in.

“What if this is like last time?” Libby whispers to Sara.

Last time: the solar flares, six months earlier. Those flares, their father said, would cause a geomagnetic storm that would knock out power all over the world for weeks or months, or maybe forever, and no one knew about it, he said, because the media was under some kind of gag order, which is a thing that happens all the time in this country, and if you don’t believe that, you’re just being naïve. He had kept the girls home on that day, in case of violence or looting. Sara was too scared to eat, as they waited for the radio to snap silent, for the auroras to streak the California sky. But the lightbulbs went on glowing, steady as stars, and the sky kept clear and quiet. “We got lucky today,” their father finally said, as they climbed the stairs to their bedrooms that night, the danger apparently past. “But it’s good to be cautious.”

They are eating peanut butter sandwiches at the kitchen table when they hear a knock at the door.

“Don’t open it,” says their father, his chair scraping hard on the linoleum. He reaches for his gas mask. They’ve had them for a while, these masks, but there has never been a reason to wear them. Hers and Libby’s are smaller than his, specially made for kids, and he let the girls decorate them, so that their names shine in puffy paint, gold glitter against the dark green rubber of the masks.

“Get upstairs,” he says to the girls. The knock comes again, louder this time.

They watch from the stairs as their father fits the mask to his face, tightening the straps before getting close to the door.

He opens it, but only a crack, the chain snapping taut across the opening. Sara feels a rush of embarrassment for her father in that mask, the way the strands of his beard hang below it, like a plant, overgrown. These are their private preparations on view to a stranger.

On the doorstep, it turns out, is a policeman, and Sara is sure she sees the future in his uniform: he will take her father away.

“Is everything okay in here?” says the policeman.

From the bedroom window, the girls can see the top of his hat, his tan shirt spotted with rain, his car parked out front.

A strange sound is coming from the house next door, drowning out what her father is saying to him. Some kind of sawing. Sara looks out the window—it’s the professor, on his porch, cutting off the top of a pumpkin.

Her father’s voice is rising now, echoey through the mask: “I didn’t threaten anyone,” he says to the policeman.

“Well,” says the policeman, his words slow and careful, a pair of handcuffs clinking on his belt. “This woman from the school felt concerned by what you said.”

The sawing next door slows to a stop. The professor is watching the policeman. His wife is out there, too, with the baby. Stop staring, Sara wants to say.

“This is bullshit,” says her father, and Sara wishes she could go down there and calm him, drain all that sharpness from his voice. He does things a hard way when usually there are easier ways. But she could translate, maybe, like the children of immigrants, explain what he really means. “I was trying to warn her,” he says. “Do you even know what’s going on?”

The policeman nods. His face is as calm as snow. Yes, he says, he is aware of the situation at the college.

Libby picks at the wallpaper while they listen. You can see the different layers of it, like tree rings, the velvety green paisley from when this house was new, and then all the later sheets on top of that, each one less ornate than the last, their family’s money fading away through the years, all those layers leading somehow down to this: a policeman standing on their doorstep and saying these words: “Are your children here? I’d like to speak with them, too.”

“You don’t have any right,” says her father.

But she and Libby are already peeking down the stairs.

“Are you girls okay in here?” the policeman calls when he sees them.

“We’re fine,” says Libby.

“Yeah,” says Sara. “We’re fine.”

The rain is getting heavy, the ringing of drips in the pots around the house.

“You should be careful what you say to people,” says the policeman. A sudden surge of hope comes to Sara. “Okay?” he says.

What a relief it is to see the slow turn of that man’s shoulder, and then the back of his uniform as he walks across the yard in the rain, the beautiful rumble of his engine starting up.

And then her father is back inside, the door locked again, his gas mask lying flat on the table, his lungs breathing the safe air of the house.

At dusk, like fireflies, the trick-or-treaters start to fill the sidewalks, first the younger ones, pressed into parkas and trailed by their parents, wet leaves clinging to shoes and capes, and then the older ones, quick as burglars, pillowcases slung over their shoulders.

“Jesus,” says their father, looking out through the boards on the windows. “This thing is going to spread through the whole town tonight.”

She can almost picture it as it happens, the disease jumping from one person to the next, through the grazing of hands in a candy bowl. She once watched a show about a murder, where the police used a special kind of light to make invisible traces of blood glow green in the dark. A seemingly clean room proved suddenly streaked. She pictures the sickness like that, too, a trail of green snaking through the town.

When their doorbell rings, there’s no question of answering it. “They’ll go away,” says their father. “Turn out those lights.”

Anyway, they have no candy to give.

From her bedroom window, Sara can see two boys from her class on her porch. They are dressed like skeletons, one with a knife sticking out of his chest. The boys always dress up like that, she has learned, as if they don’t know that the scariest things are invisible.

If she and Libby had been allowed to go trick-or-treating this year, they would have gone as they always do, as fancy ladies from another time, wearing their relatives’ dresses from the attic, pinned up to fit them, the hems dirtier every year.

The boys ring the bell again. Sara hopes they don’t know that this is where she lives. Finally, the boys give up and move on to the new neighbors’ house, where two jack-o’-lanterns glow against the night and where the front door swings open again and again, the woman standing in the doorway with the baby in her arms—they’ve dressed her up as a pumpkin.

“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.”