The Dreamers

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.

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.