The Dreamers

29.

Two weeks: that’s how long it has been since the girls have left the house, except to water the vegetables in the garden in the middle of the night and, once, with flashlights, on the night their father was taken away, to inspect the giant X painted on the side of the house.

They keep the curtains closed. They keep their voices low. They have an idea that the helicopters might have telescopic sight.

News of the quarantine has not reached their ears. They keep the television going all day and all night, but never on news channels. Infomercials or cooking shows—it doesn’t matter. What they like best, these girls, alone in this big house, is to hear from a distance the soothing sounds of voices coming from another room.

Everything they need is in the basement: peanut butter and tuna fish and macaroni and cheese, crackers and cereal and granola bars for a year. They have canned vegetables and canned fruit. They have toilet paper—stacks and stacks of toilet paper—and also the shelves of all those rarer things, each one an act of their father’s imagination, just waiting to prove clairvoyance: radiation suits, a Geiger counter, capsules of potassium iodide. Maybe they should be sleeping in the cots down there instead of in their bedroom upstairs, but there are spiders in this basement, and that one bare bulb, the smell of soil coming up from the earth. They never pictured sleeping down there without their father.

They do not know where he was taken or when he’ll come home, or if, but the only way to tolerate living alone in this house is to expect him to return at any moment.

On this morning, Sara is washing out the smell of urine from the sheets he last slept in. There is a kindness in not telling. There is love in covering up.

It is only as she is closing the lid of the washing machine that the danger occurs to her: Could she catch it from breathing in that smell? Now she’s at the sink. Now she’s washing her hands. She washes her hands for five minutes.

Libby is in the kitchen with the cats, handing out scraps of turkey.

“Don’t give them our food,” says Sara. She dries her hands on her jeans.

“But we’re all out of theirs,” Libby says.

They’ve been a good distraction, the cats, the four kittens skating across the wood floors, the two older ones always howling for food. One of the babies keeps throwing up on the rug. Another one pees on the stairs. But it feels good to take care of them—the way it is possible to disappear inside someone else’s need.

“We must have more food for them somewhere,” says Sara. But then she remembers: her father’s survival plans do not include the cats.

One of the kittens steals a piece of turkey right out of the mouth of another; he swallows quickly as if it might be taken back. There’s a scuffle on the linoleum, a sudden hiss.

“We have to get them more food,” says Libby.

“We can’t go out,” says Sara.

But she is soon turning the lock on the safe in the basement and pulling two twenty-dollar bills from the envelope her father keeps interred there.

“We’re bringing these,” she says as she stuffs the two gas masks into her backpack. “And the gloves.”

They leave through the back fence, through the woods, and then emerge on a path along the lake, so that their neighbors will not see them leaving the house. This is how they keep the secret of their living alone in the house.

How odd it is to be outside again, their shoes grinding the dirt, the glittering of the lake in the sun. Only two weeks earlier, they were walking this same stretch of sand with their father and his metal detector. As the lake shrinks into the distance, coins lost in these waters decades ago are now hidden by only a thin layer of dusty soil.

They walk slowly, deliberately, like they do on the high dive at the Y. There’s the feeling that they might have forgotten the way.

Two helicopters are hovering over another part of town. And some sort of military vehicle crosses an intersection up ahead. It makes some kind of announcement, but they cannot understand what it says.

They can tell from across the street that something is happening at the grocery store. Never before have they seen so many cars circling for spots. Never have they seen so many shopping carts heaped so full—a woman near the entrance is leaning hard to get hers rolling, as if pushing a stalled car down a hill. Some people are pulling two carts at once.

“Maybe we shouldn’t go in,” says Sara.

“We have to,” says her sister, her white cowboy boots clicking quickly into the crosswalk.

They should put on their masks—that’s what Sara is thinking. But it’s too embarrassing, now that they are here, now that she has spotted two girls from her class, to walk into a crowded grocery store wearing gas masks.

“Let’s at least put on the gloves,” says Sara. “And only the cat food. Don’t touch anything else.”

Inside, the aisles are choked with people. The checkout lines snake to the back of the store. And it is so much louder than usual. The workers are shouting to manage the crowd.

Some people, just a few, are wearing paper masks.

But still the usual music tinkles from the ceiling, not the work of real strings or real keys, their father likes to point out, but some digital imitation, as artificial as the apples that shine in the produce section, genetically modified for color instead of taste.

But on this day, all those apples are gone. And the bananas, too. On the back wall of the produce section, the automatic sprinklers are showering mist over a row of empty bins where the lettuce usually sits.

The canned food section has been similarly stripped. A tightening is spreading through Sara’s stomach. This is just as their father predicted.

Only a few bags of cat food are left slouched on the shelf. The girls grab what they can carry, one big bag each, and keep moving.

The clearest way out is through the candy aisle, where the racks still bulge with abundance, the only aisle empty of people. If they stand here among the chocolate bars and the Blow Pops, and if they cover their ears, they can pretend that the store is the same as it always is, the calm cool of packaged food, the aisles wide and clear. Simple.

Libby pauses to pull a big bag of gummy worms down from the rack.

“We don’t need that,” says Sara.

Candy is not allowed in their house.

But the gummy worms remain wedged under Libby’s skinny arm.

Suddenly, a soft voice nearby is saying Sara’s name, a boy: “Hey.”

She turns and finds Akil at the end of the aisle, with a small black bulldog beside him on a leash. A ping of happiness comes to her, but also the urge to hide her gloved hands, to smooth her unwashed hair.

“Hi,” she says.

She has never met Akil’s parents, but those must be them, a man in a gray suit, a woman in dark pants, a green paisley scarf at her neck, now digging through the groceries in their cart.

“Where have you been?” says Akil. This rush of gladness—to be missed—is too strong to admit.

The lie comes out almost without her notice: “I’ve been sick,” she says.

“They canceled the play,” says Akil.

The loudspeaker crackles with an announcement: they have sold out of diapers, says the voice, all sizes.

Behind him, Akil’s father seems agitated. He raises his voice: “This is outrageous,” he says.

“I didn’t know they could close off a whole town,” says Akil, in that crisp way he has of speaking. “Not in the States, anyway.”

“Is that what they’re doing?” she says. A new tenseness comes into her. This is another of her father’s darkest imaginings.

But now Akil’s mother is cutting in between them, her accent thick and glamorous, a flash of concern on her face: “Are you girls here alone?”

Sara has the idea that Akil’s mother is accustomed to crisis. They had to leave Egypt, he once told the class, after his father was arrested for something he wrote, and when he got out of jail, they left everything behind and moved to Florida, and then here, so he could teach at the college. Maybe what is happening in Santa Lora is nothing for this woman, compared to everything that came before. There is a calmness in the way she is dressed, her dark hair, perfectly parted, those gold earrings, shaped like seashells. But every mother is a little exotic to these motherless girls.

“Our dad knows we’re here,” says Sara, and the words release a surge of longing—for this wish to be true.

There is a pause that sounds like skepticism. And it is only then that Sara notices how much cat hair has collected on Libby’s black sweatshirt. She can hear a gummy worm already shifting around in her sister’s mouth, unpaid for.

“Please be careful, girls,” says Akil’s mother, the curve of her accent giving the words a special weight.

Akil’s father agrees: “You should go straight home.”

“We will,” says Sara.

Akil looks like he might say something more, but he doesn’t. He just smiles a small smile, and then walks away with his little dog and his beautiful mother, his father trailing behind them.

One aisle over, a man is leaning down on one knee, reaching for something on a low shelf.

“Hey, you girls,” he says as they rush past him. “Can one of you reach that box?”

The turning of his head reveals two facts at once: this man is their neighbor, the professor, and he has the baby with him, pressed against his chest in a wrap, a pacifier pulsing in her tiny bird mouth.

If he recognizes the girls, he does not show it. He looks different. The beginnings of a beard are coming in patchy on his chin. And he is moving awkwardly, delicately—he can’t reach the box because of the baby burrowed in the wrap.

“I’ll get it,” says Sara.

It’s formula, the last box. She holds it out to him through the cuffs of her sweatshirt, no contact with her skin.

There’s something terrible about the depth of this man’s gratitude as he thanks her for an act so simply done.

Suddenly the baby begins to wail. The pacifier has dropped from her mouth, and it is as if, all this time, the noise of her crying has been plugged up like water in a tub.

“Shit,” says the professor. He rubs the back of her little bald head and leans slowly toward the floor—like a pregnant woman. She can tell he’s not used to carrying her like this. Libby tries to help by scooping up the pacifier and stretching it out toward the baby’s mouth.

But the professor lunges forward. “No,” he says, grabbing hold of Libby’s sleeve. “Don’t touch her.”

The baby seems as stunned as Libby. She goes quiet for a moment, and then the crying rushes back, even louder.

“I’m sorry,” says the professor. He is rubbing his eyes. “I’m so sorry.”

He looks like he might cry, and there’s no need for the girls to discuss what to do next. They want the same thing at the same moment: to get away from this man as fast as they can.

In the checkout line, Sara begins to feel a strange weariness in her limbs. It’s her legs especially, but also her back, as if every muscle in her body is calling out to her for rest.

“Are you okay?” says Libby.

It’s just the waiting, she thinks—the line is long and slow, and the cat food is heavy in her arms.

“I’m fine,” she says.

What happens next begins with a sound she does not recognize: the cracking of eggshells on linoleum. “Oh my God,” someone is shouting from the dairy section. “Oh my God.” A single scream leaves a momentary vacuum. Every head turns toward the sound. And what they see when they do is a woman crumpled on the floor, egg yolks pooling around her head.

Sara grabs her sister’s hand just as everyone lurches forward, a tidal surge toward the front doors. The girls run like the others, the cat food pressed against their chests.

There’s a bottlenecking at the front—the automatic doors keep trying to close, but there are too many people trying to get out at once, that ringing again and again. Here is where Sara sees the professor a second time, just a quick flash of his face, which is desperate and red. He is pressed against a wall of windows, his arms curled around the head of his tiny girl. “Stop pushing!” he’s shouting. “I have a baby! Stop pushing!”

The girls burst outside, and they don’t stop running for two blocks.

At first, Sara feels better outside, the cool air on her skin, the sun. A gummy worm is releasing its sweetness in her cheek. She’s okay, she says to herself as they walk. She’s fine.

But when they’re a few blocks from home, a sudden pain twists her stomach. It soon spreads to her back. The feeling comes with an intense urge to lie down. And this wish seems to produce right in front of her a patch of dry grass.

“Hold on a second,” she says to Libby. She sits down right where she is.

“Do you have your inhaler?” says her sister.

“It’s not that,” says Sara. She pulls her knees tight to her chest. It feels right to close her eyes.

“Oh my God,” says her sister. “Oh my God.”

But it is hard for Sara to feel afraid, because, suddenly, the world has been reduced to only this one fact: this massive ache flooding her body. Somewhere very far away is the sound of her sister dropping the cat food on the sidewalk.

“Please don’t be sick,” says Libby. “Please. Please.”

It only lasts a minute, the worst of it, anyway, and then everything eclipsed rushes back to her at once: the smell of the grass, the dry dirt against her legs, the terror in her sister’s voice.

The pain comes and goes all the way home. They have to stop again in the woods.

“You can’t go to sleep,” says Libby, once they’ve snuck back into the house. “You can’t.”

But she needs to lie down. She is clenching her teeth on the stairs.

If she curls herself up in a certain way, she feels a little better.

Soon, she can no longer hear the yowling of the cats downstairs, or the rattle, loud as hail, of Libby filling their bowls with food.

She lies curled in her four-poster bed, that old green quilt pulled up to her chin, one socked foot sticking out from the sheets. Her ponytail fans out on the pillow, and the hood of her sweatshirt is crumpled around her neck. Her eyes are closed. Her mouth is open. Saliva is gathering on her lips. Her breathing is light and steady.

Lost, for now, is the buzz of the panic in the grocery store. Gone is the price of gummy worms. Fading away is the face of the woman who was standing two people behind them in line and the man pushing a cart near the entrance.

If, in the months before the sickness appeared, you had asked a specialist why it is that a human being spends part of every day unconscious, you might have heard an answer that’s been around since at least the ancient Greeks: we sleep, the theory goes, in order to forget.

Sleep, the experts would tell you, is when our brains sift through the day’s memories, sweeping away the unimportant things. What remains for Sara is the soft look on Akil’s face when he asked where she had been, the music of his mother’s voice, the sweaty warmth of her sister’s hand as they sprinted toward home.

Unlike so many of the others, Sara eventually opens her eyes.

She wakes to the sound of shouting. It’s Libby. Libby is screaming at the foot of the bed.

“You wouldn’t wake up,” her sister shouts.

Sara is still a little in her dream—something about her mother, the idea of her, anyway. She was wearing the green cardigan from the picture of her that Sara has in her drawer. And the kitchen. They were sitting together in the kitchen. But matching the words to the dream only dissolves what is left of it, the way certain stars vanish from the sky if you look directly at them.

It takes a second to remember her waking life. Here she is in their bedroom, the sunlight flickering through the boarded-up windows. Here is her sister, her face red from crying.

“You have to go to the hospital,” says Libby. She is pulling at the sheets. There are streaks of brown blood here and there. “You’re bleeding.”

Now the dream is gone from Sara’s head—only a tracing is left, like skates on ice, a sadness.

“Wait,” says Sara, sitting up in wet jeans. “Let me think for a second.”

There’s a small swell of relief as the situation becomes clear in her head. “I’m not sick,” she says.

Sara is not a girl who has been waiting for this day to arrive. Ever since they showed the video at school, she’s been nursing the idea that maybe, hopefully, it would never happen to her at all. It was easy to believe. How could something so bizarre really be so ordinary?

“I didn’t think it would be so much blood,” she says to her sister through the bathroom door.

A tide of adrenaline pushes her through the first steps: the changing of her jeans, the layers of toilet paper, to be replaced eventually with a washcloth folded in quarters, the swallowing of two Tylenol at the sink. There is the slightest traitorous gladness that her father is not here to witness any of it.

It is hard not to wish for her mother. Akil’s mother flashes into her mind—maybe she would know how to help.

She can hear her sister in the hall, through the door. A strange snorting sound.

“Are you okay?” Sara calls to her sister. No answer.

On the other side of the door, she finds Libby sprawled on the floor: laughing. She is laughing so hard she can’t talk.

“It’s not funny,” says Sara.

Libby is giggling so much that she is holding her stomach as if it might otherwise come undone.

“Stop laughing,” says Sara.

But she keeps at it.

“Stop it.”

“I can’t believe I thought you were dying,” says Libby. The noise has attracted the kittens, who are nuzzling their faces against her shoulder. “And look at your jeans.”

But all Sara can feel at this moment is a vague sense of an animal indifference in the universe, how everything in nature is just as relentless as a virus, replicating itself again and again without end.