The Dreamers

34.

He sleeps when she sleeps. He wakes when she wakes, which is six times or eight times or ten times a day. And every one of these wakings is also a remembering, a collecting again of the facts: Ben is alone with his six-week-old baby.

Wherever he goes, he is the man with a newborn curled up on his chest. You should stay home, he is told again and again. That’s the safest place to be. But he has to go out, for formula and for diapers—they’ve started handing out supplies at the high school.

No one can tell him where his wife is. Not the operators who answer the phones at the hospital. Not the soldiers outside the emergency room. Not even the paramedics, on that first night, sheathed in blue suits and white masks—as they lifted Annie up from the kitchen floor, her fingers fluttering slightly, the way they always do when she sleeps—could say exactly where it was she would go.

The morning after, when the nurse comes to take the baby’s temperature, she wears plastic goggles and a full-body suit. The baby cries and cries. Already the baby can recognize what is ordinary and what is not.

That nurse never comes again.

Every so often, a Humvee drifts down the street. An ambulance roars by. The neighbors come and go from their houses, tense and watchful. But all Ben can see is the face of his baby. All he can hear is her crying. The only way she will sleep is in the bend of his arm, her lips going loose against a bottle. All his clothes smell like urine and sour milk and the sweet stink of her diapers. There is no time to take a shower. There is no time to wash his face. Dirty laundry litters the floor.

One of Annie’s colleagues stops by those first few days with formula and wipes. “Doesn’t it seem like no one knows what they’re doing?” she says, arms crossed, voice shaking a little. “I don’t think they know what the hell they’re doing.”

They are not very close, this woman and Annie, but they have lived in this town for only three months, and you ask whoever you can.

Annie, Annie, Annie: her name sounds suddenly sacred—and strange—rendered somehow extraordinary by not saying it thirty times a day. Come home, he whispers, like a prayer.

He calls his mother in Ohio every day. She wants to fly out, but it’s no use, he tells her, whispering into the phone, while the baby dozes on his chest. “They would never let you in.”

It has been decades since he has felt this way about his mother, the simple need for her presence. “You should have let me come when she was born,” she says, but he and Annie had decided in advance that they wanted to be alone with the baby for a while before letting their parents come. He sees now that this was a teenager’s notion of what it is like to be an adult. “If I had come when she was born,” says his mother, “then I’d be trapped there with you now and could help.”

Sometimes, he is so tired that it does not sound so bad: to fall asleep and not wake up.

Scraps of news from public radio drift through the house between feedings. Six hundred cases and counting. Seven hundred. In Los Angeles, seventy miles away, the stores have run out of masks; people are stockpiling food in case the sickness spreads.

Every ordinary thing turns ominous. A black bulldog wanders leashless in the street. Somewhere nearby, a teakettle whines for many hours. A trickle of water runs all day through the gutter, as if someone somewhere has collapsed while watering the lawn.

On the third day, when Annie’s friend does not arrive when she said she would, and when she does not answer her phone, Ben does not need to be told why.

After that, he sets up a system with his mother—he will call her every morning. “If I don’t call you by eight,” he says, “call the police.” But time with a newborn is shifty. The hours roll away. On the third day, Grace wakes up wailing and spitting up, and he forgets to call his mother—something is happening to his memory, some kind of disintegration. Two hours pass before he looks at his phone. Ten missed calls and a message: his mother has called the police.

“Thank God,” she says when he finally calls her back, and that rush of relief in her voice, like some kind of high—he understands it right then for the first time in his life: the special suffering of loving a child. “So,” she says, her breathing still quick in the phone. “What did you say when the police showed up?”

“They didn’t,” he says.

Two days later, a police officer arrives with a crew of workers in blue suits.

“We have a report,” says the officer, “that there might be a sick man here, and that there might be a newborn baby alone in this house.”

“That was two days ago,” says Ben.

The police officer sighs through his mask. His eyes look tired and red.

After that, Ben leaves the windows open all the time. His mind is fertile with visions of a terrible future. If the windows are open when he goes under, maybe some good stranger will hear his baby crying before the dehydration takes her away.

In a surge of the kind of unlikely luck that is just as possible in a disaster as it is in daily life, Ben eventually tracks Annie down. Someone on the phone at the hospital can finally confirm that she is a patient, his Annie. But not in a regular room. She has been moved to the campus library, says the woman on the phone, which has been converted into a ward. No one can enter the building, which, like the hospital, is quarantined and guarded, but, says the woman on the phone, the thing about the library, she says, as if passing on a secret that is not hers to share: there are floor-to-ceiling windows.

When he gets there with the baby, he finds a small group of people already crowded near those windows, just normal people in white paper masks, a few children, holding hands with their parents. Soon the soldiers will fence off this whole area, but for now, on this day, it is still possible to press two hands against the tinted glass and peek in.

Here is what he sees inside: maybe fifty beds, lined up in rows, someone sleeping in each one, a few nurses or orderlies in blue suits moving between the beds. The old lamps and the tables have been pushed to one side of that vast room, the books looking down from their shelves.

He does not see her right away, but soon he notices someone in the far corner with curly brown hair. And he knows immediately that it’s her. He takes a sharp breath that jolts the baby on his chest. “There she is,” he whispers to the baby, his lips making contact with her bald head as he speaks. It is upsetting to see Annie that way, lying flat on her back, the tubes, but it is also a relief. It’s her, it’s Annie, and she looks like herself, the way she looks on the rare mornings when he wakes before she does. It is a comfort to know where she sleeps.

He pulls the baby out of the carrier and holds her up to the window to see, her little legs curling up under her like a bug. A newborn’s eyes cannot see more than four feet into the distance, say the books, but by now, he has stopped trusting those books. Babies know so much more than the experts think—he is sure. There is a difference between what is not true and what cannot be measured.

“Do you see her?” he says. “Do you see?”

But even then, even as he stares at Annie’s body, even as he knows for certain that this is her, that this is his wife’s hand lying on her lap, that this is his wife’s hair falling in her face, even then, with the proof of her right there, the same questions bob back to him anyway: Where are you? Where have you gone?

But also, somehow, there is this: walks with the baby at sunrise when he can spend not one more minute in the house, her little body zipped into his fleece and her eyes squinting shut in the sunshine, the crunch of his footsteps in the woods.

He spends all day telling her the words for things. Those are the mountains, he says as they walk. This is a lake. This here is a hummingbird, hovering over the neighbor’s bougainvillea, and that buzzing up there, that’s called a helicopter, and it is hovering, too. And the sky, that sky, so clear of clouds and blue. Blue. That’s what we call that color: blue. She stares at everything as if in amazement. She begins to babble. That little voice. This is the voice of his daughter. A surprising feeling sometimes surges in his chest, quick and bittersweet, a little guilty, even, given the circumstances, but what other word for it is there but this: joy.

He tries to commit it all to memory, every small smile and every new trick—this is how he misses Annie most, as the person who would want to know the baby at this level of detail, the contents of her diaper, the long-awaited burp, that thing she does with her toes, the scale of the love expressed in minutiae. He tries writing it down, but it is all whooshing past him. It would take as long to retell it as it does to live through it. The only way to preserve these days for Annie would be to preserve every hour, every minute. In one way, at least, this time is just like any other: it goes.