The Dreamers

47.

Six A.M.: a barking of dogs in the yard, the clink of the chain on the back door.

Three floors up, alone in the house, Sara goes stiff in her bed, as if whoever is out there might sense the small movements of a twelve-year-old girl through the walls. She is sleeping again in one of her mother’s sweaters.

Now the crunch of footsteps in the dirt. Now a rattling of the side door.

The dogs go on barking and barking—she does not even know most of their names, each one rescued by Libby, hungry, from the street, but thank God for their loyalty, thank God for their noise.

Now the scrape of metal on wood. Something is being dragged across the loose boards of the back porch.

She wishes for her sister like a prayer. And in the darkness of the bedroom, still shadowed with the dolls they once imagined had the power to talk, she almost believes it: that some similar magic might call Libby back from wherever she sleeps.

She tiptoes to the window. Her hands shake as she pulls back the corner of the curtain.

The kittens are agitated, too, the littlest one pacing and pacing the floor, the others waiting deep under Sara’s bed.

When she peeks out through the boards on the bedroom window, what she sees in the early morning dark is a man standing on a trash can. It’s not the neighbor, this time. It’s someone else, this man who is right now reaching up toward the second-floor window.

He calls out to the dogs to be quiet—and this is when she recognizes him, his voice.

He arrives like a stranger and a thief, but here he is: her father.

At first, it’s a relief. Of course it is. Of course. Here is her father, sitting at the kitchen table. Here he is: alive and awake.

He keeps saying her name. “Thank God,” he says. “Thank God.” She does not remember a look like that showing up on his face before, a relief that seems somehow explosive.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he says. He is a little out of breath.

His head has been shaved clean. His beard is missing.

He does not say much at first, as if there is not much to say, as if, after five weeks, he simply woke up and walked home.

“I don’t know what happened to my key,” he says. “Do you know what happened to my key?”

His skin is very pale, and he is squinting through a pair of borrowed glasses. He looks even skinnier than usual in a loose green T-shirt she has never seen before. But it’s him. It’s him. Those are his arms resting on the kitchen table, and those are his tattoos, the intricate wolf with the yellow eyes and the blocky black spider on his elbow, and her mother’s name fading gray on his forearm beside the birth dates of both of his girls. This cataloguing of his body feels necessary because there is something about him—there is something about him that is different.

“Do you know what happened to my key?” he says again.

His fingernails have grown long like a woman’s but ragged, the thumbnail so long that it is starting to curl.

“What happened to your hair?” Sara asks. “What happened to your beard?”

“I don’t know,” he says.

His skin is so pale, and that bare chin—she tries at once to look and not look, as if a section of his face has been removed. A phantom impulse rises in her: to point it out to her sister.

“You’re okay,” he says. “Right?”

“Are you?” she says.

By now, the sun is coming up. There is a quiet comfort in that milky light, the way it streams through the cracks in the boards so like the way it would on a more ordinary morning.

“Where’s your sister?” he asks. He glances toward the stairs.

She cannot look at his face while she tells him, so she looks out the window instead, toward the dogs. Every word of the story must be pushed, one by one, over the hard knot in her throat.

Her father seems confused by what he hears.

“You already told me that,” he says. “Didn’t you? You already told me she got sick.”

“What do you mean?” she says, her eyes going blurry.

“We talked about her, earlier,” he says.

She is afraid to say no, but he can see the truth on her face. It is hard to know what to say.

“Never mind,” he says, rubbing the bald ridges of his head. He has a mole up there she has never seen. “Never mind.”

She has the urge to replace the confusion that follows with a nice, clear idea: “If you got better,” she says, “then she’ll probably be okay, too, right?”

Her father stays silent. He looks like a man struggling to make mathematical calculations in his head.

She brings him a soda, the cool reassuring pop of the tab beneath her fingers. She brings him the nail clippers, too, leaves them on the table beside him. There is a certain confusion in the room about who is the caretaker and who the one in need of care.

Now that her father is home, she is suddenly aware of how the house has gotten away from her—that’s the way it feels—like weeds taking over a garden. The kitty litter is pebbling out of the bathroom, and there is the clamor of dishes in the sink, the scatter of soda cans, and all those forgotten cereal bowls, licked clean by the cats.

But her father does not seem to notice any of it.

He does not ask whose dogs these are, wagging and whining and lapping water all over the linoleum.

“Can you get these dogs out of the kitchen?” he says, and that’s all he says about them. “I have a lot to figure out.”

Thank God he does not think to go down to the basement, where, if he did, he would discover what those dogs have done to the neat stocks of toilet paper and the cereal boxes, the many jars of preserved carrots they’ve cracked on the cement.

Her father spends that first day right there at the kitchen table, bent over an unfamiliar spiral notebook.

“What are you writing?” she asks after a while.

“I don’t know exactly,” he says. “I’m just trying to sort some things out.”

He hardly moves all day, as if his body has grown used to it: the motionlessness of sleep. And when he does move, he moves slowly, as if pushing through a thicker kind of air. His pen inches across the page, leaving a trail of tiny words.

This is only the first day, thinks Sara, an uneasiness creeping through her. Maybe he’s still waking up.

Chloe skids across the linoleum when she sees him for the first time, a hiss.

“That’s Daddy,” says Sara as Chloe’s tail puffs up like a duster. “He’s your favorite, remember?”

Maybe it’s the baldness of his head that bothers her, or that bare chin. Or maybe it’s the unhealthy color of his skin. Whatever it is, Chloe stays away, her path to her water bowl arcing unnaturally wide.

On television, the same headline is running on all the news channels: “Man Awakens from Santa Lora Sickness.”

“I think they’re talking about you,” she calls to her father from the living room.

But he stays at the table and goes on with his writing. From a distance, he looks as if he is performing the careful work of a clockmaker.

The news channels do not seem to have much information about him, no picture, no name, no sense of his condition.

“Can you find me another pen?” her father calls from the kitchen, shaking his pen in the air, his mind having drained it of ink.

Among the many things her father fails to notice that day is the way her mother’s belongings are spread out around the house, those attic boxes now gutted in the living room, the treasures spilling out: the wedding pictures and the cassette tapes, her collection of turquoise jewelry, all the objects they’ve been lovingly studying, like clues to an old mystery, and her tarnished silver charm bracelet, which is right now revolving around Sara’s small wrist, clinking lightly against the table.

Sara uses the last of the bread from the freezer to make tuna fish sandwiches for dinner, but her father leaves most of his on his plate.

All day, the nail clippers sit on the table beside him, untouched. All day, the scrape of his nails on the soda can.

“You should go to bed,” he says finally, the kind of thing no one has said to her in weeks. And it is appealing, in a way, to be told that and to do it, these the normal words of a father to a daughter.

Much later, in the middle of the night, she can still hear him down there, not sleeping, moving around in the kitchen.

In the morning, two policemen come to the door.

Sara watches them from the widow’s walk, afraid to find out why they have come—in their white masks and their green gloves, tucked tight beneath the cuffs of their uniforms.

The knocking on the door sets off the dogs.

“Daddy,” Sara calls to her father. He is sitting at their bulky old computer, waiting and waiting for a page to load. “The police are here,” she says.

“Just ignore them,” he says, as if they are salesmen who will go away on their own.

They keep shifting their weight on the porch, these police. They keep looking around, as if eager to get away. Behind them, on the other side of the street, the frame of the nurse’s house leans forward like a shipwreck. After so many weeks, the caution tape has frayed in the wind, and the birds have built a nest in the stove, which stands, rusting, in the open air.

The police knock again.

Sara can hear the dogs whining and scratching at the door from the inside. Maybe the police can hear it, too, that whining and that scratching.

At some point, the knocking stops. She watches, flush with relief, as the policemen step down off the porch, and then stand for a moment in the weeds that have overtaken the front yard. One of them says something into his radio.

Instead of walking back to their car, they disappear around the side of the house. Then comes the creak of the side gate, the terrible crunch of their shoes in the gravel that leads to the backyard.

The knocking starts again, this time at the back door.

“Hello?” they call. “Hello?”

Sara listens from the kitchen, hidden by the boarded-up windows. But she can hear the swish of the static on their radios outside.

She is not prepared for what comes next: the creak of the back door, the cry of its hinges, the way the thin crack of sunlight beneath the door explodes to the shape of the whole doorway. Her father must have left it unlocked in the night, which is not like him, to make a mistake like that, not like him at all.

“Oh,” say the police when they see Sara, the way she is squinting in the kitchen in pajamas. It’s too late for her to hide.

“Oh,” one of them says again. He is a dark figure in the doorway. Sunlight blazing around him. “We didn’t know if anyone was home.”

The dogs begin to jump up on their tan police pants, friendly tongues lolling out of their mouths, but the policemen are backing away, as if the dogs, too, might be contaminated.

One of them is holding the door open. He is using only two gloved fingers to do it, and he is leaning way back as if for access to fresh air.

“Is Thomas Peterson here?” the other one asks. It sounds like a stranger, the way they say his name. No one calls him Thomas.

“If you know where he is,” says the one holding the door, his voice softened by the mask, “it’s very important that you tell us.”

She is not sure what the right answer is, or if this is a time when a lie is right. She settles on silence, and for a moment, the only sounds are the panting of the dogs and the squeak of their black police shoes as they dodge the leaps of the dogs.

One of the men finally crouches down to talk to her, as if she is a much younger child.

“Listen,” he says through his mask. He is looking past her, searching the living room over her shoulder. “He wasn’t supposed to go home yet. He might still be sick.”

She wonders if they know about the slowness of his walk, the strange writing. She wonders if they know how little he has been sleeping.

“It was too soon,” he says to her.

But she will not watch her father leave again.

“He’s not here,” she says finally, her voice scratching from so long without speaking.

The two men look at each other. She can see only their eyes over the tops of the masks, but their eyes are where the skepticism floats.

“Have you been staying here alone?” one of them asks, which seems to raise a new threat.

An answer comes in the form of her father’s footsteps on the stairs behind her. He walks differently—that’s another thing that has changed. He takes smaller steps than before, a wobbly stride, almost like a limp.

“You don’t have a right to be on my property,” he says to the police. He is wearing the same clothes as yesterday.

They just want to monitor him for a while, they say, the doctors.

“That’s why they sent us here,” one of them says.

“I’m not going to the hospital,” he says.

“It’s a matter of public safety, sir,” says the one holding the door.

“It’s not safe for you or your daughter,” says the taller one.

“I’m not going to be some guinea pig,” says her father.

And this is how the conversation ends: he closes the door and locks it. Then he goes back upstairs to the computer.

It is a surprise when the police really do leave, that after all that, words are enough to chase them away. Before they get into their car, she watches them pull their green gloves off, one glove at a time, dropping them into a trash bag.

There is a feeling that they will be back, or that someone else will. It’s a feeling of a leak plugged only temporarily.

That night, a sound familiar but hard to place drifts up from the kitchen after midnight. A soft sandpaper scrape. And then again: scrape, scrape, scrape. She knows, from the occasional cough, that it’s her father down there. She is not sure he should be left alone.

The smell confirms it at the same moment as the sight: her father at the kitchen table, a lit match burning between his fingers.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

On the table beside him is a scattering of burnt-out matches, a whole pack from the basement, used up in a night—it isn’t like him to waste.

“This thing did something to my brain,” he says.

He watches the flame for a while and then gently shakes it out. He drops it in the pile with the others.

“What are you doing?” she asks again.

He takes a sip of beer. He pulls a fresh match from the box and begins again, the slow striking of the match to the box, too slow, at first, to make the match light. But he keeps at it, a determined, careful scrape.

The helicopters are still thumping outside in the dark, but she knows from the news that the reporters are wrong about which house is his—they think that the man who woke from the Santa Lora sickness lives in an old white house a few blocks away, a place abandoned for years, since before Sara was born, wildflowers growing up through the planks of the porch. Maybe it’s the boarded-up windows that make them confuse that house for theirs, that lead the helicopters to hover over that other roof and not theirs. But after she has watched the footage all day, that other house, a stranger’s house, a dead man’s house maybe, begins to take on a feeling of familiarity for her, the way, in a dream, a place you have never been can somehow stand in for home.

Finally, the match blooms in his hand. He lets it burn for a few seconds. Then he shakes it out again.

“I had these dreams,” he says. “While I was sick. Dreams that were like no dreams I’ve ever had before.”

He takes another drink of beer. It is not his first, she can see. Two other cans are sitting on the counter.

“What were they about?” she says.

“What do you mean?” he says, as if she is the one who brought it up. This is the way he has been since he got home, his mind always running on some second, unknown track.

“The dreams,” she says. “What did you dream about?”

He rubs his bald head. His fingers move slowly, as if tracing an alien terrain.

“I need to ask you something,” he says. He looks right at her. A layer of stubble has grown where his beard used to be. “Was there a fire while I was gone?” he says. “Was there a fire at the college library?”

“There was one in the woods,” she says, and it seems amazing that he could know about that somehow, though he slept through the whole thing. “On the night you got sick.”

But he shakes his head in frustration as if he has been trying to get this point across to her for hours.

“No, no,” he says. “I’m not talking about a brush fire. I mean in the building. Was there a fire in the library? On the second floor,” he says. He is closing his eyes as if remembering. “Or maybe the third?”

“I don’t think so,” she says.

“I had this dream,” he says. “That there was a fire at the library, and somehow, the fire—it woke up all the sick.” He takes a sip of his beer. He swallows hard. “The fire,” he says, “it worked like some kind of cure.”

After that, he goes quiet again. He goes back to his matches, lighting them one by one. Every once in a while, a look comes into his face that she has not seen before—spooked but satisfied, as if to say, Aha, there it is, that’s it.

“I’ve been having this strange feeling,” he says. “Ever since I woke up, I’ve been having this feeling that things are happening out of order.”

He scrapes another match. It doesn’t light. He tries again.

“Like just now,” he says. “When you came into the kitchen, I had the sensation that you were standing beside me, but that was before you walked in.”

It’s like everything’s out of order, he says, like there’s something wrong with the sequence, as if the future were coming before the past.

She understands already how powerful his imagination is. After trauma, she’s heard, people sometimes have hallucinations.

He picks up another match.

“Sometimes,” he says, “I see the flame before I strike the match.”