The Dreamers

11.

That same night, in the kitchen of a large gray house ten blocks away from the college, a mother is singing to her newborn baby. A father is cooking dinner.

Of course they’ve heard the news. Of course. But at this point, just ten days in, it is still possible to enjoy the smell of onions browning in a pan, and the warmth of the baby’s head against his hand, and to say to Annie, as he opens the wine: “See? It’s getting easier, isn’t it?”

The baby is seventeen days old.

They are new to Santa Lora, Ben and Annie, visiting professors, their boxes still spread on the pinewood floors, their books stacked like firewood in the dining room, and the disassembled shelves, waiting for screws, and her prints in brown paper, leaning everywhere, unhung, against the walls. Also a soccer ball, clean and white and bought on impulse along with the grill—a backyard, can you imagine? A separate room for the baby. A whole house. They are delirious with space. They are young but not that young, these the last years in their lives when they can still be thought of that way.

Annie is sitting at the kitchen table in a T-shirt and boxers, the pajamas she’s been wearing for days and days, her breasts hanging loose beneath the cotton—so changed they seem like someone else’s, so much larger than before, and the centers gone wide and dark.

Grace is asleep in her arms. Those little pink feet, one crossed over the other.

“Can you defrost another bottle?” says Annie.

Her milk has been slow to come in. For a while, the baby was lighter every time they set her on the scale, as if she might soon float away, which is how it felt to them as they waited, like two animals, waiting for their baby to thrive. She’s a skinny little thing, said one of the nurses that first week, which made Annie cry right there in the hospital, from hormones, maybe, or from exhaustion, or from something much simpler: love.

But they’ve had a good day. The baby is finally gaining weight, thanks mostly to the milk of other women, donated to the hospital by mothers with too much supply. How weird this would have seemed to Ben before—milk pumped from other women’s breasts—but now, there is only urgency. There is only getting his daughter whatever she needs.

He has learned to bathe the baby while Annie’s incision healed. He taught himself to change a diaper. And there is all the other washing, too, the cleaning of dishes and sheets and clothes, always the sound of bottles clicking in the sink, so much work and no sex and the days so often ending before he has ever showered. For seventeen days, they’ve been sleeping different sleep: short and sudden, and like sipping salt water for thirst—they wake more in need than before they closed their eyes. Every hour is needed, every moment put to use. It is exactly what he has always feared would happen with a baby. But what he didn’t understand before, what he failed to imagine in advance, is how much pleasure there is in being so consumed.

These minutes, though, this evening, they form a sudden pause, an unexpected quiet, during which they have realized, for the first time in weeks—and with a flush of joy—that there might be time enough to make a salad, to cook a piece of fish.

Here I am with my wife, thinks Ben, as he washes the lettuce at the sink, here we are with our daughter, Grace—there is a delight in just saying her name. What pleasure there is in some statements of fact, such simplicity, such calm.

To say they are ignoring what is happening at the college would be not quite true, or not quite fair. A few sick strangers—those poor kids, but none from the classes they teach—is only one of a hundred bad stories that must be overlooked every day. To close one’s eyes can be an act of survival.

Annie turns her head toward the back door. She is saying something that he cannot quite hear.

“What did you say?” says Ben. He turns off the water to listen.

“Can you hear that?” she says, standing up with the baby, who stretches and stirs in response—the baby has a way of arching her back like a fish, her whole face turning red with the strain of it. “The birds,” says Annie. “They’re going crazy out there.”

From the backyard, there come the urgent cries of the swallows who live beneath the air conditioner, their nest wedged against the windowsill. That nest was one of their earliest discoveries here, even more endearing than the goslings who float on the lake at dusk, as if they had come to a place so bursting with life that even the air conditioners could engender it.

Annie’s is a temporary position at the college, two years in a physics lab, and his is only part-time, teaching literature. But there is a charm in the modesty of it, like the warped floors beneath their feet, a pleasant shabbiness.

“Maybe there’s a hawk somewhere?” says Annie. With Grace curled against one arm, she creaks open the screen door. She moves slowly, still sore from the cesarean. “Maybe that’s what’s bothering them? A hawk?”

She stands barefoot in the yard, squinting through the lenses of her glasses. Her dark hair, like his, is unwashed, curled in a loose knot at the nape of her neck.

She is scanning the sky, which is pale and blue, the light just starting to fade. Behind their fence lie the woods, pine trees packed tight on a slope, at the top of which, a mile or so in the distance, is a large blackened patch, the bare branches proof of the last wildfire.

In their yard, the two swallows are skittering back and forth between the nest and the olive tree. The yellow house next door looks deserted.

“Hey, birds,” Ben says for Annie’s enjoyment. “What’s wrong with you guys?”

He likes the shape of her mouth when she smiles, her small teeth, not quite straight, her lips waxy with ChapStick.

“Yeah,” she says. “What’s wrong with you guys?”

Their birds continue screaming. This is the way they think of them, as theirs.

Grace suddenly opens her eyes. Her little arms shoot out from her sides as if startled.

“Do you hear that, Gracie?” says Ben. “Those are birds. Birds are the only animals that can fly.”

They’ve been advised to talk to her as much as possible, but they did not need to be told. It is an immediate urge: to tell her everything they know.

Just three months removed, their apartment in Brooklyn feels already like a cage from which they’ve finally been sprung. That apartment, three hundred square feet, and the site of so much unhappiness. And what luck to be released right here, to this place, these mountains, bordered on three sides by state forest, a place where the smell of pine sap floats over fences, where they sit evenings outside in Adirondack chairs, bought for ten dollars at a yard sale, and where they listen to the crickets buzzing in the trees and to the voices of children playing in the woods. And the stars—you can actually see the stars. And the cabins—some people actually live in log cabins here. And the strawberries and the tomatoes and the avocados and the corn, all of it sold at the produce stand on the road into town, stocked each day with the fruits of the valley below. Here is where they’ve waited these months for the baby to come. California.

A second sound now surfaces, just as urgent or more so, the doorbell. Someone is ringing it again and again. Surprise jumps between Annie’s eyes and his, no words needed. So much can be said without saying it, the efficiency of marriage.

Ben is the one who answers the door, and so he is the one who finds her: one of the girls from next door, the younger one, is standing in sandals on their front porch. She looks as upset as the birds.

“Excuse me,” she says, her voice breaking, her dark eyes blinking with tears, pink cheeks.

She is maybe ten years old, or eleven, sucking on a strand of her hair. He is not used to speaking with children.

“Are you okay?” he says.

Suddenly his wife is beside him, taking over.

“My God,” says Annie, one hand over her mouth. “What is it?”

“It’s an emergency,” says the girl. In her ears, tiny studs, the color and shape of ladybugs.

Annie reaches out toward her shoulder, but the girl steps away.

“I’m not supposed to touch anyone,” she says.

Annie’s eyes flash at Ben’s.

“What do you mean?” asks Annie, but the girl doesn’t say.

They’ve been watching these sisters for a while. They have seen them walk to the bus stop in the mornings and water the vegetables at night. They know they sit reading sometimes in the windowsills or in the widow’s walk at the top of that big, old house. The quiet ways of these girls seem so different from their father, who came over shouting one day, something about a tree. He and Annie could not make him believe they were only renting this house, and that it was the owners who must have cut down that fir.

“Just tell us what you need,” says Annie to the girl.

Right then, a window scrapes open next door. The girl’s older sister calls out to her from their house. “Libby!” she shouts. How startling to hear that quiet girl yell. “Get back here,” she says. “Get in here. I’m serious.”

These girls are afraid—Ben can see it in their faces.

Across the street, a nurse is just arriving home in blue scrubs. Ben knows her name, Barbara, and nothing else. She glances in their direction, in curiosity or in judgment, but she keeps moving. She goes inside.

“Please,” says the girl on the porch. “I just need to get into your backyard for a minute.”

He cannot understand what is happening, but whatever this girl needs, he wants to provide it. This girl is his daughter in ten years. He has begun a running narration to that older Grace, mouthing to himself as she sleeps on his chest: When you were a baby, he likes to say, we lived in California.

“Come on, then,” he says to the girl.

She refuses to come into the house, so they walk the long way instead, around the side, all three, he, Annie, with the baby, and the girl. He unlatches the gate in the side yard. He throws it open. The girl runs through.

They have stopped asking her questions.

Soon the girl is crouching over something in the grass behind the oak tree. This is when they finally see it: a white kitten is huddled in the corner of their yard. In its mouth, it holds a tiny swallow, fresh wings hanging from its teeth.

“Let it go, Chloe,” she is saying. “Let it go right now.”

Later, Ben will think of this moment as the arche kakon, the start of the bad times, as he would say of Greek tragedy, as he has written so often on whiteboards for his students, as if that kitten were an omen of every rupture that will follow. But Annie would laugh at this kind of thinking. She is a scientist, his wife, a scholar of physics. You’re too superstitious, she would say. But isn’t her physics just as much like magic as anything else?

The girl squeezes the kitten’s jaw until it drops the bird on the grass. It’s one of the babies. Dead.

“There’s a hole in our screen door,” says the girl, holding the kitten with two hands. “This one keeps getting out.”

She runs from the yard, and soon they hear the slamming of her front door.

Ben crouches over the bird. The small wings, those miniature feet. He can see the wounds where the cat’s teeth have punched through the feathers and the flesh.

Their birds continue crying out from above. How much do they know? he wonders. How much can they feel?

“Do you think they’re okay?” says Annie. There are tears in her eyes. This is something that has been happening since the baby, a change in hormones or in outlook—who can say? “Those girls?”

Annie is looking at the house next door. She is chewing at her fingers. It’s a habit of hers, the reason her skin is so raw and so red around the nail beds. He touches her wrist; she stops.

“I don’t know,” he says. A moroseness is creeping into his head, heavy and familiar. “I hope they’re okay.”

But you never know for certain what goes on in other people’s houses. Their neighbors in Brooklyn never would have guessed how close Annie came last year to moving out.

They try to go back to their meal, but the onions have charred by then. And soon the baby is awake, her cries filling the kitchen.

Ben has forgotten to defrost a bottle of breast milk, so he works on that now, turning it over in warm water at the sink, while Annie tries to feed Grace with her body, from which only a few drops of milk ever flow. Grace looks more and more desperate—she keeps pulling her head away from Annie’s breasts.

“I can’t believe you forgot to warm the bottle,” she says. She takes it from his hands and holds it under the tap, as if the slush inside will melt more quickly under her watch than his. He knows what she is not saying, how his mind is always drifting in a thousand directions. “We have a child now,” she says. “You can’t be so flaky all the time.”

He has seen it already, how a child can unite them but also divide.

After that, Annie disappears upstairs with the baby. Ben drinks a glass of wine, quicker than he means to. Something has turned. The mood has spoiled. How often that used to happen in Brooklyn: a nice night slipping from their grasp. He drinks another glass.

That night, he dreams the same dream he’s been dreaming for two years: Annie leaves him for her dissertation advisor. Certain tied knots come loose in the night. This time, she takes the baby with her. And there is something else new: at the end of the dream, his teeth begin to loosen from his gums.

To those who believe in the fixed meanings of dreams, the loss of teeth is significant, symbolic of anxiety or fear. They would say that the dream presaged what will happen in the morning and maybe everything that happens after that. But he is always trying to lure his students away from those kinds of readings, asking them to be more expansive in their thinking, less obvious, less easy, more true. All they want are the answers, those kids, a grand order of things, as if every story were only code for something else.

He is awake at the time of the accident, as he will later tell the police, in bed but not asleep. The baby’s breathing is slow and steady in her crib, and Annie lies beside him, one bare leg stretched out on the sheet.

Six in the morning, everything quiet, that earliest, faintest light.

Into this silence there comes a sudden boom, as loud as thunder but nearer. It rattles the windows in their frames. Some sounds trigger a kind of vision. An image comes to mind.

“What was that?” says Annie, sitting up fast in the dimness. He can tell she isn’t sure whether she dreamed it or really heard it. Car alarms are ringing outside.

He reaches for the light, but no light comes. The power is out. His hands are shaking. Grace begins to cry.

He goes to the window in his boxers. Something has happened across the street, where the nurse lives. It is hard to see through the smoke.

“What is it?” Annie asks again.

Through the drifts of smoke, he can see that the house no longer stands. The walls have caved in, leaving a pile of blackened wood in which small fires burn. The lawn is scattered with debris.

“It’s the house across the street,” he says. “It looks like there was some kind of explosion.”

Already, neighbors are coming out into the street, hands over their mouths, a few running toward the lot with garden hoses, water streaming. In the air, scraps of paper are fluttering away in the breeze.

“An explosion?” says Annie.

The utility pole on the corner has snapped. Electrical wires are hanging like garland in the trees. They hear sirens in the distance.

Later, while the firefighters do what they can, and the police keep the people away, Ben and Annie stand around with the other neighbors in bathrobes, Ben with the baby in his arms, her eyes wide and serious, as if she, too, senses the mood. The sun is rising around them, while every dog on the street is barking and speculation is spreading through the crowd. A faulty hot water heater, maybe, or a stove left on too long. “That could do it,” says one of the older men. “A gas stove left on for many hours.”

Everyone hopes that the nurse was not at home. Maybe she was at work, they say, the overnight shift. But they can all see her car right there in the driveway, the windshield cracked and smudged black.

“First those college kids getting sick,” says one of the older women. “And now this.”

Some try to look for luck in the situation: “At least the fire didn’t spread to the other houses,” they are saying, the way people sometimes do. There is a comfort in thinking up something worse than what is.

Through all of this, the two girls next door stay inside. Ben can see them up in the widow’s walk, watching the street from above, their faces faintly red from the flashing of the fire trucks across the street.

At the same time, their father is doing some kind of work on the exterior of the house. He is standing up on a ladder, thick beard, no shirt, the sound of hammer and nail.

Annie is the first to notice him. “My God,” she says. “I think he’s boarding up the windows.”

He looks like a man at sea up there, closing the hatches of a ship, as if preparing for a storm that no one else can see.