The Dreamers

20.

That same night, a cloud of smoke is spotted wafting from the woods outside of town. It is windy this night. It is dry. Santa Ana winds are pushing west from the desert: fire weather.

As on so many nights before this one, the flashes of fire trucks light up the streets of Santa Lora. Emergency radios crackle with the news of yet one more wildfire burning these ancient drought-dried woods. In a town already worried, the crack of sirens wakes the healthy from their dreams.

But not the baby, who is snoring, by then, in her crib, an hour past when she usually wakes up to eat. And not Ben, either, who has fallen asleep on the rug while watching her breathe through the slats of her crib. And not Annie, who joined him there sometime later, draping a blanket over his body before closing her eyes beside him.

Ben and Annie: in how many places these two have lain side by side. On various twin beds all through college—legs tangled as they breathed each other’s breath. On that basement air mattress at her parents’ house, where she used to sneak down to join him, after her parents went to bed. In those sleeping bags in Mexico, the summer after college, when they were so young and so serious that they spent their evenings like this: Annie trying again and again to explain to him string theory, Ben reading aloud from Proust. Together, they have slept the sleep of too much whisky and too much wine, the jetlag sleep of their first afternoon in that hostel in Rome, the daytime dozing in hammocks, years later, on her family’s back porch in Maine, and the naked napping of so many Sundays in Brooklyn. There was the restless, jealous sleep the year before last, when Annie started working late with her advisor. There was the going-to-bed-mad sleep when she insisted that nothing had happened, but that she needed time to figure things out. There was the lonely insomniac sleep of the two weeks she then spent at her parents’ house without calling, Ben alone and sleepless in their studio, and then the hard sleep of grief and relief when she decided she wanted to come back, and asked, could he forgive her? They’ve slept the brief shoulder sleep of so many car rides and train rides and planes, the beach sleep in Mexico, those sunburns on their honeymoon, the sleep of bad dreams and good dreams, the dreams they’ve shared and the dreams they haven’t, and all the dreams they never remembered and never would, so many of which have traveled through their minds while their two heads have lain not more than a few inches apart.

And now, for the past three weeks, they’ve been sleeping this new kind of sleep, clipped but deep—such steep efficiency—because who knew when the baby might open her eyes and call out?

But on this night, in spite of the sirens, the baby does not wake. On this night, the baby does not cry.

Instead, all three remain as they are, deep in their separate sleeps, lights off in the baby’s room, minds speeding off in distant directions, even Grace’s, whose unknowable dreams send her eyelids fluttering and her lips shuddering and one arm quivering lightly in her crib.

One house over, Sara and Libby wake up fast. So do the cats.

“Dad,” the girls call out in the dark, while the sirens scream outside.

But they know what to do. They know where to go. This is something that happens a few times a year. Fire season. Soon they’ll be waiting out in the truck while their father hoses down the roof. A single ember can travel for a mile on the wind and set a house like theirs on fire.

“We can’t leave the kittens,” says Libby.

She is trying to gather the kittens up, but they overflow her skinny arms. Two have already squirreled beneath her bed, the hairs on their backs sticking up, their white tails inflated like dusters, tiny eyes flashing in the darkness.

Sara rushes to her father’s room at the end of the hall. He sleeps with his window open, no matter the season—his whole room is vibrating with the wail of the sirens and with the staticky voices of the police radio he keeps always by his bed.

“Dad,” she says. She is suddenly shy in the doorway.

By the low glow of the streetlight, she can see his silhouette, the way he’s lying on his side in that wide old bed, how quiet he is in the dimness.

A gust of dry wind sends the curtains whipping into the room.

“Daddy?” she says.

She switches on the lights: his eyes are closed, his face is slack. With two fingers, she pulls back the sheets. She pokes him on the shoulder, which is bare and a little bony. He has grown so skinny these last few years.

“Wake up,” she whispers.

How strange to touch his face, to smell the old sweat on his skin, the staleness of his breath as he snores.

Libby runs in behind her, wiping her hair from her face. “You guys have to help me get all the cats,” she says. “They’re running everywhere.”

“He’s not waking up,” says Sara.

It is Libby who shouts into his ear—no response. It is Libby who pinches his arm.

“Be careful,” says Sara. “Don’t hurt him.”

But his face registers no pain.

And it is Libby who leans up close to his face, her curls falling across his forehead as she bends to make sure he is breathing.

“It’s the sickness, isn’t it?” says Libby. Her eyes are already watering.

By now, they should be downstairs with their bags, shoes on. At the earliest sign of a fire in those woods, their father likes to get out of town—it’s a dangerous corridor, what with only the one road out. The safest place to be is away, and the safest time to go is before anyone else thinks they should.

They are starting to smell the smoke.

This bedroom is the wrong place to be in a fire. The third floor, the most dangerous place.

“We can’t leave him up here alone,” says Libby.

The sirens cry on. Sara looks out the window. It’s too dark to see where the smoke is coming from or how near or far its source.

A terrible calmness is descending on her. A series of decisions needs to be made. He would want them to leave and get somewhere safe—she is sure. Downstairs, at least, ready to run if they need to. But she will not do it.

“We’re not going to leave him,” she says. “We’re gonna stay right here, no matter what.”

Outside, the eucalyptus trees are bending hard in the wind, their branches scratching against the roof as if for ballast.

“Think of how many wildfires there have been since this house was built,” says Sara, leaning close to her sister. “Think of how long it’s been here and stayed standing.”

And so they sit that way in their nightgowns, holding their father’s slack hands, waiting for whatever will come.

Three streets over, the sirens wake Nathaniel from a troubling dream.

In the dream, he and Henry are thirty years younger—they have only recently met, two young professors. Nathaniel’s daughter is a two-year-old girl, stacking blocks on the rug in that tiny apartment that Nathaniel rented after the divorce. In the dream, Henry is looking for something. He is searching the apartment. Frantic. Nathaniel understands without it being said what Henry is searching for: some kind of poison. And what Henry wants to do with the poison is drink it. What Nathaniel cannot understand is why. Henry is begging for Nathaniel’s help, begging. He can’t live like this, Henry keeps saying, but Nathaniel cannot follow the thinking: live like what? He cannot, in the dream, understand the source of Henry’s suffering. Eventually, he follows Henry through a doorway that leads, somehow, to the living room of Nathaniel’s grandmother’s house in Michigan, and Nathaniel has a sudden certainty that the poison is hidden inside the grandfather clock that ticks in the corner. But he will not tell Henry where it is. Why not? Henry keeps asking. His face is young but his eyes are pained like an old man’s. Why won’t you do this for me?

When Nathaniel wakes, his whole body is tense. He is sweaty in his sheets.

Had he dreamed this dream in a different time, he might have considered it prophecy. Or perhaps, at certain moments in history, he would have taken it as a message from God.

If he had dreamed it fifty or a hundred years ago, the era of Freud, the leading experts might have argued that the dream is not about Henry at all, not really, but about Nathaniel’s own childhood, some repressed sexual desire from infancy, the dream’s true meaning concealed from his conscious mind, and in need of analysis.

And yet, those who favored Jung in that same era might have read it differently still, insisting that a dream cannot be so simply reduced. Not everything is about desire. And as Henry liked to say to his literature students, the poem is the poem—you can’t translate it. They might point out, too, the presence in the dream of certain archetypes from the collective unconscious: the father figure, the child, the clock.

But these are ideas from a different time.

These days, science doesn’t take much interest in dreams.

For Nathaniel, professor of biology, this dream of Henry is merely an upsetting distraction. It will remain unexamined. He rushes to think of something else.

On this night, the night of the fire, it is easy to find a different focus. It is almost a relief: the smell of smoke in the air, the scream of the sirens, the fact that there is work to be done.

He is soon standing out in the yard, spraying his roof with the hose.

At the hospital, the smell of smoke goes undetected. Twelve hours into the quarantine, a more pressing danger is floating through these fluorescent halls. A fifth nurse goes under. And an old man, admitted for pneumonia, now sleeps with the others in the isolation wing.

There are not enough beds for the families trapped in the hospital, so they sleep on the floor in the halls. At this late hour, no one can tell by looking who among them might be sick and who well.

Certain small problems are already threatening to grow larger: two toilets have stopped flushing, and the usual shipment of cafeteria food has not arrived—the truck driver too spooked by the news to approach the building.

Inside, Catherine keeps her mask tight, her hands in double gloves, her psychiatric training leaving her only slightly more prepared than the others. One thought keeps beating in her mind: if this sickness takes her away, her daughter will not remember even one wisp of her days with her mother. It seems suddenly selfish to have brought her into this world alone.

She tries to write a note to her, in case—to read when she’s older. But she is unable to put down on that page anything more than the biggest, most obvious thing: You were loved.

In the gym, no one is sleeping. Twenty-six kids are awake in the dark, four fewer than the day before. A belief has spread among some of them that sleep itself is the poison, the cause and not the effect. How can you catch it if you never close your eyes? Mei is lying in her cot, shaking beneath her blanket. They are stiff, those blankets, as rough as old coats. She is holding her phone to her chest like a cross. Someone is whispering in one corner. Someone is crunching candy in the dark.

Into this wide space, the sirens rise quietly, muffled by the windowless walls. But the faint scent of smoke soon slips into the gym.

“Do you smell that?” says the voice of one of the boys on the other side of the room. Mei can see his silhouette against the green glow of the exit sign. He is pressing his hands to the door, feeling for heat.

There is a rising of voices as the word travels through the room: fire. The smack of bare feet hitting the polished wood floor.

“We need to get out of here,” someone is saying.

The voice of the guard out front calls into the room: “Everyone stay calm,” he says, as always, from a great distance. Those guards are afraid to breathe the same air as the kids. “The fire is way up in the woods, but we’re keeping an eye on it.”

A tide of protest goes up in the gym. They can hear the wind growing outside. There’s a need to see what is happening out there, how near or far that fire might be.

Some of the kids begin to crowd near the front door. The guard backs away. “You need to obey the perimeter,” he says.

But the smell of the smoke is getting stronger.

“What do they care if we burn alive?” says Matthew, as Mei slips her shoes on, her backpack.

Matthew tries it first. He walks quickly toward the guard.

“Stop,” says the guard, but it is suddenly obvious to everyone watching: that guard is afraid to touch him. Matthew keeps going—he walks right out the front door.

And then the crowd realizes it, too. Never before has Mei felt so connected to these other kids, to the force of them all walking out the door, quick and firm, on only the strength of their minds, as if crossing hot coals. There is a terror and a thrill, that sudden sense of purpose. She can hear the guard calling for help on his radio.

When the wind hits their faces, some tear off their masks right away, let them float off behind them like freed birds. Who knows how many of these kids carry the sickness already, the thing multiplying in their bloodstreams, even now, awaiting its moment to bloom?

But for now, on this night, they feel fine—fine!—and what they do is they run. All of them. Even Mei, her backpack pounding against her spine, and the air, slightly smoky, rushing into her throat. The wind is so violent it swallows her breath—a Santa Ana.

If the guard is calling after them, not one of them can hear his voice, too loud is the weather in their ears.

Matthew will know what to do next—this is the idea that propels her toward him in the dark. She stops where he stops, which is in the shadows of the back entrance to the library, a boy, tall and skinny, a stranger, really, leaning against a wall.

“Where can we go?” she says. Her breaths are coming fast from the sprint.

The fire is more distant than she had imagined: a slight glow, tended by helicopters, way up high in the woods. It seems suddenly clear that the fire is not what is making them run.

“I don’t know,” says Matthew. He keeps looking around. His face is half hidden in the shadows cast by the streetlights. “I don’t know.”

The other kids are streaming past, footsteps crunching quickly in the dark.

“This was stupid,” says Matthew. He is rubbing his hands together. “They’ll send a SWAT team here any second.”

But a surprising idea is forming in Mei’s head. The start of a whisper is coming up from her throat: “I think I know a place,” she says.

“What?” he calls in the wind.

Louder this time: “I know where we can go.”

She will never know the meaning of that flash of surprise on his face—the same way the boys sometimes looked at her as a child, when she revealed how fast she could run across a soccer field.

He asks no questions.

The two of them just go.

What a rush it is to provide this boy with the exact thing that is needed.

The lawn, when they get there, is wet beneath their shoes; this grass always so much healthier than the grass in other yards, no matter the drought. A row of white roses is blowing in the wind, the petals a confetti on the grass.

“I babysit here,” says Mei. The Mercedes is gone from the driveway, but the porch light is on. “They’re out of town.”

It is surprising how easy this is: as easy as turning that key, as quick as one finger punching the code for the alarm system.

Inside, the air smells like clean laundry—and like safety, too, as if no trouble can come to a home so well kept. The feeling is in the marble countertops of that enormous white kitchen, the abundance of copper pots. It’s in the miniature succulents arranged in mason jars, one in each windowsill. It’s the way the wood floors shine beneath the overhead lights, which run on a timer to make it look like the house is occupied, which, for now, it is.

“We have to take off our shoes,” says Mei.

Matthew looks skeptical, but he kicks off his sandals, one held together by tape—none of the other boys wear sandals like his. She tries not to notice how dirty his feet are as they sink into the creamy white rug in the living room.

“Where are they, anyway?” he says, while she sets his sandals on a rack in the closet, as if to say in tableau: At least we kept our shoes in the proper place. “Maybe they knew something we didn’t.”

“They’re just on a cruise,” says Mei.

Matthew laughs a private laugh. His mask now gone from his face, it’s the first time that she has really noticed his mouth, the thin lips, the beginnings of a mustache, his teeth packed tight as tile, the overcorrection of braces.

“Do you ever wonder why they need such a huge house?” he says. “I mean, what do they do with all these things?”

He lifts a small sculpture of a bird from its spot on the piano. He flies it around like a kid.

“Be careful,” she says.

Maybe they shouldn’t have come here.

Over the fireplace hangs a gleaming honey-colored guitar, someone’s signature laced across the belly. It’s not for touching—this is what she’s been telling the little girl who lives here, two years old, just beginning to understand what you can and cannot do. No touching, repeats the girl whenever she passes that guitar, no touching. But here is Matthew, reaching up for a strum.

“Oh,” says Mei. “Um, can you leave that alone?”

It’s the wrong thing to say. How embarrassing, this concern for material objects, but also: the way her voice goes up at the end, like a question, like maybe he shouldn’t be touching it?

“Relax,” he says. “Aren’t they in the middle of the ocean?”

His whole body is moving. His fingers are snapping. His feet are tapping. There is a feeling of adventure in the way he pauses to play drums on the coffee table like it’s a dashboard, the way he climbs onto the little girl’s rocking horse, the absurd bend of his long legs at the sides. And it’s a little contagious—it is—his wildness.

“I just want to close the curtains,” says Mei. “So the neighbors won’t see us.”

There are a lot of windows.

Afterward, she finds Matthew in the kitchen—with a bottle of wine in one hand, a corkscrew in the other.

“You really can’t do that,” she says.

But a moment later comes the soft pop of cork leaving bottle. A tenseness spreads through her—who knows what else this boy will do?

“It isn’t right that they have so much when some people have so little,” says Matthew. “We could pour all this down the drain as a protest.”

Instead, he pours the wine into two coffee mugs and slides one across the counter toward Mei.

“No thanks,” she says.

He laughs. It was a mistake, she knows now, to bring him here.

“Come on,” he says.

He is just standing there, staring, so she takes a tiny sip. The taste is a surprise: fresh and cool in her mouth, not at all like the heavy red wine she has tried once or twice at Katrina’s, never enough to feel more than a slight warmth on her tongue—it seemed so important, back then, not to mess with her mind. But it sounds juvenile now, like bullshit—that would be Matthew’s word.

“We have to remember to take the bottle with us when we leave,” she says. “So they don’t know we drank it.”

“That’s the least of our worries,” he says.

She takes a few more sips. Maybe she doesn’t want to be this girl anymore, this girl who follows the rules.

Now and then, the call of sirens in the distance. The chop of helicopters.

Matthew turns on the television. They sink into the couch, the cool of real leather beneath her palms.

“Look,” says Matthew. “We’re on TV.”

On the screen is the campus, as seen from a helicopter, ringed with the flashing of police cars. Unconfirmed reports, says the reporter, suggest that as many as twenty students have left quarantine.

From this couch, the situation seems less and less urgent. It seems a little funny, actually. Matthew keeps refilling her mug.

He is saying something about American history. He is saying something about the fucked-up ethics of quarantine, civil liberties.

At a certain point, she has the urge to close her eyes. A few seconds later comes the sound of strumming. The autographed guitar from the mantel is now stretched across Matthew’s lap.

“I think that’s just for decoration,” Mei says, but she is melting into the couch.

The bottle of wine stands nearly empty on the coffee table.

“This thing is totally out of tune,” says Matthew.

Somewhere in that room is the idea that he should not be playing that guitar, but it is a concept and not a feeling, like something theoretical and not at all connected to her.

She’s getting tired, too, so tired—maybe she’s never felt so sleepy in her life. A flicker of fear makes her wince: What if this is it, the sickness finally taking over her body? But this concern quickly floats away. Something is dulling every possibility but this one: the cool calm of the leather couch beneath her palms, the softness of the cushion beneath her head.

“Hey, wait,” Matthew says. “Maybe you should drink some water before you go to sleep.”

But it’s too late. She falls asleep right there, sitting up on the couch beside Matthew. It’s a dark, oceanic sleep: deep and still, and empty of dreams.