The Dreamers

40.

It is easy to mistake a wish for a fact, a hope for a lie, a better world for the one that is. For example, our children: we don’t expect we’ll ever lose them.

And so, when Ben finds his baby girl in her crib, sleeping late into the morning, it is hard for him to believe that anything might be wrong. She looks so much like she always does in sleep, those peach cheeks, those fat lips. Her eyelids are fluttering like they always do. Her little legs are pumping slightly as she snores. Nothing seems amiss, except for this: no matter what Ben does, she will not open her eyes.

“Come on,” he says. She is so warm in his arms, and, if he puts his thumb in her palm, her fingers still close around it. “Come on, little nut.”

But no tickling of her feet, no brushing of her cheek, no splashing of water on her face—none of it will rouse his daughter.

No matter that he has imagined this exact scenario constantly for weeks—all those visions turn out to be useless now, his worst fears proved flimsy by the real experience. This, this is ghastly: a sudden draining of meaning from the world.

Later, he will think of all the ways he might have saved her from this: maybe they should have stayed inside all this time, or left town earlier, broken the barricades—anything.

But for now, he just kneels down on the floor as if to pray or to beg.

“Please,” he says, his hands on her chest like he might still find some magic there. “Please, wake up.”

There is a reason that time seems to slow down in moments like these, a neurological process, discovered through experiment: in times of shock, the brain works faster—it takes more in. And so, some might say that this—the increased rate at which his neurons are firing—makes these first few seconds even more excruciating than they might otherwise be.

But forget all that. The only way to tell some stories is with the oldest, most familiar words: this here, this is the breaking of a heart.