The Dreamers

41.

That night, something wakes Sara up.

Maybe it’s the creak of the hinge in the front gate. Maybe it’s the crunch of footsteps on the gravel of the driveway. Or the quick clearing of a man’s throat on the front porch.

But these are possibilities that predate her awareness. The only thing she knows is that she is suddenly awake in the dark.

All she can hear, for now, is the drip-drip of a faucet, and the small stirrings of the kittens in their sleep, and one more slow metronome: the steady rhythm of her sister’s breathing in the bed beside hers.

The room is warm from their bodies, and she can see her sister’s face in the moonlight. But a strange sensation keeps creeping into her body, the feeling that she is alone in the room, that her sister is not there at all.

It’s her sister’s breathing—that’s what it is: too slow. The possibility hits her with the heft of a fact: her sleep is too deep.

Maybe ten seconds pass between the moment this thought surfaces and the one when she’s poking Libby’s shoulder.

Libby wakes up right away.

“What are you doing?” says Libby. Her voice is scratchy and grouchy, and the most wonderful noise Sara has ever heard. It is hard to remember in the dark that every worry is more worrisome in the middle of the night.

Libby turns over in her sheets, already bobbing back to sleep.

The clock glows midnight, and Sara aims for sleep, too. She is close to a doze, dipping in, when the kittens suddenly pop up from their box. Sara sees them in silhouette, eight ears twitching in the same direction, as if they have caught some ominous sound, too low for the girls to hear.

But then comes another noise, much louder: the tinkle of breaking glass.

Now she is up and out of bed. The cats are running everywhere. She is shaking Libby’s shoulder.

“Get up,” Sara whispers. “There’s someone in the house.”

This house is a hundred years old. The floor shudders whenever anyone takes a step. Huddled in a closet, the girls listen through the vent. Someone is moving around downstairs.

Her sister is so close she can feel her warm breath against her shoulder. She is so close she can feel her shaking.

Now the creak of the wood is replaced by the sticky smack of linoleum. Someone has passed into the kitchen.

The refrigerator swooshes open. It suctions closed. Open again. More steps. And then a crashing sound, as if someone has overturned the table. From the backyard, Charlie begins to bark.

“Maybe it’s Daddy?” whispers Libby, a sudden blast of optimism.

“I don’t think so,” says Sara.

Now they hear the squeaking of hinges as the kitchen cabinets swing open and slam shut. There is a scraping sound. There is the clatter of dishes.

A few seconds of silence precede a terrible new noise: the creak of the stairs. Whoever it is—he is coming up. And he is coming quick.

Now the bedroom door clicks open. They hear the cats scurry away, their claws sliding on the wood.

In the closet, Libby is squeezing Sara’s hand so hard it hurts. Her little nails are digging into her palm.

On the other side of the closet door, drawers are opening and closing. Things are crashing onto the floor. There’s another sound, too, an intermittent static, like a radio or a walkie-talkie.

Every dark scene her father has ever painted comes flashing into Sara’s mind: someone has come to hurt them. Maybe it’s the government, like in that movie their father likes. Maybe they’re killing everyone in town to stop the epidemic.

She begins to cry. Her sister reaches over to cover her mouth.

And then it happens: the closet door swings open.

By the low light of Libby’s night-light, they can see the outline of a man.

“Are you in here?” he says. There is panic in his voice. “Are you here?”

The girls keep quiet.

They do not imagine what he might see at this moment, the faces of two little girls in nightgowns, squeezed together among their sweaters and their coats, one crying, the other burying her head into the other’s shoulder. But that is the thing: he does not seem to see them at all.

They can see his feet now—no shoes. And his chest—no shirt.

He parts the coats in the closet like curtains.

“Please,” he keeps saying. “Please tell me where you are.”

That’s when Sara recognizes him. It’s their neighbor. This guy is their neighbor, that professor with the baby.

It is a relief to know that this man is a father, as if one parent will always look out for the children of others.

Now she sees that he is bleeding. His hands are running with blood. Bits of glass sparkle on his bare feet.

“Where is my baby?” he says. “I can’t find my baby.”

There is something about his eyes, seeing but not seeing, as if, it comes to her suddenly, as if he is dreaming.

There’s that sound again, the windy swish of some kind of electronic device. He holds it up to his ear. A baby monitor. The noise comes in like an old recording, or a radio station losing its signal. A surge of noise, but no baby sounds.

And then he rushes out of the house as suddenly as he came.

He does not flinch or shout out, when his bare feet step on broken glass. He never makes it home. From the widow’s walk, the girls spot him passed out on his porch.

Libby runs out to put a blanket over him. Sara calls the police. Only late the next day does an ambulance come to take him away. Those suited-up workers spend a long time in the house and then mark it with an X. If they find the baby in there, the girls do not see her.

In the morning, they discover that among the things he shattered in his sleep are their mother’s black ceramic birds from Portugal. There they are, in pieces on the floor. Libby spends all day trying to glue them back together. But time moves in only the one direction. Not everything that breaks can be repaired.

That night, Sara wakes again, gripped by another ominous feeling. This time, her sister’s bed is empty. Sara rushes for the lights. And this is how she discovers Libby, lying perfectly still on the wood floor. But worse than that: her brown eyes are wide open.

For five seconds, Sara knows she is alone in the world—only the dead lie like that.

But then an odd mumbling begins to come from Libby’s mouth, singsong, as if she is speaking in her sleep, eyes still open. Not so uncommon, she will later learn, in the youngest victims of the virus.

Sara puts a hand on her back, gentle at first. “Wake up,” she says.

But she knows already that the thing she has been dreading for weeks has finally come to pass: the sleep has come for Libby.