The Dreamers

42.

They carry her sister in their arms, these strangers, college kids in college sweatshirts. A boy and a girl who seem to know what to do. They wear white masks and green gloves.

“I kept calling 911,” says Sara. Her voice is shaking with a desperate gratitude—it feels like some kind of love. “I kept calling, but they never came.”

“They don’t have enough ambulances,” says the boy.

He is lifting her sister up from the wood floor, where she has been lying all day. Libby—green pajamas, bare feet, her cheek creased from the knots in the wood. Her lips, Sara worries, are beginning to chap.

“Are you guys staying here alone?” asks the college girl through her mask.

An urge keeps rising up in Sara: to apologize for the trouble.

The boy is holding Libby as if he has never held a child, careful and stiff and way out in front of him, as if her body were an heirloom, a thing that might break.

But he walks quickly once he has her, in running shoes, skinny legs, long strides down the staircase, quick steps across the living room and out the front door.

“The hospital is full,” he says, squinting on the sidewalk. “But they can help her on campus.”

His mask has fallen down over his chin, and the girl works to fix it—she is tender as she pulls the elastic back over his ears. But the boy wants to rush.

“That’s good enough,” he says, and he turns away from the girl.

“You should put some shoes on,” the girl says to Sara.

“No,” says the boy. “She should stay here. She’ll just slow us down.”

Their eyes conduct a brief argument. The girl wins.

She hands Sara a fresh pair of green latex gloves.

“Put these on,” she says. They are too big on her fingers, but she wears them anyway—she will do whatever these people say.

And then the three of them start walking, Libby in the boy’s arms.

The sky is loud with helicopters. But down here, the streets are empty. Here and there, a distant voice comes through, or sometimes a face in a window. But mostly it is only the sun and the woods, the birds on their branches, the soundless shuffling of the pine needles in the wind.

It is warm for December, but a breeze reminds Sara that she has left the house in only a flannel nightgown and sandals.

Libby’s eyelids keep shuddering, as if she is dreaming, even then, even as her head bobs in the crook of this boy’s elbow; even now, she is dreaming some secret dream. There is something unsettling about it, to see so clearly this fact: how unreachable the inside of even her sister’s mind.

The front door of the Garabaldi house stands wide open—no Garabaldis. Sara spots a bird flapping around inside.

Her father was right about everything.

When an ambulance swings around the corner, the college girl waves it down. But the paramedics, in their goggles and full-body suits, shake their heads through the windshield.

“We can’t take anyone else,” they call through their masks. All you can see are their eyes. “We’re full.”

This is the moment—as that ambulance fades like a dream in the distance—when something begins to happen inside Sara’s chest. A sudden tightening, a resistance to the task of breathing.

She stops where she is on the sidewalk. She bends over, feels faint. Someone’s hand is rubbing her back.

“Have you eaten anything today?” asks the college girl.

Food—the whole idea is surprising. And water, too. The information comes to her suddenly: how dry her mouth is.

“We don’t have time for this,” says the boy. “Her sister is the one who needs help.”

“Have this,” says the girl. She pulls a few things from the pocket of her sweatshirt.

A few gulps of water and a granola bar put Sara back on her feet. Or maybe it’s something else: to be cared for like this.

A Hummer whooshes by without stopping. A policeman rushes past them on foot.

The boy shifts Libby’s weight in his arms, so that her head rests on his shoulder, her hair on his neck, the way a father might carry a toddler. The boy’s mask has fallen down again—and again, the girl tries to fix it, but he shakes his head.

“Just leave it,” he says.

You can see she wants to say something but doesn’t. Instead she drips a little water into Libby’s mouth, and Libby coughs a tiny cough as the water runs down her chin.

“She needs an IV,” says the boy.

That’s when the college girl takes Sara’s hand in hers, which feels weird at first—Sara is not that young, and it’s strange through the gloves. But the longer they walk, the more it feels like a good idea.

When they get where they’re going, outside the campus gates, when she sees the crowd that has gathered there, Sara remembers something awful: they are not the only ones who need help.

From far away, they look lifeless, all those people spread out in other people’s arms. The heads hang back, the necks exposed. Their arms, like Libby’s, dangle loose like something wilted. Worse are the ones on the ground, lying on their backs on the sidewalk or facedown in the grass. Who knows how they got there or who they are? Workers move through the crowd in blue suits, but Sara can see from half a block away how much the need outweighs the aid.

Slowly, very slowly, the sick are being carried onto campus on stretchers and into the white tents that loom on the college lawns. And always the helicopters, arcing across the sky, as useless as flies.

Someone in a blue suit is going around handing out gloves. Another is walking through the crowd, spraying something clear on the ground and on people’s shoes. Bleach, maybe.

A stab of longing for her father comes into Sara—she has no way of knowing where he sleeps.

An enormous man lies snoring on the sidewalk, his belly showing under his shirt. No one can lift him. He looks so alone, lying there—she can’t bear it: Maybe his family has only gone on an errand and will be back to sit with him soon. Maybe his wife has only gone to find a bathroom. Four blue suits struggle to get him onto a stretcher. The smell of urine wafts in the air.

A rumor is traveling through the crowd. An evacuation is coming. Buses.

But the boy is skeptical.

“Why would they evacuate anyone now?” he says. “That’s the exact opposite of what they’re trying to do.”

To Sara, it feels as if there is no one left out in the world, anyway, as if this is the last town on earth. The feeling stays with her, like a thing you know is both true and not true at the same time.

Some people are angry. A man keeps shouting at the soldiers. “Shame on you,” he says. “Shame on you.”

In the grass between the road and the sidewalk, a woman and a little boy lie unconscious together. Names and phone numbers are written on the boy’s overalls. Who wrote them? Sara wonders, but there’s no one to ask. A bee lands on the woman’s face. The college girl shoos it away.

On the fence around the campus, boots and suits hang from the posts, a creepy batch of laundry, drying in the sun. In the distance, the smell of burning.

“They burn the masks and gloves,” he says.

The boy and the girl leave Sara with Libby and help whoever else they can. She watches them handing out water.

Libby is lying on the grass, her head in Sara’s lap. She is holding Libby’s hand.

Libby begins to mumble in her sleep, but it’s nothing Sara can decipher. Maybe they are the lucky ones, the ones dreaming more fortunate than the ones awake. Sara drips a little more water into her sister’s mouth.

The boy is gone for a long time, and then returns with a couple of workers—for the woman and the little boy. What about her sister? she thinks. But she is too afraid to ask. It is hard to tell whether there is no order here, or if she just does not understand the order that there is. The woman and the boy are eventually scooped up by the workers—they want to take the little boy first, alone.

“Can’t you keep them together?” the girl asks. “He’s so young.”

One worker sprays the grass where they were lying.

The boy brings to Sara a piece of thick paper, like a notecard, but with a string attached.

“Write her name down on this card,” he says to Sara.

To see the letters of her sister’s name in her handwriting brings a fresh sadness. He ties the card around Libby’s little wrist and then disappears again.

After a while, Sara spots someone she knows in the crowd, her drama teacher, Mrs. Campbell. The surprise of seeing a teacher outside the classroom, and the further surprise: to see the look of suffering on her face. She is holding someone in her arms, someone sick, a man in short sleeves, a blanket draped around his narrow shoulders. She knows that man, too, she realizes. The sleeping man is Sara’s math teacher, Mr. Guitierrez. But for no reason she knows, Sara pretends not to see them.

The college girl soon comes back to check on her. She squeezes Sara’s hand. On another day, this college girl would have made her shy, this Mei, with her thick hair and her closeness to this boy, how she knows how to be in the world. But Sara thinks of none of this. There is only the rising and falling of her sister’s chest and the warmth of this older girl’s hand in hers.

“Come on,” says the boy to the girl. “You’re wasting time.”

“This is important, too,” says the girl. She stays where she is, on the sidewalk with Sara.

The feeling of that girl’s hand in hers is how she makes it through that day—to the moment, hours later, when the girl and the boy give up on the workers and carry her sister through the gates themselves, and then the way that girl walks her home to the house, where Sara will fall asleep alone—curled in her sister’s bed.

She promises, this girl, to come back later to check on Sara, but hours pass. The whole night passes. The college girl does not return.