The Dreamers

52.

In a famous experiment, a geologist once subjected himself to eight weeks alone in a lightless underground cave. Among other things, he wanted to test the accuracy of his own internal clock. He woke and slept as he pleased. He marked his days in a notebook. Without the ticking of clocks or the rising and setting of the sun, his body’s rhythms soon fell out of synch with the earth’s. At the end of the experiment, he was sure he had spent only thirty-five days underground, but sixty days had passed at the surface.

Libby: she sleeps for three weeks but she dreams of a single afternoon.

She wakes with a smile on her face, a calmness. She yawns and stretches in her sheets.

With the opening of those eyes comes an elation that Sara has never known before. Nothing is more potent than relief.

“How do you feel?” Sara asks her sister.

Libby has awakened in her own bedroom, where their father brought her after the fire—during the first minutes of chaos when no one was guarding the patients. He and Sara have been tending to her for a day without the help of doctors or nurses.

“I had the most amazing dream last night,” says Libby.

Her voice is hoarse. Her curls are tangled. She does not seem to understand how much time has passed.

“What kind of dream?” says her father, an odd intensity to his voice.

Libby meets eyes with Sara, their old habit.

“What happened to your beard?” asks Libby.

“Those dreams,” says their father. “Those were not normal dreams, okay? What did you see?”

The hair on his head is starting to grow back, but it’s coming in white instead of brown. And he is just as skinny as he was on the day he woke up.

“It was about our mom,” says Libby. There’s an unfamiliar quiet in her voice, a reverence. “We were by the lake.”

But her father is shaking his head.

“No,” he says, his hand up, like a stop sign. “That’s not the kind of dream I’m talking about. What else?”

“Just that,” she says.

He keeps asking if she’s sure, and she is, and then he disappears downstairs.

“How long did I sleep?” Libby asks once he’s gone.

“Three weeks,” says Sara.

Libby’s reaction is almost physical, as if the wind has been knocked out of her chest.

“It felt like just a few hours,” she says. “Like a nap.”

The cats have collected around Libby, cuddling in the sheets of her bed.

“You were there, too,” says Libby. “In the dream. We were down at the lake with her.”

If Libby closes her eyes, she can remember everything about those minutes: the lavender cables of their mother’s sweater, her fingernails, chipped with pale peach polish.

“And these earrings,” says Libby, picking up a pair of silver hoops from a scattering of jewelry on the nightstand. “She was wearing these earrings.”

There was a newspaper spread out on a picnic table by the lake. Finger paints set out.

“We were making handprints with the paint,” says Libby. “And she was painting a little picture of the lake with her fingers.”

The air smelled like barbecue. Someone was grilling down on the beach. Their mother had a certain way of wiping her hair from her face with the back of her hand.

“You were wearing a sunflower-shaped barrette,” says Libby. “And a white sundress.”

Their mother handed them milk in plastic cups, a ziplock bag of Goldfish.

“I started to throw the paint, and she said: ‘Girls, I’ve told you three times.’ ”

The blue paint drying in the creases of her palms, the sound of the birds, the voices of other children splashing in the water.

“Do you remember a day like that?” says Libby.

“No,” says Sara.

“I think it was real,” says Libby, a distant afternoon recovered, intact, from the deep.

Libby was so young when their mother died—she has never before remembered anything about her.

“It can’t be,” says Sara, suddenly filled with envy. “You were too young to remember.”

But she makes Libby tell her the whole thing again, in even more detail, until the time it takes for the telling far exceeds any minutes they spent, once, years ago, by the lake.

Libby lowers her voice. “What did Daddy dream of?”

“He dreamed there would be a fire at the library,” says Sara.

“Don’t talk about that,” her father calls from the other room.

Sara whispers: “And then there really was a fire there.”

An uneasiness comes into Libby’s face.

“What happened was just like your dream,” says Sara. “Right, Daddy?”

He shakes his head. He is adamant. “In my dream,” he says, “no one died.”

While the Humvees continue rumbling down the streets of Santa Lora, their father checks and rechecks the supplies in the basement, obsessed with new worries.

He had other dreams, too.

“The oceans moved a hundred miles inland,” he says. “Los Angeles was swallowed. The ocean came all the way to the base of these mountains.”

He takes a sip of beer. He swallows hard.

“And then today,” he says, “this news comes out: the biggest ice shelf in Antarctica is about to collapse. Do you see what that means?”

They wait for him to explain.

“It’s happening,” he says. “The dreams I had. They were all real.”

Sara at once believes it and does not believe it. She has not yet heard the rumors circulating that some of the other survivors claim to have seen glimpses of the future, too. But isn’t the future always an imaginary thing before it comes?