The Dreamers

4.

What a terrible thing going on at the college—this is the way the people of Santa Lora talk about it in the aisles of the hardware store and the supermarket, or as they walk their dogs in the woods. Have you heard what’s happening at the college? they say to their neighbors over fences, and in the bleachers at the high school, as if the college were an island apart from the town, its gates impenetrable, even by germs.

A sleeping sickness. That’s what the local reporters are calling it. One girl is dead, another unconscious, both from the same dorm floor.

There is a drought fanning out all across California. No rain in ninety days, and they are behind already from the year before. No one has ever seen the lake in Santa Lora sit so low or the sandbars rising in the middle like dunes, the old docks standing dry, fifty feet from the water’s edge.

It’s the worst drought in a hundred years. Or longer, some say. Five hundred, maybe, or more.

But the weather, this weather: it’s glorious. Six weeks of sunshine in a row.

It does not seem possible to suffer in weather like that, as if beauty were a spell that could ward off death, but they know the grapes are dying in the valley below, and their lawns are going browner by the day, parched by the same sun that is warming their porch swings long into October.

And yet, somehow, the disbelief holds: it does not seem possible in weather so pleasant for an eighteen-year-old girl to die.

But Santa Lora is a place that has suffered before.

This land is prone to shaking. These hills are liable to slide. And this forest is so fertile for fire that the cautious few among them keep their family photos packed in duffel bags at their front doors, in case of the sudden need to flee.

The tribe that once roamed these woods for game was ravaged by smallpox from fur traders, and a party of pioneers once starved in these mountains. Ten years after that, the first wooden houses, built when the silver was found in the hills, were drowned with three feet of snowmelt that very first spring. You can still find the proof in the antiques store at the corner of Mariposa and Klein: photographs of women in dark dresses, the men in frayed coats, and those children, so serious, so spindly, standing knee-deep in the water, their eyes the eyes of those accustomed to tribulation.

A landslide later swallowed every bungalow on the east side of town, and the tiny city hall, with its dome and its bell, is only a replica of the first one—an earthquake cracked the walls of the original.

The first cemetery, long since closed to new arrivals, is packed with the dead of Spanish flu. Some say their ghosts still roam the mansions on Catalina Street, now shabby and subdivided for students. The people of Santa Lora had known it was coming, that flu. They’d heard word of it traveling west from town to town. They tried to block the one road into town, but the sickness got in anyway, and then it spread through the town like news. Twice as many people died of that flu here as in the next town over, leading some to suspect, back then, that Santa Lora was cursed.

The idea still sometimes surfaces in certain superstitious minds. Whenever a teenager drowns in the lake or a hiker goes missing in the woods, some in Santa Lora wonder if this is a land destined for catastrophe. What if misfortune can be drawn to a place, like lightning to a rod?