The Dreamers

5.

If, on the fourth night of that first week, a stranger were to visit Santa Lora, and if that stranger were to go walking at the end of the day, at sunset, maybe, or just before, if he were to drift ten blocks east of the college, he might notice eventually a large yellow house, maybe a hundred years old, once grand but no longer, with a rusted rain gutter and a sagging porch swing and green beans growing out front. If he were to see that house, he might notice a girl. And he would wonder, as he walks, the way strangers sometimes do, what it is she is doing there, this girl at the window, so serious, so still, just standing, looking out.

She is twelve years old, this girl at the window. She is skinny in her cutoff jeans, dark hair. Glasses, bracelets, sunburn. Sara.

She has the feeling already that she will remember this night for a long time. But she feels this way often, a certain simmering. It is a habit of thinking she shares with her father—every ordinary moment holds a potential calamity, and you cannot know when one will rise.

Tonight, there is this: her father is late coming home.

From the window, she watches other cars slide into the other driveways on their street. She hears the opening and closing of her neighbors’ doors. There’s the crinkling of grocery sacks and the ringing of keys and the calm of their voices—other people are always so calm—as they speak to their children and their husbands and their dogs.

“He probably just stopped somewhere on the way home from work,” says Libby, her sister, ten months younger, upstairs with the kittens. Five weeks old, they sleep in a box.

“You always freak out,” her sister goes on. “But it’s always fine.”

“He’s never this late,” says Sara. She turns back to look at the street.

Outside, the birds are calling out from the trees, swallows, maybe, or chickadees. A pair of joggers fly by on the sidewalk. The college kids who share the big house on the corner are lighting a grill on their porch. Her father’s blue pickup does not appear.

She can smell dinner cooking in the house next door, the gray one with the screened porch and the white trim, the house where the new neighbors live with their baby, those professors, as her father calls them, those professors who cut down the pine tree that stood between the two houses for so many years, for as long as their father can remember, since before he was born, which was thirty-five years before the girls were. It was our tree, her father is always saying. He stops often to inspect the stump. It was not their tree to kill.

The last of the light is draining from the sky. Insects have begun to bump against the screens.

When her chest tightens like this, it can be hard to tell if it’s her asthma that’s doing it, or her mood. She fishes her inhaler out of her backpack. Two quick puffs.

She checks the clock on the microwave again. He is an hour and ten minutes late.

But finally: the crunch of tires on gravel, the friendly rattle of the broken tailpipe.

She opens the front door. So many days seem likely to veer toward disaster, but so many turn the other way instead.

“We got hungry,” she says to her father, hiding her gladness at the sight of him. His brown beard is going gray. His blue work shirt is wearing thin. “So I made sandwiches for Libby and me.”

Her father slams the door of the truck.

“And we fed the cats, too,” she says. She steps out onto the porch, bare feet on the splintering wood.

“Don’t come out here,” he says.

She stops where she is. He can get angry. It’s true. But the reasons are usually clear. She waits for him to say why. He doesn’t.

Instead of coming inside, he jogs around to the backyard, his work boots coming down hard on the gravel, his steps quick in the twilight.

Soon, he is uncoiling the garden hose. He is turning on the spigot.

Sara opens the back door.

“What are you doing?” she calls out into the dusk. She can hear the hose running in the dirt.

“Bring me some soap,” he says. He begins to unbutton his shirt. “And a towel, too,” he says. “Quick.”

The buzz of adrenaline comes back quickly to her blood. There’s a skinny bar of soap in the bathtub. She finds a towel in the dryer, where their clean clothes always wait instead of folded in drawers.

“What’s he doing out there?” asks her sister. The tiniest kitten is curled in her hand, his mouth wide open, sharp teeth to the air. You have to really listen to hear that little cry.

“I don’t know,” says Sara. “I don’t know what he’s doing.”

And then she’s back downstairs, watching her father through the window.

It’s hard to see through the screen and the low light, and he has moved to the far corner of the yard by then, beyond the potatoes and the squash. But she looks again and knows that it is true: her father is standing nearly naked in the backyard.

He is wearing only his boxers now, and he is holding the hose over his head.

His chest looks bony beneath that stream of water, his beard pasted flat to his chin. The rest of his clothes are scattered in the dirt, like laundry fallen from a line.

Sara can see the new neighbors sitting in their kitchen next door, wineglasses glittering on their table, the baby in the woman’s arms. They can see you, she wants to say to her father. That woman can see you. But she is too afraid to speak.

“I need that soap,” he says. She can hear him shivering in the dark against the screech of the crickets. A few fireflies blink among the vegetables. “Don’t come too close,” he says. “Just toss it to me.”

The white of the soap as it sails through the air catches in the glow of the neighbors’ porch light. The woman is looking in their direction.

“Now get back inside,” says her father. “Now.”

He scrubs his face hard with the soap. He scrubs his arms and his legs and his hands, his hands more than anything else. She is used to her father’s ideas, how different they are from other people’s, but a fresh fear is coming to her. Maybe he has done something wrong. Maybe that’s why all the washing.

The floor creaks nearby—her sister’s socked feet. “What the hell?” says Libby.

How grateful Sara is for her sister right then, for the brown of her eyes, for the clear of her voice, for those ladybug studs she always wears in her ears—their mother’s, they think, but aren’t sure. Even the smell of the pretzels on Libby’s breath is a part of it, just the truth of her sister beside her.

They stand together for a long time, not talking, watching their father through the glass the way they sometimes watch raccoons doing their evening washings—how strange the action of those miniature hands.

Libby keeps asking Sara what their father is doing out there. Sara keeps shaking her head. They are almost like twins. That’s what people say, two sisters born so close together, less than a year apart—to a mother who was gone from this earth before either girl turned four.

Finally, their father turns off the hose. Finally, he picks up the towel from the dirt. The last thing he does is throw his clothes into the trash can out back. Their father, who never throws anything away, leaves his good brown belt in that trash can, still threaded through the loops of his jeans.

He won’t talk about it. Not at first.

“Let me think,” he says, raising his palm in the air, as if to hold back a crowd. He sits hunched at the kitchen table, the towel wrapped at his waist. His beard is dripping on the linoleum, that sound the same sound of every faucet in the house, every fixture slightly loose, the whole place disintegrating. “Just let me think for a minute,” he says.

He shoos the girls out of the kitchen, and Libby goes upstairs to be with the kittens, but Sara stays near her father, one room over, waiting for some kind of news.

There is something about television that soothes her. Not the shows but the voices, the people, the knowing that she isn’t watching Wheel of Fortune all alone, not really, because thousands of other people are watching it, too, an enormous web of people. She can feel them with her as she watches, as if, in a crisis, that link might work the other way, as if they could see her, send help.

Beneath the tick-tick of the Wheel of Fortune losing speed, her father’s fingers thrum on the kitchen table. He opens a can of beer. From the living room, Sara searches the sounds for meaning, clues to the workings of a mind: the scrape of his chair, the sighing and the sips, the softening clink of the can as he drains it.

When the phone begins to ring, her father does not move. Sara lets it go, too, but her sister answers it and then runs downstairs to whisper into Sara’s ear: “There’s a boy on the phone for you.”

With the scratch of that whisper comes a sudden tensing of her body. She does not get many phone calls—and never once from a boy.

Her voice, she can tell, is shaking as she picks up the phone: “Hello?”

“Sara?” says the boy. “This is Akil.”

Akil: a surge of surprise and happiness comes into her. Akil, a new boy at school. He plays Sara’s husband in the play: Our Town.

“Hey,” she says, but she is breathing too hard. She is not sure how conversations like this should go.

“Is this your cell phone?” he says. He has a formal way of speaking, this boy, the slightest accent, almost British, but his family is from Egypt, she has heard him say, his father some kind of professor. “I meant to call your cell phone,” he says.

“Oh,” she says. “I don’t have one.”

She regrets it immediately—why draw so much attention to it, how strange she must seem to other kids?

“Oh,” he says.

Libby is watching her, straining to hear what is being said on the other end.

“Anyway,” he says. He clears his throat. In the space of that pause blooms an immense feeling of longing. “Do you know,” he says, “what time rehearsal is tomorrow?”

Her face flushes with embarrassment—this is only a practical call.

“I forgot to write it down,” he says.

The call is over in less than two minutes. And then the world of the house comes flooding back: her father in that towel at the table, that look in his eyes, his refusal to explain what is wrong.

Wheel of Fortune goes on and on. One puzzle is solved, another presented. She becomes aware eventually of an ache at the back of her jaw. Only then does she know how hard she’s been clenching her teeth.

Finally, her father speaks.

“Sara,” he calls from the kitchen. Here is a wisp of hope. An explanation is coming, an arranging of parts into a whole.

“I want you to go downstairs,” he says, “and count how many gallons of water we have.”

That’s when she knows. Something awful has happened.

The basement: she hates the basement. The basement is proof of everything that could ever go wrong. Here is where they keep the cans of food they will eat if there comes a nuclear winter. Here is the water they will drink when everyone else runs out. Here are the bullets they will use as barter, if one day money loses its meaning. And here are the guns her father will use to guard all that food and that water and those bullets when other people come to steal it all away.

It is hard to picture sleeping down there, with the bare bulbs and the spiders, the smell of dirt hanging always in the air, the one small window, boarded up. But they keep blankets and pillows in the corner, in case. Three cots wait in a stack.

By the time she reaches the jugs of water on the far side of the basement, her hands are shaking. She counts slowly. She counts twice.

The weather is changing, her father is always saying. The seas are rising. The oil and the water are draining away. And asteroids. Asteroids are what worry her most. From her bed at night, she can see the stars, and she sometimes senses them moving closer, always at bedtime, on the lookout for the star that might not be a star.

“But maybe none of it will happen, right?” she says often to her father. No one can see the future. He cannot know for sure. “Things might be fine for a while, right?”

“Maybe,” he always says, shaking his head like he means to say no. “But sooner or later, something big is going to change. Things can’t go on as they’ve been.”

This is why they grow the vegetables in the yard. This is why, when their squash ripens, they jar it, and when their potatoes come up, they will freeze-dry them. This is why they keep a two-year supply of her asthma medication in a box on the highest shelf of the basement.

No one else knows what they keep in there. Not even her father’s brother, Joe, who was born in this house like her father and who came to visit the summer before, after being away for so many years, on drugs, her father said, in Arizona. For that whole visit, two weeks, they kept the door to the basement locked because the most important thing about the basement is that the contents of the basement stay secret.

A small sound comes from the stairs behind her. She looks up. It’s only Daisy in the doorway, staring down at her, one white paw outstretched in the air, her shadow huge on the stairs.

Sara remembers then what her father has said about the cats. When it happens, he has said, they’ll have to get rid of them. There won’t be enough food and water to share. He will do it humanely, he’s said. But he might have to shoot them. That might be the least painful way. She thinks of when the kittens were born, the needle-prick points of those teeth, the small eyes, still sealed, and the way Daisy carried them around with her mouth, how she knew right away how to do that, knew right where to hold them—by the loose bit of skin at the backs of their necks.

Sara’s throat grows tight. They are only babies. She and her sister will have to convince him not to do it.

In the kitchen, her father is staring out the window at nothing. People notice his eyes, an uncommon green. There is more gray than she remembers in the hairs of his bare chest.

“So?” he says.

“Fifty gallons,” she says. “We have fifty gallons of water.”

“Okay,” he says, standing up from the table, still pinching the towel at his waist. “Okay.”

Little by little, the situation turns clearer. He doesn’t tell the story in order. The facts surface slowly, like the invisible lemon-juice notes that her sister learned to write that summer in the yard—you have to heat them in the sun to make the letters show. That’s the way his story comes out of him that night, demanding of patience and in need of deciphering, the simplest parts left out.

Something happened to him at work.

“They didn’t tell us anything,” he says. He is a janitor at the college. “They didn’t tell us one goddamn thing.”

The girls stand listening in the kitchen, quiet.

“They should have told us why we were cleaning those rooms with bleach,” he says.

His voice is rising to a shout, and the more he talks, the less the girls do, as if volume were like oxygen, a thing that runs out.

“I would’ve worn a mask,” he says. “I would’ve worn gloves.”

It takes a long time to understand the crux of the story.

A sleeping sickness—that’s what he keeps calling it. A strange sleeping sickness has broken out at the college.

“But they’re not admitting it,” he says. “They’re trying to keep it quiet.”

Also this: it is spreading.

“Have people died?” Libby asks. She is the calm one, the balm, easy with a faith in the goodness of things. She isn’t quick to get scared, but here she is, scared.

“Listen to me,” says their father, squeezing their shoulders hard, too hard. They step back. “I don’t want you girls going outside,” he says. “Not for a few days, at least. Okay? We’re all going to stay right here in the house.”

Then he stands up fast, like he’s just remembered something else. He rushes down the stairs to the basement. They can hear him down there, an urgent sorting and shuffling.

“What about school?” Libby whispers, and Sara feels suddenly much older than her sister, just the year but it matters, and she can hear it, the difference, in that question. School is the least of their worries. Whatever needs doing, Sara thinks, it will be Sara, and not her sister, who will do it.

Their father returns to the kitchen with three white pills in his hand.

“Take this,” he says, dropping one into Sara’s hand. He goes to the counter to cut Libby’s in half. She can’t swallow big pills.

“What are they?” asks Sara.

“Antibiotics,” he says. “Now go to bed.”

Bedtime: they can hear the mice moving in the attic. The sounds upset the kittens, who wander the floor in circles, heads turned up to the ceiling, white throats exposed as they cry.

The sounds upset the girls, too.

“Dad,” they call down from their bedroom.

No answer. They can hear the clicks of his fingers on a keyboard, the beep and shudder of their old computer connecting to the Internet.

If you bang on the ceiling with the butt of a broomstick, the mice quiet down for a while. This is their father’s trick, and you can see the proof of it on the ceiling, the marks of the broomstick, moons and half-moons, stamped into the plaster from all those nights before this one, a time-lapse map of a small migration, from one side of the room to the other.

“Dad,” Libby calls again. “Dad, come up here.”

Sara can see him without looking, his eyes in the blue light of that ancient monitor, the waiting and the waiting as webpages load through the telephone line.

“What is it?” he says finally, his voice far away.

“The mice,” the girls shout together.

In the silence that follows, Sara can picture his face, going tight with the effort of patience.

“You’re just going to have to live with it for tonight,” he says.

It’s a scratching sound, like the scrape of a fingernail digging into a wall, like a tiny prisoner, trapped somewhere in the house, as if a thousand days of scratching will finally break him out.

“Let’s leave the lights on,” says Libby. She is curled beneath a yellow quilt, handmade—by their mother, maybe, or maybe not. They are always on the lookout for things that might have been hers.

Most of what they do know comes from a newspaper article they once found folded in their father’s desk drawer: one morning in June, a jogger came across a three-year-old girl, crying in the front yard of a house. An even younger girl was standing in the doorway, her diaper overfull. Sara has memorized every detail: how this jogger found an uneaten lunch in the kitchen, macaroni and cheese in three bowls, and a woman lying unconscious on the floor. Asthma is the one thing Sara knows for sure that she has inherited from her mother.

They stay awake a long time on this night, listening to the workings of the mice. Sometimes a big fear can magnify the smaller ones.

Soon the morning will come, but they will not get dressed for school. They will not walk to the bus stop. When their teachers call attendance, no one will answer to their names. Sara will not speak her lines in the dress rehearsal for Our Town, or practice—in that last scene—taking Akil’s arm in hers and walking off the stage.

Sara is used to not sleeping. She is a dreamer of bad dreams, dreams that keep her mind moving for hours—an afterglow. But it’s weird to see her sister awake, too, so late. Libby is staring at the ceiling, eyes wide.

Something needs to be said in that room, but there is no one to say it. Sara finally does it herself.

“Don’t worry,” she says to her sister. Her voice doesn’t feel like her voice, the tremor that comes before a lie: “It’ll be okay,” she says. “I think everything’s going to be fine.”