Grete screams, Fuck! and throws her bandanna and stomps away.
Bit has to wait for the downswoop of his heart to steady. Apparently, he says, my daughter is a poor loser.
But Hannah’s face reflects back the sun. Got my devil in her, she says.
Bit leans closer. You were a poor sport? he says, knowing it’s true, even as he says it.
No. Fast, says Hannah. Together, they watch Grete composing herself at the fence. Fast, fast, fast, Hannah says, and she pats her wasted legs with her good hand, as if to praise them for everything they had once so easily done.
Bit is in the dawn in the forest, breathing the scent of water, all fish and sweet leaf rot, when the sun grows through the treetops and touches him where he stands, camera forgotten. He is so still the doe doesn’t see him and bends her elegant head to drink at the stream. There is a flash of red: a fox, startled, running fast and looking backward; it careens into the doe’s haunch and bounces back on its rear. The creatures gaze at one another, appalled. Bit guffaws, and the animals disappear in a blur. Alone now, Bit can’t catch his breath, and he laughs so hard that he goes dizzy. Something breaks in him, and the breaking, at last, feels good.
Grete has one friend. Her name is Yoko, and she has a sweet cupcake face, a trill of a laugh. She is a Japanese exchange student in this wee country place; now that Grete has come to school, Yoko is always at the house. She was supposed to go home but can’t: Japan is under quarantine, ten thousand dead already, the photographs of the streets swept of people, and those who can afford it wearing oxygen tanks. Yoko’s host parents in Summerton are dim, strict Christians who make her play the organ for hymn hour at night while they sing. When they pick her up at the Green house, they honk impatiently and never come in. Behind Grete’s door, there are sobs and Grete’s gentle soothing. When they emerge, both puffy-faced, Grete and Yoko bake cookies, watch movies, build panoramas of classic short stories for English class. A man and a woman at a little table; the hills in the distance, white elephants. A heart below the floorboards, and curled within it, the text of the story on a strip of paper that scrolls out; a tale-tell heart. A brain like a phrenological illustration, a bullet passing through it, the sections each filled with a tiny image of bliss.
Bit studies the last project for hours. During his white nights, he holds the shoebox in his hands and looks at the delicate drawings of happiness in the lobes. If he holds it long enough, his own scenes swim up. The long stretch of Helle under a white sheet, Cole’s adolescent face the first time he heard Houses of the Holy, a sea urchin in a tidepool on a trip Grete and he took to the shore, spiny as a horse chestnut on her fat pink palm.
Hannah can’t be understood. She must take Grete’s e-reader and pluck out the words with her two fingers that work. She barks with frustration; she weeps over nothing. At supper, which Bit cooks — peas and grilled tofu, soy cheese enchiladas, the old Arcadia standards he has been cooking for thirty years now — the conversation between Yoko and Hannah is a surreal play.
Hannah: Gwabway eel o aampee en ooah eewa, Oko.
Yoko: Sofunneee, Glannah! Ha-ha-ha!
They fall into stitches, and Grete and Bit look on, bewildered. They share a glance, shut out of the delight in the air; for a breath, envious of the inarticulate.
In the full blow of April, Arcadia seems even emptier of people. The strong wind rises against the trees so they bend like girls washing their hair; it rattles the Arcadia House windows. Wandering through the upstairs rooms one day, Bit finds a raccoon in Leif’s vast bathtub, spinning a bar of soap around and around in its humanoid hands.
If he listens closely, over the wind against the screens and a distant plane above, he can almost hear the Arcadia he knew, the strum of Handy’s guitar somewhere in the thickness of the house, the women in the Eatery kitchen, laughing as they cook. His own young voice, urgent and high. Although he almost hurts his ears, straining, he can’t understand what the once-upon-a-time Bit is saying to the current version of himself or to the one who will stand here in the future, a man changed as the house is changed, worn a little more by time and loss, gradually dragged down by gravity. If he is so lucky. If they are all so lucky. The schools on the West Coast have been closed; the airports are bare. Dogs trot down the middle of L.A.’s freeways. In Summerton, the mail carriers wear gloves and masks, and in all the stores, there are great tippy stacks of wind-up radios and soup and bottled water. But in Arcadia, with their well and garden and basement full of food, they are an island. They could wait as the disease washed again and again over the world and emerge when it was safe again.
What relief there would be in starting anew; what hope there would be in doing better. The old story, Noah’s, the first step into the world scrubbed clean.
The raccoon is watching him, holding out his uncanny black hand, the sliver of soap catching the light from the window. Bit reaches slowly and takes it. Though the creature surrenders the soap, it curls its black lips and reveals its teeth, and Bit can’t tell whether it is smiling or showing its fear.
Ellis steps through the ferns and onto the rock beside Bit. A Saturday and Grete is Hannah-sitting. After the examination — Hannah losing function and weight in shocking numbers — Ellis looked scared. In the hallway Bit said: Tell me on our hike.
A date? Perhaps. They had arranged it on her last visit. He wanted to show her the waterfall, the spring-fat waters coming down, a white sheet fading into the wind. But they are here and it is only a strip of ribbon. He looks at the ghost of the waterfall and feels ill.
It’s beautiful, Ellis says.
No it’s not, Bit snaps at her. She frowns back at him, and he says, Sorry. It’s just less than it should be. When I was a kid, it roared. We could hear it a mile away. He laughs in embarrassment at his swoop of sadness and says, Everyone in my house seems to have inappropriate emotional reactions these days.
Ellis presses his arm. Understandable. Grete’s fourteen. You’re bearing the weight of your mother’s sickness. And Hannah’s bulbar paralysis is causing her to react wildly.
Oh, says Bit. I just thought my mother was happier.
Ellis sits and pulls out the sandwiches she’d brought. Chicken or egg, she says.
I’m so sorry, Bit says, dismayed. I’ve been vegan my whole life.
Ellis gives a beautiful guffaw that echoes against the cliff. I meant, she says, who knows what came first. Hannah truly could be happier. She has her two loves near her; she’s on massive antidepressants. It’s spring, and you make sure she sits in the sun for hours every day. And maybe all that crazy laughter in itself is making her happier, sparking some kind of neural pathway in her brain. Whatever the case, treat it as a gift.
A gift, Bit says, sitting. A gift would be lunch. What are the sandwiches?
Peanut butter and jelly, she says. I can’t cook.
My favorite, he says and cuts an apple for them to share.
Ellis stretches her bare feet into the little pool. She smiles at him, chewing. Listen, she says. This is probably not what you want to hear. But do know it’ll get worse before it gets better.
Your cooking? Bit says.
Ellis doesn’t smile. Her eyes, in the sun, are the deep blue of dusk. She rests her side against his, and he can feel her waiting for him to either lean in or shift away. I know it will, he says, leaning in.
In the kitchen window, there appears a lady in a bedazzled purple mask. In the kitchen, Hannah says, Shit, and wheels into her room. The lady goes to the back of her car and heaves at something in the trunk. When Bit comes into the bright dust to help, she gives a squeal. Oh, thanks, she calls out. I’m helpless!