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 detaiclass="underline" 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.”
6.
Infectious disease is not the only thing that can spread. On the fifth day, a specialist in psychiatric disorders is called in from Los Angeles.
She has seen this kind of thing before—how one girl can sometimes feel the feelings of another, a different kind of contagion, the way a yawn sometimes jumps from mouth to mouth. A certain kind of empathy. A hundred cheerleaders once fainted this way on a football field in Dallas—and only one of them turned out to be ill.
It’s a two-hour drive from the neuropsychiatric hospital downtown, in her five-year-old Volvo, Goldfish crumbs crunched into the leather, her daughter’s Legos rolling back and forth across the backseat.
She is Catherine to her colleagues, Katie to her family, Dr. Cohen when she walks the halls of her locked ward.
The city gives way to the suburbs as she drives toward Santa Lora, the suburbs to miles of lemon groves. A long succession of switchbacks finally delivers her up into the mountains and the shade of a thick pine forest.
The radio stations fall away. Her cell phone goes silent. And then the road twists through forty more miles of uninterrupted woods.
What a relief it is when a motel appears beside the road. But the windows are boarded up. A faded sign still advertises COLOR TVS.
But finally, a lake glitters through the trees. The woods crack open. A campus comes into view, college kids spread out on lawns, the grass browned to the color of wheat. Santa Lora.
The hospital, when she gets there, is no bigger than the motel.