“You actually wrote this down,” she finally said, her voice hollowed out through the mask.
A statement and not a question. Some essential marital weaponry from the arsenal of not giving an inch. Verbalize someone’s actions back to them. Menace them with language, the language mirror. Death by feedback.
“It’s a suggestion,” I said, in the bedside voice I’d adopted as her caretaker.
Of course it wasn’t a suggestion. It was the plan and it was what we had to do. Otherwise there’d be chalk marks around us in days. We had tripped our Esther threshold weeks ago, and our medicine—the comprehension blockers, the agents of estrangement, the treated smoke that left a sick chill to our faces—was only making us worse. There was nowhere safe to send Esther, so it was we who had to depart. The children would remain.
How the children would conduct themselves now that they were the only ones not sickened by speech, that was their business.
If you were smart, if you wanted to buy yourself a few more days, you wouldn’t speak at all. Perhaps you already couldn’t. The symptoms swallowed some people faster, circled others more slowly, allowing false strength to set in. But for most of us the face was hardening. The lips were pulling back. Inside the mouth was turning tough, numb, and the tongue was docking. Denial had lost its blissful appeal as Claire turned into a paper-skinned creature, sloughing each time she disrobed, too tired to cough. I could live without all the pretense we poured into discussions where the issue had already been decided, where the issue left us no choice. So much ceremony around caring what the other person thought. We’d rub our faces in etiquette, obsess over manners, and fail to notice that we were on the floor and the light was gone and it was no longer possible to breathe.
Claire gave the timeline back to me and turned away.
“Unbelievable,” she whispered. “I hope you’re enjoying yourself.”
“Oh, I am, Claire,” I said. “The time of my life.”
2
The day my wife and I drove away, the electric should have failed. The phone should have died. The water should have thickened in our pipes.
When the Esther toxicity was in high flower, when it was no longer viable to endure proximity to our daughter, given the retching, the speech fever, the yellow tide beneath my wife’s skin, to say nothing of the bruising around my mouth, that day should have been darker, altogether blackened by fire.
That day should have been visibly stained at the deepest levels of air, broken open, sucking people into oblivion. The neighborhood should have been vacuum-sealed, with people reduced to crawling figures, wheezing on their hands and knees, expiring in heaps.
A seizure of cold brown smoke should have spilled over the house.
What are the operative motifs from mythology when parents take leave of a child? Is there not some standard departure imagery offered by the fables?
The day we finally left, birds should have frozen midflight in the winter air as they cruised the neighborhood. Birds locked up with ice, their wings too heavy to hold them aloft. Birds fallen to the ground and piled at our feet, eyes staring up at the sky.
In the street, cars should have quit and rolled to a stop and the road should have buckled, with gases leaking forth, with water foaming out, with perhaps an unclothed man clawing his way from under the asphalt to stalk the neighborhood.
The yard where we played and sometimes picnicked, where Esther and I once staged father-daughter pretend fights, with fake angry faces, to confuse the passing motorists—Is that a man fistfighting his young daughter?—or where we argued in earnest, with calm faces that belied our true feelings, Esther asserting, no doubt correctly, that there was something I didn’t understand—this yard might have functioned as a massive sinkhole. The yard, a throbbing pit in its center, should have exerted a steady pull on anyone in range.
From above, through the brown smoke, you should have seen people and dogs and the smaller trees getting dragged into the collapsing grass.
The day we left there should have been mourners in the street, a parade of weeping parents walking from their homes. Or not weeping. Past that. Devoid of all signs of feeling in the face. Just walking with calm expressions because their faces had finally failed to signal what they felt.
There should have been music pouring from a loudspeaker on the roof of an emergency vehicle. Or perhaps no music, no sound whatsoever. Instead, an emergency vehicle broadcasting a heavy coating of white noise so that even the leaves rustled silently. A plague of deafness, as if an unseen bunting smothered everything, drinking noise, so we could hear nothing.
Making mimes out of all of us. So that we couldn’t hear ourselves breathe. So that our shared language would have been suddenly snuffed out.
What a fine bit of foreshadowing that all would have been.
But our neighborhood was failing to foreshadow.
What is it called when features of the landscape mirror the condition of the poor fucks who live in it?
Whatever it is, it was not in effect.
This was, instead, a plain day in the neighborhood, save for the shielded officials of the quarantine, lurking under trees until an enforcement was needed.
If you took the Sedgling exit off 38 and hugged the access road until the Beth Elohim Synagogue reared up, and from there you veered right, keeping the highway at your back, you would pass the ring of bread and coffee shops, and the town square with its deafening fountain, before entering our not-so-gated community of houses just new enough to be nothing special at all.
Perhaps the first thing you’d see that was curious as you circled up Montrier Hill, in the shadow of the electrical tower, which on a clear day dropped a net of darkness over the houses, yards, and roads, was a clottage of ungaraged cars, skewered hastily against curbs, up and down the street with their trunks and doors open, bags spilling out, and men and women who, if you examined them closely, looked more medically defeated than frantic.
And you would have seen, no matter how hard you looked, even if you checked the houses from closet to attic to cellar, precisely no children, least of all those blasting language from their not-so-innocent faces.
Adults only. Cars, suitcases, tears.
A masking silence probably would have been noticed. The neighborhood language-free.
There’d be coatracks flashing across lawns, strung up with intravenous pouches fashioned from sandwich baggies, toppling over into the grass, with people scrambling to leave.
Everyone ill from something no one could explain. What the news first had called hysteria, which everyone wished was true. If only it were that.
And finally, at the dark, water-soaked end of Wilderleigh Street, an area of limited sun penetration, there’d be the anemic figures of my wife, Claire, and me, shuffling from the house to the car, carrying one item at a time, loading up for a getaway, with Esther, our only child, thank you God, nowhere in sight.
Do the math on that.
3
In the months before our departure, most of what sickened us came from our sweet daughter’s mouth. Some of it she said, and some of it she whispered, and some of it she shouted. She scribbled and wrote it and then read it aloud. She found it in books and in the mail and she made it up in her head. It was soaked into the cursive script she perfected at school, letters ballooning with heart-dotted i’s. Vowels defaced into animal drawings. Each piece of the alphabet that she wrote looked like a fat molecule engorged on air, ready to burst. How so very dear.
The sickness washed over us when we saw it, when we heard it, when we thought of it later. We feasted on the putrid material because our daughter made it. We gorged on it and inside us it steamed, rotted, turned rank.