When Esther was finally old enough to walk to school by herself, she still wanted approval for things that were too basic to be considered talents. Eating an apple. Standing on one leg. Soon she’d want to be congratulated for waking up, leaving a room. Once she sat on our windowsill—she must have been eight or nine already. She was very pleased with herself, swinging her legs back and forth.
Do you know, Dad, that I can do a trick?
Oh yeah?
Yeah!
I can make my legs go this way and that, that way and this!
I see that.
Do you see?
I do.
You’re not looking. Why aren’t you looking?
I’m looking. I see it.
You’re not, though. You’re not.
I should have congratulated her. Who was I to say this wasn’t extraordinary? What did I really know about extraordinary things?
At the car I crouched down next to Claire to administer her travel dose. When we got to the motel I would bathe her, let her sleep, and go out and get us some food, if I could find any. Perhaps she would sleep for days. I would let no children into the room. Would I hurt the children if they approached? I had not decided. I would refrain from speaking. The television and radio and phone would be unplugged. Claire would enjoy total silence. She could rest and eat and rest and bathe and eat and sleep until this was over and she recovered.
I had recuperative medicines in mind for this next phase. Claire needed a few weeks of quiet.
Perhaps we’d find the moans that were safe to exchange, and into them we’d spread enough meaning to get by.
I pushed Claire’s gown up her legs and grabbed a handful of skin.
She didn’t flinch when I jammed in the needle.
A clear bead of serum gathered on her thigh, clung to a fine hair.
Despite the precaution against speech, I spoke to Claire, and I wish I could remember what I said, if only to seal off this memory and never consider it again. I have not found my doubt to be useful. It is a distraction to live so long with uncertainty.
What I said to Claire may have been an estimate of our departure. Probably that sort of chatter, whatever was coming next. We were minutes away—Let me check the trunk. Are you thirsty?—or it may have been an endearment I offered. Did I say that I loved her? Nothing but wishful thinking would suggest that I did. Such a phrase would have sounded awful on that day. Certainly ill-timed, certainly self-serving. A phrase designed purely to trigger an equivalent response. But wishful thinking has had its way with me. It has hounded me. In all of this silence it is my primary voice.
Did I say that I loved her?
The question is immaterial. It’s the last piece of speech I gave my wife, and it matters to no one but me.
The car was packed, but before we could leave I had my own injection to administer. I’d doctored my blend with a trace of Aphaseril, which curled into the serum in a dark ribbon that settled at the bottom of the vial. For privacy I crouched down against the rear wheel of the car.
“Here’s how,” I said to no one, and fed the needle into my loneliest vein. A coldness overtook me as the needle found purchase, chilling my groin, rising up my stomach. I clung to the car as my heart surged. Such a sweet ache rushed in to cover the nausea. It was what I needed to make the final push out of here.
PART 2
22
When the departure horn tore open the New York air, and the cars started their slow crawl from town, Claire opened the passenger door and stumbled into the grass. At first I thought she forgot something in the house, so I let her stagger away.
My wife in her nightgown on a strangely warm December day, running not so well from the car.
Go ahead, I thought. If we couldn’t have Esther, we could have more of her stuff. Grab the baby teeth stashed in the foot of an old onesie, the self-portrait Esther took with her long face overlit in the lens, the blanket stitched from Esther’s stuffed animals that might make this easier. We have no more time, Sweetheart, we really don’t, but go ahead. They’re motioning us to leave now, so please hurry.
It was true. The officials of the quarantine had initiated a semaphore that left no room for doubt. People so disfigured in padding they looked like technicians from a bomb squad, waving bright yellow traffic rods, firing a jolt at those few of us who were seeking to stay put. Men and women doubling over in the road from lightning shot into their torsos. It was time to go.
But Claire didn’t go to the house. She crossed into the field, entered the high growth, and before she even reached the meadow she faltered.
I raced after her but by the time I reached her she was fallen, her eyes already cold. She couldn’t even make it to the tree line. By the time I reached Claire the men of the quarantine dropped down on me, dragging me back to the car.
I left Claire on her back in the grass, staring through me, at something no one else could see. She looked finally gone.
From the woods trotted a pack of dogs, like old men in animal suits, barking with human voices. Behind them trudged a human chain of jumpsuited rescuers, arms linked so they’d miss no one. They were flushing stragglers from the woods, kicking the bushes for shapes.
And there were some stragglers. They thought they could wait out the evacuation, then return to their homes until this blew over. But nothing was blowing over. We kept believing it couldn’t get any worse, as if our imaginations held sway in the natural world. We should have known that whatever we couldn’t imagine was exactly what was coming next.
The technicians of the quarantine carried me over their heads in grips so fierce I couldn’t move.
I caught one last sight of Claire. She seemed confused. No one told her she’d come up short in the field and collapsed. No one told her she had not escaped.
They stuffed me in my car, shut the door, then banged a hand on the roof to tell me it was okay to go now. Join the procession out of here. Get going. Without her.
But it was very much not okay. I scrambled across the seats out the other side of the car, made a break for the field to get my wife—even dead, she should be coming with me, even if I had to drive up to Fort Wine to bury her—but they grabbed me again, pushed me back in, this time guarding the doors with their cushioned bodies.
When I kicked on the doors they were blocked from the outside. It was like my car was underwater and I could not get out. Underwater, with padded men hovering over me like… like nothing else I’ve ever seen.
From inside the car I watched them take Claire to their truck and then the truck’s cargo door slid down and the truck’s lights flashed once, before the truck pulled out and took, not the street, because the street was clogged with cars, but the field that stretched out beyond our houses. And if the truck stopped as it cruised through the grass, it was only to collect another straggler, some local citizen who had lost the strength to leave and would now join my wife and the stunned others inside that dark vehicle, headed slowly out of sight like the rest of us.