I should be terrified, Matt thought. And I’m not. And that should be terrifying, too. But it wasn’t.
Sedation. What else to call this clinical calm? We should be screaming. We should be outraged. We should feel violated. Because this was—
Was what?
The end of the world?
Yes, Matt thought. Probably the end of the world. That was probably what this was.
At three o’clock a courier came upstairs with a folder of test results from the private med lab on the third floor. The blood results might be skewed, but apparently they could still sort out gonadotropin from a few CCs of urine. Matt gave the dossier a quick perusal. Then he phoned Lillian Bix and told her she was pregnant.
They closed the empty office at four.
“I walked to work,” Annie said. “Maybe you can drive me back to your place.” Matt looked blank. “Your dinner party. Remember?”
He almost laughed. The idea was ludicrous. How was he supposed to conduct a dinner party? Serve salt peanuts and play “Nearer My God to Thee?”
Annie smiled. “It’s okay, Matt. Some cancellations phoned in this morning. Check your memo pad. There are probably more on your machine at home. You can call it off if you want… I’ll get dinner at a restaurant.”
He shook his head. “No. Annie, I want you to come home with me. But there might not be anybody else.”
“I know.”
“Nothing to celebrate.”
“I know, Matt. Maybe we can have a drink. Watch the lights.”
“I’d like that,” Matt said.
She was right about the party, of course. Everybody had canceled—most citing the flu—except for Jim and Lillian Bix, who showed up with a bottle of wine.
The mood was not celebratory, though Lillian had announced her pregnancy to Jim and Jim announced it to Annie. It was obvious from their slightly dazed expressions that his friends felt the way Matt did: fenced off, somehow, from the significance of all these strange events. “Like a patient etherized upon a table”—T. S. Eliot, if Matt recalled correctly. The phrase echoed in his head as the four of them fumbled around the kitchen, improvising dinner, while Rachel watched a TV newscast in the next room. The President, Rachel said, had canceled his Friday night speech. But everything was quiet in Washington.
Later, Matt switched off the air conditioning and the adults adjourned to the backyard deck. Lawn chairs in a cooling breeze, wine in stemmed glasses. Sunset faded; the first stars emerged. The breeze swayed the big Douglas fir at the back of the yard and Matt listened to the sound of its branches stirring, as gentle in the dusk as the rustling of a woman’s skirt. “My God,” he said, “it’s—quiet”
Jim looked quizzical. “What do they say in the movies? Too quiet.”
“Seriously,” Matt said. “Listen. You can hear the trees.”
Now they crooked their heads at the evening and grew attentive.
“I can hear the frogs,” Annie marveled. “From the river, I guess. My gosh. Way down the valley.”
“And that ringing sound,” Lillian said. “I know what that is! The flagpole over at the elementary school. I walk by there some mornings. The rope bangs against the staff when the wind blows. It always reminds me of a bell.”
A distant, random tolling. Matt heard it, too. Jim said, “Is all this so odd?”
“Friday night,” Matt said. “The highway runs along the river. You can usually hear the traffic. Usually nothing but. People going to the movies, guys out at the bars, maybe a lumber truck roaring by. It’s the kind of sound you can put out of your mind, but you notice it when it’s gone. There’s always some kind of noise up here, even after midnight. A train whistle. A siren once in a while. Or—”
“TV,” Annie said. “Everybody in the neighborhood with their TV turned up. On a summer night like this? With the windows open?” She shivered, a tiny motion; Matt felt it when he took her hand. She said, “I guess hardly anybody’s watching TV tonight.”
Matt glanced back at the house, where Rachel had switched off the TV and was standing at the window of her room, the light behind her, gazing moodily into the twilight.
“So everybody went to bed early,” Jim offered. “The flu.”
This offended Lillian, who sat upright in her chair. “You don’t have to protect me. I know what’s happening.”
Matt and Jim exchanged glances. Matt said gently, “If you know what’s happening, Lillian, you’re one up on the rest of us.”
Her voice was raw, her eyes mournful. “Everything’s changing. That’s what’s happening. That’s why there’s nobody here tonight but us.”
There followed a silence, which Matt guessed was acquiescence, then Jim raised his glass: “To us, then. The hardy few.”
Lillian drank to show she wasn’t angry. “But I shouldn’t,” she said. “Wine puts me to sleep. Oh, and the baby. It’s bad for the baby, isn’t it? But I suppose just a sip.”
Tang, clang, said the distant flagpole.
Matt stopped to say goodnight to Rachel and found her already dozing, tucked in a pink bedsheet, the window open to admit a breath of night air.
He pulled up a chair beside the bed, mindful of its creak as he sat.
Rachel hadn’t changed her room significantly since her mother died. It was still very much a child’s bedroom, lace blinds on the window and stuffed animals on the dresser. Matt knew for a fact that she still owned all her old toys: a vanity chest full of My Little Ponies and Jem; of miniature stoves, TV sets, refrigerators; a complete Barbie Camper set neatly folded and stored. The chest was seldom opened, but he supposed it served its purpose as a shrine: to Rachel’s mother, or just to childhood, security, the kingdom of lost things.
He looked at his daughter, and the thought of the toy chest made him suddenly, inconsolably sad.
I would give it all back if I could, Rache. Everything the world stole from you.
Everything the world is stealing.
She turned on her side and opened her eyes. “Daddy?”
“Yes, Rache?”
“I heard you come in.”
“Just wanted to say goodnight.”
“Is Annie staying over?”
“I think so.”
“Good. I like it when she’s here in the morning.” She yawned. Matt put a hand on her forehead. She was a little warm.
A troubling thought seemed to hold her attention for a moment. “Daddy? Is everything going to be all right?”
Lie to her, Matt thought. Lie and make her believe it. “Yes, Rache,” he said.
She nodded and closed her eyes. “I thought so.”
He unwound the studio bed in the basement for Jim and Lillian, who had both had too much wine, or were otherwise “etherized”: too dazed, in any case, to drive.
I know how they feel, Matt thought. Bound up in cotton. Buoyant but sleepy. There had been occasions, as a college student, when he had smoked marijuana in a friend’s dorm room. It had sometimes made him feel like this… encased in a protective and faintly luminescent fog… afloat, after he had found his way home, on the gently undulating surface of his bed.
Tonight he climbed into bed beside Annie.
It had been a while since they’d slept together, and now he wondered why. He’d missed this, the presence of her, her warmth and what he thought of as her “Annie-ness.” She was a small woman, all her vivid energies and enigmatic silences packaged tightly together. She rolled on her side but snuggled closer; he curled himself around her.