“You don’t have any right,” says her father.
But she and Libby are already peeking down the stairs.
“Are you girls okay in here?” the policeman calls when he sees them.
“We’re fine,” says Libby.
“Yeah,” says Sara. “We’re fine.”
The rain is getting heavy, the ringing of drips in the pots around the house.
“You should be careful what you say to people,” says the policeman. A sudden surge of hope comes to Sara. “Okay?” he says.
What a relief it is to see the slow turn of that man’s shoulder, and then the back of his uniform as he walks across the yard in the rain, the beautiful rumble of his engine starting up.
And then her father is back inside, the door locked again, his gas mask lying flat on the table, his lungs breathing the safe air of the house.
At dusk, like fireflies, the trick-or-treaters start to fill the sidewalks, first the younger ones, pressed into parkas and trailed by their parents, wet leaves clinging to shoes and capes, and then the older ones, quick as burglars, pillowcases slung over their shoulders.
“Jesus,” says their father, looking out through the boards on the windows. “This thing is going to spread through the whole town tonight.”
She can almost picture it as it happens, the disease jumping from one person to the next, through the grazing of hands in a candy bowl. She once watched a show about a murder, where the police used a special kind of light to make invisible traces of blood glow green in the dark. A seemingly clean room proved suddenly streaked. She pictures the sickness like that, too, a trail of green snaking through the town.
When their doorbell rings, there’s no question of answering it. “They’ll go away,” says their father. “Turn out those lights.”
Anyway, they have no candy to give.
From her bedroom window, Sara can see two boys from her class on her porch. They are dressed like skeletons, one with a knife sticking out of his chest. The boys always dress up like that, she has learned, as if they don’t know that the scariest things are invisible.
If she and Libby had been allowed to go trick-or-treating this year, they would have gone as they always do, as fancy ladies from another time, wearing their relatives’ dresses from the attic, pinned up to fit them, the hems dirtier every year.
The boys ring the bell again. Sara hopes they don’t know that this is where she lives. Finally, the boys give up and move on to the new neighbors’ house, where two jack-o’-lanterns glow against the night and where the front door swings open again and again, the woman standing in the doorway with the baby in her arms—they’ve dressed her up as a pumpkin.
“I told you to turn off that porch light,” says their father.
Sara spends the rest of the evening up in the widow’s walk, practicing her lines from Our Town, coming back again and again to that part near the end, when she’s dead and speaking from some sort of heaven, and telling Emily, the pretty one, freshly dead from childbirth, not to try to revisit her life. “When you’ve been here longer,” she says now to her reflection, slow and deep the way Mrs. Campbell has taught her, “you’ll see that our life here is to forget all that.” She looks out over the lights of the neighborhood as she speaks, the pumpkins glowing on the porches, the college buildings in dark silhouette, and the bulk of the hospital in the distance, where the sick kids lie sleeping their strange sleep. She likes the way Mrs. Campbell has explained the meaning of her last line, how the living can’t see the good in life while they’re living it. She says the line slowly now, as if she herself possesses all the wisdom in its words: “No, dear,” she says softly, buzzing with a vague nostalgia. “They don’t understand.”
She does not see who it is who picks the squash from their front yard and smashes it on the side of their house, or who writes in shaving cream on their driveway: WEIRDOS.
When the doorbell stops ringing and a quiet falls over the neighborhood, she finds her father hunched over the old computer, waiting, as always, for a page to load.
That computer is too slow for the girls to use it the way the other kids do. The other kids are always mentioning events that have transpired online, the flirtations and the fights, a vast second society that echoes mysteriously through the one she knows.
“I was wondering,” she says to her father. “What about the play?”
“What play?” he says.
From behind, he looks older than he is, his shoulders bony through his T-shirt, the balding spot on the top of his head.
“At school,” she says. “The one I’ve been telling you about.”
He’s typing now. He works slowly at it, as always, using only one finger and spending long seconds searching the keyboard between words, as if the letters get reshuffled each time he looks away.
“This is the first I’ve heard of it,” he says.
“It’s this Friday,” says Sara. “Remember?”
He stops typing.
“A theater full of people?” he says. “Are you kidding? Do you know how fast this thing would spread in a room like that?”
The sting of tears surprises her. It’s just a stupid play. And hers isn’t even the best part. She wipes her eyes fast. She bites down hard on her lip. The slow tap of her father’s typing resumes. Then, suddenly, Daisy the cat is beside her, rubbing her face against her shin—it seems the cats can sense it in Sara, the sadness that sometimes comes into her.
Later, Libby will do her the favor of not commenting on her tears.
“No way,” says her father. “The only safe place is right here.”
14.
On her fourth visit to Santa Lora, as she is leaving the hospital parking lot, Catherine gets a call from one of the nurses inside.
“It’s one of those sick college kids,” the nurse is saying again and again. She is out of breath. “One of those kids,” she says. Catherine can hear a commotion in the background. “One of them—he woke up.”
The boy is found wandering the hall in his hospital gown, IVs trailing behind him. He is barefoot on the linoleum, eyes squinting in the fluorescent lights, while in the rooms around him, the other sick go on sleeping.
But the parents: the parents jump up from their chairs and crowd out into the hall, to watch this boy walk, as if he has risen from the dead. Catherine can feel the hope radiating out of their bodies.
But he doesn’t look right, this boy. He is eighteen years old, but he is walking like an old man. His gait is slow, his limbs stiff. There’s a slight stoop in his posture.
He keeps shaking his head, as if trying to figure something out. When he speaks, his voice comes out in a whisper.
“This doesn’t make sense,” he says. He is looking around. He fingers the stubble on his chin.
“You’re in the hospital,” says Catherine, the one psychiatrist in the building. “You’ve been unconscious for four days.”
A skepticism flashes on the boy’s face.
“It’s been a lot longer than that,” he says.
You have to be gentle with delusions. It can be better not to argue.
It’s natural, she tells him, to feel confused. But confusion—this is not quite the right word. This boy’s words hum with a strange confidence.