But the warmth of Grace’s body in his lap—this is a fact. And the way her eyes drift between his face and the glow of his laptop—this is a fact, too. The rising and falling of her chest is a fact, and the knowing every second that air is moving in and out of her lungs.
“It’s my fault,” says Annie. “This is my fault.”
“It’s the hospital’s fault,” says Ben.
He is reading the directions on the formula they’ve been keeping in the cupboard, just in case they ever ran out of the donor milk.
Annie is trying to nurse her. There is magic in human milk—that’s what they’ve been told. Antibodies and hormones, secret messages, even. Any drop Annie can give is a drop she should give. But her milk, as usual, runs out quickly, and Grace is soon pulling away from her chest, rooting around for some other source.
She soon sucks down the formula, and there is an animal comfort in knowing that their baby’s belly is full.
She is a quiet baby. Everyone says so. But is she quieter than usual tonight? Maybe this thing is already hiding in her bloodstream. Maybe it’s slipping into her little brain, even now.
They do not wear gloves when they touch her. They do not keep a distance from her breaths. They do not even think of it that night: that their baby might be a threat to them. Why say it, this truth that is implicit between them after only three weeks: that if anything ever happened to her, well, what would it matter what happened to them after that?
In the morning, Annie takes Grace’s temperature right away: normal. She looks normal, too. Eyes wide, cheeks pink. Her legs wag as usual on the changing table. What a perfect little being—in knit cap and footed pajamas, and those miniature fingers perched in her mouth. How is it possible that their bodies knew how to make her?
But soon Grace is screaming in Ben’s ear. It’s a mood that sometimes rolls through her, and only Annie can soothe her when she gets like this.
After a while—and he feels guilty thinking it—he wants to get away. Here is what he has learned about loving a baby: the time away from her is vital to the pleasure of being with her.
“How about I go get her more formula,” he says to Annie. His keys are already jingling in his hand.
Annie is examining her little forehead. “Did they say anything about a rash?”
“She’s always had that,” says Ben. He remembers those dots from the first time he held her, in the white light of the operating room, that startled look on her face, Annie’s blood on the linoleum.
There’s an urgency in the way he is tying his shoes, in the way he is searching for a hat to cover the hair he hasn’t washed in a week. He hasn’t left the house in two days.
But then the door is closing behind him, and he’s out. And there it is: the rush of those first minutes alone, the smooth glide of the car backing out of the driveway—even that is a part of it, the satisfaction of something moving according to his will. How quiet it is out in the world—that’s what he’s noticed since the baby was born—and how orderly. A flock of black birds is drifting over the mountains in formation. A serene voice on public radio is introducing a piece of jazz. A lightness comes into him as he drives, like a first sip of whisky numbing his throat, a quickly spreading calm.
This town, these neighbors walking their dogs on the streets—this does not look like a place where a plague is right now unfolding. You can draw a lot of comfort from the normalcy of others—if this thing were really spreading, would the neighbors be raking their lawns? Would the mailman be delivering catalogues?
He takes the long way, along the lake. He stops for a coffee and feels the wonder of it, this thing he hasn’t done since Grace was born: to drink a whole cup while it’s hot.
But by the time he is standing in the baby aisle of the drugstore, he is starting to worry again. He is beginning to miss her. At three weeks old, their book has said, her mind cannot grasp the idea that an object continues to exist even after it leaves her sight. But Ben feels that way, too, as if whenever his daughter is out of his view, she might easily slip out of the world.
16.
By now, certain alternate theories are beginning to circulate online. It’s the government, they say. Or it’s Big Pharma. Some kind of germ must have gotten loose from a lab at the college.
Think about it, they say: Do you really believe that a completely new virus could show up in the most powerful country on earth without scientists knowing exactly what it is? They probably engineered it themselves. They might be spreading this thing on purpose, testing out a biological weapon. They might be withholding the cure.
Or maybe there’s no sickness at all—that’s what some have begun posting online. Isn’t Santa Lora the perfect location for a hoax? An isolated town, surrounded by forest, only one road in and one road out. And those people you see on TV? Those could be hired victims. Those could be crisis actors paid to play their parts. And the supposedly sick? Come on, how hard is it to pretend you’re asleep?
Maybe, a few begin to say, Santa Lora is not even a real town. Has anyone ever heard of this place? And look it up: there’s no such saint as Santa Lora. It’s made-up. The whole damn place is probably just a set on some back lot in Culver City. Don’t those houses look a little too quaint?
Don’t be naïve, say others—they don’t need a set. All that footage is probably just streaming out of some editing room in the valley. If you look closely, you can tell that some of those houses repeat.
Now just ask yourself, they say, who stands to benefit from all this. It always comes back to money, right? The medical-industrial complex. And who do you think pays the salaries of these so-called journalists reporting all this fake news? Just watch: in a few months, Big Pharma will be selling the vaccine.
17.
It is hard to tell who is in charge—beyond the campus police who take turns standing near the elevators—but someone somewhere has decided that it is time for Mei and the others to leave the dorm. Rumors zoom: the germ is in the water, they say, or the ventilation system, or there’s poison in the carpet or the paint.
In just a few days, Mei has grown numb to the chill of the stethoscope on her chest each morning, and those gloved hands that read the glands of her neck like braille, the spearmint breath of the nurses. Even the skin behind her ears has begun to adjust, chapped by the elastic that holds the mask to her face. And something similar, maybe, is happening to her mind.
A weariness has come over the whole floor, a quiet, as they rush back and forth past the emptied rooms, each one sealed shut with yellow tape.
But now: they are told to pack a bag.
Once outside, Mei stands blinking in the sunlight, as if she’s been kept all these days underground. The campus is empty of students. Dried leaves skid across wide lawns, where so recently Frisbees sailed instead, and where, in a different time, these same freshmen lounged in tank tops, bare feet.
She is alert to the smallest sensations, the fall breeze moving the fine hairs on her wrists, the seesaw call of a bird she cannot name, the sun, hot and fresh on her face. A sudden coming-to.
Also there is this: a new profusion of police. Their cruisers are parked on the sidewalks. Their belt buckles flash in the sun.
A row of news vans is waiting, too, satellite dishes pointed to the sky. Soon her parents will see these pictures: Mei, small and thin, on the evening news, walking like a hostage among the other masked kids.
They walk as instructed, single file, a few feet apart, a chain of kids slowly snaking across an abandoned campus.