In the days since Rebecca arrived at the hospital, the doctors have come no closer to understanding her condition, but in another realm, more ordinary, a complex progress has been made: that cluster of cells has burrowed into the wall of her womb and is hooking itself up to her bloodstream. The nutrients that are right then sliding into her stomach through a tube in her nose are now feeding not one being but two. No bigger than a poppy seed, and yet, so much is already decided—the brown eyes, the freckles, the slightly crooked teeth. Her sense of adventure, maybe, her affinity for language. A girl. It is all of it packed into those cells, like a portrait painted on a grain of rice.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the glass, Rebecca’s family hold their Bibles to their chests and watch the soft movement of her eyelids, that delicate flutter. A few feet away, Caleb’s foot twitches slightly beneath the sheets. For now, their secret sleeps with them.
That same night, a sudden breaking of glass is heard in the hospital hallway. A dull thud. One of the nurses has collapsed on the floor. The linoleum where she landed is streaked with dark blood. So are her scrubs. It takes some time to locate the source of all that spatter: the vials she was carrying when she fell.
In the end, it’s just like the others—the sleep has spread to her.
19.
The lake: now muddy and shrinking in the sun, but once a glittering, uncanny blue. It was Little Pine Lake in the language of the tribe that once used these waters for healing rituals. It was Lake Restoration when it was printed in cursive blue letters on the brochures for the sanitarium, now repurposed as a nursing home. The lake was renamed again, along with the whole fledgling town, by a later developer, who longed for a Spanish-sounding name and who built the whole downtown in mission style to match his invented saint: Santa Lora.
Most of the tourists and the weekenders have always stopped thirty miles before they get to Santa Lora Lake—they swim and they boat in the larger, more famous lake down the road.
But this small lake, along with the mountains around it, dominates the logo of Santa Lora College, inscribed on signs, imprinted on T-shirts, embroidered on jackets and hats.
Nathaniel first looked out on these waters thirty years ago, as a young biology professor, his daughter squirming in the arms of his wife, their marriage already foundering, only one year in. This was supposed to be a temporary job, a stopping place. He would have left years ago if it were not for Henry, the surprise of falling in love in middle age. The unexpected simplicity of focus: him. And this lake is where they liked to walk together, he and Henry, in the three decades that followed.
This lake is where Sara and Libby learned to swim, in the shallow waters marked off by buoys each summer, and patrolled by teenage lifeguards. It is this lake that shimmers in the background of one of the few photographs these girls have ever seen of their mother: her dark hair blowing across her face, a bouquet of daisies in her hand, her wedding dress, cream-colored, knee-length. In the picture, she is clutching a pair of heeled sandals with one finger, while their father stands beside her in a simple gray suit, both of them barefoot and smiling in the sand, as if their whole lives, as they say, are ahead.
There is less of this lake than there used to be. Every year it recedes, revealing more of what it has swallowed over the decades: cans as abundant as seashells, pieces of beach chairs and coolers, a skeletal, half-buried Model T.
But this lake, and the families of ducks that glide across its surface every spring, still charmed Ben and Annie on their very first day in Santa Lora, and Mei, too, and her parents, at the end of their campus tour.
This lake has put out forest fires, its water scooped up, pelican-like, by specially designed helicopters and then dropped on the flames in the hills.
And this lake still provides a quarter of the water that runs through the pipes of Santa Lora. This is the source of the rumors that now begin to spread through town: maybe that water is contaminated.
But the facts are these: on the fourteenth day, a researcher at a government lab in Los Angeles isolates the Santa Lora pathogen in a petri dish. The source of the troubles, it turns out, is not madness or poison or bacteria. Santa Lora is being haunted by a force neither alive nor dead: a virus. One previously unknown to science. And this virus does not swim in the waters of the evaporating lake. Instead, this bug travels like measles and smallpox and flu. This thing—it flies.
Airborne: at the hospital, this news confirms what the staff has suspected for days. Two doctors and four nurses now lie sleeping alongside their patients. The ventilation system has been turned off.
And on this, the fourteenth day, the hospital closes its doors. A quarantine.
Locked inside are twenty-two sleepers, sixty-two other patients, forty-five visiting family members, thirty-eight doctors, nurses, and other staff, and one psychiatrist from Los Angeles: Catherine, trapped with all the others, a hundred miles from where her daughter sleeps.
20.
That same night, a cloud of smoke is spotted wafting from the woods outside of town. It is windy this night. It is dry. Santa Ana winds are pushing west from the desert: fire weather.
As on so many nights before this one, the flashes of fire trucks light up the streets of Santa Lora. Emergency radios crackle with the news of yet one more wildfire burning these ancient drought-dried woods. In a town already worried, the crack of sirens wakes the healthy from their dreams.
But not the baby, who is snoring, by then, in her crib, an hour past when she usually wakes up to eat. And not Ben, either, who has fallen asleep on the rug while watching her breathe through the slats of her crib. And not Annie, who joined him there sometime later, draping a blanket over his body before closing her eyes beside him.
Ben and Annie: in how many places these two have lain side by side. On various twin beds all through college—legs tangled as they breathed each other’s breath. On that basement air mattress at her parents’ house, where she used to sneak down to join him, after her parents went to bed. In those sleeping bags in Mexico, the summer after college, when they were so young and so serious that they spent their evenings like this: Annie trying again and again to explain to him string theory, Ben reading aloud from Proust. Together, they have slept the sleep of too much whisky and too much wine, the jetlag sleep of their first afternoon in that hostel in Rome, the daytime dozing in hammocks, years later, on her family’s back porch in Maine, and the naked napping of so many Sundays in Brooklyn. There was the restless, jealous sleep the year before last, when Annie started working late with her advisor. There was the going-to-bed-mad sleep when she insisted that nothing had happened, but that she needed time to figure things out. There was the lonely insomniac sleep of the two weeks she then spent at her parents’ house without calling, Ben alone and sleepless in their studio, and then the hard sleep of grief and relief when she decided she wanted to come back, and asked, could he forgive her? They’ve slept the brief shoulder sleep of so many car rides and train rides and planes, the beach sleep in Mexico, those sunburns on their honeymoon, the sleep of bad dreams and good dreams, the dreams they’ve shared and the dreams they haven’t, and all the dreams they never remembered and never would, so many of which have traveled through their minds while their two heads have lain not more than a few inches apart.
And now, for the past three weeks, they’ve been sleeping this new kind of sleep, clipped but deep—such steep efficiency—because who knew when the baby might open her eyes and call out?