But on this night, in spite of the sirens, the baby does not wake. On this night, the baby does not cry.
Instead, all three remain as they are, deep in their separate sleeps, lights off in the baby’s room, minds speeding off in distant directions, even Grace’s, whose unknowable dreams send her eyelids fluttering and her lips shuddering and one arm quivering lightly in her crib.
One house over, Sara and Libby wake up fast. So do the cats.
“Dad,” the girls call out in the dark, while the sirens scream outside.
But they know what to do. They know where to go. This is something that happens a few times a year. Fire season. Soon they’ll be waiting out in the truck while their father hoses down the roof. A single ember can travel for a mile on the wind and set a house like theirs on fire.
“We can’t leave the kittens,” says Libby.
She is trying to gather the kittens up, but they overflow her skinny arms. Two have already squirreled beneath her bed, the hairs on their backs sticking up, their white tails inflated like dusters, tiny eyes flashing in the darkness.
Sara rushes to her father’s room at the end of the hall. He sleeps with his window open, no matter the season—his whole room is vibrating with the wail of the sirens and with the staticky voices of the police radio he keeps always by his bed.
“Dad,” she says. She is suddenly shy in the doorway.
By the low glow of the streetlight, she can see his silhouette, the way he’s lying on his side in that wide old bed, how quiet he is in the dimness.
A gust of dry wind sends the curtains whipping into the room.
“Daddy?” she says.
She switches on the lights: his eyes are closed, his face is slack. With two fingers, she pulls back the sheets. She pokes him on the shoulder, which is bare and a little bony. He has grown so skinny these last few years.
“Wake up,” she whispers.
How strange to touch his face, to smell the old sweat on his skin, the staleness of his breath as he snores.
Libby runs in behind her, wiping her hair from her face. “You guys have to help me get all the cats,” she says. “They’re running everywhere.”
“He’s not waking up,” says Sara.
It is Libby who shouts into his ear—no response. It is Libby who pinches his arm.
“Be careful,” says Sara. “Don’t hurt him.”
But his face registers no pain.
And it is Libby who leans up close to his face, her curls falling across his forehead as she bends to make sure he is breathing.
“It’s the sickness, isn’t it?” says Libby. Her eyes are already watering.
By now, they should be downstairs with their bags, shoes on. At the earliest sign of a fire in those woods, their father likes to get out of town—it’s a dangerous corridor, what with only the one road out. The safest place to be is away, and the safest time to go is before anyone else thinks they should.
They are starting to smell the smoke.
This bedroom is the wrong place to be in a fire. The third floor, the most dangerous place.
“We can’t leave him up here alone,” says Libby.
The sirens cry on. Sara looks out the window. It’s too dark to see where the smoke is coming from or how near or far its source.
A terrible calmness is descending on her. A series of decisions needs to be made. He would want them to leave and get somewhere safe—she is sure. Downstairs, at least, ready to run if they need to. But she will not do it.
“We’re not going to leave him,” she says. “We’re gonna stay right here, no matter what.”
Outside, the eucalyptus trees are bending hard in the wind, their branches scratching against the roof as if for ballast.
“Think of how many wildfires there have been since this house was built,” says Sara, leaning close to her sister. “Think of how long it’s been here and stayed standing.”
And so they sit that way in their nightgowns, holding their father’s slack hands, waiting for whatever will come.
Three streets over, the sirens wake Nathaniel from a troubling dream.
In the dream, he and Henry are thirty years younger—they have only recently met, two young professors. Nathaniel’s daughter is a two-year-old girl, stacking blocks on the rug in that tiny apartment that Nathaniel rented after the divorce. In the dream, Henry is looking for something. He is searching the apartment. Frantic. Nathaniel understands without it being said what Henry is searching for: some kind of poison. And what Henry wants to do with the poison is drink it. What Nathaniel cannot understand is why. Henry is begging for Nathaniel’s help, begging. He can’t live like this, Henry keeps saying, but Nathaniel cannot follow the thinking: live like what? He cannot, in the dream, understand the source of Henry’s suffering. Eventually, he follows Henry through a doorway that leads, somehow, to the living room of Nathaniel’s grandmother’s house in Michigan, and Nathaniel has a sudden certainty that the poison is hidden inside the grandfather clock that ticks in the corner. But he will not tell Henry where it is. Why not? Henry keeps asking. His face is young but his eyes are pained like an old man’s. Why won’t you do this for me?
When Nathaniel wakes, his whole body is tense. He is sweaty in his sheets.
Had he dreamed this dream in a different time, he might have considered it prophecy. Or perhaps, at certain moments in history, he would have taken it as a message from God.
If he had dreamed it fifty or a hundred years ago, the era of Freud, the leading experts might have argued that the dream is not about Henry at all, not really, but about Nathaniel’s own childhood, some repressed sexual desire from infancy, the dream’s true meaning concealed from his conscious mind, and in need of analysis.
And yet, those who favored Jung in that same era might have read it differently still, insisting that a dream cannot be so simply reduced. Not everything is about desire. And as Henry liked to say to his literature students, the poem is the poem—you can’t translate it. They might point out, too, the presence in the dream of certain archetypes from the collective unconscious: the father figure, the child, the clock.
But these are ideas from a different time.
These days, science doesn’t take much interest in dreams.
For Nathaniel, professor of biology, this dream of Henry is merely an upsetting distraction. It will remain unexamined. He rushes to think of something else.
On this night, the night of the fire, it is easy to find a different focus. It is almost a relief: the smell of smoke in the air, the scream of the sirens, the fact that there is work to be done.
He is soon standing out in the yard, spraying his roof with the hose.
At the hospital, the smell of smoke goes undetected. Twelve hours into the quarantine, a more pressing danger is floating through these fluorescent halls. A fifth nurse goes under. And an old man, admitted for pneumonia, now sleeps with the others in the isolation wing.
There are not enough beds for the families trapped in the hospital, so they sleep on the floor in the halls. At this late hour, no one can tell by looking who among them might be sick and who well.
Certain small problems are already threatening to grow larger: two toilets have stopped flushing, and the usual shipment of cafeteria food has not arrived—the truck driver too spooked by the news to approach the building.
Inside, Catherine keeps her mask tight, her hands in double gloves, her psychiatric training leaving her only slightly more prepared than the others. One thought keeps beating in her mind: if this sickness takes her away, her daughter will not remember even one wisp of her days with her mother. It seems suddenly selfish to have brought her into this world alone.