These visions have been deposited into their heads by their father. How many times has he warned them what would happen if social services took them away?
There is no grandmother to call. No aunt. There is no friend of the family who would know what to do. Always it has been just the three of them in this house, and in life. And now, in a way, it’s just the two.
In the end, it comes back to water. His body needs water, doesn’t it? They have no way of getting it into him.
Sara is the one who finally calls for help. She is the one who tells the lies that need telling. She is calling from Minnesota, she says, from her grandmother’s house, she tells the dispatcher. Her dad, back home, he might be sick, she says into the phone, with that thing, she says, that sleeping sickness. Could someone go check on him?
Later, the girls watch their house from the woods, the little hill at the edge of the street, knees pressed tight to their chests, as if they are only the neighbors sitting there in that dry dirt, picking at pinecones while they wait, just someone else’s girls. Sara sees now how their house must look to the neighbors, those windows boarded up, those rain gutters rusting away.
“So what,” says Libby. She is squinting in the late afternoon sun. “I don’t care what they think.”
A breeze comes up from the lake. It is colder out there than they thought, after so many days inside.
In the air: the scent of pine sap, the buzz of insects, the cries of the baby who lives next door. The mother is out front with her, pacing the porch. She has put her face up close to the baby’s cheek. Her mouth is moving, like singing.
“That’s the smallest baby I’ve ever seen,” says Libby.
The baby’s face is red. Her eyes are squinty. She is bundled in a white knit blanket.
Before leaving the house, the girls corralled the cats down into the basement and locked it. They left the front door open for the rescuers. Their plan stretches only a few hours into the future. They will hide outside for a while. Tomorrow is a darkness. The next day unknown.
When a siren finally calls out in the distance, Sara squeezes her sister’s hand—help has come for their father. But when the double doors of the ambulance swing open, it looks like something else.
Libby gasps: four figures are descending from the van in full-body blue suits. Like astronauts, thinks Sara. Men or women—the girls can’t say which, not with those goggles and those masks, the hoods that cover their heads. They wear green rubber gloves that stretch over their hands and all the way up past their elbows. Even their shoes are encased in plastic. And aprons—each one wears a clear plastic apron over his or her suit, as if these people are butchers, here to cut up some meat.
“What are they going to do to him?” Libby asks.
“They’ll help him,” says Sara, but she isn’t so sure. Their father’s fears suddenly flower in her own mind. A surge of guilt tightens her stomach.
“I told you,” says Libby. “You shouldn’t have called.”
But it is too late. Already, these strangers in suits are crossing through the front door, soon to reappear as flashes of blue in the upstairs windows, their suits just visible above the boards on the glass.
The baby is crying again next door, but the mother has stopped rocking her. Instead, she is standing perfectly still, staring at what is happening at the girls’ house. She is holding one hand over her mouth, like someone receiving bad news. Or a shock. She has let the baby’s blanket fall loose, little pink feet sticking out in the air.
When the girls’ front door swings open again, there he is—their father—spread out on a stretcher, which swings like a coffin in the arms of the workers.
He looks so exposed on that stretcher, his bare chest and his boxers. She doesn’t like the way his head bobs as they carry the stretcher down to the sidewalk.
Not everything that happens in a life can be digested. Some events stay forever whole. Some images never leave the mind.
“He wouldn’t want this,” says Libby. She throws a pinecone into the woods. Her boyish little arms. “He would hate this.”
“What else could we have done?” says Sara. But a tenseness is moving through her body, regret traveling the length of it, one muscle at a time.
The soles of their father’s feet are dirty as usual and callused, and now disappearing into the white of the ambulance. One of the workers is spraying the other workers down with some kind of mist.
The woman next door has disappeared with the baby.
Before the van leaves, one of the suits returns to the porch with a can of something in his hand. The girls can hear the metallic rattle as he shakes the can in the air, and then the long shush-shush of spray paint gushing through a nozzle.
“Hey,” Libby whispers. “What are they doing to our house?”
A giant black X is now dripping down the splintered wood of the front door. They hear the rattling again, more spraying, as the worker draws a second X, this time on the side of the house.
It takes the girls a long time to know that they are hungry. Once the sun sets over the hill, and the crickets begin to call to one another and the street is almost dark, the girls creep back into their house, quiet as criminals, and afraid to turn on the lights. They are eleven and twelve years old. They are all alone in a big house.
23.
Ben is waiting in the drive-through line, the car full of diapers and groceries, when he thinks to check his phone. Maybe he senses, somehow, the trouble he will find there: two missed calls from Annie, a message. “It’s me,” she says in the recording. “Come home right now.”
He calls her from the parking lot. No answer.
He drives home fast, baby toys rolling around in the backseat. A sensation of floating.
The night before this day, he dreamed that he was floating in the ocean with the baby. No raft. No land. He was holding her with one arm, paddling with the other. Her head kept slumping forward into the water. That’s what the dream was about: the keeping of her nose above the swells. But she soon fell away, and the rest of the dream was just the thrashing of his arms in search of her in that dark, cold water. It went on for hours, this thrashing, but what do we know about the physics of dreams? Perhaps, in the room where he was sleeping on the floor beside her crib, only a few seconds ticked by on the baby’s whale-shaped clock.
He speeds through town, hugging the lake.
At a stoplight, he calls Annie again. Nothing.
When he finally reaches his driveway, he leaves the groceries in the trunk, the car unlocked. He rushes up the stairs.
He hears his wife’s voice before he sees her: urgent and curt. He doesn’t notice the markings on the house next door.
“Finally,” she says from upstairs. “I’ve been calling and calling.”
“Where is she?” he says. But the baby is right there as usual, lying on her side in her crib: blue eyes open, alive. He holds her warm head to his face. “Is she okay?” he says. She is still so small that her hands keep disappearing inside her sleeves.
It scares him, sometimes, to remember that he did not want to have a child, as if time can sometimes run backward toward a reckoning, in which whatever is will be revoked and replaced with whatever might otherwise have been.
“The neighbors have it,” says Annie. “They have the sickness.”
A tenseness comes into his stomach.
“What do you mean?” he says. But he knows what she means.
“They brought the father out on a stretcher, just now,” she says. “Unconscious.”
Could it waft through the air through one open window and into another? Or could it float up from the throat of a girl who so recently stood on their porch, only a few feet away from the baby?