“And the men who came were wearing those suits,” says Annie. “You know, all plastic, no skin showing. The kind they wear for Ebola.”
“Jesus,” he says.
On any other day, he might have worried more for the daughters of that man, but today he can think only of his own, who right then is squirming against his chest, her immune system not yet fully formed. What an adult’s body would quickly discard might flower in the body of a newborn. He rocks her in his arms, as if she is the one who needs comfort.
“Let’s leave,” says Annie. “Let’s just get in the car and go.” Maybe she won’t get it from the milk, she keeps saying, but if they stay in this town, she is sure to catch it some other way.
She is stacking Grace’s clothes in a little pile on the bed, packing.
“But they said we’re not supposed to leave town,” he says.
Annie sighs, hard and deliberate, as if she’s been arguing with him all day.
“I knew you would say that,” she says.
There is something mean in her voice, something new.
“Stay if you want to,” she says. “But I’m taking her away from here.”
Only Annie can say a thing like that, as if she and the baby are still housed together inside one body.
She is pulling a suitcase down from the top of the closet.
“Let me do that,” he says. She isn’t supposed to be lifting anything yet. “If we’re going to go,” says Ben, “we better do it soon.” There is only an hour before the nurse will be back to take the baby’s temperature.
But it takes a long time to gather up what they need. By the time the bassinet and the diapers, the clean bottles and the formula, the swaddle blankets and the pacifiers and the pump—by the time they are all lodged together in the trunk of the car, it’s time to feed her again, which means the doorbell is ringing just as Grace is finishing a bottle of formula, her eyes going droopy with the last of it, then to sleep in Annie’s arms.
Ben feels his face radiating with the secret of their leaving.
“Just be normal,” whispers Annie as the doorbell rings again.
The lie is in the way Ben makes sure to take off his shoes before opening the door so that he answers it barefoot, like a man who is in for the night.
On the doorstep stands the same nurse as before, but she’s wearing more gear: full green scrubs and a paper mask, blue gloves that stretch to her elbows.
“The procedures keep changing,” she says through the muffle of the mask. With the back of her wrist, she nudges a strand of hair from her eyes. “Ready?” she says.
When she sees their daughter, still dozing in Annie’s arms, a little gasp comes up from her throat.
“How long has she been sleeping?” she says.
“She always does this after she eats,” says Annie.
The nurse writes something on her clipboard.
Annie starts to get up from the couch.
“Just stay there,” says the nurse. She holds her hand out in the air, firm, like a push. “I can take her temperature from here.”
None of them speak while she holds the thermometer out toward Grace’s forehead. The only sound is the wind blowing through the trees, and, much closer, in paralleclass="underline" the air moving in and out of their daughter’s lungs.
Finally, the wand beeps. “No fever yet,” says the nurse.
Ben doesn’t like the way she says it, that one word, yet, as if she can see the future in that thermometer.
“And still no other symptoms?” says the nurse.
Already she’s moving toward the door, her scrubs swishing as she moves. Even with the gloves, she uses as few fingers as possible to touch the doorknob, as if grasping it with pincers.
“I’ll be back tomorrow at nine,” she says.
“Of course,” they say, and they nod. “See you then.”
But by tomorrow, they’ll be a hundred miles away, in San Diego with Annie’s sister.
Annie rides beside the baby, in the backseat—that’s the way they’ve been doing it since the start. More than anything else, these two agree on this one thing: for their daughter to ever feel alone in the world seems the worst possible thing.
“I think she’d be sick by now if she were going to get it from the milk,” says Annie. It sounds true as she says it, as certain as science. You can’t always distinguish between reason and hope.
She is looking for Ben’s eyes in the rearview. She is holding their baby’s hand. His little family.
“Don’t you think?” she says.
By the time they pass the college, Grace is asleep again. They see now, for the first time, the news vans that have been lined up on College Avenue for a week, their broad sides turning pink in the sunset while grim news flies invisibly up from their spires, some of it pouring out through the speakers in Ben and Annie’s car: thirty-nine cases, a local reporter is saying, which is almost twice the total of the day before, and still no word on what is causing it.
Ben turns off the radio.
They leave town the only way you can, on the road that twists up over the mountains and then down again to the valley on the other side. The houses are fewer and fewer as the road rises. And for a few minutes, in the shade of those old woods, they feel free of this thing.
“We’ll be in San Diego by eight,” says Ben, as if the danger comes from the land itself, and all they need is a geographic cure.
But a turn in the road reveals a long line of brake lights. A trail of cars is waiting in the dusky light.
“I don’t see an accident,” says Ben. His hands begin to sweat on the steering wheel.
“Let’s not get paranoid,” says Annie.
The possibility floats between them for a moment, a quiet whiff of hope: that this is an ordinary calamity, one that can be cleared away with tow trucks while the drivers trade insurance information.
Yes, they agree, an accident.
But they’ve never seen so much traffic on this road.
Ten minutes pass. Twenty. Their wheels roll so rarely that the speedometer detects no movement at all. Some of the other drivers have turned their engines off.
The sun is sinking fast. Grace is snoring her little snores.
In sleep, she always looks lifeless. And he is just as likely as Annie is to drop his head down close to her chest and listen for the workings of her lungs. Don’t bug her, they say to one another as she sleeps, don’t bug her, don’t bug her, but then they do it anyway, one or the other, a compulsion they have shared since her birth.
“I want to wake her up,” says Annie. “Just to make sure. Can I wake her up?”
Many cars ahead, two doors swing open. A man and a small boy emerge and begin to walk together along the side of the road. They stop near Ben’s car and the man points at the woods, and then the boy is walking into the woods alone. You can tell what is happening, the boy pausing to unzip his pants near a tree, his back turned to the road.
The father, arms crossed, nods at Ben. “He couldn’t hold it,” he says, a small smile.
There’s a camaraderie among parents that Ben didn’t recognize before. Strangers with children are not so much like strangers—he doesn’t need to know them to know a lot about their lives.
Ben calls to the man: “Can you tell what’s going on up there?”
The man comes a few steps closer, the sound of his shoes crunching on the dirt.
“There’s a checkpoint up there,” he says. “They’re searching for those kids. The ones they had in quarantine or whatever at the college. The ones that got out.”
They’re probably hiding in the woods, says the man, looking around, as if they might be watching. But he doesn’t blame them, he says. “We’re trying to get out ourselves.”