“What was I like?” asks Henry. “What was I like all this time?”
Henry saw his own father this way. And his uncle. He must know what he was like.
“It was like you were gone,” says Nathaniel.
There are certain thoughts he does not want to think. Among them: when tides recede, they always rush back in.
“I should be angry with you,” says Henry. “You didn’t do what you promised.”
Nathaniel waits, but he knows what he means. He cannot look into his face, so he watches the lake instead. In the distance, a sailboat drifts, as if nothing remarkable were happening in the town of Santa Lora.
“But I’m not,” says Henry. “I’m not angry.”
These words—they are the exact right thing. Some kinds of trees require the blast of a forest fire to break open their seeds.
Henry’s voice softens to a whisper. “I have an idea,” he says. A surfacing of an old rebelliousness, as familiar as the warmth of Henry’s hand in his. “Let’s leave.”
The surprise is how easy it is.
No one stops them. No security guard comes running after them. No police. They just open the gate. They just get in the car, and they go.
They do not listen to the news. They do not follow the protocols for contagious disease. If Henry offers him a sip of whisky from his glass, Nathaniel takes it. They do not sleep in separate beds.
Every day, Henry’s walk is more steady, his voice more sure. Here is Henry sitting in his wingback chair with a book. Here Nathaniel, making him tea. Here is Henry, walking at his side in the woods.
These woods: If classes were in session, today is the day Nathaniel would have done his lecture on the pheromones of trees. It’s a way of catching the attention of the undergraduates for a minute with the counterintuitive news that trees, so silent and so still, have ways of reaching out to one another, lines of communication, systems of warning. There is something satisfying in it, that the plain reality of the universe reads to us like magic. Henry might go further. He would point out how much our brains are limited by what we believe already—how once, when people expected to see ghosts, ghosts were what they saw.
Henry’s presence in the house, and in these woods, triggers a second longing, too, a profound need for his daughter to be here, and not just as she is now—a grown woman in San Francisco, whom he calls on the phone to say, yes, yes, it really is amazing—but also as she was once: a six-year-old girl in blue butterfly barrettes, trailing behind him and Henry, as she did on so many evenings back then, out in these same woods, reciting the names of the trees like a catechism, ponderosa, manzanita, white oak, her pockets bulging with pinecones.
His daughter, as she is now, the grown woman in San Francisco, does not seem to understand what he is trying to tell her on the phone. “He’s cured?” she says. “How is that possible?” She has a lot of questions that he does not want to consider.
A rush of anger comes over him, washing everything else away.
“Just leave it,” he says to her. “Just leave it alone.”
It is on the third or fourth day that Nathaniel’s mind begins to feel a little foggy. He and Henry are out on the porch drinking whisky, the way they used to, and Henry is telling a complicated story about a man in Key West in the 1930s. He was in love, this man. He was in love with a dead woman.
“At first, he tended her grave,” says Henry, leaning back in his chair. “Then he removed her body and kept her in his house for years.” Seven years, he keeps saying. “He kept embalming her body. She was like some kind of doll.”
It is hard for Nathaniel to remember the start of the story or why Henry is telling it. There it is, that fogginess again. A confusion. For the first time, Nathaniel worries that he might be getting the sickness, too.
“Are you all right?” asks Henry. His hand is on his back.
How cruel it would be to fall sick just as Henry got well. But there is no law in nature against cruelty. In fact, Henry would argue, with his Victorian rooms and his seminars on Thomas Hardy, it seems, at times, to run in that direction.
Nathaniel’s confusion is accompanied by something else, too, a strange noise. “Like water,” he says to Henry. “Do you hear that? Like water dripping somewhere.”
But Henry does not hear it. The house is dry. The sun is out. But the sound persists, unnerving, inexplicable: like the light sloshing of water against a boat, always there and growing louder.
27.
One hundred twenty cases balloons to 250 in two days. Two-fifty soon cascades to 500.
But with the hospital closed to new patients, these newly sick are spread out in giant tents instead, as if they’ve been felled on a battlefield in some distant place.
Along with supplies, volunteers are flown in from other places to give the only treatment there is: keeping the hearts beating and the bodies hydrated and fed. It’s a lot of work to perform manually every task the waking body does on its own. There are not enough monitors. There are not enough beds. There are not enough workers to turn the bodies back and forth in the sheets.
The story is everywhere now. Television commentators are circling Santa Lora on maps of California: this place is only seventy miles from Los Angeles and only ninety miles from LAX, which might as well be a neighborhood in New York or London or Beijing.
Something needs to be done, that’s the feeling. Something big.
On the eighteenth day, three thousand miles away, watchers of the morning news shows awaken to a series of aerial images of the town of Santa Lora, California.
From the cockpit of a helicopter, the campus of Santa Lora College looks serene: sixteen brick buildings, lit with orange lights, parking lots empty of cars. The lake, or what is left of it, shines in the moonlight, its former waterline not so obvious in the dark. Beyond that, the streets fan out in a grid. Swimming pools, covered over for winter. Station wagons parked in driveways. An ordinary town in the middle of the night—except for a long line of military trucks clogging the one road in and out. And also this, visible only faintly through the trees: a line of soldiers standing in the woods.
For now, the people of Santa Lora are sleeping soundly, the healthy and the sick alike. Hours will pass before most of them will hear the words that people in Maine and Pennsylvania and Florida are learning right now: cordon sanitaire, the complete sealing off of an infected region, like a tourniquet, not used in this country for more than a hundred years.
From the air, all the streets look the same, the houses packed close like teeth, the artificial lawns indistinguishable from the real grass gone brown from the drought. But on one of those streets, under one of those roofs, a baby is crying in the dark.
One floor up, Ben wakes to the noise, knowing that his wife is with her already, that soon his daughter will go quiet in her arms.
He dozes, a half-sleep. But the crying wakes him again.
He turns in his bed. He begins to wonder if this crying is different from the crying of all the other nights, more urgent, maybe a kind of screaming. The sickness floats up into his mind—what if this is how it starts?
Now he’s up. He’s out of bed. His heart is beating fast. The way to slow it down is to see her. He wants to see his baby right away. But her room is empty. They’re downstairs, he realizes—that’s where the crying is coming from. The kitchen.
“Poor little nut,” he says in the dark when he gets there, which is a way of greeting his wife, who he knows is in there, somewhere in that blackness, probably pacing like she does, the baby curled in her arms, or else she’s rocking her in that special way they learned from a book. They haven’t spoken much since their fight, but he forgets all that now. “How long has she been awake?” he asks.