Everything they need is in the basement: peanut butter and tuna fish and macaroni and cheese, crackers and cereal and granola bars for a year. They have canned vegetables and canned fruit. They have toilet paper—stacks and stacks of toilet paper—and also the shelves of all those rarer things, each one an act of their father’s imagination, just waiting to prove clairvoyance: radiation suits, a Geiger counter, capsules of potassium iodide. Maybe they should be sleeping in the cots down there instead of in their bedroom upstairs, but there are spiders in this basement, and that one bare bulb, the smell of soil coming up from the earth. They never pictured sleeping down there without their father.
They do not know where he was taken or when he’ll come home, or if, but the only way to tolerate living alone in this house is to expect him to return at any moment.
On this morning, Sara is washing out the smell of urine from the sheets he last slept in. There is a kindness in not telling. There is love in covering up.
It is only as she is closing the lid of the washing machine that the danger occurs to her: Could she catch it from breathing in that smell? Now she’s at the sink. Now she’s washing her hands. She washes her hands for five minutes.
Libby is in the kitchen with the cats, handing out scraps of turkey.
“Don’t give them our food,” says Sara. She dries her hands on her jeans.
“But we’re all out of theirs,” Libby says.
They’ve been a good distraction, the cats, the four kittens skating across the wood floors, the two older ones always howling for food. One of the babies keeps throwing up on the rug. Another one pees on the stairs. But it feels good to take care of them—the way it is possible to disappear inside someone else’s need.
“We must have more food for them somewhere,” says Sara. But then she remembers: her father’s survival plans do not include the cats.
One of the kittens steals a piece of turkey right out of the mouth of another; he swallows quickly as if it might be taken back. There’s a scuffle on the linoleum, a sudden hiss.
“We have to get them more food,” says Libby.
“We can’t go out,” says Sara.
But she is soon turning the lock on the safe in the basement and pulling two twenty-dollar bills from the envelope her father keeps interred there.
“We’re bringing these,” she says as she stuffs the two gas masks into her backpack. “And the gloves.”
They leave through the back fence, through the woods, and then emerge on a path along the lake, so that their neighbors will not see them leaving the house. This is how they keep the secret of their living alone in the house.
How odd it is to be outside again, their shoes grinding the dirt, the glittering of the lake in the sun. Only two weeks earlier, they were walking this same stretch of sand with their father and his metal detector. As the lake shrinks into the distance, coins lost in these waters decades ago are now hidden by only a thin layer of dusty soil.
They walk slowly, deliberately, like they do on the high dive at the Y. There’s the feeling that they might have forgotten the way.
Two helicopters are hovering over another part of town. And some sort of military vehicle crosses an intersection up ahead. It makes some kind of announcement, but they cannot understand what it says.
They can tell from across the street that something is happening at the grocery store. Never before have they seen so many cars circling for spots. Never have they seen so many shopping carts heaped so full—a woman near the entrance is leaning hard to get hers rolling, as if pushing a stalled car down a hill. Some people are pulling two carts at once.
“Maybe we shouldn’t go in,” says Sara.
“We have to,” says her sister, her white cowboy boots clicking quickly into the crosswalk.
They should put on their masks—that’s what Sara is thinking. But it’s too embarrassing, now that they are here, now that she has spotted two girls from her class, to walk into a crowded grocery store wearing gas masks.
“Let’s at least put on the gloves,” says Sara. “And only the cat food. Don’t touch anything else.”
Inside, the aisles are choked with people. The checkout lines snake to the back of the store. And it is so much louder than usual. The workers are shouting to manage the crowd.
Some people, just a few, are wearing paper masks.
But still the usual music tinkles from the ceiling, not the work of real strings or real keys, their father likes to point out, but some digital imitation, as artificial as the apples that shine in the produce section, genetically modified for color instead of taste.
But on this day, all those apples are gone. And the bananas, too. On the back wall of the produce section, the automatic sprinklers are showering mist over a row of empty bins where the lettuce usually sits.
The canned food section has been similarly stripped. A tightening is spreading through Sara’s stomach. This is just as their father predicted.
Only a few bags of cat food are left slouched on the shelf. The girls grab what they can carry, one big bag each, and keep moving.
The clearest way out is through the candy aisle, where the racks still bulge with abundance, the only aisle empty of people. If they stand here among the chocolate bars and the Blow Pops, and if they cover their ears, they can pretend that the store is the same as it always is, the calm cool of packaged food, the aisles wide and clear. Simple.
Libby pauses to pull a big bag of gummy worms down from the rack.
“We don’t need that,” says Sara.
Candy is not allowed in their house.
But the gummy worms remain wedged under Libby’s skinny arm.
Suddenly, a soft voice nearby is saying Sara’s name, a boy: “Hey.”
She turns and finds Akil at the end of the aisle, with a small black bulldog beside him on a leash. A ping of happiness comes to her, but also the urge to hide her gloved hands, to smooth her unwashed hair.
“Hi,” she says.
She has never met Akil’s parents, but those must be them, a man in a gray suit, a woman in dark pants, a green paisley scarf at her neck, now digging through the groceries in their cart.
“Where have you been?” says Akil. This rush of gladness—to be missed—is too strong to admit.
The lie comes out almost without her notice: “I’ve been sick,” she says.
“They canceled the play,” says Akil.
The loudspeaker crackles with an announcement: they have sold out of diapers, says the voice, all sizes.
Behind him, Akil’s father seems agitated. He raises his voice: “This is outrageous,” he says.
“I didn’t know they could close off a whole town,” says Akil, in that crisp way he has of speaking. “Not in the States, anyway.”
“Is that what they’re doing?” she says. A new tenseness comes into her. This is another of her father’s darkest imaginings.
But now Akil’s mother is cutting in between them, her accent thick and glamorous, a flash of concern on her face: “Are you girls here alone?”
Sara has the idea that Akil’s mother is accustomed to crisis. They had to leave Egypt, he once told the class, after his father was arrested for something he wrote, and when he got out of jail, they left everything behind and moved to Florida, and then here, so he could teach at the college. Maybe what is happening in Santa Lora is nothing for this woman, compared to everything that came before. There is a calmness in the way she is dressed, her dark hair, perfectly parted, those gold earrings, shaped like seashells. But every mother is a little exotic to these motherless girls.
“Our dad knows we’re here,” says Sara, and the words release a surge of longing—for this wish to be true.
There is a pause that sounds like skepticism. And it is only then that Sara notices how much cat hair has collected on Libby’s black sweatshirt. She can hear a gummy worm already shifting around in her sister’s mouth, unpaid for.