“Please be careful, girls,” says Akil’s mother, the curve of her accent giving the words a special weight.
Akil’s father agrees: “You should go straight home.”
“We will,” says Sara.
Akil looks like he might say something more, but he doesn’t. He just smiles a small smile, and then walks away with his little dog and his beautiful mother, his father trailing behind them.
One aisle over, a man is leaning down on one knee, reaching for something on a low shelf.
“Hey, you girls,” he says as they rush past him. “Can one of you reach that box?”
The turning of his head reveals two facts at once: this man is their neighbor, the professor, and he has the baby with him, pressed against his chest in a wrap, a pacifier pulsing in her tiny bird mouth.
If he recognizes the girls, he does not show it. He looks different. The beginnings of a beard are coming in patchy on his chin. And he is moving awkwardly, delicately—he can’t reach the box because of the baby burrowed in the wrap.
“I’ll get it,” says Sara.
It’s formula, the last box. She holds it out to him through the cuffs of her sweatshirt, no contact with her skin.
There’s something terrible about the depth of this man’s gratitude as he thanks her for an act so simply done.
Suddenly the baby begins to wail. The pacifier has dropped from her mouth, and it is as if, all this time, the noise of her crying has been plugged up like water in a tub.
“Shit,” says the professor. He rubs the back of her little bald head and leans slowly toward the floor—like a pregnant woman. She can tell he’s not used to carrying her like this. Libby tries to help by scooping up the pacifier and stretching it out toward the baby’s mouth.
But the professor lunges forward. “No,” he says, grabbing hold of Libby’s sleeve. “Don’t touch her.”
The baby seems as stunned as Libby. She goes quiet for a moment, and then the crying rushes back, even louder.
“I’m sorry,” says the professor. He is rubbing his eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
He looks like he might cry, and there’s no need for the girls to discuss what to do next. They want the same thing at the same moment: to get away from this man as fast as they can.
In the checkout line, Sara begins to feel a strange weariness in her limbs. It’s her legs especially, but also her back, as if every muscle in her body is calling out to her for rest.
“Are you okay?” says Libby.
It’s just the waiting, she thinks—the line is long and slow, and the cat food is heavy in her arms.
“I’m fine,” she says.
What happens next begins with a sound she does not recognize: the cracking of eggshells on linoleum. “Oh my God,” someone is shouting from the dairy section. “Oh my God.” A single scream leaves a momentary vacuum. Every head turns toward the sound. And what they see when they do is a woman crumpled on the floor, egg yolks pooling around her head.
Sara grabs her sister’s hand just as everyone lurches forward, a tidal surge toward the front doors. The girls run like the others, the cat food pressed against their chests.
There’s a bottlenecking at the front—the automatic doors keep trying to close, but there are too many people trying to get out at once, that ringing again and again. Here is where Sara sees the professor a second time, just a quick flash of his face, which is desperate and red. He is pressed against a wall of windows, his arms curled around the head of his tiny girl. “Stop pushing!” he’s shouting. “I have a baby! Stop pushing!”
The girls burst outside, and they don’t stop running for two blocks.
At first, Sara feels better outside, the cool air on her skin, the sun. A gummy worm is releasing its sweetness in her cheek. She’s okay, she says to herself as they walk. She’s fine.
But when they’re a few blocks from home, a sudden pain twists her stomach. It soon spreads to her back. The feeling comes with an intense urge to lie down. And this wish seems to produce right in front of her a patch of dry grass.
“Hold on a second,” she says to Libby. She sits down right where she is.
“Do you have your inhaler?” says her sister.
“It’s not that,” says Sara. She pulls her knees tight to her chest. It feels right to close her eyes.
“Oh my God,” says her sister. “Oh my God.”
But it is hard for Sara to feel afraid, because, suddenly, the world has been reduced to only this one fact: this massive ache flooding her body. Somewhere very far away is the sound of her sister dropping the cat food on the sidewalk.
“Please don’t be sick,” says Libby. “Please. Please.”
It only lasts a minute, the worst of it, anyway, and then everything eclipsed rushes back to her at once: the smell of the grass, the dry dirt against her legs, the terror in her sister’s voice.
The pain comes and goes all the way home. They have to stop again in the woods.
“You can’t go to sleep,” says Libby, once they’ve snuck back into the house. “You can’t.”
But she needs to lie down. She is clenching her teeth on the stairs.
If she curls herself up in a certain way, she feels a little better.
Soon, she can no longer hear the yowling of the cats downstairs, or the rattle, loud as hail, of Libby filling their bowls with food.
She lies curled in her four-poster bed, that old green quilt pulled up to her chin, one socked foot sticking out from the sheets. Her ponytail fans out on the pillow, and the hood of her sweatshirt is crumpled around her neck. Her eyes are closed. Her mouth is open. Saliva is gathering on her lips. Her breathing is light and steady.
Lost, for now, is the buzz of the panic in the grocery store. Gone is the price of gummy worms. Fading away is the face of the woman who was standing two people behind them in line and the man pushing a cart near the entrance.
If, in the months before the sickness appeared, you had asked a specialist why it is that a human being spends part of every day unconscious, you might have heard an answer that’s been around since at least the ancient Greeks: we sleep, the theory goes, in order to forget.
Sleep, the experts would tell you, is when our brains sift through the day’s memories, sweeping away the unimportant things. What remains for Sara is the soft look on Akil’s face when he asked where she had been, the music of his mother’s voice, the sweaty warmth of her sister’s hand as they sprinted toward home.
Unlike so many of the others, Sara eventually opens her eyes.
She wakes to the sound of shouting. It’s Libby. Libby is screaming at the foot of the bed.
“You wouldn’t wake up,” her sister shouts.
Sara is still a little in her dream—something about her mother, the idea of her, anyway. She was wearing the green cardigan from the picture of her that Sara has in her drawer. And the kitchen. They were sitting together in the kitchen. But matching the words to the dream only dissolves what is left of it, the way certain stars vanish from the sky if you look directly at them.
It takes a second to remember her waking life. Here she is in their bedroom, the sunlight flickering through the boarded-up windows. Here is her sister, her face red from crying.
“You have to go to the hospital,” says Libby. She is pulling at the sheets. There are streaks of brown blood here and there. “You’re bleeding.”
Now the dream is gone from Sara’s head—only a tracing is left, like skates on ice, a sadness.
“Wait,” says Sara, sitting up in wet jeans. “Let me think for a second.”