There’s a small swell of relief as the situation becomes clear in her head. “I’m not sick,” she says.
Sara is not a girl who has been waiting for this day to arrive. Ever since they showed the video at school, she’s been nursing the idea that maybe, hopefully, it would never happen to her at all. It was easy to believe. How could something so bizarre really be so ordinary?
“I didn’t think it would be so much blood,” she says to her sister through the bathroom door.
A tide of adrenaline pushes her through the first steps: the changing of her jeans, the layers of toilet paper, to be replaced eventually with a washcloth folded in quarters, the swallowing of two Tylenol at the sink. There is the slightest traitorous gladness that her father is not here to witness any of it.
It is hard not to wish for her mother. Akil’s mother flashes into her mind—maybe she would know how to help.
She can hear her sister in the hall, through the door. A strange snorting sound.
“Are you okay?” Sara calls to her sister. No answer.
On the other side of the door, she finds Libby sprawled on the floor: laughing. She is laughing so hard she can’t talk.
“It’s not funny,” says Sara.
Libby is giggling so much that she is holding her stomach as if it might otherwise come undone.
“Stop laughing,” says Sara.
But she keeps at it.
“Stop it.”
“I can’t believe I thought you were dying,” says Libby. The noise has attracted the kittens, who are nuzzling their faces against her shoulder. “And look at your jeans.”
But all Sara can feel at this moment is a vague sense of an animal indifference in the universe, how everything in nature is just as relentless as a virus, replicating itself again and again without end.
30.
The parents: one mile outside of town, at a rest stop where the highway twists into the woods, a group of parents begins to gather. This is the closest the soldiers will allow them to get to Santa Lora.
This is outrageous, the parents say to one another. This is a violation of their sons’ and daughters’ civil liberties. They call their lawyers. They call their representatives and their senators. They call the media. They watch military vehicles trundle in and out of town. One father tries to climb aboard an army truck but is soon shooed off by the soldiers.
Some sleep in their cars. Some set up tents. They take turns driving back down the mountain for food.
They talk in small groups, exchanging news and blankets. Most of their children are still awake in Santa Lora—why not let them come home and wait out their quarantine in their own houses?
Protest signs begin to appear. Cameras.
Among the parents here is Mei’s mother, who, unbeknownst to Mei, has been sleeping in her station wagon. It feels better to be at least this near. Her daughter has not answered her phone in two days. And there is no way to know if this silence means that she has caught the sickness, or if it is only proof of the natural order of things: how parents are always so much more focused on their children than the other way around.
31.
The day after the start of the quarantine, Mei and Matthew join the crowd that forms at the barricades of Recuerdo Road in Santa Lora. They stand side by side in sweatshirts and jeans, white masks on their faces, blue gloves on their hands. Mei is looking around. She is nervous. Matthew stares straight ahead.
This is Mei’s idea, this turning themselves in. Something unfamiliar is blooming in her, something big, like duty.
But Matthew has agreed. He has thought it over. “This is the greatest good for the greatest number,” he says.
For Mei, it is less a thought than a feeling, almost physical, as if it is the muscles in her stomach that know most clearly the right thing to do.
Two rows of barricades stand at the point in the road where the state forest land ends and Santa Lora begins—with a scattering of cabins in the woods. The old sign hangs nearby: WELCOME TO SANTA LORA.
Only two months earlier, Mei came in on this same road, her mother’s Volvo packed with new sheets and new clothes and a mini-fridge still in its box. In her head, so much hope and longing, her new life so close at hand.
The crowd here is loud with need, for supplies and for food, but most of all for information. A man here is asking about his daughter. A woman is looking for her husband. “They took him away in an ambulance,” she says. “No one will tell me where he is.”
Every one of these questions is met with the same response from the two soldiers posted behind the fence: the slow shaking of their heads.
They wear fatigues and big boots, sunglasses. They would help if they could, they say, through their crisp white masks, and they do look sorry, like boys, is what they look like, but with big black guns at their sides.
“You should all go home,” one of them calls out through his mask. “That’s the safest place to be.”
“But we don’t live here,” shouts a woman in a wrinkled business suit. She is with a group of nine or ten people who were here for a conference, she says. “We’re stranded,” says the woman. This is the moment when Mei notices that she is barefoot, the same woman she saw the day before. “Where are we supposed to go?”
Two news helicopters are swirling overhead. All the channels have dropped the story of the escaped college kids in favor of the bigger headline: for the first time in American history, a tourniquet has been applied to an entire town.
Matthew calls out to one of the soldiers. “Excuse me,” he says. “Excuse me.”
“Hey,” shouts a man from somewhere nearby. “There’s a line.”
An hour of waiting produces nothing. A line of wispy clouds drifts in the sky. A dog walks alone in the road, his leash dragging behind him. Whose dog is this? people call out to the crowd. Whose dog is this? They keep asking until that dog wanders out of sight, his tags jingling unread, his leash still flapping behind him. It is hard not to wonder what happened to the person whose hand let go of that leash.
When it is their turn to talk to the soldiers, Mei and Matthew fare no better than the others.
“Who told you to come here?” says one of them, as if they have asked him for some kind of favor. “We can’t help you here.”
“But we’ve been exposed,” says Matthew. “We’re trying to do the ethical thing.”
The one soldier meets eyes with the other, like Matthew might be some kind of nut.
The soldier hands them a yellow flyer and taps with one gloved finger the same number that Mei called earlier.
“They said to come here,” says Mei.
“Call again,” he says. “I guess.”
Suddenly someone is shouting nearby. There is the clanging of metal on pavement.
“Hey,” shout the soldiers. “Stop.”
A man is trying to climb over the barricades.
A woman in the crowd is calling after him: “Sayyid,” she shouts. “Come back.”
“Stop where you are,” shouts the soldier closest to Mei. He does not point his rifle. But if anyone were really looking closely, which no one is at this moment, he or she might notice the way his hand tenses against the barrel.
“You can’t trap us here,” says the man. He has an accent, Mei can’t tell from where. “What about all your talk of human rights?”
He is wearing a gray suit, this man, and dress shoes. He already has one leg over the fence.
The woman keeps calling after him from somewhere in the crowd.
“Sayyid,” she says. “What are you trying to do?”
And now another voice joins hers, a boy’s: “Daddy, stop.” He says. “Please. Come back.”