“From now on,” says the ER doctor, “you and I are the only ones who will know the exact location of these drugs.”
More and more doctors fall sick.
Catherine finds herself performing procedures she has not done since medical school. How strange the sewing needle feels in her hand, the coarse thread, as she stiches up a cut on the forehead of a young boy, after he slips near one of the overflowing toilets. And how odd is the heft of a newborn’s head at the moment he finally slips out of his mother and into Catherine’s gloved hands—while the only obstetrician in the hospital goes on dreaming in the isolation ward.
A few days later, Catherine finds the ER doctor slumped in an office chair in what was previously the waiting room. It is less and less surprising, how suddenly this sleep takes over the body, though his breathing seems even slower than the others’.
Two orderlies in blue suits are moving him to the isolation ward, when a bottle of pills falls from his pocket.
“Wait,” says Catherine. “It’s not the sickness,” she says. It’s OxyContin. An opium sleep. No wonder he knew so clearly what others might do.
For this, at least, there is a cure, a temporary one, anyway: one shot of naloxone in the thigh. He opens his eyes, awake and embarrassed. He avoids her after that.
That night, Catherine gets a call from her daughter’s babysitter.
“She has a fever,” says the babysitter. Catherine’s breath catches. The sickness, they have come to understand, starts that way, too. If something happens to her daughter, it will be Catherine’s fault, she is certain.
“I didn’t want to worry you,” says the babysitter. “But she fell asleep a few hours ago, and I’m having trouble waking her.”
Now it is Catherine’s turn to imagine the worst in florid detail.
A crazy simplicity cuts through everything else: she must get home to her daughter.
She will leave this hospital, which no one has left for two weeks. She will leave this town, surrounded by soldiers and military vehicles.
She peels off her gloves and rushes downstairs.
She does not even make it past the front door. There are guards, of course. This is not a voluntary quarantine.
Catherine spends the whole night on the phone with the babysitter. On the small screen of her phone, her sleeping daughter looks just like the sick do. Sometime after midnight, she realizes with a burst of panic that she cannot remember the exact color of her little girl’s eyes. People comment on it, an unusual shade of hazel, but she cannot picture it. She cannot remember her own daughter’s eyes.
Finally, at 3 A.M., relief: her daughter opens her eyes and asks the babysitter for water.
This is not the sickness, then, just an ordinary childhood fever.
The sound of her daughter’s little voice on the phone releases in her a tenderness for the whole world, for everyone, awake and asleep, in this hospital. It feels like a drug spreading through her body. It feels like the moment her daughter was born.
33.
At the center of that hospital, in the wing where the first patients are now tended by nurses in Level 4 Tyvek suits, beneath the sheets of one particular bed, beneath the thin cloth of the hospital gown, and beneath the smooth skin of the belly of one young woman: a tiny heart begins to beat. It is a secret, fluttering, hummingbird beat, four weeks in the making.
Rebecca experiences none of the emotions she otherwise would, pregnant by accident at eighteen—the panic, the disbelief, the excruciating need to make a decision.
Ten feet away, dreaming in another hospital bed, Caleb feels none of that, either.
The whole thing, too young yet to call a fetus, has grown to the size of a pea.
A face is beginning to surface from the tissue of the head, the earliest components of eyes. Those eyes: they will show her everything she will ever see. Passages are forming that will one day become the inner ear. Those ears will deliver every voice, every note of music, every drop of rain, she will ever hear in her life. Already, there is an opening that will later become the mouth, the same mouth that, if mother and child survive, might ask, someday, what God is and why we need the wind, or where she was, anyway, before she was inside her mother’s belly.
In the room, the monitors hum and whir. The suits swish as nurses and doctors come and go, performing the same diagnostic tests they have been doing from the start: the massaging of the sternum, the tickling of toes. No change.
Nutrients travel through a plastic tube up through one nostril, then down her throat and into her stomach.
Meanwhile, Rebecca sleeps and sleeps, the conscious brain, it turns out, as superfluous to the process unfolding inside her as the sunflowers that are right now wilting on the windowsill beside her.
34.
He sleeps when she sleeps. He wakes when she wakes, which is six times or eight times or ten times a day. And every one of these wakings is also a remembering, a collecting again of the facts: Ben is alone with his six-week-old baby.
Wherever he goes, he is the man with a newborn curled up on his chest. You should stay home, he is told again and again. That’s the safest place to be. But he has to go out, for formula and for diapers—they’ve started handing out supplies at the high school.
No one can tell him where his wife is. Not the operators who answer the phones at the hospital. Not the soldiers outside the emergency room. Not even the paramedics, on that first night, sheathed in blue suits and white masks—as they lifted Annie up from the kitchen floor, her fingers fluttering slightly, the way they always do when she sleeps—could say exactly where it was she would go.
The morning after, when the nurse comes to take the baby’s temperature, she wears plastic goggles and a full-body suit. The baby cries and cries. Already the baby can recognize what is ordinary and what is not.
That nurse never comes again.
Every so often, a Humvee drifts down the street. An ambulance roars by. The neighbors come and go from their houses, tense and watchful. But all Ben can see is the face of his baby. All he can hear is her crying. The only way she will sleep is in the bend of his arm, her lips going loose against a bottle. All his clothes smell like urine and sour milk and the sweet stink of her diapers. There is no time to take a shower. There is no time to wash his face. Dirty laundry litters the floor.
One of Annie’s colleagues stops by those first few days with formula and wipes. “Doesn’t it seem like no one knows what they’re doing?” she says, arms crossed, voice shaking a little. “I don’t think they know what the hell they’re doing.”
They are not very close, this woman and Annie, but they have lived in this town for only three months, and you ask whoever you can.
Annie, Annie, Annie: her name sounds suddenly sacred—and strange—rendered somehow extraordinary by not saying it thirty times a day. Come home, he whispers, like a prayer.
He calls his mother in Ohio every day. She wants to fly out, but it’s no use, he tells her, whispering into the phone, while the baby dozes on his chest. “They would never let you in.”
It has been decades since he has felt this way about his mother, the simple need for her presence. “You should have let me come when she was born,” she says, but he and Annie had decided in advance that they wanted to be alone with the baby for a while before letting their parents come. He sees now that this was a teenager’s notion of what it is like to be an adult. “If I had come when she was born,” says his mother, “then I’d be trapped there with you now and could help.”