There is a feeling, as they walk, of being watched. Every rustling of pine tree might be a soldier shifting his weight, every fluttering of wings a whisper. They walk fast.
But they see no one, not in the woods and not on the streets they glimpse through the trees. Sometimes, the air is so quiet that it feels like they are the last ones left awake.
Through the trees, Akil’s house looks the way it always does: those big clean windows, the red curtains, the potted plants on the porch. The garage door is open, leaving exposed the bicycles bunched in the corner and Akil’s science fair project, a model for some kind of robot. Beside it are three suitcases stacked against the wall—is that the luggage they brought with them from Egypt, she wonders, when they left in the middle of the night?
A shiver of shyness moves through her body.
Only later will Sara think about the lights, how the porch light is on in the middle of the day, how the chandelier in the dining room is blazing like it’s night.
And then Charlie is suddenly sprinting across the street, up onto the porch and right into the house. This is when they realize: the front door is standing open.
“Hello?” says Libby.
Akil’s green backpack is slumped by the door. Books are scattered everywhere.
They are inside for only a minute, just long enough to discover a dinner spread out on the table, flies drifting from the soup to the bread.
Charlie is barking and barking.
“We shouldn’t be here,” says Sara, and at the same time, she notices what they should have seen before: a drippy black X spray-painted on the front door.
Oh, Akiclass="underline" to survive one terrible thing, and then be caught by something else. Tears rush into Sara’s eyes.
Someone is suddenly shouting at them.
“Hey, girls,” a man’s voice is calling. A neighbor is leaning out from an upper window of the house next door. He has a full mask on his face. “Get away from that house.”
They run all the way home through the woods, pinecones cracking beneath their feet. Charlie runs with them, suddenly silent, his black fur going dusty.
Once they are home, sitting, panting in the yard, a new worry comes to Sara:
“What if he has it on his fur?”
So they pull out the hose. They put their gloves on first and long sleeves, but they forget to wear the masks. Sara sprays him from far away, as far away as possible. What they do not think of is how much he will shake once he’s wet. He shakes that water all over the vegetables. He shakes water all over them. Then it’s their turn to take showers.
“Try to hold your breath,” says Sara as the steam fills the bathroom, but it is too many minutes. They breathe it right in.
They feed the cats. They change the litter. They arrange and rearrange their mother’s things.
That same afternoon, when a terrier comes wandering down the street, his leash snaking behind him, tangling with the fences, Libby runs out and scoops him up, too.
Now they have two dogs to feed. Two dogs and five cats.
From the widow’s walk, the neighborhood seems drained of neighbors. Whenever the helicopters float briefly out of earshot, a strange quiet rushes in: no lawnmowers whirring, no children yelling, no basketballs bouncing in driveways. No buzzing of garage doors opening and closing on tracks. No slamming of car doors. No one is out for a run. In the house across the street, a television has been flickering, unattended, for days. And somewhere out there, their father sleeps.
But the birds go on singing. The squirrels rummage through the garbage, which has not been collected for days. A group of stray cats has started living in the wreckage of the nurse’s house across the street.
At these times, and these times only, Sara feels suddenly grateful for the rumbling of a Humvee—proof that she and Libby are not the last ones left.
That night, Sara falls asleep in one of their mother’s sweaters.
38.
In other parts of the country, certain skeptics remain. A new hashtag begins to trend: #SantaLoraHoax.
The government, they are sure, knows more than it is saying. That’s the real reason they’ve cut off the town: to hide whatever it is they have done.
The only thing that’s real are the soldiers. That’s what this is really about: an excuse to let the government take control. Think about it. Santa Lora is probably only the beginning, a test case.
Or if it is real, it’s our own damn fault. It might be Russia that’s behind this, or North Korea. Some kind of nerve agent, maybe, released by a drone. Haven’t we been asking for something like this for years? Going around the world and dropping our bombs? Or more likely, the government just wants us to think we’re under attack.
Just open your eyes, people. If you really believe this Santa Lora story, then you probably think that the fluoride in the water really is for our teeth and that a passenger airplane really did crash into the Pentagon on 9/11.
And have you heard the latest numbers? Fifteen hundred cases in six weeks? Come on, nothing spreads that fast.
39.
It is around this time that Ben’s dreams begin. They come quickly when they do. No matter how brief his sleep, the dreams rush in immediately, as if his consciousness can hardly keep them away. And always—always—at the center of these dreams, like a song that lives for days in his head, is Annie. In the dreams, she comes back to him in the smallest possible ways, in the form of things he did not know he knew: the click of her ChapStick rolling across the counter, the crisp scent of her practical soap, the way she lets her nails grow until they break, so that they’re always a little ragged and each one a different length. Sometimes, he dreams of what she sounds like moving through the rooms of the house, the flush of the toilet through the wall, the small splash of her spit landing in the sink, or her humming interrupted by the stubbing of her toe, once again, on the same loose floorboard she always trips on, that small familiar chirp: “Shit.”
These dreams always end the same way: with the wailing of the baby for milk.
Walking soothes the baby. And it soothes Ben, too, and what else is there to do? So they walk: two, three, four times a day.
This is a pine tree, he says as they drift once again down their street, and here is a pinecone. This is our shadow, yours and mine, long on the sidewalk because the sun is low in the sky at this time of year. And what we call it, this season, is fall.
Those people on that porch, he says, his eyes going watery, that woman looking weary and saying, “No, no, we have to stay inside again today”—we call her a mother. And that boy in the doorway, we call him her son.
Here is a sidewalk, he says. Here is a street. Here a spider web. A birdhouse. A car.
But not everything is so easy to name.
What are the right words for this: someone in a blue plastic suit who is crawling around in the middle of the street.
Ben and the baby are half a block away when he notices. The person’s hands are pulling at the rubber of his hood, yanking at the mask, the movements urgent but inefficient. Panic is a feeling you can recognize from a hundred feet away. Finally, those hands succeed in lifting that hood up and off the head. A face is revealed: a young man with sweaty black hair.
He is saying something, this man, sounds without meaning, an urgent mumbling. Something is wrong with his eyes—a blankness.
Ben steps back. His arms encircle the baby on his chest, as if the muscles of his wrists are separate from him, as if they know what to do before his mind can decide.