Morning: there’s a sudden dripping sound, and he cannot at first make sense of what he sees—coffee streaming across the kitchen counter and down the linoleum. He has turned on the coffeemaker while the carafe is still in the sink.
As he warms another bottle for the baby, his most recent dream still clinging to him, he begins to believe that maybe—he would never say it out loud, but maybe, maybe, like collective unconscious, like ESP, maybe—he really is seeing the future in his dreams.
40.
It is easy to mistake a wish for a fact, a hope for a lie, a better world for the one that is. For example, our children: we don’t expect we’ll ever lose them.
And so, when Ben finds his baby girl in her crib, sleeping late into the morning, it is hard for him to believe that anything might be wrong. She looks so much like she always does in sleep, those peach cheeks, those fat lips. Her eyelids are fluttering like they always do. Her little legs are pumping slightly as she snores. Nothing seems amiss, except for this: no matter what Ben does, she will not open her eyes.
“Come on,” he says. She is so warm in his arms, and, if he puts his thumb in her palm, her fingers still close around it. “Come on, little nut.”
But no tickling of her feet, no brushing of her cheek, no splashing of water on her face—none of it will rouse his daughter.
No matter that he has imagined this exact scenario constantly for weeks—all those visions turn out to be useless now, his worst fears proved flimsy by the real experience. This, this is ghastly: a sudden draining of meaning from the world.
Later, he will think of all the ways he might have saved her from this: maybe they should have stayed inside all this time, or left town earlier, broken the barricades—anything.
But for now, he just kneels down on the floor as if to pray or to beg.
“Please,” he says, his hands on her chest like he might still find some magic there. “Please, wake up.”
There is a reason that time seems to slow down in moments like these, a neurological process, discovered through experiment: in times of shock, the brain works faster—it takes more in. And so, some might say that this—the increased rate at which his neurons are firing—makes these first few seconds even more excruciating than they might otherwise be.
But forget all that. The only way to tell some stories is with the oldest, most familiar words: this here, this is the breaking of a heart.
41.
That night, something wakes Sara up.
Maybe it’s the creak of the hinge in the front gate. Maybe it’s the crunch of footsteps on the gravel of the driveway. Or the quick clearing of a man’s throat on the front porch.
But these are possibilities that predate her awareness. The only thing she knows is that she is suddenly awake in the dark.
All she can hear, for now, is the drip-drip of a faucet, and the small stirrings of the kittens in their sleep, and one more slow metronome: the steady rhythm of her sister’s breathing in the bed beside hers.
The room is warm from their bodies, and she can see her sister’s face in the moonlight. But a strange sensation keeps creeping into her body, the feeling that she is alone in the room, that her sister is not there at all.
It’s her sister’s breathing—that’s what it is: too slow. The possibility hits her with the heft of a fact: her sleep is too deep.
Maybe ten seconds pass between the moment this thought surfaces and the one when she’s poking Libby’s shoulder.
Libby wakes up right away.
“What are you doing?” says Libby. Her voice is scratchy and grouchy, and the most wonderful noise Sara has ever heard. It is hard to remember in the dark that every worry is more worrisome in the middle of the night.
Libby turns over in her sheets, already bobbing back to sleep.
The clock glows midnight, and Sara aims for sleep, too. She is close to a doze, dipping in, when the kittens suddenly pop up from their box. Sara sees them in silhouette, eight ears twitching in the same direction, as if they have caught some ominous sound, too low for the girls to hear.
But then comes another noise, much louder: the tinkle of breaking glass.
Now she is up and out of bed. The cats are running everywhere. She is shaking Libby’s shoulder.
“Get up,” Sara whispers. “There’s someone in the house.”
This house is a hundred years old. The floor shudders whenever anyone takes a step. Huddled in a closet, the girls listen through the vent. Someone is moving around downstairs.
Her sister is so close she can feel her warm breath against her shoulder. She is so close she can feel her shaking.
Now the creak of the wood is replaced by the sticky smack of linoleum. Someone has passed into the kitchen.
The refrigerator swooshes open. It suctions closed. Open again. More steps. And then a crashing sound, as if someone has overturned the table. From the backyard, Charlie begins to bark.
“Maybe it’s Daddy?” whispers Libby, a sudden blast of optimism.
“I don’t think so,” says Sara.
Now they hear the squeaking of hinges as the kitchen cabinets swing open and slam shut. There is a scraping sound. There is the clatter of dishes.
A few seconds of silence precede a terrible new noise: the creak of the stairs. Whoever it is—he is coming up. And he is coming quick.
Now the bedroom door clicks open. They hear the cats scurry away, their claws sliding on the wood.
In the closet, Libby is squeezing Sara’s hand so hard it hurts. Her little nails are digging into her palm.
On the other side of the closet door, drawers are opening and closing. Things are crashing onto the floor. There’s another sound, too, an intermittent static, like a radio or a walkie-talkie.
Every dark scene her father has ever painted comes flashing into Sara’s mind: someone has come to hurt them. Maybe it’s the government, like in that movie their father likes. Maybe they’re killing everyone in town to stop the epidemic.
She begins to cry. Her sister reaches over to cover her mouth.
And then it happens: the closet door swings open.
By the low light of Libby’s night-light, they can see the outline of a man.
“Are you in here?” he says. There is panic in his voice. “Are you here?”
The girls keep quiet.
They do not imagine what he might see at this moment, the faces of two little girls in nightgowns, squeezed together among their sweaters and their coats, one crying, the other burying her head into the other’s shoulder. But that is the thing: he does not seem to see them at all.