They can see his feet now—no shoes. And his chest—no shirt.
He parts the coats in the closet like curtains.
“Please,” he keeps saying. “Please tell me where you are.”
That’s when Sara recognizes him. It’s their neighbor. This guy is their neighbor, that professor with the baby.
It is a relief to know that this man is a father, as if one parent will always look out for the children of others.
Now she sees that he is bleeding. His hands are running with blood. Bits of glass sparkle on his bare feet.
“Where is my baby?” he says. “I can’t find my baby.”
There is something about his eyes, seeing but not seeing, as if, it comes to her suddenly, as if he is dreaming.
There’s that sound again, the windy swish of some kind of electronic device. He holds it up to his ear. A baby monitor. The noise comes in like an old recording, or a radio station losing its signal. A surge of noise, but no baby sounds.
And then he rushes out of the house as suddenly as he came.
He does not flinch or shout out, when his bare feet step on broken glass. He never makes it home. From the widow’s walk, the girls spot him passed out on his porch.
Libby runs out to put a blanket over him. Sara calls the police. Only late the next day does an ambulance come to take him away. Those suited-up workers spend a long time in the house and then mark it with an X. If they find the baby in there, the girls do not see her.
In the morning, they discover that among the things he shattered in his sleep are their mother’s black ceramic birds from Portugal. There they are, in pieces on the floor. Libby spends all day trying to glue them back together. But time moves in only the one direction. Not everything that breaks can be repaired.
That night, Sara wakes again, gripped by another ominous feeling. This time, her sister’s bed is empty. Sara rushes for the lights. And this is how she discovers Libby, lying perfectly still on the wood floor. But worse than that: her brown eyes are wide open.
For five seconds, Sara knows she is alone in the world—only the dead lie like that.
But then an odd mumbling begins to come from Libby’s mouth, singsong, as if she is speaking in her sleep, eyes still open. Not so uncommon, she will later learn, in the youngest victims of the virus.
Sara puts a hand on her back, gentle at first. “Wake up,” she says.
But she knows already that the thing she has been dreading for weeks has finally come to pass: the sleep has come for Libby.
42.
They carry her sister in their arms, these strangers, college kids in college sweatshirts. A boy and a girl who seem to know what to do. They wear white masks and green gloves.
“I kept calling 911,” says Sara. Her voice is shaking with a desperate gratitude—it feels like some kind of love. “I kept calling, but they never came.”
“They don’t have enough ambulances,” says the boy.
He is lifting her sister up from the wood floor, where she has been lying all day. Libby—green pajamas, bare feet, her cheek creased from the knots in the wood. Her lips, Sara worries, are beginning to chap.
“Are you guys staying here alone?” asks the college girl through her mask.
An urge keeps rising up in Sara: to apologize for the trouble.
The boy is holding Libby as if he has never held a child, careful and stiff and way out in front of him, as if her body were an heirloom, a thing that might break.
But he walks quickly once he has her, in running shoes, skinny legs, long strides down the staircase, quick steps across the living room and out the front door.
“The hospital is full,” he says, squinting on the sidewalk. “But they can help her on campus.”
His mask has fallen down over his chin, and the girl works to fix it—she is tender as she pulls the elastic back over his ears. But the boy wants to rush.
“That’s good enough,” he says, and he turns away from the girl.
“You should put some shoes on,” the girl says to Sara.
“No,” says the boy. “She should stay here. She’ll just slow us down.”
Their eyes conduct a brief argument. The girl wins.
She hands Sara a fresh pair of green latex gloves.
“Put these on,” she says. They are too big on her fingers, but she wears them anyway—she will do whatever these people say.
And then the three of them start walking, Libby in the boy’s arms.
The sky is loud with helicopters. But down here, the streets are empty. Here and there, a distant voice comes through, or sometimes a face in a window. But mostly it is only the sun and the woods, the birds on their branches, the soundless shuffling of the pine needles in the wind.
It is warm for December, but a breeze reminds Sara that she has left the house in only a flannel nightgown and sandals.
Libby’s eyelids keep shuddering, as if she is dreaming, even then, even as her head bobs in the crook of this boy’s elbow; even now, she is dreaming some secret dream. There is something unsettling about it, to see so clearly this fact: how unreachable the inside of even her sister’s mind.
The front door of the Garabaldi house stands wide open—no Garabaldis. Sara spots a bird flapping around inside.
Her father was right about everything.
When an ambulance swings around the corner, the college girl waves it down. But the paramedics, in their goggles and full-body suits, shake their heads through the windshield.
“We can’t take anyone else,” they call through their masks. All you can see are their eyes. “We’re full.”
This is the moment—as that ambulance fades like a dream in the distance—when something begins to happen inside Sara’s chest. A sudden tightening, a resistance to the task of breathing.
She stops where she is on the sidewalk. She bends over, feels faint. Someone’s hand is rubbing her back.
“Have you eaten anything today?” asks the college girl.
Food—the whole idea is surprising. And water, too. The information comes to her suddenly: how dry her mouth is.
“We don’t have time for this,” says the boy. “Her sister is the one who needs help.”
“Have this,” says the girl. She pulls a few things from the pocket of her sweatshirt.
A few gulps of water and a granola bar put Sara back on her feet. Or maybe it’s something else: to be cared for like this.
A Hummer whooshes by without stopping. A policeman rushes past them on foot.
The boy shifts Libby’s weight in his arms, so that her head rests on his shoulder, her hair on his neck, the way a father might carry a toddler. The boy’s mask has fallen down again—and again, the girl tries to fix it, but he shakes his head.
“Just leave it,” he says.
You can see she wants to say something but doesn’t. Instead she drips a little water into Libby’s mouth, and Libby coughs a tiny cough as the water runs down her chin.
“She needs an IV,” says the boy.
That’s when the college girl takes Sara’s hand in hers, which feels weird at first—Sara is not that young, and it’s strange through the gloves. But the longer they walk, the more it feels like a good idea.
When they get where they’re going, outside the campus gates, when she sees the crowd that has gathered there, Sara remembers something awfuclass="underline" they are not the only ones who need help.
From far away, they look lifeless, all those people spread out in other people’s arms. The heads hang back, the necks exposed. Their arms, like Libby’s, dangle loose like something wilted. Worse are the ones on the ground, lying on their backs on the sidewalk or facedown in the grass. Who knows how they got there or who they are? Workers move through the crowd in blue suits, but Sara can see from half a block away how much the need outweighs the aid.