Slowly, very slowly, the sick are being carried onto campus on stretchers and into the white tents that loom on the college lawns. And always the helicopters, arcing across the sky, as useless as flies.
Someone in a blue suit is going around handing out gloves. Another is walking through the crowd, spraying something clear on the ground and on people’s shoes. Bleach, maybe.
A stab of longing for her father comes into Sara—she has no way of knowing where he sleeps.
An enormous man lies snoring on the sidewalk, his belly showing under his shirt. No one can lift him. He looks so alone, lying there—she can’t bear it: Maybe his family has only gone on an errand and will be back to sit with him soon. Maybe his wife has only gone to find a bathroom. Four blue suits struggle to get him onto a stretcher. The smell of urine wafts in the air.
A rumor is traveling through the crowd. An evacuation is coming. Buses.
But the boy is skeptical.
“Why would they evacuate anyone now?” he says. “That’s the exact opposite of what they’re trying to do.”
To Sara, it feels as if there is no one left out in the world, anyway, as if this is the last town on earth. The feeling stays with her, like a thing you know is both true and not true at the same time.
Some people are angry. A man keeps shouting at the soldiers. “Shame on you,” he says. “Shame on you.”
In the grass between the road and the sidewalk, a woman and a little boy lie unconscious together. Names and phone numbers are written on the boy’s overalls. Who wrote them? Sara wonders, but there’s no one to ask. A bee lands on the woman’s face. The college girl shoos it away.
On the fence around the campus, boots and suits hang from the posts, a creepy batch of laundry, drying in the sun. In the distance, the smell of burning.
“They burn the masks and gloves,” he says.
The boy and the girl leave Sara with Libby and help whoever else they can. She watches them handing out water.
Libby is lying on the grass, her head in Sara’s lap. She is holding Libby’s hand.
Libby begins to mumble in her sleep, but it’s nothing Sara can decipher. Maybe they are the lucky ones, the ones dreaming more fortunate than the ones awake. Sara drips a little more water into her sister’s mouth.
The boy is gone for a long time, and then returns with a couple of workers—for the woman and the little boy. What about her sister? she thinks. But she is too afraid to ask. It is hard to tell whether there is no order here, or if she just does not understand the order that there is. The woman and the boy are eventually scooped up by the workers—they want to take the little boy first, alone.
“Can’t you keep them together?” the girl asks. “He’s so young.”
One worker sprays the grass where they were lying.
The boy brings to Sara a piece of thick paper, like a notecard, but with a string attached.
“Write her name down on this card,” he says to Sara.
To see the letters of her sister’s name in her handwriting brings a fresh sadness. He ties the card around Libby’s little wrist and then disappears again.
After a while, Sara spots someone she knows in the crowd, her drama teacher, Mrs. Campbell. The surprise of seeing a teacher outside the classroom, and the further surprise: to see the look of suffering on her face. She is holding someone in her arms, someone sick, a man in short sleeves, a blanket draped around his narrow shoulders. She knows that man, too, she realizes. The sleeping man is Sara’s math teacher, Mr. Guitierrez. But for no reason she knows, Sara pretends not to see them.
The college girl soon comes back to check on her. She squeezes Sara’s hand. On another day, this college girl would have made her shy, this Mei, with her thick hair and her closeness to this boy, how she knows how to be in the world. But Sara thinks of none of this. There is only the rising and falling of her sister’s chest and the warmth of this older girl’s hand in hers.
“Come on,” says the boy to the girl. “You’re wasting time.”
“This is important, too,” says the girl. She stays where she is, on the sidewalk with Sara.
The feeling of that girl’s hand in hers is how she makes it through that day—to the moment, hours later, when the girl and the boy give up on the workers and carry her sister through the gates themselves, and then the way that girl walks her home to the house, where Sara will fall asleep alone—curled in her sister’s bed.
She promises, this girl, to come back later to check on Sara, but hours pass. The whole night passes. The college girl does not return.
43.
The second floor of the college library is where the youngest sick now sleep.
Here, in the makeshift pediatric ward, they sleep in cat shirts and ballet skirts. They sleep with feeding tubes taped to pink cheeks. They sleep with IVs peeking out from the sleeves of fire truck pajamas. Some sleep with stuffed animals in the crooks of their arms, put there by who knows who, a worn elephant, a floppy rabbit, a plastic baby nestled in the arms of a toddler. Some sleep with notes pinned to their clothing: their names and their phone numbers and PLEASE HELP. Some sleep, like Libby, with eyes half open to the ceiling, their little bellies rising as they dream.
Maybe their parents sleep in other rooms—in the hospital or on other floors of this library, or in the tents on the lawns outside. Or, maybe, their parents have ceased to sleep. Wherever they are, those parents are not here.
The bookshelves, pushed to the sides of the room, loom over the children’s cots while doctors and nurses in blue plastic suits check vitals, one by one.
A kind of sacredness suffuses this library. It is quiet here, except for the small sounds of their snores, the occasional cough, the steady beep and whir of the monitors, which track the workings of their little beating hearts.
But there is a certain amount of chaos here. Always, there are one or two workers wearing less protection than they should, by accident or ignorance or a shortage of the proper gear. Volunteers sometimes carry sick children right into this room with only gloves on their hands and thin paper masks, the rest of their skin exposed to contaminated air.
This is how Mei and Matthew end up in here, carrying the girl through the big double doors and up the stairs, after many hours of waiting for someone else to do it. They are suddenly breaking their last remaining rule: to stay outside the wards.
“Let’s go,” says Mei, as soon as they have left the girl in the care of a nurse.
But Matthew hesitates, mesmerized by what he sees: there must be a hundred children sleeping in here, and only a few nurses and doctors to care for them. He is suddenly alive with the work there is to do here.
“Matthew,” Mei says. “We need to leave.”
But instead, he heads toward a nearby bed. A young boy is sleeping there; his IV has come unhooked. It’s a quick fix, but no one has yet noticed.
“Come on,” says Mei. She is hot with fear.
But Matthew will not leave, even when the nurses try to shoo him out.
“I’m leaving,” says Mei.
“So then go,” he says.
And she does. Out in the sunshine, the open air, a mix of relief and guilt comes to her. He can be so infuriating, this boy, so brave and so rash—what good will it do if they get themselves sick?
It is late that night before Matthew comes back to their tent in the yard. She wakes to the sound of the zipper coming open.
“Please don’t do that again,” says Mei.
But Matthew is vibrating, electric with a day of doing the most vital work.
“Think of how many years of life are ahead of those kids,” he says. “Their lives are worth so much more than the adults’.”