Now that her father is home, she is suddenly aware of how the house has gotten away from her—that’s the way it feels—like weeds taking over a garden. The kitty litter is pebbling out of the bathroom, and there is the clamor of dishes in the sink, the scatter of soda cans, and all those forgotten cereal bowls, licked clean by the cats.
But her father does not seem to notice any of it.
He does not ask whose dogs these are, wagging and whining and lapping water all over the linoleum.
“Can you get these dogs out of the kitchen?” he says, and that’s all he says about them. “I have a lot to figure out.”
Thank God he does not think to go down to the basement, where, if he did, he would discover what those dogs have done to the neat stocks of toilet paper and the cereal boxes, the many jars of preserved carrots they’ve cracked on the cement.
Her father spends that first day right there at the kitchen table, bent over an unfamiliar spiral notebook.
“What are you writing?” she asks after a while.
“I don’t know exactly,” he says. “I’m just trying to sort some things out.”
He hardly moves all day, as if his body has grown used to it: the motionlessness of sleep. And when he does move, he moves slowly, as if pushing through a thicker kind of air. His pen inches across the page, leaving a trail of tiny words.
This is only the first day, thinks Sara, an uneasiness creeping through her. Maybe he’s still waking up.
Chloe skids across the linoleum when she sees him for the first time, a hiss.
“That’s Daddy,” says Sara as Chloe’s tail puffs up like a duster. “He’s your favorite, remember?”
Maybe it’s the baldness of his head that bothers her, or that bare chin. Or maybe it’s the unhealthy color of his skin. Whatever it is, Chloe stays away, her path to her water bowl arcing unnaturally wide.
On television, the same headline is running on all the news channels: “Man Awakens from Santa Lora Sickness.”
“I think they’re talking about you,” she calls to her father from the living room.
But he stays at the table and goes on with his writing. From a distance, he looks as if he is performing the careful work of a clockmaker.
The news channels do not seem to have much information about him, no picture, no name, no sense of his condition.
“Can you find me another pen?” her father calls from the kitchen, shaking his pen in the air, his mind having drained it of ink.
Among the many things her father fails to notice that day is the way her mother’s belongings are spread out around the house, those attic boxes now gutted in the living room, the treasures spilling out: the wedding pictures and the cassette tapes, her collection of turquoise jewelry, all the objects they’ve been lovingly studying, like clues to an old mystery, and her tarnished silver charm bracelet, which is right now revolving around Sara’s small wrist, clinking lightly against the table.
Sara uses the last of the bread from the freezer to make tuna fish sandwiches for dinner, but her father leaves most of his on his plate.
All day, the nail clippers sit on the table beside him, untouched. All day, the scrape of his nails on the soda can.
“You should go to bed,” he says finally, the kind of thing no one has said to her in weeks. And it is appealing, in a way, to be told that and to do it, these the normal words of a father to a daughter.
Much later, in the middle of the night, she can still hear him down there, not sleeping, moving around in the kitchen.
In the morning, two policemen come to the door.
Sara watches them from the widow’s walk, afraid to find out why they have come—in their white masks and their green gloves, tucked tight beneath the cuffs of their uniforms.
The knocking on the door sets off the dogs.
“Daddy,” Sara calls to her father. He is sitting at their bulky old computer, waiting and waiting for a page to load. “The police are here,” she says.
“Just ignore them,” he says, as if they are salesmen who will go away on their own.
They keep shifting their weight on the porch, these police. They keep looking around, as if eager to get away. Behind them, on the other side of the street, the frame of the nurse’s house leans forward like a shipwreck. After so many weeks, the caution tape has frayed in the wind, and the birds have built a nest in the stove, which stands, rusting, in the open air.
The police knock again.
Sara can hear the dogs whining and scratching at the door from the inside. Maybe the police can hear it, too, that whining and that scratching.
At some point, the knocking stops. She watches, flush with relief, as the policemen step down off the porch, and then stand for a moment in the weeds that have overtaken the front yard. One of them says something into his radio.
Instead of walking back to their car, they disappear around the side of the house. Then comes the creak of the side gate, the terrible crunch of their shoes in the gravel that leads to the backyard.
The knocking starts again, this time at the back door.
“Hello?” they call. “Hello?”
Sara listens from the kitchen, hidden by the boarded-up windows. But she can hear the swish of the static on their radios outside.
She is not prepared for what comes next: the creak of the back door, the cry of its hinges, the way the thin crack of sunlight beneath the door explodes to the shape of the whole doorway. Her father must have left it unlocked in the night, which is not like him, to make a mistake like that, not like him at all.
“Oh,” say the police when they see Sara, the way she is squinting in the kitchen in pajamas. It’s too late for her to hide.
“Oh,” one of them says again. He is a dark figure in the doorway. Sunlight blazing around him. “We didn’t know if anyone was home.”
The dogs begin to jump up on their tan police pants, friendly tongues lolling out of their mouths, but the policemen are backing away, as if the dogs, too, might be contaminated.
One of them is holding the door open. He is using only two gloved fingers to do it, and he is leaning way back as if for access to fresh air.
“Is Thomas Peterson here?” the other one asks. It sounds like a stranger, the way they say his name. No one calls him Thomas.
“If you know where he is,” says the one holding the door, his voice softened by the mask, “it’s very important that you tell us.”
She is not sure what the right answer is, or if this is a time when a lie is right. She settles on silence, and for a moment, the only sounds are the panting of the dogs and the squeak of their black police shoes as they dodge the leaps of the dogs.
One of the men finally crouches down to talk to her, as if she is a much younger child.
“Listen,” he says through his mask. He is looking past her, searching the living room over her shoulder. “He wasn’t supposed to go home yet. He might still be sick.”
She wonders if they know about the slowness of his walk, the strange writing. She wonders if they know how little he has been sleeping.
“It was too soon,” he says to her.
But she will not watch her father leave again.
“He’s not here,” she says finally, her voice scratching from so long without speaking.
The two men look at each other. She can see only their eyes over the tops of the masks, but their eyes are where the skepticism floats.
“Have you been staying here alone?” one of them asks, which seems to raise a new threat.
An answer comes in the form of her father’s footsteps on the stairs behind her. He walks differently—that’s another thing that has changed. He takes smaller steps than before, a wobbly stride, almost like a limp.
“You don’t have a right to be on my property,” he says to the police. He is wearing the same clothes as yesterday.