Not quite two years old, this boy, says the mother, had not yet begun speaking in sentences.
But now listen to him:
“Mama,” he says, “I had a bad dream.”
But Ben and Annie’s baby sleeps on. They cut her nails. They bathe her body. They sleep on the linoleum beside her bassinet.
Ben thinks more and more about his dreams. So strong is his feeling that those dreams were premonitions that they begin to frighten him. One thing was missing from those dreams: his baby. If those dreams were of the future, where was she?
52.
In a famous experiment, a geologist once subjected himself to eight weeks alone in a lightless underground cave. Among other things, he wanted to test the accuracy of his own internal clock. He woke and slept as he pleased. He marked his days in a notebook. Without the ticking of clocks or the rising and setting of the sun, his body’s rhythms soon fell out of synch with the earth’s. At the end of the experiment, he was sure he had spent only thirty-five days underground, but sixty days had passed at the surface.
Libby: she sleeps for three weeks but she dreams of a single afternoon.
She wakes with a smile on her face, a calmness. She yawns and stretches in her sheets.
With the opening of those eyes comes an elation that Sara has never known before. Nothing is more potent than relief.
“How do you feel?” Sara asks her sister.
Libby has awakened in her own bedroom, where their father brought her after the fire—during the first minutes of chaos when no one was guarding the patients. He and Sara have been tending to her for a day without the help of doctors or nurses.
“I had the most amazing dream last night,” says Libby.
Her voice is hoarse. Her curls are tangled. She does not seem to understand how much time has passed.
“What kind of dream?” says her father, an odd intensity to his voice.
Libby meets eyes with Sara, their old habit.
“What happened to your beard?” asks Libby.
“Those dreams,” says their father. “Those were not normal dreams, okay? What did you see?”
The hair on his head is starting to grow back, but it’s coming in white instead of brown. And he is just as skinny as he was on the day he woke up.
“It was about our mom,” says Libby. There’s an unfamiliar quiet in her voice, a reverence. “We were by the lake.”
But her father is shaking his head.
“No,” he says, his hand up, like a stop sign. “That’s not the kind of dream I’m talking about. What else?”
“Just that,” she says.
He keeps asking if she’s sure, and she is, and then he disappears downstairs.
“How long did I sleep?” Libby asks once he’s gone.
“Three weeks,” says Sara.
Libby’s reaction is almost physical, as if the wind has been knocked out of her chest.
“It felt like just a few hours,” she says. “Like a nap.”
The cats have collected around Libby, cuddling in the sheets of her bed.
“You were there, too,” says Libby. “In the dream. We were down at the lake with her.”
If Libby closes her eyes, she can remember everything about those minutes: the lavender cables of their mother’s sweater, her fingernails, chipped with pale peach polish.
“And these earrings,” says Libby, picking up a pair of silver hoops from a scattering of jewelry on the nightstand. “She was wearing these earrings.”
There was a newspaper spread out on a picnic table by the lake. Finger paints set out.
“We were making handprints with the paint,” says Libby. “And she was painting a little picture of the lake with her fingers.”
The air smelled like barbecue. Someone was grilling down on the beach. Their mother had a certain way of wiping her hair from her face with the back of her hand.
“You were wearing a sunflower-shaped barrette,” says Libby. “And a white sundress.”
Their mother handed them milk in plastic cups, a ziplock bag of Goldfish.
“I started to throw the paint, and she said: ‘Girls, I’ve told you three times.’ ”
The blue paint drying in the creases of her palms, the sound of the birds, the voices of other children splashing in the water.
“Do you remember a day like that?” says Libby.
“No,” says Sara.
“I think it was real,” says Libby, a distant afternoon recovered, intact, from the deep.
Libby was so young when their mother died—she has never before remembered anything about her.
“It can’t be,” says Sara, suddenly filled with envy. “You were too young to remember.”
But she makes Libby tell her the whole thing again, in even more detail, until the time it takes for the telling far exceeds any minutes they spent, once, years ago, by the lake.
Libby lowers her voice. “What did Daddy dream of?”
“He dreamed there would be a fire at the library,” says Sara.
“Don’t talk about that,” her father calls from the other room.
Sara whispers: “And then there really was a fire there.”
An uneasiness comes into Libby’s face.
“What happened was just like your dream,” says Sara. “Right, Daddy?”
He shakes his head. He is adamant. “In my dream,” he says, “no one died.”
While the Humvees continue rumbling down the streets of Santa Lora, their father checks and rechecks the supplies in the basement, obsessed with new worries.
He had other dreams, too.
“The oceans moved a hundred miles inland,” he says. “Los Angeles was swallowed. The ocean came all the way to the base of these mountains.”
He takes a sip of beer. He swallows hard.
“And then today,” he says, “this news comes out: the biggest ice shelf in Antarctica is about to collapse. Do you see what that means?”
They wait for him to explain.
“It’s happening,” he says. “The dreams I had. They were all real.”
Sara at once believes it and does not believe it. She has not yet heard the rumors circulating that some of the other survivors claim to have seen glimpses of the future, too. But isn’t the future always an imaginary thing before it comes?
53.
A tiny heart goes on beating in the dark. A spinal cord coalesces. Electricity begins to flow through the synapses of a brain. Bones form, the beginnings of teeth. Eyelids. The first flapping of hairline arms, the minute flowering of fingernails. The knees and the wrists—they begin to bend.
Rebecca, ten weeks in, goes on sleeping all the while. Her cheeks, flushed with extra blood, now take on a certain fullness as her chest rises and falls beneath the hospital sheets. A surge of hormones is responsible for the extra oil in her skin, and the nurses—sheathed in their masks and their suits—like to point out the one nice thing in this dark place: she really does have that pregnancy glow.
That same week, inside one of the vast medical tents on campus, the professor of biology opens his eyes in the quiet middle of the night. Above Nathaniel looms a bright white ceiling, fluorescent lit. He is not at home—this is Nathaniel’s first thought. The air smells like soil.
He is lucky, says the first doctor—his was a mild case. Only three weeks. That’s their best guess, anyway. “Some kids brought you in,” he says through his mask. “A boy and a girl carried you here.”
He is too weak to sit up, at first, but he asks about Henry, if Henry is here somewhere, too. It takes hours for the answer to come back to him: no, there’s no patient here by that name. He borrows a phone. He calls home. No answer.
Here marks the beginning of a period of confusion, not uncommon among the survivors, he is told by the doctors. Now marks the start of a slowly bubbling dread.