She kneels down as if her daughter is one of her patients. “Can I give you a hug?” she asks.
Her daughter shakes her head. She is wearing a green dinosaur T-shirt that Catherine has never seen.
“You look different,” her daughter says, peeking out for a moment. And it’s true: Catherine has grown thin during the time away.
At least there is this, a comfort and a sadness: her daughter will not remember any of this. Whole years of her life will pass before anything more than flashes will register in her long-term conscious memory.
But Catherine will always worry that this time will stay with her child somehow, this period of separation from her only parent, the way the root of a tree grows around a rock in its path, or a broken bone without a splint heals crookedly beneath the skin.
At twenty weeks, the part of the hypothalamus responsible for the circadian rhythm begins to regulate the rate of the heartbeat and the tides of certain hormones in a pattern that matches almost exactly the length of a day on earth.
Caleb wakes four doors down from Rebecca. He does not pass her room. He does not touch her hand. He does not know what lives inside her, growing, as he leaves Santa Lora with his parents, who have camped out all these weeks right outside the barricades, waiting for news of their son.
Rebecca sleeps on with eighty-five others, the last of the sleepers consolidated now into one wing of the hospital.
At twenty-eight weeks, the brain becomes complex enough to be startled by sudden noises and to turn the head in the direction of voices. At this age, the brain begins to dream. But of what? The sensation of floating, perhaps, the subtle shifts of light and dark? Or perhaps brains so young dream dreams unimaginable to us, beyond the reach of science and language, unrecorded and unrecoverable.
Soon the mouth begins to open and close. The lungs are growing fast, in preparation for the task of converting the air of this planet into something the body can use.
The schools reopen.
Sara goes back to eating lunch alone each day on the quad. What a relief it is to one day spot Akil, finally back at school.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hi,” he says. There is a heaviness in the way he speaks. He does not need to tell her that he had the sickness. She can see it, somehow, in his face.
“Is your family okay?” she asks.
“Yeah,” he says. “We’re okay. And yours?”
She nods.
Often, they eat lunch side by side, while the other kids careen around the quad. There is a comfort in sharing a silence. The spring flowers have returned, pink roses near the science lab, marigolds along the gym. Dandelions are everywhere in the grass.
One bright blue day at the end of lunch, the woods looming in the distance beyond the playground, Akil tells her about what happened to his father.
“He could have died,” he says.
Instead, he walks with a slight limp and a long scar on his hip.
“I can’t get rid of this weird feeling,” says Akil. “That it’s all still in the future.” There is always the sense, he says, that one day soon, his dad will be taken to jail in Egypt, that they will have to leave everything behind, and that on another day soon, he will be shot by American soldiers right here in this American town.
The bell rings. The other kids begin to stream toward the classrooms. But Sara stays right where she is beside him, listening.
“I know that it all already happened,” says Akil. “I know that. But that’s not how it feels. It feels like it’s all coming up ahead, and always will be, around and around again.”
Rebecca sleeps through the early contractions. She sleeps through the insertion of a needle between two rungs in her spine. She sleeps as the anesthesia spreads through the tissues in her body.
She sleeps while, in another room, the obstetrician and the nurses don Tyvek suits and Tyvek hoods. She sleeps while, thus protected, they rub her belly with iodine, in preparation for the cesarean.
Even the scalpel does not disturb her sleep.
She does not wake when the obstetrician, with double-gloved hands, having sliced through the layers of her skin, spreads apart the muscles of her abdomen. She sleeps while this same doctor cuts through the wall of her uterus, and while the nurses sponge the resulting blood. She sleeps through the prying of the baby from her body—like pulling a tooth from its bed. She sleeps through the baby’s first moments outside.
It is the quietest birth anyone remembers.
Everyone is hoping for a cry, but no cry comes. Rebecca sleeps through the good news: that the baby is breathing, at least. And she sleeps through the bad news, too: that her baby, like her, is sound asleep. The Santa Lora Virus, it turns out, can travel across the placenta.
After the cord is cut and clamped, and the baby weighed and wrapped and the nasal passages cleared, one of the nurses thinks to move Rebecca’s hand to the baby’s forehead, a pantomime of a mother meeting her child.
Rebecca sleeps while they sew up the incision. She sleeps while they cauterize the wound.
She sleeps when they settle the baby on her chest. And, when they move the baby to her breast, and when the baby begins, somehow, to nurse in its sleep—Rebecca sleeps through that moment, too.
54.
The dead: they are doctors and nurses, teachers and artists, professors of philosophy and French, the mayor of Santa Lora. They are young, they are old, they are in the middle of their lives. One whole family, three hearts, goes quiet within a few hours, like lightbulbs winking on a string. For the undiscovered dead, the cause is dehydration. But under medical care, it is most often the heart that gives out, a slowing so extreme that, at a certain point, the pumping can no longer support the body, like certain Buddhist monks who, in deep meditation, have been known to attain a state of such relaxation that their hearts no longer beat.
The dead are mourned with flowers left at the roadblocks outside of town, or funerals, sparsely attended, the pews moved out onto the lawns of the churches for the continuing fear of contagion.
More dreamers quit breathing each day. One in ten never do wake up. At least, some say, they die good deaths, peaceful. They are spared the experience of their own endings.
The names of the dead will one day appear on a plaque beside what is left of the lake, shaded by pine trees, browning where they stand.
55.
Rebecca, five years older, is holding her little boy’s hand as they walk one day in the woods. His fingers pull dandelions in a field. He blows the seeds through the air. She sees wisdom in the sight of him, his growing body announcing it every day: life goes on.
Soon he is a boy at six years old, standing on a diving board in aqua blue swim trunks, calling: “Mama, Mama, watch this.” She is sitting on the weedy grass beside the pool. They are at her parents’ house on a Sunday afternoon. She is holding her boy’s flip-flops in her lap. His church clothes lie in a heap beside her. From inside the house comes the soft clinking of plates, the sounds of her mother making lunch in the kitchen.
Her boy jumps into the pool. A cannonball. That look on his face as he leaps: his eyes pressed shut, as if by the force of his smile.
Rebecca calls to him from the grass as he bobs afterward in the water. “Amazing,” she says.
He looks like her brother did at that age. Goggles, a gap between his teeth, lanky legs and long feet. The smell of the neighbors’ orange trees is wafting over the fence. The sounds of her mother in the kitchen, the low heels of her church shoes clicking on the linoleum.