He scrubs his face hard with the soap. He scrubs his arms and his legs and his hands, his hands more than anything else. She is used to her father’s ideas, how different they are from other people’s, but a fresh fear is coming to her. Maybe he has done something wrong. Maybe that’s why all the washing.
The floor creaks nearby—her sister’s socked feet. “What the hell?” says Libby.
How grateful Sara is for her sister right then, for the brown of her eyes, for the clear of her voice, for those ladybug studs she always wears in her ears—their mother’s, they think, but aren’t sure. Even the smell of the pretzels on Libby’s breath is a part of it, just the truth of her sister beside her.
They stand together for a long time, not talking, watching their father through the glass the way they sometimes watch raccoons doing their evening washings—how strange the action of those miniature hands.
Libby keeps asking Sara what their father is doing out there. Sara keeps shaking her head. They are almost like twins. That’s what people say, two sisters born so close together, less than a year apart—to a mother who was gone from this earth before either girl turned four.
Finally, their father turns off the hose. Finally, he picks up the towel from the dirt. The last thing he does is throw his clothes into the trash can out back. Their father, who never throws anything away, leaves his good brown belt in that trash can, still threaded through the loops of his jeans.
He won’t talk about it. Not at first.
“Let me think,” he says, raising his palm in the air, as if to hold back a crowd. He sits hunched at the kitchen table, the towel wrapped at his waist. His beard is dripping on the linoleum, that sound the same sound of every faucet in the house, every fixture slightly loose, the whole place disintegrating. “Just let me think for a minute,” he says.
He shoos the girls out of the kitchen, and Libby goes upstairs to be with the kittens, but Sara stays near her father, one room over, waiting for some kind of news.
There is something about television that soothes her. Not the shows but the voices, the people, the knowing that she isn’t watching Wheel of Fortune all alone, not really, because thousands of other people are watching it, too, an enormous web of people. She can feel them with her as she watches, as if, in a crisis, that link might work the other way, as if they could see her, send help.
Beneath the tick-tick of the Wheel of Fortune losing speed, her father’s fingers thrum on the kitchen table. He opens a can of beer. From the living room, Sara searches the sounds for meaning, clues to the workings of a mind: the scrape of his chair, the sighing and the sips, the softening clink of the can as he drains it.
When the phone begins to ring, her father does not move. Sara lets it go, too, but her sister answers it and then runs downstairs to whisper into Sara’s ear: “There’s a boy on the phone for you.”
With the scratch of that whisper comes a sudden tensing of her body. She does not get many phone calls—and never once from a boy.
Her voice, she can tell, is shaking as she picks up the phone: “Hello?”
“Sara?” says the boy. “This is Akil.”
Akiclass="underline" a surge of surprise and happiness comes into her. Akil, a new boy at school. He plays Sara’s husband in the play: Our Town.
“Hey,” she says, but she is breathing too hard. She is not sure how conversations like this should go.
“Is this your cell phone?” he says. He has a formal way of speaking, this boy, the slightest accent, almost British, but his family is from Egypt, she has heard him say, his father some kind of professor. “I meant to call your cell phone,” he says.
“Oh,” she says. “I don’t have one.”
She regrets it immediately—why draw so much attention to it, how strange she must seem to other kids?
“Oh,” he says.
Libby is watching her, straining to hear what is being said on the other end.
“Anyway,” he says. He clears his throat. In the space of that pause blooms an immense feeling of longing. “Do you know,” he says, “what time rehearsal is tomorrow?”
Her face flushes with embarrassment—this is only a practical call.
“I forgot to write it down,” he says.
The call is over in less than two minutes. And then the world of the house comes flooding back: her father in that towel at the table, that look in his eyes, his refusal to explain what is wrong.
Wheel of Fortune goes on and on. One puzzle is solved, another presented. She becomes aware eventually of an ache at the back of her jaw. Only then does she know how hard she’s been clenching her teeth.
Finally, her father speaks.
“Sara,” he calls from the kitchen. Here is a wisp of hope. An explanation is coming, an arranging of parts into a whole.
“I want you to go downstairs,” he says, “and count how many gallons of water we have.”
That’s when she knows. Something awful has happened.
The basement: she hates the basement. The basement is proof of everything that could ever go wrong. Here is where they keep the cans of food they will eat if there comes a nuclear winter. Here is the water they will drink when everyone else runs out. Here are the bullets they will use as barter, if one day money loses its meaning. And here are the guns her father will use to guard all that food and that water and those bullets when other people come to steal it all away.
It is hard to picture sleeping down there, with the bare bulbs and the spiders, the smell of dirt hanging always in the air, the one small window, boarded up. But they keep blankets and pillows in the corner, in case. Three cots wait in a stack.
By the time she reaches the jugs of water on the far side of the basement, her hands are shaking. She counts slowly. She counts twice.
The weather is changing, her father is always saying. The seas are rising. The oil and the water are draining away. And asteroids. Asteroids are what worry her most. From her bed at night, she can see the stars, and she sometimes senses them moving closer, always at bedtime, on the lookout for the star that might not be a star.
“But maybe none of it will happen, right?” she says often to her father. No one can see the future. He cannot know for sure. “Things might be fine for a while, right?”
“Maybe,” he always says, shaking his head like he means to say no. “But sooner or later, something big is going to change. Things can’t go on as they’ve been.”
This is why they grow the vegetables in the yard. This is why, when their squash ripens, they jar it, and when their potatoes come up, they will freeze-dry them. This is why they keep a two-year supply of her asthma medication in a box on the highest shelf of the basement.
No one else knows what they keep in there. Not even her father’s brother, Joe, who was born in this house like her father and who came to visit the summer before, after being away for so many years, on drugs, her father said, in Arizona. For that whole visit, two weeks, they kept the door to the basement locked because the most important thing about the basement is that the contents of the basement stay secret.
A small sound comes from the stairs behind her. She looks up. It’s only Daisy in the doorway, staring down at her, one white paw outstretched in the air, her shadow huge on the stairs.
Sara remembers then what her father has said about the cats. When it happens, he has said, they’ll have to get rid of them. There won’t be enough food and water to share. He will do it humanely, he’s said. But he might have to shoot them. That might be the least painful way. She thinks of when the kittens were born, the needle-prick points of those teeth, the small eyes, still sealed, and the way Daisy carried them around with her mouth, how she knew right away how to do that, knew right where to hold them—by the loose bit of skin at the backs of their necks.