THEY DID THE SENSIBLE THING. THEY HUDDLED TOGETHER in that big king. Family bed—Amanda hated the idea. Thought it was for antivaxxers and mothers who breastfed their five-year-olds, but she couldn’t bear Archie and Rose being away from her. They turned the lights off because the children were exhausted, but privately wished to leave them burning to keep the night away.
“You can—” Clay wanted to invite Ruth and G. H. to bed with them! It almost made sense.
“Try to sleep.” G. H. held his wife’s hand, and they descended the kitchen steps once more.
Neither adult could sleep. Soon, though, the children began to snore. The curve of Rose’s body made Clay think of those natural bridges on the California coast, hollowed out by the ocean over millennia. Eventually, though, those collapsed. They said the ocean was coming for them all. He appreciated the persistence of her lungs. It was incredible that you didn’t need to tell yourself to breathe or walk or think or swallow. They had asked themselves questions when they decided to have children—do we have the money, do we have the space, do we have what it takes—but they didn’t ask what the world would be when their children grew. Clay felt blameless. It was George Washington and the men of his generation, their mania for plastic and petroleum and money. It was a hell of a thing to not be able to keep your kid safe. Was this how everyone felt? Was this, finally, what it was to be a human?
He kissed the worn cotton on Rose’s shoulder and regretted that he did not believe in prayer. God, she looked like her mother. Nature was fond of repetition. Did one flamingo know another from yet another?
Amanda kept reaching for Archie’s arm. He flinched a little, each time, but did not wake. She wanted to ask her husband something but couldn’t think of the right words. Was this it? Was this the end? Was she supposed to be valiant?
Clay couldn’t see his son in the dark. He thought of how he still sometimes crept into the children’s rooms. They never woke during these nocturnal visits. You told yourself there was an end to the worry. You told yourself it was sleeping through the night, then weaning from the breast, then walking then shoelaces then reading then algebra then sex then college admissions then you would be liberated, but this was a lie. Worry was infinite. A parent’s only task was to protect his child.
He couldn’t imagine his own mother anymore; she’d been dead most of his life. His father must have performed this office. It did not square with what he knew of the man, but that was how a parent loved.
Amanda touched the boy’s cheek and found it was hot. She tried to distinguish between fever and summer, mammalian adolescence and illness. She touched the boy’s forehead, throat, his shoulder, pushed away blankets to cool his body. She touched his chest, the steady drumbeat. Archie’s skin was soft and dry, warm like a machine left on too long. She knew that fever was the body’s distress signal, a pulse from its emergency broadcast system. But the boy was sick. Maybe they were all sick. Maybe this was a plague. He was her baby. He was their baby. She couldn’t imagine a world indifferent to that.
Theirs was a failure of imagination, though, two overlapping but private delusions. G. H. would have pointed out that the information had always been there waiting for them, in the gradual death of Lebanon’s cedars, in the disappearance of the river dolphin, in the renaissance of cold-war hatred, in the discovery of fission, in the capsizing vessels crowded with Africans. No one could plead ignorance that was not willful. You didn’t have to scrutinize the curve to know; you didn’t even have to read the papers, because our phones reminded us many times daily precisely how bad things had got. How easy to pretend otherwise. Amanda whispered her husband’s name.
“I’m awake.” He could not see her, then he could. He needed only to look more closely.
“Should we still go?”
He pretended to be thinking this over, but the dilemma was already plain to him: no, they shouldn’t, yes, they must. “I don’t know.”
“We have to get Archie to a doctor.”
“We do.”
“And Rosie. What if the same thing—” To say it would have been to risk it. She didn’t bother. Rose would have loved the flamingos. Maybe they should feel only awe at life’s mysteries, as children did.
“She’s fine. She seems okay.” She did; same old Rose. Reliable, implacable, really, that strength of the second-born. He wasn’t even thinking wishfully. Clay had faith in his daughter.
“She seems okay. I seem okay. Everything seems okay. But it also seems like a disaster. It also seems like the end of the world. We need a plan. We need to know what we’re going to do. We can’t just stay here forever.”
“We can stay here for now. They said so.” Clay had heard the offer.
“You want to stay here?” Amanda wanted him to say it first.
He tried to think how many cigarettes he had left. He did want to stay. Despite the sick teen, despite the nicotine withdrawal, despite the fact that this was not their beautiful house. Clay was afraid, but maybe they could pool courage between all of them and find enough to do something, anything, whatever that was. “It’s safe here. We have power. We have water.”
“I told you to fill the bathtub.”
“We have food, and a roof, and G. H. has some money, and we have one another. We’re not alone.”
They both were and were not alone. Fate was collective but the rest of it was always individual, a thing impossible to escape. They lay that way for a long time. They didn’t talk because there was nothing to discuss. The sounds of their sleeping children were relentless as the ocean.