A DRY HEAVINESS ON THE TONGUE AND IN THE THROAT, A wince that made it hard to see, the brute stupidity of hangover, and God they were too old for this. When would they learn not to be this way? Amanda hurried from the bed to drink at the bathroom sink, accidentally licking the metal faucet. She knew she’d vomit, in that way you always do. Sometimes you just need to admit to yourself what you know. Salt on the tongue. She bent at the waist like a yogi contemplating the toilet, then something that felt like a belch but burned in the back of the throat, and the release. The vomit was thin and pink as a flamingo (get it?). She let it leave her. Her eyes watered, but she did not look away from it. Her stomach contracted once, twice, three times, and the vomit leaped from stomach to throat to water, and once that was done she flushed it down and rinsed her mouth and felt ashamed. That was how all people the world over ought to have felt that morning.
Clay heard her terrible retch. You couldn’t just doze through something like that. The room was too warm from too many bodies. At some point in the night, the air-conditioning had switched off. The kind of hangover where you yearn to throw open windows, strip the beds, clean your way back into virtue. A noisy, wet revolution inside his stomach. It would not be pretty.
Archie sat up and looked at his dad. He mumbled like his mouth was full of something. “What’s happening?”
“I’m going to get us some water.” Did he notice that Rose was not there? It seemed to make sense in that moment.
Clay filled glasses. He sipped his, relieved, then refilled it. “Rosie.” He called out to the empty house. There was no answer. The refrigerator’s icemaker made its periodic whirr. There was a trick to carrying three, but he managed it.
Pallid Amanda sat on the edge of the bed. Archie had pulled a pillow over his head. “Drink up.” Clay put the glasses on the table. Whenever you were sick with something undetermined, you were supposed to drink water. Water was the first line of defense. If there was something in the air—if the storm had blown in more than just tropical birds—and that something was in the water, the whole system a closed loop, he didn’t know it.
“Thanks, honey,” his wife said.
Clay moved urgently, trot down the hall, quick slam of the door. The bathroom redolent of Amanda’s vomit and his own shit, that postmidnight binge pouring out of him in seconds. He stood in the shower as penance, asshole burning, rinsing his mouth over and over again, spitting the water against the tile wall, angry. Did he know if this was hangover or a symptom of something worse? He did not.
On the other side of the wall, Amanda opened the door to the backyard—ugh, the smell of their bodies—where the sweet air was alive with light. She wanted to undo the bed, but her boy still lazed. “How are you feeling, baby?” She thought he looked more himself.
Archie tried to come up with the right answer. He felt strange or weird or sleepy or whatever, but that was how he felt whenever he woke up before noon or so. He was mad or something in that moment, turned away from his mother and pulled the covers over his head.
“I should check your temperature. We were so worried, I was planning on taking you to see Dr. Wilcox this afternoon, after we get back, but maybe we don’t need to.”
Archie made an irritated little groan. “We’re going back?”
“Come on. I know you’re sleepy, but sit up, let Mom look at you.” Amanda sat on the bed beside her son.
He pulled himself up to sitting, but slowly, his way of protest and his way of showing off the elastic efficiency of his adolescent body, an angled line morphing gradually from obtuse to acute.
The back of her hand against his forehead, Amanda looked in her son’s eyes, bottomlessly beautiful to she who had made them, even when crusted and shrunken by sleep. “You don’t feel so warm anymore.” She put her palm against his forehead, his neck, his shoulder, his chest. “Does your throat hurt?”
He didn’t know if his throat hurt. He hadn’t thought about it. His mother would not leave him to sleep until he cooperated, so he did, opening his mouth wide as though to yawn as a way of gauging the health of his throat. Seemed fine. “No.”
Good mother, she ignored the boy’s sour breath. She looked into the pink recesses of his body as though she knew what she was looking for, or as though what was in there could be seen.
Archie closed his mouth and then his tongue tapped a tooth, a tic, a test, and the salt of blood flowed over his taste buds. Familiar, but you remembered that, no matter what, the taste of blood. Curious, he ran his tongue over enamel again and the tooth yielded to that gentlest nudge. His mouth filled with saliva.
Archie opened his mouth wider, and it spilled out, now, onto his neck, dribbled down his chest, saliva, drool, like a baby’s, cut with crimson that didn’t quite mix into it, like salad dressing insufficiently shaken. Blood was usually a surprise. His mouth continued to water, and to bleed. He put a finger to it, probing into the problem, and touched the tooth, and it fell over with a fleshy pop, down like a domino, onto his tongue and then, horribly, back into his mouth like a cherry pit almost swallowed. He spit it out, and the tooth landed in his palm. He stared at it. It was bigger than he’d have guessed.
“Archie!” Amanda thought at first the boy was vomiting. That would have made more sense. But this was so controlled, so understated. He’d just leaned forward over his hand and dripped blood onto his bare chest.
“Mom?” He was confused.
“Are you going to be sick, honey? Get out of the bed!”
Archie stood up and walked to mirror. “I’m not sick!” He held the tooth out in his palm, sticky and pink with blood.
She did not understand.
Archie looked at himself in the mirror. He opened his mouth and willed himself to confront the wet dark of it. He swooned a little, because it was disgusting. With his finger, he touched another tooth, a bottom one, and it, too, gave, then he grabbed onto it and pulled it right out of his gums, now near black with blood. Then another. Then another. Four teeth, tapered at the root, solid and white, four little pieces of evidence, four little proofs of life. Was he meant to scream? He closed his mouth and let the liquid gather there for a second, then spit it out onto the ground, not caring if he soiled the rug because what did that matter, really? Another of his teeth fell out and dropped onto the ground, where of course it did not make a sound. In the vast universe, it was too small to matter.
“Archie!” Amanda did not know what was happening. Of course she didn’t.
He crouched to the ground to pick up his tooth. It was bigger than the hollow little shells that he’d left under his pillow until he turned ten. It tapered at the root, animal and menacing. He held them in his palm like a diver proud of his pearls. “My teeth!”
Amanda looked at her boy, slender and pathetic in his ticking-stripe boxer shorts. “What is it?”
The boy did not weep because he was too baffled to. “Mom. Mom. My teeth.” He held his hand out for them to see.
“Clay!” She didn’t know what to do but appeal to a second opinion. “My god, your teeth!”
“What’s happening to me?” His voice was ridiculous because he couldn’t talk properly without the percussion of tongue against tooth.
Amanda took the boy by the shoulders, steered him back to the bed. He was too tall otherwise. She pressed palm, then back of hand, to his forehead. “You’re not hot? I don’t understand—”
Clay came as beckoned, towel at his waist, irritation on his face. “What’s happening?”
“There’s something wrong with Archie!” Amanda thought it was evident.
“What is it?”
The boy held his hand out toward his father.
Clay did not understand. Who would? “Honey, what happened?”
“I was just—my tooth felt weird, and I touched it, and it fell out.”
This was the moment. This was the ravine. Clay was going to lay his body down. “How is this—does he still have a fever?” Clay reached out to touch the boy’s arm, his neck, his back. “You’re warm—does he feel warm?”
“I don’t know. I thought it wasn’t so bad, but I don’t know.” Amanda could not remember having said those words so many times. She didn’t know, she didn’t know, she didn’t know anything.
Clay looked from the child to his wife, baffled. Maybe the boy was sick, maybe he was contagious? “It’s okay. You’re okay.”
“I don’t feel okay!” But this wasn’t true. Archie felt . . . fine? As normal as possible. His body was working to keep it together. It would shed what was extraneous to preserve the whole.
In some private part of himself, Clay stopped to see if all was well with his body. He did not know that it was not. Then he came awake, more truly, and looked at his son, bloody and toothless, and tried to think of what to do next.
“Did you fill the bathtub?” Amanda was doing what she was able to. “It’s an emergency! We’ll need water!”