CLAY COULD FEEL THE GRAVEL THROUGH HIS FLIP-FLOPS. They were almost worn out, at the end of their life. If you wanted to mitigate your guilt over making garbage, you could mail them back to the manufacturer, gratis, who would dump them in Ecuador, Guatemala, Colombia, some place like that where NGOs taught people to snip them into pieces and stitch them into rubber mats for white people to buy. There was nothing out front, there was nothing past the hedge, just the very same view that had taunted him the day before. Was that only yesterday? “Rose!” His voice didn’t carry. It didn’t go anywhere. It fell to the verdant ground.
In the garage Ruth pointed out the ladder up to the loft. A girl might want to play up there! Ruth had half-plans to someday turn it into a guest apartment. Amanda scooted up the ladder, but there was nothing up there.
The women came out of the garage as Clay rounded the corner and G. H. completed a circuit of the house. The four of them looked at one another.
“She’s gone?” Amanda didn’t know what else to say.
“She can’t be gone—” Ruth meant gone, finality, disappearance.
Whatever this was, it wasn’t the rapture. Rose definitely would have been saved, but Clay knew they couldn’t yield to pure myth. “She must have just—gone somewhere.”
“She was so curious about other houses. And the eggs! Maybe she went to the egg stand.” Ruth had her doubts.
“Where’s Archie?” Clay looked toward the backyard.
“He was right there.” Amanda could hold only one thing in her head at that moment.
“He seems better.” Such optimism! It only worked if he excused the fact of the boy’s missing teeth, but parenthood meant occasional magical flights of fancy.
Ruth nodded. “One of us should go down to the egg stand.”
Amanda strode away, impatient. “I’ll go. Clay, go to the back. Look in the woods. But don’t go far—”
“I’ll look inside again.” Ruth dismissed the two men. “You go out back.”
He and G. H. cut through the front door, and from the back deck Clay saw his son, prone, in the grass. He called his name. He ran toward him. He could no longer remember what he was supposed to be doing.
The boy was on his knees and his chest like a Muslim in prayer. Clay slipped a hand into his armpit and pulled him back.
“Dad.” Archie looked at him, then leaned forward and vomited once more, a beautiful plash of liquid onto earth.
“What’s happened?” G. H. was demanding an explanation. “You’re all right, you’re all right.”
Ruth saw this from the deck. She hurried, knowing she was needed. They braced the boy’s body between theirs and walked at the deliberate pace of the elderly. The boy kept choking, or seizing, but there was nothing left in him to escape his mouth. His eyes were almost but not exactly closed, fluttering like the eyes of a kind of now-antiquated camera, but did they see? Did they capture anything?
Ruth was cataloging. They had old antibiotics. They had a hot water bottle. They had that powdered drink for when you were down with flu. You dissolved it in hot water and slept for hours. They had sea salt and olive oil and basil and laundry detergent and Band-Aids and a huge package of those little travel packages of tissues that were so handy to have in your purse. George had ten thousand dollars in cash tucked away for emergencies. They were rich! Would any of that be a salve to whatever this was?
“Let’s get him inside.” G. H. captained this endeavor. They proceeded, awkward, up the wide wooden steps. The pool’s filtration system began its scheduled cycle, which told him that it was 10:00 a.m. It whirred and gurgled joyfully.
They laid the boy’s body on the sofa. “Archie, honey are you okay? Can you tell me?”
Archie looked up at the trio. “I don’t know.”
Clay looked at the other adults. “Where’s Rose?”
“I think she’s probably playing down the road. She borrowed one of the bikes. I know she’s been bored. She’s just having—she’s playing.” G. H. tried to make this sound inevitable. “Let’s get Archie some water. We can’t have him dehydrating.”
Clay did know that Rose loved to do. She was always with a book, and in her books, girls her age had big hearts and appetites for adventure. They did unlikely, brave things, facing down private fears, then chastely held hands with boys with beautiful eyelashes. These books had given her a sense of the world as something to be conquered with derring-do. Books ruined everyone—wasn’t that what his academic work was meant to show? “Water. Right.”
Ruth had already filled another glass. “Drink this up.”
“Sit up, easy now.” Clay’s body remembered the pose of early parenthood, ready to leap and right your toddler’s toppling body.
“We have to go to the hospital.” George had decided. “We have to go now.”
“You can’t leave me.” Ruth unfolded the blanket on the sofa’s back and draped it over the boy’s body.
“He’s sick. You see that.”
“We can’t go without my daughter—”
“We’ll go. You and me. We’ll take Archie.”
“No. You can’t, George, you can’t leave.”
“Ruth. You find Amanda. You two find Rose. You stay here.”
Did she have it in her to do this? Wasn’t she bored with having to be strong and noble and competent, best supporting actress? Wasn’t she allowed to be hysterical and afraid? “George, please.”
He looked into his wife’s eyes. “We’ll come back. We’ll come right back.”
“You’ll never come back. Don’t you see that something is happening? It’s happening right now. Whatever it is, it’s happening to Archie, it’s happening to all of us, we can’t leave.” Ruth was not crying or hysterical, which made what she said more unsettling.
Clay did not notice the tingle in his knees, his elbows, or he did and took it for fear. “Ruth, please. We need help.”
This was his moment. Men of his generation made decisions, they waged wars, they made fortunes, they acted with conviction. “We’re going. Clay, take Archie to the car. Bring that blanket. Ruth, get him a bottle of water. Archie, you lie down in the back seat.”
“George. I won’t let you do this. I can’t let you do this. I can’t.”
“This is the only thing we can do. This is the thing that I have to do.” George held the keys in his hand. He didn’t spell it out for her because he knew Ruth and knew she’d understand: if they weren’t human, in this moment, then they were nothing.
Ruth didn’t know how to enumerate the things she could not do. She could not do any of this. “You’re coming back to me. You’re coming back for us.”
“Set a timer. Get your phone. Set the alarm. One hour.” G. H. was sure he could do this.
“You can’t make promises you can’t keep!” Ruth fumbled with her phone.
“It will take one hour. Less. I’ll drive to the hospital. I’ll leave them and turn around and come back for you and Amanda and Rose. You’ll find Rose. Do you understand? I’ll set a timer too.”
“It won’t work. It won’t work out.”
“It will. There is no choice. Look.” He pressed the digital display, and the seconds began counting down. “I’m going to leave Clay and Archie there, and then I’ll be back for the three of you by the time this goes off.”
“How do you know the hospital will be—” Clay faltered.
“Clay.” George did not think it worth discussing. He knew what was supposed to happen. “We’re going. Get him into the car.”
“Come on, honey.” Clay helped his son to his feet and remembered his hands at the toddler’s waist. So skinny he could circle it, fingertips touching.
Ruth draped the blanket around Archie’s shoulders again. “One hour.” She pressed the button on her phone, and the seconds started ticking. “That’s what you get. You’ve promised.”
“It’s nothing to worry about.” George gripped his keys, heavy to connote luxury. Was he lying? Was he hopeful?
Ruth didn’t believe in prayer, so she thought of nothing.