Her brother was possibly just half her age. The eyes that peered out through the holes in his Tony the Tiger mask were very pale—the light green of an empty Coke bottle.
“Trick and treat,” Captain America said again. A gold locket, shaped like a hardcover book, hung outside her moth-eaten turtleneck.
“You shouldn’t be knocking on doors for candy.” She looked past them to the man smoking a cigarette on the curb with his back to the house. “Is that your father?”
“We aren’t here to get a treat,” Captain America told her. “We’re here to give you one. And we’ve got tricks, too. You can have one of each. That’s why it’s trick and treat. We thought it would cheer people up.”
“You still shouldn’t be out. People are sick. If someone sick touches someone who isn’t, they can give you the bad thing they’ve got.” She raised her voice and yelled past them. “Hey, buddy! These kids shouldn’t be out! There’s a contagion on!”
“We’re wearing gloves,” Captain America told her. “And we won’t touch you. No one is going to catch anything from anyone. I promise. Sanitation is our number-one priority! Don’t you want to see your treat?” She jabbed the boy with her elbow.
The Tiger held open his bag. There was a bottle of sugared gummy vitamins in there—prenatal vitamins, she saw. Harper snapped her head up, eyeing one child and then the other.
“What is this?”
“They’re like Sour Patch Kids,” said Captain America. “But you can only take two a day. Are you all right?”
“What do you mean am I all right? Hang on a minute. Who are you? I think I want to talk to your father.” She lifted herself on tiptoes and hollered over their heads. “I want to talk to you!”
The man sitting on the curb didn’t look at her, just waved one hand in a sleepy, dismissive gesture. Or maybe he was fanning the smoke away from his face. He blew a trickle of smoke rings into the afternoon.
Captain America cast a casual glance over her shoulder at the man on the curb. “That’s not our father. Our father isn’t with us.”
Harper dropped her gaze. The boy was still holding the bag open for her to inspect his offering. “These are prenatal vitamins. How do you know I’m pregnant? I don’t look pregnant. Wait. Do I?”
Captain America said, “Not yet.”
“Who sent you here? Who told you to give this to me?”
“Don’t you want them? If you don’t want them, you don’t have to take them.”
“It’s not about whether I want them. You’re very kind, and I would, but—”
“Take them, then.”
The boy hung the bag on the doorknob and stepped back. After a moment, Harper reached through the gap and slipped the bag into the house.
“Now have a trick,” the girl said and held her own bag open, so Harper could see what was inside.
Tony the Tiger didn’t seem to have anything to say. He never made a sound.
Harper looked into the bag. There was a slide whistle in it, in plastic wrap.
“They’re really loud,” said Captain America. “You can hear it all the way from here to Wentworth by the Sea. A deaf person could hear it. Take it.”
“There’s nothing else in the bag,” Harper said. “You don’t have any other tricks to hand out.”
“You’re our last stop.”
Harper wondered, for the first time, if she might be dreaming. It felt like the kind of conversation that occurred in a dream. The children in their masks seemed like more than children. They seemed like symbols. When the girl spoke, it felt like she was talking in a secret dream-code; a psychologist could spend hours trying to puzzle it out. And the boy. The boy just stood there staring at her. He never blinked. When Harper spoke, he stared at her lips like he wanted to kiss her.
She felt a brief but almost painful stab of hope. Maybe all of it was a dream. Maybe she had a bad case of flu, or something worse than flu, and everything that had happened in the last three months was a vision inspired by sickness. Wasn’t this exactly the kind of thing a person would dream if she were on fire with a fever? Perhaps she was only dreaming Jakob had left her and that she was alone in an infected world, a world that was burning, and her only visitors in weeks were a pair of masked children who spoke in fortune-cookie messages.
I will take the whistle, Harper thought, and if I blow it, if I blow hard, my fever will break, and I will wake up in bed, covered in sweat, with Jakob pressing a cool washcloth to my forehead.
The girl hung her bag from the doorknob and stepped away. Harper took it, clutched the crinkling plastic to her chest.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” the girl asked. “Do you need anything? I mean, besides your trick and your treat? You don’t come outside anymore.”
“How do you know I don’t come outside anymore? How long have you been watching me? I don’t know what you’re up to, but I don’t like games. Not unless I know who I’m playing with.” She looked past them, elevated herself onto her tiptoes once more, and shouted at the man sitting on the curb with his back to her. “I don’t like games, buddy boy!”
“You’re all right,” Captain America said, in a confident, assertive tone. “If you need anything, just call.”
“Call?” Harper asked. “How am I supposed to call? I don’t even know who you are.”
“That’s all right. We know who you are,” Captain America said, and gripped the little boy by the shoulder, and turned him away.
They walked swiftly down the path toward the street. As they reached the curb, the man sitting there pushed himself to his feet, and for the first time Harper saw he wasn’t smoking a cigarette, he was just smoking. He blew a last mouthful of cloud, which disintegrated into a hundred small butterflies of smoke. They scattered, flapping frantically away into the smoggy morning.
Harper slammed the door, yanked the chain off, threw the door open wide, took three reeling steps into the yard.
“Hey!” she shouted, her heart clouting against the inside of her chest, as if she had just run a few laps around the house.
The guy looked back over his shoulder at her and she saw he was wearing a Hillary Clinton mask. For the first time she noticed he was wearing slightly reflective yellow pants, like the sort firemen wore.
“Hey, come back here!” she yelled.
The man walked the children swiftly away down the sidewalk, disappearing behind a hedge. The boy was practically skipping.
Harper crossed the yellowing grass, still clutching the bag with the slide whistle in it. She reached the sidewalk and looked around for them, blinking in the haze that drifted perpetually along the street. It was thicker than usual today, a pale mass that gradually erased the road, so that she couldn’t see to the end of the block. The smoke swallowed houses, lawns, telephone poles, and the sky itself. It had swallowed the man and his children, too. Harper stared after them, eyes watering.
When Harper was back in her house, she put the chain on the door again. If a Quarantine Patrol showed up, that chain might buy her enough time to get down into the basement, out the back door, and into the woods. With her carpetbag. And her slide whistle.
She was turning the whistle over in her hands, wondering how loud it was, when she realized the house had gone perfectly still. No music and no Marlboro Man. Somewhere in the last few minutes, the batteries had died in her Hello Kitty radio. The twenty-first century—like her masked visitors—had briskly and unapologetically slipped away from her, leaving her all on her own again.
Trick and treat, she thought.
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