Before This Is Over

by Amanda Hickie

  “Could you stop doing that?”

  He stood up, stretched. Hannah looked at him expectantly, hoping he would go somewhere else. He sat down again. She put her finger on the word she was reading and waited for the spasm to pass.

  He stood decisively. “I’m going to get some coffee.”

  “We’re out of coffee.” Which was obvious—they had searched the cupboards, the pantry, the fridge, the freezer, and the boxes in the garage.

  “I’ll get some from Lily’s.”

  Inexorably she took her part in this irrational conversation. “Lily’s is shut, and if they weren’t, she’d be out of coffee by now.”

  Sean looked at her as if she had failed to grasp the magnitude of what was going on. As if she wasn’t aware of exactly how many packets of rice and pasta were in the pantry and exactly how many meals were between them and having to step out into an uncertain fate. As if she didn’t know how germs were spread. “She won’t be there. There won’t be anyone there.”

  “So how will you get coffee?”

  “I’ll break the lock.” He was matter-of-fact.

  “You can’t loot Lily’s!”

  “It’s not looting, it’s borrowing. If I leave money, then I’m buying the stuff, just without Lily. For the lock too. Why do you think we have the cash?” He had worked it through in his mind.

  It seemed incomprehensible that she was mustering reasons for not looting the corner store. “We have to shop there. If you loot Lily’s I have to walk an extra three blocks for milk. Forever. I’m not walking three blocks uphill for milk for the rest of my life because you can’t wait one more day for your headache to go away.” She had his attention—he might succumb to rational argument. “And how will you lock it up after? If you break her lock, other people will take stuff and they might not leave money.”

  He took the objection on board, mulled it over.

  “Anyway, there’s probably nothing left. She’s been cleaned out by now.” The intruding thought forced its way back in—her argument rested on the assumption that Lily’s would reopen, that Manba would disappear and they would all pick up exactly where they left off. But what if they couldn’t?

  “Then it won’t hurt for me to look.”

  “No.” She flung herself dramatically over the hall doorway. He ran in the other direction—there was no chance she could beat him to the back door. He had ahold of the back door handle. She slipped her hand underneath just in time to push it up before it unlatched.

  “I’m going. You might as well let me out.” He squeezed her hand hard. The metal dug into her palm, but she held fast. She grabbed his little finger and pulled back on it. He let go suddenly and sprinted to the hallway door, flinging it open. “Ha!”

  She felt a chill at the thought that they had been playing with ideas. “You can’t think that’s a reasonable trade-off—fatal illness for coffee. And even if you find some, bigger, meaner people than you like coffee too.”

  He strode through the living room. The three kids looked up for a moment, then went back to the city they were constructing out of blocks.

  “I won’t touch anyone. I won’t let anyone breathe on me. I’ll take gloves and a mask. And even then, I’ll run away from anyone I see, especially the mean ones.”

  He had almost reached the front door.

  “You go out, you’re not coming back. Someone has to think of the kids.” She grabbed his sleeve with one hand and with the other pried the keys out of his grip.

  But the door was already unlocked and he swung it open with his free hand. “I’ll bring you back toilet paper.” He kissed her, like he was going to work. “And maybe some chocolate.”

  His impish smile hung in the air as the door swung closed behind him. It wasn’t funny and it wasn’t a game. He was gone.

  It was at most a five-minute walk to Lily’s and back. She ran through the house in her mind, cataloging every surface that could possibly hold a clock. Her phone was off and she couldn’t justify turning it on simply to know the time. What else? What else? The microwave, the computers, the VCR, the alarm clocks all needed power. Her mother’s watch. She scrabbled through the bowl of jewelry on her bedside table. It was stopped, run-down years ago and never wound. She turned the crown and nothing happened. Not a single mechanical clock in the whole house. The front door shut out the normal measures of time. Days, weeks, hours, minutes, were meaningless. Only numbers of meals meant anything.

  One clock—there was one clock. An old-fashioned alarm clock with hands that Sean bought for Oscar, the kind of caricature that Oscar recognized only from the icon on their phones. She snatched it from his windowsill. It was a chimera, a fraud. Battery powered, not mechanical at all, but it was ticking. Five to, although she had no way of knowing how long he had been gone already.

  Too long. Too long. That was the only yardstick she had. She leaned against the inside of the front door, turned her back to it, and slid down to the floor, placing the clock beside her. It transmitted a tiny vibration across through the boards with every second.

  And each second that ticked by was another too many. She needed Sean, she needed him beside her, for all their sakes. Without him…there was no without him. It was a future she couldn’t conceive. If she just opened the door, looked outside, up the road, by now she must be able to see him coming back. And where was the risk in that?

  Sean’s keys lay in a pile on the floorboards where she had dropped them. She picked them up and flung them back down the hall. The few steps from the door to the keys would give her time, even if only a little, to find sanity if she couldn’t resist the urge to escape out the front. A chance to remember that her duty was to Zac and Oscar.

  “Is everything all right, Mum?” Zac appeared in the doorway at the other end of the hall.

  “Sure. Fine. Nothing to worry about.” Although she could barely get the words out.

  He shrugged and closed the door as he went back to Oscar and Ella. Hannah stared at the clock. Five past. He would be knocking any moment. The second hand bounced as it moved forward, a jaunty flourish. Each bounce marked off more risk that she had no say in—to him, to the kids, to all their preparations. Each one brought to mind some catastrophe that she wasn’t out there to prevent. Through the door she felt the throaty vibrations of a car roaring up the street, too fast. It meant nothing to her but bad news, potentially the return of Sunday’s thugs. In the street, Sean would be an easy target for them or for someone even less scrupulous.

  She took a deep breath. There was no earthly benefit to them in mugging Sean. The cash in his pockets was worth nothing, he didn’t have keys on him. She fantasized briefly that they lived in a world where muggers would inquire as to the value of their victim before attacking. Perhaps they would if they balanced the spoils against the chance of infection.

  Ten past. She lost herself in the curlicues on the dark hands of the clock, a cartoon imitation of another age. He had been gone nearly fifteen minutes. There should be nothing to distract him, no friendly neighbors to bump into. She could feel the thoughts crowding at the edge of her mind, all the worst things she had read and seen online. Sick people in the streets, turned out of their homes by frightened relatives. Bodies dumped on the curb. Without crossing their threshold, she had no way of knowing if the quiet emptiness ended at the intersection. Beyond sight of the porch there could be a scene imagined in any number of end-of-the-world movies. Maybe the minute he turned the corner, a mask and gloves were not enough. Maybe. Maybe.

  He might be lucky—she might be letting her imagination run away with her—but lucky wasn’t what got you through. Easy didn’t keep danger at bay. A mistake in judgment wasn’t an excuse, it was the kind of failure that they couldn’t afford. Every disaster in human history started with a bad judgment call.

  She turned the clock over, flicked the battery door with the end of her finger. If she pulled the battery out, the ticking would stop. It would no longer tell her he had been gone for twenty minutes. Then how
long would she wait, when waiting was all she could do? An hour, two hours? Would she then decide to stop waiting for a knock at the door? When was the moment to leave the safety of the threshold and move back into the house? When to tell Zac and Oscar where he had gone? When to admit to herself that something had gone unthinkably wrong?

  If she stayed at the door, the moment was frozen between him leaving and returning. Twenty-five minutes. She breathed with the second hand, a meditation of panic.

  The door shook her as someone knocked. She took two deep breaths and answered as calmly as she could, “Who is it?”

  “Some random person knocking on your front door when you were expecting your husband.” His voice sounded small.

  She told herself to hold firm. “I’ll unlock the gate. You can go to the office. Leave whatever you brought on the porch.”

  When his voice came back, it was stronger but more hesitant. “You don’t have to quarantine me. I didn’t go in—there was nothing left.”

  “You’re just saying that.”

  “Why would I say that? If I had coffee and chocolate and toilet paper, believe me, I’d tell you.”

  She scrambled down the hall on her hands and knees to where the keys lay lifeless under a new dent in the plaster. They were like hope in her hands, the temptation of a gamble.

  “Hurry up. I can hear another car. Just let me in and you can shut me out again when it’s gone.”

  She unlocked the door but not the grille, looked him up and down, looked behind him. There was no sign of food. She would have let the food in.

  His mask hung loose in his hand. “I’m virus-free. There wasn’t anything left. There wasn’t anyone. I don’t think they’re even collecting the garbage anymore. All the rubbish bins were still out. And that’s all there was, garbage. Someone did a job on Lily’s a while ago.”

  She was still standing back from the grille. “It doesn’t take that long to walk to Lily’s.”

  “I needed to breathe, so I went around the block.” He shrugged and held his gloved hands out, a sheepish confession. “All I got was air—uncontaminated, unshared air.”

  “What the hell? What the absolute hell? You went for a walk?”

  “I talked myself into a state, okay? There was a car and I ran the other way. And then there was this pile of garbage on the footpath. It had a smell so strong I could almost see it. Food scraps and tin cans and I thought I saw some old clothes and a pair of shoes. I swear that was all it was, some old clothes and shoes, but I freaked myself out. And then one of the shoes moved. I think it was a rat—I’m not sure that’s much better. I just had to clear my head. I didn’t touch a thing. Please just open the grille.”

  “You want me to open the grille and let in a big fat idiot.” All the worry, all the steeling herself for the worst, all this he had chosen to put her through. “I told you not to, I asked you not to. But you didn’t think, you didn’t think about anybody or anything.” Her righteous rage for Lily’s, for letting Ella into their house, for all the times he had put her plans at risk, carried her away. “And what was I supposed to say to Oscar and Zac if you didn’t come back? That their dad’s a moron? That he didn’t have the common decent sense to keep himself alive?

  “Tell me, when did you decide that the rest of us were happy to risk death so you could go for a stroll? Seven and a half thousand people died yesterday. In driving distance of this house. And you think you’re bloody Superman.”

  An obstinacy settled on his face. “A number doesn’t change what is happening in this street now.”

  “Then what does? What on the face of the earth would it take for you to know exactly what is outside our door? Because going out and looking is the most shortsighted, dumbest answer to that question.” She unlocked the grille and stomped into the bedroom, threw herself down on the bed, the tension in her body spent. Having each other for protection was a relief, but if she was thinking with her head and not her instincts, he’d be in the garage.

  “I’m sorry I wanted to loot Lily’s.”

  “That means nothing. You didn’t because you couldn’t.”

  “Yeah.” He sat down next to her on the crumpled bedclothes. “We’re still going to need more food. How many more weeks can we survive on nothing but beans and rice?”

  “Beans and rice will keep you alive. Why is this not clear to you? This isn’t the time to go out shopping. That time is over—I did that when it was safe. This is the time when you stay inside and shut up about the beans and rice.” It was his fault that she had lost her resolve, his fault that she couldn’t face being without him. “And don’t talk to me. I don’t even know why I let you back in. Don’t talk to me, don’t look at me. Just go away.”

  I don’t have a present.”

  Two more steps and Hannah would have made it through the kitchen and to the back door. She held the phone in front of her leg and cheated it behind her as she turned around, trying to keep it out of both Zac’s and Oscar’s eye line. “That’s the way it goes, Oscar.”

  “But you have presents on birthdays.”

  Ella looked up at the sound of the word.

  “We could make a cake, Oz.” Zac really was trying to be helpful. Hannah caught Zac’s eye with a warning look, because she didn’t need that kind of help, and used the moment she held his gaze to slip the phone into the pocket of her jeans.

  “A cake?” Oscar’s face lit up.

  “I don’t know.” She glanced at the ceiling as if help might descend. “The stove doesn’t work and we don’t have any flour.” A dark cloud was moving onto Oscar’s face. “You have to understand, Mouse.” She looked to Zac to help undo what he had done. “We would make a cake and have presents, but we can’t.”

  “Then it’s not a birthday. It’s just a day.” Oscar twisted back to the kitchen table.

  “Mum, there must be something in the pantry we could make into a cake.”

  “I’m not hiding packet mix and a generator behind the beans.” Now Zac stared at her. “Daddy won’t mind. He understands.” Their silence communicated how much she had let them down. “You could make him something for a present.” Zac rolled his eyes. “You could try.”

  “And you could try to find something in the pantry.”

  Oscar turned around looking disappointed and angry. “We have to have presents and a cake and a special dinner. Not beans and rice.”

  She sighed and felt a headache coming on. “You’ve got a shelf full of craft books and materials. If you make something, I promise I will try to find some way of making dinner different tonight. Agreed?”

  She looked across at Sean in the office, saw him pointedly not looking in their direction. Since the power went off, its only purpose was as a refuge for the two of them. The children still respected its status as a workspace even now that there was no work to be done. She waited until they were all reabsorbed into their coloring books or reading and, with her hand in her pocket covering the bulging phone, nonchalantly strolled across the yard to the office.

  She closed the door behind her without looking back. “Are they watching?”

  “Zac keeps looking over.”

  The phone bit into her hip as she sat down. The denim folded tight across the top, sealing it in. “We weren’t at all planning your birthday, but if we were, try to be surprised and delighted. It means a lot to Oscar.” She slowly and awkwardly turned her head to look through the window to the glass kitchen door. “I can’t see him.”

  “His head is down—it’s safe. Give me the phone.”

  “I don’t think so, looty boy. I’m still mad at you.”

  She stood up to free the phone, held the on button, and put it on the table next to Sean. He sneaked his hand into hers, watching the start-up screen, impatient with its stylish and colorful animation. Finally the home screen came up. The battery had only a sliver of orange at the bottom. They stared at the signal strength icon, waiting for connection. There it was, five bars. The screen flashed bright, went to black blazo
ned with “No battery remains” in white, and shut off, all in a few seconds. Hannah felt a little sick. Sean squeezed her hand.

  “I’ll get my phone.”

  She sat anxious, waiting, playing with the dead phone. She levered off the back, reseated the battery. There was a possibility, a very remote one, that it had worked itself loose. She stared at the blank screen, wondering if Sean’s battery might have run down even while it was turned off, wondering just how many days of connection they had left. Once his phone died, they were down to Zac’s, and all it could do was text. She heard Sean’s voice from the house, booming and overly reassuring. That had to raise Zac’s curiosity, but Sean came out alone, hand on phone in pocket. She pulled the battery out of her phone again to get at the SIM.

  The glass door and large window of the office didn’t give them much privacy from the house as Sean took apart his phone and slipped in Hannah’s SIM. He turned it on, cupped in his hands. She realized she was holding her breath, twitching with impatience.

  Less than half the battery icon. “You’ve been using it.”

  “Come on—I was an idiot the other day, but I’m not an idiot. It was run-down before I turned it off but I can’t remember exactly how much.”

  Five bars of signal. “Check the government site first.”

  He was staring at the phone.

  “What’s taking so long?” The sun reflected off the screen, making it dark and unreadable from her angle.

  Sean still stared, transfixed. “It’s connected.”

  “What does it say? Has something happened?”

  “Twenty…” He looked away and squinted, then back down at the phone, as if trying to focus his eyes.

  “What is it?”

  “Fourteen thousand and twenty thousand.”

  “Twenty thousand new cases?”

  “No, that’s the number dead.”

  “The number for the whole country, not just Sydney. That can’t just be in Sydney.”