Phase Six

by Jim Shepard

  She had barely known the boy, with his little brown bangs and big ears. His chest looked a little sunken and his arms a little higher from all of the compressions, and he was still looking upward like he’d been stunned by the ceiling tiles. Val couldn’t look at him and couldn’t look away. She wasn’t sure how long it was before someone led her out into the hall and sat her in the break room with a Styrofoam cup of water in her hand.

  When things had quieted a little, afterward, someone came to get her to attend the meeting for the team that had managed the code to review what might have been done better. She didn’t catch a lot of what was said, but when someone asked her some direct questions, she put in her two cents and then sat there thinking that just a few hours ago the boy had been served his lunch and had wanted her to bring him her laptop and had teased her about her password. She thought about his brother Aaron: if he’d just not gone on that trip. If he’d just turned left instead of right, gone up instead of down, done whatever instead of whatever. Her mentor in med school had reminded her more than once that doctors got even less time than families had to deal with patients dying. Someone died and the relatives went off by themselves and collapsed, but you still had the rest of your shift to get through.

  At least she didn’t have to transition to small talk with her mother and sister.

  Why had this boy’s death rocked her more than some of the others she’d just been through? She didn’t know.

  The chief attending was a nice guy and sat with her for a little while. “You want some tea?” he asked. She shook her head, and he nodded like he already knew that. He reminded her that every lousy outcome was ten times more powerful than a save. He said that when it came to what was doing the killing, it seemed pretty clear that multiple causes were converging in a cascade. She agreed. He waited, and then made a big exhausted noise himself, and told her to take care. After he left, she got herself up and into a bathroom.

  In the mirror she had that shot-out-of-a-cannon look she remembered from an intern who hadn’t worked out, who’d been so inept they’d called him Double O, as in licensed to kill. The first time one of his admissions had died, he’d been so shell-shocked he’d sat down for lunch with nothing on his tray but silverware, and had not seemed to notice that there was a conversation going on around him.

  She cracked her knee on the doorframe leaving the bathroom, but she was so tired everything felt like it was happening somewhere else. She vaguely remembered during her initial anatomy exam in med school wandering from station to station, each station featuring a body part she’d definitely never seen before, and the way she’d started to feel as though she were being pranked.

  * * *

  —

  At some point the news that the disease seemed to be everywhere around them broke down the logic of the quarantine. Early on everyone had looked to the CDC for guidelines and the CDC had sent out PDFs and videos of quarantine procedures and lengths, but all of these had seemed to envision scenarios in which the outbreak was relatively contained. Pressure had grown from the staff to be allowed to visit loved ones, and then the head nurse’s mom had gotten sick and she’d been so distraught that the chief attending had let her go home for a day, and she’d come back a little restored and still healthy, and so after that a few more favored staff members who seemed have remained healthy, once they were checked out as fully as they could be for traces of the disease, were allowed to go home after long stretches on call, with various precautions, for twenty-four hours at a time.

  When the chief attending came back into the room to check on Val, she said, “Maybe I should take a break. You know: if we’re still letting people out.”

  “You do look like you could use one,” he said.

  She gave him what she imagined was a wan smile. “One of my mother’s texts the other day said, They can’t keep you there forever. Can they?”

  “Any sniffles? Respiratory issues?” he asked.

  She did a bodybuilder’s arm curl and flexed her bicep.

  “Well, we can’t keep everybody here forever,” he conceded.

  A nurse cracked open the door and peeked in like she didn’t want to disturb anyone. “Ronnie’s struggling again,” she told Val.

  The chief attending followed them to the room Ronnie was in. “Where in Oklahoma is he from?” he asked before they got there.

  “Tulsa,” Val told him. Right after she got to the room, two nurses wheeled a crash cart in behind her, and Ronnie said in a way that pierced her, “Hi, Dr. Landry.”

  “How’re we doing, Ronnie?” she asked.

  “I woulda said okay until a minute ago,” he told her.

  “You gonna let a little bug worry you?” she asked him.

  He gave her a small smile and closed his eyes and shook his head.

  She upped the oxygen to 28 percent on his venturi mask, and that seemed to settle him down, though his face stayed flushed and his tremors shook the mattress. After a short wait his oxygen levels were up again, so everyone relaxed a little. He looked like he’d conked out, and she smoothed his hair and went back out into the corridor with the chief attending.

  “So what do you think, about that break?” she asked him. He stretched his arm out down the hallway in response, like a doorman pointing the way across a lobby.

  Vinegar

  When she called her mother to tell her she was coming home, her mother burst out crying and said that she’d see her soon, and then called back and asked if it was really safe for her to be coming home, and then called back again after that and reminded her that Lori always got sick easier than she did, and said that she just wanted to make sure that Val was doing the right thing.

  “So does your boss think that you can’t spread it?” she asked, after Val had made no response.

  “Nobody knows anything, Ma,” Val said. “This is our best guess. I’ve been working on the ward for quite a bit longer than what we think is the incubation period for the thing, and I haven’t been near any of the new arrivals, and I feel good, other than being tired. And they checked me out as best they could. Do you want me to not come home?”

  “Come home, come home,” her mother told her.

  “Can we hug?” her mother asked at the front door. Her mask had a pattern of strawberries on it. Val said they didn’t need to take extra chances, so her mother waited until Val had gotten her coat off and changed into sweatpants and flopped down onto their sofa before asking her if they were any closer to figuring out what this thing was. When Val said that as far as she knew, no one had any idea, her mother wanted to know if Val had asked her boss. Her mother was like some of the older patients on Val’s rounds who tended to be very sweet to her before they asked when they were going to get to see the doctor.

  While her mother set the table she explained to Val that her neighbor was convinced it was the coronavirus and that the government just wasn’t telling people, and that they’d be splitting eight manicotti because that’s what she’d been able to dig out of the freezer. She and Lori had gone to both Herrema’s and the Price Rite and both had been cleaned out.

  “There was nothing on the shelves?” Val wanted to know.

  “Like, vinegar,” Lori called from upstairs. “Hot sauce.”

  They also had a can of beans in the cupboard, her mother added. And the Price Rite guy had told her that as far as he knew, the regular Monday deliveries would still be happening.

  She opened the beans and dumped them into a little pot with some water. “You have about twenty minutes,” she said. By which Val understood her to mean Go up and say hello to your sister.

  She heaved herself off the sofa, but when she passed her mother, her mother held the back of her hand up toward Val’s cheek. “You look tired,” her mother said.

  “Yep,” Val said.

  “You don’t seem warm,” her mother suggested.


  “Nope,” Val agreed.

  “I know you’re working hard, but I hope you’re not overdoing it,” her mother said. “You can only do what you can do.”

  “Sometimes you can’t even do that,” Val said.

  “Oh, honey: I’m sure you’re helping a lot of people,” her mother said. She’d told Val years ago that she hadn’t been sure that Val could be a doctor, though she had been sure that Val was stubborn enough to stay at it, and that Val was certainly smarter than anyone else in the house, and when push had come to shove, Val’s mother and father had each taken on double shifts to help pay Val’s tuition.

  At the top of the stairs, Val stalled outside of Lori’s room, half amused and half irritated that even now her sister was making her jump through these kinds of stupid hoops.

  She pushed open the door. Lori was at her desk staring out the window. The desk was from when she was a kid, and at this point she was way too large for it, and for some reason that always moved Val.

  “Did you hear that Joey Kiely died?” Lori said. She was wearing an old bandanna as her mask. She got up and came over to give Val a hug, but Val held up a hand. She was a big woman and bent a little as if to adjust herself to Val’s height. Joey Kiely was a boy they’d played with as kids. “And his mom, too,” Lori added.

  “No,” Val said, and ran a palm up and down her own sleeve.

  “Ellis is shut down for the time being,” Lori said. “So I’ve been home all week and she’s been driving me nuts.” Ellis was her PR firm.

  “She’s been enjoying quality time with her favorite daughter,” Val told her.

  “So has it been as awful as I would think?” Lori wanted to know.

  In the corner, some board games were still stacked in a Jenga-like tower half the height of the dresser. Dirty and clean clothes were flung everywhere. Her sister’s softball bat and some trophies were heaped in the open closet.

  “We just lost a nine-year-old I really liked,” Val told her, surprising herself. Lori looked at her with such sympathy it made Val’s eyes water. “He’d already lost his whole family. He handled it better than I’ve handled losing my car keys.”

  “Sorry,” Lori said.

  “Thanks,” Val said.

  “Have you heard of anybody getting any closer to figuring out what’s going on?” Lori asked. “Every so often something on the news feed gets your hopes up and then nothing happens.”

  “A lot about it seems simple, but apparently not simple enough,” Val told her.

  They stood there looking at each other, since that was as helpful as anything else. “Well, don’t forget what Grandma used to say,” Lori finally reminded her. “ ‘What’s always inside impossible is I’m possible.’ ”

  “If only Grandma were alive today,” Val said.

  “If only Grandma had known what she was talking about,” Lori added.

  Their mother called from downstairs that their dinner was ready.

  “You know, it’s not easy for us when you don’t answer,” Lori told her after a minute. “We’re left out here in the dark, and we know you’re busy, but you can’t take two minutes to answer a text?”

  How had they gotten to the point at which she couldn’t get through to either of them? Val wondered, standing there with her sister. They’d been present for each other any number of times. They knew what was involved, in terms of watching out for one another. They’d remembered birthdays, and had had bonding rituals, like watching The Bachelor together every Monday night. Until recently they would have sworn that the three of them could have talked about anything.

  “Isn’t this nice,” her mother said from the doorway. “Did nobody hear me yelling that dinner was ready?”

  “We heard you,” Lori said. “It’s just that, you know, these kind of moments are more important.”

  “Oh, shut up,” her mother said, and led them both downstairs.

  * * *

  —

  When Kirk called the next night, she told him that she probably should spend the time she had with her mother and sister, and he was fine with that and then invited himself for dinner. Her mother told her that they didn’t have enough to feed him, and when Val passed that along by text, Kirk texted back that he’d be in the area anyway and that he was bringing ribs.

  “Your boyfriend will be here soon, in case you want to fix yourself up,” her mother told her around five that evening.

  She went into the bathroom and splashed her face and pulled her hair back into a ponytail and came back out into the kitchen. Water dripped off her nose.

  “Very nice,” her mother said grimly.

  After Kirk came in and gave everyone a wave he pulled the ribs out of a shopping bag and told Val that she looked worn out, like it was a useful observation.

  “My daughter’s been under a bit of a strain lately,” her mother explained.

  “What’s that all been about?” he asked. There was a bottle of wine in the bag, too, and he handed it over to Lori.

  Val laid out some napkins, and while Lori hunted up a corkscrew, he made a face at his phone. “It’s like Twitter’s blowing up every ten minutes,” he said.

  “Every five,” she told him.

  “I thought you were too busy for Twitter?” he asked.

  “My sister tells me,” she said.

  Once they sat down to eat, her mother remarked that it had to be a really stressful time for Kirk, as well, wasn’t it? and he shrugged and said that sure, the shit was hitting the fan everywhere, but he was still doing some of his usual workload, and he reminded her that surgeons’ rounds were about as basic as rounds could get. You went down the line making sure everyone was still alive, not in too much pain, and could move their extremities. You kept it simple on the back end.

  Val remembered him bragging once that one of the things that patients liked about him was his laugh, which they claimed you could hear even on the other wards.

  “I’m doing what I can do, but these are the heroes, right here,” he said to her mother, pointing at Val. When Val didn’t say anything in response, he added, “So what’s the good word?”

  “I don’t know what we’re going to do at this point,” she told him.

  “Well, I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I’m going to eat my dinner.”

  Boy Meets Girl, Revised

  After dinner they chatted for a while with everyone in the living room, and then after Lori said she was turning in, Kirk followed Val to her room and they both sat on the bed with their backs to the headboard. Her mother peeked in and pointedly left the door ajar when she withdrew, and Val got up and shut it again just out of principle.

  They were almost shoulder to shoulder and he talked for a little while about what a mess his hospital was. He was genuinely at a loss about it, and she felt bad for him. He put his palm on her lower belly and she moved it away and then apologized that her moods were all over the place. She said, “I wish I could kiss you,” and he reached over and pulled their masks down and kissed her.

  “That was dumb,” she said.

  “That was important,” he told her.

  He took his phone out again and was flipping through feeds with his thumb. “Don’t look at that stuff,” she requested. He set it down.

  She put her face in her hands and said again that she didn’t know what they were going to do.

  He said he didn’t know either. “I guess we either keep working or pack it in and grab a beer at the pity party,” he told her.

  “Somebody’s gonna get a handle on this soon,” he added, after she didn’t respond.

  “How’re you guys handling your quarantine?” she wanted to know.

  He shrugged. “You know: it’s your basic sieve,” he said. “But we’re doing what we can to keep it going.”
>
  He tipped his head toward hers and sat quietly with her, and it made her feel a little better. They stayed like that for some minutes, listening to the sounds of her mother cleaning up downstairs.

  “I should get going; you probably have an early shift tomorrow,” he finally said, and she gave him a smile.

  After a minute he pocketed his phone and got to his feet, and she got up and followed him downstairs to the door. He thanked her mother for having had him over, and she thanked him for coming, and Val followed him outside and put her hand on his shoulder and told him she’d see him soon. “You rode your bike here?” she asked.

  “Exercise,” he said. He pulled some lights from his pannier and Velcroed one around his bicep and snapped the other into a mount on his handlebars and switched them both on. Once they started flashing, he looked pleased with his accessories, and swung the bike around onto the street, straddled it, and rode away.

  “He seems pretty good,” her mother said when Val came back into the house. Val nodded and said she was hitting the hay. She fell asleep almost as soon as she climbed into bed, and she woke up coughing and headachy and sick, her sheets soaked with sweat.

  “No no no no no,” she told herself, only half awake but petrified, and she stepped into the shower and scrubbed herself down, as if that was all she needed to do, and she turned up the heat for the steam, and still found that she had more and more trouble breathing, and she was still saying no to herself while she toweled down and climbed into her sweatshirt and back into bed, and pulled the covers up to her face, and then just went blank, waiting for the sun.

  VII

  This Is Normal

  Ililussat went without power for two days, and toward the end of the second day, the hospital had a temporary blackout as well when the diesel generators ran dry. Portable backups kicked in for the life support and HEPA machines, but in the midst of it Danice texted Jeannine Sitting in the dark in Greenland. Some lights and heat were jerry-rigged by a custodial guy everyone called Kleivan, who, when he was working in the converted storeroom Danice had been using, seemed to have a plumber’s resourcefulness when it came to both improvising tools and coming up with strategies for bypassing problems.