by Glenn Cooper
“You were well stocked,” he said.
“I like to be prepared for unforeseen situations.”
“Doesn’t get more unforeseen than this.”
He noticed her limp and asked about it. She told him she tripped up on her steps, and declined his offer to take a look.
She made coffee while he put away all the cans, boxes, and bottles. One tote bag was filled with bottles of expensive liquor, another with nothing but Heinekens. She asked how the girls were doing.
“I’ll show you.”
They were upstairs in their room, quietly sitting on the bed, not doing much of anything. To Jamie, it was jarring to see a couple of fifteen-year-olds, particularly these two, not glued to their phones, not engaged in conspiratorial chatter.
They didn’t recoil at their entrance—in fact, Kyra smiled a little.
“Baby, do you remember me?” Linda said, hobbling closer.
Her approach didn’t seem to sit well with her daughter who said, “Ahhhh,” and put her back to the wall.
Linda seemed deflated. “The smile must’ve been for you,” she said.
Jamie tried to bolster her. “I spent the morning with them. They’re getting used to me. Here, watch this.” He told her they seemed less intimidated when he wasn’t lording over them, and he lowered himself to his haunches. He pointed to Kyra and said, “What’s your name?”
The girl closed her eyes tightly, as if deep in thought, and when she opened them again, she said, “Ky-ra.”
“Oh my God!” Linda exclaimed. “Honey!”
“Okay,” Jamie said, pointing to Emma, “what’s her name?”
Emma’s name came out smoothly.
He repeated the exercise with Emma, and she performed equally well.
“We did this just before you got back, so I don’t know if it’s stuck yet, but let me try it.” He pointed to himself and asked Emma his name.
“Dad-dy.”
He could have taught her dad, or father, but something about her state of innocence made him want her to say daddy.
“Okay, Kyra, what’s my name?” he asked.
When she too said, daddy, he shook his head. She imitated the headshake and tried again. “Ja-mie.”
“Very good, Kyra! Very good!”
Linda teared up and asked if he could teach her to call her mommy.
“I’ve got to make a call,” he said. “Why don’t you take a stab at it?”
“I don’t know how.”
“Just be yourself and smile a lot.”
He had Derek’s phone on speed dial. Mandy picked up so quickly he imagined her clutching it, waiting for it to go off. He possessed a finely tuned bedside manner, the product of countless, difficult moments with patients and their families, but this conversation was hard. He could feel her guilt oozing out like sap from a wounded tree. Over and over, she lamented that she had left Derek alone in the bedroom. She told him that their affair had been a terrible mistake, as if conflating the two events made sense. Her anger and grief were raw, and his platitudes weren’t making any difference. So, he went quiet and just listened.
“All I want to do is go back to work. I don’t want to stay at the house. When I look out the bedroom window, do you know what I see? I see fresh earth. He’s in the backyard, twenty feet away from the fucking gas grill. I’m going to go to the lab, probably sleep there.”
He finally interrupted her flow. “Is it safe there?”
“Is it safe anywhere?”
He replied weakly that he didn’t know, and his mournful tone must have reminded her that his life had been upended too.
“How’s Emma?”
He told her about tutoring her and her girlfriend, and he told her about Kyra’s mother. Talking about a third party seemed to be therapeutic. Mandy became more animated.
“It can’t be easy bringing a stranger into your house.”
“Kyra calms Emma down and vice versa. It’s worth it on that score. But her mother’s not exactly my type. She’s rough around the edges. And she’s a big boozer which, given the circumstances, I don’t love.”
“And she’s not sick.”
“She is not. She was probably exposed the same day I was. She was on duty and tried to interview a confused man who sounds like an early case. You, me, her—it’s the luck of the draw, I guess. At this point I’m hoping we’re not going to get it.”
“I think we’re in the clear,” she said. “Like we discussed, at some point in the past we were probably infected with a type-specific adenovirus infection that triggered an immune response to the current strain.”
“And we probably bitched and moaned at the time because we were pissed off about a sore throat and cough that lasted a day,” he said.
It was good hearing a tinkling laugh coming down the line.
“What are you going to do now?” she asked.
“I’m thinking of hitting my lab too,” he said. “We’ve got to come up with treatment options. Linda’s a goddamn cop. She should be capable of watching the girls. If—”
“If what?”
“If she can keep away from all the booze she brought in today.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, oh.”
*
It took another day for Jamie to feel comfortable enough to leave Emma in Linda’s care. During that time, they fell into a kind of weird routine where he and Linda divvied up household chores as if they were domestic partners looking after two vulnerable toddlers. They took turns on meal preparation and tending to the girls’ needs. He was the neater of the two by far and did most of the tidying. He was also a more patient and effective teacher. To him, there was nothing more important than their re-education, so he spent the bulk of his time working with them.
His view was that they needed a foundational lexicon, the cornerstone for all the learning that was to follow. He was convinced that with intact frontal-lobe function, the stored grammatical logic of procedural memory would kick into gear and allow them to arrange newly learned words into a semblance of coherent and organized sentences. In the afternoon he had a breakthrough with Emma.
“I food.” She was looking at a full bowl he had brought up from the kitchen.
“Good,” he said. “Try again.”
Then, after a serious, inward-turned look, she said, “I want food.”
He smiled broadly, and she allowed him to give her a kiss on the forehead, followed up with a slice of Fuji apple.
Kyra was close by on the bed, closely watching their interaction.
“I want food,” she said in a pleading tone.
She got a kiss and an apple slice too.
“I’m going to show your mom what you can do,” he said. “She is going to be very happy.”
When the time came for the next conference call with the CDC, Jamie dialed in and the automated system informed him that the call would begin when the conference leader joined. The music-on-hold was mildly irritating; after twenty minutes, it was positively annoying.
That’s it, he thought, hanging up. The CDC is off-line. We’re on our own.
The TV news, if you could still call it that, gave the same impression. The only continuously broadcasting cable station was CNN, but their field reporting had dwindled to nothing. The remaining anchors resorted to passing along scattered tidbits of information from Twitter and Facebook of uncertain veracity. Common intros were, “Take it with a grain of salt—” or “Please don’t consider this the gospel truth but—” before passing along unpleasant stories about looting, violence, shortages of necessities, or groups of people seen wandering the streets of this city or that town.
Pretty much the only verified coverage was of CNN employees reporting on themselves, turning the cameras on their own travails holed up as they were in self-imposed quarantine in the CNN Center in Atlanta, and voicing their own anxieties and fears about what was happening to families and friends on the outside.
At nightfall, Jamie was making pasta when he heard his door
bell. He got to the hall when Linda did. She put her bottle of beer down on a side table and pulled her gun.
“Jesus, Linda, I don’t think that’s necessary.”
“Don’t answer it,” she said when the bell rang again.
Romulus was barking his head off and Jamie tried to shush him.
“My house, my rules.” He called through the door, “Who is it?”
The muffled response was, “It’s Jeff, your neighbor, Jeff Murphy. I saw your lights.”
The Murphys had invited Jamie over for dinner a few years back. He hadn’t really clicked with Jeff and his wife and there had been no further socializing. Both the Murphys worked at financial services jobs that Jamie hadn’t really understood, and once they figured out that his politics leaned left, the coffin nails came out.
Jamie unlocked the door and opened it enough to see a painter’s dust mask covering most of his face. The man took a step back.
“You don’t have a mask.”
“I was exposed early on. At this point I’m pretty sure I’m immune, Jeff.”
“You’re the doctor, but I’ll keep mine on if it’s okay with you. Is your daughter okay?”
“She isn’t. She’s upstairs with a friend who’s also infected. The girl’s mother is with me.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“What’s going on with you?”
“Liz and I stopped going to work the day the news came out. I don’t think we were exposed to anyone, we’re both fine, but here’s the thing. We’re running a bit low on supplies. We wondered if you had any food to spare?”
From behind Jamie, Linda said, “The hell we do!”
Irritated, Jamie asked Linda to cool it and he invited his neighbor in. He hesitated when he saw Linda wasn’t wearing a mask either, so he waited by the open door while Jamie and Linda went to the kitchen to argue in private.
“You’re not going to give him our food, are you?” she asked angrily.
“A few cans, a box of spaghetti, sure. We’ve got to be civilized. We lose that, we lose everything.”
“We starve to death, we lose everything.”
He wanted to say that it was his damn house and he could do what he wanted, but he dialed it down and quietly said, “We’re a long way from that. If you’re so possessive of your supplies, I’ll give him some of mine.”
She left in a huff to go upstairs and Jamie filled a small bag with provisions.
At the door, Murphy said he was grateful and repeated that he felt bad about Emma.
“Do you have any advice, I mean as a doctor, on what we should be doing?”
“Isolation’s the ticket. You should keep it up.”
“What happens when we run out of food?”
“Hopefully the government and military, or what’s left of them, will work out food distribution.”
“And if they can’t or don’t?”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Jeff. We’re all going to have to figure that out if the time comes.”
*
In better times, Mandy’s lab was the happiest place in her universe. Every lab chief is a potential autocrat, but her technicians and post-docs considered her a dream boss. She never lost her temper and made each one feel like an integral part of the team. Her success was theirs. By square footage, it was a small shop. When everyone was on site and working, it took on the feel of a restaurant kitchen with bodies bustling around, narrowly avoiding collisions, in a tight choreography. Now that she was alone, the place seemed almost cavernous.
She rolled a stool to her biocontainment hood and began the preparation of what would be a multiple-day experiment to explore the effect of combinations of antiviral drugs on the viability of the FAS virus. She had already shown that standard drugs on their own had no significant killing activity. The new experiments would be tedious, and working solo, setting them up would be time-consuming. She began laboriously preparing buffer solutions, plaque media, and dilutions of antiviral agents to fill dozens of ninety-six-well assay plates. She didn’t know if the drugs would be therapeutic, but for her, the work was. Blessed chunks of time passed where she wasn’t thinking about Derek or the rest of the horror show.
Well into the afternoon, Derek’s phone rang, pulling her back to reality. She didn’t know the number.
“It’s Stanley.”
“I’m sorry, who?”
“Stanley Rosenberg? Your neighbor? You gave me this number. It’s okay I’m calling you, right?”
She apologized and told him she had been distracted by work.
“I know you’re busy doing very important things, but I wanted to know when you were coming home tonight?”
“I’m not sure I am coming back. Are you all right?”
“I’m okay. And I’m still not sick, or how could I have made this call? Silly thing to say. Maybe I just need some hand-holding.”
She owed him, and the last thing she wanted was to be saddled with more guilt.
“You know, Stanley, it’s probably good that I come home at some point.”
“Wonderful. I’ve got a chicken that’ll go bad unless I cook it.”
*
Mandy didn’t turn on the outside lights when she went to visit Rosenberg because she didn’t want to see Derek’s grave. Their house had been built about the same time, but his had never been renovated. It was something of a 1950s time capsule with Formica kitchen countertops, narrow floorboards, and yellowing, pull-down window shades. But that wasn’t what first caught her attention. The walls of the living room and dining room were covered in oil paintings.
“These are yours?”
“You seem surprised,” he said.
She was. She was no expert, but the small, confident brushstrokes and his pastel-colored take on the world took her breath away. There were landscapes and still lifes, European, Caribbean, and Mexican motifs.
“You’re an Impressionist,” she exclaimed.
“And you’re a cultured young woman. Yes, I’ve been called a neo-Impressionist. It’s a great space to work in if you want to make sure you don’t earn a lot of money, at least nowadays. Nobody’s interested in this kind of art anymore.”
“Unless it’s a Monet or a Degas,” she said.
“Yeah them. They used to be pals of mine.”
“You’re not quite that old.”
“Not quite. Come on. Let’s have a passable chicken cacciatore.”
Rosenberg kept the wine flowing, good wine. He was a charming conversationalist and she appreciated the way he kept things light in this dark time. He avoided any mention of Derek, or his wife (whom she presumed was upstairs), or the disease. When it was time for dessert, he tasked her with whipping the heavy cream while he melted chocolate for the ice-cream sundaes over his old electric range. A series of deep sighs made her think he was poised to bring up weightier matters. The lights winked out for several seconds before flickering back on.
“Brown-out,” he said. “Must be instability in the system.”
“God forbid we lose power,” she said.
He nodded in solemn agreement then suddenly said, “My wife’s name is Camila.”
“That’s a beautiful name.”
“She’s Mexican. When I was a young man, I used to go to Mexico to paint and do spear-fishing. I guess I speared her, if you’ll excuse any vulgar connotation. We had a long marriage and a lot of good times, Camila and me. I suppose, what with her stroke, she didn’t have long for this world but now, with the infection—”
“I’m sorry, Stanley.”
“Listen, I’m not looking for sympathy, especially not from someone who’s gone through much worse. I feel we’ve sort of bonded in adversity. It’s because of that bond, I’d like to ask for your help.”
“I’ll do anything I can.”
His moist eyes were the color of the sea in one of his paintings of Mexico. He fixed her with those eyes and plucked the maraschino cherry by its stem from his fluted sundae glass and popped it into his mou
th.
“I want you to help me kill her.”
17
“What the hell are we gonna do?”
Blair Edison kept pacing his living room, using the hooked rug as a walking track, repeating his question over and over.
His son, Joe, was thinking more clearly.
“We’ve got to get them safe as we can and then I’ve got to go back up to Clarkson and get a doctor.”
“You said the hospital’s closed.”
“I’m just going to have to open it.”
Brittany, the eight-year-old, was downstairs with them. Joe had a Disney DVD on for her and she was belly-flopped on a fluffy throw, her head resting in her hands. He went into the kitchen and came back with a couple of dish towels. His father asked what they were for. He tied one around his face and tossed the other to his father to follow his lead.
“Stay put, Brittany,” Joe said.
She saw them out of the corner of an eye and told them they looked funny.
“What’s the plan?” Edison asked on the landing.
“I think we should close them all up, so they don’t go wandering off and hurting themselves. The only room that’s got a lock is yours and there’s a bathroom in there.”
Edison agreed, and they began herding the family into the master bedroom. Delia was already in there, standing in a corner and muttering, “I can’t, I can’t,” like a broken record. Seth, the fourteen-year-old, was tired out and docile, and he allowed himself to be led by the hand and put onto Edison’s bed. Delia acknowledged his presence with her eyes and kept perseverating. Benjamin, Seth’s younger brother by two years, was a handful. He was confused and agitated and the sight of his father and older brother with towels wrapped around their faces sent him into hysterics. He wouldn’t come willingly, and they had to get him by the wrists and ankles and carry him, his ass dragging along the floor.
Once inside the bedroom, he made a beeline to the bathroom and hid behind the shower curtain. Joe’s older brother, Brian, was too big and strong to be forced anywhere.
Joe said, “Oh hell, he’s already breathed all over me,” and dropped his mask to try to reason with him.
