I want to create a beautiful dying The end will need to be dark and soft Like walking home to your real mother —Melissa Broder, “Light Control”
The thing about the apocalypse is that nobody said it would be so beautiful.
Spring is letting down her hair. The air is warm, sweet, and clear. Moss drapes over a storm drain, parting for the rush of early-morning runoff. A heavy quiet has descended since we took to our homes, save for the shrieking hawks circling the shuttered strip-mall parking lot next door to my mother’s house outside of Philadelphia.
Morning breaks on a kitchen, a mug that reads, “Nice Tits,” above illustrations of various birds: “Great Tit”; “Long-tailed Tit”; “Crested Tit.” My tits, I notice, are sweating through Kurt Cobain’s pretty face on my faded Nirvana T-shirt. Hanging in the corner of the kitchen, a muted TV ticks off unfathomable COVID-19 death tolls. People line up outside grocery stores preparing to dash for dwindling toilet paper rolls and Clorox wipes. The acrid tang of an invisible virus hangs in the air. On the coffee table are a pile of ripped pillowcases in various stages of transformation, glint of strewn sewing needles, black thread, an unused replacement filter for the HVAC cut into twelve muzzle-sized strips.
Two weeks ago the small Ohio liberal-arts university where I taught creative writing closed indefinitely. In the meantime, our news feeds tell us, we need only secure a few weeks’ worth of canned goods and wine and sit tight. The cavalry is a-coming. Find ye a sourdough starter stat.
No one else is up yet, so I take my coffee back to bed. I observe my mother’s neighbor through the guest-room window, pregnant and sunning herself on the back porch. A red azalea glows behind her, almost blinding, while pink gladioli nod sleepily in the garden. She yawns and stretches. I’ve been watching her since I arrived a week ago. She weaves stars out of straw and hangs them from the eaves of her porch. As she rolls to her side atop a blue blanket, her shirt lifts, and her belly shines in the sun. Her languor belies her fortitude. She is not blessed with child, but vigorously at work, like a glacier carving the Earth’s surface. She has a corporate job somewhere fancy, my mother told me, and this is her first baby. Like me, she is past prime childbearing years. Maybe thirty-six, thirty-eight. I am both heartened by and jealous of her fecundity. Her wife comes out and hands her a mug of something steaming, bends, kisses the top of her head, and then returns inside. I pull the covers over my shoulders.
In a few weeks I will move to Virginia to start a tenure-track teaching position, provided the offer remains. This is the job I’ve been working toward forever, a chance to settle down, as they say—“they” being The Women, my mother and grandmother, the two matriarchs. And by “settle down” they mean “get remarried and have babies.”
Fifteen years with the same man, a house in Vermont, a couple of years married, an adequate trajectory for a certain kind of young, middle-class woman in America: The kind of woman The Women would prefer me to be. The kind I once preferred to be myself and rather willfully set out to become. The wedding came too late for their taste, but OK. Soon a child should appear.
The trouble is that I failed spectacularly, at the marriage and the childbearing. And now I am not so young. The Women say, “You have plenty of time,” but I also hear: “Ticktock.”
Last night my mother sat on the sofa watching CNN, drinking wine, and sewing makeshift face masks out of old pillowcases. She beamed and held up her first attempt: a pink strip of fabric crosshatched with thick black thread, like sutures on a flesh wound. Her red cat got on her lap, then set to kneading her thigh.
“This is kind of fun,” she said, holding out the mask, its pink entrails dangling from her palm. “For you.”
She sipped her wine, proud as punch, and then went back to work. I couldn’t recall ever seeing her this happy. Her daughter was in town, her son was sober for the first time in years, and she had her first grandchild on the way: my younger brother’s girlfriend, whom he started seeing soon after getting sober last summer, is nine months pregnant. That a virus is currently decimating the world’s population either didn’t register or was too vast and horrible to hold beside my mother’s more immediate and humble joys.
She deserved this happiness, I thought, as much as anyone deserved anything. So much of her life had been spent fighting her husband’s addiction, then her son’s, essentially raising two kids alone, working long hours. And after her husband was finally gone, she’d wasted her one, glorious womanhood on another man who could not fathom her depths. I wanted to close the shades and stop clocks for her, hold her smiling face in my hands. I wanted to refill her wineglass and sit beside her, helping fashion useless face coverings out of our old sheets and telling stories.
Instead I pulled the strip of cotton over my mouth and tied the entrails behind my head. I glanced in the mirror and saw myself silenced, snuffed out. Well, that’s apt, I thought, here in this suspended time, under viral siege, still grieving my divorce and unable to envision any kind of future. The dream job, the imperiled world, my brother’s tremulous sobriety, and his girl-child imminent. All poised to shatter.
“Women are always looking for something to fill their holes,” I read in a poem this morning. When I was a girl, I filled my holes with demonstrative love, thereby securing love in return. My loving was outsized, desperate. I crawled into The Women’s laps; I cuddled and swooned and begged to be petted. I laid my head on my grandmother’s bosom and fell asleep. If I sensed my mother was upset with me, I would cry for hours. If she looked wistfully through a window, I ached for her. My father, in the meantime, was busy drinking himself to death, a goal he finally achieved when I was seventeen and he was forty-four. As a teenager I sensed that I’d been born tethered to my mother’s grief, and her mother’s grief, and her mother’s grief before her, like a knotted string of pearls. A family heirloom.
“I’d only ever wanted to be a mother,” my mother told me when I was a teenager. “It was my only ambition.” But she didn’t tell me then about the three abortions my father and his parents had forced her to undergo before I was born. She didn’t tell me how my father had left her and moved to Colorado when he’d discovered she was pregnant with me. She didn’t tell me about the sexual assaults she’d endured since childhood: the music teacher; the college English professor; the locally famous TV clown with a raging alcohol addiction and an affinity for little girls. Nor did we discuss my grandmother’s body shame, nor how her father had refused her a college education, dragging her around the country like a rag doll—he the consummate schemer, a get-rich-quick charlatan, and she his hapless possession. My grandmother had, as a child, stumbled in on her mother splayed naked in the bathtub, half conscious and clutching a clothes hanger, her feet pressed wide and white against the porcelain and her inner thighs slicked with blood. Not once, but several times. “Every time I looked at his penis, I was pregnant,” my great-grandmother later told my mother. She had four kids by the time she started giving herself bathtub abortions, and then my grandmother had four kids, and then my mother had three abortions and was distraught, having been denied her one true ambition. Perhaps, in part, this is why I grew up believing that having children was how women passed on the torch of themselves. But this inherited grief was only partly why, in my twenties and early thirties, I was ambivalent about having kids.
Or perhaps ambivalent is too mild a word. I agonized, weighed, fantasized, and bargained. I desperately wanted to have a baby in order to please The Women. Pleasing The Women made me feel safe. When nothing else was in my control, I could rely on their approval. At the same time, years spent nannying other people’s kids had made me weary of children: their rampant needs and boundless hunger. I have needs! my young-adult self whined. I want to eat the whole box of Cheez-Its, too! In time, though, I realized that I did want a child. But not just any child. Our child, my husband’s child. Our love made manifest. It was voracious and out of my control, this longing, a creative imperative more powerful than the writing of one hundred books. I imagined our features on a chubby face, smelled bananas on her breath.
A life of more love was possible, and in those days especially, I always chose more over less.
When I learned, too late, that my husband was adamantly opposed to having children, I pleaded with him to reconsider. For two years I hoped he would change his mind. I said things I am not proud of in order to try to convince him. I willfully cultivated the life I thought he needed in order to support the vision I had for our family: the job, the house, the sweet, one-eyed dog. It was no use. He wanted something else entirely. Eventually I accepted that I’d have to leave him if I wanted a child. But we’d been together since we were eighteen, for God’s sake; how could I possibly live without him? I didn’t like the idea of sacrificing one love to create another. That math didn’t add up.
Now, The Women are not pleased with me: thirty-six years old, divorced, and childless. They glimpse on the horizon their flickering flames.
My brother, Eric, knocks on the guest-room door. He’s a full-grown man now, bearded and big-bellied. He’s nine months clean of heroin—his longest stretch of sobriety since he was thirteen—and staying with my mother until he can afford his own place. It’s the first we’ve spent any length of time together in nearly twenty years. We are regressing by the day. Two nights ago we fought over which movie to watch. Yesterday it was who did the dishes last. This morning he tried to claim he hadn’t left a giant shit to fester in the toilet.
He tells me he needs to use my SUV for his new landscaping business, the one he hasn’t started yet. He’s also never landscaped a day in his life. “But I’m watching YouTube videos about it,” he says. “Anyway, I can’t haul a lawn mower on the bus. That’s a fact.” That this is somehow my problem should be notable, but it isn’t; such are the well-worn dynamics of our relationship. “Jess, I’m having a baby,” he says, as if I didn’t know. He’s thrilled to be a father. I had no idea he harbored such a longing. I was so busy worrying about his sobriety, trying to solve it with the right combination of words, deeds, and financial assistance, that I failed to consider he might have a sense of self beyond the ken of his addiction.
“You’ll need a website,” I tell him, throwing off the covers. I close the curtain on the neighbor and follow him downstairs and outside. “You’ll also need a Facebook ad and an Instagram account. You can do Mom’s yard first and post before-and-after pics.”
“A what account?” he says.
Outside, Eric pulls a pack of cigarettes from his jeans and lights one. It’s hot for April, though the one-eyed dog giveth not a fuck, asleep again beneath the crab apple tree and bounding across invisible plains in his dreams.
“An Instagram account,” I say, opening the app on my phone and noticing that no one has liked my story about the tit mug—a brief blow to my ego. My brother and I both hunt ego-death in our own ways. Maybe it’s the dead daddy, or lead in the water. The internet, turns out, is not the shortcut to sublimation that drugs are, or children. Anyway, it’s still a great mug.
“Make me an account?” he says.
His relationship with technology is limited. He couldn’t keep up while he was using or in jail, and he often couldn’t afford any devices during his brief periods of sobriety. So when he was able to hold on to a phone for a short time, he was as obsessive about it as the boy who once played Nintendo for so many hours he couldn’t move his neck for a week. Now he can’t get past the most rudimentary functions: calls, texts, and nineties-style games like Texas Hold ’Em poker and something featuring the Mario Bros. The lag in his real-world experience reminds me how much of his life has been spent in absentia, like a man in a coma. I nod sagely, slip my phone into my jeans pocket, and say nothing of my paltry Instagram following. I hold out my hand for the cigarette, take two quick drags, then hand it back. I quit a year ago, but since I left Ohio, I’ve been sneaking cigarettes, as if hiding the habit from myself. For many years smoking was our family pastime, the way some families go camping or play cribbage. When Mom got lung cancer, she and I quit, and now Eric bears the burden of tradition alone, an exemplar of devotion.
I tell him that the landscaping business is a good idea in spite of his lack of actual experience, to which he grins and shrugs. Last week he was laid off from his job as a waiter, the only work he can get with a couple of felonies on his record. People will want their yards prepped for spring: the garden beds cleaned, weeded, and mulched; old leaves raked and bagged; lawns mowed. After all, everyone is spending a lot of time at home. There is a whole demographic right here in our mother’s neighborhood who can’t afford professional landscaping but might be willing to pay for basic prep work. How hard can it be? I want to believe that this will be the beginning of his adulthood, sobriety, fatherhood. That his daughter, at least, will have what we did not. He takes a last drag, stubs the butt out, and stands. In a few weeks he’ll have enough money to buy a beater truck and haul the equipment himself, he tells me. Military jets scream by, and we crane our necks to see. Everything has been so quiet, planes stilled, the nearby highway empty, that the sound of the jets startles us both.
Eric yawns. Three teeth are missing, and his face is glistening and pockmarked, puffy, and dark around the eyes. I agree to take him into the city to meet a guy who’s selling an old lawn mower. As we speed down the empty turnpike, he leans over his phone, dripping sweat and then wiping it away fastidiously with the napkins he keeps in his pocket for this purpose. It’s a side effect of the medications that help keep him sober: Suboxone, Wellbutrin, and others I can’t recall. The sweating embarrasses him, and he swipes swiftly across his pale forehead and over the top of his head. His hair is thinning and close-cropped, combed to the side to appear fuller.
“Do I look OK?” he asks timidly, smoothing his hair.
“Much better.”
He sighs and fiddles with the car radio, then returns his attention to the phone. He lost his last restaurant job because customers complained about the sweating. The manager called him into his office after one lady complained that perspiration had landed in her soup. Eric said he did not argue with the manager. He quietly took off his apron, collected his tips, and waited on the curb for our mother to pick him up. It was the third job he’d lost that month.
I glance at him and say, “You look very handsome.”
He smiles from the passenger seat, where he’s trying to figure out how to set up a Venmo account, which I told him he’d need if he wanted an easy, no-contact way for customers to pay him.
“Goddamn right!” he says.
I used to mitigate my desire to have a baby by writing. Eric kept overdosing, and because I could not save his life, I felt the longing to create a new one even more acutely. For a long time, writing, making something, felt like a counteraction to his imminent unmaking. If I worked hard enough, I reasoned, I could disarm death, use a creative force to outweigh its destructive force. For all the years my ex-husband and I were together, I was hedging bets, tidying loose ends, as if a marriage and a child and a house in Vermont and a tenure-track job would save me—and everyone I loved, magically!—from dying.
In other words, imagining Eric’s death fueled me.
But essays do not sate The Women as much as a child would. I often thought about a friend whose aunt had died a week before the friend’s baby was born. She and her partner had named the baby after the aunt. The baby was not the aunt, but she was something. At the funeral my friend’s mother had held the newborn tightly and rocked while the rabbi prayed.
Watching her, I’d thought, Art is prayer, but what we pray for are our people.
We were eighteen when the husband and I met, kids ourselves, six months after my father died. The husband’s body became an extension of my body. I did not know where my body ended and his began. We graduated from college and proceeded to grow into adults together, in lockstep, like little boppity boy and girl dolls. Boop bop, off we went. Our twenties were pure slapstick. He plugged my holes, so to speak. What I forgot, he remembered. Where I was loud, he was quiet. I broke things, and he fixed them. I got lost all the time. Worked late and forgot to call. I was Lucy to his Ricky Ricardo, gauche but well-meaning.
Once, while waiting tables at Le Cirque in New York City, I spilled soup on Leonardo DiCaprio and later cried on the apartment floor all night. Once, I did cocaine with the regulars and went home at dawn in another woman’s dress. Once, I made out with the prep cook inside the meat freezer and never told a soul.
I insisted we move again and again, state to state, as I impulsively chased jobs, classes, and more “aesthetically conducive landscapes” (my words, dear God) in which to write. I wrote feverishly and waited tables while the husband found full-time, grown-up work and largely supported us. Those were my salad days. They were not his. We were twenty, twenty-three, twenty-five. I was not quirky or witty or waifish like the leads in nineties rom-coms. There really is nothing charming about a woman acting out fears of abandonment, though screenwriters try to convince us otherwise: the damsel in distress; the crazy girlfriend; the witchy-bookworm-cum-sexpot who rejects your advances but eventually blows your mind. In my own sloppy way, I was trying to step outside of myself and into the eternal.
“You know who knows how to landscape?” Eric says when we get back with the lawn mower. “Dads,” he answers, grinning.
Later he pushes an imaginary stroller across the street, looking both ways with an exaggerated sense of concern. “You know who pushes strollers?” he says. “Dads.”
I follow him around, giggling like the adoring sister I have always been, despite all the pain that’s passed between us. This is his new and constant refrain. Everything he does is a marker of his impending fatherhood, even though many of these activities are merely stuff that adults do—adults who haven’t spent the last twenty years addicted to heroin, anyway—cooking, going to the doctor, opening a bank account. Submitting half their waking hours to the mind-suck of their phones.
When I was a kid, I watched adults compulsively. I studied my mother smoking like some people watch their mothers cook or apply makeup. She smoked angrily, the way women on TV kissed their no-good lovers. I watched my grandmother wipe crumbs from my grandfather’s mouth. I watched her worry over her husband’s dementia and then scuffle off to work. The Women knew how to work. They worked all the time. They were good at working and proud of it too. Sold real estate together, a duo whose headshots adorned “For Sale” signs all over town. Growing up, I saw their work as the highest ideal of womanhood, the most moral and essential. While The Women worked, my grandfather dozed on the sofa, my father drank, and my brother and I ate buttered matzo for dinner.
I listened to The Women talk. I absorbed their cadences and rhythms and the ways they related to one another. My grandmother was bossy and precise; my mother, simultaneously defensive and appeasing. We never knew when my father, who usually kept away during his benders, was going to land in jail, or show up at the door, or die. So I stayed attuned to The Women for clues. Watching them helped me figure out what was going on and how to prepare. Watching them helped me shape chaos into a pattern. In this way, watching The Women was a form of resilience. In those days Mom, Eric, and I had been a front against our father’s unending crises, precursors to his death: drunken car accidents, arrests, belligerent phone calls, emergency-room visits. We’d been a team. A gaggle. A comedy of errors. Our mother burned chickens and forgot us at school. We drove my first car backward through the neighborhood and laughed when I hit a mailbox. She taught us how to forge her signature. We locked doors and unplugged the phones. We ate buttery pancakes in bed when Dad relapsed; sausage pizzas when he landed in jail.
Now our roles have shifted, and our metabolisms have slowed. I work too much and yell at everyone to be quiet. I cook elaborate meals no one appreciates. I forbid our mother from seeing her friends because “it’s a goddamn pandemic.” She sneaks hits from her bowl in the garage and sleeps until eleven. Meanwhile dads like my brother get up early and go to work. Dads grill burgers. Dads fall asleep on the couch at nine. Dads take their meds and keep their shit together because that’s what dads do.
Not ours, of course, but other dads.
Eric’s landscaping business is called We Can Still Grow. I build him a simple website, and he designs flyers that Mom and I distribute in neighborhood mailboxes on our daily walks. She is practically giddy during these outings. It’s starting to unnerve me. She hopes the baby looks like our side of the family and embraces her Jewish side.
“We’ve been to synagogue twice in my lifetime,” I say, “and both times were for funerals.” I stuff another mailer in a mailbox and feel a moment of panic when my glove snags on the door hinge. I imagine the virus as an army of invisible Nazis biding their time inside, checking out water bills and Sam’s Club circulars, appalled at prices these days.
“Culturally Jewish then,” she says. “I want her to like my gefilte fish.”
She’s wearing an Eagles football sweatshirt, shorts, and the stained L.L.Bean slippers that I got her last winter. We’re both wearing masks because we don’t yet know that the virus isn’t just hanging out in the fresh air, scoping for targets.
“Your gefilte fish?” I say. “The brown turds you scoop out of a jar?”
People hesitate when they see us stuffing their mailboxes, braless and wearing our blue latex gloves, but they call the number on the flyers. Eric studies more YouTube videos to learn how, exactly, one landscapes. We loan him money for a cheap tiller that takes us five days and two return trips to Home Depot to assemble. He is proud of himself, and we are proud of him. While the world panics and grieves, we are getting into a groove as a family, maybe for the first time. Mom laughs and dances to Led Zeppelin in the living room. We get into spats with Alexa and play endless games of poker. This is all she has ever wanted, my mother, and though she has suffered unfathomably for it, here we are. I am trying not to panic, but I can’t help worrying this moment is like the temporary bliss of the terminally ill, who in their final hours inexplicably run smiling and naked down hospital corridors, then suddenly keel over and die. Here we are, summoning new life just as the world is taking its final bow.
Or if humanity survives this pandemic, then what? Do I really believe my brother’s decades of addiction are behind him? That he will be a good father to his daughter? That he won’t abandon her as we were abandoned by our father? In the dark reaches of my brain, do I not question how it is that my brother—sick, unpredictable, often unreliable—gets to have a child when I do not?
The husband left me; that’s how it happened. He didn’t want a child, and I did. Had yearned for her all my life, even when I couldn’t admit it to myself. In those early days after his leaving, I went into shock. I could not move for hours at a time. I sat, gape-mouthed and snotty, on the living-room floor of our empty house on a hill in Vermont. Everything I knew to be true was no longer true. The language it had taken us fifteen years to invent was suddenly dead. We were the only people on the planet who knew its syntax and jokes and gestures, its noises and nonverbal indicators. I hadn’t seen it coming, and yet I had always seen it coming.
To everyone’s great shock, Eric’s business flourishes. He makes plans to get an apartment with his girlfriend after the baby is born. Sometimes I drive my mother’s car by his jobsites just to glimpse him at work, his white T-shirt sweaty and covered in dirt while he digs and pulls and shapes the earth. I can’t believe how much work he does: the visible, physical kind and the emotional work of staying sober. He stops and takes a long pull of water, wipes his gloves on his jeans. How has he become this person I do not recognize, so resilient, when only a year ago he was all submission?
But when I try to imagine him doing the active work of parenthood, of fathering, the verb, my mind resists. I picture instead our father, who fucked up so badly that, twenty years dead, he is still wreaking havoc on his children. I can count on one hand how many times we saw him in his final decade, the man who missed every milestone, broke every promise, performed all manner of debased behaviors—screaming on the front lawn slobbering drunk, screwing the neighbor for a couple of Klonopin, crashing every car he owned. Of course, I am afraid for my tiny, unborn niece and imagine stealing her away to raise as my own, shielding her from all the damage my brother will inevitably inflict. She would not replace my brother, or be a substitute for the child I never had, but she would be something.
I have been writing about my brother for as long as I have been writing. It has helped me believe I was in control, the same way he believes, right now, that the perfect mound of dirt he has sculpted around the base of a cherry tree will not erode beneath torrential rains, that the creeping phlox will flower despite mosaic virus, that the wisp of girl-child, his daughter, churning slowly now toward the sun, will flourish no matter how eclipsed his presence may become.
On the night my marriage ended, I got up from the table at which we’d untethered ourselves and walked slowly to the bathroom. There was nothing left to say. I didn’t want to cry in front of him ever again. On the cold tile floor of the shower, I tried to breathe. I listened for his footsteps or the turn of the doorknob, but he didn’t come. I turned on the water, then turned it off again. I lay back and put my legs in the air. My toenails were painted a dark red, but I did not remember painting them. How else to say it? I watched her dissolve. I smelled her neck one last time, my longed-for girl-child’s. I put my lips to her forehead. Her voice grew thin until it was only the shushing oscillations of the exhaust fan. She blinked once, twice, then out. On the bathroom floor, with my feet in the air, I saw her age backward until she was just a tiny ball of cells inside me, amorphous and bright. Then I, too, began to shrink. We were circles of light connected to my mother and her mother and her mother, all our mothers back to the beginning. A string of pearls.
A few nights after I arrived in Philly, my mother and I were sitting in front of her laptop, trying to summon my grandmother onto the screen. She’s ninety now, which means this was more a conjuring than a Zoom tutorial, but suddenly there she was—or her nostrils anyway, facing down the camera lens like the double-barrel of a shotgun. We talked about the last few days and tried in vain to make sense of all this loss. A cousin’s wife had died, a neighbor’s lawn guy, somebody’s barber’s infant son.
“It’s horrible, so horrible.” My mother shook her head and squeezed her eyes closed. “And yet I’m so happy.”
In my late twenties my mother finally shared with me the grief she bore over the three abortions she’d been coerced into all those years earlier. She told me that after each procedure she’d wanted to have sex more than any other time in her life, and she couldn’t understand why. I remembered that conversation during the winter months when I was alone and mourning my marriage and spending hours every day walking the snowy hills of Vermont. Walking eased the splitting sensory overload. I could channel pain into movement. I could outrun it. I looked for the divine in the flotsam alongside the road: torn candy wrappers and smashed beer bottles. The wind winked. The ryegrass seethed. Out of my grief grew a shoot of desire. I wanted to fuck every person I passed on these walks. I suspected the urge was similar to what my mother had experienced after she’d been forced to end those pregnancies: the body’s dumb persistence, like an oyster shell hardened by the ageless sea.
“Jess,” my grandmother cooed from her home miles away. “Jessica. When are you going to have a baby, Jessica?”
One night at dinner Eric is too tired to eat. He picks at my latest experiment, a curried chicken with peanuts and cilantro. His body hurts. His hands hurt. Our mother and I wait on him like nursemaids. Here, a water. Here, another napkin. Some Tylenol, sir. Our mother fetches him a heating pad for his aching back. “I’m the one who cooked the goddamn dinner,” I say to no one. Dads, he reminds me, need to put up their feet at the end of the day.
The next morning the labor begins.
We drive Eric to the hospital to join his girlfriend. Her parents are dropping her off at the front door, and we let Eric out a few hundred yards behind. The parents stand beside their car in masks, hug their daughter, wave to us, and then leave. We watch Eric walk slowly toward his girlfriend and the hospital. Nobody is allowed to join them because of COVID, so we go home and wait by our phones.
Around noon I start dozing on the sofa, only to startle awake ten minutes later when the phone rings—I’ve been “preselected for a new credit card!” On the muted television a woman weeps. There’s a shot of a swaddled patient hooked up to a ventilator; then the image switches to an elderly man pressing his hand against a window. On the right of the screen the death toll continues to climb. The number could be the stock market, the lottery jackpot. It makes no sense.
My mother pirouettes through the living room carrying a glass of iced tea. Her phone rings, and I sit up expectantly. It’s just her best friend. They titter in excitement as she paces into the kitchen. I text my best friend: Any minute now! She’s one of the few people at her office who’s still required to come in, so she’s busy constructing a shield out of polypropylene and dirty looks. She sends me a selfie wearing three masks, plastic glasses, and gloves. At home her husband waits anxiously with their two-year-old. They both were violently sick last week, and there were a couple of anxious days while they waited for COVID test results. Turns out the husband and the kid had eaten some bad pears, but that pocket of time between not knowing and knowing was, for my friend, a screaming black hole.
My mother comes back from the kitchen and sits down beside me on the couch, gripping her phone and grinning. With her other hand she reaches over and squeezes my shoulder. The one-eyed dog circles, then spots the red cat in the corner and gives chase. The cat darts, turns around, and swats him across the face. I pick up Philadelphia magazine and flip through a feature about up-and-coming restaurants where nobody will be eating, an article about summer concerts nobody will attend. In one photo a lawn is covered in people smiling, clapping, drinking, or wrapping their arms around one another and singing. A young boy is sitting on a red-striped beach ball and holding a taco, or maybe a sandwich. A group of girls drape over one another on a purple blanket, their mouths open in muted chorus. A couple kisses. A child does a headstand. One guy looks incredibly bored. My mother puts the phone on the coffee table in front of us, and we stare at it—tiny oracle of doom and light—and wait for it to ring.
