Chapter 5
Anne
Then
I didn’t go home the summer Joe got married.
I rented a room in a house with four other people and worked as a nanny until classes started.
But that fall, after a long day of student teaching, I was meeting my mentor, Sarah, for a drink.
I’d pulled out my book to wait. And there, in an underground bar on the north side of Chicago Avenue, love found me.
I’d noticed him when I came in. He was standing by the foosball table with some other professional types, guys dressed in khakis with their ties loosened or stashed in their shirt pockets. He was tall, blond, and handsome. Straight, I thought as he crossed the bar toward me, or at least into me.
“Good book?” he asked.
“The best.” My new housemates were no substitute for Daanis. Sometimes I felt my books were the only companions I could count on. Not that I was blurting that out to a stranger in a bar. “Plus, it keeps the creepers away.”
He angled his head to see the cover. “Anne of Green Gables,” he read out loud and gazed into my eyes, and, yep, that was a definite tingle. “Is it working?”
I grinned. “Maybe.”
His smile was white and even. Good genes there. Or braces.
I didn’t learn until later that he was a resident—pediatric oncology!—at nearby Children’s Memorial Hospital, but even in those first moments I could see he had hazel eyes.
Just like Gilbert Blythe.
I’d never had a real boyfriend before. I’d certainly never dated anyone like Chris: financially stable, emotionally secure, dedicated to his career.
He was close to his parents, Dr. and Dr. Harris.
(His father was an orthopedic surgeon, his mother a dermatologist in Kenilworth.) He took care of sick children.
Plus, there was that square jaw, that tousled blond hair…
Basically, he was a prince out of a fairy tale.
Sure, he was frequently preoccupied or wiped out from long shifts at the hospital.
Sometimes he canceled plans or fell asleep on my couch.
Some weeks I only saw him on random nights for sex or Sunday mornings for brunch.
But Daniel and Mei-Ling, my closest friends in the house, had started hooking up, hanging out without me, and I was grateful to have Chris, someone to walk with in the park occasionally and talk to at the end of the day.
Spending the night at his cushy white-and-gray condo (a gift from his parents when he’d graduated from med school) felt like a vacation from my own life, my own place, where the hot water ran out in the shower before I’d rinsed my hair, where the sounds of sex came through the walls, where the living room always smelled like weed.
He met my parents in November, when they came for their once-a-year obligatory campus visit.
On Valentine’s Day, when his fraternity brother got married, I was his plus-one to the wedding.
We made plans, three weeks, three months ahead, like a real couple.
He cleared out half a drawer in his apartment for my clothes.
I started looking for teaching jobs in Chicago.
And then, two years ago, the world changed.
When the first stories about Covid filtered into my news feed, I barely paid attention. Some virus in China, an outbreak in Italy.
“Nowhere near us. Nothing to worry about,” my housemate Daniel said.
Mei-Ling elbowed him. “Speak for yourself. They’re calling it the Chinese flu.”
By March, the rumors and ripples had spread outward and inward into the academic community, lapping at the walls of my ivory tower, shaking the foundations of my comfortable life.
The dance marathon, canceled. Study abroad, canceled.
The university extended spring break by a week and then moved all classes online.
Everyone who left campus was told to stay home.
I called Chris from my parents’ house. “It’s only for a few weeks,” I told him.
“You don’t know that,” he said. “Nobody knows.”
“I miss you.”
“I miss you. But we have to prepare for the worst.”
Fear clutched my chest. By then, Chris and the other residents were working ninety-hour weeks, putting their training on hold trying to save the patients flooding the emergency department.
There were no vaccines yet. No antivirals.
There weren’t enough beds or portable oxygen tanks or personal protective equipment.
While I was gone, one of my housemates moved out, back to Ohio. Another one’s boyfriend moved in. Mei-Ling and Daniel called to tell me they were getting their own apartment.
“Our own pod,” Mei-Ling explained.
It seemed everybody I knew was coupling up, fast-tracking their relationships, taking the leap to cope with the enforced isolation of the pandemic.
“I think we should move in together,” I told Chris when we FaceTimed that night.
My boyfriend was a hero. The least I could do was be there to support him, to make sure he ate in the rare snatches between his shifts. I had fantasies of doing his laundry. Ordering his groceries. Learning to cook.
There was a silence, like the quiet of an exam room after a doctor has delivered bad news.
“Absolutely not,” Chris said. Through his plexiglass shield, I could see the lines carved by exhaustion, the purple bruises left by his tight-fitting N95. “If we lived together, I’d have to worry about you all the time.”
I squelched a squiggle of fear. “I’ll be fine.” Sure, the news out of the big cities—New York, London—was scary. But according to CNN, the virus mostly killed the elderly, right? I was young and healthy. “I’m more worried about you.”
“This is my job. My duty. I won’t risk bringing this home to you.” Sirens blared in the background. “If I even come home,” he added.
“Don’t say that. It’s bad luck.”
“I’m sorry.” He glanced offscreen. “I have to go.”
“Chris…”
“Don’t make this any harder,” he said. “On either one of us.”
Guilt sandbagged me into silence.
After graduation (live streamed), I spent the next two months surfing on my phone, watching Netflix from my parents’ couch, and making desultory stabs at my novel. Several novels.
Nothing held my attention.
The chatter of talking heads on TV, broadcasting from their makeshift home studios, trickled into my bedroom.
At night, I doomscrolled, clicking obsessively on every new guideline and breaking news story.
Writing had always been my escape, the place I could go when I was bored or lonely, where I could revise reality to suit myself.
But compared to the worldwide trauma of the pandemic, anything I had to say seemed so unimportant.
The imaginary woes of my fictional characters couldn’t hold a candle to the real-life suffering Chris was witnessing every day.
I felt us growing apart, separated by more than distance.
On Mackinac, the islanders’ main concern was the effect of the shutdown on the tourist season.
Mom was short-tempered. Worried about money, I guessed.
Dad was off all day doing projects for the big hotels that would normally have waited until the slow winter months.
Daanis was sequestered in her house with newborn Rose, lost to a world of breastfeeding and diapers.
I was lonely. Adrift. Useless.
“At least if we were living together, I could take care of you,” I argued to Chris.
“I appreciate that,” he said wearily every time I brought up the idea. “But it would be impossible to isolate if I got sick. The Midwest is already seeing a surge. Edelman says it will get even worse this winter.”
My brain was hijacked by horrible visions. What if he collapsed in the hospital parking lot? What if he died all alone in his apartment?
“I’m moving back to Chicago anyway. Sarah called.” My mentor at Ravenscrest. “I got the job! I start teaching at the end of August.”
“If schools are even open by then,” Chris said.
Not the reaction I’d been hoping for. “Sarah said we might be teaching remotely for the first few weeks. My point is, we can be together!”
“Honey, you know my shifts are crazy right now. I can’t sleep if you’re Zooming with a bunch of high school kids in the next room.”
“I’ll be quiet,” I promised.
“I’m sure you’ll try,” Chris said. “But I won’t expose you. I can’t expose my patients.”
So that fall, instead of moving into his Gold Coast condo, I signed a lease on a studio in Rogers Park with a separate, tiny alcove for a bed, where I holed up alone, learning to Zoom and order DoorDash and wipe down my groceries with Clorox wipes.
I brought the outdoors inside, filling the window over the fire escape with straggling rescue plants.
I ran errands for my elderly neighbor, Mr. Banerjee, and tried to connect with my students—whom I’d never met—online.
If I couldn’t save lives, like Chris, I could at least make them better. I could offer my poor confined students the hope and escape I’d always found in books.
But none of my classes at Northwestern had prepared me for sitting in a chair all day staring at a computer screen.
I was overwhelmed by the online workload—moderating discussion boards, updating my course websites and resources, answering the dozens of emails from students and parents that came at all hours of the day and night.
I missed the hints of progress, the tiny cues that only came from teaching face-to-face.
It was all worth it, I told myself. Because I had Chris.
Once or twice a week, he came from his shift at the hospital, freshly showered and wearing clean clothes to avoid infection.
Afterward, he slept like the dead, his body heavy beside me, his thick blond lashes shadowing his cheeks, while I listened to him breathe, my heart wrung with love and worry.
“Things will get better,” I told him (and myself). I wanted desperately for the world to return to normal, for us to go back to the way we were.
But even I had to admit that some things had changed forever.
Or maybe the problem was they hadn’t changed at all.
Two years later, our relationship was still stalled—stuck—in some pandemic Twilight Zone.
“Of course I love you,” Chris had said when my lease renewed in August. “But we have to be reasonable. My residency is up at the end of the year. A move simply doesn’t make sense right now. ”
He wasn’t wrong.
So the months passed. My plants withered slowly on the windowsill. My books overflowed my space.
My father died.