Chapter 2 #4
Jesse was almost at the door when he turned. “Ambrose,” he yelled, and I looked up. “Is it still right now?”
I remembered him last year in Memorial Park, a smile ghosting over his lips. Right now. I can work with that.
My throat was dry. I nodded.
He was smiling. I couldn’t see it behind his mask, but I knew. “Just for the record,” he called out over his shoulder, “I’m still waiting.”
Adelaide segues to questions about the plane crash in Philadelphia: what could have been done differently; where the limitations of emergency management grind up against the reality of disasters.
I assure her that my colleagues in Pennsylvania did all they could to be ready for an accident of these proportions.
“Armchair quarterbacking doesn’t work in emergency preparedness,” I tell her, “because no two disasters unfold the same way. Our work mitigates crises, but it can’t prevent them. ”
“And yet the blame often falls on departments like yours,” Adelaide muses.
She’s not wrong.
“In a crisis, emotions run high, and people demand answers. Nobody wants to be told there aren’t any,” I reply.
She shuffles her notes. “Do you think that’s what happened during the pandemic?”
My head whips toward her at the change in topic. “Well, that was an unprecedented situation.”
“Was it? You just said that every disaster is different, and there’s only so much preparation you can do.”
“And yet,” I say, “it was planning and forethought that allowed us to develop a vaccine for Covid at a blistering speed, and prevent millions more deaths.”
Here’s what I don’t say: that once we had the vaccine, we had to figure out how to inoculate a large group of people at one time when gathering a large group of people was guaranteed to spread the disease.
When we got up to speed, we were vaccinating ten thousand people a day in Rhode Island, but those shots couldn’t be randomly administered.
Public health departments got blamed for any hiccup, snafu, or delay.
They got blamed for mitigating measures like public distancing and masking and online schooling.
They got blamed when people who got vaccinated still got Covid—-even though the vaccine kept them from dying.
“We’ve had our first measles death in ten years in America,” Adelaide presses. “Are we prepared for another pandemic?”
I shrug. “I don’t have a crystal ball, and I don’t like to borrow trouble.
But you need to ask why measles are back.
Some parents said, ‘There aren’t measles, there aren’t mumps, so why should I give my kid an MMR shot for nothing?
’ When, of course, it’s all those inoculated babies that made it possible for us to eradicate those diseases.
Because of what happened during Covid, we’re never going to be able to command that kind of response again.
People won’t tolerate lockdowns, masks, vaccines.
” I look at Adelaide bleakly. “Public health doesn’t work when the public has lost its trust in you. ”
Jesse crossed my path so much it started to feel like fate.
I’d be overseeing the distribution of monoclonal antibodies to vans of nursing home residents, and I’d look up to see that he’d been pressed into service, managing traffic flow at the site.
I’d pull into Dunkin’ for takeaway coffee and the car behind me would flash its high beams—-I’d look in the rearview mirror to see him grinning, brows raised as if to say: I know, I can’t believe it, either.
I’d turn the corner at the grocery store and smash my cart into his.
That day, he’d texted me a meme of a shopping cart knocking over a massive display of watermelons, with the message: How’s your day going?
So of course I had to respond.
But that initial LOL became a sentence or two, and then a few text exchanges a day. When I mentioned that I had started running—-
a sentence that I never imagined would come out of my mouth, ever—-he asked me what route I took. When I went for my end--of--day run on the East Bay Bike Path later that week and Jesse was waiting, I didn’t even feign surprise. “How did you know what time of day I’d be here?” I asked.
“I didn’t,” he admitted, grinning. “I’ve been here since seven in the morning.”
We started exercising together, if you could call it that.
Usually our runs devolved into slow walks as we tried to buy time in each other’s company.
We talked about everything from whether NFTs were really art to William Shatner going to space to Squid Game.
Eventually, Jesse brought me to his office, showed me how a polygraph worked, and taught me that I’d been lying to myself: I wanted Jesse, even if I didn’t want to want him.
After that we merged our Covid bubbles. Time moved differently then, and our relationship settled quickly into necessity.
Air, food, water, and Jesse. I couldn’t get through a day without them.
I remember one night when he was called to Maine to do a polygraph, I was alone and the bed, the apartment, my life all seemed too big for a party of one.
When he came home, I tackled him on the couch.
“Guess you missed me,” he said, laughing.
One lazy Sunday, we were lying in bed and trying to tease each other into scenarios that would make us move from our blissed--out postcoital state. Jesse’s hand was tracing figure eights on my stomach; my hair was trapped under his shoulder. “Hunger,” I suggested, and on cue, my stomach growled.
“You can last days without any food,” Jesse pointed out. “Fire?”
“Well, obviously I’m not going to lie here while the mattress goes up in flames.”
“Challenge accepted,” he said, laughing, burying his face in my neck.
I almost believed he could succeed. I had never been as combustible with any other man.
“Zombie apocalypse,” I said, as Jesse kissed a path down the center of my body.
He paused, looking up at me. “What would you do in the case of a zombie apocalypse?”
“Make sure I had a way to get clean water—-you know, like a pot to boil it in or a tarp to catch the rain.” I frowned at him. “Why? What would you do?”
He smiled. “I’d let them eat me instead of you.”
“That’s a terrible solution,” I said. “I’d still die.”
“Yeah . . . but I’d never have to live a minute without you.” He crawled up my body, his gaze pinned to mine. “Marry me.”
I blinked at him. “I can’t marry you.”
“You won’t marry me,” Jesse corrected.
I shifted, pulling the sheets between us. “We’re at different points in our lives.”
“The age difference is nothing, Mol. The only reason I’m older than you is because I’ve been waiting for you to get here.”
I bit my lip. “The kind of job I have isn’t like being a detective. I get called at all hours of the night. I never have a day off.”
“But when you’re married to your job,” Jesse countered, “there’s no one to run an errand, or go grocery shopping, or do your laundry. I could be that person for you. If there is a national disaster, should you really be worrying about how much longer you can go without running out of underwear?”
“I have an obscene number of panties.”
“Good to know,” he said. “But maybe you could clear out just a few of them and give me a drawer.”
It was a compromise.
I threaded my fingers through his hair. “I’m allergic to fabric softener.”
Jesse’s dimple flashed. “Noted,” he murmured.
The cardinal rule of my job is to never let your guard down.
Even if you have never had a case of Ebola cross the border of your state, be ready.
Even if the odds of a tornado are slim in the Northeast, create a protocol.
So I suppose it is my own fault that I assumed this interview would be about the Philly crash and not the failings of emergency preparedness and public health during Covid.
I am getting ready to rip off my lavalier mic and end the grilling when Adelaide lobs a question that lands like a grenade at my feet. “Recently, the twenty--fifth anniversary of 9/11 passed. I understand you have a personal connection to that event?”
I stare daggers at Soo--Yun, whose attention is suddenly focused wholly on her phone.
Adelaide is a seasoned journalist. Of course she didn’t show up at the Department of Emergency Preparedness without knowing exactly who I was.
I steel my features. “My mother died in the attacks on the Twin Towers when I was two and a half months old.”
Adelaide nods, somber. “How old were you when you realized your mother was one of the casualties of 9/11?”
“I don’t really see what that has to do with emergency preparedness.”
I’m lying, of course.
I think, as I have a thousand times, about what I would do if I had a time machine and could go back to 9/11. Could I have saved her?
When I don’t respond, Adelaide presses. “Most people who lost a loved one as a child would run from a career where they face death and disaster on a daily basis.”
I take a deep breath and say, “When emergency preparedness works—-it’s magic.
Sometimes the plan is executed and the crisis is managed without a single death.
And when I put my head on my pillow those nights, I know that all those people lived because I did my job.
Nobody had to lose their mom, like I did. ”
“That,” Adelaide says, “is a wrap.”
I pull off the lapel mic, my face hot. I may be the forward--facing side of my division, but I keep my private life firmly hidden.
I say a cool but polite goodbye to Adelaide. I cross my office, stopping near Soo--Yun at the doorway. “I’m going to kill you,” I mutter under my breath.
“I know,” she says.
We spent Christmas 2021 at my tiny apartment.
I’d gotten Jesse a sweater that matched the cobalt of his eyes, a pair of running shoes to replace the ones that he’d duct--taped when a sole began to separate, and an “old man starter kit” with a pill organizer, a pair of reading glasses, and Metamucil.
The age difference had become a joke instead of a splinter under the skin. If it didn’t bother us, Jesse said, why should anyone else care?