Chapter 22
APRIL
“IT’S POSITIVE.”
I cough to punctuate the positive test, but the cough isn’t bad. This is what we keep repeating those first few days: it’s a mild case.
Sadie is three. We’ve heard that the virus isn’t bad for children, but we don’t want to find out. We don’t want to be the exception. So I don’t leave the bedroom.
Six days pass. Seven.
On the morning of day eight, Leo leaves a plate outside the bedroom door: an egg hash with bell pepper and mushroom.
A mug of hot broth. My appetite is robust again, and my cough has waned to a crescent of sound, soon to disappear completely.
I wait a minute after his knock before opening the door to retrieve my breakfast. We’ve got quarantine down to an art.
The steam from the broth hits my face, and Sadie giggles in the distance.
Leo makes animal sounds. I hear him whinny and know he is crawling around with Sadie on his back.
Leo, I think, his name a prayer of gratitude.
The current of Sadie’s entrance into our lives almost carried us away from each other, but we’re still here, living through times we couldn’t have imagined.
Actually, no. Suffering is easy to imagine. It’s our responses that take us by surprise. The ways trials edit who we are.
I stack my mug on the empty plate and set it outside the door, turning back to the bedroom, where I begin to walk around, my morning ritual.
Then I take a bath and watch The Office and call Josie, these powder-blue walls my refuge and my cage.
I put the pulse oximeter on my fingertip: ninety-eight, ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-nine.
I organize our dresser drawers, rolling Leo’s undershirts, pausing at the swimsuit drawer and running my fingers over his American flag swim trunks, thinking of our trip to South Padre, the sun-hot skin of his broad shoulders as I smeared sunscreen across them.
The day we learned how to eat lobster, its salty tang as we passed the metal lobster cracker back and forth.
I’m not sure when I fall asleep, but it’s dark when I awaken.
This hodgepodge of hours has become normal, but something isn’t right this time.
My brain is slamming into my skull. I try to sit but am too weak.
With wincing effort, I stretch for my phone, thermometer, pulse ox.
Fever is high, oxygen is low. Ninety-three percent.
The doctor said ninety-three was the lower limit.
So I’m okay, but barely. Drenched and increasingly confused, I manage to text Leo: OX 93. BAD FEVER/HEADACHE. ICE BY DOOR PLZ.
Next thing I know, the door is opening in slow motion.
I protest, but not out loud. Leo walks toward me like a hologram.
The sight of his beautiful face sets off an internal siren: Sadie.
Danger. I fall back asleep and wake to Leo placing pills on my tongue, instructing me to swallow.
Swallow again. He’s touching my mouth? I’m furious; I’m contagious.
But I don’t have energy to shout, I don’t even have energy to speak.
My pain is so severe that I think my skull might explode, a bursting dam of bone.
For a second it’s all I want, death. Ice is rubbed across my neck, freezing drops of water pearling down my shirt.
I’m eating lobster in the sun, a tender gradient of pink meat behind claws.
And through it all, Leo. My prayer. My deliverer.
The sun is bright, but I am not at the Gulf.
I’m in my blue bedroom with a dusty ceiling fan circulating above me.
Hair is sticking to my forehead in cool, drying sweat.
I turn my neck like a crank. It doesn’t hurt anymore.
Leo is beside me, new hair growth above his lips, on his chin, his cheeks.
I try to lift my finger to touch it, but I’m caught in the mouth of the pulse ox, red lines forming square numbers: ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-nine.
“Sadie…” The name comes out of me with less effort than the person did, but barely.
“Sadie’s fine. She has Bluey and chicken nuggets.”
“Time?” My mouth is arid.
“Five. How’s your head?”
I pause to check. “Better. What was the medicine?”
“Steroid.”
“How’d you get—”
“I called the doctor when you said your oxygen was ninety-three. She prescribed a steroid and said to go to the emergency room if it hit ninety-two. It never did.” He looks at me, and I can see the fear in his eyes like a tide receding. “I almost took you anyway.”
“But now you might get sick and—”
“Please don’t. You stopped responding to texts. You didn’t get your ice from the hall or answer when I knocked. So I made a decision, and I don’t regret it.”
The words slink around the room. I made a decision, and I don’t regret it.
“I’m not mad.” I drag my hand to his face, pulse ox and all. “I’m thankful.”
There on two pillows—mine flattened and yellowed from sweat—we face each other, eyes flecked with shared evanescence.
“Daddy?” Sadie is at the door.
Leo shoots upright. “Remember to stay at a distance. Do you need more food?”
She looks at me cautiously, with what appears to be a pinprick of ketchup on her chin. “Hi, Mama,” she says.
I want to see my daughter, but I don’t want my daughter to see me like this. My syllables are more catches of breath than sound as I say, “Hi, sweetheart.” I’ve never done anything as hard as not hugging her right now.
Sadie grins from well over six feet away, obedient. “You like Daddy’s mouth brow?” She says it like bwow.
It takes me a beat, and then I laugh for the first time in nine days. It reverberates through the warehouse of my head, and I take a deep breath against the flare of pain.
Leo grooms his mustache dramatically as Sadie adds, “He say you not like.”
“Well, he was wrong. I do like it. He looks like Zorro.”
Leo laughs.
Sadie dons a quizzical expression. “Like sorrow?”
I say to Leo under my breath, “Keep it a while?”
So he does. And he doesn’t get sick. Neither does Sadie.
It takes a month for my headaches to subside, but gradually, finally, they do.
In the shower, I stare down at myself as hot streams of water leave cherry-red dots on my stomach like a rash.
The last time I liked my body was high school, before it was given to sickness or men or a baby.
I try to reconcile this soft, pale, veiny sight with what it once was, and I feel like the picture of weakness, having spent the last month needing to rebuild basic daily stamina.
But then that thought shifts like a foundation, the whole thing settling just a bit differently.
For a few luminous minutes, I get a sense of gratitude.
It’s this body—this version of this body—that has shown staying power.
I’m strong and able to survive. My insecurities will return, but not before I put on a lacy negligee for the first time in years and let my husband leave the light on.
My body is alive, it is loved, it is capable of pleasure.
Leo ascends me like a ladder to heaven. The mustache is a new experience, and I like it.
A few weeks later, I emerge from the same bathroom where I so recently sluiced cold water onto my virus-riddled face, my undereyes like black, upside-down umbrellas, and my nose raw from the rub of tissues.
It’s the same bathroom where I rinsed my freshly loved self after the negligee and mustache.
I emerge from that bathroom and pass through the blue bedroom where Leo and I once had no furniture or clothes, only dots of paint on our skin like marks on maps.
The same bedroom that housed our newborn and me through diaper leaks and sprays of milk.
The same bedroom that saw my oxygen thin out and return.
I take a deep breath now, because I can.
Because sometimes you have to allow for life, even with all the uncertainty.
I emerge from that bathroom, through that bedroom, past our sleeping daughter and into the hushed living room with the woven light fixture, under which my husband sits and waits, clasping his hands.
I smile, wide and girlish.
Leo stands and steps toward me.
I touch my belly, nodding.
“It’s positive.”