“Just think about it,” she says, switching off the light.
We snuggle again, pretending to be calm once more but I know it will take me hours to fall asleep having had this grenade of uncertainty thrown into the future I am imagining.
I can’t help but ask, “What made you think of this?”
“I’m a professor of Renaissance history with decades of knowledge of the ways in which female artists and inventors have had their work stolen, Lisa. Use that enormous brain of yours.”
ELIZABETH
London, United Kingdom
Day 275
Everything is falling into place. Like summer follows spring, once we identified the genes responsible for vulnerability to the Plague, and understood the origin of the virus, we created a test for immunity: a finger-prick blood test that can be rolled out around the world, with the use of a simple machine and no need for a scientist to assess the blood, to identify the genetic markers for the Plague virus. We had the press conference yesterday—George, Amaya and I in front of this mass of women with cameras and phones and notepads—and I felt so proud. The practicalities of how men can be tested without those who are vulnerable being infected still needs to be worked out, but for the first time, I feel hopeful. I’m working in a team renowned around the world, we’re at the cutting edge of Plague research and, if things continue the way they have been, we’ll have a vaccine within a year or so.
Working with Amaya has been life-changing, partly because she has literally changed the world with her discoveries and made me a better scientist, but also because of her demeanor. I said to George a few weeks after we started working with her, “The lab feels different, what is it? It’s good different.” He just pointed at Amaya, sitting in her glass office reading a report, and that said it all.
Where I’m nervous, she’s calm. Where I try to buoy people up with optimism that’s sometimes delusional, she makes a plan to survive every possible outcome. Where I had boxed myself into my work out of fear and desperation to find a vaccine, my friends and Simon have forced me to live a little. And I really do mean a little. I’m not going out to raves or anything—where does one find a rave? Are they advertised?—but they’ve taken me off the course to burn out I was so slavishly following. I sleep, I rest, I spend time with Simon, who makes me laugh and shows me his favorite parts of Regent’s Park—“the most underrated park in London.” He cooks spaghetti Bolognese and I teach him what biscuits are （my kind, not the English kind） and we watch TV curled up together on the sofa in his tiny, warm, cozy, book-filled flat in Hampstead. Sometimes I want to pinch myself but I repeat to myself that I deserve good things and that maybe, just maybe, Simon and I are meant for each other. For the first time in a long time, I dare to make plans. Simon talks about marriage and if I’d like to go back to the States one day and asks what baby names I like. “Rose for a girl, Arthur for a boy,” I reply, stunned and thrilled. There’s so much happiness all of a sudden that at times it feels ludicrous. Why me? And then I remember the bravery of coming to London, of persuading George to make me his deputy, of asking Simon on a date, of reaching over and kissing him and I think, no one handed me any of this. I built this weird, challenging, rewarding life in London for myself. Why not me?
It’s still difficult, and the days are long. At times it feels like such a grind I wish more than anything a vaccine would just drop down from the sky, but we’re making progress. We have solid, tangible achievements—a genome sequenced, a test created—that we can hold out, and say to the world, “Look, we know what we’re doing. We have done something good. We will beat this.”
CATHERINE
London, United Kingdom
Day 295
My house is eerily quiet. I never realized the difference between the sound of a sleeping house and an empty one but it’s so stark, I can’t believe I never noticed it before. I used to work at the dining table, Anthony sleeping soundly in our bedroom and Theodore deep in slumber next door to him. The house was still but full as I worked, content in the knowledge my family was safely ensconced a floor above me. Now, it is so empty I keep the doors shut and spend most of my time in the kitchen as if I can trick my mind into forgetting the mausoleum that exists beyond this one room.