I wonder where she is, what other time or place. I hope it’s more real to her than here and now. That in the end it’s where she will choose to remain.
I imagine her existence shrinking down to the point of a pin, a hole in the fabric of the universe, before she jumps into another life.
She seems to be falling asleep. Gently, I reach for her glasses and slide them from her face. I let my hand linger along the soft swell of her cheek, her paper-thin skin. I set the folded glasses beside a paperback novel on the nightstand, and notice the deckled edge of an old photo that is sticking out from between the pages, like a bookmark.
I don’t know what makes me open the book to better see the image.
It’s a terrible picture of my mother, when she was young. The top half of her head is cut off, and her wide smile is blurry. Her hand is outstretched, like she’s reaching for something.
Someone.
Me.
I remember being the one behind the shutter, when I was no more than a toddler.
Here. You try.
I must make some small noise, because my mother blinks at me. “Have we been introduced?”
Surreptitiously, I slip the photo into my pocket. “Yes,” I tell her. “We’re old friends.”
“Good,” she says firmly. “Because I don’t think I can do this alone.”
I think of the staff, who might come in to check on her at any moment. Of this virus, and how if I catch it again, I may not survive a second time. “You don’t have to,” I tell her.
I don’t realize how late I am until I am in the Uber on my way back to the apartment, and see that Finn has left me a barrage of texts and six phone messages. “Where have you been?” he says, grabbing me when I walk through the door. “I thought something terrible happened to you.”
Something already did, I think.
I set down the toolbox I took with me. “I lost track of time,” I tell him. “My mother tested positive for Covid. There’s an outbreak at The Greens. But they told me I couldn’t visit.”
Finn’s fingers flex on my arms. “God, Diana, what can I do? It must be killing you to not be able to see her.”
I don’t say anything. My gaze slides away from his face.
“Diana?” he says softly.
“She’s dying,” I say flatly. “She has a DNR. The odds of her getting through this are virtually nonexistent.” I hesitate. “No one even knows I was in her apartment.”
Yet. Eventually someone will notice the torn screen.
He suddenly lets go of me. “You went into the room of a Covid-positive patient,” he states.
“Not just some patient—”
“Without wearing an N95 mask …”
“I took off my mask,” I admit. Now, in retrospect, it seems ridiculous. Risky. Suicidal, even. “She was scared and didn’t recognize me.”
“She has dementia and never recognizes you,” Finn argues.
“And I wasn’t about to let that be the last experience we had!”
A muscle leaps in his jaw. “Do you realize what you’ve done?” He spears a hand through his hair, pacing. “How long were you in contact?”
“Two hours … ?maybe three?”
“Unmasked,” he clarifies, and I nod. “For fuck’s sake, Diana, what were you thinking?”
“That I could lose my mother?”
“How do you think I felt about you?” Finn explodes. “Feel about you?”
“I already had Covid—”
“And you could get it again,” he says. “Or do you know more than Fauci? Because as far as we know right now, it’s a crapshoot. You want to know what we do know? The more time you spend in a closed-in space with someone contagious the more likely you are to catch the virus, too.”
My hands are shaking. “I wasn’t thinking,” I admit.
“Well, you weren’t thinking about me, either,” Finn shoots back. “Because now I have to quarantine and get tested. How many patients am I not going to be able to take care of, because you weren’t thinking?”
He turns like a caged animal, searching for an exit. “God, I can’t even get away from you,” Finn snaps, and he stalks into the bedroom and slams the door.
I am shaky on the inside. Every time I hear Finn moving around in the bedroom I jump. I know that he will have to come out sooner or later for food or drink or to use the bathroom, even as the shadows of the afternoon lengthen into the dark of night.
I don’t bother to turn on the lights. Instead, I sit on the couch and wait for the reckoning.