Page 2 of Upstate

I didn’t expect David to get up when I did in the morning, but I was surprised to find him still asleep when I came home from my Saturday spin class.

“You must be getting old,” I teased him, “to be this hungover.” His only response was a piteous moan as I pulled him out of bed. He spent the day sprawled on the couch, ostensibly watching a soccer match but mostly napping while I prepared my coming week’s lessons. He roused himself on Sunday, our hands entwined as we made the rounds of farmer’s market stalls, the vendors all charmed by David’s lively banter. That afternoon, he rehearsed at home for an upcoming session while I finished my grading, his fiddle the soundtrack to my students’ stories.

Monday morning saw me rushing out to catch the Metro-North from Grand Central for my interminable commute to the college, which is so storied I felt like an imposter just stepping on campus. Though early in the month, March was already mild as a lamb, the lush lawns dotted with white snowdrops and purple crocuses. I wasn’t worried about anything other than work as I taught my creative writing class, did research in the library, met colleagues for lunch, led a memoir workshop, attended a committee meeting, and kept my office hours.

David’s forehead felt warm Wednesday morning, the same day the World Health Organization declared the Coronavirus a pandemic, but I told myself the two events couldn’t possibly be connected. We each went out into the world, David to his session, me to the college. The studio followed Broadway’s example and closed the next day, but classes weren’t canceled Thursday, so off I went to work, careful to wash my hands when I arrived on a campus suddenly awash in anxiety. Even though he’d been in the apartment all day, David texted that he didn’t have the energy to make supper, so on my way home I got takeout from the Ethiopian place on Eighth Avenue we both loved. I laid the food out on the table, spongy bread surrounded by a festive array of small dishes. Instead of starting to eat, David stared at the orange carrots and red lentils and green okra, hands limp in his lap.

“What’s the matter, aren’t you hungry?”

“It’s quite strange,” David said, his sorrowful eyes meeting mine, “but I can’t smell a thing.”

David’s temperature shot up to a hundred that night. On Friday morning, we called our primary doctor. He told us not to panic, that it was likely just a flu, not the same sickness people were dropping dead from in China. Lots of rest and fluids, he advised, and Tylenol for the fever. On Saturday, while the President tested negative and Congress passed their Coronavirus bill, David’s cough worsened until he sounded like a lost seal pup barking for its mother. I didn’t need any doctor’s diagnosis to know this wasn’t the flu.

At dawn on Sunday, I hauled David to his feet and bundled him into a winter coat. With my shoulder wedged beneath his arm, we somehow managed the harrowing descent down five flights of stairs.

It wasn’t until the cool outside air hit me that I realized I was starting to feel sick myself, too. Not nearly as bad as David, it really was more like a head cold, but I wasn’t thinking clearly when I hailed a taxi to take us to the nearest emergency room instead of calling for an ambulance. All that mattered in the moment was that my husband’s lips were turning blue, that he couldn’t catch his breath, that his fever hadn’t let up in days. It’s only later, when my thoughts turn back to that cab driver, that I’ll wonder if I’m a murderer as well as a widow.

We were confronted outside the emergency room by a triage nurse shrouded head to toe in personal protective equipment. From behind goggles and a mask, she screened David for fever and respiratory distress, then led us around the corner to a tent that had been set up on the sidewalk to handle the anticipated tide of Coronavirus patients. While the nurse settled David into a wheelchair, I was told to put his driver’s license and his green card and his insurance card in a plastic bag, which she clipped to a lanyard and hung around his neck. That’s when I realized I’d left his phone at home. In a panic, I blurted out, “How will he reach me?”

The nurse shook her head. “Listen, I’ve worked with Doctors Without Borders. I know how crazy this is going to get. Best thing you can do is write your phone number on his arm. Here.” She pulled up his sleeve and handed me a marker. My mind flashed to high school lessons about the Holocaust as I inked numbers onto my husband’s skin. When she swung his wheelchair around, I started to follow them inside. She stopped me. The hospital had new rules. No visitors allowed, not even spouses. David was rolled away so quickly, I never got to say goodbye.

It was Monday afternoon, thirty-two agonizing hours later, before a different nurse called with an update. David was in intensive care, she told me, on a ventilator to help him breathe. She said she was going to hold her phone to his ear so I could speak to him, that he might be able to hear my voice despite being drugged into a coma so he could tolerate the intubation tube. Between mechanical hisses of the machine, I said everything anyone could possibly say in a moment like that—all of which, I was surprised to realize, could be summed up in so few words they fit in the palm of one hand.

I love you. Come home.

I said it over and over and over again, as if casting a spell. I kept saying it after the nurse told me there were other patients she needed to see, other calls she needed to make. I continued saying those five words until I singsonged myself to sleep, the phone pressed to my breast like pledging allegiance.

“Hello, Audrey Beacon? Are you still there?”

The nurse’s voice yanks me back to the present moment. “Yes, sorry, I’m here.”

“Do you know what funeral home you want to handle your husband’s remains?”

I’m confused by this. To me, remainders are unsold books. Then I realize the nurse means his body, as in: The soul departs, the body remains. Where is David’s body now? I wonder. Is he alone? Is he cold? Is some exhausted orderly gawking at the tattooed snake that winds its way up his left calf or the flight of swallows that swoops over his right shoulder?

I force myself to think. We talked about this, once, while wandering like tourists among the headstones in Trinity Church Cemetery.

“David wanted to be cremated, so I guess it doesn’t matter.”

“All right, I’ll make a note of that. I have to go now, but one of the hospital social workers will be in touch with more information.”

“What about his jewelry?” There’d been no time, on the sidewalk, for me to remove the barbell from his ear or take off the claddagh ring that matched my wedding band.

“His effects will be returned to you, but it may take a while,” the nurse says. “Things are moving slowly right now, as you can imagine.”

“Slowly?” My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth as I echo the word. Each of the hours since I left David at the hospital has felt like an eternity, the circular face of the clock having ballooned into a sphere around which each minute must travel before the hand can tick forward. But with news of his death, that sphere has shrunk to a speck. The seconds spin by too fast. I’m not prepared for David to be in the past.

“Is there anything you need before I let you go?”

“No,” I lie, the size of my need too vast for words.

What I need is someone to stand in for the parents I’ve already lost, the siblings I never had, the grandparents who are strangers to me. I need someone to place the call to David’s parents in Ireland, to spare me the sight of their stricken faces on a screen when I tell them their son is dead. I need a time machine, an escape hatch, a spaceship to fly through a wormhole at warp speed. I need my husband to put down his fiddle, take off his boots, and say he’s decided to skip the gig and stay home, with me.

Chapter 2

Having a disembodied voice tell me David is dead is like stepping into an open manhole. The feeling of falling lasts for days. Even after my fever breaks, leaving me limp as a wrung-out rag, I don’t trust myself to stand. I crawl across the apartment floor whenever I need to use the toilet, or get a glass of water, or down another shot of gin. Plugging my ears against the incessant sound of sirens, I close the curtains, sleep at all hours, lose track of time. When the order comes to shelter in place, I hardly notice the difference.

I hear on the radio that schools are closed, trains stopped running, flights canceled. I turn on the television news and imprint on Governor Cuomo like a lost duckling that will follow anything that looks like a leader. The Javits Center—where last year, at a bustling book expo, I signed copies of my memoir, Dad’s Apprentice, and pitched my editor a sequel about how my mom went missing when I was ten—is converted into a military field hospital. Alone in the apartment, my eyes sore from crying, I cradle my essential alcohol and stream Contagion like it’s an instructional video. Though I never got as sick as David, I’m certain I had Covid, too. I suppose that means I’m immune now, like Matt Damon’s character in the movie. I have a dream in which he and I are the only survivors of the pandemic, the two of us responsible for repopulating the planet. Matt Damon is unbuttoning my blouse when I wake up weeping.