Love Gone Viral

by Meg Napier

  “Nothing?” Somehow I was standing on the ground across from him, steadying the hammock as he got out, too. “Sick kids? They poisoned the water table—in a part of the world where the water table is barely below the surface.”

  “Yes,” he said, ducking under the hammock and coming for me. “All right? They’re the devil and I’m the devil’s advocate. Or Philip is, and I work for him. I don’t like it, but that’s why I’m here. Can we stop talking now?”

  He backed me against a tree and caged me in with his strong arms. This kiss was the best yet. Barely any teeth and quite a lot of heat. I purred and put my objections aside. For now.

  Quarantine: Day 5

  Philip tailed me on my morning run again. I’d been stewing over the Little Hell oil spill all night. When I should have been dreaming of Darren, I was hunched over my computer researching Kemper Oil.

  By the time I laced up my running shoes, I was bubbling with fury. God, I hated a bully.

  Philip trailed me until I took the road for Little Hell. I was listening and I knew the minute he peeled off and went back to the route we ran the day before.

  I, on the other hand, was angry enough to run the seven miles to Little Hell, which is barely a wide place in the road, and then had to walk back exhausted. At least my fatigue made me too weary to give that man a piece of my mind when I got back…

  …which I still could have done, as Philip appeared at lunch looking like a child who had lost his mommy.

  “I’m finished,” he said simply.

  Kumiko fluttered around him. Turned out he’d done everything he could possibly think of while away from the office and was now at loose ends.

  Based on the reactions of Darren, Kumiko, and Saul’s face on the Zoom call, this was utterly unheard of; it had never happened before that the Puzzle Master had no puzzles to solve. I had a moment when I actually felt sorry for him.

  “Then you can come with us this afternoon!” Kumiko chirped like a cricket. “Mrs. Kilburn was just saying she wanted to make clam chowder for dinner, so Mr. Kilburn needs to take us clamming!”

  My parents had, in fact, had that exact conversation, but it was assumed that it would be Darren and me who’d do the clamming, and Kumiko who would stay at the B&B and stare hopefully at Philip’s cottage. Suddenly she was all for life on the high seas.

  And so off we went on Dad’s slow-moving party barge, the flat-bottomed floater that was ideal for taking guests onto the water or checking crab pots on a quiet day. Saul insisted he could avoid needing desperate medical care for a few hours, so even Mom sun-blocked her nose and put on her bathing suit.

  Dad set the anchor in about three feet of water and gracelessly jumped into the bay. He stood hip-deep on a sand bar and waited to hand out buckets. “Come on,” he said.

  Philip spoke for the group. “I thought you clammed with a rake in the mud.”

  “Not here in the bay. Come in. I’ll show you. Help them in, Joan.”

  I didn’t push Philip Blackstone in because I was a well-brought-up person, but I thought about it. Soon we were all on the sand bar, the sky and the mirror-flat water stretching all around us.

  “Feel around in the sand with your toes,” Dad instructed. He walked slowly away, scrunching his toes as he went. “There!” He did an awkward little dance as he dug into the sand with his foot. “Feels like a softball. Now, you can sort of walk it up your leg if you want to keep your upper half dry, but really, once the clam is out of the sand, it’s easier to…” He ducked down up to his neck in the water and stood again, a large Quahog clam in his triumphant hand. He put it in the bucket that floated next to him. “Go on. We need a couple dozen for dinner tonight. Off you go.”

  And off we went. It’s silly, fun, wet, sunny work.

  “Ooh, I’ve got three over here!”

  “I can’t find any.”

  “I’ve got one!”

  “Hey! Grab my hat!”

  Pretty soon, we’d lost track of any divisions between us. It wasn’t lawyers and Kilburns. It was just a group of people clamming and grinning and enjoying the summer…

  …until I found myself within grumble range of Philip Blackstone, who was clamming with an alarming focus, unseeing eyes ignoring any sensory input in favor of the feeling in toes that usually wore bespoke shoes and trampled on the rights of the little people.

  “Nice that this clam bed hasn’t been poisoned by Kemper Oil, isn’t it?” I hissed.

  He reacted as if my words were wasps. He turned from me rudely and walked away. I was fine with that. Battle lines were drawn and now he knew I was gunning for him.

  On the ride back to the inn, we were slowly drying on the deck when Darren uttered a dry little cough.

  Immediately all eyes turned to him and we instinctively drew back.

  “Oh, no!” cried Kumiko.

  “It’s nothing. I’m sure.” Darren waved us away. And then he coughed again. He looked up in horror. “Shit!”

  We were all paralyzed. Then Philip barked at his underling. “Darren. Inhale. Deep as you can.”

  Darren complied and immediately fell to coughing.

  “Sense of smell? Taste? Seem normal to you?”

  Darren shrugged, looking scared. “I guess. Except maybe…”

  “All right,” Philip said. “Back of the boat. Go on, Darren—back there. Mr. and Mrs. Kilburn, will you come up here to the front, please?”

  “I’m driving,” Dad protested. I cut him off and stepped to the wheel.

  “Not any more. I’m driving. Up front, Dad. Take Mom. Go on.”

  Kumiko went with them, leaving her folding chair to stand as far upwind from Darren as she could.

  The rest of the ride was silent and fearful. We were unprotected in the presence of the virus. I kept the boat going as fast as I could to create the wind that would take Darren’s toxic breath away from my parents. But a party barge is no speed boat, and the drive seemed endless. I had plenty of time to consider the implications of not just being close enough to breathe the same air as Darren but in fact close enough to taste the same tongue… The nurse and I were going to have to have a little chat about how much more that increased my risk.

  At the dock Philip made Darren wait until my parents were inside the house, Kumiko on their heels. “Into your room, now, Darren. Take anything you’ll need for a while.”

  “I’m fine,” Darren protested, but there was fear in his eyes and he immediately admitted, “I do feel kind of shitty.”

  “Right. Into your room. Joan, will you call the healthplex, please, and ask Saul’s nurse to bring a testing kit when she comes this afternoon.”

  Astonishingly, he remembered to bring the bucket of clams when he escorted Darren to his room.

  Quarantine: Day 6 (Saul), Day 2 (Darren)

  The nurse, a weary-looking woman named Becky, agreed that Darren had all the symptoms of the Coronavirus but advised that the rest of us remain calm. Sure. Easy for her to say. She hadn’t been smooching in a hammock with Typhoid Mary.

  I pulled her aside and had a hurried, whispered conversation about the increased likelihood of contracting, and worse, passing on the virus from someone with whom, let’s just say for instance, you’d been kissing.

  “Mouth-to-mouth contact won’t help,” she said, “but you’re all pretty much living together. I’d say you’re just as likely to get it as if you hadn’t been making out with the handsome young man.”

  She gave me a look—she was tired but not too tired to find a little morbid humor in her job—and turned to us all.

  “Some people never get it. Some people get it and don’t ever know they have it. Some people get it and get over it easily and quickly. You should continue to self-quarantine, but there’s no sense in wasting energy getting overly upset about this. We’ll deal with each case as it comes, and I can have the doctor check in if anyone gets too sick.”

  “Test us!” Kumiko demanded. “Test us all!”

  Becky, clearly having heard simi
lar demands before, just smiled and took Darren’s swab away with her. “I’ll be back tomorrow to check on both patients. Sugar and salt for them. Push the apple juice and Gatorade. The rest of you—stay calm. Stay outside as much as possible. Wash your hands. Don’t touch your faces.” The words came out of her like a recording, except she grimaced at me as she advised us on limiting face contact. Thanks, Becky.

  Kumiko went into isolation, refusing to leave her room. “You can bring my meals to the door. I’m not coming out again until I can leave!”

  I would have mocked her for being faint of heart, except I’d actually found myself in tears while begging my parents to do the same.

  They refused.

  That night at dinner, I took bowls of fresh clam chowder to three locked doors and scurried back down to the dining room. Mom and Dad and I made awkward conversation with Philip—The Enemy.

  On Darren’s second day of quarantine, I tried to flirt with him through the door but it didn’t go well; we didn’t know each other well enough. I’d armed him with all the supplies I’d bought. Garbage bags so he could throw away all the disposable plates, bowls, forks I brought with his meals. Thermometer. Pulse-ox reader. Tylenol for the fever. Precious Mucinex.

  There wasn’t anything else I could do.

  I slumped back to the main room and found Philip equally at loose ends.

  I looked at him and thought about children in Little Hell sick because of the client that he defended and the anger rose up in me. Maybe I was looking for someone to blame for the Coronavirus. I didn’t know all of my down-deep motivations, but I eyed him cruelly.

  “Philip, let’s take a bike ride.”

  I got him to Little Hell by a route he hadn’t seen before so he couldn’t peel off before we arrived the way he had on my run, but he recognized the hamlet when we arrived. I pulled over in the shade and let my bike fall on the shoulder of the road.

  “You recognize this place now, huh?” I was pugnacious, longing to pick a fight.

  He nodded, but didn’t speak.

  “I’ve been reading about this place online. The local papers have tried to get national attention but someone keeps suppressing the news. Was that you?”

  He was looking across a dusty yard where a rusted swing set sat forlornly in the sun. He heaved a sigh. “Public relations firm. Not my department.”

  “But you know the kids are really sick. Don’t you?”

  He was silent and then turned to me. The eyes of the Puzzle Master were on me and I began to regret trying to pick a fight. “Why do you care?”

  “Why? Why should I care that a huge multinational oil conglomerate has destroyed the health of a community? Are you seriously asking me that question?”

  He didn’t move; I was pinned like a bug by his eyes. His sudden question shocked me.

  “Are you Killer Joan?”

  Wow. I was astonished. His mind was quick. “I used to be. What made you think that?”

  He’d assessed me and now dismissed me. He looked away. “The way you talk. It sounded like this pain in the ass investigative journalist that used to give my firm a hard time in Goshen.”

  “The Goshen spill? That was you?”

  “It was my firm. Joan Kilburn is Killer Joan. I should have known.” He shook his head in disgust.

  “Didn’t help, though, did it? You won. Those people never stood a chance.”

  “They got a better settlement than we’d predicted, and you were a big part of that. My research never figured out who you were. Are you still in the business? Is that what you’re doing here?”

  I was as disgusted with him as he was with me. “No. If I was, I’d nail you to the wall for this one. And it still wouldn’t do me any good, would it? You bastards always win.”

  “I absolutely hated you.”

  “Me, too. I mean, I absolutely hated you.”

  “I’m heading back now.” He went to his bike.

  “You’ll get lost.”

  “I have GPS on my phone. Goodbye, Killer Joan.”

  I could have caught up with him, but I felt too befouled to make the effort. Bastard.

  Quarantine: Day 7 (Saul), Day 3 (Darren)

  Mom and Dad hadn’t noticed the tension between me and their last remaining visible guest. Philip announced that he preferred to eat alone on the deck of his cottage and I stomped over with a tray that I did NOT spit in—an act of tremendous restraint on my part.

  I called Darren to croon to him. I sat on the floor outside his door and poured out my disgust at his law firm’s big client into the phone. I realized how thoroughly I’d bought into the idea of a long-term romance with Darren when I found myself asking a true “girlfriend” question that I had no actual right to ask.

  “When we get back to New York, you’d consider getting a different job, wouldn’t you?” Even as I said it, I knew I was expecting too much from the big, good-looking child on the other side of the phone.

  “Change jobs?” he said. “Are you kidding? Do you know how much money I’ll make this year? The bonus alone should be enough for me to get in line for a membership in the New York Yacht Club.”

  Oh, Darren. Golden hero with feet of clay. “Do you have a yacht?” I asked forlornly.

  “Well, no. Not yet.”

  “Okay. Well. Let me know if you need anything.”

  “I could use one of those kisses,” he said with an audible leer.

  “See you in a few weeks.” It was the first time I was glad for the door between us. Worse, it was clear to me that if he’d given me the virus, and if I then passed it on to my parents, it would be no one’s fault but my own… and maybe he hadn’t been worth the risk after all.

  Quarantine: Day 8 (Saul), Day 4 (Darren)

  Mom and I scrubbed the bed and breakfast. Every surface we could find, we hit it with Lysol. Anything that could be thrown in the washing machine got put through on the “sanitize” setting. We dragged rugs to the porch railing and beat the dust out of them with brooms.

  “We only moved in two years ago,” Mom panted. “How did it all get so dirty?”

  “Don’t know,” I gasped back. “Sand. A lot of sand on sandy feet.”

  “I guess that’s right.”

  Once everything was back in place, I sent her for a nap and sat on the back deck in the afternoon sunlight. I watched as Dad and Philip returned from checking the crab pots, tying up the party barge at the dock.

  “Make Mom lie down,” I shouted to my father. “I can hear her in your apartment cooking something.”

  “I’m fine,” she called out the window.

  “Stop cooking,” Dad called. “We’re going to have a crab feast tonight, the four of us. Five,” he called to Kumiko’s balcony, “if you want to join us.”

  “I told you! I’m not coming out of this room!”

  And here I’d thought I was relaxing in my solitude. Ears were everywhere in this wide-open inn.

  Philip paused at the foot of the steps. I gave him my best “Keep moving, bub” stare, but he ignored the unspoken message.

  “I can’t find your byline anywhere online,” he said. “Who are you tormenting now?”

  I tried to ignore him, but he simply stood there, waiting me out. “No one,” I finally admitted. “I’m no longer an investigative journalist.”

  “Why not? You were inconveniently good at it.”

  “Haven’t you heard? Journalism is dying. I might have been good at it, but I wasn’t good enough to get a job with the big guys. And all the little guys went out of business years ago.” Did I sound bitter? I tried not to.

  “Huh. What are you doing now?”

  Self-revulsion threatened to overwhelm me. I hated my job enough without having to admit it to someone like him. “I’m in social media.”

  “What does that mean?”

  I was a puzzle he wanted to solve; I wished he’d go drown himself in a crab pot. “It means I’m paid to make Bright! an appealing lifestyle brand.”

  “Bright?�
��

  “No. Bright! With an exclamation point. It’s trademarked.” I tried to sound huffy; I’m pretty sure I failed.

  “Bright the laundry detergent?”

  “Isn’t it a dish soap?” My question slipped out before I could self-edit. He grinned, showing off surprisingly even and white teeth.

  “You don’t even know if it’s a dish soap or a laundry detergent?”

  “I’m not in advertising!” I protested. “I don’t talk about the crap. I post about the kind of people who like Bright!” I remembered his phrase when he admitted his firm didn’t handle public relations for Kemper Oil and flung it back in his face. “It’s not my department.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  I was uncomfortably aware that he probably saw a great deal more than I’d wanted him to.

  “You used to fight for justice and compassion and now you shill for a dish soap.”

  My lip curled in contempt—for him, for me, for the world, but I still corrected him, now that I knew. “For a laundry detergent.”

  “That’s crazy,” he opined.

  I sighed. “I know.”

  Quarantine: Day 9 (Saul), Day 5 (Darren)

  I was setting up the lunch trays for our invalids and faux-invalid when my mother appeared, chewing her lip and regarding me with nervous concern.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Now, Joan, don’t be upset.”

  I put down the paper plates and fisted my hands on my hips. “What now?”

  “Well, he’s fine. I’m sure he’s fine…” Her voice trailed off and my heart stopped. I grabbed her shoulder.

  “What?”

  “Your father has a little fever. And a cough.”

  My world grayed out a little. “No, no, no, no, no,” I found myself muttering.

  “Joan! Are you all right, dear?”

  I rounded on her. “How are you, Mom? Do you have a fever?”

  “I’m fine! Don’t you worry. It will be fine. I’m going to take care of him…”