He stood up, out of breath. A cough rising out of him that threatened to heave out his insides. You scrambled away, the glass on the floor piercing your hands and back, until you could find the wall to lean on.
“I fucking knew it,” you said. “You’re sick. You’re fucking spreading it, you piece of shit.”
Your neighbor wouldn’t stop coughing. He grabbed at his chest with one hand and covered his mouth with the crook of his other arm. He swayed like a boxer trying to keep his legs just seconds before the sound of the bell. Between coughs, he gasped and tried choking out words, but they were indecipherable.
You found your strength—what little of it—again and stood up. You matched his movements. It was a sloppy drunk ballet. “I could hear you. I could hear your little fucking friend too. Going out. Playing around. Spreading this fucking disease. How many people do you think you’ve killed, eh? How many old ladies are coughing their fucking lungs out now? Look at you.” You pointed at him mockingly. “Poor you. Keep coughing, motherfucker. Keep fucking coughing and die. We need you all to wipe yourselves out. Then we can get back to normal.”
You didn’t have to wonder if you meant the words anymore. It was what you felt. This quarantine made you an honest person for the first time in your life. It didn’t matter anymore; you could simply be you. So you watched him cough and you reveled in it. The chant in your head, ‘Die motherfucker, die,’ repeated until your wish came true.
Weeks later, you remained in isolation. The death toll spiked again. The rules became sturdier and less likely to roll back. But you were ready, and you were content to live the life you now felt at ease with.
Of course, there’d been the aftermath of the bastard next door.
They came within minutes of the last dry breath. Three officers all wearing personal protective equipment from head to toe. They collected the body and put you in handcuffs. They questioned you.
“I would have killed him,” you told them, “I wanted to kill him. But I didn’t. I was too weak.” The truth set you free, even if they wanted to lock you up. But they couldn’t. This was your property and the body was at the threshold—proof that your neighbor had entered without consent—flimsy proof, but hey, a win is a win—and the police had no interest in dealing with anything else once you told them he had been coughing and coughing. With that ghost of a threat in the air, everyone wanted to be out of your apartment. They left you back to the bliss of solace.
You made a new list, though. You realized you needed to be ready in case anyone else tried to spread the disease to your safe space. You cleaned the treadmill off. You wrote up an exercise regimen. You watched hours of videos on knife handling and throwing. You decided to keep a kitchen knife within reach of your front door—knives within reach of all doors.
You were feeling good, though. You lost five pounds in two weeks. You brought your sourdough starter back to life and found some great new recipes to try over the weekend. You even landed a brand-new contract for work with minimal effort.
You sat on your couch and checked emails. You finished your mint tea—and made a mental note to order more teabags. You closed your eyes and listened to the sirens a moment, a mental break to remember what the world was like. All that death and chaos outside would be unbearable, but you knew you could make it. You had your head back and you had your new list. Everything would work out, even if you didn’t feel safe. Maybe it was better to never feel safe; to embrace that the world was now at war with you and the only means to succeed in this war was to simply survive.
Or maybe you’d walk away from this a really great baker.
Then you coughed.
By Steve Weddle
The garage door lumbered closed, and I stepped out of Nancy’s new-to-us car as she stood inside the kitchen and opened the door to the house.
“Were you nice to Amber?” she asked.
“At the grocery store?”
“My new car.”
Opening the trunk, I said, “You named your car ‘Amber’?”
“I told you that last month when we got her.”
“This car is brown.”
“Fine, but her name is ‘Amber,’ and I was asking if you were nice to her.”
I pulled two New Yorker magazine tote bags of groceries from Amber’s trunk, walked them up the steps, then went back for an Edgar Allan Poe tote. At that point, we were down to the store’s “Is plastic OK?” bags.
“We have more tote bags in the hall closet,” Nancy said when she noticed I’d run out. We weren’t used to buying groceries for so many people.
“I’ll put them in for next time,” I said, bringing out the final plastic bags, one with a frozen loaf of garlic bread pondering a tumbling escape.
Nancy pulled the loaf of bread from the bag as I got to the top of the steps and closed the door behind me. “The governor just said no trips to the stores for the next two weeks, at least.”
“Groceries and pharmacies are exempt,” I said, setting cans of vegetables on the counter next to the stove. Peas and carrots. Corn. Peas and carrots, again.
“In Italy and France,” I started.
“We’re not in Italy or France. And if we were, Bella could just drive home.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice,” I said.
“Now, be nice,” Nancy replied, and lightly smacked me in the head with a 40 oz. MegaBag! of Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries.
Just before the Great Pandemic Lockdown, my daughter and two of her friends—one from Italy, one from Germany—were on their college’s spring break. We had picked them up from the airport to take them back to school, all three still jumping from a week in Paris. But like most colleges, theirs never reopened from spring break. Then the international flights stopped. My daughter, Annie, now had her two friends, Bella and Sofie, living here with her, me, my wife, and our teenage son, Brayden (I lost a bet with my wife, so she got to name him).
We’d finished putting the groceries away and Nancy handed me a sheet of paper.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Can you just look at it before you ask?”
So I looked at it. Grids, boxes. A calendar for the week, each with slots for two meals.
Hamburgers. Italian spaghetti. Greek spaghetti. Pizzas. Baked potato bar. Breakfast for dinner. Grilled cheese and tomato soup.
“I could only get one loaf of bread because the store had a limit,” I told her. “Not sure about grilled cheese for everyone.”
“Scheisse,” she snarled.
I laughed. “See you’re picking up some German while the kids are here.”
“Learned a new one today, but I don’t know what it means. Just that it makes the girls laugh.”
“Well, go ahead,” I said.
My wife cleared her throat, leaned in and whispered, “Steig auf diese Hoden.”
Around the corner, from the breakfast room, three teenage girls burst into laughter.
“Annie, what are you making your mother say?”
She stopped laughing long enough to say, “Nothing, Dad. It’s fine.”
Nancy tapped me on the shoulder. “Didn’t you take German in college?”
“Minored in it, actually.”
“Well, Herr Fancypants?”
“I mostly got D’s,” I said, and the breakfast room erupted again.
When the girls went out for a run, I poured a couple fat fingers of bourbon, sat down at the kitchen table with Nancy, who had her laptop open.
“What’s left for you today?” she asked, taking a sip of tea from her Shakespeare Quotes mug.
“Got the shopping taken care of, so I was thinking of taking a nap.”
“If you plan it right, you can get a late morning nap and a mid-afternoon nap in,” she said.
I said “cheers” and took a sip. I’d been following a Reddit group for bourbon drinkers since this pandemic started and, as long as the governor kept the liquor stores open, we were going to be fine.
Nancy had taken to connecti
ng online with people locally, through Facebook groups and hashtag challenges and neighborhood forums.
She asked if I’d seen a Weimaraner while I was out.
“Taking your German lessons pretty seriously, aren’t you?” I said.
“The Powells up on Ruddy Duck said they saw one this morning, didn’t know whose it was.”
“That’s the big lab kind of dog?” I asked.
“Pretty much. This one was gray.” She turned the laptop so I could see a sixty-pound, shiny dog easing out a turd right on John and Maria Powell’s back deck.
“I’m fairly confident that dog is in violation of the covenants,” I said. “Bet Maria wants to find the dog and fine him.”
“She’s not on the POA board anymore, actually.”
I asked when that happened.
“At the meeting in February.”
I took a long swig of bourbon. “So disappointed I didn’t get to go to that one. Sounds fascinating.”
She tapped the down arrow on her keyboard a little louder than she had to. “One of us has to take one for the team, to keep up with what’s going on in the neighborhood.”
“And what’s that?” I asked.
She reached across the table, finished off my whiskey. “Not much at all.”
Brayden walked into the kitchen, said there was a man in a mask at the door.
To be clear, it’s only a couple dozen steps from the kitchen to the front door of the house, but if you’re a parent, and your kid has gone off on a run and then you hear there’s a masked man at the door, well, you make that couple dozen steps in about three.
Somewhere in the parental fear lobe of my brain, the three girls had been kidnapped by Lee Van Cleef and I’d have to win them back using only my ability to bench-press eighty pounds and the only weapon in the house, a tourist’s pocket knife that said “Niagara Falls” in confusing cursive and hadn’t been opened since the gift shop where we’d bought it a decade back.
I opened the door, ready to drop the “very certain set of skills” line from that movie with that guy whose family keeps being taken from him, but it was just Dave from over on Merganser, wearing a blue bandana and a maroon Tech baseball cap.
I nodded. “Dave.”
He nodded back: “Will.”
“What can I do for you?” I asked, relieved it was only Dave, but still a little disappointed I wouldn’t get to run around the globe strangling bad guys on yachts.
“Y’all making out alright?” he asked.
Fine. We were going to chat each other up first? “Just fine, man. How are you and Rachel doing in all this?”
“Well as you can, I figure. Say, you got any 2-stroke oil?”
Should have figured. Dave was the kind of guy who liked the idea of getting out and doing some yard work, but never thought things through. You could pass by their house throughout the spring and summer and see half-finished projects lying there, while Dave or Rachel drove out to the hardware store to get one more bag of mulch or another can of paint for the shutters, two pale blue shutters left propped against the sawhorses while fourteen were laid out, yellow and drying in the driveway.
I said I probably did. “Want to meet me around and I’ll open the garage door and we can take a look?”
He turned to walk back down the sidewalk to the side of the house. “Appreciate it,” he said.
I walked back through the hallway to the kitchen, on my way to the garage.
“What did Dave want?” Nancy asked. “Stain? Paint? Thousand pounds of gravel?”
“Nice guesses. Oil for the weedeater.”
I whacked the button to open the garage door, stepped between the cars, and walked around to the wall where I kept the oil and gas and antifreeze and windshield wiper fluid and so forth. I saw Dave was standing halfway down the driveway.
“Want to come grab a bottle?” I said to him.
“Social distancing,” he said, and I just stood there until he said if I could just leave it in the driveway and then close the door, he’d come up and get it.
I said that was fine, found two bottles, one full and one half, and set the half-full one in the drive for him.
He said thanks, waved his hand, then stopped. “Hey, was that your kid I saw making the loop on Mallard?”
“Probably. She and her friends went out for a run a little while ago.”
He nodded, said he didn’t recognize the other girls.
I said no, that he probably wouldn’t have. Then I closed the garage door and went back in the house.
As the garage door clattered its way down and I stepped back into the kitchen, Nancy asked how Dave and Rachel were.
“Aren’t they online telling everyone how they are?” I asked, opening the refrigerator for a stout.
“He’s Snape and she’s Mr. Wickham.”
“Their screen names?”
“No. The new ‘Which Villain Are You?’ quiz that’s going around.”
“Not sure either one of those guys was a villain,” I said, “just misunderstood.”
Nancy laughed. “Yeah. The world has enough ‘misunderstood guys’ to burn the whole place down. Any idea where the wine went, by the way?”
“We had wine?”
“Yeah,” she said, opening the doors of the liquor cabinet where we usually stocked a couple bottles of wine. “A Cab Sauv from the Maipo Valley. Time to crack it open for a ‘Thank God It’s Friday’ toast.”
“But it’s Tuesday,” I said.
“I was making a joke, but it’s Wednesday, actually.”
“Pretty sure it’s Tuesday.”
“Computer,” Nancy said, tilting her head back and aiming her voice at the ceiling as she did when she asked the lady in the tube for weather and news updates, “What day of the week is it?”
“Today is Friday,” the voice said.
I said I’d be damned.
Nancy said she’d drink to that.
The girls were at the kitchen table, doing their college assignments on their laptops and watching videos on their phones. Brayden was taking the dogs for a walk through the neighborhood, and Nancy and I were in the den scrolling through nothing on our phones. The weather had been nice for a couple days, but now it had gone cold again, and I was feeling guilty for not going out when it was nice out.
We had a fire pit we never used, and I asked Nancy if she wanted to grill hot dogs out there this weekend. She said that sounded good, and we both knew we’d never manage to pull that off, but it was nice to have things to look forward to, even if they weren’t real.
“We do need another meal, since we can’t do the grilled cheese,” she said.
“Sorry I couldn’t get another loaf of bread,” I said, again, for maybe the fifth time since I’d gotten back from the grocery store.
“Just so you know for next time, they limit the Wonder Bread and Sunbeam and all, but you can buy as many loaves from the bakery as you want.”
“You mean I should have gotten bread from the bakery part of the store?” I asked.
“It’s fine. I’ll figure something out. Everyone is sharing recipes.”
She brought her laptop back into the den with her, started clicking through sites. “You been on the neighborhood app recently?”
“The forum thing? No. What’s the top post this month, lost dog or recommend a plumber?”
She turned the laptop to me, and something in the back of my throat popped.
“Is that?”
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s us. And that’s the girls.” She scrolled, kept reading. “The Mitchells. And the Larkins son, Mark.”
I took the laptop from her, scrolled up and down. “This is a list of everyone in all of Adams Creek that’s travelled internationally in the past few months.” I kept scrolling. “How did someone even get this list?”
Nancy sat back on the couch, put her hands in her lap. “It doesn’t matter how they got it. What’s the point of it?”
“I don’t know,” I said, reading the p
ost over and over again. Maybe a dozen or more names from the entire neighborhood, three of them right under our roof.
“The Mitchells were on that cruise,” Nancy said. “They’re always going somewhere.”
“So what? Why would someone even have this list?”
“I don’t know why they have it, but why have they posted it to the whole neighborhood?”
I sat back against the couch, setting the laptop as far from me as I could. “So everyone in the entire neighborhood could see who the threats were.”
“Threats?”
“You know what I mean,” I said, noticing she was getting more upset. A couple years back, just three doors down, a man who was renting a house from the Gilberts got tired of the Ellmanns’ dog always getting loose and wandering the neighborhood, so he poisoned the dog. No one could ever prove it, but he’d moved out since then and Bob Ellmann had moved away when Abigail Ellmann went into a nursing home last year. When the poisoning happened, Nancy had gotten so upset, she shook for a week and couldn’t sleep for two.
All I wanted for the rest of my life was for her to never be that upset again. Yet here we were. And I couldn’t do anything.
“What threats? The girls? The Mitchells? The Larkins? What kind of threat?”
“From the virus. International travel.”
“I know that’s their point,” she said. “But a threat? What are they even talking about?”
She’d reached the point where the basics didn’t make sense, so all you can do is just repeat the same thing, over and over. I didn’t know how to help her.
“Maybe we should keep the girls inside?” I offered, trying to think of some kind of solution.
“Keep them inside? You’re trying to protect the neighborhood now?”
“I’m trying to protect the girls,” I said.
“Jesus God,” She drained her glass of wine, then reached for my bourbon and finished that off, too. She made the same spitting-up-a-hairball sound as whenever she tried hard liquor, one of the hundred moves of hers that I’d fallen in love with twenty years back in graduate school.
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