“Fuck my studies,” Rojan said, to which her mother clucked her tongue, but for once didn’t admonish her daughter for cursing. “Just deal with the fact that you need us, for once.”
Naz slowly explored the rest of the warehouse to make sure no one else was inside. Her mother ordered her to raid the staff refrigerator on every floor and eat everything in there first, and save her packed nonperishables. For breakfast, Naz had birthday cake, egg salad, and pickles. Rojan told her to turn on the laptop she found on top of the drum case, but its battery was dead and the charger was nowhere to be found, so her mother and sister relayed updates to her from the news on their television set instead. Cases had now been spotted in Wyoming, New Hampshire, California, and the D.C. area. Planes had been grounded, interstates closed. Some cities were practically under martial law. Sometimes the three of them didn’t say anything at all. They just stayed on the line together. Every four hours, Naz went back to the wall outlet and lay on the floor while her phone was plugged in, to charge it back up before the call cut out.
“Where exactly is this studio?” Rojan kept asking her. “How do you spell Dorchester Street?” She became obsessive about it, about being able to pinpoint Naz’s exact location. “What does the building look like? How many stories? What shape? What color is the outside?” She asked so many questions that their mother finally shouted at her to get her maps and pens out of the way or she was going to throw them all in the trash, and started knocking what sounded like stacks of paper off the table as they argued.
“I know what you’re doing. Don’t try to come here,” Naz whispered into the phone to Rojan late that night, after their mother had fallen asleep.
“I won’t,” Rojan replied.
“I mean it. Don’t try to find me. It won’t help anything.”
“I won’t,” Rojan repeated, but Naz knew she was lying.
“Tickets are thousands of dollars anyway. The airports—”
“How much?” Rojan interrupted.
“I don’t know, like probably twenty or more thousand to fly in now, because no one wants to come near,” Naz answered.
“Fuck.”
“And Boston airport is closed and under quarantine, I’m sure,” she finished. She dropped her voice lower. “I’m serious. I can hear people dying out there. It’s not safe. Don’t come.” She tried to think of something she could say that would force her sister to listen. “Stay with Maman. Don’t leave her alone. Don’t make it so that she has two daughters here instead of just one. Okay?”
Rojan made a small sound, like Naz had physically hurt her. “So what, you’re just going to be alone over there, trying to survive without any help?”
“What would you coming do anyway?” Naz asked.
“I don’t know, but something. Anything,” she said. “You’re my sister, Mahnaz.”
“Don’t come, Rojan,” Naz warned. “Don’t leave Maman.”
She could hear Rojan breathing slowly on the other end of the line. It sounded like she was trying not to cry. “Okay, I won’t come,” she finally said.
“Promise,” Naz ordered.
“I promise.”
Naz settled back against the wall and cradled the phone between her ear and shoulder. She still didn’t know if she fully believed her sister, but she also knew that if Rojan was still lying, arguing about it further wouldn’t convince her. All it would do was wake their mother up when one of them started shouting.
“Can you see the stars?” Rojan asked in the silence.
“From the roof,” Naz said.
“Go up there.”
THE DAY AFTER, NAZ WOKE UP TO LIGHT RAIN PATTERING against the windows. I should try to collect that for drinking, she thought groggily as she rolled over on the carpet to unplug her phone from the wall. But the charge was barely full.
Naz called, and her mother picked up crying. She and Rojan already knew from the news that the power had gone out in Boston overnight. “How much battery do you have left?” Was all she said.
“Seven percent,” Naz answered.
NAZ LEFT THE EARPIECE IN FOR WEEKS, EVEN THOUGH IT WAS useless. She knew even then that it seemed a little crazy, but she kept talking to them as if they were there. She needed to. “Whew, that was heavy!” she’d say when she finished lugging down water from containers she’d found around the building and put open-faced on the roof. Or “Remember when we found out I’d been accepted to train here?” or “Did you hear that?” when an errant sound had terrified her in the middle of the night. It turned out to be a rat in the ventilation system, not a human.
Naz asked Rojan which office she should move to when the music studio grew boring and small, then babbled about the pros and cons. She described what other floors looked like.
She asked her mother if they’d both known what would happen, would she still have cut Naz off to try to stop her from dating? If the shadowlessness had never come, would she have held out until she died, or given up and reached out? She asked if she might try to be better to Rojan than she had been to Naz, if Rojan wanted something else someday, too. Slowly, slowly, Naz stopped talking.
Orlando Zhang