Dr. Bek can sense our hesitation. He has more to say. Do we know the story of the flight attendant who carried the AIDS virus from Africa to the West? The index case. How much time do we spend considering the reactions of our actions, the way one disaster can give way to another, like mud sliding down a mountain in springtime? He pauses and makes a diving motion with his gloved hands.
“What a calamity it would be for you to go out there now.” He points the remote at the window. “You could reinfect the entire population. You could ruin our chances of finding a cure. Do we want America to be just as helpless if the sickness returns? No. We want her to be able to help herself next time. Isn’t that what we want?”
None of the patients say anything. “Well, isn’t it?” Dr. Bek presses.
“Yes,” some of us mutter in reply.
“I thought so.” He nods at the white wall of nurses behind him, as though he’s just given them a lesson in how to handle us. Behind the shield his teeth are like tiny polished stones.
Dr. Bek reminds us that Lights Out was over an hour ago and it’s time for us to be on our way.
*
When darkness comes, I lie awake and picture patients flooding out of the Hospital, into the snowy land, and drifting back to wherever they came from. I’m left standing outside, looking east and west, unsure of where to go.
I try to see something different: Louis and I walking out of the Hospital and across the frozen plains. Catching a bus and watching the white landscape roll by. His hand on my cheek. Our fingertips on the cold windowpanes. It’s all going beautifully until I hear Paige’s feathery voice and realize she’s on the bus too, sitting right behind Louis, her hands on his shoulders.
I get out of bed and go to the Common Room. The space is dark and quiet. I sit down on the couch and turn on the TV. Another news truck moves through a suburb and catches people cracking open doors and peering outside. This is in California, where the sickness started. The sky is a violet haze. When a truck passes a blue gingerbread house with a white fence, I see a family standing in the yard. They’re wearing gas masks. They even have one small enough for their little girl. The truck casts a net of light over the mother as she kneels and rubs the dirt. The father holds the child. The girl waves her tiny finger around like a wand. The mother and father look up and raise their fingers too. The girl lifts her hand higher. They are all pointing at something in the sky.
*
I’m on a highway in Boston, passing through the Sumner Tunnel. I’m riding in the passenger seat. The driver is a heavy shadow. Is he wearing some kind of mask? The tunnel has turned the radio music to static. I am feeling very curious about the glove compartment. The car speeds past the tile walls and the tracks of white light on the ceiling. There are doors in the tile. Where do they lead? There is no traffic.
“Wake up, Joy,” I hear Louis say. I feel myself blinking. I’m sitting up in bed. I don’t know how long I’ve been back in my room.
“You’re talking in your dreams again.” I listen to him roll over, his voice thick with sleep.
He’s wrong, or maybe half-wrong: I wasn’t awake, but I wasn’t dreaming either.
6.
0–6. Group home, Roxbury.
7–9. Foster with the Carroll family, Allston.
10–12. Group home for children, hundred-acre farm, Walpole.
13–14. Foster with Ms. Neuman, Charlestown.
15–17. Group home for teenage girls, Mission Hill.
18. Over and out.
*
If someone (my mother?) asked me to account for how I’ve spent my life, the Years is one place I could start.
*
Massachusetts Safe Haven Law, definition: “Voluntary abandonment of a newborn infant to an appropriate person at a hospital, police department, or manned fire station shall not by itself constitute either a finding of abuse or neglect or a violation of any criminal statute.”
For years, I did not think it was right that what my mother did to me could not be called a crime.
*
At the Stop & Shop, some people bought very strange things in the middle of the night. Chicken in a can, glow-in-the-dark condoms, fish guts wrapped in brown paper, baskets filled with little round tins of Ant-B-Gon, baskets filled with chewing gum, baskets filled with enough birthday candles to light the world’s largest cake, one whole coconut.
Once a man came in and said he was lost and asked me to draw him a map that would lead him to where he wanted to go. I drew one on a folded-up shopping bag and hoped my landmarks were clear. Once someone wanted to buy five shopping carts and the manager said, “No way.” The person gave up and left and the manager told me, “My price was a hundred dollars. I would have let them go for that.” More than once people brought us sagging bags of loose change, wanting cash in return. More than once I found a woman weeping in the Frozens section.
For a while a bagger with tattoos on his knuckles worked nights with me. He used to be in jail. When there was nothing else to do he would count and recount the numbers of each item on the shelves—thirty-five bags of hot dog buns, seven cartons of egg substitute, fourteen jars of grape jelly—and sometimes I would follow behind him and ask what he was doing, which I knew he found annoying, and he would say, “There is no enemy like time.”
After he left I worked with another guy who was always trying to play a joke where he snuck up behind me and put a plastic bag over my head, no matter how many times I told him that I did not find this funny at all.
If there were no shoppers, I would slip into the bathroom and sip a little more Robitussin and when I came out, the light was soft and running down the walls like rainwater.