At Target, in addition to buying the pulse oximeter, a jumbo pack of tissue boxes, and several jugs of Gatorade, Noah had bought a so-called bedside commode (it was gray with armrests that made it grimly throne-like); a so-called bedside urinal (a sideways-slanting plastic thermos with a glow-in-the-dark cap); and a medical shower chair (a lot like a regular plastic-and-aluminum chair except with a wider seat and suction cups on the bottoms of the legs). At some point on that endlessly long first day back in Kansas City, after Jerry ate a quarter of a scrambled egg I’d made, Noah and I together got him into the shower, and, while Noah wore a mask, running shorts, and nothing else and Jerry wore nothing at all, Noah bathed him and I changed his bedding. As I did, I played the Indigo Girls on my phone at a low volume, so that I could distract myself and have company at the same time that I could hear Noah and Jerry in the shower and help if they needed me.
When Jerry was resettled in fresh sheets, I went outside, crossed the front yard, and rang the Larsen family’s doorbell. Then, so as not to be standing overly close when the door opened, I turned and descended the three steps back to the walkway. Both Charlotte and her husband, Keith, came outside, and I thanked them profusely for letting Sugar stay with them for the day. They said it had been the highlight of the pandemic for their daughters. Keith went to get Sugar while Charlotte asked how Jerry was doing, and when Sugar bounded out to me, seeing her mournful eyes and wagging tail—it was two-thirds black and one-third white, at the end—almost made me weep. Instead, I lifted Sugar into my arms and thanked them again.
“Let us know if you need anything,” Keith said, and I turned back toward Jerry’s house.
“Sally, sorry if this is a weird question,” Charlotte said then, and I paused, and Keith said, “Not now, Char,” and Charlotte said, “But are you dating Noah Brewster?”
“Oh.” I hesitated.
Charlotte was in her midthirties and worked as a buyer for an electronic goods company, and it was the Larsens’ older daughter, Stella, who was eleven, who thought she’d caused the pandemic by telling her mother she traveled too much. “I’m not sure,” I said.
“It’s just that he’s my favorite favorite singer. For real, since I was a teenager.”
“Oh, wow,” I said. It seemed safe to assume that revealing Noah was inside Jerry’s house, about twenty feet away, would complicate rather than simplify matters.
“I know you meet lots of famous people with your job, but those pictures—was that really you?”
“Charlotte, let her go,” Keith said.
“I do know Noah,” I said. “Have a good night!”
When we entered Jerry’s bedroom, Sugar leapt onto his bed and licked his face, which seemed maybe medically inadvisable. But then, his voice weak, Jerry said, “There’s my good girl.”
* * *
—
That night, when I told Noah that I was going to sleep on the floor in Jerry’s room, he said, “With a mask on? Won’t you sleep terribly?”
“Presumably,” I said, and went to find an ancient sleeping bag in the basement. Noah slept in my bed with the wicker headboard.
On the second afternoon, someone from Dr. Fischer’s office called to say that Jerry’s Covid test was positive, and offered me the opportunity to speak with Dr. Fischer after he finished seeing patients, but instead I called my pediatrician college roommate, Denise. Although the advice Denise gave echoed Dr. Fischer’s recommendations, I had learned my lesson, and instead of asking how worried I should be, I said, “It’s completely plausible that he’ll recover, right?”
Immediately, she said, “Oh, sure.”
The second night, I slept again on the floor of Jerry’s room and on the third night, I slept in my old bed with Noah. In contrast to in California, our physical contact was minimal and chaste.
During this time, Jerry continued to have a fever, to report a sore throat, and to mostly sleep and still seem exhausted when he woke, but, with our encouragement, he ate small amounts of bananas and applesauce and chicken broth and toast. He didn’t seem to have lost his sense of taste or smell, he didn’t vomit, and, once we got the rhythms of the bedside urinal and commode established, he no longer went to the bathroom in the bed. I was usually the one who emptied the bedside urinal, which he used solo after I’d helped him sit up, and Noah was usually the one who helped him onto the commode.
As the days passed, Noah and I increasingly took turns doing things other than taking care of Jerry. I binge-watched a fantasy drama full of dragons and gore, and Noah worked out in the backyard, apparently while facetiming with Bobby, and he went for runs in the neighborhood. On one of his almost-daily outings to Target, he purchased a legal notepad and a guitar that I’d find him playing on the deck, while intermittently pausing to make notes on the pages, as Sugar sunbathed at his feet. “Kansas City is really creatively inspiring, huh?” I said the first time I came upon this scenario, which was on our fifth day at Jerry’s house. “Kind of like Paris in the 1930s.” I’d just carried a soup bowl from Jerry’s bedroom to the kitchen sink, seen Noah out the window, and slid open the glass and screen doors.
Noah smiled. “Kansas City did produce you.”
I stepped onto the deck, and Sugar immediately rolled into belly rub position. Noah was sitting in a folding lawn chair with gray webbing, wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses that he removed. It was eleven in the morning and eighty degrees, which by Midwest summer standards wasn’t bad.
“My mom died of stomach cancer so it was, you know, very messy,” I said as I crouched to pet Sugar. “I’ve been through a variation of this. But sometimes I still can’t believe how undignified and sad life is.”
“I know what you mean,” he said, “but I’m sure it makes a huge difference to Jerry that you’re here.” We both were quiet, and the whisking and tapping of a nearby sprinkler became noticeable. “I wish I could make this easier for you,” Noah added.
“You have,” I said. “In about a million ways. Have you ever been around a super-sick person before?”
“There was a producer, this beloved guy named Billy Rodriguez, who died in 2010 of glioblastoma. I’d worked with him on all my albums except one. I wasn’t directly cleaning up after him, so to speak, but I saw him a bunch of times in the hospital and once in hospice and yeah—it’s rough.”
“If you want to go back to L.A., I hope you know it’s okay. I don’t want you to feel trapped here.”
“Do you want me to go back to L.A.?”
“No.”
Again, we were quiet, and Sugar wagged her tail against the deck and the sprinkler went tck, tck, tck. Was it my imagination, or was there a head and a pair of shoulders in the Larsens’ second-floor bathroom window, a figure watching us? Which was as likely to be Charlotte as one of her daughters.
“I don’t want to go back to L.A.,” Noah said. “I do eventually. But not now.”
* * *
—
That afternoon, courtesy of Viv and Henrietta, an enormous box arrived from a gourmet grocery store in New York: dried fruit and fancy coffee and cheeses wrapped in gel packs and many kinds of crackers and cookies. I was moved, and almost certain Noah would eat none of it. That night, he made us pan-seared salmon for dinner, and as we were cleaning up in the kitchen, I said, “So I have a question.”
Noah raised his eyebrows.
“Do you still want to be my boyfriend—or whatever—now that you’ve given my stepdad a shower?”
He laughed. “I’d love to be your boyfriend or whatever. I do have a condition, though.”
Nervousness surged through me.
“If something upsets you,” he said, “it’s fine if you need to pause the conversation or go in the other room, but I don’t want you to blow everything up, because it’s too stressful to live like that.”