“Shit,” Finn says. “Dinner.”
He scrambles to his feet and I am jealous of his easy, unthinking movement. In his hurry, he pulls on my sweatshirt instead of his own, and it stretches too tight across his chest. As Finn hops into his boxers, I watch. “Don’t forget the … ?tip,” I say.
A laugh bursts out of him. “I cannot believe you said that.”
He is back a few minutes later, holding a brown paper bag full of Thai food. He looks at me, almost shyly. “Hungry?”
“Starving,” I say.
I watch him put the food on the counter, take out some disinfectant spray and paper towels, and start wiping everything down. “What … ?what are you doing that for?”
He blinks at me. “Oh, right. You don’t know. It’s for safety. You should use gloves, too, when you go to the mailbox, and let the mail sit for two days, just to make sure—”
“To make sure of what?”
“That there’s no virus on it.”
He washes his hands again vigorously as I stand up and walk toward him. “You know what has no virus on it?” I ask, and I pull his head back down to mine.
The food cools on the counter as we tangle ourselves on the couch. When I finally unspool in Finn’s arms, I open my eyes to find him watching me. He brushes my hair off my face. “Something’s different about you,” he murmurs.
“I like being back here,” I whisper.
What he likely thinks I mean: not in the hospital.
What I actually mean: not wandering in my clouded, confused thoughts. In his embrace and wholly, blissfully present.
Finn is, and always has been, my anchor.
We eat in our underwear, and make love again, knocking over the sanitized cartons of food. At some point, we stumble to the bedroom and crawl under the covers. Finn’s arm comes around me, holding my back tight against his front. It’s not the way we usually sleep—we have a king bed and we tend to retreat to our corners; I get cold too easily and Finn throws the covers off. But, oddly, I don’t mind. If he is holding me tight, I can’t disappear.
I wait until he falls asleep, until I feel his breath falling in even puffs on the back of my shoulder. “I have to tell you something,” I whisper. “Everything I dreamed in the hospital? I think it was … ?real.”
There is no response.
“I was in the Galápagos,” I say, testing the words out loud. “There was a man there.”
Almost imperceptibly, Finn’s arm tightens around me. I hold my breath.
“As long as you know who you’re really having sex with,” he murmurs.
He does not let go of me. And I do not sleep.
THIRTEEN
The next morning when Finn leaves for work, we do not talk about what I said in the middle of the night. He asks me a hundred times if I’m all right here on my own, and I spackle a smile on my face and tell him yes, and then the minute he walks out the door I have a panic attack.What if I trip and fall?
What if I cough so hard I can’t stop?
What if there’s a fire and I can’t move fast enough?
All I want to do is call Finn and tell him to come back, but it’s both selfish and impossible.
So instead, I take Candis into the kitchen with me, leaning on the quad cane when I have to balance to get a mug from the cabinet. I fill up the kettle with water and put it on the stove, moving slowly and deliberately. I grind enough coffee for the Aeropress and congratulate myself on doing all this without stumbling. I slosh hot coffee all over my hand on the way to the table, and the first day of the rest of my life begins.
In the past, when Finn wasn’t working tirelessly through a pandemic, we’d spend our days off lingering over coffee, reading The New York Times and The Boston Globe online. Finn would read aloud highlights about politics and sports. I gravitated toward the arts pages, and the obituaries. It sounds morbid, but it was actually for work: I kept a running list on my computer desktop of those who might have collections to be sold posthumously at Sotheby’s.
Of course, I don’t have a job at Sotheby’s now. I don’t know when or if I will again. Finn says I shouldn’t worry about that; he thinks we can make do on his salary for a while if we are careful. But I have a feeling there are financial hurdles we’re going to face that we can’t even imagine yet. We are only a month into this pandemic.
The first New York Times banner I read: NYC DEATH TOLL SOARS PAST 10,000 IN REVISED VIRUS COUNT.
The Boston Globe headlines are only marginally less anxiety-producing: CHELSEA’S SPIKE IN CORONAVIRUS CASES CHALLENGES HOSPITALS AND STATE; BOSTON SCIENTIFIC GETS OK TO MAKE A LOW-COST VENTILATOR.