She said nothing.
“Then make a doctor’s appointment, Kath. Go see Bahethi. You can do it first thing on Monday.”
“There’s no need,” Kathy said.
“Why?” He didn’t like the defeat in her voice.
“The hospital has mandated that all remaining employees get blood tests to see who else might be infected.”
He had heard about this on the news, but he wasn’t sure how foolproof the blood tests were. It seemed the CDC didn’t even know what they were dealing with yet, so how reliable could a blood test be?
“Okay,” he said, digesting all of this. “Okay. Then get your blood test and you’ll see. You’ll see that everything’s okay.”
“I’m scared.” She turned to him, her face pale, her eyes searching his.
“It’s going to be all right,” he said. He brought her close to him, hugged her.
She pushed him away and straightened up. “Have you seen the news? Have you read a newspaper? Jesus, David, they’ve started printing maps with all the cities where . . . where . . .” She shook her head, her thoughts too weighty for them to be spoken. “I don’t know,” she whispered, more to herself than to him, he thought. “I just don’t know.”
“There haven’t been that many cases here,” he said. “Not in Maryland. Not in this area.”
She made a noise that sounded like part-laugh, part-cough. “Are you serious? Deke Carmody just down the street—”
“There was no proof he was sick.”
“Of course he was! You said yourself you saw all that blood in his bathroom. The way he was acting, was talking . . . Don’t you remember how worried you were about him when you came home that night? And then he sets fire to his own house . . .”
“That doesn’t mean he had the disease,” David said. Yet he knew right then and there that he was fighting a losing battle, and not just with Kathy, but with himself, too. Of course Deke had been sick. And not just Deke: All too clearly he was thinking of the ice cream man again, so long ago now, and so early in the game that none of them even knew about the illness that everyone was now calling Wanderer’s Folly—a silly, almost innocuous name, which somehow also made it all the more terrifying.
“All right,” Kathy said, calming down. She kissed his knuckles, then got up from the table with her wineglass. He listened to her footfalls move down the hallway. A moment later, he heard the tub’s faucet clunk on.
Wanderer’s Folly, he thought now, and it was suddenly impossible not to see what remained of Deke’s house through the bay windows.
There was no certainty as to its origin, though many doctors, philosophers, and government officials reserved their own opinions. It was given a scientific name, some cryptic-sounding rubric cobbled from language in medical textbooks that proved a real tongue twister for newscasters, but it soon became known among the general public as Wanderer’s Folly. Little was known about the illness, including its origin or exactly how it was contracted, except that it was a virus that apparently poisoned, attacked, and ultimately killed the brain. Early symptoms appeared harmless enough: a bit of brain fog, excessive daydreaming. More progressed symptoms were supposed to include mild hallucinatory stimulation—such as feeling cold when it was hot, or smelling things that were not there to be smelled—which only escalated as the virus grew stronger. In the middle stages, the infected supposedly found themselves more apt to act out their daydreams or even respond to the hallucinations as if they were real. Someone could spend hours wandering around a city park before realizing their lunch break was over and they were due back at work; someone might drive fifty or even a hundred miles off course of their destination before clearing their mind and wondering what had overtaken them; someone might believe they were standing in the middle of a beautiful orchard, a shiny bronze apple in each hand, when in reality they had wandered into their neighbor’s garage.