The patient was sleeping. He had the kind of handsome, imperious face that one saw immortalized in stone, on horseback, in a European capital—possibly he was a banker or lawyer. He needed a shave and for someone to run a comb through his silver hair. But this man was one of the lucky ones. The odds of dying of the disease were comparable to winning the lottery; so were the odds of surviving it. He was intact—more or less—and soon he would be transferred to another wing in the hospital for rehabilitation.
“He doesn’t look like somebody who should be sick, am I right?” Castello asked. “The disease can strike anybody, but he looks like someone who gets all the breaks in life.”
“I don’t believe in eugenics,” Rieux said. “But I see what you mean.”
“Victor thinks his DNA makes him invincible,” Castello said. “Do you know that my surname is the Italian word for castle?”
“I didn’t, but it makes sense,” Rieux replied.
“Victor’s family comes from a town two hundred kilometres from Florence. The other day he told me that he’s descended from plague survivors. He was bragging. He believes that people with Southern European ancestry have genes that will protect them from this new outbreak.”
“I’m glad you’re talking to him again,” he told her. “His views were always … provocative.”
“It’s not entirely fun,” she said. “But we still have our secret language. It gets tiring to ask questions no one else can answer.”
Rieux offered himself for shifts in the auxiliary hospital whenever they didn’t conflict with his duties at the clinic. He dreaded his evenings alone with his mother even as he regretted neglecting her.
“I have one more request,” Castello said as they removed their protective gear and washed their hands. “This one is more personal.”
The man responsible for her son’s death would be having a parole hearing later that week. Castello would be giving a victim’s impact statement. Her lawyer had asked for a delay in the hearing given her high-profile role in the disease resistance efforts, but to delay his hearing would affect the killer’s rights. She wanted Rieux to attend. “Victor will be there, if you can’t make it,” she told him. “But even when we were happily married, he was never someone I could lean on.”
Rieux knew he would say yes. Castello rarely used to make requests. Now they seemed to burst forth, urgent and irate. He’d thought that, at this point, she would mention the barrage of phone calls and text messages she’d sent him, but then it occurred to him that she might not remember them. “It’s much easier for me to administer an injection or set a broken bone,” he said. “Why do you ask me to do such hard things?”
“The answer is so obvious, I feel stupid saying it,” she said. She had removed all the protective gear except for a face mask. “Because you live to help.”
12.
Megan Tso spent three nights on Janice Grossman’s couch after her father’s sudden death. Three nights was enough time to feel as though she’d given of herself to another without the resentment of martyrdom. Although it wasn’t an entire week of sitting shiva, she thought seventy-two hours felt like a traditional interval for helping an acquaintance through a tough time; it was like a “minute of silence” or “forty days in the desert.”
She remembered something she’d read the other day: The term “quarantine” had been coined by plague-struck Venetians in the fourteenth century. “Quarantinario” was Italian for “forty days.” Ships coming into the port city had to wait out that period, while flying a yellow and black flag, before passengers could step foot on the mainland. What Tso wouldn’t give to know that this quarantine would last only forty days—even fifty would be okay. As it was, the word had decoupled from its etymology.
When Grossman texted the news of her father’s death, Tso had already been out on a run to clear her head after the previous night’s boozy outing with Rieux. It was barely eight when she left the hotel. She bought oranges, cereal, and milk at a corner store that had just opened, then took a taxi to Grossman’s.
“They took him into the auxiliary hospital,” Grossman said. “They told me to go home, but I waited. When I spoke to a doctor after he died, he said I couldn’t see the body because of infection, so part of my brain keeps telling me he must’ve switched wristbands with another elderly white male patient.” Her voice was hoarse and emphatic. “I don’t know how someone who never left his apartment, never saw anyone, who hired somebody to wash his kitchen floors with bleach every week, could become infected. If he could fall sick, I may as well run around licking toilet seats.”
Grossman’s gaze swam around the room. Tso forced her to sit and placed a bowl of cereal in front of her. Grossman took a bite and pushed it away. “I don’t even know what I want. Except to clean my dad’s room.”
Tso wanted to be like the white people she’d grown up watching on TV; someone who could stroke a friend or acquaintance like a house pet. Instead, she placed her hands in the back pockets of her jeans. “We can do that later,” she told her. “You’re exhausted.”
“Sorry to text you when I did. My first thought was to call Janet, but then I hated myself for thinking of talking to her. I could imagine her saying nice things to me while Happy Dancing at her house. Janet and my father hated each other. Sorry again,” she told Tso. Milk dribbled on her chin. “You must be exhausted.”
Tso was cutting oranges. She had already gone for a run, and her knees were stiff. She said, “A little tired.”
“Would you sleep with me?” Grossman asked. “I miss having someone next to me.”
Tso stopped cutting oranges. “Sleep sleep, right?”
“Of course.” She started rubbing her arms nervously. Everything about this house—the blackout curtains, the candles—gave the impression that Grossman was not a morning person. “I wouldn’t suggest we do that. Just forget I said anything.”
“I would like to sleep with you,” Tso said slowly, sounding like someone reciting from a script for people learning the English language.
Grossman shook her head, though her gaze drifted toward the bedroom. “It would probably be awkward.”
Tso was, in fact, intrigued by the idea of a sleeping partner. For an entire year after she moved in with her aunt, they would spend an hour in her bed at night talking about their plans for the next day. The prospect of being with someone, of feeling someone’s warmth—day in, day out—was something she craved and wanted to be ready for. She refused to take up more than half the king-sized mattress in her hotel suite.
She waited for Grossman to change into her pyjamas and climb onto the air mattress. The bed was pushed up against the wall, and Grossman took the outside half. Tso removed her shoes and jacket but kept the rest of her clothes on. She lay down next to Grossman, arms across her chest, elbow brushing against her friend. She felt self-consciously jittery.
Grossman told her that she planned to call the funeral home when she woke up. Her father had prepaid for his funeral decades earlier and made detailed arrangements. “He didn’t think I could handle it,” she told Tso. “My half-sister lives in Montreal. He always trusted her more. If she were the daughter living in this city, he wouldn’t have preplanned.”
Grossman’s father was much older than Tso had suspected. Born before World War II, he and his parents crossed the Atlantic—first to Brooklyn, then Montreal—before such trips became urgent escapes for Jewish people. Izzy Grossman left school early and found his first restaurant job at age thirteen, then he started to work in the entertainment industry. He moved to Vancouver in 1963, where he met his first wife and started a talent-booking club. He managed a roster of song-and-dance acts. “But he didn’t like the direction music was going in,” she told Tso. “And my dad had an affair with a chorus girl who would eventually become my mother. Once they married, she didn’t approve of his lifestyle.” He briefly ran a comedy club until it burned down. “My mother had left him six months earlier for her high-school sweetheart. Let’s just say that made him careless about fire safety.” With his insurance money, he bought the house and eked out a living through his rental suites and the grocery store. “We’re always talking about me,” Grossman said. “Why don’t you ever talk about yourself?” She lay her head on Tso’s shoulder. She gave the appearance of being larger than she actually was, mainly because of her frizzy hair and wide hips.