Outside the gray door next to the first vehicle of interest, I pressed my ear to the letter box. No buzz. I lifted it and peered inside. No body. I took a step back and slammed my foot right against the Yale lock. Pilates be praised for flexibility and strength; the door gave and swung open. Gray walls, wood tones. A chalkboard hanging off the banister requested that I wipe my feet. A quick scan showed no obvious place to find car keys. In a closet bathroom under the stairs, I washed my hands in a tiny sink before I went out to the next house and listened at the letter box. A kick and a slam revealed mid-century modern lines, ruined by a toppling pile of clutter on the sideboard. Too messy to know where to start. The third door was deadlocked, and I succeeded only in hurting my hip.
But the fourth door slammed back against a wall of family photos, which started in the hallway and spread back through the generations up the stairs. Funny-face-pulling kids, a mum in her salad days, a glammy granny on a cruise ship—all looked down at me. The buzz was audible behind the closed bedroom doors above, but it seemed to be contained and didn’t bother me as I approached a console table where brown carnations festered in white water, giving off a sleazy smell like bodily fluids, not unlike the one in my kitchen. I picked up a set of car keys and bounced them in my palm. If the residents of number 42 disapproved of my theft, their holiday grins didn’t show it. I gave them a nod, hoping they understood that while I was sorry they didn’t need this car anymore, we did, so I was taking it.
I pressed the button on the key fob. An SUV parked outside flashed a complicit reply. I pulled the front door shut and drove back to the park to present Joni with her new car.
It’s quiet because all the people are inside their houses. They are inside their houses because everyone got sick. No, we can’t go inside to check on them because they might be contagious. Con-tay-jus means that we might get sick, too, so we have to leave now. No, we can’t get the rabbit; we have to leave the rabbit. Yes, we have to leave right now. I’m sorry about the rabbit; I’ll let him out of his cage so he can live in the garden. Look, throwing yourself on the ground won’t change anything.
As soon as we started explaining, I realized we should have split the kids up and told them separately in their own respective languages. Lola knew already, of course. As did Peter, it seemed, who accepted the news with dark eyes and a sangfroid request that I check on his mother and pick up his Star Wars Lego. If Maggie heard what we said, and I’m sure her eyes were darting about beneath the fringe, it didn’t stop her frenzied digging up of sand. Charlie asked about his father—a question I sidestepped for the time being—and then released such a deluge of questions covering arcane practical measures that Joni gave him a pencil and told him to write it all down. I let my fingers toy with Charlie’s floppy hair. His bent head and square scribble reminded me of Julian at university.
Loss closed in on me. Really, I’d lost Julian weeks ago, when he first told me he wanted to move out. I was, if nothing else good could be said of me, a fighter: I’d fought to keep my family together. But this was different. Death, even I couldn’t fight.
Sadness gripped me in the fierce hug of an angry parent. What a waste! For years, I’d lamented how Julian wasted himself. His potential, his privilege, his intellect. And I’d clung to the hope that the man I first met at university would return. We used to sit up all night back then, brainstorming. The possibilities crackled around us like static electricity off the nylon carpet. When Julian received his family trust fund, he bought what we then called a “home computer,” which David trained us how to use just before he took his payout to some place called Silicon Valley and promptly lost it—though he did find an American wife to bring home. Julian and I stayed in most nights with that first iMac, programming, writing business plans, playing Lemmings; we must have led millions of the creatures away from certain death. We were geeks long before that was cool. And after three years of techy bliss, we shot out of university, right into the jet stream of the dot-com era. I picked my best plan—online retail; no one else thought it would catch on—and rode the bubble higher and higher while Julian . . . didn’t even try. He didn’t need to; he had the trust fund. And by the time that was spent, he had a successful wife. So.
It wasn’t that I ever stopped loving him, but it also wasn’t the first time I’d wondered: Did I marry the man—or his potential?
Billy sneaked up and huddled into my side.
“You’re crying, Mum-may.”
“I’ll stop soon,” I said.
“Good girl.”
I kissed the fluff behind his ear.
Joni called out that the new car had fold-down seats in the boot, so all the kids could fit inside, buckled up. They would stop quickly at Joni’s to pick up her stuff and then start a slow drive back toward the camp, while I got a carload of supplies and caught up with them. I could stop by Peter’s house on the way; better to do that alone, so the boy couldn’t rush inside and find, well, who knows what he’d find. His mother was a nurse, at the hospital, which must have been ground zero. Horatio von Drool stepped up beside me as their car turned at the end of the park, the yellow indicator bright against the black railings. He thumped his tail on the pavement and then spun round, startled, to see who had made the noise.
I waited outside my front door, key in hand. I had to go back in, get clean clothes for the kids, enough for a few days at least. It would be easy to avoid the buzz. The front door swung back, and this time I left it wide open. I stepped inside and went straight up the stairs. The handrail was smooth and cool, softened by a hundred years of fingers. It was calming, the sense of running my palm against theirs, as I caressed the full length of the wood, the perfectly hewn joint that turned onto the landing. Up the smaller staircase to the master bedroom in the attic. Two suitcases lay open on the bed, seemingly exhausted from their efforts to expel their contents all over the room. Every drawer of the tallboy was open, with clothes retched up over the sides.
So, Julian had been planning to leave after all. He’d started packing.
I moved across to open the windows. The curtains blew into the room like flags on a pole. At half-mast they slapped around my head.