tan and orange running clothes, sprint toward the house just as Cole and his mother were getting into the car to drive to school. Now, inside the house (or even out on the porch), you could not escape the sound of his hacking. It tore your own throat to hear it. When his mother was there, Cole saw how every cough made her flinch, like a whip being cracked in her face.
His mother was the only one who went out anymore. When she went out she always wore the same bandanna tied over her nose and mouth. It was the only one she had and it was getting filthy, she complained. The first time Cole saw her leaving the house with the bandanna on he warned her not to walk into a bank, and they’d both laughed. Now what he noticed (but did not say) was how covering the lower part of her face made her eyes look even bigger with fright than usual.
He’d seen his mother frightened before, he’d seen her worried and upset more times than he could count, but he’d never seen her quite like this. There was another element in the mix, and it took Cole a while before he could name it: he’d never seen her trying to be brave.
“I still say we’re going to be all right.” She kept repeating this, each time with a sharp little thrust of her chin. “Dad’s strong. Dad’s going to make it. We’re all going to make it. By the way, don’t you have any homework?”
Completely forgetting there was no more school! They’d laughed together about that, too. And then she had started to cry.
Being brave didn’t mean she could stop herself from breaking down at least once a day.
Each time she returned from having been out, she’d collapse on a chair as if she had run on her own steam to and from her destination and needed to catch her breath. Then she’d report on how much emptier the streets were, how many more places had closed, how much less there was to be found on the shelves of the stores that were still open.
After the mailman hadn’t shown up two days in a row, she went to the post office and found it closed. “Imagine, not even a sign on the door. You’d think they’d at least let people know what the hell’s going on.”
When she finally got through to the health department hotline, all they could tell her was to keep the patient in bed and give him lots of fluids. “It took all my strength not to start screaming.”
Though from time to time she did scream—about the lack of information and how inept the people in charge were—she was mostly mad at herself. For not having been prepared. For not having understood the amount of danger they were in. There was a certain forgiveness-begging air she took on when she knew she’d hurt or let someone down, an air that made her look like a punished child. No matter how angry Cole might be, whenever he saw his mother like this he’d go straight from feeling angry to feeling sorry for her, a feeling he found particularly unpleasant—far more unpleasant than anger. It could happen with his father, too, in which case the unpleasantness was even worse. Except that it was a very rare thing for Cole to feel sorry for his father.
Her last trip to the supermarket she was gone less time than usual and returned in tears.
“Now they’re not even letting people inside. I had to shout through the door and tell this guy what I wanted. Then he went and collected it all in a bag and put the bag on the ground outside the door. He yelled at me not to approach the bag until he’d closed the door again. And there was this locked box to slip the money in, and if you didn’t have the exact amount, tough shit, they weren’t making change. And this guy was so nasty, too, shouting Keep back! Keep back! like I was some kind of rabid dog. Plus he had a shotgun.”
Among the few things she’d brought home this time was a loaf of raisin bread, which she confessed she had found in the parking lot. “Someone must have dropped it,” she said. “It seemed crazy not to take it, since we don’t know when all this is going to end. My god, what a time to be stuck in the middle