he was screaming. He remembered waking up to the noise and how he’d decided against going downstairs. Mistake! Mistake!
The man wouldn’t go with her to the hospital, she said. Suddenly she began to sob. “Why did we come here? We never should have come!” She sat up and gazed around the room with a look of terror. “We never should have come!” She was sobbing so hard Cole could barely make out the words.
He said nothing. He felt utterly helpless, under a spell, without the power even to put his arms around her. How would they live? How would they live without his father?
His mother had let herself fall back. She was still sobbing, but quietly, and Cole let her be. Minutes passed—he had no idea how many—and he saw her fall asleep, or pass out. A river of fear ran through him. He didn’t want to be alone.
“Mom!”
Her eyes flew open. For an instant she looked blind.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t stay awake anymore.”
Cole thought again of that old movie, the one where falling asleep meant worse than death. The one whose hero had the same name as his father.
“Let me sleep just a little,” she slurred, eyes closing again.
He was alone.
He got up and drifted back into the kitchen. He took a sip of water from the glass sitting on the table and poured the rest down the sink. How clean the kitchen was, all neat and shiny. The whole house was like that. It was one of his mother’s ways of dealing with stress. If my hands are busy I’m not wringing them, she said. At other times, the house was a mess.
He sat down at her laptop and tapped the touchpad.
Addy, the worst has happened. Miles had a heart attack and died last night. I’ve been trying to call you but can never get through. I’m writing now mostly just for something to do until Cole wakes up. I don’t know how I’m going to tell him. I swore to him Miles was going to get over the flu, and technically he didn’t die of the flu, though I was told the attack was probably triggered by inflammation caused by the virus. I had to ask a stranger to help me get Miles to the hospital. He kept telling me it wouldn’t do any good and I knew he was right, but if Miles was past saving I was determined at least to get his body out of the house. I didn’t want to be like all those poor people forced to live with their dead or secretly dump them somewhere. What will happen to his body now I don’t know, I suppose it will be burned, or buried in some mass grave. My god, I can’t believe I just wrote that. I feel like a big part of me still hasn’t taken it in.
I’m not sure how much Miles understood what was happening, either. His last lucid moment was around noon two days ago, when for a little while he was able to breathe a bit more freely and he could talk. And he looked at me with tears in his eyes and said, We blew it, baby. I still don’t know what he meant. I thought he might have been talking about us separating, but it’s possible he was talking about the flu and how we’d blown our chance to get away. He may not have realized there was nowhere to go. But these were his last words to me, and I will never get over that. I can’t bear to think of him dying under the weight of such a heavy regret. And it was the first time he called me baby in such a long time.
But I can’t let myself think like this right now or I’ll go mad. I’ve got to think about Cole. And now that I’ve been to the hospital and seen with my own eyes what it’s like, I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try to do something. I’ve made up my mind to volunteer at the clinic they’ve set up at the college, at least for a few hours a day. It will mean leaving Cole home by himself but I think he’ll understand. Besides, if I’m around him all the time it just gets on his nerves. Poor Cole. When I think of all the trouble we’ve been having with him, how badly he’s doing in school and how cold and sullen he’s