French Braid(70)

“Your mother’s already heading out front to watch for your car,” David told Nicholas. And then, “No Juana?”

“No, here’s the thing: Juana is on the front lines now. They’ve transferred her to Infectious Diseases because we’re getting slammed in this city; I don’t know if you’ve heard. So she hardly comes home at all anymore, and even when she does, it’s not safe for her to stay in the same room with us. And since our nanny’s gone home to her family, that leaves me in sole charge of Benny. I was wondering if maybe you and Mom could help me with childcare.”

“Lord, yes,” David said. “Of course we’ll help. And forget about the self-quarantine; start packing up this minute.”

“No, no, we don’t want to take any chances. We’ll isolate here first and then see you in—”

But David didn’t hear the rest of that, because Greta seized the phone from him. “Nicholas?” she said. “You must come right away. There is no need to self-quarantine.”

David retreated to a kitchen chair to let her handle this; she still had the nurse’s air of authority about her. And she was right to argue, because in fact they were not at all at risk. Or only a little, maybe. They certainly didn’t resemble the people you pictured when you saw those don’t kill mee-maw signs urging masks and social distancing. David’s hair was not so much white as merely a washed-out blond, and Greta had that smooth, tan, firm kind of skin that showed only a few deep crevices around her eyes.

But he’d forgotten that doctors outweigh nurses, because now Greta was saying, “Yes, I do realize Juana’s the expert…Yes, of course I see her point…”

So David resigned himself. Okay, two more weeks. But then finally, at long last, they’d have a child under this roof again.

What nobody understood about David, with the possible exception of Greta, was that he had suffered a very serious loss in his life. Two losses, in fact. Two very dear children: Emily and Nicholas. It was true that these days there happened to be two very dear grown-ups who were also named Emily and Nicholas, but they weren’t the same people. It was just as if those children had died. He’d been in mourning ever since.

And now he felt a surge of hope, a sort of inner effervescence, and even before Greta got off the line he began to make plans for their time with Benny.



* * *



—

They started preparing immediately—ordering an inflatable wading pool from Amazon, for instance, and a badminton-like game that didn’t require a net. It was decided that Benny would sleep in Nicholas’s old room, which still had glow-in-the-dark constellations plastered to the ceiling, and Nicholas in Emily’s room. (No chance that Emily herself would be needing it, sad to say. She lived in Wisconsin, where she was an emergency-room physician and therefore in the thick of things. But don’t think about that, David told himself. Don’t let your mind go there.)

His study, which opened off the kitchen, could serve as Nicholas’s work space. Nicholas earned his living by marketing his inventions: a roll-up pallet arrangement called a Naptress, for example, that small children could bring to daycare with them, and a beehive-like system of fiberglass sleeping pods called GoWings for use in airports. David wasn’t sure what the current enterprise was, but he knew it was bound to involve quite a few business meetings—all online now, of course—and the study had the least glitchy Wi-Fi connection.

Another preparation, one that David made on his own, was to start a small vegetable garden. This required taking some shortcuts, since two weeks was not enough time to grow anything from scratch. He paid their lawn-mowing people to come in with a rototiller, and he ordered a variety of young plants to be delivered from a nursery. “But would this really interest a child?” Greta asked. “It won’t be so exciting as watching new shoots poke up from seeds.”

“Well, at least it’s something he and I can do together,” David said. “Pull weeds together, and pick the vegetables once they’re ready.”

He had given it a good deal of thought, because they would have to find ways of keeping Benny occupied. When Nicholas was Benny’s age it hadn’t been a problem; there’d been dozens of neighborhood children to play with. But nowadays, that was forbidden. David cast his mind back to his own childhood: what had he and his father done together? Not a lot, really; his father had worked such long hours. David did recall a carpentry project they’d once embarked on, a wooden birdhouse they had planned to hang in a tree. But it hadn’t gone well. David had never been good with tools, whereas Robin couldn’t get enough of them. (Toward the end of his life, Robin’s idea of bliss had been cruising the aisles of the twenty-four-hour Home Depot whenever he couldn’t sleep.) He had taken over the birdhouse project and finished it on his own, as best as David could recollect.

David was counting the days now; both he and Greta were. Yet as time grew short, he found himself feeling uneasy. He became distracted and inattentive, in a way that he hadn’t experienced even during the earliest, most unsettling days of the pandemic. He couldn’t seem to read anymore or focus on TV, and at night anxious dreams skittered jerkily through his sleep. He would wake and lie staring into the darkness, trying to make his muscles relax. Beside him Greta slept peacefully, her breathing as soft as flour sifting, and he wondered how she could be so oblivious when there was so much to worry about. The world was collapsing, people were dying, they were losing their jobs and starving, the planet was racing toward extinction, and this country was turning against itself. And Emily: would she manage to stay safe? Was she taking proper precautions? Plus, why was she still alone? She kept mentioning new men’s names, but then somehow no more was heard of them. And then Juana: how could Juana think of choosing her work over her family? What would it do to Benny? What would this whole pandemic do to Benny? He needed playmates; he needed real school; he was missing a stage of his development! As were all children everywhere; good Lord. The little ones who should be making friends, the older ones who should be gaining some distance from their parents, the young adults who should be living on their own right now and finding their true loves.