How High We Go in the Dark(66)

I look at the Flannery house two doors down, that tiny Spanish-style cottage, and I think of two sisters jogging together, coaching softball in the park. I know Penny is lost to us. I’ve seen her name on the wall of remembrance at the community post office. I see you jogging at night, Kate, crying. Once, I almost ran outside to help you after you collapsed, but someone else, someone who probably knew what to say, reached you first. If the void we shared was real, I saw that you and Penny liked to escape from your money troubles with black-and-white horror movies. You sold a screenplay about two sister con artists with demonic powers and, for the first time, your parents seemed proud of you. I know the film studio that bought it no longer exists.

As the social nexus of our cul-de-sac, Alex and Amalia’s house used to be the place where many of you gathered for barbecues and late-night drinks. I missed out on most of that, didn’t I? If Alex were still with us, he’d be grilling every day to keep up morale. I was away for your backyard wedding, Amalia, but while I was in the void, I saw you tell my wife that you were pregnant and show her the ultrasound photo. I saw Alex secretly stash money for a belated honeymoon in a shoe box on the top shelf of a guest room closet (you might want to check if it’s there?). I know from the community newsletter that you are, by some miracle, still expecting after eleven months in a coma, as if your baby remained in stasis. I know I should have come over long ago with baby things like I’ve seen the others doing. I know I should have been one more person to let you know that you aren’t alone.

And Benny on the other side of our back fence, I know there’s only you now. But before everything, you and Phillip used to hold virtual minigolf battles with your son Zeke every night before bedtime. I never knew Shelley helped you two with your coding for the immersive VR app you built to help senior citizens experience the world from their homes. I never knew how often she hopped the chain-link fence and finished bottles of wine with you, confessing our marital woes, how I was barely home anymore. I’ve wanted to come over and drink wine with you, too, and maybe learn about the woman Shelley was in the end. I have a bottle of pinot that I bought just for you.

And Mabel across the street. You were away for so long, living abroad in Japan when the plague hit. I know you dreamed of becoming a tattoo artist in your ancestral land. While you were gone, my wife and I would watch your mother sit outside on the stoop, as if she was expecting you home at any moment.

“I hope she’s okay,” your mother said to my wife when she came over for tea. We had learned of the first outbreaks in Russia and Asia, but the plague still seemed so far away then.

On the day you returned, two weeks ago, I peered through my window and watched your mother embrace you. Your body was covered in tattoos. I shouldn’t know (but I do) that each of them tells a story—the big dipper on your ankle an homage to a high school friend who passed; the iridescent feathers on your calves for the time your father chased a peacock around the Honolulu Zoo so you could have a souvenir; the virus on your neck, to own the plague you contracted in Thailand when you jumped off a cliff into the ocean.

I can no longer pretend that my daughter and wife aren’t gone forever and so I immerse myself in WeFuture profiles for work. I scroll through the lives of strangers, studying videos and photos and status updates of new jobs, engagements, cross-country moves. For some of these people, few relatives and friends have survived to remember these moments. Like how Brianna Estes, forty-seven, an insurance adjuster in Pensacola, Florida, dropped out of medical school to care for her mother with dementia and posted poetry late into the night. Sometimes I call the numbers listed on these profiles. Mostly they are disconnected. Every now and then a relative will pick up, though, and say something like: “This is Shannon’s phone. This is her mother.” If I were a braver person, I would speak. I would tell Shannon’s mother who I am, what I’ve lost, and that she can call me anytime, that I would welcome a voice in the night that was real.

I spotted a group of you a few days ago around midnight at the grocery store. I assume we all had the same plan: to venture out into the world in the safety of solitude and silence. Our eyes met for a split second. We quickly pushed our carts in opposite directions, gliding through the aisles on autopilot. I saw Mabel at the pharmacy, Benny ordering orzo salad at the deli. And it was this moment, without really planning it, that I began loading hamburger buns and patties and chips and soda into my cart. I bought paper plates and plastic cups, citronella-scented tiki torch fuel, bags of ice. It was almost as if Shelley was whispering into my ear as I checked out at the register. We need a party to break the silence, to begin to heal. Had she lived, I know there would have been one every week—parties to forget, parties to remember, parties to dance the night away. She would have declared that the postapocalypse doesn’t mean we stop dancing. She would have told me to stop being such a stick-in-the-mud.

I realize there aren’t many of us left and maybe this won’t be much of a party, but there’s the rest of the street, the community bulletin at the pool. It just opened for the first time since the outbreak. As you know, I never showed up to anything back then. I was never one to connect. I’ve been that way my entire life. I went to work, kept my head down, and came home. I let old friendships fizzle. I orbited my family and all of you like a distant planet—there and yet nearly impossible to reach. I know I can’t survive alone. Maybe this will be lost in a stack of your unopened mail; maybe you’ll read it and throw it away, saying it’s too late. Or maybe you’ll peek out your window and wonder about coming over and saying, Hey, me too. I’m hollowed and cracked and imploding. All I do know is this: I will continue to wake up and tell my family I love them, something I never did enough when they were alive. I will go grocery shopping at midnight. I will tell strangers online that I’m sorry for their loss, and I will eventually wash the bedsheets and their clothes and be okay with a quiet home. Maybe, with help, I will wave at you when you cross the street. I will begin setting the table for one.