The New York Times Magazine 57he coughs and spits out phlegm — with bleach,
take out T’s washcloth, towels and bathmat and
replace them with clean ones, telling CK to try
not to touch anything, to shower and go right
back to her room. Then I do the same. If T needs
to use the bathroom before we’re ready to show-
er, I do the whole bleach routine again before
we go in. Twice, in the fi rst week of the illness, I
eased him into an Epsom- salt bath. But not since
then. He is too weak. It would be too much. There
is no way. When he shuff les down the hall from
the bedroom to the bathroom, he lists against
the wall. He splashes water on his face in the
bathroom, and that has to be enough.
I run through possibilities. I’m not so worried
about CK getting sick. I can nurse her too. It’s
if I get sick. I show her how to do more things,
where things go, what to remember, what to do
if — What if T is hospitalized? What if I am? Could
a 16-year-old be left to fend for herself at home,
alone? How would she get what she needed?
Could she do it? For how long?
The one thing I know is that I could not send
her to my parents, 78 years old and nearby on
Long Island. They would want her to come,
but she could kill them, their dear grandchild
coming forward to their embrace, radioactive,
glowing with invisible incubating virus cells. No.
Not them. Someone else would have to take her,
someone who has a bedroom and a bathroom
where she could isolate and be cared for. Some-
one would. I lie awake at 4 a.m., on the fl oor,
listening, thinking, wide awake with adrenaline.
The nights are hardest, when the fear and
dread descend, T feverish, lying on his back,
murmuring hoarsely about ‘‘anomie,’’ saying he
almost just called CK by the name of his 20-years-
ago ex- girlfriend. Three times we have tried to
decide whether we need to go to the emergency
room while on speakerphone with the doctor,
once after I burst into sobs in the bathroom,
saying out loud, ‘‘I’m afraid to make the wrong
call.’’ Each time we decided to stay at home. He
doesn’t have trouble breathing, and that would
be the reason to go to the hospital.
We do a video call on one of these nights with
a New York University emergency- room doc-
tor, one of 250 who have been mobilized to do
urgent- care video calls with patients who have
fl ulike symptoms. She tells us that they are seeing
this illness run two to three weeks. She tells us
that T is OK to stay home if his oxygen- saturation
reading doesn’t get too low, if he is not struggling
to breathe. He is not. When I open the bedroom
door to check on him and fi nd him sleeping, I
tiptoe closer and bend to make sure he is alive,
to make sure he is still breathing, as I used to do
when CK was an infant, asleep in her crib.
On one of the worst nights, I stay next to the
bed, rubbing his body through the piled- on blan-
kets, trying to comfort him. I hear myself start to
hum, low, the only song I would: the song both
my mother and my grandmother used to sing to
me. When my mother sang it, it was ‘‘Tura Lura
Lura,’’ with ‘‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’’ cut
into it after the words ‘‘That’s an Irish lullaby.’’
When my grandmother sang it to me, it was ‘‘Tura
Lura Lura’’ with the words changed to ‘‘That’s
a Russian lullaby.’’ That is the song of my early
childhood, and more than four decades later I am
humming it to my gravely ill husband.
‘‘Now we live in a dystopian story,’’ I say to
CK in the kitchen.
‘‘Yeah,’’ she says. And then: ‘‘Lots of people
already did.’’Out on the street, T somehow looks even more
frail, his 6-foot-1 frame stooped and swaddled
in his winter jacket over another jacket over
his father’s gray wool sweater over a Duofold
wool undershirt over a white ribbed tank. He
says it’s cold, blinking in the March sun over
the white surgical mask he wore at the clinic
when he was tested.
We both wear disposable gloves. I put my
hand through the crook of his arm, and we slowly
start for the clinic. The day before was one of the
harder ones, with T lightheaded and nauseated
most of the day, eating only if I spoon-fed him,
coughing more and using his albuterol inhaler
more, then coughing more again. He was soaked
in sweat in the morning and by evening was lying
curled up, looking apprehensive. ‘‘I coughed up
blood just now,’’ he told me quietly.
We talked to his doctor on speakerphone. ‘‘We
are all kind of working blind,’’ he told us. Many
patients, he said, seem to begin to feel better after
a week. But others, the more serious and severe
cases, take a downturn, and the risks rise as the
virus targets the lungs. Pneumonia is a common
next step in that downward progression. We read
about it in the patients admitted to the hospital.
Now the doctor called in a prescription for anti-
biotics to the CVS pharmacy that would close in
less than an hour. I texted T’s friend down the
block, and he texted back that he would pick up
the medicine. I asked if he would get oranges too;
T has been accepting a little fresh- squeezed juice
or cut-up pieces, and we were down to one last
orange. They suddenly seemed an unimaginably
exotic treat.
The doctor told us to go back to the clinic for
a chest X-ray fi rst thing in the morning. Now we
slowly walk the three blocks, T coughing behind
his mask. As we move along the street, we see
some other people too — fewer than a few days
ago, before Gov. Andrew Cuomo directed New
Yorkers to stay indoors as much as possible.
Some joggers go by. Just over a week ago, that
was still me. Now I point out the buds about to
bloom on the branches we pass, drawing T’s
attention away from the few passers- by so we
won’t see if they start or turn around. A few are
wearing their own masks, but they are walking
upright, striding along, using them as protection
for themselves. Not like us.At the clinic, another couple wearing masks
opens the door and walks in. A man in a mask sits
in the waiting area. T eases into a chair and leans
against the wall with his eyes closed. I go to the
desk. ‘‘My husband has already tested positive for
Covid-19,’’ I tell the attendant, whose eyes meet
mine over her mask.
She hands me a mask. T’s doctor is working
at a diff erent clinic today, so we’ll see another
doctor, and they will compare notes. We wait,
wearing our masks. T’s eyes are still closed. I look
out the window behind us, where people on the
street are walking along as if it were an ordinary
day. A man opens the door of a tiny cafe across
the street with his bare hand and goes inside.
Another attendant comes to the desk, and the
fi rst attendant murmurs quietly to her. The sec-
ond attendant puts on a mask.
We’re called inside. The nurses, in masks,
check T’s vitals. He has a slight fever, just over
99 degrees, but that may be lowered because of
the recent ibuprofen and acetaminophen in his
system. His blood pressure is fi ne. His pulse is
fi ne. His oxygen saturation is fi ne. We tell them
about the fevers, the sweats, the nausea, the
coughing, the spots of blood he is continuing to
cough up, the lower oxygen- saturation number
we recorded at home this morning.
When the nurses leave, T leans back in the
examination chair, resting his head with his eyes
closed. Out in the hall, I hear someone telling
a patient that he has been sick for a long time.
It’s time to go to the hospital fi ve blocks away.
The doctor comes in, wearing a mask and
a plastic shield over it. T, shivering in a paper
gown, follows her out for the X-ray. ‘‘That was
strangely diffi cult,’’ he says when he returns.
‘‘Just holding my arms above my head.’’ The
X-ray looks diff erent from the one a week ago,
the doctor tells us after consulting with the
radiologist. Now it shows pneumonia in the left
lung. T’s doctor was right to order the antibi-
otics last night. T’s lungs sound all right when
she listens through a stethoscope — he is not
wheezing. He is not having breathing prob-
lems. He can keep being treated at home. ‘‘But
now we’re going to be watching you even more
closely,’’ she says.
At the door of the clinic, we stand looking
out at two older women chatting outside the
doorway, oblivious. Do I wave them away? Call
out that they should get far away, go home, wash
their hands, stay inside? Instead we just stand
there, awkwardly, until they move on. Only then
do we step outside to begin the long three-block
walk home. I point out the early magnolia, the
forsythia. T says he is cold. The untrimmed
hairs on his neck, under his beard, are white.
The few people walking past us on the sidewalk
don’t know that we are visitors from the future.
A vision, a premonition, a walking visitation.
This will be them: Either T, in the mask, or — if
they’re lucky — me, tending to him.