Almost Forty Days
BY LINDSAY ZIER-VOGEL
The kids wear paper crowns and ask about my favourite part of the day at 8:30 in the morning. It’s only been two hours, but I answer dutifully, and they talk about the movie they watched yesterday, and I don’t bother correcting them.
My friend in London has it. The virus. She posts updates on Facebook, tracking the tightness in her lungs, her headaches, her nausea, her hovering fever, her cough, the ache for her daughter. She is four or five hours ahead—it’s been so long since I travelled I don’t remember time zones. The weirdest part is the exhaustion, she writes, and then says she’s going to sleep.
Today, the five-year-old had an epic meltdown about drawing tulips. Mine were better than his and it ruined the day.
By some miracle, I wake up before the baby wakes up, though she’s not a baby anymore. She is almost three and peeing on the little green potty now. She is a big kid, she insists, and she is the most capable of all four of us.
It rains. A lot. Too much to go outside, but I send the kids out anyway, to count the crocuses, to scare the squirrels from eating the crocuses, to check and see how much lawn the raccoons and skunks dug up last night, to report on how many eggs, how many loaves of bread, how many take-out containers of organic couscous salad our neighbour left out for the raccoons and skunks.
The lines on my face are becoming deeper and more permanent now that I no longer compose my face for strangers
Esther’s fever won’t break and it’s all I can think about while the kids build a dinosaur nest in the backyard with sticks that have blown off the oak tree.
I love them the most when they are outside and I can watch them from the sliding glass doors in the kitchen. They look so happy. They are mine, I think, my heart swelling until they come in, fractured and loud and refusing to take off muddy boots and airing injustices about stealing basketballs and t-ball turns and then I escape again to the bathroom where no one can question the closed door.
The lines on my face are becoming deeper and more permanent now that I no longer compose my face for strangers. My face furrows as I stare at my phone, constantly staring, avoiding news, reading about Esther’s heart rate, up to 79 bpm from 70 yesterday, and peering beyond people’s well-composed photos of sourdough starter and tulips to see the mess in the background—the pillows cast off from couches, the capsized towers, the abandoned craft projects, the half-eaten snacks.
Instagram is filled with the wild, cooped-up eyes of children who have been inside too long, been together too long, the hashtags of acquaintances barely keeping it together, the positive comments I add to my own staged photos, forcing optimism because I don’t want to remember the morning when the oven broke and I cried and cried until I had to stop because Jack grew scared. “We are going to still eat. We can still make food,” I said into his hair over and over. “We can use the barbecue. We will make Claire’s birthday cake on the barbecue!” Can we? I don’t know. But if it doesn’t work, there is a Tupperware of tiny cupcakes I made for her daycare class months ago when I had extra cake batter and an oven that worked and daycare was still a thing.
Adam and I try to teach the kids what whining sounds like, try to convince them that we can’t hear that pitch. They continue to whine because they are kids. We continue to pretend we can’t hear them because we are parents.
Esther is running low on Tylenol, and I feel panicky about it all day, until she writes me back and says she is having some delivered.
My kids scream at squirrels and pound the glass doors in the kitchen. “The black squirrels are winning,” Claire tells me.
“Not the grey squirrels.”
I don’t know what the game is.
We stand on the sidewalk in the thin afternoon sunlight and ask in awkwardly loud voices, “How was your day?”
But there are too many days in each day to answer that question. There are minutes that are good. And minutes, hours that are impossible. The sun helps. The rain doesn’t help.
It is the day before Mother’s Day in the UK and Esther’s chest burns and the headache and nausea have returned. She air-hugs her daughter from ten metres away and posts a photo of them together, and apart.
When this was all still novel, a three-week vacation, we made lists of spring things, of fun things, of things to do around the house. They were lofty and ambitious—make Beef Wellington! Wash the walls! Touch up the paint! Caulk the bathtub! Organize the basement!
Now our lists are immediate—get through breakfast. Work for ten minutes without checking Twitter. Have a dance party. Give the kids a bath. We don’t often get through it all.
We had drinks last night with friends, screens connecting our living rooms. It was a treat to see them on a Wednesday night, and it felt strangely normal. We told them Claire is potty trained, that the kids have been setting the table, even though what we really meant is they fight over the forks and who gets to choose the napkins. I saw them bristle and realized it sounded like we were bragging and I regret saying anything.
Esther can’t reach her GP, but the Corona Team promises to call her back. Her fever persists, the headache, the congestion. She adds salt to her water. She doesn’t move from her bed and starts the BBC’s 1995 version of Pride and Prejudice. I’ve never seen it, or read the book, though I know you’re not supposed to admit that when you have degrees in English.
I send the kids out in the rain to look for worms but Claire tells me she is scared they will eat her so I tell her she can look for robins instead.
She is long now, tall, and when the rain stops, she flies down the sidewalk on a scooter, her second time ever. Neighbours yell her name, cheering her on. She is buoyed by it and races even faster. I don’t know how she learned how to do this. I didn’t teach her. Jack didn’t teach her. She just knows that she wants to fly, and so she does.
She has started having night terrors. Shrieking and thrashing. Awake, but also not. She is a rabid wolf. All claws and teeth, kicking the wall next to her bed until I’m afraid the plaster will crack. Once, asking her about the orange cat down the street snapped her out of her fury, but today nothing will bring her back, and she punches and kicks her way through her afternoon nap, her hair matted, the little cars and trucks on her pillowcase drenched in sweat. “Do you want water? Do you want me to rub your back? Can I rub your back?” “No no no no leave me,” she howls and I want to. I want to leave, her fury too terrifying. It is exhausting, lying here, avoiding fists and heels, but I make myself stay. Eventually, she falls back to sleep. I lie beside her as she breathes.
After she wakes up, we play volleyball with a balloon I found in the basement, the coffee table as a net. She laughs and laughs and it is such a relief to hear, like waking up to hear robins singing and knowing the season has changed.
Despite her best efforts, Esther is beginning to fall in love with Mr. Darcy.
The days are three, four days in one. They are never ending and we debate what to eat when and how to not scare the children, but also ration their goldfish crackers. The parks are closed and off-leash dogs run wild in any speck of green space, so we stay in our backyard, on the sidewalk. “Two sidewalk squares apart!” I yell over and over.
“I forgot. I keep forgetting,” Jack says.
Me too. Me too. I talk to any grown-up who walks past, words spilling out of me even as they’re walking away.
The kids make construction paper crowns every afternoon now, decorating them with bingo dabbers. I am scared we are going to run out of tape.
The Corona Team calls Esther back, and I picture a bunch of bubbly, blonde Frosh Week girls in crop tops handing out shitty beer with slivers of limes. They tell her she may or may not have the virus, that they are not testing. At all. That they don’t know when she won’t have the virus. That they don’t know when it will be safe to see her daughter again. They don’t know. They just don’t.
It’s Claire’s third birthday. “I’m three!” she yells over and over, running from the kitchen to the front door and back and forth and back and forth. “I am stronger today,” she tells me after she punches the wall next to her bed, furious that Adam went in to get her this morning instead of me. After breakfast, she tries to skip and I laugh so hard at her gallop-run-shuffle that I think I’m going to choke.
I bake her a cake on the barbecue. “Is it working? Is it working?” Jack asks. “Are you going to cry if it doesn’t work?” I paste a smile on my face. “I am not going to cry,” I promise and it does work and we cover it with blue icing and candles. We sing loudly and neighbours hold up signs. Happy, the first one says. Birthday, says the second; Claire, the third one says.
We are running low on avocados and stickers.
I’m not going to die. Well, not right now, of this, Esther writes. I didn’t ever think she would, but when I read this, I realize she could’ve and I’m the one who suddenly can’t breathe. Her headaches are almost gone, but return later in the day. Her temperature rises again, then recedes. And then she’s diagnosed with a secondary infection. Pneumonia. She can still hold her breath for a full minute, and I hold tight to this.
Fuck fuck fuck. Will this ever end? I write, and then delete.
I press the crocuses the kids trample with soccer balls in my book and remember when I got pneumonia after my grandmother died. I couldn’t walk to the kitchen. I couldn’t even sit up. There are 5,037 kilometres between my front door and Esther’s flat and I wish we were still living across the street from each other the way we did when we were in grad school.
She is on antibiotics now, delivered by her landlord. She plays Roblox with her daughter for two hours. They fish and swim, and after they hang up, she roasts a chicken. It’s exhausting, carving it, she writes, but I feel relieved that she has a fridge full of food.
The kids found 63 worms this morning. Many of them were dead, stranded on the sidewalk and run over by small plastic scooter wheels, cleaved in the centre. Worms have five hearts, Jack writes on a piece of Bristol board, mostly without vowels. They don’t have eyes. They breathe through their skin.
Boris Johnson is in the ICU and Esther feels like herself for the first time in 22 days. I add confetti canon emojis and a string of hearts. An untrained German Shepard charges at the kids. They are out for a bike ride with Adam and it is too unbearable to think about. Their fear, the what ifs what ifs—. Now they are both afraid to leave the house.
I think I’ll stop with the daily symptom posts, which are, to me, becoming repetitive, Esther writes on her Facebook page and posts a photo with her and her cat. But I don’t want her to stop. How’s the morning? I write to her when I first wake up, hoping there is no fever, no burning in her lungs, no debilitating exhaustion. Okay, she writes back. It’s warm here.
The nights here are especially cold, dipping down below zero and so we turn off the water and without the motion sensor sprinkler, the raccoons dig up our backyard grass, peeling it back, and picking at it like a scab. There is less and less grass each day and the seed Adam threw by the handful refuses to grow.
The fatigue takes her out on Day 35, coupled with a low-grade fever, a headache, a tightness in her chest — all of it all over again. Fuck fuck fuck. Will this ever end? I write, and then delete.
Owners let their dogs run and run and insist they are friendly, they are friendly! And my kids are now terrified of dogs, and our street, and every single park. It doesn’t matter how many posters we make of the friendly dogs we know, or how many pages of the dog identification book we read, they are terrified. And it fills every corner of every day.
Esther sees foxes in her yard. They are taking over, she writes.
Teri comes by in the afternoon with her daughter. Clara digs in the mound of dirt the plumbers dug when sewage was seeping into our neighbour’s basement in the winter. Teri and I talk about work and parenting, and how everything is different and hard. Everything is hard, and also we’re all okay. Clara holds out a handful of beach glass, pale green and pale blue. I have not even thought of the beach in weeks, months maybe.
Teri takes a picture of us, the four of us. The first portrait of the four of us in months that hasn’t been taken at arm’s length, the camera turned back around to face us. We are smiling and we look happy, except Claire who is on my lap, refusing to look at the camera.
Day 36: It’s like I’m walking slowly on a moving sidewalk in the wrong direction, Esther writes.
How is it the 19th? How is it not the 12th or the 10th. Everyone says it but it’s true, time doesn’t make sense anymore.
Because I can’t send over her daughter, or the lemon cake I made on the barbecue this afternoon, I send flowers, even though I have no idea how much they cost with the exchange rate. But what does money even mean? It is like time these days. Today is my first day without a job. I don’t think I miss it yet, but I might. Esther will get the flowers on Saturday. I check my phone—three days from now.
“Thank you for having your dog on a leash,” the kids have started chanting to every owner with a tethered dog. It is a slow, measured chant that is impossible to understand, so I translate for bewildered dog owners, who brighten once they understand.
“Of course.”
“Always.”
“No problem.”
She has been sick for almost 40 days. She hasn’t seen her daughter in almost 40 days, and the thought very nearly capsizes me. She talks to her over her phone, their faces filling screens, and they play Minecraft together in their respective living rooms, and I cannot imagine not smelling my kids’ hair that we haven’t washed all week, their sticky fingers, their whining. I would miss their whining.
They are playing basketball in the backyard. “Mom’s on her own team,” Jack tells Claire. “We’re on the same team. Pass to me.” “I’m never going to be on your team,” she yells, until they pick up hockey sticks. “I’m the goalie,” she says, widening her stance.
LINDSAY ZIER-VOGEL is a Toronto-based writer and arts educator. Her first novel Letters to Amelia (2021) is published by Book*Hug Press. She is also the creator of internationally acclaimed The Love Lettering Project and has two picture books based on the project coming out with Kids Can Press.
www.lindsayziervogel.com