Chapter 3 Proof

By nine o'clock the apartment was empty, and I had not decided yet whether that was a relief or a mistake. Daniel left first. He kissed me at the door with his laptop bag over one shoulder and said he'd try to be home by six. Elise left ten minutes later, borrowing my umbrella without asking, the way she had borrowed everything of mine since she was eleven. "Love you!" she called from the stairwell, already halfway down. "Love you too," I said to the closed door. It came out easily. That frightened me more than anything else that morning. I stood in the hallway until the building went quiet. Then I went back to the kitchen, washed the three plates, wiped the syrup off the counter, and sat down at the table with a pen and the pad of paper that lived beside the grocery magnets. I'd been a nurse for four years. When the world fell apart, I wrote it down. That was the only method I had. I wrote the date at the top. Then I stared at it for a long time. The trouble was that I did not trust my own head. A mind that has died once does not feel like a mind that is working properly. It felt like a house after a flood, everything still standing, but the floors soft, the walls remembering water. I could see the ridge road. I could see Mrs. Abernathy's buttoned cardigan. What I could not do, I discovered, was put the events in a straight line. So I started with the things I was sure of. The alert came on the twenty-third. I'd watched it in a break room with six other nurses, a government voice reading a statement that kept getting interrupted by a second, quieter voice off camera. Nobody said the word infection. Somebody said containment, and Priya from pediatrics dropped her coffee. The first blackout came after that. I wrote it down, and then stopped with the pen on the paper. The sixth? The seventh? I had held that date in my hands for nine days. I had counted toward it. I had stood in a stairwell in total darkness and thought, this is the sixth night, the sixth, and it was gone. Not erased, exactly. Just out of reach, the way a word goes when you try too hard to say it. I could feel the shape of the answer, and nothing inside it. I wrote both numbers down with a question mark. My hand was steady. My stomach was not. It's fine, I told myself. It's been less than two hours. You've been awake less than two hours. I moved on to the smaller things, the details that don't matter to anyone but the person who lived through them. A cold front that would hit the city tomorrow night. A transit strike announced on Wednesday, called off on Thursday. The name of a pop star who would be hospitalized on the nineteenth, which sounded insane written down, but I'd heard it in the break room the day before the alert and it had been the last thing anyone talked about that was not the end of the world. None of it was useful. All of it was a test. I picked up my phone, still lying where I'd dropped it on the rug, and opened the weather. A cold front, arriving tomorrow night. Temperatures dropping eleven degrees by Wednesday morning. I put the phone down very carefully, like something that might go off. Then I got dressed, because if I sat in that kitchen another hour with my own handwriting I would start to come apart. I put on jeans and my gray coat and walked to the corner store on the next block, not because I needed anything, but because I needed to be near other people who did not know. The man behind the counter was reading a newspaper. An actual paper, folded in quarters, a habit I'd always found charming. I bought a pack of gum and a coffee and stood by the door while I flipped through it. Page three. A transit workers' union threatening to walk out on Wednesday. I read it twice. My eyes kept sliding off the words and landing on the paper's masthead, the date, the little weather icon in the corner. I stood there until the man looked up and asked if I was all right. "Fine," I said. "Sorry. Long night." "Aren't they all," he said, and went back to his paper. I walked home the long way. Past the bakery, where a girl in a striped apron was chalking the day's specials on a sandwich board. Past the bus stop, where three people waited and one of them was laughing into a phone. Past the pharmacy, my pharmacy, the one with the calendar on the wall. Its windows were bright and clean. Somebody had taped a paper snowflake to the glass. I stopped in front of it for longer than made sense. This was where I had stood on day eleven with a tire iron, looking at that same calendar through a smashed door. Same sign. Same chipped green awning. In nine days this window would be gone. A woman came out with a paper bag, glanced at me, and slowed. "You okay, hon?" I opened my mouth to say yes. What came out instead was a laugh, a small, ugly, wet thing. I put my hand over my face. "Sorry. I'm sorry. I'm okay." "No, I know that look." She laid a hand on my arm, light, brief. "Bad week? Mine too. Get yourself something warm. It helps, I swear." She walked away. I stood there with my coffee going cold and my eyes burning, understanding that she was the first stranger who had touched me in this life. In the last one, the last person who had done that was Mrs. Abernathy. I made myself walk the rest of the way home. Back at the table, I turned to a fresh page. At the top, in block capitals, I wrote: WHAT CHANGED. Underneath it, nothing. A single line, and then a second. It was a joke. It was a notebook about differences, and I had nothing to compare yet. Everything I did from here on, every purchase, every phone call, every word I said to the people I loved would nudge this world a little off the track I remembered. I wanted a record of exactly how far. Below that I wrote three rules. One. Tell no one. Not Elise, not Daniel, not anyone. Two. Write down everything that happens, the day it happens. Three. Do not trust a date. I looked at the third rule for a while. Then I added, under it, smaller: Not even mine. The apartment ticked and settled around me. Refrigerator, radiator, the floorboards cooling. I held very still and listened for the other sound, the slow patient one from under the floor. I sat for five minutes, Ten, still nothing. Just an ordinary old building doing its ordinary old noises. I should have felt better but I didn't. There was one more thing to do, and I had been putting it off since the kitchen. I reached into the pocket of my coat, then my jeans, then the zippered pouch of my bag, and then I remembered it was in the small dish on the dresser where it always lived when I showered. I went to the bedroom and picked it up. A thin gold band with a small stone. It had been in my pocket for eight days of the end of the world, and I had stopped wearing it because it caught on things. I turned it over in my fingers. It was warm from the sunlight on the dresser. Daniel had gotten down on one knee in the middle of a restaurant that smelled like garlic and cried, actually cried, and I had said yes before he'd finished the question. He had meant it. I believed that. I believed it with the same part of me that still believed in the lavender detergent and the bird outside the window, the part that had not been told. If I was going to be lied to by two people who loved me, I could at least be the first one who started. I slid the ring onto my finger. It fit exactly as it always had. Then I picked up my phone and texted my sister, because the Mara who died at that door would have, and the Mara who woke up was going to need to keep being her for a while. Dinner at mine tonight? I'll make that pasta you like. The three dots appeared almost at once. Then, a second later: YES. Daniel says he has news, btw. Something about work!! Don't tell him I told you. I read it three times. I put the phone face down on the dresser and stood in the middle of my bedroom, in the pale ordinary light, with my own handwriting waiting in the kitchen. Then I went to buy groceries for the last family dinner I would ever cook without knowing what I was feeding.