Сигрид Нуньес - Salvation City

I’m not sure how much Miles understood what was happening, either. His last lucid moment was around noon two days ago, when for a little while he was able to breathe a bit more freely and he could talk. And he looked at me with tears in his eyes and said, We blew it, baby. I still don’t know what he meant. I thought he might have been talking about us separating, but it’s possible he was talking about the flu and how we’d blown our chance to get away. He may not have realized there was nowhere to go. But these were his last words to me, and I will never get over that. I can’t bear to think of him dying under the weight of such a heavy regret. And it was the first time he called me baby in such a long time.

But I can’t let myself think like this right now or I’ll go mad. I’ve got to think about Cole. And now that I’ve been to the hospital and seen with my own eyes what it’s like, I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try to do something. I’ve made up my mind to volunteer at the clinic they’ve set up at the college, at least for a few hours a day. It will mean leaving Cole home by himself but I think he’ll understand. Besides, if I’m around him all the time it just gets on his nerves. Poor Cole. When I think of all the trouble we’ve been having with him, how badly he’s doing in school and how cold and sullen he’s gotten with me, and now he’s even smoking on the sly—how small all these problems seem now. Can you imagine losing Mom or Dad when we were that age, and without even being able to say good-bye?

Cole stopped scrolling and went upstairs to get his cigarettes.

It was chilly outside but he didn’t put on a jacket. He paced back and forth on the porch, shivering, as he smoked a Marlboro down to the butt—first time he’d ever smoked a whole cigarette all at once. Cough, cough, cough. It stung his lungs and made him so woozy he had to sit down. He was afraid he might throw up.

The sky was the solid blue of any fine Midwestern winter day. Across the street, on the graveled drive, the calico sat cleaning itself just as if the end of the world were not taking place.

She should have woken him. It was all wrong. She was always wrong! He felt the heat expanding in his chest, the heat of his rage, but at the same time he was ashamed, for to be so angry at his mother now was all wrong, too.

He stared up the street, toward the house of the man who’d been in their house last night, an old geezer Cole had only glimpsed once or twice. Lumber jacket, ear-flap hat. One of the last people to touch his father. Cole beamed his anger there. That man should have stayed with his mother. That man should have done more to help them!

Cole was freezing now, his teeth actually chattering so that he bit his tongue. He went back inside.

A whole Marlboro turned out to be way strong—almost strong enough to knock you out.

He weaved up the stairs, but instead of going to his own room he found himself walking into his parents’ room and diving into their rumpled bed. Immediately, his father’s smell engulfed him. He pulled the covers over his shivering body, he pulled them up over his head, he burrowed his face in the pillow, inhaling the smell of his father.

The bed went slowly round and round, borne on a lazy tornado.

His mother was lying. His father was gone—hadn’t she wanted to be rid of him?—but he wasn’t dead. It was part of her plan. Maybe his father was in on it, too. They had plotted together to pretend he was dead . . .

Later Cole would call this the sickest and craziest thought he’d ever had.

His parents had talked to him about death. They had talked about it at length after his grandparents died. What had they said? That it was irrational for a person to be afraid of death because if you were dead you didn’t know you were dead, and how could you be afraid of something you didn’t know. But also that it was perfectly natural to be afraid. Even people who got to live a long time weren’t happy to die, they said. Death was always tragic, they said. But the worst tragedy was to have your life cut short. To die young.

When he thought about it, though, Cole didn’t believe it would be such a bad thing to die. Even before the pandemic began, he’d caught himself thinking this. It was another one of his secrets (he knew his life would become unbearable if his parents ever found out). He imagined the actual moment of dying as something like sinking into Lake Michigan: deeper and deeper, colder and colder, darker and darker. He imagined it was something like being frozen stiff. And then you’d be dead but you wouldn’t know you were dead, so you couldn’t feel bad. You couldn’t feel anything. You’d be free. Never to have to worry again about how people were looking at you, or talking about you. Never to have to pretend how awesome it was to be alive, how lucky to be a kid, enjoying every minute of your precious kid time.

A few weeks earlier, someone in Chicago had called to tell them Cole’s old classmate Ruthie Lind had died. It wasn’t that Cole hadn’t felt sad for Ruthie; he’d felt very sad, even if he hadn’t cried. But he’d felt something else as well. A funny, nagging, must-keep-secret feeling. And already many times since hearing the news he’d caught himself thinking, She got out.

But his parents believed life was too short no matter when you died. They hated growing older, and once, when they heard Cole tell someone his grandmother had died because she was old, they had rushed to correct him. Sixty wasn’t old, they explained, it was middle-aged. And to die at sixty was to die young .

His father was forty-nine.

His father had wanted to live forever. That was why he ran every morning.

Cole wanted to know, though he knew no one could ever tell him, if somehow, at the moment you died, you understood what was happening to you. He tried to imagine then how his father might have felt, and he could not imagine this except as something extremely frightening and painful. He could not believe that, in his father’s last seconds, there had been any thought of rest or quiet or sleep or peace. What he imagined his father seeing and smelling and hearing was a saber-toothed tiger pouncing to tear him apart.

The year before, his father had had some kind of symptom, some stomach pain, and he’d gone to the doctor, who ordered some tests, one of which came back “iffy.” The doctor had ordered more tests, and it was while they were waiting for the results that Cole had seen what a hard time his father was having. Though his father had gone about his business as usual, it was clear in everything he did, including repeating the same joke—at which his mother always laughed dutifully, though each time with a little more strain: “Who has time to die?” The day the doctor called with good news his father said he felt ten years younger. “And you look it, too!” said his mother, dabbing at tears of relief.

From time to time Cole had sat in on a class that his father was teaching. In fact, the last time he’d done this had been just three weeks ago. He had sat in on one of his father’s lectures. It was a happy memory. His father complained endlessly about teaching, but that day he was clearly enjoying himself, and Cole had been particularly impressed with how he held the attention of those fifty or so students, even getting a couple of good laughs out of them. Anyone would have thought he and Abe Lincoln were bros. Cole remembered how bitter his father had been about not getting tenure. “If it was up to the kids, it’d be a different story. Just read their evaluations.” The students loved him, his father insisted, and whenever he said this Cole would wonder how those students would feel if they knew what awful things Professor Vining said about them and how much he made fun of them, sometimes reading from their papers to his mother, the two of them roaring with laughter.