By early February, optimism and anxiety coursed throughout the city. For the first time since the outbreak began, Coastal Health Authority officials reported steep drops in both infections and fatalities. The success was attributed to the vaccine, and the anti-vaxxers or those who’d found excuses to avoid a needle rushed to the various clinic sites. During this wave, supplies correctly anticipated the surge of demand.
With good news came opportunities to call as many press conferences as possible. In the second week of February, one media event was arranged by Dr Orla Castello to announce the imminent closure of the auxiliary hospital. In the ensuing question period, Castello admitted that discussions about lifting the quarantine had begun. “There will be another press conference when we have a firm date in mind,” she added.
Romeo Parsons kicked off a full return to his role as mayor by announcing a date in late May for a referendum on his anti-poverty plan. “It’s also a referendum on my leadership,” he said. If the people voted “No,” he would resign. He acknowledged again his personal troubles, blaming them on hubris and an “outdated sense of a private life” that had not considered digital security. In a separate press conference with Canada’s Prime Minister (onscreen through a satellite connection), he also announced details of a federal stimulus package that included infrastructure improvements like free wi-fi in the downtown core.
The tentative date in mid-March for the reopening of the city was made known two weeks in advance. The barricade gates would be removed and the airport would open if the infection rate continued to drop. “It’s not unusual for these epidemics to lobtail,” Castello said. “We expect to see the last gasp of disease before the reopening.” Her tone implied that the reopening was conditional on our good behaviour.
This caution was not heeded. Strangers waltzed cheek-to-cheek, mask-to-mask, on Robson Street. Cyclists on the icy bicycle lanes rang their bells cheerfully as they passed one another. Restaurants and bars gave away celebratory rounds of smuggled, premium-priced alcohol. Parents took their children out of school for ice cream and Go-Kart rides.
To survive, Vancouverites had adopted a measured approach to the privations of the quarantine. They could not waste the energy needed to stay alert to infection. Their tears were reserved only for the suffering of those closest to them. With the deadline in sight, they lost their composure. Like long-distance runners with the finish line in sight, they began to notice their ragged lungs, sore joints, and aching muscles. They bawled and wailed in agony and relief.
During those two weeks, people started to wonder about the future. Some of them used that transitional period to ready themselves, while others booked vacations to their “bucket list” destinations. Some romantic relationships crystallized in this period, and many more dissolved in anticipation of freedom and possibility.
Not everyone prepared for their new life, but no one expected to return to their old one.
Janice Grossman had been offered her previous job as a tour-bus operator, at reduced hours. She declined to return. She hoped to continue hosting performances at her unlicensed space. “I mean, I know the fucking mayor,” she told Tso. “I nursed him back from the grave.” To make up for lost income, she rented her downstairs apartment to Jeffrey Oishi.
In the process of preparing the apartment for rental, she cleared some of her own space. She found Janet’s unopened letters and read them for the first time. There were three separate letters written three months apart in the first three months after their split. The first letter was the longest and most conciliatory. The final one was cold and brief. The second one fell in the middle of those extremes.
“She basically wrote the same letter three different ways,” she told Tso. “The third letter was the clearest one.” In her unanswered correspondence, she explained that she felt guilty for mistreating Grossman and that she could not repay her. She would never be happy trying to repay her. She chose instead to live with her guilt and move on.
The admission of fault moved Grossman. “It means more to me than her saying she would always love me,” she said. “Because love fades. It’s guilt that lasts.”
To celebrate the city’s reopening, Grossman reactivated another “long-dormant thing,” her internet dating profile. She invited Tso over for tea so that she could share her initial impressions about her romantic prospects. Hanging on a clothes line from the wall over the kitchen table was what at first seemed to be a chain of paper dolls. Upon closer inspection, Tso realized that the dolls, held to the clothesline with binder clips, were pictures of Grossman. They were the cut-out images of herself from Janet’s paintings.
Grossman noticed the figures had caught Tso’s attention. “I’m not sure I’ll keep the cut-outs like that,” she said. “I might put them all in a scrapbook.” She had arranged the paper dolls from the youngest-looking one—Grossman wearing her Gertrude Stein T-shirt—to depictions of her from later in their relationship. Each figure, stripped from its tableaux, was finely detailed. As the paper dolls danced across the clothesline, the depictions of Grossman’s features gained wrinkles and the tint of her hair mutated. Her expression grew lighter, less like a horny satyr and more restful and content, as she collected experience. At the end of the line, Tso saw her friend.
From outside the quarantine zone, Raymond Siddhu sent out resumes for various communications jobs in the public and private sector.
As he waited for a response, he continued the couples therapy that he and Uma had begun in late January. During their sessions, Siddhu revealed his previous infidelity to his wife. Although she had long suspected the incident, she felt its sting, but she also appreciated his confession as an attempt to reduce her own sense of guilt over her affair. Siddhu realized that the schism in their marriage had been exacerbated by the strain of separation; it was a fissure that had been growing since their sons were born.
They each wrote a list of their daily childcare tasks. He’d known she did more work around the house, but this chart was striking. “The list is skewed,” Siddhu insisted at first. “She’s been on maternity leave.”
Now out of work, Siddhu began to take his sons to the park. He did their laundry and cooked dinner on the days when Uma, whose internet fling had ended, did the books in the office of her brother’s Honda dealership. Uma texted him during the day to check on his emotional temperature. Saturday nights alternated between date nights and “me” nights—when either Siddhu or Uma were free to do what they wanted.
He followed the coverage around Elliot Horne-Bough’s arrest for invasion of privacy and began to craft a proposal for a true-crime book. Out on bail, Horne-Bough remained an enigma worthy of study, but Siddhu had found his erratic leadership style to be exhausting. Writing about him, especially if he were to cooperate, would return Siddhu to his mercy for an indefinite period of time.
That’s when he received a call from the mayor’s office for an interview as a communications director. They set up an appointment for the Monday after the city gates opened. “The mayor obviously knows your work,” his aide told Siddhu. “He wants you on his team.”
Siddhu knew he didn’t want to be on the team of any person or party or company. As a journalist, he had aligned himself with the objective truth. At least he strived to do so beyond any of his inherent biases and the limitations imposed on him by deadlines and access. He also knew he had to feed his family. And he liked Parsons. Given a choice between Horne-Bough and Parsons, he’d work for Parsons.
Orla Castello completed paperwork for early retirement. When she met with Rieux for coffee, she had already made plans with a nonprofit to help coordinate the founding of a hospital in Sierra Leone. A new wave of the Ebola virus had decimated the medical system, taking down ten percent of its doctors and nurses. She would leave in the spring.
“I want to get out of here before they start handing out medals—not that I expect to get any,” Castello said.
“You’d be the first in line,” Rieux told her.
“I have a feeling that the wrong people will get those medals. They’ll be the ones who come out of it talking about ‘lessons learned.’ They’ll talk about innovation and say it was simple. It was actually complicated. People suffered no matter what we decided to do.”
She asked Rieux about his wife.
“Elyse has made a remarkable recovery—I shouldn’t have called her treatment quackery,” Rieux said. “But we’ve grown too far apart. She’s leaving Mexico but has no plans to come home.”
She leaned across the table toward him. “I’m sorry,” she told him. “I love both of you.”
He squeezed her hands.
This was the first time he’d admitted out loud that his marriage was over, something he hadn’t even told his mother. He felt like he’d stabbed himself.
“I didn’t know how poorly I cared for her—until all this happened,” Rieux said. “Things might be different if I’d understood her pain.”
“You always tried, Bernard. She knew that,” Castello said. “You’re too hardworking. When are you going to take a vacation?”
“In about two weeks,” he said with a smile. “I still have patients to see and paperwork to put together.”
The bill came to the table. She snatched it from the plate like a cat swatting at a bird. “Go on holiday earlier,” she told him. “People are going to live and die whatever you do.”
The Sanitation League met an unceremonious demise as calls to its hotlines and emailed requests plummeted more drastically than the rate of infection. Tso and Rieux personally thanked every volunteer for their service. They talked about throwing a party after the quarantine was over, but neither could manage to do anything. Besides, Tso needed to leave.
Through the US consulate Tso purchased a ticket home. The time in Vancouver had drained her savings—the consulate would reimburse her, but the lag in processing meant that she pushed up against her credit-card limit. She needed to make money soon, and her old job had opened up. A friend in Los Angeles emailed to say that she was moving in with her boyfriend. Tso had always loved her apartment. Did she want it? Tso could take over her lease in March.
She decided that a sudden return to her old life would be the best cure for any hangover that came from her experience in Vancouver. Leaving these new friends behind would be bittersweet, but there was no point in staying in one place when everyone else’s lives were being reordered. You either leave people, or you’re being left behind, she told herself.
At the US consulate, she was given an envelope. It had been couriered from their Japanese counterparts. The note was written on tissue-thin writing paper in a frail hand.
Dear Megan Tso,
I apologize for our late reply. I apologize also for our simple English.
Thank you so much for sending to us the passport of our daughter, Yuko. The consulate official said you tried to help her when she became sick.
We thought you might want to know more about Yuko.
Yuko was our only daughter. She was twenty-two years old. She studied English for a year in the United Kingdom. She wanted to work for an airline and travel. She loved dogs.
We are very sad since she died. But we know that she lived a life that made her happy.
Thank you for reading this letter about our daughter.
Yuko’s Mother (and Father)
Tso’s hands trembled as she reread the note. She saw a girl running down the beach into the embrace of the person who made her.
After being released on bail, Elliott Horne-Bough announced his latest venture with philanthropist and family friend Frederick Graham. Evermark™ would create luxury monuments for the ultra-rich, built to last a thousand years.
“I think we should keep an eye on Farhad,” Grossman told Tso a few days after the reopening was announced. She had heard him screaming into the phone in his apartment.
The smuggling trade had not yet been affected. As inspection protocols remained in place, contraband was still required to meet the city’s more celebratory appetites for foie gras, champagne, and Atlantic lobster. But within a few weeks, his services would no longer be in demand.
It was Oishi’s move into Izzy Grossman’s apartment that prompted Khan’s next outburst. When he saw the judge outside the house with the moving van, he ran up to Grossman’s apartment, pounded his fists against her door, and demanded that she open it.
Tso, who had moved to Grossman’s couch until she left the city, was wearing her pyjamas when she cracked open the door. Khan slipped his foot in the crack and pried it open.
“What message are you trying to send to me, eh?” Khan asked. “Have I not been your friend? Why do you rent to that judge?” he asked. “Is there a reason why you’re torturing me?”
Grossman appeared a moment afterward. Khan shouted to her over Tso’s shoulder. He kept thumping his bare chest like an over-emotive singer.
Grossman didn’t know about Oishi’s connection to Khan. “He needed a place to stay,” she said.
He threw his hands in the air. “A man needs to feel like he’s at home. Not like he’s on trial.”
He stomped back into his apartment. When they heard glass breaking and other noises, Grossman called the police. Khan stormed out before they arrived. Grossman prepared an eviction notice for him, but he never bothered to pick it up. He never returned to the apartment.
A few days before the quarantine was lifted, one of Gastown Annex’s newest condo projects, set to cast the rest of the block in its shadow, was set ablaze. Police and firefighters found Khan sitting on the curb with two tanks of gasoline.
The damages to the stone and steel foundations were superficial, yet the developers wanted Khan punished severely. Later that year, when Khan stood in the courtroom for his sentencing, he swayed back and forth until his lawyer asked him to stop. He dutifully answered the questions that the judge asked him but otherwise looked swept up in his own private music. He seemed disappointed that his prison sentence wasn’t longer.