A week later, the pair drove to the country with Mack, his fat head dangling ecstatically out of the window, his jowls whipped into a smile by the wind.
Heath had a beat-up old Chevy 4X4, which was a good thing because people were now fleeing the city in earnest, and Romy imagined it would be impossible to snag a rental.
It wasn’t a comfortable drive, the truck had no backseat and they didn’t dare put Mack in the outside flatbed, so he sat on the door side, Romy squished between his hard muscled body and right up against Heath’s thigh, something she couldn’t stop thinking about the entire ride.
She kept a grip on Mack’s thick leather collar, worried he might excitedly try to make a run for it, despite the fact there was no way he could get through the half-rolled-up window with that fat head. His tail, which Romy was glad was not cropped, was thick as an armadillo tail and kept up a steady thwack-thwack against her arm.
Like two million other New Yorkers that March, they made their escape from the crowded city, where anyone walking down the street could inadvertently blow the virus into your face.
And because a lot of people who had the virus didn’t show any symptoms, anyone could hold the key to your doom—your mailman, your deli counter guy, your neighbor, your best friend, your lover, your child. Best to get out into the open spaces. So went the thinking at the time, anyway.
Before she left, Romy slipped another note under Bill’s door, explaining that she’d decided to leave town but was only four hours away, and could come back whenever he returned. She promised to take good care of Mack.
Despite being in possession of an N95 mask, she couldn’t bring herself to open Bill’s door. The virus was still so new, so little known about it, that Romy sometimes felt it might lunge out from behind a telephone pole and tackle her to the ground.
She tried not to think about all she and her neighbor had said to each other in those last minutes before his door buzzed and she’d rushed downstairs to let the EMTs inside.
Bill was the only person she’d ever told what happened that night.
Now she was painfully ashamed at what she had told him. But, at the time, she’d felt it would ease his conscience if she unburdened hers. In truth, it had felt good to unlock it from her mind and share it with someone, someone who had his own burden.
“Mack, calm down, boy!”
The dog was straining on his leash as if a giant pork chop was being brandished in front of his nose. He’d apparently never seen a big yard before and the weed-infested but splendidly blooming lawn with its huge lilac bushes and crops of perfumed lily of the valley was dog nip for him.
Inside, the house smelled the way Romy remembered—a powerfully nostalgic brew of dampness, dust, and that indefinable odor that signaled Nana.
“Sorry,” she said to Heath. “It looks so… unkempt. I haven’t been here in a long time.”
After graduating high school and moving to Manhattan to attend art school, she’d visited her grandmother at least twice a year but stayed at a hotel or bed-and-breakfast, telling Nana she needed reliable and fast Wifi, which her grandmother didn’t have, and which was true.
But the reality was she couldn’t bear to be in her old bedroom, in that same old bed, staring at those same walls, with those same woods behind her.
She’d thought she would have years left to learn how to sleep in her old bedroom again, how not to lie there and relive that night over and over. But her grandmother had died a year ago, victim of a massive stroke. At least she’d died in her own home, watching one of her favorite cop shows.
“It looks great,” Heath said, eye-smiling at her from over his white conical mask. The pair had agreed to wear them while they were inside the truck and now they were uncertain what to do.
He tapped one finger against his mask. “If we’re going to be living together, there’s no real point in them. Unless you think…”
“I agree. But I’m pretty sure my neighbor had it.”
“That was two weeks ago, right?” he said. “I locked myself in my room for two weeks.”
She nodded. They stared at each other, tentatively.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s do this.”
They simultaneously removed their masks, then grinned at each other, as if delighted they didn’t instantly drop dead. Mack wroah-ed his approval, and they laughed. She unhooked the dog’s leash from his collar and he began eagerly sniffing every corner.
Romy showed Heath the house, though there wasn’t much to show. It was a thousand square feet, tops. Her bedroom looked exactly as it had when she was a teen, including its pop idol posters on the walls. Very embarrassingly including The Jonas Brothers.
“I have no idea how that got there,” she said as Heath grinned at her.
She opened the door to the spare bedroom, the one her grandmother had kept a piano in but never played on. Romy would take her grandmother’s bedroom. It was the biggest room, and while it would be creepy sleeping in her grandmother’s bed, she wasn’t going to go back into her old bedroom. She wasn’t ready for that.
Especially not with Heath Asher—bizarrely and surreally—here in the house with her. Until long, lean Heath Asher stood in the living room, his overgrown mop of wavy, dirty blond hair almost grazing the popcorn ceiling, she’d never realized how low the ceilings of the home were. It had been built sometime in the 1950s. Were people shorter back then?
“How is this room?” she asked, hand on the doorknob. “It’s kind of small…”
The entire house looked minuscule to her now. Cringingly rundown. There was black mold crawling up the cracks of the pink tile in the bathrooms. At least the paint job in the spare room had held up, the springy light green paint wasn’t peeling anywhere that she could see but the room, like the rest of the house, had that musty, neglected odor.
He looked down at her, seeming to sense her discomfort. “It’s great, Romy. You should see my Williamsburg apartment. It’s a slum. My room is basically a large closet. This is a palace, believe me.” He turned, spreading one arm. “Man, look at that view!”
He gazed out of the three large windows onto a hot pink azalea bush, as if overlooking the Seine. Nature had continued to flourish without Romy’s attention—had probably thrived on the lack of it. After all, the area got plenty of sun and rain.
They put down their things and decided they’d better head into town to grocery shop and buy cleaning supplies and whatever else they would need. The plan was to stay here for a few weeks but both had the uneasy and unspoken feeling it would be longer. The world seemed to be on the precipice of something gigantic.
“Do you think he’ll be okay here alone?” Romy asked, looking at Mack, who was already snoozing on the living room carpet.
“Sure. I had dogs growing up. They can stay home alone. Does he chew up stuff?”
“Not that I’ve noticed.”
“Then let’s give it a shot. But we should buy him bones and chew toys.”
The grocery store was another indication that strange days were ahead, even out here in this rural area that still had most of the wide-open spaces it had when it was primarily tobacco land.
The store was crowded and Romy sensed the same human panic she’d sensed in the city, even more so. New Yorkers are accustomed to all manner of craziness, not so much suburbanites.
Many shelves were wiped bare and she was unable to find things she wanted, including cleaning supplies. There was no bleach. No disinfectant wipes. No hand sanitizer. She saw people taking multiple jugs of laundry detergent, multiple packages of soap. She managed to grab two packages of toilet paper before a small mob descended on the remaining ones.
Heath, who was pushing the cart, looked stunned. “Damn,” he said under his breath. “Toilet paper hoarders. Does the virus make people shit more?”
Romy would have laughed except she was too busy frantically eyeing the shelves, wondering what would disappear next. “Let’s go over to frozen foods,” she said. “That stuff will last forever.”
In the frozen foods aisle, Heath turned. “I’ll grab some stuff. You guard the toilet paper.”
She nodded, knowing this was no joke, and watched him leave, then protectively pulled the toilet paper packages closer to her side of the cart.
“Romy? Romy Renskler? Is that you?”
She turned towards the male voice. The man in front of her looked familiar, extremely familiar… then it hit her.
“Mr. Sands.”
He reached out to grasp her hand but yanked it back before his skin could touch hers. “Wait, we’re not supposed to touch, are we?”
“I… I guess not.”
“Well, Romy! I thought we’d agreed when you graduated you would call me Avery.”
Her high school art teacher. Her mentor. The reason she’d majored in design at The New School. The reason she’d even gone to The New School. The reason she had a career she loved.
Mr. Sands.
He looked a bit older but essentially the same—at least from what she could tell with his black cloth mask stretched over his mouth and nose. Trim, lean, about five foot ten. Eyeglasses and deep-set, intelligent, warm brown eyes. The midnight black hair that had formerly been longish, especially for a high school teacher, was shorn close to his scalp and stippled with silver. He still looked good.
Plenty of the high school girls had had a crush on Mr. Sands. “Mr. Manz” they called him. For a lot of the girls, including Romy, he was the only handsome adult male they knew who was not their father.
Romy had not had a crush on “Mr. Manz.” She’d respected him in a way she didn’t respect any adult except her grandmother, and that included her parents, but her heart was only capable of one deep crush at a time and that spot had been taken by Heath Asher. When Heath left town after Misty died, her heart had decided crushes were not for her.
Mr. Sands—Avery Sands—was also married with two young daughters, or at least the daughters used to be young. Romy supposed they’d be teens now. She and Mr. Sands had kept in touch occasionally by email but like almost everyone from her past, their communications had dwindled to nothing.
“I recognized your bangs, Romy,” he said.
Romy touched her thick, pin-straight bangs. She’d always wanted a side part but not with this hair.
“So you’re home?” he asked. “I thought you were living in Brooklyn.”
“We’re here temporarily. We kind of…”
“We? Oh!” His intense brown eyes, ones she had looked into for hours and hours as he talked to her about her art and about being an artist, roamed past her towards the frozen foods. Heath had returned and was plopping bags of vegetables and TV dinners into the cart.
“Heath,” Mr. Sands said. “Nice to see you.”
Romy was impressed with Avery’s name recall—and that he managed to recognize Heath, who was also wearing a mask. Seeming to sense her thoughts, Avery glanced at her and said, “I hardly ever forget a student.”
“Oh, um…” Heath snapped his fingers in a gesture of having forgotten the teacher’s name.
“Avery Sands. I was the art teacher at Glass Town High. You never took my classes.”
“No, umm…”
The words fell between them, both men looked down. Romy knew what was going through each man’s mind. Misty had taken Avery’s classes, or at least one.
Romy knew this because Misty had sat in front of her for one semester. Intermediate Drawing. Romy had spent oodles of time marveling at the back of Misty’s glossy raven hair, wondering how anyone managed to get hair that fabulous.
Occasionally, Misty would turn and speak to Romy, and Romy then marveled at her perfect face, which, because of its perfection, was actually uncomfortable to look at.
The artist side of Romy wanted to draw Misty but when everyone was paired up for the inevitable “draw your partner” assignment, Misty had grabbed one of her friends. Romy had ended up paired with one of the only males in the class, a reticent, bespectacled freshman who looked and acted so bored, practically hostile, that drawing him was a challenge. (He’d then complained how bored and hostile she’d made him look.)
“We came to get a break from the city,” Romy said. “We both live in Brooklyn. My grandmother’s house was empty, so…”
“Getting bad there, is it?” Avery asked, concern etched around his eyes.
“Yeah.” The vision of her neighbor’s body on the bathroom tile came to her, his coughing fits.
“What a crazy thing all this is!” Avery said. “Who would have thought we’d live to see this?” He looked around, incredulous. “I came to pick up a few things. I didn’t know it would be a mob scene. Let’s hope people are overreacting.”
“Let’s hope,” Romy said. “I guess we better keep shopping before everything is gone.”
“Romy, Romy,” he said, contemplatively taking in her face, or at least the upper half. “So nice to see you. You too, Heath.”
Back at her grandmother’s house—her house—Romy fed Mack. Then she put away the groceries while Heath took Mack for a walk.
It was a disquieting combination of unreal and natural to be here in this country house with Heath, grocery shopping, walking the dog, making dinner. She recognized that, deep down, a part of her had always anticipated—or hoped was a more accurate word—that something like this would happen. Not a pandemic. But being with Heath, doing couple-y things.
At the same time, it was terrible to keep seeing him, keep being reminded of what she’d done. Yet, no one had forced her to invite him here. She could have left him in Brooklyn. But after seeing the condition the virus had left her neighbor in, it became so real to her that she couldn’t stand the idea of Heath’s roommate potentially bringing it home to him.
She’d already killed Heath’s true love and his baby—she couldn’t kill him as well.