It's easy to mistake a wish for a fact, a hope for a lie, a better world for the one that is. For example, our children: we don't expect we'll ever lose them. And so, when Ben finds his baby girl in her crib, sleeping late into the morning, it is hard for him to believe that anything might be wrong. She looks so much like she always does when she's asleep. Nothing seems amiss, except for this: no matter what Ben does, she will not open her eyes. No tickling of her feet, no brushing of her cheek, no splashing of water on her face will rouse his daughter. No matter how much he has imagined this exact scenario constantly for weeks, all those visions turn out to be useless now, his worst fears proved flimsy by the real experience. This, this is ghastly: a sudden draining of meaning from the world.
Later, he will think of all the ways he might have saved her from this: maybe they should have stayed inside all this time, or left town earlier, broken the barricades, anything.
But for now, he just kneels down on the floor as if to pray or to beg.
“Please,” he says, his hands on her chest like he might still find some magic there. “Please, wake up”
There is a reason that time seems to slow down in moments like these, why our chest suddenly feels empty. This heart is breaking.
He will cry there alone, till Alice arrives and they reminisce on the moment hope was lost.
Some will say that the official response was too slow. But certain procedures are being followed. Lists are being made. Calculations. There is, after all, a mathematics of disease: how one case grows to three or four, and each of those four to four more. A quiet arithmetic, a naming of names, this is how it comes to be that thirteen days after the first girl fell sick a nurse's gloved finger is pressing the doorbell at the house where Alice, Ben and their baby live.
Have they heard, the nurse wanted to know, about the sickness going around?
A burst of adrenaline came into Ben's blood. She seemed nervous, standing there, the young nurse in green scrubs and fresh gloves.
She's holding a clipboard under one arm. She's asking about his baby.
“Is she here?” she says. “Your daughter?”
“Why?” he says, but the details are rushing into his mind, all those reports he has only half heard.
“We're taking every precaution,” the nurse says. “We're monitoring everyone who's had contact with the sick.” She speaks as if reciting the words of a script, newly learned.
“But who's sick?” asks Ben. There's a sudden tightness in his throat.
The nurse looks away, as if the truth embarrasses her.
“No one called you?” she says. She is tugging at the chain of her necklace; a tiny silver cross catches the light.
He's been having nightmares about losing the baby. He wakes with a physical sensation, a terrible emptiness in his arms.
"It's the milk", says the nurse. "It's the donated milk from the hospital."
“My God,” says Ben. They have a freezer full of it, rows and rows of bottles, pumped from the bodies of other women. And a bag full of old bottles that Grace has already drunk.
One of the donors, says the nurse. One of them might have been exposed.
He will remember, later, the look on Alice's face as she walks down the stairs, that last moment before she knows to be worried. She is holding Grace in her arms, hand under her head. Fear feels different, so much sharper, with a baby.
“Has she been feeling all right?” asks the nurse.
“Oh my God,” says Annie, bringing her hand to her mouth. “Oh my God”
“I need to take her temperature,” says the nurse.
Soon the nurse is holding a wand a few inches from Grace's forehead, no contact. It's the same kind of thermometer they used in the hospital in those first few hours of her life when her body was still learning to regulate its own temperature, and her limbs, so accustomed to life underwater, were squirming slowly, like a jellyfish moving in a current.
“They said it was sterilized,” says Ben. “I thought the milk was supposed to be sterilized”
The nurse's hands are shaking as she holds the thermometer over Grace's head. She is standing as far away as she can. She keeps having to start over.
“There was some kind of mistake,” she says. “I'm sorry”
Finally the beeping: no fever. A tiny ping of relief.
"But someone will be back to do it again in the morning", says the nurse. "They'll have to do it twice a day".
In the meantime, they should stop using the milk. They should throw out whatever they have left, and switch to formula. And there is one more thing: “We have to ask that you keep her at home for now,” she says. She is peeling off her gloves. She is already backing away. “And also,” she says, “please don't leave town".
He thought, that maybe, the nurse was wrong. But then here he is, surrounded by the sound of his breathing alone, estranged by their loss.
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