As she says this, I sense that my companion is so very near to me, close as my breath, but it is not here for this woman. It does not have her name on its lips. It had hovered over her, considered her perhaps, but then it had pulled away, even before I got here.
I am suddenly overcome by my inability to understand why some will survive the flu and some won’t. Why some babies live and some don’t. Why some people pass away in a warm bed full of years while others have their breath snatched from them before they’ve earned so much as one gray hair.
I bid the woman good-bye and head quickly back to the dark, chilly foyer. I close her door behind me and lean my back against it for a moment, unable not to imagine that there is probably a person like Mrs. Abramovic in every row house on this street, and on the next street over, and on every street in this neighborhood, and in my neighborhood, and in Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania, in America, in France, in Spain, and in all the countries whose names I don’t even know. This flu is like a black shroud that has been flung across everything that breathes under the canopy of heaven, and if you could stand back far enough, you wouldn’t see all the people it touches, only the immense length and breadth of its expanse.
For no reason that I can see, Mrs. Abramovic was able to crawl out from underneath that shadowy veil.
“You took her brother and his wife, but you didn’t take her,” I whisper. “Why didn’t you? Why?”
There is not so much as a tremble in the air about me. No sound or movement. No indication that I have even been heard. And then there is a startling whisper of a thought resonating deep within me: that my companion never chooses. It merely responds.
I don’t know what to make of this revelation. And I don’t know how I will manage coming back to Mrs. Abramovic every day until she is well enough to care for herself. But I know I must try. I’ve no doubt the others on the list will affect me just as greatly.
My hand is on the front door and I throw it open, eager now to see Maggie and the face of innocence. But she is not on the bottom step.
I step outside and pull the door closed behind me, gazing about for my daughter. “Maggie?”
I see the cat that had been walking toward her when I went inside Mrs. Abramovic’s building. He is sitting on the sidewalk licking his paws and washing his face, paying me no mind whatsoever. There is no other living thing on the narrow street.
“Maggie!” I shout, and my heart starts to thrum inside my chest.
My daughter is nowhere in sight.
