by Becky Tuch

(photo c/o wpxi.com)

I

Erika receives her furlough letter via email, halfway down the Asian/Indian aisle in Giant Eagle. Though for weeks she has worried that the letter would come, and has tried to prepare herself, to read the actual words now is a closed fist in the gut. 

Somewhere in the supermarket her daughter has gone to fetch toilet paper. They are supposed to be stocking up on supplies, items Erika has never had before in her life—canned milk, dehydrated meats, freeze-dried vegetables. Astronaut food, as if the whole country were about to shoot off into space.

And perhaps it is. The speaker overhead is playing Dido’s “White Flag”—“I won’t go down with this ship”—and the glistening floor is lined with social-distance markers. Arrows in each aisle direct customers one way or the other to avoid passing face-to-face. Every customer wears a mask; some of the cashiers wear plexiglas face guards. 

Erika might not have come to the supermarket at all, were it not for the city-wide panic, a sudden rush for provisions. The stores were so overwhelmed she’d been unable to get an appointment for food delivery. At any rate, she felt funny about ordering food from home, sending others off to risk themselves on her behalf. Were some lives more expendable than others? 

“Mom,” Bess says, reappearing from her sojourn. “They’re out of toilet paper.”

Erika slides her phone into her jacket pocket, tries to say something assuring, or funny, but finds herself merely blinking, the letter a ticker tape flashing through her mind. This notice is to inform you … your position is included in this furlough … you are being placed on a temporary, unpaid leave of absence … effective immediately.

“Mom?”

Avoiding her daughter’s eyes, Erika removes two cans of tomato sauce from the cart, clunks them back onto the shelves. “We don’t need half these things. Too much to carry anyway.”

“What about dinner?”

Yes, Erika thinks, what about dinner? Tonight, tomorrow night, every night next week. Dinner. For her and Bess, a sixteen-year-old with an appetite recently more rapacious than Erika has ever seen in a young girl, in the midst of a growth spurt that reminds Erika of her years of breastfeeding, the baby always wanting more, more. 

Although now her daughter looks not hungry, but blanched, almost nauseated. Stressed, Erika thinks, by the  panic, the isolation. Poor girl hasn’t seen her boyfriend in weeks.

How can she possibly tell Bess what has happened? This teenager, whose expectant eyes follow Erika’s hands as she fumbles with a pasta box in their cart, turns a jar of peanut butter to check the price, pulls a bottle of soy sauce from the shelf, then puts it back. Bess, sixteen and yet with such a fierce sense of right and wrong that she’d insisted on coming along to the supermarket, worried that Erika would forget to sanitize the cart handle, would neglect to use rubber gloves when she touched the pin pad at checkout, squirt more sanitizer into her hands again on the way out. Bess, the rare teenager who had not broken a rule in all her life, let alone CDC guidelines about avoiding high-touch surfaces.

“It’s fine,” Erika says about the lack of toilet paper. “We can use tissues.”

“Tissues?” 

Erika fiddles with her jacket zipper, itchy now, overheated. “Let’s just go.”

Bess looks like she wants to say something, but Erika rolls the rickety cart away before she can.

At home they unload the bags, carry them up the three flights of stairs, set them on the counter. Bess disappears into the bathroom, where she instantly runs water for a shower. It’s not like her to not help with the groceries, but Erika is grateful for her daughter’s rare delinquency, for this chance to be alone, to check her email, to read the letter again.

What is really going on? When Erika considers the facts, the letter does not make sense. Hadn’t she been bringing profit into the museum? Wasn’t the museum store, where Erika had worked for nearly fifteen years, one of the few departments of the museum that actually did turn a profit? 

Forget the fact that Erika had risen from sales associate to store manager after over a decade of assiduous work, that she had dropped Bess off with a steady rotation of friends in order to attend countless trade shows around the country, that she had stayed continually up to date on what was being done in stores all over the world—wooden wave-shaped chairs in Amsterdam’s Kunst Museum, a floor made of sand in Malta’s Military Nautical History Museum, puzzles, posters, magnets featuring the unsung women of Impressionism. Forget the personalities Erika put up with, the snotty or distracted curators, the petulant or neurotic artists, all to coordinate exhibits inside the store, all so shoppers would have an experience. 

Every museum store is an extension of the museum itself. No one understood this better than Erika, with her thousands of hours thoughtfully curating and tracking the sales of every object on offer—custom-made umbrella panels, artisanal glow-in-the-dark cufflinks, neckties that turned into paintbrushes. 

Not to mention the entire digital inventory. There was money coming in even now, while the museum was closed. Thanks to whom? Who oversaw that? Erika did. It was Erika.

So, why? And in an email, no less. A generic notice that must have gone out to one-third of the staff.

She slams a milk jug into the fridge door, swings it shut, and with gritted teeth pounds through the hallway and into her bedroom.

Burning with heat but too impatient to unzip her jacket, Erika sits on her bed, pulls out her phone again. Only now, she does not check her email or schedule an appointment with the museum management, as she was advised to do if she had any questions.

She taps out a text message.

Did you tell her?

His reply comes moments later.

Never.

Then why…  She begins to type, but changes her mind and tosses her phone aside, twists her hair back, stabs a pencil through the tight knot.

She trusts him. Doesn’t she? Trusts him not to tell his wife? Just as she had trusted him all those times when he had told her how incredible she looked, how no one turned him on like she did. How her eyes were just … God. Her eyes made him want to do crazy things. 

He used to come to the store, reach across the glass counter and rub the inside of her palm with his index finger until she could barely stand up straight. Once, after hours, in the New Art from Ghana wing, within a darkened corner out of view of security cameras, he’d pressed her against the wall and slid his hand down her skirt, his smell of honeyed-alcohol aftershave bathing her skin for what felt like days afterward. 

They’d been carrying on for fifteen months. He told her she was like an Impressionist painting. He told her her breasts felt in his hands like Cezanne’s pears. He wanted to make her melt like a Dali clock, come like foam on a Turner wave. He told her she made him feral, red and uncaged and stark raving mad as a Caravaggio.

He was the co-director of the museum. He was her boss. His wife was the other director. His wife was also her boss. 

Why did Erika do it? Why did she let it happen? 

Even after news of the pandemic broke, they had not stopped seeing each other. They fucked in the inventory room at the back of the museum store on a rainy Saturday afternoon. They fucked in the alcove outside, against the brick wall, just under his wife’s office, not far from the river, sunlight glinting in white blades off the gray water. They fucked in the museum’s gender-neutral bathroom, tiles leaving hexagonal indents up and down Erika’s back.

She had been weak. Lonely. Angry, still, at Bess’s father, for whom she’d stopped her Master’s work after the unexpected pregnancy, who left soon after with nothing in the way of financial support. Angry at the world, which granted so much freedom to men, while still tying women up with low-paying work, child care, household chores. 

But why allow a man even more freedom? Why seek refuge in the one person who could so easily ruin her life? 

As always when she thinks of him, she has no answers. Perhaps, in truth, she does not want any. 

The rabid clacking of Bess’s computer keys next door brings her attention back to now. Jesus, she has failed her daughter. At exactly the moment Bess needs her most.

Thus it is decided: Erika will not tell her daughter what has happened. 

She stands, at last unzips her jacket, hangs it on the hook in the hallway. She returns to the kitchen, finishes unpacking groceries, resists the urge to change into sweatpants, to take off her bra, to dissolve into a puddle on the floor. Tomorrow she will set her alarm, iron her clothes, put on blouse and slacks and log on to her computer as if for work. She will continue wearing make-up. At meals, she will eat less so her growing child can eat  more. She will smile when she feels like screaming.

She will stop seeing him. Even as he calls, texts, begs, pleads. Even as she wakes in the morning, yearning for his voice, his skin.

It is a deception, not telling her daughter, but a justified one. And who knows? Maybe the museum will open up soon. It is possible the director does not even know about the affair. This might all be reversible. Erika wasn’t fired, after all. Normal life could return soon enough.

Through the kitchen window, Erika seeks out the puffy white globe of the moon. That relentlessly cheerful old-man face, smiling even as he drags darkness up with him through the sky.

II

Lonnie is a jackal. That’s his tag name, Jackal, and that’s also how he thinks of himself, how his body feels. Tonight he’s most especially a jackal because he is not supposed to be outside after dark, not supposed to be leaving his home, and sure as shit is not supposed to be carrying his backpack full of spray cans to the train tracks that run from the East Liberty depot, which he will follow west until he sees it, the coal train that takes its nightly break just one mile away from town.

For months he’s been dreaming of hitting up this particular train. Jackal. He’s tagged the downtown bridges, the Roberto Clemente and the Andy Warhol, those banana-yellow constructions. He’s tagged mailboxes and walls, because obviously. And nearly all the office buildings behind Heinz Field. It was Lonnie who did the bubble letters on the undersides of all the Frick Park bridges, plus the bridges of Schenley Park. Jackal. 

When he saw this train, weeks ago, his heart began clanging like the train’s own bells. Imagine: Jackal traveling from Pennsylvania coal country through West Virginia and Ohio. Jackal, zipping through Montana. Jackal, zooming out to Utah. All these places he’s never gone, won’t be going anytime soon. It makes his whole body feel quick as fire to think of it, fire in his blood, liquid light on his tongue. Jackal, racing through one state and into another. Choo choo, motherfucker, here I come. 

It’s past nine. Going out, he’d told his mother, who opened her mouth in protest just a minute before Lonnie opened and slammed their apartment door. He will have hell to pay when he comes back, when his older brother slaps him upside the head, says, Risking your life and being rude to Mom? Get your shit together, man.

But he can’t think of that now. His shit is together. The cans rattling in his backpack are like maracas, accompanying his own private dance. His fingertips itch. Behind his red bandanna, tied tight around his mouth, he’s got the world’s biggest smile.

He hustles along the bridge on Aiken, black sneakers light as wings. At the stairway, he bounds down, two steps at a time. A police siren wails far away, but he doesn’t break stride. He’s near the hospital now, there are sure to be sirens and noises. And the cops won’t come after him, he’ll be sure of that. He’s Jackal. A sleek and racing animal, free as desert wind. 

You stupid? Comes his brother’s voice again. 

But what does Kendall know? Kendall is his man, his brother, his best friend. But Kendall is no artist. He doesn’t have the bug. That thing, that need. To make. To stamp one’s name. To destroy and reimagine. And in this, he may as well be as far from Lonnie as his own dead grandparents. No offense to Kendall. But dude just does not understand how these things don’t mean anything, these real world things. Lockdown, pandemic, cops. What are they gonna do, kill me? 

Yes, says Kendall in his ear. Exactly, you fucking idiot. 

But if I didn’t do my art, Lonnie thinks, I may as well be dead.

His inner Kendall rolls his eyes at him. But there’s a smile at the corner of his mouth too. Because, Lonnie knows, mad respect. Come on, bro. Give it up. You know half the people in this world don’t have something like this worth dying for. What’s the point of living, if not dying for something?

Anyway, it’s not a choice. His sneakers crunch the gravel along the railroad tracks and he thinks about the train, its smooth dark brown exterior, a canvas. How he will begin with the white coat, sharp and bright, the hiss of aerosol flying from his hands. He will not be alone. He’ll be with Bansky, with Haring, with DONDI and Lady Pink. Basquiat. Cope2. All the greats humming through his blood, muscles working, eyes squinting, the work swallowing him like the warm mouth of a whale.

He glides along the train track, street lamps above yawning pale-orange light, another siren wailing nearby, a nervous tight joy in his stomach, upper lip sweating under his bandanna, sweat along his scalp, itchy under his bleach-tipped dreads.

Then from nowhere a rattling snake, a vibration deep inside his pocket. He almost doesn’t answer. But when he looks, it’s not his mother or Kendall calling. It’s Bess.

“Lon?” she says. 

He can tell something isn’t right. He ducks into a shadowed alcove, whispers into the phone, “What’s up, girl?”

“Are you busy?”

He laughs. “Not too busy for you.”

It’s true. He and Bess started hooking up just a few months back, and something changed in him then. Oh, the shit he took from Kendall for crossing over, hooking up with a white girl. Typically Lonnie would agree. He’d never even found them cute, with their flat butts and wilting hair. But Bess, somehow, was different. He hated the phrase falling in love. Hated the way it made him think of tumbling down a stairway of fluffed pillows, pastel feathers getting stuck inside his skinny dreads. 

But here she was.

“I just wanted to hear your voice.”

She sounds like loose leaf paper, thin and torn from a notebook. 

“I’m right here,” he tells her.

There’s a long silence. Gravel under his feet, the moon’s big yellow-white face hovering in the smoggy gray-black sky. A damp brick wall behind him that he leans against, propping up his foot. He reaches behind him for his backpack, touches the hard outlines of the spray cans, just to remind himself that they’re still there. 

“I think my mom lost her job.”

“For real?” Lonnie remembers how once, early on, Bess’s mom caught him putting spray cans back into his backpack after he’d taken them out to find a book, how her eyes locked with his and he waited for the lecture, either about the defacing of public property or about the danger he put himself in, it was always one of the two. But she did neither, just walked away, and the next time he saw her she handed him a book about cave paintings that she bought at a discount from the museum where she worked.

Sometimes he wondered if part of his love for Bess had to do with that museum. Before her, he had never been to a museum when there were no people there, when he was free to speak in his regular loud voice and stare at some of the works for as long as he pleased. Erika, now and then, had invited them in, and it was different to see art with no one else around.

He didn’t have to goof off or pretend to be bored like he had in school on some class trip. He didn’t have to race through the whole thing and see nothing at all, like he did with Kendall, who only went there when he had a date, and took Lonnie along so the girl would feel at ease.

The museum where Erika worked was newish and smallish, but that suited Lonnie just fine, the crisp clean smell and the glowing bright lights. He found a painting by an artist named Amoako Boafo, and stopped when it hit him like a punch to his chest. He had to sit on a bench. He stared and stared. The layers and colors and a boldness that did not flinch. Boafo’s paintings were all portraits, but made up of swirls, as if the artist had painted their faces with his fingertip. How did their eyes and lips express so much? How did they look like they were moving while just sitting or standing there? He had to grip the straps of his backpack so he wouldn’t float away. 

He knew he loved Bess, loved her goodness and her kindness. He loved that she always expected people to be their best selves, how her nose would twitch when the bus didn’t come on time or someone pushed into her in the hallway. The way her lips parted for him, soft as flower petals, his hand looping round her long dark ponytail. But he suspected, too, that the love was tied up with the museum, how clean it made him feel afterward, scrubbed new from inside, a place where people breathed in shapes and spoke in colors, an alternate universe untouched by the silly dramas and petty foolishness of this one.

“I don’t know for sure,” Bess says. “She’s just been acting weird.”

“Your mom always acts kind of weird.” 

He hears her smile. 

“I read about it online though. Her museum is furloughing employees. All the museums are.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

He’s silent, his brain a vast blankness. “Maybe ask her?”

“I don’t want her to know I know. Seems like she’s trying to hide it.”

The faintest mist of rain begins to spread through the air, cooling and wetting his skin. Droplets hover like diamonds under the streetlamps.

“Could you ask the director?”

Bess doesn’t reply.

“Didn’t you once say she was a nice lady?”

“Lots of people are nice ladies. That doesn’t mean they’ll want you nosing around in their business.” A snarky edge in her voice he’s never heard before. The kind he hears all the time from other girls at school. The thing that Bess didn’t have, that made her different, that made her all the soft pillows he was tumbling down for.

“But it’s your business too,” Lonnie says, and there’s a crack in his voice. He feels himself squeezing his phone, becoming more determined. He needs Bess to stay Bess, lovely and soft. 

Also, he needs Erika to keep her job. He can’t let himself believe the truth of what everyone has been saying, that this pandemic, the lockdown, could go on and on, the museums closed indefinitely, which means that Lonnie will have days and weeks and months without that feeling of looking at a painting on the wall and somehow, like magic, that painting is the exact replica of the things inside your head. It’s like if someone were to come to your home and take away all the mirrors.

“You gotta talk to someone,” he insists. “I mean, damn. They really can’t afford to keep paying your mom? How much are their paintings worth? I bet you one painting in that place is worth at least a million dollars.”

He doesn’t know this for sure. But it sounds possible. If he had a million dollars, art is exactly what he would spend it on.

“So you’re saying I should just, like, call the director?”

“Go to her house.”

“Her house?”

He’s not sure at all that this is right. In fact it might be terrible, especially during a pandemic. But the night is taking on a strange turn, as though there is a cliff at the end of this railroad track and everyone is rushing toward it. Why not be bold? Why not do what we all need to do to survive? When will we ever have another chance?

Another siren wails, crying up at the bright dopey-faced moon.

“I should get going,” Lonnie says. His lips purse reflexively. If they were together he’d be leaning into her, his hand sliding round the back of her slender neck. His lips would surround hers, pull in their gentleness, the tender point of her tongue. 

He is always amazed by her, by how far she’s willing to go. By now she would have her hand up under his tee shirt, pressing hard against his shoulder blade. Like she did that one time. Her entire body a shimmering silky swan around his blood-hardened flesh.

“Where are you?” Bess asks.

He pauses, listening to the night.

“Are you outside? Tagging up?”

He stands rigid, waiting for her to get upset.

When she doesn’t, he tells her. “The train. Remember? I’ve got to hit up that train.”

Bess laughs through her teeth. Lonnie’s chest booms with love. She gets it. He loves her and she gets it.

“Just,” she says, “be safe.”

He will. Of course he will. 

And, he thinks, moments after they have said goodbye, how dope is he? 

No joke. You show me another young man such as himself whose hands are tipped with silver, who zips like wild-eyed fire through the dark night and who, at the very same time, stops to give advice to his girlfriend. No. There isn’t another young man like him.

His paint cans rattle like bars of a xylophone. He blinks, sees his name splashing across the train car. Jackal. The whole world should see this name, should let this name set them free. Run, all you trapped and caged creatures of impossible demands! Race through the desert with your hungry tongues! Be carried by your slender legs, your ferocious fearlessness fleeing to be free! 

These are the racing lines of his mind when, a short time later, he hears someone shout his name.

“Lonnie!”

He keeps on running.

“Lonnie!” And then: “Stop running, you dumbass dickwipe!”

Kendall.

Lonnie stops. He brings his sweatshirt sleeve to his eyes, wiping sweat away. He leans on his knees to catch his breath.

How long was Kendall here, waiting for him? How did Kendall even find him? 

It doesn’t matter. It is Kendall who will insist that Lonnie come home. Kendall, who will stare him down until Lonnie gives in to his big brother like he always does. Kendall, out here trying to protect Lonnie, though all Lonnie can feel right now is his brother’s hand on his arm, gripping his flesh. Tight and painful as a lasso.

III

With a heavy exhale, Isabella pulls up the day’s numbers on her phone. She checks the national count, then the local count. Here in Pittsburgh, numbers of positive cases have taken a small climb upward since last week, the paper’s jagged red arrow like a dart shooting up her throat.

It’s okay, she tells herself. Thiss will not go on forever. And plenty of museums have managed, made adjustments. She leans back against her patio wicker chair, reads the news briefs from Museum World. See? She thinks. Look at that. The Philadelphia Art Museum has installed new filtration devices in the ceiling vents. And clever: the Science Museum has set up glow-in-the-dark footprints six feet apart, to keep the visitors properly distanced. It’s not impossible. Not unmanageable. 

Then, though, there is other news. LACMA still closed. ICA, still closed. Oh, it makes her dizzy. Uncertainty everywhere. Isabella’s eyes feel as if they’re going to bulge from their sockets, as they always do, each morning, on reading the day’s news. How much can a person take? She clicks off her phone, sets it down next to her laptop, soon to be opened for the day’s dozen Zoom meetings, and tilts her head back, closing her eyes against the morning light.

She is in her front garden, where she’s set up her work station, a large white beach umbrella to block the glare as the sun rises and the day grows oppressively hot. She is lucky. She knows she is lucky. In too many ways to count. The spacious home in Mount Washington, the kind neighbors, food they’ve had delivered, cleaning and gardening services they’ve been able to employ, their ability to work from home. They have robust immune systems, strengthened by decades of yoga, hiking, Pilates, zinc and Vitamin D tablets, not to mention the herbs, tinctures, juices, smoothies she’s drunk every day like a goddamn zealot.

Then, too, there is their summer home in East Hampton, where under normal conditions they would surely be right now. Isabella had wanted to go there as early as February, as soon as it was clear what was going to happen. They could work remotely, breathe in the fresh ocean air, perhaps have the occasional socially distanced dinner party with the Williasmses, the Kleins, other summer friendships formed over the decades.

But Franklin insisted it wasn’t a good idea. They would need to be close to the museum, should physical changes have to be made. What if they decide to make renovations? What if they have to significantly alter the museum infrastructure? 

They could oversee that from out there, Isabella had pointed out. Drive back if necessary. 

“And do you really want to be driving back and forth like that?” Franklin had asked. His face looked ragged, the stress of lockdown taking its toll, darkness under his eyes, perpetual beard stubble. “What if we’re needed on a moment’s notice?” He’d bitten his lip, as if begging for her forgiveness. “Grizzly, it’s best we stay here.”

“Grizzly Izzy,” he alone called her, a nickname that went back to nearly their third or fourth date, almost twenty-five years ago. Their grad school days.

In the end, she’d assented. He was right. It would be better for them to be at hand. When it came to the museum, Franklin was always the one who was right.

She pulls up her phone again, glances at the day’s meetings. One after another, but first and most importantly with Finance. They will have an honest talk about the museum’s budget after their most recent “realignment.” A third of their staff, gone. Yet this word, “realignment,” sounds so very much better than layoffs and furloughs.

A familiar feeling of sickness, revulsion, coils Isabella’s belly, like food she’s been unable to digest. The simple truth is that the museum was hemorrhaging money well before the pandemic hit. Even before the lockdown, she had been sitting in some of the worst meetings of her life, staring into the disapproving faces of the trustees, the heavy bunched brows of her board members. Having to explain why memberships were down, why attendance was down, why no one in this city was coming to their beautiful museum.

What could she say? The market is King. Wasn’t that the mantra of all her economics courses back in grad school? Let the market decide. 

Well, the Pittsburgh market had spoken and very few people in this city appeared to have any interest at all in contemporary art. They loved their Warhol Museum for its kitschy nostalgia; they took a patriotic pride in their Carnegie Museums. The Mattress Factory had the beat on location, so close to City of Asylum that one could do it all in one go and declare oneself “up on everything.”

But their new little museum of contemporary art, tucked deep in The North Side, just wasn’t cutting it. People didn’t come to see videos of men giving out tattoos to strangers on side streets. They didn’t come to see entire exhibits filled with string. They barely showed up for the Amoako Boafo exhibit, even with the bus advertisements and NPR sponsorships. Boafo was a leading painter from Ghana, said to be the second coming of Egon Schiele. His was one of their lowest-earning shows of the whole season. 

The market is King. Isabella taps her tongue to the roof of her mouth, feeling the dryness there every time she starts to think of all these things. A dryness borne from guilt. Shame. 

“The thing is,” she might have said to Franklin during that conversation, “I really don’t care.”

But she could just see the look on his face. Ghostly pale. Aghast. “Don’t care?”

And she would shrivel from his outrage, as she always did.

She could not bear to tell him. Could hardly bear to admit it to herself. When this dark thought rose up inside her, she stuffed it way down, down, down, into the bottoms of her feet, then stepped down, desperately trying to crush it.

Yet it arose, again and again and again. No. She did not care. Not anymore. Not the way Franklin did. Good Franklin. Passionate Franklin. The museum and its artists always at the forefront of his mind. His voice high, words and hands flying when he talked about all the work they would show in the coming months.

How did he do it? Isabella wondered. She marveled at him. His devotion, his faith. 

While inside, she bore the terrible truth of her own feeling, her loss of passion for the entire endeavor. Her loss of belief in all of it.

“Oh, come on,” Franklin had occasionally chided her. “So some of what we do is not exclusively about art, per se. So our trustees have a personal stake in driving up the value of their own collection. Would you rather the museum simply go broke? Anyway, look at The Gugg. They’re getting money from Purdue Pharma, Lockheed Martin. That’s just how it is, Grizz.”

Was it willful blindness or some inviolably pure of heart that kept Franklin so unrelentingly committed to the museum, so unfailingly loyal?

She doesn’t know. Yet for her part, Isabella more and more finds she is craving something she cannot quite name. She sets her phone down, looks out over the garden, blinks into the hazy sunlight rising over the city. 

Were they really benefiting the public with these works? Was anyone’s life actually changed from looking at them? Improved by them?

She rubs the tips of her fingers together, as if trying to grasp what it is exactly that she so deeply craves. Clarity. Kindness. Goodness. 

Truth. 

But where to find it? She opens her computer But over the rim of her screen, a moving figure catches her eye. Isabella watches the slender body, in dark silhouette, make its way slowly up the street. 

She turns her attention back to her computer. Focus, Isabella. Begin the day’s work. Concentrate on saving this museum. 

But again her attention is drawn toward the body, now coming closer. It appears, upon squinting, to be a girl. A gangly teenager. Hair in a high swaying ponytail. Long lean legs exposed under short jean shorts, neatly cut in sharp straight lines. She wears a mask, simple, cloth, black.

Isabella licks her lips, her heartbeat quickening, though she isn’t sure why. A teenage girl, probably taking a morning walk along the promenade that overlooks the city. Not any neighbor’s kid that she recognizes, but familiar enough that Isabella shouldn’t feel threatened.

Yet she is uneasy anyway, so unaccustomed these days to seeing strangers stroll along these streets. Reflexively she scans the girl’s body as though looking for a weapon. Is that a gun in the girl’s hand? No, just her phone, which the girl is using as a navigation tool. Lost. 

Isabella closes her laptop, presses into her chair’s armrests, though whether to rise and greet the girl to offer her directions or to run into the house to hide, she is not exactly sure. The air smells of gasoline, a truck revving its motor farther up the hill.

The girl approaches Isabella’s house. She slows. She steps toward the stone walkway connecting the garden to sidewalk. She stops. 

“Can I help you?” 

“Hi,” says the girl, deep and bold in a way that belies her gangly limbs and loose wisps of hair falling from her ponytail. “I’m looking for Isabella Hingham.”

Isabella swallows. “Yes?”

She stands from her chair, gathering herself. How silly to be afraid, nervous of this teenager, barely taller than she. Easy enough to remember who she is in normal times, a Director, a woman who clacks through marble hallways on Amina Muaddi heels, who has traveled the world to have dinner with Saatchi, breakfast with Gagosian on opening day of a hookah lounge in Dubai.

And yet, isn’t this the very version of herself Isabella had come to detest? Wasn’t she only moments ago longing to shed that utterly tedious self?

Her internal chatter is so loud that she nearly misses the girl’s quiet remark. “I wanted to talk to you about my mom.”

“Your mom?”

“Erika? Shore?”

Isabella thinks, then summons the picture: Their gift shop manager. One of the several important employees who had been furloughed rather than fired outright. A friendly, if slightly nervous, woman. Deferential in ways Isabella knew would never take her very far in the Art World. Isabella recalls a time she caught the woman talking to Franklin in their New Art from Ghana wing. The woman was chewing on her pinky nail like a nervous child. The sight embarrassed Isabella, made her turn away.

“Is everything okay?” Isabella asks, rising from her chair. “Your mother, is she sick?”

The girl puts her hands over her belly, a weirdly protective gesture, as if she expects Isabella to kick her, or as if she already has.

“She’s not sick, no. She … ”

The girl stops abruptly. Her face whitens. Suddenly, before Isabella can offer assistance, the girl covers her mouth, turns toward the ring of yellow tulips along the edge of Isabella’s garden, yanks her mask off and vomits.

It is with an outstretched arm, a sudden and engulfing wave of tenderness, a maternal feeling that Isabella cannot remember experiencing in a long time, if ever, that she invites the girl–now apologizing profusely, wiping her mouth with a tissue from her pocket, her eyes watery with tears–to enter her garden, to sit at Isabella’s patio work space, while Isabella goes inside to fetch her a glass of ice water, as well as her own face mask, hesitating only briefly as she passes the stairway and hears upstairs the murmured speech of Franklin, on the phone, inside their bedroom, undoubtedly with someone from the museum, Franklin working, always working, his generous heart the fullest of moons that shines Isabella’s pathway back outside and toward the waiting girl.

IV

Bess is running. 

She doesn’t remember choosing to run, but she finds herself doing it, running from that woman’s house, running from her boozy-syruppy smell and the tight wrinkles at the edges of her eyes as she smiled above her mask, and running through the heights of this posh Mount Washington neighborhood, toward the incline , the wooden cart that will take her down and down to street level.

Is it a happy run? She doesn’t know. It should be. The woman said they would look into it. They would see what could be done about getting Bess’s mother her job back.

Before she’d thrown up, Bess had stood there, refusing to move.

“Who is your mother?”

“Erika,” Bess had said. “Shore.”

The woman didn’t seem to know who she was. How could she not know one of her own employees?

“Museum store?” Bess had squeaked.

“Yes, of course, I know, Erika,” she’d said, her eyes quickly returning to life. The woman’s eyes had looked sad, almost, full of pity.

It made her skin crawl. Maybe that is why she is running. 

Yet everything is making her skin crawl. That, too, might be why she is running. From her own itchy body, from her own stomach, forcing itself out of her mouth and all over that woman’s screaming yellow flowers.

The rattling cart carries her down the side of the hill. It used to make Bess queasy. Now everything makes her queasy. She stares at the uneven slats along its floor, taps her foot, wanting to run again. When the cart lands with a clunk and a rattle, she steps out of the wooden doors and onto the street.

Yes, she is wearing a mask. Yes, she is taking precautions. Not touching anything. Not going near anyone. 

But she doesn’t want to go home, to lock down, to see her mother, who has been spaced out and distracted for days— “Everything’s fine, Bess,” she keeps saying, as if Bess can’t see her mother’s lipstick in a sloppy smear around her lips, the job search tabs open on her laptop. She heads toward downtown instead, the Point, Pittsburgh’s famous tourist spot. Only now there are no tourists.

“Please,” she had said to the woman. “My mom loves this job.”

The woman said something then, but Bess couldn’t concentrate because something weird was happening with the woman’s eyes. They had become squinty, intense, making Bess feel like some little bug trapped in amber glass. Which then brought on another wave of nausea, though this one was smaller than the last, and she was able to drink the water and keep it down.

It wasn’t until Bess said, “The museum means so much to us,” and then went on to tell the woman about how the other director, her husband, used to let them in after hours and even her mom would spend extra time working there, in the store, when she never had to, and her mom would sometimes go to the museum when it was closed just to stock inventory, even sometimes staying until midnight.

The woman had looked confused. “Your mother stayed at the museum until midnight?”

Bess was suddenly unsure if that was a bad thing, so she added, “The other director was there. She wasn’t, like, alone.”

The woman had sat there blinking, as if Bess had just flung sand in her eye, and it seemed like this was all a mistake, a terrible idea, and she’d felt a stabbing anger at Lonnie for sending her here, when, suddenly the woman said softly, “I’ll have to talk to my husband.”

“You will?” Bess said.

But the woman didn’t answer, and Bess felt again as if she was going to vomit, and so she stood up and thanked the woman profusely, because this was good, right? As good as could be expected? The woman didn’t send Bess away, didn’t tell her absolutely not. She said she would talk to her husband. Right away, she’d added, her voice sounding a bit strange, almost like she was choking.

Bess won’t tell her mother this, won’t ever mention it, and when her mother checks her email on Monday and maybe sees that she has her job back, Bess will know that it has all been straightened out, and she will carry this secret meeting inside her heart forever.

She is used to keeping secrets. 

Like how she called Kendall the other night, to tell him where Lonnie was. She hated it, felt like a rat, because she knew Lonnie’s art mattered. But Lonnie could be stupid too. Reckless. And if something happened to him, it would all be over, her whole world. So she’d called Kendall, and he’d thanked her, genuine kindness in his voice, and she told him no problem and when Bess saw the train pass by this morning without his tag on it, her heart thudded sadly, but that was just too bad because no, better to be safe.

She’d had to call Kendall. The reason is, her other secret is that her period is late. She doesn’t know how. She and Lonnie have always been careful. And so maybe it is nothing. Just late. 

Except, there was that one time, six weeks ago, when they took a trip to the museum together. They had walked through the entire space in silence, all the exhibits ones they had seen before, but there was something about seeing that Amoako Boafo exhibit, maybe with the light warm rain outside, maybe because the place had been empty and they kept giggling amid the marble-floored echo, maybe because they had looked at those paintings and had both just stopped, the pulse of paint flowing through their eyes their blood their flesh, and how incredible it was, to stand here with this boy she loved and be able to hold his hand and look at this art, and to glance at him and see the joy, the hunger and curiosity in his eyes, how much she loved him and loved his love for art, which meant a love for the entire world. 

Afterwards, they could barely control themselves. They scrambled to an alcove behind the museum, practically in public but not, and he stuck his tongue in her throat and she swallowed it like it was a honey-soaked paintbrush, and he’d pulled his pants down and lifted her dress up and he shot through her body like a streak of cerulean light, and it was over in literally zero time, like barely begun.

And no, you couldn’t get pregnant from that.

But of course you could. Bess knows better. 

And yet. Something about museums, her mother once said, really makes people horny.

Bess had rolled her eyes. Her mother talked about sex way too much. 

More than anything in the world, Bess does not want to become her mother.

Actually, there is now one thing worse than becoming her mother, and that is becoming a mother.

She runs and runs, carrying her something nothing something inside of her, past the vast grassy expanse where normally this time of year there would be concerts, tents and vendors selling overly sweet lemonade and balloon animals, underneath the tunnel and toward the fountain, one of the city’s main tourist attractions, now turned off. No one here. No water. No sound.

She sits on the ground, leaning against the fountain, and looks out at the river. It is three rivers, really, Monongahela, Allegheny, Ohio. They flow from different sources, but at The Point they merge into one. 

I guess they didn’t get the memo about social distancing—a joke Lonnie might tell.

No, Bess thinks. They didn’t get that memo. 

She stares at the water, a circle of cloudy daytime moon watching over her from the sky’s blue. She folds her clasped hands over her belly, breathes deep. She will get through this. Everyone will get through this. Whatever this is. A growing seed of the uncertain future planted inside all of them. She will take a test, and the test will answer one question. Though perhaps then there will be others. More questions, more tests. Too many to talk about. Too many to name

Another swell of nausea rises, but she lets it pass. Breathe, Bess, breathe. She does. She sits, calm and still as she can be, watching the white caps of the tiny waves bob in the wind, watching the three veins come together, forming one body, moving together toward a distant destination that no one individual can ever fully see.

Becky Tuch is a fiction and nonfiction writer, based in Philadelphia, PA. Her work has been honored with awards and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, The Somerville, MA Arts Council, Moment Magazine, Briar Cliff Review and more. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including Salon, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Virginia Quarterly Review online, Tikkun Magazine, Gulf Coast, Post Road, Salt Hill, Literary Mama and Best of the Net. Learn more at www.BeckyTuch.com.