9. Lockdown

LOCKDOWN

Five hours after Dickie McGinity threw up his breakfast, Ginny Koong threw up her lunch. Over the weekend, Vera Wentz threw up. Then Maxine Jenkins. Then Duane Stafford. Followed by Mozelle Davidson and Ida Walker.

When the boy arrived back at work Monday morning, Shady Glen truly resembled the scene of one of those zombie-apocalypse movies he was so fond of. The halls—usually full of residents slowly perambulating from one area to the other or just sitting around chatting—were completely empty. The air, always buzzing with the overloud conversations of the hard of hearing, was quiet.

"Hello?" he called, walking to the front desk, where the ditzy receptionist answered phones, checked in families, and located, or failed to locate, packages. But there was no one there. The phone rang into the silence.

There's no such thing as a zombie apocalypse, he told himself, but his heart didn't get the message and started to pound.

"Hello?" the boy called. "Anyone here?"

He walked past the empty dining room into the empty activity area before he saw someone unrecognizable in layers of protective gear. And then he saw the belly bump.

"You showed," Etta said. "Thank you, Jesus."

The boy pointed to himself, confused. In his first week at Shady Glen, the boy had grown used to feeling like the gum stuck under everyone's shoe, most of all Mrs. Winston's. And now she was thanking Jesus he was here.

"Uh, what's happening?" the boy asked.

"We're on another lockdown."

"Lockdown?" he cried. This was worse than a zombie apocalypse. He knew that now, even though when everything had closed and everyone had had to stay at home, he'd been glad. No school. Lots of TV shows, games of Scrabble, and plentiful food from the pantries that showed up everywhere. It had felt like one long snow day, and—best yet—his mom had said that the landlords weren't allowed to evict anyone, so they wouldn't have to move.

But then, as the months dragged on, his mom started to go to one of her bad places. He could recognize the signs as easily as the freckles across the bridge of her nose. He'd wake up in the morning and find her in the same chair she'd been in when he'd gone to bed, the TV on the same channel, the dinner he'd left out for her cold on the table. She didn't cook any meals or eat the ones he put together. Not even lasagna. Usually when she got like this, she stayed that way until she declared it was time for a "fresh start." Not long after, he'd come home to find their belongings in garbage bags and boxes, his mom smiling and humming and excited about the move to a new town, where this time, she promised, things would be different.

But under lockdown they couldn't move. And that was when things started to get really bad. When his mom started to mutter to herself day and night. When sores began to appear all over her legs that she refused to see a doctor for. When she stopped leaving the house, not even to get food from the stores or pantries. He'd actually been relieved when he could go back to school, because he got breakfast and lunch there. His mom always said that moving all the time—being nomads, she called it—was an adventure, and he went along with it, but really, he hated moving, hated starting a new school. But that time it got so bad with his mom, he actually wanted to move, wanted that fresh start. And then he got one.

"Not that kind of lockdown," Etta explained, putting a latex-gloved hand on his shaking shoulder. "It's temporary. We just have to take precautions until no resident shows any symptoms for seventy-two hours. We got pretty good at this during Covid, but now we're down several aides who are on vacation or sick, and the other volunteer didn't come in because of the risk of contagion."

The boy felt a little smug about that. The contagion hadn't kept him at home. He hadn't known about it, sure, but even if he had, he would have come in. What a spoiled baby Maya-Jade was.

"Come with me," Etta said, and led him down the corridor through the dining room and into the huge industrial kitchen, where two people also in hazmat-type suits were hurriedly stacking Styrofoam boxes onto a cart. "I found someone," she said to one of them, a physical therapist named Julio who had been drafted into meal delivery now that all physical-therapy sessions had been suspended.

"How old are you, sweetie?" asked the other person. She had on a mask, a face shield, and a pretty scarf that covered her hair.

"Twelve," the boy replied, flushing a little at the sweetie . No one had called him anything like that since his mom had gotten taken away. He liked her, even before he knew that this was the head chef and therefore the mastermind behind the lasagna.

"Is that too young, Leyla?" Julio asked.

"Probably, but I'd rather risk a code violation than let the residents go hungry," Leyla replied. And with that she pushed a cart full of cartons toward him and handed him a marker. "These are vegetarian." She tapped one of the towers of boxes. "These are the low-sodium." She tapped a second tower. "These are for the diabetics." She tapped the third. "And these are kosher." She gestured to a fourth.

"Uh…?" the boy began, unsure what he was supposed to do.

"Start marking the boxes!" Etta ordered, and she left.

The boy took the Sharpie and marked the vegetarian ones with a V , the low-sodium ones with an LS , and the diabetic ones with a D , and then used C for kosher because he had never heard the word before. He didn't even need anyone to remind him which was which. When he was finished, Julio counted the boxes again and checked them against a paper chart. Then he nodded and loaded the marked boxes onto a trolley full of other boxes and thrust the printout into the boy's hands.

"These are for the second floor. Pay attention to the names with stars. They're the ones who get special meals. If you give Nelson Lippincott a regular-sodium meal, you could kill him, and if you give Lois Stein a nonkosher meal, she'll kill you."

"You want me to deliver the food? To the old people?"

"To the residents . Knock once, then open the door, then announce you're there," Julio replied. "Give them a minute, otherwise you might see something you don't want to see."

"Like a dead person?"

"I was thinking a half-naked person. It's not a sight for the uninitiated."

"But could they be dead?"

"Always a possibility."

"Then what?"

"Then you don't have to deliver that meal."

The first two deliveries went smoothly enough. Vera Wentz and Fred Bocarelli both had deluxe suites, with separate sitting areas and bedrooms, and both were in their bedrooms. The boy was able to knock on the door, enter, drop the meal on the small dining table, announce, "Lunch is here," and get out without seeing or talking to anyone. Lois Stein was next on his list. He made sure she got a box marked C and knocked on the door. She called for him to come in, and when he did, she barely looked up from her newspaper. Sid Bellows was too engrossed in perusing pictures of women on the Silver Singles dating site to pay the boy any mind. Ginny Koong's room was empty because she was downstairs with Dickie in his room, the two of them now recovered enough to convalesce together.

The boy paused when he saw the next name on his list: Vivian, Maya-Jade's imperious grandmother. He knocked on the door but wasn't sure he could be heard over the loud radio. Only when he opened the door did he realize it was not the radio. It was Vivian herself, singing Gilda's first-act aria from Rigoletto , which she had first sung in the San Francisco Opera when she was twenty-one. She glared at the boy as if he'd traipsed onstage during her solo performance. He dropped the food and left.

Minna Waxman's room was easy enough. She was staring at her television, watching a rerun of Jeopardy . She barely said anything when he delivered her meal.

He checked his list. The next room was 206. Joseph Kravitz, it said. No dietary restrictions. That was me.