Hospital

Her father was the first. Not the first in the world, but the first in their world, the first the sickness reached into the house in Aurora and took, and because he was the first they did not yet know the rules, did not yet know it was everyone, did not know that the fear they felt was a small early drop of the ocean the whole earth was about to drown in. They thought it was only theirs. There is a kind of innocence in a first grief that no later grief can have, the innocence of not yet knowing that the world does this, that it is not singling you out, that it is only the weather now and the weather takes everyone. Laura would almost come to envy that early version of herself, the girl who still thought a death was a special catastrophe and not just Tuesday.

It came into him like an ordinary flu. That was the horror of the early days, that it wore the clothes of an ordinary thing. He was tired and then he was hot and then he was in the bed with the fever, and her mother, who knew more about it than anyone alive, who had studied its cousins her whole career, went very quiet and very careful, and Laura understood from her mother's quiet more than from anything else that this was not an ordinary flu. Her mother moved the children to the far end of the house. She wore a mask in the sickroom and made herself into a wall between them and their father, and Laura had thought at the time it was because her mother did not want them to catch it, and only understood years later, at the camp, doing the arithmetic of the ages, that her mother had already known the children would not catch it, not really, that the mask and the wall had been the other way around, had been to keep the children from having to see it, to keep the last of their father that they would ever have from being the sight of what it did to him.