Chapter 1

Mornings were the hardest. Mornings she woke from the dreams of the night—filled as they were with dead relatives and equally dead celebrities—to the dreams of the day, with their fat, chirping birds and lush gardens, devoid of people. She was among the many fortunate ones who worked from home, tucked away in co-ops and condos or, in her case, a two-family house in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn where she hung on to a writing gig with a travel magazine whose offices lay just across the bridge in that borough that lorded it over the others. It might as well have been another universe. And whenever she had to commute from Brooklyn into Manhattan, it really did seem as if it were.

But Brooklyn offered her a lovely little slice of heaven in a home she would not have been able to afford on her own, and so she was determined to keep her place and her job and, to that end, stay well. That meant a complete lockdown in yet “another day in paradise.” She meant it ironically as Phil Collins did in his song. There was nothing paradisaical about the endless sound of sirens and even the defiant blaring of Frank Sinatra’s rendition of “New York, New York.” And yet, there was something Edenic about an almost physically perfect spring. Nature, Aristotle said, abhorred a vacuum and its richness that spring seemed designed to will the world to go on.

As did the house itself—actually two conjoined townhouses with a walled garden halved by a rille of water punctuated by arborvitae. This backyard garden—which also contained apple, cherry, and plum blossom trees, along with dogwoods, lilacs, daffodils, and tulips—seemed to care for itself but was in reality tended by gardeners who showed up and left without a word, paid for by her landlord, the twin townhouses’ owner, who had chosen to remain with his family in Florida—the best of all possible situations for her.

“How lucky you are to live in such a house,” one of her envious apartment-dwelling friends said. “At least you can go out and take a walk and be alone.”

She hadn’t seen it that way at first. Instead, she missed her glamorous, old way of life—shopping at Bloomie’s; Thursday night dinners with her friends, in which they solved the world’s problems; The Mets, as in the museum and opera house, not the ball club; the City Ballet, the Yankees, tennis—everything. That longing for everything but especially for an ordinary day in which going out didn’t mean you were taking your life in your hands every time you took a breath or failed to concentrate on what you were doing, turned into resentment and resentment into anger. She was, though she hated to admit it, a bit lonesome, too, even though as a writer she had always craved solitude.

That was the first week. During the second week, something funny happened. The second week was easier to bear—thanks to the realization that she was not only getting more work done but had time for the house, exercise, and all those things she always lamented never having time for. By the third week, she was not only content but indeed came to see this as her natural state of being, as if there had never been another world order and never should be. Her home was her fortress, her refuge, her protection. She would not be going back to her One World Trade offices, not if she could help it. She would have to play that card carefully, but play it she would. Her health came first. After all, without her health there was no one to write all those stories and make money, and no one to take care of her.

She had learned that lesson at a too-tender age. At age five she had already accomplished something that most native New Yorkers never achieved: She had lived in all five boroughs. That was thanks to her mother, a single parent who could never outrun the voices in her head and so kept moving from place to place, often one step ahead of a collection agency and child welfare. When she was old enough, she would tell her classmates that her mother had an important government job. But in truth, she was embarrassed by her, then afraid of her, then just plain contemptuous of her.

She lost track of all the times her mother hit her. She lost count of all the times she hit her back, she who was really the parent. She remembered the last time she saw her in a hospice for the homeless—the pleading eyes, the concave chest. Her mother kissed her hand over and over. She let her as she took her last breath. “Well,” she said to the attending nun, “she’s done it at last. She’s finally outrun them.”

She herself had done it, too, outrunning her past. Through all the turmoil, she had studied hard, earning scholarships, internships, powerful mentors. She had made it, so much so that she could have a piece of Park Slope. She wasn’t about to give that up for a virus. And so, complete isolation meant only a walk in the walled garden. And the grocery delivery service.