We Are Not Alone

      I knew that it was going to be today. Today was going to be different. For the first time in a long time I had a hope. I was even going to get dressed. Something I hadn’t done in a while, it’s hard to find the motivation to do even the smallest of things when there is no one around to judge you. I chose my favourite dress, the black one that looked like something Audrey Hepburn might have worn. I paired it with the comfiest shoes I own even though they don’t match. But I wasn’t dressing for anyone else, I was dressing for myself, and this was the dress I wanted to die in.

I had put a lot of thought into how to do it. Hanging seems too painful and it would take too long. Gas smelled bad. There was jumping what if I survived the initial fall? A gun would be quick, but eventually I decided on pills. An overdose would be a relatively peaceful way to die. I was just going to pick up some pills and return home and die. It was supposed to be an easy day, for once it was going to be easy. Nothing had been easy since Andy died. That is what it is like being a mother, the rest of the world dies, and the real pain comes only from the death of your child.

It has been only four months since Andy’s death, he got sick at the peak of the pandemic. The hospitals were so full and there was no one there to help. So many of the doctors and nurses were sick themselves. It was more life a mob then a hospital. And there was nothing anyone could do anyway, there was no cure. He died at home, in the arms of his mother. Then he was buried in the back yard. There had been no real funerals at that point. Instead there was just a mother laying her son to rest, telling herself that funerals were always for the survivors anyway.

It was hard to keep track of what was going on in the world. The T.V. stations eventually had to shut down and it was too dangerous to leave the house for news. But it was not like I had the strength to get out of bed. I spent weeks just lying waiting to die too, but I never got sick. For some unexplainable reasons I never got sick. One of life’s cruel jokes, the one person who wanted to die is immune.

I walked around the town in the past days, looking for anyone else, but I was alone. Although I never minded being alone the silence is too deafening. I am too alone.

The hospital must have some medication left, enough to end the life of one person. The last time I had been at the hospital it had been packed, it was full of people screaming, and crying, and dying. But now everything is quiet.

The thing you never see in movies about the end of the world is the bodies. If this were a movie, I’d be walking down an empty hall, not stepping over corpses. They never prepare you for seeing the dead bodies of your high school math teacher, or the lady who lived next door. Did that body? I must be going crazy because it looked like that body moved.

“Help me,” the body said in barely more then a whisper. She was lying on a gurney in the middle of the hall. “Help me please.” How had this woman lasted so long? It didn’t look like she could even stand on her own.

“I’ll try, I’ll try to help you,” I said hoping that she would not ask too much. All I wanted was to go back home and die, but maybe that was all she wanted too.

“Are you a mother?” she asked.

“I-I was.”

“My daughter,” she coughed, almost to weak to talk, “my daughter, Leigh, she’s only eleven, I can’t leave her alone, take care of her.” She must have gone crazy dying here alone, the only hope she has in still believing that her daughter is alive. But no one is still alive.

“I’ll look after her,” I promise knowing that my words are empty. Just the last bit of piece to a dying mother.

“There she is,” I turn and see a little girl standing behind me, a girl very much alive. She was slim, with wavy brown hair, big brown eyes, eyes so filled with sadness, so young but so familiar with loss. She didn’t look sick. She was immune.

The girl walked to her mother’s side. I just stood in stunned silence. The mother whispered to the girl, “she will look after you, I love you.”

“No, no, I need you,” the little girl cried, fat tears streaming down her face.

“You will still have… a mother’s love,” the mother caressed her daughters face, barely able to get the words out, “You… are… my heart,” the hand fell limp. The girl cried over her mother, who through the strength of love had stayed alive just long enough to find a future for her daughter. But I didn’t want to be responsible for this girl’s future.

The girl, Leigh, cried over the body of her mother. I felt as though I was invading an intimate moment. I told her that I would be right back and went into a room down the hallway. Memories of my own son rushed to the surface, the day he was born, his first word, his death. This girl was another child, but I didn’t know if I had it in my heart to love another child.

Hot tears ran down my face, a sob in my throat. I sank to the floor, not strong enough to stand. How am I supposed to do this? All I wanted was death, but even that was too much to ask.

In an open cupboard there was bottles of exactly what I came here looking for. It would be so easy to just do it, to just die. With the bottle in my hands the girl walks in silently. She looks at me with her big eyes, she’s sniffling.

“I don’t want to be here anymore,” she says. I nod.

“We can go,” I say, slipping the bottle of pills into my bag. We quietly leave the hospital when I realize I don’t know where we are going to go. I don’t want to go back to my house, I don’t want her there, sleeping in Andy’s room.

“Where do you live?” I ask, “we can go there.” We walk in silence. I should be better at acknowledging another person’s grief, everyone I knew had lost someone before they too had died, but I didn’t know what to say to her. What pain did a child feel for the death of a mother? I only knew the pain of losing a child. I tried to think about what my own mother would say in such a moment, but she was often cold and unloving, she had been the opposite of what I had wanted to be as a mother.

We stopped at a house, nice, it had clearly been built recently. I saw the body of an old man laying on the yard next door. For a while people were told to leave the dead bodies on their front yard and it would be picked up that way there would be less human interaction. There were so many bodies, and with more people becoming sick all the time it meant that there were rotting corpse left outside.

To step inside the house felt like stepping into a different time. Everything was neat and clean, there was no aspect of a world falling into decay represented in the house. In the front hall there was a large family portrait, it showed the woman, but there was also a handsome father and two other children, an older boy and a younger girl. Leigh was in the middle, smiling and holding small dog. I looked at the picture thinking of all that we had both lost.

“That’s my brother Evan, and sister Lucy, my parents and our dog Frisbee. They’re all gone now.”

“I had a family too. I had a little boy” I can feel the tears about to fall. The little girl takes my hand, even though it should be me comforting her. She gives me a tour of the house, it’s very nice.

“You can sleep in my parent’s bedroom if you want,” she says, a look of discomfort on her face. Neither of us wants me to take on the role of her mother.

“That’s alright, I sleep better on couches,” she’s too young to understand the obviousness of the lie, but she looks relieved.

There’s an ever-present awkwardness in our relationship. We are two people tied together by the mere fact that we are the only ones left. Whatever bond we form will be inorganic, with neither of us ever sure what to say next. I can see the long days ahead of me, the two of us playing house in the home of her dead family. Me, constantly trying not to take on the role of her parent. What does that make me then? Her guardian?

She tells me that she is tired, I figure that it’s a lie given how early it appears to be with the sun still out. But grief is an exhausting emotion, and maybe she too wants to get away from the awkwardness hanging in the air.

As she disappears into her room, I sit on the couch that will double as my bed. I cannot live like this, in this house pretending that things are normal. I need a better plan.

I have often wondered what the chances are that I alone am immune to the disease, whatever has protected me also protects Leigh. The chances of just two people being immune somehow seems smaller than just one person. Meaning there must be more people who are still alive. There must be more people who can take on the role of this girl’s protector. With a plan of beginning to search for more human life in the morning I fall asleep.

When I tell Leigh the plan, she seems emotionally unaffected, she goes along with my idea with total apathy. As she packs her belongings, I prepare us for a journey, I find the keys to the car the family has sitting in their driveway and load it with the house’s remaining food.

“Alright, we just have to stop by my house first and then we are off!” I say with a strange amount of cheerfulness. For the first time in a long time I feel a sense of optimism.

The house that I once live in is older and less nice then the one we just left, but I had been able to rent it for a reasonable amount. It’s strange to think about how important money was in the world, now it means less then nothing.

“I’ll be right back, you can wait here,” I tell her. It is exactly the same as the way I left it yesterday, a cluttered mess filled with dirty clothes and dirty dishes. The small amount of cleaning I had managed to maintain before had slipped away following Andy’s death. I quickly stuff some clothes into a bag, not caring which of my belongings I take and leave behind.

But then I walk into Andy’s room, it’s painted blue with white clouds on the wall. His toys scatter the floor. I walk over to his bed and put the pillow to my face and just breathe in, it still smells of him.

I’m so lost in my own pain that I don’t notice Leigh walk in, “Was this your son’s room?” I jump, shocked to be awaken from my memories.

“I told you to wait in the car,” I say sharply. The girls face falls as she turns away. “Yes, this was him room. Here this is a picture of him.” I show her what is one of my favourite pictures of him, taken on his second birthday, not long before the start of the pandemic. I took him to the zoo, and I had never seen him more excited. His favourite was the penguins, it was a picture of him laughing, looking at the animals in total amazement. He was so innocent. I’m unable to think about him without crying.

Leigh sits on the bed next to me and puts her arm around my shoulder. “I miss my family too.” We just sat there, and it almost felt nice to not be alone. But I eventually break the moment.

“We should go,” I say, wiping away the tears. I put the picture of Andy and his favourite stuffed animal in the bag and leave the room.

We drive in silence, I have no real plan of where we are going, I just drive. The scenery is strange, it’s both so familiar and so different. There are dead bodies, broken windows, spray painted signs for help. I notice that Leigh has her eyes shut, I don’t know how hard this must be for her, she’s just a child.

When it begins to get dark, I stop at a highway motel. It’s the kind of place that wouldn’t have been very nice at the best of times, but it will likely be empty. I can’t imagine many people were staying in a grungy motel in their last days and the last thing I want is to walk into a house and find the remains of an entire family.

I find the keys to a pair of adjoining rooms where we share a can of cold beans. “Well I guess we should be getting some sleep. We’ve got to keep moving tomorrow,” I say walking toward the other room.

“Don’t close the door…at least don’t close it all the way.” I look at the girl and realize for the first time how scared she looks. She’s in a strange room, with a strange person, and yet she seems to trust me, she wants the door left open. I nod and leave the room, keeping the door open half-way.

As I lie in bed trying to fall asleep, I hear a noise from her room. She’s crying. I should just leave her alone. Pain can be too personal to share with another person. But as I hear the soft whine of her cry, I remember that she is a child. She shouldn’t be left alone with her pain. She should be comforted.

I get up and enter her room, she looks up “I want my mom.”

“I know. I know” sitting on the bed I stroke her hair. I don’t know how to comfort someone in this much pain. I know what it feels like to have this much pain, but I still haven’t figured out how to ease the pain. I just say the truth “I know you feel alone, and I know that a part of you wishes that you were dead too, so then you wouldn’t have to feel this pain. I know that you feel this way because I feel this way too. I don’t know why we are still alive. All I know is that your mom loved you so much that her love kept her alive until she knew that you were safe, and she thought that you would be safe with me. I’m not your mother, and you’re not my child, but at least together we are not alone.”

I realize just how true my words are, that the pain I felt was the same pain that she felt, that a mother, a mother who loved her child as much as I loved mine, had trusted me, and that I was no longer alone. I was needed by her and maybe I needed her too. I lay down on the bed next to her still stroking her hair and say, “you are not alone, I will stay alive to protect you, we are not alone.”