The Strain. Book I of The Strain Trilogy

Kelly and Eph stood across from each other in the modest kitchen. Her hair was lighter and shorter, more businesslike now. Maybe more Mom-like. She gripped the edge of the countertop, and he noticed little paper cuts on her knuckles, a hazard of the classroom.

She had gotten him an unopened pint of milk from the fridge. “You still keep whole milk?” he said.

“Z likes it. Wants to be like his father.”

Eph drank some, and the milk cooled him but didn’t give him that usual calming sensation. He saw Matt lurking on the other side of the pass-through, sitting in a chair, pretending not to look their way.

“He is so much like you,” she said. She was referring to Zack.

“I know,” said Eph.

“The older he gets. Obsessive. Stubborn. Demanding. Brilliant.”

“Tough to take in an eleven-year-old.”

Her face broke into a broad smile. “I’m cursed for life, I guess.”

Eph smiled also. It felt strange, exercise his face hadn’t gotten in days.

“Look,” he said, “I don’t have much time. I just…I want things to be good. Or at least, to be okay between us. The custody thing, that whole mess — I know it did a job on us. I’m glad it’s over. I didn’t come here to make a speech, I just…now seems like a good time to clear the air.”

Kelly was stunned, searching for words.

Eph said, “You don’t have to say anything, I just—”

“No,” she said, “I want to. I am sorry. You’ll never know just how sorry I am. Sorry that everything has to be this way. Truly. I know you never wanted this. I know you wanted us to stay together. Just for Z’s sake.”

“Of course.”

“You see, I couldn’t do that — I couldn’t. You were sucking the life out of me, Eph. And the other part of it was…I wanted to hurt you. I did. I admit it. And that was the only way I knew I could.”

He exhaled deeply. She was finally admitting to something he’d always known. But there was no victory for him in that.

“I need Zack, you know that. Z is…he’s it. I think, without him, there would be no me. Unhealthy or not, that’s just the way it is. He’s everything to me…as you once were.” She paused to let that sink in, for both of them. “Without him, I would be lost, I would be…”

She gave up on her rambling.

Eph said, “You would be like me.”

That froze her. They stood there looking at each other.

“Look,” Eph said, “I’ll take some blame. For us, for you and me. I know I’m not the…the whatever, the easiest guy in the world, the ideal husband. I went through my thing. And Matt — I know I’ve said some things in the past…”

“You once called him my ‘consolation life.’”

Eph winced. “You know what? Maybe if I managed a Sears, if I had a job that was just that, a job, and not another marriage entirely…maybe you wouldn’t have felt so left out. So cheated. So…second place.”

They were quiet for a bit then, Eph realizing how bigger issues tended to crowd out the little ones. How true strife caused personal problems to be set aside with alacrity.

Kelly said, “I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say we should have had this talk years ago.”

“We should have,” he agreed. “But we couldn’t. It wouldn’t have worked. We had to go through all this shit first. Believe me, I’d have paid any amount not to — not to have gone through one second of it — but here we are. Like old acquaintances.”

“Life doesn’t go at all the way you think it will.”

Eph nodded. “After what my parents went through, what they put me through, I always told myself, never, never, never, never.”

“I know.”

He folded in the spout on the milk carton. “So forget who did what. What we need to do now is make it up to him.”

“We do.”

Kelly nodded. Eph nodded. He swirled the milk around in the carton, feeling the coldness brush up against his palm.

“Christ, what a day,” he said. He thought again about the little girl in Freeburg, the one who had been holding hands with her mother on Flight 753. The one who was Zack’s age. “You know how you always told me, if something hit, some biological threat, that if I didn’t let you know first you’d divorce me? Well — too late for that.”

She came forward, reading his face. “I know you’re in trouble.”

“This isn’t about me. I just want you to listen, okay, and not flip out. There is a virus moving through the city. It’s something…extraordinary…easily the worst thing I’ve ever seen.”

“The worst?” She blanched. “Is it SARS?”

Eph almost smiled at the grand absurdity of it all. The insanity.

“What I want you to do is to take Zack and get out of the city. Matt too. As soon as possible — tonight, right now — and as far away as you can possibly go. Away from populated areas, I mean. Your parents…I know how you feel about taking things from them, but they have that place up in Vermont still, right? On top of that hill?”

“What are you saying?”

“Go there. For a few days at least. Watch the news, wait for my call.”

“Wait,” she said. “I’m the head-for-the-hills paranoiac, not you. But…what about my classroom? Zack’s school?” She squinted. “Why won’t you tell me what it is?”

“Because then you would not go. Just trust me, and go,” he said. “Go, and hope we can turn it back somehow, and this all passes quickly.”

“‘Hope?’” she said. “Now you’re really scaring me. What if you can’t turn it back? And — and what if something happens to you?”

He couldn’t stand there with her and address his own doubts. “Kelly — I gotta go.”

He tried to walk out, but she grabbed his arm, checking his eyes to see if it was okay, then put her arms around him. What started as just a make-up hug turned into something more, and by the end of it she was gripping him tightly. “I’m sorry,” she whispered into his ear, then left a kiss on the bristly side of his unshaven neck.

Vestry Street, Tribeca

Eldritch Palmer sat waiting on an uncushioned chair on the rooftop patio, bathed in night. The only direct light was that of an outdoor gas lamp burning in the corner. The terrace was on the top of the lower of the two adjoining buildings. The floor was made of square clay tiles, aged and blanched by the elements. One low step preceded a high brick wall at the northern end, with two door-size archways hung with iron-work. Fluted terra-cotta tiling topped the wall and the overhangs on each side. To the left, through wider decorative archways, were oversize doorways to the residence. Behind Palmer, centered before the southern white cement wall, was a headless statue of a woman in swirling robes, her shoulders and arms darkly weathered. Ivy slithered up the stone base. Though a few taller buildings were visible both north and east, the patio was reasonably private, as concealed a rooftop as one might hope to find in lower Manhattan.

Palmer sat listening to the sounds of the city rising off the streets. Sounds that would end so soon. If only they knew this down there, they would embrace this night. Every mundanity of life grows infinitely more precious in the face of impending death. Palmer knew this intimately. A sickly child, he had struggled with his health all his life. Some mornings he had awakened amazed to see another dawn. Most people didn’t know what it was to mark existence one sunrise at a time. What it was like to depend on machines for one’s survival. Good health was the birthright of most, and life a series of days to be tripped through. They had never known the nearness of death. The intimacy of ultimate darkness.

Soon Eldritch Palmer would know their bliss. An endless menu of days stretched out before him. Soon he