Philip stared at his computer screen, at row on row of black words stretching across the white page, the first of eighty. Some Ph.D. in chemistry from Lexington wanted his paper edited so that it made sense. The company Phil worked for had six months’ worth of projects stacked up for him. They paid well.

Yet each morning he sat in his bathrobe at his desk and stared out the bedroom window at the cold Pacific breaking along the strand. He struggled to concentrate, felt like a clump of dune grass rooted in place but whipped by emotion. Susan and the past two years flooded his mind.

In the kitchen, his mother fixed his breakfast, father already off to work at the Pharmacy. Philip grabbed his coffee mug and shuffled toward the aroma of French toast and fresh-brewed Brazilian.

“Did you get enough sleep?” Paula, his mother asked.

Phil slid onto the stool at the counter and rubbed his eyes. “Yeah, plenty.”

“You don’t look like you did. We heard you again last night.”

“Sorry, loud dreams.”

“You sounded so . . . so angry. Is it something we—”

“ Mom, please. Can you just pour the coffee?”

“Okay, okay. I’m just trying to help.”

“I know.”

After completing his post-doctoral work, Phil had moved back home to Morro Bay and taken a job as a science editor, a stopgap measure until he could find a university wanting to hire him as a research associate. Two years passed. Then the pandemic hit and funding evaporated.

“I’ve made your favorite,” Paula said. “How many slices do you want?”

“A half slice will be fine.”

“Phil, that’s not enough. You’ve already lost too much weight.”

“It’s good for me, good for my heart.”

“Ah, honey, your heart needs food, in more than one way.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Paula turned away and busied herself getting down his favorite plate from the cabinet stuffed with 1950s dishes, no two alike.

Philip fumbled in his robe pocket for his iPhone. He streamed the local news, letting the words of the commentators flow over him while he feigned attention. His mother placed two slices of French toast before him along with maple syrup.

“Moooom,” he complained.

“Just eat what you can.”

He glared at her, then felt bad and reached out and touched her arm. “Thanks.”

After all, he was grateful that they’d let him move back into their ocean-side home. A son pushing thirty living with his parents: was he really that much of a geek, some misfit who gets up by eight and dresses by noon?

He hurried through breakfast, clearing his plate. His mother smiled. The mail truck rumbled outside, stopping briefly before moving on. He bolted for the door.

“I’ll get it.”

“You’re not dressed.”

“It’s all right. I’ll give the neighbors something to gossip about.”

Outside he sucked in salty air and moved to the mailbox, finding normal junk, bills, and a forwarded letter addressed to Philip Banworth and Susan Jacobs. He stood on the sidewalk and stared at it, hands trembling.

“You gonna stay out there all morning?” Paula called from the front door. “You’ll catch a cold. Come in and get dressed.”

He ground his teeth and marched inside, pushed past his mother, and dumped the mail on the kitchen counter, all except the letter. Why did she insist on treating him like an eighteen-year-old? He remembered the freedom he’d felt more than a decade before when he left home and the small California seaside community for Princeton University and the wilds of New Jersey. But now her constant watching, her cloying sympathy, her ridiculous urge to please angered him the most. He just wanted to forget and her servitude wouldn’t let him. And the letter he fingered in his soft pink hands had sharpened the ache.

Philip tucked the letter inside his robe and returned to his room. Dressing quickly, he slipped through the sliding glass door onto the deck and scanned the dunes and beach. A picket line of brown pelicans flew just above the wave tops, heading north. High above, gulls circled in the cloud-scattered sky. The air smelled of rotting seaweed left by the tide in piles along the strand. No surfer had ventured into the frigid water but the morning dog walkers claimed the shoreline, each toting their plastic baggie full of dog poop.

Philip slumped into a deck chair and stared at the letter. It held nothing important, a request for donations from a national environmental organization. But seeing his name next to Susan’s cast his mind in the direction that’d been plaguing him for months. Why wouldn’t those thoughts leave? Would they cripple him forever? Could he stand it? Did he want to?

***

They met at a community mixer two years before the Covid-19 pandemic. He had just moved back home and had struggled through his first editing job. Susan taught bonehead mathematics to freshmen at the local university. She wasn’t pretty. Neither was he. She suppressed her femininity so she could function as a teacher of hormone-addled teens. He really didn’t think about his impression on women, not that he could do much about it if he did.

They found themselves in a corner, discussing the latest developments in math. She had her doctorate but worked as a temporary lecturer, hoping to get on the university’s tenure track.

“So, I’m editing research papers for this company,” Phil said. “If the math gets too bizarre, would you like to work with me as a sub-consultant?”

“Sure, I could use the money. My roommate moved out and the mortgage payments on my condo are horrendous.”

“That’s why I live with my parents . . . but it’s only temporary.”

“That’s nice.”

“Not really.”

“No, I guess not.”

“Will we ever get over our parents?” Phil asked.

“No.”

They sat holding cups of fruit punch with the silence stretching on and on. Finally, Susan asked, “Do you want to ditch this place and go somewhere?”

“Yes, please. But all I have is my motorcycle.”

“Cool. What do you ride?”

“An old Triumph. Best damn bike, even if it’s made by the Brits.”

“I have a Chevy.”

“Good.”

They found a tavern with a tolerable music level and exchanged life histories: he being a local boy fascinated by insects, outer space, and quantum mechanics; she a by-the-numbers girl from Fort Worth who succeeded in her early teens in dropping her Texas accent.

“I’d rent old movies and practice speaking like the actresses,” she said.

As a result, her voice took on a very slight British tone, and when mixed with the remnants of the southwest, confused the hell out of most people she met.

Sometime after their third date, they held hands. Weeks flew by before they kissed. For Susan, that proved to be her Come-to-Jesus moment and she invited Phil to move in with her, share the mortgage and her bed. A year passed before they both used the “L word,” Phil being the first.

“I sometimes feel I’m losing myself when I’m with you,” Phil confided.

“What do you mean? Do you have a problem with us being together?”

“No, no. It’s just that I’ve worked so hard holding onto the vague image of myself. And when I’m here with you my mind wanders and I think more about us. It’s like I’ve given up my pronouns he and him for us and them.”

“Isn’t that what happens when two people become a couple?”

“Maybe . . . but it’s also frightening. I barely have a clear image of who I am and it’s getting blurred by . . . by you.”

“I know,” Susan said and snuggled against him. “Isn’t it great?”

“God yes.”

They worked together on editing math-intensive research papers. It proved satisfying, invigorating. Their combined incomes paid the condo’s mortgage with funds left over for camping vacations during term breaks. Susan’s parents seemed to approve of Phil, although his dark beard and ponytail tested their Baptist sensibilities. Phil’s parents loved Susan and the couple had a standing invitation to Sunday dinners, served on their outdoor deck, weather permitting, with lots of dark Mexican beer.

“So are you guys engaged?” his mother asked. “You’ve been together for over a year and you seem really happy.”

“We haven’t set a date. But, yeah, sometime next year.”

His mother beamed and hugged him.

On a Tuesday morning in February, Susan woke with a headache and a slightly elevated temperature. She’d begun remote teaching from home two months before and Phil seldom mingled with people. They felt insulated from the Covid-19 virus. But the number of infections and deaths reported daily by the local press frightened them and they religiously wore double masks whenever venturing outside Susan’s condo.

“It’s probably a cold,” Susan said.

“Yeah, but maybe we should get tested.”

“Really? Even if we test positive, they can’t do anything about it. And vaccines are months away.”

“You’re right. But if one of us is positive, we should both quarantine ourselves. No outside contacts.”

They went online and signed up for testing at the County Public Health Clinic. Three days later, the results came back. Susan tested positive while Phil was negative. Armed with masks, surgical gloves, and disinfectant, Phil sanitized their bedroom and installed Susan in their king-sized bed. He slept on an air mattress in his editing studio and used the adjoining WC and shower.

They wore masks, except when they slept, kept apart with no touching. He fixed meals, took her vitals every two hours. Susan’s temperature rose to 101 and stayed there, then dropped, then rose again, edging upward. She developed a cough. Her pulse oximeter readings dropped below 90 percent, then to 88, then 85. Her breathing became labored.

“I . . . can’t get . . . enough . . . air,” Susan complained one morning, about ten days after showing symptoms.

“You need oxygen. I’m taking you to the hospital.”

Susan lay back on her pillows, chest heaving, her eyes wide and face red from the fever. He mopped her brow with a cool cloth. He had already packed a bag full of her essentials, fearing this day, trying in vain to push it from his mind.

Phil called the hospital and told them they were on their way. He carried her to the Chevy and buckled her into the front seat. In the parking lot, other condo residents stared but didn’t come near.

At the hospital, he pulled up to a special intake portal for Covid patients. Staff approached wearing what looked like hazmat suits. Through the closed window, they interviewed Phil, took down Susan’s basic information, but left her essentials bag behind. They rolled a gurney next to the car. Susan stared into his eyes and clutched him in an embrace.

Outside on the gurney, they fixed an oxygen mask over her nose and mouth and wheeled her through two swinging doors.

It was the last time he saw her.

A fully-suited woman slid Philip an information sheet through the window with all the hospital’s contact numbers and told him to go home and stay in isolation for at least two weeks then get tested or come in if he showed symptoms.

Five days later Susan suffered acute respiratory distress and was placed on a ventilator. A week after that, she died, her body cremated, her ashes Priority Mailed to her parents in Fort Worth.

***

A stiff wind blew off the ocean, stripping the tears from Philip’s eyes. He stared at the letter in his lap with Susan’s and his name side-by-side. After a year he still felt the ache. But somehow his mourning had morphed into regret and a new resolve, to never expose himself to that type of pain again. He had put so much into their relationship and for what? What was the purpose of being vulnerable if it just ended in tragedy?

Philip felt his mother’s presence, standing behind the glass next to the curtains, staring, weeping, a bad day all around. He heard the sliding door open.

“Phil, it’s really cold out there . . . and you’re only in shirtsleeves.”

“I know, Mom. I’ll be in soon.”

“Do you want some coffee to warm up?”

“Sure. I’ll get it.”

He stood, his back and legs stiff from inaction, and moved inside. Holding a steaming coffee mug he returned to his bedroom and the computer screen full of words, sentences and paragraphs. He couldn’t focus, the caffeine making him jumpy. He pulled on a sweatshirt, donned his leather jacket and grabbed his helmet.

“Mom, I’m gonna be gone for a while. Don’t bother making me lunch.”

Paula looked startled. “Where are you going?”

“Up the coast, maybe to Monterey. I’ll be back for supper.”

Paula stared into his face. “Are you okay, Phil? Do you wanna talk?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine. Just had enough editing for a while. Gotta get some . . . air.”

“Okay. But be careful. They’re expecting rain.”

“I’ll call if I’m late.”

In the garage he uncovered his restored ’69 Triumph “Bonnie.” He kicked the starting pedal a few times before she caught, then sedately motored through the neighborhood of 1950s single-story houses, all facing the sea.

Philip snugged his gloves tight and buttoned up his tattered jacket. He wore an old-fashioned pair of goggles and an open-face helmet to complement the British heritage of his bike.

Under a darkening sky he motored north on Highway 1, with little traffic on a winter weekday. The town of Cayucos and the hamlet of Harmony glided past, the roar of the Triumph’s engine mesmerizing. Rain started falling in sheets and blurred his vision. The sky darkened further. Oncoming vehicles clicked on their headlights. Just north of Cambria, the road straightened. Philip twisted the throttle and the bike shot forward, the engine screaming.

He watched the Triumph’s front tire as the centrifugal force deformed it into an ovoid-shaped wheel spitting rainwater. Traffic became an impressionistic smear across his goggles. With the bike’s tachometer needle buried, Philip closed his eyes and sucked in a deep breath, his body tense, ignorant of the downpour.

A horn blared and he opened his eyes. A pickup dually pulling a horse trailer headed straight for him. He’d drifted into the oncoming lane. Just one more moment, hold steady, hold steady. But his body overrode his mind. He eased the Triumph to the right, narrowly missing the truck’s protruding side-view mirror.

At the village of San Simeon Phil pulled onto the highway’s shoulder, stopped, and vomited into the weeds. He removed his goggles and stared at the winter sea rolling onto the stony coast. His soaked body shook, breaths came fast and hard, tears mixing with the rain.

A Highway Patrol car pulled up next to him and the officer lowered its passenger-side window.

“Do you need any help?”

“No officer, just taking a quick break.”

“You best get out of the rain; it’s not safe. The highway’s getting slick and we’ve already had a bad accident today.”

“I . . . I don’t want that,” Phil said and grinned.

“Good. By the way, nice bike.”

“Thanks.”

“You sure you’re okay?”

“Yes, thanks for asking.”

The cruiser’s window slid shut and the officer drove away. Phil kick-started the Triumph, checked traffic, then headed home to a bracing cup of coffee with an added shot of bourbon.

“You’re back so soon,” his mother said. “I’m glad. It started pouring right after you left.”

“Yeah, I’m soaked.”

“Give me those wet clothes and I’ll stick ’em in the wash.”

“Thanks.”

“Are you all right, Phil? You look exhausted. I’m . . . I’m a little frightened.”

“Sorry, Mom. I’m okay . . . now. I guess I needed to move to the very edge.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Honey, are you all right?”

“Don’t worry, Mom. I’m fine.”

He stood in the kitchen and clutched his spiked coffee while dripping rainwater onto the floor tiles. His mother brought him his bathrobe and he stripped down and left his drenched things in the laundry room.

The wind and rain increased, blowing sideways and beating on the windows. But the internal tremor that had shook him ever since Susan died quieted, at least for the moment. Maybe it would leave him for good. Philip smiled. He felt like a small child who had just stopped sobbing and had sucked in a deep breath before one final shudder. He felt almost at peace.

– Terry Sanville