Fighting the virus, gaining hope

chapter 3

Dinner for Charlotte and Jean was generally a utilitarian affair; they cooked together to save time, wolfed it down mostly in silence because the textbooks were dull and the hospital was the wrong kind of exciting, and then they’d spend an hour or two in each other’s company or else she’d read some more and he’d go to sleep. Jean had had enough of seeing her eat seemingly without being nourished, so he set out to turn things around.

One early evening Jean scrubbed and changed at the hospital facilities and took a detour on his walk (the first time in ages that he hadn’t passed by the woman’s window) to a local supermarket with late hours. Some particular shelves were empty but not all of them, and the staff there were happy to help a health worker find some good food. He made the rest of the trip home laden with enough groceries for weeks, including some treats on top of the usual staples. After his shower at home, he shoved it all in the fridge with no word of explanation. He got some odd looks from Charlotte as they prepared a very nice but still unambitious meal, but she was grateful for a load or two of groceries she wouldn’t have to do, and that was that for the night.

The next day at the hospital (the woman was at the window, and her belly was preventing her from pulling up her pyjama pants properly…) Jean paced himself as best he could so that he wouldn’t be totally exhausted by quitting time. He finished up less exhausted than usual, and called it a win. He strolled home at the usual time, washed up and then took charge of selecting ingredients for dinner: chicken, pasta, cheese and an assortment of ingredients from a recipe he’d looked up while dressing. Charlotte helped, but was surprised by the scale of the endeavour; when they’d finished there was enough fettucine Alfredo to fill a medium tray even after dinner was served. It was creamy but not too creamy, and very satisfying. Afterwards the leftovers did go into a medium tray and into the fridge with alfoil. While Charlotte watched TV feeling uncommonly full, Jean casually handed her a sweet almond pastry for dessert, and then dove back into the fridge for other ingredients. By the time he was done, there were half a dozen well stacked sandwiches packed in a large plastic container, stowed back in the fridge above the Alfredo. Jean’s intention was that Charlotte would always have something good to eat if she simply opened the fridge; he could personally help her be generous to herself for breakfast and dinner, but for lunch and snacks in between he was out to make it as easy as possible for her, and he’d spend the extra time in the kitchen to keep that going.

Over the next month, the pandemic stepped down very slightly from the crisis point as social distancing measures finally took effect and new cases per week began to decrease across the town. There was still plenty to do at the hospital, but it wasn’t battle stations all day anymore, and Jean felt a very small shifting of the weight he’d been under.

With this largely psychological boost, Jean became more enthusiastic about nourishing Charlotte and cooked extra several times a week. The fridge always had lasagne, sweet banana bread, a savoury pie or something similarly tasty ready to eat in minutes. Dinner became a little more extravagant, with homemade cakes or biscuits for dessert after a substantial main course. Charlotte had never refused food but rather resorted to empty snacks whenever time was short or study was pressing; with the suddenly abundant home cooking available at a moment’s notice she was happy to partake and Jean saw the trays and containers empty quickly while he was at work. Charlotte did not change nearly as quickly or as obviously as the woman in the window had, but she was happier, healthier-looking, and still slim but progressively less “drawn”. She was not only grateful to Jean for the effort he put in but glad he had found a pursuit outside of his job; it could only be good for both their mental health.

The woman in the window stayed the course and continued to expand with every week that passed. No longer content with taking time out at the window after a big breakfast, Jean now often spotted her there with a morsel in hand, like a baked good or piece of fruit, carrying right on eating. Once he even saw her drinking the last dregs of something thick from a blender jug. This was something of a threshold crossed: she wasn’t just eating whatever she wanted, she was apparently mixing concoctions to help take in as many calories as possible. She had new nightclothes on, probably after outgrowing the old ones, and her larger shirt billowed out over her even wider hips, larger breasts and a bulbous belly that now wobbled slightly when she moved. She finished drinking and looked straight down at Jean, for the first time he had ever noticed. He realised this was because he had stopped to stare at her, mildly shocked at the measures she was taking to fatten herself. Startled and at a loss, he smiled weakly and waved. After a brief but very awkward pause she broke out into her usual smile, made the “cheers” motion with her jug, and went back to draining it. He walked on, thinking that he’d never known anyone with this attitude: See me make myself fatter and fatter, even celebrate it with me. The sheer confidence of it could not fail to be exciting.

Another few weeks later, news from all over the region was very positive. New local cases had slowed to a trickle, all related to out-of-town travel. Health authorities still urged caution but politicians were desperate to restart the economy. Jean suspected the reality would be somewhere in the middle, a careful creep back to normalcy. A few types of businesses would shortly be allowed to reopen, such as open air cafes and restaurants where maintaining a decent distance would be easier.

The cases in the hospital still related to the pandemic were mostly old cases, the semi-unlucky few who had survived the worst of it but were taking weeks to recover. The pandemic unit would be sad to see any uptick but it was ready. Jean knew the townspeople would take the necessary calculated risks to reclaim some part of their old lives, so best to do it in a controlled manner.

Jean took a rare early afternoon mark to visit the local cemetery. Among the fresh graves he recognised too many of his own patients from the early days of the outbreak. He would always wrestle with the responsibility he bore as their doctor versus the hospital’s helplessness against such a volume of cases, and he would never forget these poor brave souls. Hopefully the town - and the world - wouldn’t either.