mugs on a countertop

by Lauren Sanyal

More and more recently, Adelyn is always gone by the time Hunter wakes up.

He used to wake and run his fingers through her auburn hair, thinking about fall and the coffee they’d shared on their first date, the same that had spilled over her red plaid scarf. But now, he opens his eyes and sees the long red hairs she shed on her pillow through the night, and he wonders.

But he knows. He moves on from that question too quickly because he knows, and he thinks of her instead, of how he used to watch her get dressed in the morning. Of how she held her long hair up in one hand and tried to zip her dress with the other, and how he walked over and zipped it for her. Or, on the days she didn’t work, how she used to make coffee at noon and wait to eat until 3:00, always some frozen thing from Trader Joe’s.

He thinks about what it was like, whenever she opened the door and saw him standing with their baby in his arms. No matter how many times he greeted her like that, she always reacted the same. A pause in the doorway, wide eyes and a smile that would break across her tired face as she hurried inside, her arms outstretched.

The Morbus took their child from them mere days before she would have turned one. Hunter remembers watching the whites of her eyes turn red, how he had known and how he had lied, because he didn’t want to believe it. How he rushed her to the doctor, his mask on tight and his daughter held snug against his chest, all without telling Adelyn, because he didn’t want her to worry.

He thought he could fix it. He thought he caught it soon enough, that he’d bring her back to her mother with some medicine, maybe. Something easy and small, because the death tolls had yet to skyrocket, and how could he have known?  

But the doctors told him they had little time, and Hunter was numb and on fire. He called Adelyn and explained, and she screamed at him through the phone about how he should have told her sooner before hanging up. She showed up at the hospital minutes later. The first thing Hunter noticed when he saw her tear through the doors was the way she paused, the scarf from their first date wrapped haphazardly around her neck.

“How are you alive?” She’d asked him hours later, when they were walking outside in the frigid air. Her breath had crystalized in front of her face, and she’d stopped walking abruptly. Hunter stood behind her and prayed silently that she’d turn to face him.

She didn’t.

“I don’t know,” he whispered. He’d checked his eyes in every reflection of himself he had seen—no red. The doctors had checked his vitals when he first got there with his daughter and had found nothing wrong.

“You must have some kind of immunity,” a nurse had told him. She’d given the doctor a meaningful look when she relayed that information to him. Hunter didn’t want to know what that look meant. 

It only took a few weeks for the Morbus to quickly grow out of control; it was almost apocalyptic, the way the world had turned on itself. People were running from the cities and towns they lived in like the virus was something they could escape. Even if Hunter thought it was futile, when Adelyn suggested they leave, he agreed. It was probably because he was so thrilled just to hear her voice directed at him.

Hunter didn’t know why he was immune, why his baby had died but not him. Too many people wanted to find out, had asked for his blood or his hair or his sacrifice. So, he and Adelyn left most everything behind, and all Hunter could think about was that damn scarf and how Adelyn had left it on the floor of their bedroom.

Now that he thinks about it, they never had a funeral for their daughter.

They heard about the Bubble a month before, although it was far from the domed fortress it would soon become. Apparently, it was a small area that had remained infection-free because of the tests everyone had to take before entering. It became their mission to get there, because they both knew it was only a matter of time before Adelyn caught the Morbus.

It didn’t take long to find, since a lot of groups could be seen heading in that direction, a desperate march towards salvation they joined at a distance. When Hunter and Adelyn arrived, they were greeted by tall gates and white tents that housed doctors in elaborate suits and people who were hooked up to machines by tubes full of their blood.

Hunter watched the doctors draw his blood and knew it wasn’t necessary, but he didn’t comment. Instead, he turned to watch them draw Adelyn’s blood, trying to see if there was something different about the dark red liquid flowing out from her arm. There was nothing, and he remembered how he had trembled when they came in to tell them the results. But the doctor had been smiling, and she’d been fine. When Hunter reached out to squeeze her hand in relief, she pulled away.

He keeps thinking about every way he and Adelyn have become experts at avoiding each other, how she leaves early and stays out late. How whenever he’s home, he spends time learning new recipes in the kitchen, looking outside at the domed sky above their heads, and she's always too busy reading their limited supply of books to eat with him. He thinks about how they used to enjoy nights together, drinking wine with a record on, spinning while they kissed on the sofa, her lips slow and his hands light as they trailed over her skin.

Nights are different now. For one thing, the stars look all wrong. Hunter thinks that the creators of the dome tried too hard to make it beautiful; all of the colors above their heads at night look nothing like the night skies he and Adelyn used to kiss under. 

No; he doesn’t enjoy nighttime anymore.

He thinks about how long it’s been since they met eyes and smiled at each other. Whenever they do meet eyes, they just think about how they failed to bring life into the world and keep it there. Adelyn looks at him and sees the man who tore away her goodbye, and Hunter looks at her and sees the woman who can never forgive him. 

In the beginning, Hunter thought it would eventually pass, that they'd get through it together, somehow. Life in the Bubble was hard, artificial, lonely. Only so many had made it in time before the rest of the population bled out through the planet’s fingers. He thought that one day she’d need him, and, maybe, she’d learn to love him again.

They have time, don’t they? They’re both only in their thirties, and the Bubble shows no signs of failure. They have years to find their ways back to each other. Years.

They always fall flat, his attempts to console himself.

So Hunter pulls himself out of bed around noon and heads to the kitchen, pouring out the extra bit of coffee Adelyn left for him, along with an empty mug, sitting quietly on the countertop.

He stops, his hand unsteady where it grips the handle of the coffee pot. The mug sits there, unmoving and unassuming, but it’s there, and God, when was the last time Adelyn left coffee and a mug out for him?

He stares at that mug and where it sits. He dares to wonder, but kicks himself—what is there to wonder? She can’t touch him, much less love him. A simple mug, set out just for him, means nothing.

And he makes it mean nothing until she does it the next day, and the next, and the next. He tries to convince himself it means nothing because she still won’t speak to him or look at him, and that’s what he wants, damn it, not an empty mug and a few ounces of coffee.

Yet each time she does it, he pauses in the doorway and smiles. She sits outside under that artificial sky and sips from her own mug, and they go about their days separately, as if the other doesn’t exist.

She starts to leave more coffee for him, and Hunter dares to believe that she’s doing it on purpose, that she’s splitting it in half now instead of just giving him whatever she doesn’t want.

So the next morning, he gets up early and sits in the kitchen, waiting. With clammy hands that shake whenever he turns the pages of a random book he grabbed from the shelf, he waits.

At 8:24, the lights turn on. His world is flooded with light that burns, and he realizes that she won’t believe his excuse about reading, unless he argues that his immunity comes with superpowered-night vision.

A part of Hunter is afraid that by the time his eyes adjust to the light, Adelyn will be gone. That she’ll have seen him sitting there and that she’ll have run, because she hasn’t looked at him properly in months, so how could she look at him now?

But when they do, he sees her standing in the doorway, one hand braced lightly against the wall’s edge. With wide eyes and a shuddering chest, she looks at him, and he looks at her, and he thinks about everything she must see right now: a broken down, horrible father who’s no longer a father. His eyes begin to water.

“Lynn,” he breathes.

She just keeps standing there. Briefly, the hand that was hanging by her side comes up towards her neck. Hunter watches it, and for the first time in a long time, he thinks that she might not have completely forgotten about her scarf, the one she left to decay in their house, hundreds of miles away.

“Hi, Hunter.” She can’t quite meet his eyes, and that’s okay—it’s okay—because she just acknowledged his presence, and God, he knows he doesn’t deserve that from her.

So he stands, and he grabs two mugs from one of the overhead cabinets.

“Coffee?” His voice breaks on the way out, and he’s reminded of all those years ago, when he first saw her in that dumb rhetoric class, the light turning her red hair into embers, and his voice had been lost.

A beat.

“Okay,” she whispers, and she tries to smile at him.

This becomes routine, eventually. They greet each other in the morning like this, and it still becomes too much, sometimes. They still spend most of their days separate, but Hunter is in no rush. He knows he has no right to be.

A few weeks later, they sit together outside under that artificial morning sun, and he asks her, “When you look at me, what do you see?”

Adelyn pauses, and he thinks about times months and months ago when she used to pause in the doorway and smile whenever he greeted her with their child in his arms.

She turns to look at him, and his eyes follow the trail of hers until they meet, and he can feel himself slipping, falling and sliding through the cracks of the shuddering and shattering bones in his chest and he’s struggling, the tissue encompassing his lungs refusing to expand, because he tore away her goodbye, he tore it away, he tore it away—

“Her. I see...I see her.”

Something catches in his throat. He looks at her—really, really looks at her.

He says, “She’s all I see now, too.”  

And nothing else is said between them for the rest of the day—there’s nothing left to say.