IN THE CITY THAT NEVER SLEEPS
by Krys Stefansky
My nights are short.
If I’m lucky, I doze off around midnight. And I‘m usually up by 4 a.m.
Bathed in sweat seconds later, I lie in bed and think of a million awful things, like maybe my daughter will run out of milk today and leave her Brooklyn brownstone to go on a grocery run.
Or I get up and walk into the dark kitchen to count the days on the calendar one more time to see how long it’s been since the two fellas who delivered a stove to her apartment may have contaminated her space.
It’s a particular kind of hell when your child is quarantined in the nation’s current coronavirus hotspot. She‘s been working from home since March 10.
She is 27. She has a job. She has friends, colleagues and a passion for her writer‘s life in New York. She is an adult.
We understand that. At the same time, the news out of that city is not easy to hear. Every day means another grave and measured update by New York‘s Gov. Cuomo talking about harrowing issues like needing more ventilators to treat what he expects to be a hurricane of ICU patients as this virus makes its way through his state‘s biggest city.
We listen and watch and ask ourselves every day if it‘s time to insist that she come home. She is our only child and, maybe because of that, seems able to cope with the isolation. She can keep herself well, she says, and wants to do the same for us. Still, we‘ve made a safe plan to get and keep her here.
So while we wait for yes, we make up boxes with treats and other things. Things like hand sanitizer and chocolate, disinfectant wipes and macaroni and cheese, Tylenol and beef jerky.
I feel guilty mailing them, knowing that delivery drivers already have enough to do.
And I think about what she‘ll do once her box arrives. How she has to leave the safety of her apartment, go downstairs past the virus trail of at least six other occupants and through two doors and back again. How the cardboard box from Virginia is possibly not virus-free. How she‘ll carry it up and leave it outside of her apartment door for 24 hours, waiting for any virus on it to die. How she‘ll go back inside, shut her door and clean, clean clean...her hands, the doorknobs, her keys and 24 hours later, do it all over again when she brings the box inside to unpack it.
Before this nightmare, I spent lots of beautiful days in New York, visiting my daughter or sitting her cat Sebastian. I‘ve walked the Highline and Central Park, eaten at one after another of the great restaurants on Brooklyn‘s Franklin Street. I love the Jamaican bakery near Emma‘s apartment, the dusty chaos of her corner hardware store, the international foods in the bodegas nearby.
I know how dense the city is, how crowded the subway, how packed the streets, how difficult it is just to stay clean in an urban environment like this. I’ve washed my clothes in the neighborhood laundromat, come back and touched those same three doorknobs and handrails and taken off my shoes to enter her tiny apartment.
She could come home, of course. She could be with us here in suburbia, sit in our garden, breath our ocean air, walk at our state park.
But she loves that giant city - the traffic honking all day and night outside her windows, the yelling from the sidewalks, the sound of the choir in the church on the corner, the view through the sycamores toward the neighbors across the street.
The feeling that she is a New Yorker, no matter what.
