Dune dropped the bread and ran over to check Mama Vivian’s responses. Her grandmother was still here and she looked so confused, trying to understand what was happening. Dune hoped for small blessings—that Bab had just turned, not been sitting like this for hours. That she hadn’t wet herself. That she was movable.

Dune pulled Bab to standing and was grateful that she could shuffle her off down the hallway. Dune returned and gave Mama Vivian water, apologizing over and over, even though there was nothing any of them could do. H-8 wasn’t her fault.

Dune drove Bab home, escort to a quiet ghost. Bab had no words, which surprised Dune at first, though maybe she had spoken them all in these months of caring for Vivian. Bab’s roommates, a crew of older people of color who might all be lovers, were still there to receive her, another small blessing. Dune knew that in bringing their friend back to them, she was devastating their home.

They all knew about Kama and offered condolences, but in their shock, no one asked anything else. Dune was relieved.

When she returned to the house she sat by her grandmother’s bed, holding Mama Vivian’s hand. She told her grandmother that they wouldn’t see Bab again and that it was the same thing that had happened to Kama. She didn’t know what else to say. The emotion of earlier had left Mama’s face and Dune couldn’t tell if anything was getting through.

Most of Dune’s days now consisted of bizarre firsts.

Like the first time she realized that someone had left a sick person in a boarded-up home. She’d been across town to see about a community garden behind a church in Brightmoor and was on her way home. It was a glorious Detroit sunset that night, wide and bright, softening into a purple dusk. She’d seen a home with a front window cracked open next to a boarded-up door. The rest of the windows were boarded up too. She wondered, what was the point, and then it struck her so hard she hit the brakes.

A just-in-case option? Even though no one who had gotten sick had recovered at all, much less enough to walk out of their homes.

She had jumped out of the car and gone right up to the open window, ducking down to look in. And there, in the last fading light of day, she could see a knee, someone sitting in the room past the living room, maybe a dining room? She called out several times, but the knee didn’t move. No one else responded, no other sounds came from within. She tried to get her courage up to slip in, gather more data on the owner of the knee.