So Danny put his mask back on and went behind the admitting desk and got one for Mrs. DiMassi and a few others in the waiting room. He handed them out and sat back down, feeling each breath he exhaled press back against his lips and nose.

Mrs. DiMassi said, “Paper say only soldiers get it.”

Danny said, “Soldiers breathe the same air.”

“You?”

Danny patted her hand. “Not so far.”

He started to remove his hand, but she closed hers over it. “Nothing get you, I think.”

“Okay.”

“So I stay close.” Mrs. DiMassi moved in against him until their legs touched.

The doctor came out into the waiting room and, though he wore one himself, seemed surprised by all the masks.

“It’s a boy,” he said and squatted in front of them. “Healthy.”

“How is Tessa?” Mrs. DiMassi said.

“That’s her name?”

Mrs. DiMassi nodded.

“She had a complication,” the doctor said. “There’s some bleeding I’m concerned about. Are you her mother?”

Mrs. DiMassi shook her head.

“Landlady,” Danny said.

“Ah,” the doctor said. “She have family?”

“A father,” Danny said. “He’s still being located.”

“I can’t let anyone but immediate family in to see her. I hope you understand.”

Danny kept his voice light. “Serious, Doctor?”

The doctor’s eyes remained weary. “We’re trying, Officer.”

Danny nodded.

“If you hadn’t carried her here, though?” the doctor said. “The world would, without question, be a hundred ten pounds lighter. Choose to look at it that way.”

“Sure.”

The doctor gave Mrs. DiMassi a courtly nod and rose from his haunches.

“Dr….,” Danny said.

“Rosen,” the doctor said.

“Dr. Rosen,” Danny said, “how long are we going to be wearing masks, you think?”

Dr. Rosen took a long look around the waiting room. “Until it stops.”

“And it isn’t stopping?”

“It’s barely started,” the doctor said and left them there.

Tessa’s father, Federico Abruzze, found Danny that night on the roof of their building. After the hospital, Mrs. DiMassi had berated and harangued all her tenants into moving their mattresses up onto the roof not long after the sun went down. And so they assembled four stories above the North End under the stars and the thick smoke from the Portland Meat Factory and the sticky wafts from the USIA molasses tank.

Mrs. DiMassi brought her best friend, Denise Ruddy-Cugini, from Prince Street. She also brought her niece, Arabella and Arabella’s husband, Adam, a bricklayer recently arrived from Palermo sans passport. They were joined by Claudio and Sophia Mosca and their three children, the oldest only five and Sophia already showing with the fourth. Shortly after their arrival, Lou and Patricia Imbriano dragged their mattresses up the fire escape and were followed by the newlyweds, Joseph and Concetta Limone, and finally, Steve Coyle.

Danny, Claudio, Adam, and Steve Coyle played craps on the black tar, their backs against the parapet, and Claudio’s homemade wine went down easier with every roll. Danny could hear coughing and fever-shouts from the streets and buildings, but he could also hear mothers calling their children home and the squeak of laundry being drawn across the lines between the tenements and a man’s sharp, sudden laughter and an organ grinder in one of the alleys, his instrument slightly out of tune in the warm night air.