Two Masks April 2020 Our car rolled into the parking lot of the North York General Hospital's emergency department. There was a tunnel outside the entrance covered in tight black plastic. Three security guards stood at the front of it, wearing face masks and plastic face shields. We wondered if there was a separate entrance for patients without Covid symptoms. I got out of the car to ask one of the security guards. The moment I approached, one of them took a step back. "Is there a separate line for non-Covid patients?" I called through my mask, standing a good distance away. "All emergency patients go through here," one called back.
"Only the patient is allowed in." I went back into the car. "Dad, you need to go through that tunnel," I said. "They won't let anyone else come with you." He nodded, and I squirted some hand sanitizer into his hands. I gave him the mini-bottle, and he slid it into his pocket. "Don't touch anything," called Mom in the driver's seat. "Especially not your face.
" "Why not?" Dad said, playing dumb. The whole ride up he had been cracking lame jokes to calm us down. Things like, "Look . whatever this is . at least I still have two arms," referring to the one-armed zookeeper in Tiger King, the Netflix docuseries we binge-watched days before. Then . "Oh fuck, a tiger!" he called, thrashing around in his seat with a reusable grocery bag on his arm. "Cut it out, Harvey!" Mom barked.
"I'm driving!" Boyish humour had long been his way of coping with stress, and a method for easing the anxieties of those around him. He was wearing two masks -- one to protect him from the virus, and one to protect us from worrying. One wasn't on properly -- I adjusted the elastic over his ear after we got out of the car. The other was ineffective. "Trump says the virus is a hoax," he added. "Why would he lie? He seems like a real straight shooter!" "Not funny, Harv," Mom called with an eye roll. And it wasn't. On this day, New York state would confirm its highest daily total of first-wave fatalities: 1,028 people would die from complications related to the coronavirus in that state alone.
The numbers coming out of Europe were even worse. In Toronto, the epicentre for the SARS epidemic, we were desperately hoping we wouldn't follow suit. Dad's glasses fogged up a little, and the two of us walked toward the entrance as Mom waited in the car. It was a blue-sky morning, and sunlight beamed down on us. "I love you, Dad," I said. "I love you more," he replied. "And don't argue." That's what he always said to my mom, sister, and me.
He loved us more, and that was final. For a moment, those hazel eyes behind his foggy lenses made him look younger than the sixty-seven-year-old he was. There was a furrow in his brow, a tightness in his jaw, but his cheeks forced a smile beneath the fabric covering his mouth -- he was adjusting his other mask. "I'll be okay," he said. "I know you will . No tigers in there." Dad nodded. Then he walked through that black tunnel alone.