The Cliffs of Stop & Shop

There we stood, my brother and I, on the mighty cliffs of Stop & Shop, staring down upon our vast kingdom that was Route 7 and the subjects of the parking lot. We giggled and argued over the meanings of words like “pandemic" and “COVID” that our parents had recently started using, as my father, masked and gloved, searched desperately for Lysol and toilet paper. We had been away from home for six weeks now. I had overheard snippets of a conversation my parents had with a friend of theirs, an E.R. doctor, though I only came to understand it years later.

“We’ve had a few cases of a new respiratory virus.”

“The one from China?” 

“There’s no way of testing for it.”

“Is it bad?”

“It will be, especially in big cities like this one. You should get your family out of here, far away from all people.”

A week later, my school shut down. That same day, I was whining about how long the car ride to Lenox was. My mother explained that we would be staying in Grandma and Grandpa’s red house for four days. That night, after I had been put to bed, I heard my mother screaming on the phone with my grandma.

“Mom, this is serious. Please just don’t go. I don’t care if you already booked the flights.” 

She hung up the phone, her face red. She cried herself to sleep that night.

That was six weeks and 13 rounds of laundry ago. My brother and I laughed as we threw pebbles at the cars speeding down the highway, and hid when they honked at us. We played and scraped our knees until we got hungry. My brother saw my father had returned and whined that he was hungry. My father, standing there, facing the setting sun, gently rocking back and forth, raised his gloved hand and held a finger to his masked lips. He was praying.

When my father finished, my brother raced to the grocery bags to check if my father had bought Frosted Flakes, which he proudly explained to me early that day he had written on the grocery list. To our dismay, he was unfooled by my brother's illegible handwriting. 

My brother and I bickered on the ride home about who would get the honor of spraying down the Amazon boxes with Lysol in the morning. Then, something caught my eye—a playground. We begged him to pull over. It was dark by then, and though we were young, we knew there was little point in trying. But to our shock, he pulled over. We were bursting with excitement when we got to the gate. My father pulled on it, but it did not budge. It was locked. My brother's little six-year-old heart was shattered. His chin quivered, and he started to bawl. My father's face went emotionless, and I saw one singular tear slowly run down his face.

The car ride home was quiet. My brother had stopped crying and fallen asleep on my shoulder. As I drifted off to sleep, I heard my father whisper into the phone, “They closed the playgrounds.”