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Carol finishes a chapter and shuts her laptop before she can think better of it and delete all of today's progress.
She glances at the armchair to check whether Helen came in while she was absorbed in her work.
It's still empty.
She goes downstairs and boils water for tea.
When she takes the tea into their bedroom, Helen's still asleep—or possibly asleep again—even though it's half past two. Carol immediately backtracks, trying to leave quietly.
She evidently fails because Helen speaks without opening her eyes. "I'm awake. Unfortunately."
"I brought tea," Carol tells her. "If you want it."
"I do. Thank you."
But she doesn't make any move to take it, so Carol puts it on her nightstand.
"When are you going to eat?"
"Ideally… Never again."
"Do you want me to make you something?"
"Not really. I've already thrown up three times today."
Carol hadn't noticed her get out of bed any of those times. She ought to have.
"If, hypothetically speaking, you were to eat at some point before you expire, what would it be?"
"Soup. I guess."
"Be serious," Carol says.
"I am."
"Soup is not a food."
"It is the food universally prescribed for the flu."
Carol lays the back of her hand across Helen's forehead. It's too hot, but she'd known it would be. "Yes, I see," she says, affecting thoughtfulness. "You have fallen prey to the soup propaganda disease. I'm sorry to say it's fatal."
"Good," Helen murmurs. "May it take me quickly."
"Nope. It's lingering as hell. Messy and lumpy and disgustingly damp, much like soup."
Helen doesn't engage, which is a marker of how terribly she must be feeling.
"Fine," Carol says, like she is conceding an argument Helen has actually voiced. "I'll make you soup."
"Just get some from the store and heat it up," Helen says, her eyes still closed.
"I'm not an idiot," Carol says. "I can make soup."
(She is enough of an idiot that she can't drive, but she isn't about to burden Helen with that truth.)
"Anybody can make soup," she continues. "They shouldn't, but they can. Just take decent food and slop water all over it and overcook the shit out of it all."
"Explain something to me."
"What?"
"I'm the one who's sick, but you're the one who's whining. Why?"
"I'm not whining. I'm advancing a cogent and reasonable argument against soup. What an abominable way to consume nutrients."
"What is your problem? Like, not in general, I know the answer to that, but with the soup I have requested at your prompting."
"It takes too long to eat."
"Eat? It's practically drinkable."
"If you use a utensil, it's eating. And it's soggy and mushy and runny and sloshes everywhere—"
"Most of this could be said about oatmeal, which you do consume."
She's not wrong.
After a moment, Helen asks: "Are you flipping me off?"
Carol quickly lowers her hand. "No?"
"Liar. Go away."
Carol leaves Helen to her misery and starts poking around the fridge.
She's right; any dummy can make soup—provided they have the ingredients on hand, which she does not. There aren't really enough carrots, there's only half an onion, and there's no celery at all. So much for the mirepoix. At least there are still a couple of chicken breasts and half a bag of egg noodles.
The thought of going to the store like Helen told her to crosses her mind. The whiskey was long enough ago that it would probably be okay, but she doesn't want to run the risk of a failed attempt. Helen would hear her go outside, hear the car door, not hear the car leave, and immediately know what happened. Then she would haul herself out of bed and down the stairs and pick a fight, which she would then win.
Carol considers using DoorDash, but that would lead to the same outcome. Helen would guess why she wasted money on grocery delivery, and she'd do that disappointed suppressed anger thing where she doesn't actually say anything because she knows that Carol's conscience will do her scolding for her.
In the end, Carol adds celery salt and onion powder to the broth. It sort of works, if she doesn't think about it too hard. Helen's probably too sick to give a shit, anyway.
By the time she gets back to their room, Helen has managed a seating position—having stolen both of Carol's pillows to prop herself up, of course—and is on her phone.
"It'll be a couple hours," Carol announces. "And it won't burn because I set an alarm."
"Good job," Helen says absently.
"Do you think you'll be hungry by then?"
"Assuredly not." She pulls a face at something on her screen.
"Stop," Carol says. "It can wait a day or two. And if you do die, I don't want you to have spent your final hours checking my e-mail."
Incredibly, Helen relents, lets Carol take her phone away and replace it with the tea. "I think you should read to me," she says.
"I could get your headphones and you could listen to an audiobook," Carol counters. "A real narrator would sound better and I could get work done."
"You've been working all day and I like it when you read."
"But—"
"Don't be neglectful," Helen says. If it were anyone else, Carol would say there was a note of petulance in her voice. "I'm ill. I'm going to waste away and perish, and you're refusing my last request out of laziness and sheer callous indifference."
"Fever makes you melodramatic," Carol observes.
Helen nods, then winces. The movement was too much for her headache. "Yes. Melodrama. Get me Dickens. Bleak House, I think."
"No," Carol says. "Too much miasma."
Actually, that gives her an idea. "Hey," she says, and pokes Helen in the knee. Helen glares at her. "Hey. What if I included a miasma in Bloodsong? They think it's normal fog when they sail into it, but—wait for it—it's actually a foul miasma."
"I don't want to think," Helen says. "My head hurts."
"I don't want to read Bleak House. Come on, Helen. You don't have to make us both sick. One of us has got to be healthy and ready to take on the world."
Helen looks into her mug of untouched tea as though checking to see how much is left. "Are you ready to take on the world?"
There's a weight to the question, a weight that makes it clear that Helen knows damn right and well Carol isn't able to so much as go to a drug store to get her ibuprofen. The fact that they have ibuprofen doesn't make it less of a failure.
Carol could pretend she doesn't get it, which would be like lying. She could also defend herself and they could have something like a fight.
Or she could do what she has already done, which is to let her startled silence stretch to the point where Helen triumphs in all potential branches of this conversation without having to say a word.
"Okay," Carol says, and stands up. "Sure."
She returns to the bedroom ready for another round. She drops the book at Helen's feet, and it lands heavily.
"This thing is a thousand pages and you can't put me on one point five times speed," she says. "How long are you planning on being sick?"
"I haven't decided, but I'm thinking of adding three days every time you bitch about something. At this rate, you'll be able to read it twice."
Carol kicks off her shoes so she can join Helen in bed. "Am I allowed to read Esther's part in an annoying whiny voice?"
"What do you think?"
"Yes?"
Helen rolls her eyes.
"Fine. I'll just suffer, then."
"I refer you to my previous remarks about who's sick versus who's whining."
"Didn't Dickens, like, beat his wife up?"
"You're, like, beating your wife up by not acceding to her every whim without complaint."
"Sit up," Carol says.
Helen heaves herself forward, giving Carol access to the pillows she's been resting against. "Now this actually is violence," she mutters. "My head."
"What's that sympathetic and helpful phrase you're always repeating?" Carol asks as she rearranges all their pillows so they can sit next to each other. "Quit whining?"
"Fuck you and hurry up," Helen says.
Carol finishes and climbs onto the bed. Once she's settled, Helen leans partly on the pillows, partly on her shoulder.
"Want me to read the preface?"
"Not on your life. If I cared, I would have gotten a PhD."
"Thank God you didn't," Carol says. "Doctor Umstead sounds insufferable. I would have never talked to her."
"It wouldn't have been up to you. I would have been too good to associate with the hoi polloi."
"Whatever you need to tell yourself," Carol says as she flips past the introduction. "It's like the soup. I'll let you have this one out of pity for your wretched condition."
"Just fucking read."
"Fog. Mud. Surprise dinosaur. More fog. Metaphor for the legal system. Also illness. Miasma."
Helen manages to punch her in the stomach. "Do it right," she says.
Carol turns her head just enough to kiss Helen's.
"London," she says.