The Body in the Web

DedicationWe are always all in this together.For health care workers—especially nurses—EMTs, doctors, and teachers, along with the countless volunteers everywherededicated to all humankind who made many sacrifices, as they cared for and protected us with selfless devotionFor Alan, past, present, and future EpigraphThe artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web. —Pablo PicassoIf you’d asked me ten years ago, I would have said humanity is going to do a good job with this. If we connect all these people together, they are such wonderful people, they will get along. I was wrong. —Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web (2018) Contents CoverTitle PageDedicationEpigraphChapter OneChapter TwoChapter ThreeChapter FourChapter FiveChapter SixChapter SevenChapter EightChapter NineChapter TenChapter ElevenChapter TwelveAuthor’s NoteExcerpts from Have Faith in Your KitchenAcknowledgmentsAbout the AuthorBy Katherine Hall PageCopyrightAbout the Publisher Chapter OneJanuary 14, 2021Faith Fairchild set her phone down with the first sigh of relief she had felt for almost eight months. She closed her eyes briefly, opening them to glance around her kitchen, bathed in the late-afternoon sun that streamed through the windows. For a moment it was an unfamiliar place, as if she were seeing it for the first time. Such was the effect of the call from her husband, Tom, the Reverend Thomas Fairchild, with the stunning news that as one of the local VA hospital’s chaplains he was eligible for vaccination and was on his way to get the shot. A simple sentence, a series of words turned the room from the everyday to a rare setting she would always remember as the beginning flicker of hope. A call from her younger sister, Hope, almost a year earlier had marked a very different feeling: the onslaught of fear. Nothing had been normal since. Hope and Faith were close. Their shared experience as PKs—preachers’ kids—had prompted a pinky swear to avoid any form of cleric, no matter how attractive the sheep’s clothing, although Faith, deeply in love, had strayed. Their paths to adult careers veered dramatically, too. Hope had gone straight from reading the Weekly Reader to a subscription to the Wall Street Journal and carried a little briefcase as a lunchbox, eventually landing a plum job as a financial lawyer at a firm where she rose faster than the elevator at the Empire State Building, pausing only to plight her troth with soulmate Quentin and produce Quentin III without missing a day of work. The baby conveniently made his appearance on a Saturday. Faith had always been more interested in what was in the lunchbox, astonishing her mother, Jane, a real estate lawyer whose idea of dinner was a nice piece of fish and a salad or a salad and a nice piece of chicken. Her father, the Reverend Lawrence Sibley, did not care what was on his plate, presumably due to a mind focused on higher matters. Faith started as young as possible with courses at ICE, the Institute of Culinary Education, and unpaid stints at a number of the city’s catering firms. She knew her parents, especially her mother, were concerned the moment she had started coming home with flour on her hands, not college brochures in them. “We don’t want you to limit your options, dear,” her mother had said, and Faith compromised, taking college-credit courses at the New School and scheduling her culinary pursuits around them. In less than two years the coursework had been abandoned for a job at one of Manhattan’s top caterers. In less than four, Faith had started her own business. It became the thing to have beautiful Faith Sibley and her beautiful food. Have Faith, her business, was a roaring success, although she’d had to make her advertising a bit more explicit after several calls wanting an “escort” and not a few seeking repentance. When Faith saw that it was her sister calling during working hours on a weekday, she had been alarmed.“Hope, is everything all right? Dad? Mom?” Reverend Sibley had retired, his reluctant congregation letting him go after he suffered a mild heart attack. He’d planned to leave earlier, but the pressure on their much beloved pastor had kept him on for “just one more year” and then another. “They’re fine. But, Fay”—Hope’s nickname for her since childhood, which Faith disliked but had never been able to think how to change without hurt feelings—“things are not fine, and they are going to get much worse. Get your iPad, I have a list for you.” Faith had a pad and a pencil on the table, and whatever Hope was going to dictate, that could serve.“Now, Fay, Quentin and I have been talking to our contact at the CDC, and the couple of coronavirus cases we know about are the start of what she says may well be a pandemic. It’s already spreading outside China in Italy and other places.” “Why does the Centers for Disease Control think it’s going to spread further? Why isn’t this major news?” Quentin and Hope, with their multiple law and business degrees from a swath of institutions, had contacts not just in government but in almost every other walk of life. The best plumber, the best stock tips, the best tutor for their son. “You’re right. It should be, but let’s not go into the reasons. The main thing is to prepare. The coronavirus is an unknown, a highly transmissible strain that may have jumped from a rat or other animal to humans, for which we have no cure and no vaccines.” “You’re making it sound like the bubonic plague!” Faith’s anxiety was mounting rapidly. Hope was the calmest person she knew aside from Tom, and her sister’s even-tempered sense of humor was what saved her from being a rigid know-it-all. She wasn’t being funny now. “I’m sorry, sweetheart, that’s exactly what we are afraid of, a pandemic, and we all have to get ready for what