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Alba sidles into the dining room, sliding across the wooden floor in her socks. By the light of the overhead fixture she looks ill, too thin, shadow eyed; even her hair is dull. I don’t say anything till we are all seated around the table with our Boston coolers.

“How’s Carl?” I ask. “I thought he left for school weeks ago.”

“Yeah, he did. He’s just home for the weekend. He’s—okay.”

“Is Nick home, too?” Nick is Carl’s twin. They’re both freshmen at the University of Michigan. He is Nadia’s boyfriend, and since Nadia is at Northwestern with Alba we’ve seen a lot more of Nick and Nadia lately than we have of Carl.

“No. Just Carl.” Alba is staring at the TV. “Could you turn the sound up?”

Beck obliges. It’s an MSNBC report on the Coronavirus outbreak in China. The doctor who tried to alert authorities to the new virus has died of it. “Li Wenliang,” Alba says. “I never knew his name.”

“Is there a reason why you should have?” I ask.

She hesitates. “I guess not. My older self mentioned him a while ago. She didn’t say his name, though.”

“Is he important?” Beck asks.

“He’s kind of an accidental martyr. God, he’s so young.” We all watch as a photo of Dr. Li is replaced by video of people in hazmat suits working in Chinese emergency rooms. Alba lets out a long wavering breath. I have a premonition that I do not want to know what she is about to tell us, and then she says it: “So, Other Alba told me about him because there’s going to be an actual, worldwide pandemic and she wants you to go out and buy tons of groceries and stuff and sell some of your stock and then we are all supposed to stay home for a while. Like, about two years. She called it self-quarantining.”

Beck laughs nervously. “Two years! We’re going to New York for Clare’s show next week. And you have school.”

“New York?” Alba says, aghast. “That’s the worst place you could go, they’re going to have so many people getting it and dying! I didn’t know you were going there!” She has wrapped her arms around her chest, her blue-veined hands tucked under her armpits, as though she’s suddenly freezing. Her ice cream sits half eaten, melting into the ginger soda.

“We told you, Alba, remember?” Beck says. I don’t know what to say. Pandemic? My show at the Drawing Center opens on the 17th. On TV they are talking about a cruise ship called the Diamond Princess. Beck turns the sound off again. The quiet is unnerving. Beck continues, “Sweetie, if you don’t want us to go, we won’t go. But why are you so upset all of a sudden? Coronavirus has been in the news for a couple of weeks.”

“Other Alba gives me certain things to watch out for, like Dr. Li dying, but she doesn’t always tell me when they will happen, or all the details, like names and places. I don’t always know, so the best thing to tell my younger self is usually, When you see X, do Y.” Alba is flustered. “I just—I haven’t been paying that much attention. I mean—Carl broke up with me today and I sort of knew he was going to, but I couldn’t believe it, you know? I thought everything was really good.”

“Oh, Alba,” I say. She looks dazed. I don’t know what to say; for the umpteenth time Alba is experiencing a normal human thing that I never had to deal with, because Henry was such a huge part of my life that he crowded out a lot of ordinary experiences.

“That’s rough, Alba,” Beck says. “We liked him. He was sweet to you.”

Alba nods. Tears brim and she wipes her eyes. She and Carl have been dating for two years; when he went to U of M and she stayed in town to go to Northwestern, I thought they might not last much longer. Henry and I fell in love across gaps of decades, and somehow that seemed to bond us permanently. But there was something about Carl that made me wonder, and then feel cross with myself; he’s a kid, unfinished, a mystery in the way that all kids are mysteries. And yet Carl was cheerful and kind. I’ll miss seeing him around the house.

“I’m so sorry,” I finally manage to say. “He really did love you, it was obvious.”

“He says he still does!” Alba shakes her head, disbelieving, and the tears flow. “He didn’t say why we had to break up.”

“Distance, maybe?” Beck offers. We exchange confirmative looks: He’s gay, we knew it.

Alba reaches for a paper napkin and blows her nose loudly. “Maybe. I kept saying ‘why’ and he kept saying he couldn’t explain. I mean, I thought I knew him better than anybody. Well, except Nick.”

“Long-distance relationships are fragile. And people change a lot when they get to college.” Beck is better at this than I am. I recall that she had a high school sweetheart who dumped her the day before he left for Stanford. Beck looks glum, as though she’s remembering this, too. “But you never know who you’ll meet next.”

“I guess. But whoever it is, he won’t know me the way Carl does.” Alba stands up, excuses herself hurriedly. We hear her in the bathroom, blowing her nose, running water into the sink full blast. Beck and I have a silent conversation of furrowed eyebrows and widened eyes. Pandemic? When Alba returns, her face is damp and she’s composed herself. “Sorry.”

“Hey,” I say. “Carl still knows you. Everything that happened with you and Carl, it’s all still there.”

Alba says, “Yeah. But you could say the same thing about anything in the past; it hurts because it’s over. I’ll miss him.”

I have had that same thought so many times, when well-meaning people told me to appreciate the time Henry and I did have together. It always made me want to scream at them: I want more. I want him back. “I understand.” Time takes everything away, eventually.

We all fall silent. The television segues from the blinking reptile-like senator in a brightly lit, ornate hallway, to the president outdoors, his lid of hair undone by wind, his prissy mouth moving, always moving. I wonder, again, what Henry would have said about these grotesque people.

Alba spoons some of her Boston cooler into her mouth, then says, “Maybe it’s for the best. Unless I moved in with the Lamonts, I wouldn’t see Carl for a long time anyway. And if I was living there, I wouldn’t be able to see you.”

“What?” My thoughts were far away, with Henry. “Why would you move in with the Lamonts?”

“The coronavirus,” Alba says, patiently. “The pandemic. We have to stay home so we don’t catch it, or infect anyone. People only leave their houses to go grocery shopping. They hoard toilet paper, and everybody has to wear face masks in public. Everything is closed, the schools, museums, restaurants. Nobody can travel. Millions of people die.” She looks as though she’d like to shake us.