Ellis Island, Part 2

It is the first morning in 81 just like it that I don’t look forward to the messages on WhatsApp. For three months, first thing upon waking, I have been greeted by pictures and texts from travelling girl. She’s in Viarregio and here are some pics…She and the girls are touring Venice and here’s a video of the youth hostel….She’s having day of her own design on foot and here is a bridge, the river, a sun going down. I’ve received an inordinate amount of food photos this study abroad. But today’s message is most unwelcome and unappetizing. When classes finish and the little student apartment comes to an end after 12 lovely weeks, it’s a messy end. Ellie and her roommate are the last to check out and are left holding the proverbial bag. Her friends and flat-mates have all gone on: three to Madrid, a handful to England, one to Croatia for the next three weeks. Only one of the 19 has a flight home the next day. And he, they learn, has just tested positive on his pre-flight screening.

For this plan-changing news I receive not just messages, but a video chat at 7:30 in the morning (“Got a minute??”) and the look of a girl who, by all appearances, is fine. Behind her, the apartment beds are stripped, the cubbies and tables bare, the place looking much the way it did the day she first moved in. Nineteen sets of keys laid out on the plank wood table and the flat mates gone, not quite to all four corners but close. None of them was sick. It was the pre-flight test that clued them in they might should do the same. Ellie’s plan, laid out last fall when we booked her flights, was extra time at the end of her program, right up to the 90-day time limit to be in Italy without a VISA. We booked her return for day 89. Through her final papers and presentations, through exams and year-end, she has packed her bags and a life-full of memories and has planned up a little solo trip. She is leaving for Pompeii. With a little stop in Covid-land.

She’s clearly thought this through when she calls me, the “now what?” hanging like a banner half down, half up over us and this new situation. It’s the start of a school day for me, so I am hastily foregoing shower, breakfast, and what else to throw the lunch and the laptop in a bag and get up to duty post A. I can hear her planner going full-tilt, along with her “alternator,” which is that creative, can-do problem solver that kicks in (when it hasn’t stayed up all the night before submitting papers and cleaning bathrooms). I have it, too. Going. To. Get. Through this. Obstacles energize me. Until they don’t. I feel her shock and sadness. Planning up her lovely post-program travels… planning… planning…and wham! Could have happened at any point during the semester. Could have happened to us travelling to or from, for that matter. I certainly packed enough dread to feed it if it had. I’ve heard so many stories of people getting “over there” and then getting stuck. Could have happened. On this particular moment in time, it did.

She briefs me on her updated plan: continue double-masked to destination. The weekend to Pompeii and then Sunday afternoon to Rome, as scheduled, for some sightseeing before her flight home from there on Thursday. Eat in no restaurants, tour nothing with a roof, keep to the streets and the outdoor sights. What else to do? So she does. She and her bags and one more obstacle: a blooming case of pink eye. Not the kind that weeps and seeps and sticks your eyelids shut, but the kind (Covid-related, no doubt) that makes your eyes puffy and itchy, and turns the whites blood red. I hear hear waver, worry, send me a couple selfies with–yep, puffy, blood red eyes, and then decide that with a little ibuprofen and antihistamine drops, she’ll be fine. And she puts on her walkin’ shoes. She puts on her walking shoes and she walks. My girl. She is not defeated, but she’s close. She so wanted to enjoy these last days, to unwind from the last crazy weeks of school and say goodbye. Now it lies in–well, “ruins” might not be the right word when touring ancient Pompeii. I try to put things in perspective for her. Ellie, my girl. You’re walking past buildings and homes destroyed in an instant, past figures–human bodies–asphyxiated by hot ash pouring out of a volcano. They died on the spot. Didn’t see it coming. Frozen forever in time. And we are fretting over a few days extra in the eternal city? Think my girl. Think: it could always be worse.

Now I see what all the winter months trip planning were practice for. It was a dry run for this, the late-night, last dive for a hotel bed in Rome a day or two before you might need one. Lodging my daughter for an unforeseen length of time in a city that is in full tourist season, where I kid you not, I could book up the Hotel Flavia for $712/night (breakfast included) or the Augusta Lucilla Palace a bargain at $555 USD. Per night! Even if I drop a star in my search, the Hotel Shelter Mama is still over $300. I am back on Expedia, scrolling, trolling, trying to find an affordable hotel that will still allow us to cancel in the world of “what if” we have just entered with no return. Shall I book her in at the Hotel California? There’s absolutely nothing inside the city walls for under $350/night. I come up with a plan. At any given time I have three hotels booked, careful to observe their cancellation policies so as to avoid a charge. Each time I have to drop one, I pick up another. But I have not yet gotten close enough to May 12th to have a guaranteed hotel that night, and the room rates are climbing. I have to pay attention or I will be the proud owner of an empty bed, which as the week wears on becomes more economical than cancelling and running another search. Though my heart price for an empty bed on the 12th of May is going up by the hour, I do not really wish to be throwing money away. Speaking of which, Who emptied their pockets into the Trevi?? Each lovingly selected hotel (NOT! By the fourth or fifth one, I am not even looking at the pictures. I am checking the safety and cleanliness rating, ok-ing the location, and reserving it. Done!) If this were Paris, or possibly an American city, my mental rolodex of problem solvers would be wheeling like crazy and spitting out solutions. But look again at the circumstances: A Covid-positive college kid with no contacts and no where to go. Even the Stephanos of the world would stop short of that one, so I do not try.

For the most part, no-longer-travelling girl is in good spirits. She’s keeping to herself, eating au plein air, sightseeing, staying active. She hunts down the souvenirs our family passed up when we were there last month. She enjoys some of her itinerary and tries not to think about the upcoming deadlines. And each day, hoping beyond hope, she administers the little self test (positive, every time), bathes her eye and applies warm compresses, carefully puts in the eyedrops, pulls on a baseball cap and makes her way out into the world alone.

At home, I am hard to focus on the other stuff, like meals and chores and mountains of paper grading. The Burk Motel limps along. With its star guest on standby, our 5-star rating slumps. We are just a tired trio of overworked bus driver/student/subs who show up each night to stare at each other over some left-overs the kitchen staff is calling “re-heats,” hoping that has a European ring to it. The proprietor is jittery and has the glazed, over-screened eyes of staying up all night on Expedia. Oh Lord, please bring my girl hoooooommmmmme. I kind of half-heartedly ready her bedroom–change the sheets, plump the pillow. Little stack of mail and an Easter basket on her desk. Will definitely hold off on bathroom cleaning and special baking that’s on my list, till I know we’ve cleared the screening. What good are plans, anyway?? O dear Lord, please get her on that plane…

Ellie and I, we hit upon 1:00 pm her time for the Covid test. The one at the pharmacy. The one that will enter her into “the system” and make it very official what she is doing or not doing. That’s good. Seven o’clock our time. I will still have an hour to get online with Delta and Expedia before leaving for school. When the WhatsApp goes silent, I know she is traveling across the city or getting tested. I think I will probably learn in first period whether she is cleared for travel. Will the kids notice, if I have a little nervous breakdown in the back row? I am exhausted, getting up all night Rome time, trying to think and pray our way through this. Trying to prioritize. Trying to thank God for all the things we are not dealing with, like actual illness, or volcanic ash not raining down and incinerating us. Life is good. Praying for the US to lift its arrival screening like every other nation in the known world. Praying for her heart to be at peace if she gets a weekend (or longer) on the Tiber. After we make this plan in time, we both of us suspend for the next 6 hours–she to her weary, desperate sleep with a deadline now on the table, and I to the internet, googling and hoping beyond hope that her test will be negative, though I know it won’t be.

And it isn’t. Though the day is just starting, my cell phone, which has been on the fritz, is giving up its willing participation in the unfolding saga of travelling girl and travelling girl is…not travelling. Making her way to the little pharmacy on the corner for her pre-flight travel she is caught short, breathless and devastated by the results: POSITIVE. I am in the parking lot at school with my last cell juice and all of the life drained out of me. Can it be true? Is this really happening? She is officially done. Stuck. When I get home eight hours from now, I will fire up the alternator and she/we will call the airline, commit to one of crazy mommy’s bedding assortments, let the others go, and try to make a new plan. What do we tell Delta? It takes three hours to reach them by phone. What do we ask for–three days? Two? Ten? For them to lift the testing requirement. I could promise them my firstborn child, but they’ll have to fly her home first.

To think that two years ago this month I was standing in the bushes outside the ER watching my girl wheeled away in pain and worry over what we both assumed–correctly–was appendicitis and the surgery that came with. (See “Going to Ellis Island” May 2020). I could not be with her. I could not enter. But I could not, despite the late late hour and her many texts telling me to go home, I could not leave. This same “I will not leave you” kicks in as I set my alarm for 2 am 4 am, the hours that match the major transitions of her day–the cell phone, as evil and unpredictable as Covid, sometimes cooperates and sometimes doesn’t. I can’t get a charger to work reliably so I take to strapping a giant battery pack to the back of it which I carry around. Still, it is a blow to the beginning of the day, and my technological impairment and the relentlessness of the sub job underscore the helplessness I feel as a mom to help her. By the time I sign off and head into the building, she is patched up and has back on her walking shoes. She has a tour to get to, a plan and a day ahead. A few more days ahead, as it turns out… and isn’t that a fine thing indeed?

Being the part where she goes on, despite all odds:

I need to recreate the emotional upheaval I had when, returning to my cell at the end of a long school day, I see what can only be described as a volcanic eruption of messages on my WhatsApp. I thought I heard the thing going off. I can barely get the last student out the door to collapse in a chair. I am leveled to my inside knees: “MOM! MOM! I cleared! I went to a different pharmacy! I got another test! Mom, it came back NEGATIVE. I’m NEGATIVE for Covid. Mom, are you THERE? I’m headed to the airport, I’m coming HOMEEEEE!”

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