That Tuesday night, Helen lay awake and listened to her roommate dying. She heard the nurses moving around. Their whispers. She heard the heaving of the oxygen machine. At some point, someone had closed the curtain that divided the room, but it didn’t do much to mute the noise. The beds were so close together that each woman could hear the other breathing — and that was true on a normal day, before the coughing.
It was four days into the outbreak. Or, rather, it was four days since the Life Care Center of Kirkland, a nursing home in Washington state, had publicly confirmed the existence of a coronavirus outbreak. From Room 10, where Helen and Twilla had lived for more than a year, the women couldn’t see the nurses wheeling sick residents out the front door to meet the ambulances in the parking lot — sometimes holding white bedsheets around the stretchers to shield the patients from the photographers waiting at the side of the road. Room 10 faced inward, toward the courtyard, and it was quiet there. Still, from their beds, the women could hear nurses running down the hallway. The sound was conspicuous because people don’t usually run inside nursing homes.
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