Dr. Kolodny threatens to have Natalie restrained. Other staff and clinicians congregate around their seats. Whispers and chatter swells from the other patients.
Natalie shouts, “All right. I’ll be good. Just let Rams do it and get it over with.”
Dr. Kolodny yields the thermometer. Ramola holds the wand in one hand and the readout device in the other. How can she fool the machine? How closely are the others watching?
Natalie says, “They’re not going to like it,” and opens her mouth. Her brown eyes are wide, glassy, red rimmed. The wand goes under Natalie’s tongue. Her mouth closes, lips form a tight seal. Natalie and Ramola stare at each other, making their silent confessions.
The thermometer beeps—102.8 degrees.
Dr. Kolodny quickly huddles with staff, and before they break up and disperse she orders them to distribute respirator masks to everyone on board. One staff member stays with Kolodny, the largest one, a young, baby-faced Latino man standing well over six feet tall. He stares at Natalie as though he’s terrified of her.
The doctor says to Ramola, “What do you know? You have to tell us.”
Natalie shouts, “No!” Both hands rest atop her belly. Her teeth are gritted, lips pressed tightly together though they flutter, wanting to peel away. Breathing heavily through her nose, head tilted, downcast, not making eye contact with anyone, glaring hard at the seatback in front of her.
The large man and a clinician with a respirator mask in her hand worm past Ramola and speak to Natalie, their instructions droning and monotone. Patients vacate the seats directly in front and behind.
Natalie shouts, “No!” again but doesn’t lift her hands away from her belly, doesn’t resist their putting the mask over her nose and mouth.
Could Ramola convince any of them Natalie has the flu or any number of other viruses that cause fevers? Kolodny will surely insist upon submitting Natalie to a full examination and find the wound on her arm. What lie will Ramola tell then?
Ramola leans in, grabs the doctor’s arm at the elbow, and whispers, “Natalie was bitten on the left forearm by an infected man more than four hours ago. She received the first round of vaccine approximately an hour after exposure. She’s been presenting symptoms of infection for at least an hour, possibly longer.”
Dr. Kolodny says, “Let go of me,” and attempts to twist out of Ramola’s grip.
Natalie barks, “No!” into her mask. The two staff members remain in the area in front of Ramola’s seat, with the large man resting one knee in her chair, and ask Natalie more questions.
Ramola, no longer whispering, says, “I’m sorry we—we had to get on this bus and it was wrong of us—wrong of me to tell you she hadn’t been exposed, and I know she can’t be saved but her child still can. She needs a cesarean section as soon as possible—”
Dr. Kolodny holds up her hands, shakes her head. She twists free and darts up the aisle, almost knocking a woman to the floor.
Ramola calls after her, “You must call ahead. Tell the hospital to prepare for her arrival. Please, this is our last chance.”
Natalie continues yelling, “No!”
Dr. Kolodny is next to the driver and shouts something to him. Whatever she tells him, he does a double take. She repeats herself. The driver does not hand Dr. Kolodny the two-way radio as Ramola hopes. The bus slows and the pneumatic brakes again become hissing snakes.
It’s a smoother, more controlled stop than earlier, although because Ramola is standing she pitches forward and latches onto the headrest of the now-empty seat in front of hers to keep her feet.
Natalie continues yelling. As they rumble to a stop, other passengers fearfully peek over the rows of seats.
Dr. Kolodny walks back down the aisle announcing, “This stop is only temporary. There is no issue on the road ahead of us. Please stay calm. Keep your masks on. We will be on our way soon.” When she reaches Ramola and where the staff continues struggling with quieting Natalie, she says, “Please help Natalie get off the bus safely.”
The rest of the bus goes quiet but for Natalie still shouting, “No!”
Ramola says, “Please. I’m sorry and I should’ve told you—”
“The driver is alerting the police that we are dropping you here, using the home address on the mailbox we parked next to. You and Natalie will be picked up very shortly.” Dr. Kolodny says this while looking at some other area of the bus that neither Natalie nor Ramola occupies.
“We can’t. It’ll be too late. Please.”
“Federal quarantine law is quite clear on this. We cannot risk her infecting others on board, including our six newborns.”
“Doctor—”
“And even if I let you stay, the hospital we’re going to will not take her, and they wouldn’t take us.”
The last part sounds like a lie, has to be a lie. Or is it? Would Kolodny and staff physically remove them from the bus if she refuses to budge? Ramola shouts and appeals to other clinicians on board, all of whom wear the same blinking, blank face of disbelief, of This isn’t supposed to be happening. Ramola then turns to the terrified patients, masked women and their crying babies. Ramola knows the horror on top of the horror is that she and Kolodny are both correct: this bus is Natalie’s child’s last chance and they cannot in good conscience continue to risk the other patients without their consent, particularly as Natalie has become more agitated, more dangerous. Ramola envisions asking each patient if Natalie can stay. Many if not most would say yes, but all of them?
Natalie shrieks in pain as the two staff members yank on her arms, trying to pull her to standing.
Ramola, swollen with a righteous rage at everything, including herself, yells at them to stop and she pounds on the backs of their shoulders with closed fists until they do. Ramola pushes and shoves her way past them to her friend.
Natalie clutches her injured forearm. The fingers on her left hand spasm into a gnarled, arthritic fist. Her eyes roll around the bus’s interior as though she doesn’t recognize where she is, how she got there. She shouts, “Y-You can’t eat her! I know your names!”
Ramola tries to soothe and calm her down, saying, “I’m here. It’s me,” and rests a hand on Natalie’s sizzling forehead. Natalie lifts her head, twists and shakes the hand away. With the mask covering her mouth, Ramola doesn’t know if Natalie attempted to bite her.
She repeats Natalie’s name, leans in so their faces are mere inches from touching. She feels the unremitting heat of Natalie’s corona of fever on her own face. Natalie finally locks eyes with Ramola, blinking rapidly as though focus is difficult to maintain. Her shouts decay into a breathless, muttered mantra. Ramola slowly peels Natalie’s right hand from her left arm. Hand in hand, Ramola gently urges Natalie onto her feet and they shuffle into the aisle. She squeezes Natalie’s hand. Natalie does not reciprocate.
The large man holds the two bags Ramola brought on board. He wears a mask now too. He says he’ll carry them outside for her.
Natalie says, “You can’t eat her. I know all your names, all of them . . .” at a conversational volume, though it is not her voice anymore. It’s a voice that belongs to someone else.
Needing fuel to go on, Ramola feeds the dying embers of her previous rage. She says, “Doctor,” spitting out the word, filling it with the leaden weights of despair and disappointment, “what address did you give the police?”
Astride the driver, Kolodny states the address and points out the opened folding doors.
The large man follows closely behind Natalie. As they pass, patients shrink away. Quick, hushed bursts of “We can’t just leave her on the side of the road” and “She can’t stay. It’s not safe” percolate behind them.
Ramola spews questions as they walk the short distance down the aisle to the doors: “Doctor, did the police give you an estimated time of arrival?” and “Doctor, did you tell them Natalie is pregnant?” and “Doctor, how will you be able to sleep at night?” Ramola knows the last question might be cruel, but why not share
what she would ask herself.
She pauses at the top step. The cold, late-afternoon air is three steps down. Ramola turns away and says, “Doctor, what if we refuse? Are you going to physically remove us?”
Natalie is next to Dr. Kolodny and the bus driver, who is standing, a full head taller than Natalie. He wears a mask and gloves. The large staff member looms behind Natalie, the bags slung on his shoulders, his free hands extended and open, as though ready to reach and grab. The way they look at her, the way everyone on the bus looks at her, Ramola knows the answer to her last question.
Natalie aims her face at the doctor, and hisses. “You can’t eat her . . .” She slides her hand out of Ramola’s and swipes at the doctor, hitting her in the left side of her head above the ear. There isn’t much power behind the strike, it’s exploratory, an opening salvo, the distant rumble before a storm. But it’s enough that the bus explodes into shouts and shrieks. The driver and the large staff member clamp onto Natalie’s arms and wrestle her down the bus stairs.
“I know all your names!”
Ramola is forced out of the bus, stumbling backward, and she twists and falls off the plunging final step to the pavement. She lands in the mouth of a driveway, scraping her palms.
The bus driver is next out of the bus and he tugs hard on Natalie’s left arm. She is forced to step heavily onto the road. One leg buckles but they prop her up, prevent her from falling. Now on the street, the driver and staff member drag her away from the bus. She screams and thrashes her head side to side, and when the men finally let go, giving her a little shove away from them, they jog back to the bus.
Ramola clambers onto her feet and steps between Natalie and the retreating men. She hushes and holds her arms up in surrender. Natalie quiets instantly, a plug pulled. Her shoulders hunch, her chest deflating into itself. One hand rubs her belly, then drops limply to her side.
With one foot on the road and the other on the first step, the large staff member tosses the two bags near Ramola’s feet. He says, “I’ll make the doctor call again. This is wrong and I’m sorry. Good luck.” The doors rattle closed behind him, and the moment he’s inside the bus pulls away.
Where the road meets the end of the cracked and pothole-filled driveway, a black metal mailbox perches atop a crooked white wooden post. The red flag is missing. Ramola takes a picture of the mailbox. She texts the street address and, in a separate text (mindful of the data crunch continuing to compromise the local cellular network), she sends the photo to Dr. Awolesi, who has yet to respond to any messages.
An old white farmhouse is at the other end of the drive, set back from the road about one hundred feet. The dilapidated home squats in a wide field of dry, dead grass, with at least another three acres of land beyond it. Ramola assumes this area was once a working farm that included the vast empty field across the street, its tree line pushed back another couple hundred feet. There isn’t another home visible in either direction. The gray sky is low and falling.
Natalie walks and talks in circles, her orbit gradually carrying her up the farmhouse’s drive.
“Natalie? Please stay. There will be a car coming for us soon.” Ramola can barely get the words out of her mouth without either crumbling or exploding. She swears, shoulders the two bags, looks down the empty road in both directions, and trots after Natalie.
“We haven’t had much luck on the road today, have we?” Ramola says when she catches up. “We really should wait by the mailbox so they’ll more easily find us when they arrive.” What kind of lie is one not of your own fabrication but is instead a repeating of someone else’s meant-to-be-broken promise?
Natalie shakes her drooped head, whispers trapped within her mask.
Ramola scoots ahead and blocks Natalie’s path again. Natalie walks until she bumps into Ramola belly-first, bouncing her a few steps backward. Natalie laughs a bully’s laugh, which weakens Ramola’s legs and steals her spirit. She’s never felt smaller.
Natalie squeezes her eyes together, holds them closed for a beat, and when she opens them there’s a flicker of light, a flicker of who she is or was. She says, “I hurt so much. I’m not doing well, Rams.”
Desperate to believe in and take advantage of a brief symptomatic return to lucidity, even as she knows the stolen time will be delicate, finite, and final, Ramola says, “Natalie, please stay with me.” She means Stop walking and stay with me by the side of the road and she means the impossible, forever kind of Stay with me.
“I wish I could. I’m sorry, Rams.” The tone and the gravel aren’t her voice, but the inflection is hers.
“If the police or an ambulance doesn’t come, we’ll hitch a ride with any car that passes by.”
“You have to get me in the house.”
“It doesn’t look like anyone is home, how do—”
“It’s not safe out here. And you won’t be safe from me.”
“The house is too far from the road. If someone drives by, they might not see us and I’m not leaving you by yourself in there to watch for cars.”
“I need to lie down. I’m about done.”
“You can have my coat and rest on the grass.”
“You have to take my phone after.”
“Natalie—”
“And tell me you’ll adopt her. Tell me yes, again, Rams. One more time. Tell me now.”
“I will try.”
“That’s not a yes.”
Ramola is tempted to remove Natalie’s mask, to see more than her eyes. “Yes.”
“Thank you, Rams. Love you.”
“I love you, too, Natalie.”
Wind gusts and leaves swirl around them. Natalie gasps and full-body twitches as though startled. She quickly looks left, then right, and then ducks her head. “We can’t stay out here.” She whines at phantoms down at her feet. “You’re going to have to do it. When we get to the house.” She carefully lifts her feet one at a time, then scurries forward, ahead of Ramola, and says, “The mouses. The mouses are out of the houses.”
Ramola rushes to catch up. Natalie doesn’t slow down, trudges up the pitched and empty driveway, walking like she’s afraid, being chased. Her strides are unbalanced, too long, too greedy. Ramola worries she’s pushing herself and will fall. She tries to grab Natalie’s right hand but Natalie pulls it away.
Natalie says, “A cat will swallow them down. The way of the world.”
Ramola takes a picture of the farmhouse.
The front banister shows off missing teeth. One squared-off baluster spindle leans against its stoic neighbor. Wooden front steps bow and creak under their feet. The porch floor is warped and narrow, with barely enough room for the front stoop and a sitting area. Gray paint peels and flakes away, revealing scars of dark wood. The black skeleton of a rocking chair is banished to a corner and sags against the house. Purely decorative, the chair doesn’t appear strong enough to hold up a ghost. Behind the chair are two brooms with white plastic handles, the wire bristle heads all but buried beneath leaves and dead grass.
Natalie sways side to side and prattles on about the way of the world.
The screen door is missing its screen and rattles impatiently. Ramola rings the doorbell, knocks, and calls out, “Hello? Is anyone home?” She doesn’t wait long for an answer she assumes isn’t forthcoming and tries the doorknob. It doesn’t turn, but she notices the door isn’t flush within the frame. She leans in and pushes; the door sticks initially but then opens.
Natalie brushes Ramola aside and enters the house first. Ramola stays within the doorframe and whispers after Natalie to wait. Then she calls out to imagined residents and their shadows. Natalie parrots her calls in a high voice. No one answers. There are no approaching frenzied footsteps.
Natalie disappears down a hallway. Ramola steps inside. The house smells of dust and lavender. She turns on a light. In the front entry is a set of steep stairs clinging to the wall like ivy. A mechanized lift rests at the bottom, the seat a smaller version of a dentist’s chair. The chair is
dust-free, appearing to have been recently wiped down and cleaned. Whoever lives here likely abandoned ship less than a handful of days ago.
Ramola drops her bags next to the chairlift and leaves the front door open so that she might better hear a siren or an approaching car. She texts the photo of the house and a message about their being inside it to Dr. Awolesi. She follows that up with the somewhat cryptic “The procedure may have to be performed here,” as though she can’t bear to explain or to extrapolate what will happen if no one comes. She dials 911 and leaves it on speakerphone. The call is forwarded to an answering service. Ramola leaves a message.
As she dials and redials 911, hoping to get through to a live operator, Ramola rummages through Natalie’s overnight bag: headphones, phone charger, purse, two pairs of leggings, two T-shirts, socks, nightgown, hair elastics, nursing bras, maternity pads, toiletries, a set of infant babygrows, a green fleece coming-home outfit, a hat, booties, nappies, a set of plastic bottles with nipples, and four containers of ready-to-feed formula.
911 kicks over to the message service, which reissues the cold, high-pitched beep. The house is silent but for Natalie’s voice echoing from somewhere else on the first floor. She is talking to herself. Ramola swears and shouts at the phone. “Someone answer! We need help!”
She rips open and empties Josh’s backpack, contents spilling and thudding to the hardwood floor: a can of Lysol, hand sanitizer, rolled-up red bandannas, a hooded sweatshirt, a pack of disinfectant wipes, a coiled length of white rope (the kind that might be used for a clothesline), a roll of duct tape, latex gloves, painters’ masks, a plastic bottle of water, three disposable lighters, loops of bungee cord, a phone charger, and a sheathed hunting knife. The blade is longer than her forearm.
“Natalie?”
She doesn’t answer. Footsteps creak from the back of the house.
Ramola ducks into a small eat-in kitchen. She washes her hands at the sink using the almost-empty bottle of dishwashing soap, her scraped-up palms stinging. The window above the sink overlooks the end of the driveway and the grassy side-yard. She cannot see the road from here. After quickly drying her hands on a dishtowel hung over the oven door handle she puts on a pair of latex gloves.
Survivor Song Page 21