Survivor Song(3)
The radio hosts read straight from the Massachusetts bylaws regarding quarantine and isolation.
Natalie sighs and releases her brown hair from a ponytail. It’s still wet from her shower earlier that morning. She reties her ponytail, careful to keep it loose. She plugs in her phone although the battery is almost fully charged, and then she hikes up her blue shirt-dress and sends a hand under the wide waistband of her leggings to scratch her belly. She should probably take off the leggings and let her skin breathe, but that would involve the considerable undertaking of standing, walking, bending, removing. She can’t deal with all the –ings right now.
Natalie opens the diary app on her phone, named Voyager. In her head she says the name of the app in French [Voyageur]; she says it that way to Paul when she wants to annoy him. She’s been using the app to keep a pregnancy journal. The app automatically syncs her notes, pictures, videos, and audio files to her Google Drive storage. During the first two trimesters, Natalie had been using the app every day and often more than once. She shared her posts with other first-time moms and caused an amused stir within that online community when instead of posting pictures of her weekly belly growth, she shared pictures of her feet accompanied by her own hilarious [at least she thought so] jokes about how quickly the twins were growing. Natalie slowed down using the app considerably in the third trimester and most of those entries devolved into a clinical listing of discomforts, the saga of the strange red pointillist dots appearing on the skin of her chest and face [including a regaling of her doctor’s shrug, and deadpan, “Probably nothing, but maybe Lupus.”], work grievances, and a litanylike reiterating of her fear that she’ll be pregnant forever. Over the last ten days, she has only mustered a few updates.
Natalie opts to record an audio entry, first marking it as private and not to be shared to those who follow her online: “Bonjour, Voyageur. C’est moi. Yeah. Fifteen days to go, give or take. What a terrible saying that is. Give or take. Say it fast and you can’t even understand it. Giveortake. Giveortake. I’m sitting alone in my dark house. Physical discomforts are legion, but not thinking about that so much because I’m utterly terrified. So I have that going for me. Wearing the same leggings for the fifth day in a row. I feel bad for them. They never asked for this. [Sigh] I should turn on a light. Or open the curtains. Let some gray in. Don’t know why I don’t. Fucking Paul. Turn on your goddamn—”
Her phone buzzes and a text from Paul bubbles onto the top of the screen. “Finally out. Bundles in the car. Be home in 5.”
She suppresses the urge to make fun of his actually typing the word “bundles.” Saying it is bad enough. She types, “Yay! Hurry. Be safe but hurry. Pleeeeze.”
She tells the smart speaker to turn down the volume until it’s inaudible. She wants to listen for Paul’s car. The empty house makes its empty-house sounds, the ones with frequencies attuned to imagination and worst-case scenarios. Natalie is careful to not make any of her own sounds. With her phone she checks online news and Twitter and none of it is good. She returns to Voyager and types a riff on her dad’s favorite saying: “A watched clock never boils.”
Paul’s car and its clearing-of-a-throat engine finally chugs up their sleepy street and rounds the bend of the fenced front yard. His green Forester is a twenty-year-old beater; 200,000 miles plus and standard transmission. Another endearing/annoying quirk of his, claiming he’ll only ever drive used standards as though it’s a quantifiable measure of his worth. More annoying, he’s not a gearhead and cannot fix cars himself, so invariably his jalopy is in the shop and then she is left having to build extra time in her schedule getting him to and from the train station.
As the green machine crunches its way down their sloped gravel driveway Natalie struggles into a standing position. She unplugs and then deposits her phone in a surprisingly deep pocket of her unzipped gray hooded sweatshirt. In her other pocket are her car keys, which she has kept on her person since leaving Stonehill.
Natalie walks into the living room, her footsteps in sync with Paul’s march on the gravel. She stops herself from calling out to him. He shouldn’t walk so loudly; he needs to be more careful and soft-footed. Arms loaded with bundles [Dammit, yes, fine, they are “bundles”], he emerges from behind the car. The Forester’s rear hatch remains open and the little hey-you-left-a-door-ajar dome light shines an obnoxious yellow inside the car. She considers yelling out to Paul again, telling him to shut the hatch.
Paul comically struggles to unlatch the fence’s thigh-high entry gate without putting down any of the grocery bags. Only, he’s not laughing.
Natalie is on the screened-in porch and whispers out one of the windows, “Can I get that for you?” She has an urge to laugh maniacally and an equally powerful urge to ugly-cry. She opens the screen door, proud that she dares stick her head outside and into the quarantined morning. She briefly imagines an impossible time of happiness and peace years from now, regaling their beautiful and mischievous child [she will insist her child be mischievous] with embellished adventure stories of how they survived this night and all the others to follow.
Natalie returns to herself and to a now of stillness and eerie quiet. Exposed and vulnerable, she’s overwhelmed by the tumult within her and Paul’s microworld and the comprehensive horrors of the wider world beyond their little home.
Paul mutters his way through swinging the creaking gate halfway open, where it gets jammed, stuck on the gravel [like always]. He shuffles down the short cement walkway. Natalie stays inside the porch and holds open the door until he can prop it open for himself with a shoulder. Neither knows what to say to the other. They are afraid of saying something that will make them more afraid.