Survivor Song(32)
Ramola checks her side mirrors, shifts into drive, and rolls away from the curb.
Natalie lets her bag drop between her legs and down to the floor again. She holds her phone with both hands. She says, “I hope someone calls that obstetrician, tells her to go back home,” using her this-is-Nats-being-sarcastic voice, which, at first blush, isn’t perceptibly different from her regular, conversational tone. Instead of employing hammy, exaggerated inflection peppered with head tilts and eye rolls, Natalie holds eye contact, so direct as to make her target self-conscious, and drops into a slightly lower, more serious register, speaking with the hushed wisdom of an expert or authority. It took Ramola years and more than a handful of misunderstandings before she could consistently identify Natalie’s sarcasm. “She’ll be very put out, I imagine, when she shows up and I’m not here. Not to mention the money her police-escorted hospital jaunt will cost the state. What a terrible mess.”
Ramola won’t look at Natalie directly. She needs to concentrate on getting them out of the hospital lot, through downtown Norwood, and pointed in the direction of the clinic before she’ll dare to keep that other eye on Natalie. The questions about symptoms and the increasing possibility of infection will simply have to wait. If she could put those questions off forever, especially now that it’s just the two of them again, she would. Ramola nods as though agreeing with something she said to herself.
The ambulance floats through small but tight turns within the lot, swaying and dipping like a dinghy in choppy waters. Knowing it’s a paranoid thought, Ramola is convinced the ambulance’s high center of gravity is actively conspiring to tip.
Natalie says, “Remember where we parked. Hope we don’t get towed.”
Soldiers remove the white-and-orange-striped sawhorses blocking Central Street. Ramola pauses at the exit, offering a last chance for someone to give her instructions, tell her what to do, what to expect, how any of this is going to work out. A half block to her left, hemmed in by cement barriers, Washington Street boils with activity: police and military herd and direct people away from the hospital; people shout and they honk horns; they wander aimlessly between stopped and abandoned cars, unsure of where to go or what to do; they wave arms and fists but not in a threatening way, instead, it’s a someone-please-see-me-and-help-me plea; everyone’s face shows confusion mixed with terror and incredulity, and perhaps most frightening, an odd look of recognition/resignation, and it’s a look Ramola fears she’ll find on her own face if she stares into the rearview mirror.
Dragging the tail end of the ambulance fully out of the lot, Ramola turns right. Central Street is empty of traffic, the curbs lined by a blockade of military and emergency-response vehicles. Packs of soldiers cluster around individuals attempting to cut across the road and funnel the interlopers back onto Washington Street or Broadway.
A Jeep pulls out ahead of the ambulance, a single flashing red light perched on its roof, and leads them away from the hospital.
Natalie presses one of the console buttons, turning on their own flashing red lights. She says, “No siren. My fucking head is killing me.” She clears her throat twice, and then a third time.
Ramola has the irresistible urge to snap at Natalie, to yell at her, to tell her to stop carrying on like a phlegmatic old man, to say she is exaggerating her headache and the scratchiness of her voice, all of which is making it impossible to drive, to concentrate, to not think and imagine the worst.
They follow the Jeep through a bend, past the post office, past Olivadi’s Restaurant & Bar, and to a straightaway section of the road, and past Norwood Cooperative Bank and Mak’s Roast Beef. Two blocks away is a fire engine, a leviathan floating across Nahatan Street and then up Central. Falling in behind the red truck wider than the lane it straddles are three coach buses, each one able to accommodate more than fifty passengers.
Natalie asks, “Are they quarantining the hospital or evacuating? Do they even know?”
Ramola shrugs and says, “Come on, let’s keep it moving,” even though no one has stopped the Jeep or their ambulance. They pass between the Norwood Theatre and the green space of Norwood Common. They cross Nahatan Street, where the traffic they were sitting in an hour ago hasn’t abated. They go straight for two more blocks and turn right onto Railroad Avenue. The Jeep pulls over to the shoulder, adjacent to the mostly empty Norwood Depot parking lot, and the driver rolls down his window and waves them on.
Ramola slows the ambulance as though hoping to communicate No, you first. We insist.
Natalie says, “So much for our escort.”
Ramola says, “We’ll be all right,” and regrets it as soon as she says it.
Natalie knocks on the dash. “Pretend it’s wood. That was for you, by the way. Just because you’re not superstitious—”
“Doesn’t mean I want to be a jinx.”
Natalie finishes the punch line, one born of obligation to tradition, but not without warmth. “You are a woman of reason and science.”
A shared joke from one late night when the two of them were at the Brown University Sciences Library studying for freshman first-semester exams. Both were hypercaffeinated, loopy from stress and nearly a week’s worth of lack of sleep, and unabashedly silly and awkward in the way young people are when they are comfortable within their own skin for perhaps the first time in their lives. The study session deteriorated into laughing fits as Ramola loudly shushed and repeatedly knocked on wood whenever either of them speculated on how they would perform the next morning. The following afternoon, celebrating the completion of their exams, the two of them wandered Thayer Street searching for a ladder for Ramola to walk under or a black cat with which to cross paths so she could prove she was not superstitious; she was a woman of reason and science. Being a cold and blustery mid-December there were no cats to be found and the only ladder was the rolling one within stacks at the University bookstore, swollen with students purchasing last-minute holiday gifts. Ramola tried gamely to shimmy between the cranky, clanging ladder and the bookshelf, but got pinned between. She was in nonfiction/history—Ramola remembers the section clearly—her eyes inches from the faced-out cover of The Devil in the White City, a book that Natalie bought her as a cheeky graduation gift. A clearly unamused graduate student working one of the registers had to stand on a chair to detach the top of the ladder from its track in order to free a giggling but mortified Ramola. All the while, Natalie sat on the floor and with the straightest of faces asked Ramola if she needed water or a blueberry muffin from the café. She read aloud from the opening chapter of Into Thin Air until the grad student monotoned that she wasn’t helping.