Survivor Song(42)

“We’d be helping him. Putting him out of his misery. There’s no cure,” Josh says.

It’s clear to Ramola this is empty posturing on Josh’s part. Or maybe it’s what she wants to believe. Ramola unleashes her most withering look, and Josh dries up, shrinks, and suddenly discovers the tops of his sneakers to be fascinating.

The moment of potential further violence has passed. Ramola feels it, like an easing of barometric pressure. She says, “You don’t get to decide that.” Ramola tosses the staff into Josh’s chest.

He catches it and mumbles, an admonished child, “Neither do you,” but again, doesn’t dare return her glare.

The old man has stopped moving. His breathing is labored and arrhythmic. His eyes are closed.

The bat sags in Luis’s hands, a flag gone limp. He nods at Ramola and walks over to his friend. Josh pats him on the back, mumbles belated commentary about Luis “pillaging the zombie’s cut” with one swing.

Ramola walks past the huddled, whispering teens (their annoying bro lingo all but indecipherable) to the ambulance door and opens it. She begins to ask if Natalie was able to get through to 911 or communicate directly with Dr. Awolesi, but stops. Natalie isn’t in her seat.

Ramola climbs into and inspects the empty cab as though she might find Natalie crouching or hiding on the cab floor, folded neatly into the center console. She throws a panicked look into the rear of the ambulance, but she isn’t there either. Ramola shouts Natalie’s name as she slides out of the ambulance, landing awkwardly onto Bay Road. She slams the driver’s door shut.

“Rams. Hey, Rams!” Natalie is in the street, standing adjacent to the ambulance’s front grille. She says, “I’m right here,” as if to say, Where else should I be? As raggedy as a child’s favorite hand-sewn doll her arms are drawstrings dangling loosely at her sides. The unzipped halves of the too-small yellow sweatshirt are an open curtain for her protruding belly. Most of her hair has fallen out of her ponytail but not all, the stubborn elastic not willing to surrender when all is about lost.

Apoplectic with fear, worry, and exasperation, three questions crowd in and issue out of Ramola all at once. “Why did you—Did you climb—What are you doing out here?”

She says, “Sorry. I really had to pee. I almost didn’t make it. Or, I mostly made it.”

Ramola sighs. The teens go quiet. The old man has stopped breathing.

Natalie asks, “So how did the zombie fight go?”

Nats

Psst, hey, kid. I tried calling 911 like Auntie Rams said, but it’s not picking up. Same for Dr. Awolesi’s phone. I sent her a text, and I think it went through but she hasn’t answered back, which is a problem because we need a new ride. There’s heavy shit going down out there. I can’t really turn around in my seat to see without less-than-mildly excruciating pain. Oh don’t worry, it’s not you, it’s me.

I hear Rams talking to two boys. Can you hear them?

Sorry, I don’t know why I’m whispering. Feels like the thing to do. Hey, life lesson: if it feels like the thing to do, then do it. Trust your gut. A cliché adults say all the time. Okay, we don’t say it all the time, but we say it a lot. I mean, we’re not walking into Dunks, buying coffee, and randomly saying to the guy with a cruller, Hey, trust yer gut, like it’s the secret adult password. You know what, it might as well be the password. Not enough adults tell kids to trust themselves, trust their wee guts. My parents never said it. They only told me what not to do and what to do. Mostly the first thing. No teacher ever told me to trust your gut either. Which is stupid. No one needs to hear it more than kids do. Instead you’re told the opposite. I don’t have to tell you, right? So many of them make you do stuff you don’t want to do because of convenience or laziness or they want to take advantage of you. They’ll say you don’t know better, you don’t know what you’re doing, you don’t know who you are yet. That’s a big one. And it’s such bullshit. So, listen, only you know you, and if something doesn’t feel right and you can’t explain why, who cares. Trust your gut. Team Guts. Gut trust, all the way. You’re in my gut right now, so it’s like you are already telling you to trust your gut. You are your own gut. It’s like the Inception of gut here. Okay, I’ll stop saying “gut.”

Whoa, did you hear that? Something just banged off the back of the ambulance. Shit . . . .

I wish I could see. No one is yelling or screaming? That’s good, right? Hold on.

Back. I can see Rams in the other side-view mirror. Goddamn, I wish I could turn around. Maybe I should go out there too. She’s talking with one of the boys. I’m going to make this quick.

This might sound weird—especially with the now-you deep-knee bending whenever I do these messages—but as I talk, the you I’m imagining is at least a year, maybe two years older than the you I imagined during the last recording. Wait. Do you get what I’m saying? In my head, it’s like you age with each message I record. Time doesn’t really work like that, but at the same time it does. Yeah, I’m moving time around because I can. You’re growing up right before my eyes, or my mind’s eyes. It’s kind of cool? Maybe?

Actually it’s not cool at all. It’s horribly sad and horrible. Horribly horrible. I’m not trying to be funny. There’s no way for me to describe how brutally terrible it is your dad died in front of me, like, a little over two hours ago and that not only am I not going to be around for you, but I have, um, foreknowledge of this.