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.
Ramola creeps the ambulance past the Jeep, hoping, willing the driver for a change of mind, if not heart. The hand continues to wave, cruelly implacable, without pause or impatience.
She exhales and stomps on the accelerator. The ambulance lurches forward. Within two blocks, the commuter rail station, commercial properties, and congestion of the large suburban downtown give way to trees, rolling sidewalks, landscaped lawns, picket-fenced yards, and front porches of residential neighborhoods.
Ramola turns, sparing both eyes for Natalie.
Natalie stares into the mirror of her darkened phone. Her mouth clenched tight, the muscles in her cheeks pulse and quiver. Is she grinding her teeth? She clears her throat two more times without opening her mouth.
Ramola snaps her head back to the road as though having witnessed something she should not have seen. The ambulance’s flashing red lights reflect off the darkened windows of houses they pass.
Natalie says, “I don’t feel great. I know there has to be a thermometer in the back, but we’re not pulling over to get it. I just—I don’t feel great.”
“You’re thirsty and hungry and beyond exhausted—”
“I’m not trying to be a dick, I swear, but please don’t explain it away. All you have to say is you know: you know I don’t feel well. That’s all I need. I mean, that’s all we need, I think. I’m sorry I don’t know what the fuck I want or need or what to do.”
“When one says one is not trying to be a dick, it generally implies the opposite.”
Natalie laughs. “I can’t believe you’re calling a rabies-exposed preggo a dick. That’s gotta go against your Hippocratic Oath.”
“Nats . . .”
“Oh, please tell me you call some of your other patients dicks. That would be amazing. Let me pretend—”
“Nats.”
“What? What?”
“I know you don’t feel well.”
“Thank you, Rams. Thank you. I mean that.” Each word gets quieter, like a song fading out instead of ending abruptly.
“Doctors don’t say the Hippocratic Oath anymore.”
“No?”
“I did recite a modern version of the oath rewritten by Dr. Lasagna.”
“Ooh, yum. Lasagna.” Natalie is again at exaggerated volume and exuberance. “Hey, I like your sweatshirt. Yellow is my new color.”
“You pull it off.”
“So I
