The clinician backs up, almost into the lap of the bus driver, to allow Ramola and Natalie passage. She complains they don’t have time to store Ramola’s bags under the bus and they’ll have to be placed in the overheads, if they fit.
Ramola positions herself so that she or her bags block her view of Natalie as she climbs onto the bus. As the clinician peers over her shoulder, Ramola asks, “What is your name again?”
“Dr. Gwen Kolodny.”
“Thank you, Doctor. And where are the buses taking us?” The police officer who led them to the bus already told her where it was going. The question is to keep Kolodny talking and not focused on Natalie shuffling into the aisle. Ramola tries to catch Natalie’s eye but her head is down, hair hanging loosely over her face.
Dr. Kolodny sputters a distracted answer, a fully secured hospital, transferring unexposed maternity patients and newborns, near the border of Rhode Island, and she mentions the town of North Attleboro as the bus driver’s two-way radio spews static and coded chatter. She turns to talk to the driver. The doors swing closed and the bus rolls forward before Ramola finds her seat next to Natalie.
Natalie is turned and facing out the window. Ramola assumes she’s doing so purposefully, to avoid being seen by other clinicians in white coats flittering up and down the aisle like hummingbirds. Perhaps it is time for Ramola to stop assuming fully rational decision-making in regard to Natalie’s behavior. She’s going to begin to suffer from cognitive deficiencies and delusions soon, if it isn’t happening already.
Ramola asks, “Are you all right?”
“I’m peach,” Natalie says. Not “peachy.”
The bus rocks from side to side as it crests the elevated lip of the lot exit. It turns left, goes straight through the Five Corners intersection, following one police car, blue lights flashing. A low murmur ripples through the bus’s passengers now that they are moving. Across the aisle from Ramola are two young pregnant women. They are both staring ahead, faces frozen in worried expressions, hands folded on top of their swollen bellies. The one by the window mutters something that makes the other woman laugh nervously.
Ramola has put these women and all the others sitting in front of and behind them at risk by getting Natalie onto the bus. She has compromised her pledged medical ethics and knowingly broken federal and state quarantine protocols and laws. She’s sick with worry, fear, grief, and disappointment at how easy it was to lie and to actively endanger the well-being of others. And for what, ultimately? Natalie cannot be cured, and they are at least twenty-five minutes away from an operating table, assuming this next hospital will even admit them. Ramola takes out her phone to send a text to Dr. Awolesi. She writes, “Per your instruction we arrived at the Ames Clinic.” Ramola rescans the text, says it in her head so it reads as Look at what you made me do, should someone else get hurt it’ll be your fault too. She erases the text and starts again. “Arrived at the Ames Clinic. All patients being transferred via bus to North Attleboro. Natalie has not been seen by OB/GYN yet.” She hits Send, then types, “I don’t know what else I can do for her.” She erases that one too.
“Hey, Rams?”
“Yes, I’m right here.”
“I’m scared.”
“I know.”
“Thank you for knowing.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Everyone in here knows about me.”
“No, they don’t.”
“They do. And they’re not going to bring us where they’re supposed to. I can almost hear them thinking about what they’re really going to do. They think in small voices. They hide their small voices behind smaller hands. Baby hands, but not hands that belong to babies. But I stopped listening hard enough. I don’t want to hear them.”
“Natalie—”
“Sorry. Can you say yes again? I need to hear it.”
“Yes?”
“No, a real one.”
“What am I saying yes to?”
“I need to hear the yes you gave me back on the road. It has to be the same exact one, or it won’t work. I’m worried I’ll forget it and I need it to get me through to the end. Right, remember? When you said yes, I said I’d go all the way to the end. I need to hear it one more time.”
“Yes.”
“Please. Again.”
“Yes.”
The driver shouts and the bus slows. Not quite a slamming of the brakes and tire-screeching halt, but the rapid deceleration is enough to propel everyone forward, hands grasping the seatbacks in front of them. Passengers gasp and the pneumatic brakes hiss. Once the bus comes to a full stop, Dr. Kolodny and another person wearing a white coat rush up the aisle to the front. The bus idles in a residential, wooded area. A large white house is directly across from Natalie’s window. Ramola looks at her watch. They’ve been riding for about five minutes.
Ramola and Natalie are four rows back from the driver. The clinicians obscure most of Ramola’s view through the windshield, but the police-escort car has stopped perpendicular to another vehicle, a mammoth white SUV, parked across the middle of the road.
The chatter up front is clipped, agitated, and sets off a chorus of “What’s going on?” and “Why did we
