Ramola transfers items one at a time from the kitchen table and front entryway to the bedroom, placing them on the dresser. With each pass, Natalie calls out in her new language.
When they were inside Norwood Hospital, Dr. Awolesi explained the virus was not blood-borne and would not pass through the placenta to the baby while Natalie wasn’t showing signs of infection. She said the post-exposure vaccine Natalie received was safe for both mother and fetus, but there wasn’t a lot of medical literature out there regarding what would happen if a woman at her stage of pregnancy succumbed to rabies infection.
She said they would still perform the cesarean section even if Natalie were presenting clear symptoms. Dr. Awolesi was reasonably confident the baby would not be infected.
Ramola remembers the last line clearly, perseverates on it, inspects it from every angle available.
She also remembers Natalie volleying back a quip: Reasonably confident? Is that like a medical shrug?
Ramola dumps the clothes off the chair and sits.
Natalie continues to babble and growl and writhe, though her strength appears to be waning.
How long can Ramola wait before she is forced to attempt a hackneyed C-section?
With each second that passes it’s likely the risk of infection or illness to the child increases. However, she cannot and will not perform surgery on Natalie while she’s awake, feeling pain, and thrashing about. Ramola would most certainly injure or cut the baby. Unfortunately, there is nothing with which to anesthetize Natalie. Ramola is not going to whack her on the head like in a dime-store thriller where one swipe of the butt end of a gun handle conveniently knocks the hero out cold until the opening of the next chapter.
Killing Natalie and then performing the procedure is not an option. A mother cannot be oxygen-dead for more than four minutes or the child will not survive. Those four minutes cannot be negotiated or bargained with. C-section births normally take ten to fifteen minutes in ideal conditions. Given she doesn’t have to worry about Natalie surviving the procedure, Ramola should be able to decrease the timeline, but there’s no way she can perform it in less than four minutes.
Ramola will wait for help or—if she has no choice but to attempt the procedure herself—wait until Natalie slips into a coma.
Still, while the virus’s incubation period and post-infection timeline have exponentially sped up, Ramola does not know how long it will take for Natalie to pass into deep unconsciousness. In addition, she does not know how long her body’s basic functions will continue while comatose. What if Natalie were to die in the middle of the procedure, a distinct possibility whether or not she is in a coma? That four-minute clock would again be ticking for the baby.
Ramola leaves the chair, walks to the bed, and says, “Reasonably confident. A medical shrug.”
Natalie howls.
Ramola’s body is in the chair in the bedroom that is attached to the hallway that is in the house that someone else built.
Inside Ramola’s head, she is on the bus to the clinic sitting next to Natalie. There are other people in the seats near them but they are blurry, indistinct, and she doesn’t think about them. Ramola is in the aisle seat, facing the window. Natalie leans against the window, gapes at her phone, finger dangling above the screen. Ramola stares at the reflection in the window.
After pacing the length of the hallway with her phone, Ramola goes to the bedroom. To drown out Natalie’s cries and the groaning mattress upon which she struggles, Ramola recites a version of the fairy tale “Fundevogel.” While she has retained certain key lines, she hasn’t committed the entire story to memory as with “The Wedding of Mrs. Fox.”
“A forester on his rounds found a child on top of a high tree. She had been snatched out of her mother’s arms by a large bird. The forester took the rescued child home to live with him and his daughter, Nats. She named the found child Rams. Nats and Rams got along quite well and loved each other very much. One morning the forester left for a three-day trip. The nasty old cook then pulled Nats aside and told her he was going to boil and eat poor little Rams. Well, Nats wasn’t standing for any of that, so she told Rams about the cook’s scheme and they ran away and hid in the forest. The old cook sent a group of terrible men after them and they quickly caught up. Only moments before capture, Nats said to Rams, ‘Never leave me and I will never leave you.’ Rams said, ‘Neither now, nor ever.’ Then Nats said, ‘Do you become a rose tree, and I the rose upon it?’ When the terrible men arrived they found only a rose tree and one rose on it. The children were gone. The men went back to the cook and reported finding nothing. Outraged at the men’s stupidity, the old cook went out into the woods himself. The children saw him coming. Nats said, ‘Rams, never leave me, and I will never leave you.’ Rams said, ‘Neither now, nor ever.’ Nats then said, ‘Be a fishpond, and I will be the duck upon it.’ The old bumbling cook nearly ran into the pond. Tired and despairing, he lay down at the shore to drink it up but the duck swam to the cook, grabbed his head with her beak, and dragged him into the deep water, drowning him. Nats and Rams went home together, their laughter echoing through the forest,
