Survivor Song

by Paul Tremblay

  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 don’t look like a giant rubber ducky? I’m glad.”

  After shared, restrained laughter, they drive in silence, passing through this new ghost town, where the ghosts are reflections of what was and projections of what might never be again.

  The urge to say something, anything, to keep them talking becomes a compulsion. Ramola says, “This windscreen is rather large, isn’t it,” knowing Natalie won’t be able to resist commenting upon the Anglicism.

  “‘Windscreen.’”

  “Sorry. Of course, it’s a windshield.”

  Natalie says, “I like windscreen better. And yeah, it’s huge. You can see the whole world. You can see everything.”

  Ramola keeps her eyes on the road, afraid of looking at Natalie and seeing a ghost.

  II.

  Fill Your Knapsack Full of the Sweepings

  Nats

  Hi, I’m back. I love you.

  It’s only been, like, thirty minutes since recording my last message and it seems like I did it two weeks ago. Rams says “fortnight” when she means two weeks and still can’t get over that no one in this country says the word unless they’re talking about a video game your dad and other children are obsessed with. Yes, I just called your dad a child. He would’ve laughed at that, and totally agreed. I can’t believe he’s gone—

  Hey, you won’t be listening to any of this until years from now. From my now. So I shouldn’t talk about fortnights, weeks, and time. It’s too much. Time is too heavy. It really does have weight you can feel but you can’t measure.

  Jesus, I’m talking in shitty riddles like I’m Rabies Yoda.

  We’re back on the road. We’ve been forced to leave the hospital. It was on fire. And there were zombies—

  “Natalie, they’re not—”

  I know, I know. Okay, fine, they’re not really zombies. You probably already know that because the goddamn history of this will have already been written since you’re able to safely listen to this. I’m dreaming about you being safe right now.

  So, they’re not zombies. No one is rising from the dead. Sounds silly to have to say because it’s so obvious, right? Dead is dead. There’s no coming back.

  This is getting dark. And I’m getting way off track . . . .

  I was kind of joking when I said zombies, but not joking at the same time. They’re sick people and they turn delusional and violent and they bite, but it’s easier to say zombie than “a person infected with a super rabies virus and no longer capable of making good decisions.”

  I’m not making fun of this. I’m not. It’s either I say it this way or you get a recording of me screaming and crying.

  Not for nothing, I hope you make good decisions in your life. It’s okay to make bad ones too, of course. No one makes all good decisions, and it’s often difficult to know if your decision was good or bad or likely somewhere in between, and you might never know. I mean, don’t sniff glue, right? Doing so would be an obviously bad decision. Don’t microwave a hardboiled egg. Don’t drink milk past its expiration date. The sniff test isn’t reliable enough on milk.

  When I was in high school and going out with friends my mother used to say, “Make good decisions, Natalie.” She’d be so proud of herself for being different from the moms who said “be smart” or “be good” or “don’t drink and drive” or “be safe and don’t talk to strangers or get attacked by zombies.”

  Can you hear Auntie Rams tsking me each time I say “zombie”? She’s here next to me, on the correct side of the road, driving us in an ambulance to another hospital that hopefully isn’t on fire. I’m not making any of this shit up.

  So let’s say hi to Auntie Rams again.

  “Oh, I’m to be Auntie Rams, now, am I? Don’t I get name approval?”

  No. Say hi, Auntie Rams.

  “Hi, Auntie Rams.”

  Isn’t she so clever? You missed her calling me a dick, like, two minutes ago.

  “I did not say you were—”

  You totally did. Don’t lie to my kid.

  Auntie Rams isn’t my real sister, but she’s even better than a blood sister because I got to choose her. We got to choose each other. That sounds cheesy but it’s true. She’s the best, and she’ll be an amazing auntie. You’ll be able to count on her. I mean, she’s risking her life and her driver’s license for me right now, driving a stolen ambulance—

  “It’s not stolen.”

  Totally stolen—and driving us—expertly, I might add!—through a Fury Road wasteland, only much less dusty and way more suburban. You can watch that movie when you’re fourteen. Or maybe twelve if you think you can handle it.

  I have no familial sisters or brothers. I’m a partially spoiled only child. The full-on spoiledness inherent to being an only child was kept in check, mostly, because my parents were impossible to deal with. Maybe that’s not completely fair and I don’t want you to think your grandparents were mean or terrible people, because they weren’t. They were a little cold, not always there even when they sat in the same room as you, if that makes sense. They loved me sometimes and they tolerated me the rest of the time. Some of that was my problem too, and I’ll freely admit I was a bit of a monster as a teen. I ran away from home three different times my freshman year. My parents were older, in their mid-forties when they had me, and I don’t know if that was the reason for their distance. They tried their best, but sometimes trying isn’t good enough.

  I shouldn’t be wasting what little time I have telling you this stuff, but what else am I going to say? I don’t have a lifetime to do this. No one does, I guess.

  These
recordings are me grieving for you and your dad, grieving for us, for the moments that won’t ever happen, the memories we won’t be able to make.

  “Natalie, please don’t talk like this. You can’t give up—”

  Sorry, Auntie Rams, I have to. I need to. And I’m not giving up.

  You need to know that too. I am not and have not given up. No way. These recordings are the break-in-the-event-of-emergency glass, just in case I become a zombie.

  Doesn’t that sound better than saying “just in case infection blooms and I die a horrible, painful death”?

  I am sorry to do this to you. Maybe this is selfish of me. See, I’m a typical only child. You have my permission to fast-forward past any of this if you want to.

  Yes, I realize odds are you are an only child. Maybe I am a dick.

  You’ll be my only child no matter who you live with. But I think I can confidently say that you won’t be spoiled. I mean, how can you be, knowing that your dad and I are gone? I’m sorry you’ll never meet him. He would’ve been great at dadding.

  Hey. Took a moment to regroup. And we passed through the same rotary checkpoints we were at, like, an hour ago. The police were confused by our new ride and Auntie Rams threatened to run them over if they didn’t let us pass.

  I’m joking. Ha-ha, right? My jokes are usually better and I’m way more fun when we’re not navigating the zombie apocalypse—that was for you, Rams.

  “Thank you. Please stop saying ‘zombie.’”

  Za-om-bay, Za-om-bay, Za-om-bay-ey-ey-ey!

  You’re kicking me like crazy right now. You do that when I sing. Or when I try to sing.

  What else? I’m trying to think of stuff that no one else will tell you about me. I’m five-eight and I was that height in fifth grade. That wasn’t fun. I wonder if you’ll be tall or short. Sorry if you’re either and, um, you’d rather the other? Middle school was worse than fifth grade, but middle school is worse for everyone. I had a dog named Pete when I was a kid. He was a sweet, slobbery goof, as big and soft as a beanbag chair. My first job was scooping ice cream at a dairy farm. I love driving with the windows down, even when it’s cold out. I hate flying. To distract myself during takeoff I make up names and stories for the people around me. It’s weird but I remember a few of those random strangers because the stories got so big. Not big like action-movie big, but big in the . . . I don’t know, human way; the people they knew and loved, and the secrets they had to keep. I miss music being as important to me as it was when I was in high school and college. And I do and I don’t miss everything being as important to me as it was when I was in high school and college. I’m a terrible dancer but I loved dragging Rams to Stupid Dance Party on Thursday nights when we were sophomores. Rams had moves. The best night was when my Chuck Taylors exploded and the toes on my right foot were sticking out. Someone had a Sharpie and I got as many people as I could to draw on the sneaker and my toes. I would rather eat cookies than cake, or pies. I don’t really like pies. I wish I could draw better than I can. I read for at least twenty minutes before bed each night. If I fall asleep with the book on my face (which happens a lot), I’ll read two pages when I wake up to make sure I meet the reading goal. I’m agnostic but I have this fantasy of me as a cute old lady going to all different kinds of churches, mosques, temples just to hear people talk. If you couldn’t tell I like to talk and to listen to others talk. I don’t believe in ghosts but I’m afraid of them, or the implications of them. Maybe I’m more afraid of being wrong about ghosts. I initially kind of hated the house Paul and I bought. It was expensive and I was freaking out and it was too quiet and I just wanted to stay in Providence and live in an apartment. Neither one of us was very handy, and we knew nothing about home improvement and upkeep that didn’t come from a YouTube video. There was one fall weekend we pried the hideous wooden paneling from the porch walls and put up clapboard all by ourselves. I was so proud of us and it was our house after that. I never told Paul or anyone else that. So that belongs to you now. And Rams, too, since she’s eavesdropping.

  We’re almost to Cobb’s Corner. That means we’re really close to our house now, and getting closer.

  I—I’m going to stop now, I think. We’ll talk again later. I promise. If I break the promise, please know I didn’t mean to. It sucks, but promises get broken all the time. Promises are like wishes. Yeah. They’re great as long as you know they won’t always help and won’t always come true.

  “Now you are Bummer Rabies Yoda. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist. You can edit that part out, correct?”

  I told you Auntie Rams is the best.

  I love you. Sassafras and lullabies.

  Rams

  The first half of the trip toward Ames retraces their earlier drive, including passing over I-95, which is as still as a stagnant river. Ramola experiences a dissociative feeling of going backward—not quite déjà vu, but a sense of rewinding, of going nowhere. Listening to Natalie dictate her hey-in-the-event-I-die messages to her unborn child—a child with no guarantees of their own health or survival—isn’t helping. She worries they are moving further away—both in terms of time and distance—from getting Natalie the help she needs.

  They approach River Bend, Ramola’s townhouse complex. Her bay window is a dark rectangle. The parking lot has the same number of cars as it did when they left. She wonders how the Piacenzas and Danielses are faring. Is Frank’s cat inside his house or will she see it, haunches slouched, drunkenly stumbling in the middle of the road, fated to be the grease under ambulance tires? As Neponset Street snakes away from her new home and under the Canton Viaduct, Ramola’s scattered thoughts go deeper into her past and she wonders about the ex-neighbors from her apartment building in downtown Quincy, a mix of townies and people her age, all white, and all of whom were guarded (to be overly kind) in their initial interactions with her. By Ramola’s force of cheer and goodwill, the neighbors and locals were eventually friendly enough to engage in hallway chats and share a drink on the front porch in the summers. She hopes someone is checking in on Mr. Fitzgerald, a rascally sparkplug of an old man who lived alone on the first floor, argued with his visiting nurse, hobbled around on a bum hip that needed to be replaced, and smoked a cigar while perched on the front stairs every Saturday afternoon.

  Natalie says, “I’m joking. Ha-ha, right? My jokes are usually better and I’m way more fun when we’re not navigating the zombie apocalypse—that was for you, Rams.”

  “Thank you. Please stop saying ‘zombie.’”

  Natalie sings the chorus to the Cranberries’ “Zombie,” and not very well.

  Ramola’s thoughts briefly travel from Mr. Fitzgerald in Quincy to the flat in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, she had shared with her ex-partner, Cedric. They started dating while in medical school, one month after Natalie and Paul got their own place. She remembers Cedric with neither malice nor fondness. He was plain but handsome, gentle but never warm, maddeningly demure only when he wasn’t. He was intractable if he dug in on a topic or position. Most notably, their date-night schedule was so rigidly mapped and unmalleable in his eyes, he took to hanging an otherwise blank calendar on the refrigerator door with DATE NIGHT slashed onto a scatterplot of dates, the handwriting desperate, accusatory, childish. Her memory of their relationship is neither enhanced nor distorted by the haze of nostalgia; their time together represents a signpost of where she once was and nothing more. She idly wonders if Cedric is still in New England. Her mum took their breakup and Ramola moving to Quincy much harder than Ramola did. In the immediate aftermath Mum insisted Ramola move back home to England and do so immediately. She stammered through saying the America experiment was a noble miss and was incredulous that her daughter didn’t agree. She would not hear of how Ramola was almost done with residency and was preparing for a second interview with Norwood Pediatrics. At the height of the contentious, one-sided (or Mum-sided, as Ramola thought of their occasional spats) argument, Ramola said, “Mum. Listen to me. I cannot say it more p
lainly: I am not moving back to England. Not ever.” Ramola had never before stated this to her mum. The shocked and hurt hiss of silence on the phone was a hard-won victory, but it came at a cost. Ramola attempted to soften the blow with “I will visit you and Dad, of course, but I will not be coming home in the way that you want me to.” Mum didn’t call Ramola back for eleven days. Ramola refused to be the first to break the embargo and held out. She talked to Natalie every night instead. On the eighth day, she admitted Mum not calling made her sad in a way that felt irreparable, as though this sad (Ramola referred to “this sad” as if it were an object, something to be probed, dissected, but delicately) might diminish or fade into the background, but would always be there. Mum was the first to relent. She never apologized directly but did so in her way by calling every other day for the next two months. She demanded a detailed recounting of the third interview that became the job offer, and she wanted to know everything about Ramola’s new flat and city. There were, of course, subtle digs coded within her catching Ramola up on the lives of her friends’ children, the ones who were married and had children of their own. It went unspoken when talking to Mum, but Ramola was as resolute about never having children as she was about not moving back to England. She was content to help and to serve other people’s children as their doctor. Not that being a pediatrician was a substitute for a lack of children in her life; quite the opposite. There was no lack as far as she was concerned. Mum would occasionally ask if Ramola was seeing anyone. Ramola dismissed the queries by saying she was far too busy and by the time she got home most days she was exhausted. During one memorably wine-fueled conversation, Mum asked if Ramola missed “physical intimacy.” By then Ramola had begun to think of herself as asexual but would not admit this to her mum. She said she was impressed by Mum’s vocabulary choice, and added she enjoyed the idea of sex like she enjoyed the idea of riding a bike, but both involved too much prep work, or leg work, as it were, and she was all right forgoing both for the foreseeable. Mum surprised her by saying, “Cheers to that,” and they both broke up laughing. There would always be a point during their conversations when Ramola would tell Mum not to worry, because she was happy, which was more or less true, although happiness was never Ramola’s ambition. Happiness held no nuance or compromise, did not allow for examination, did not allow the hopeful, hungry will that fills the vacuum of failure and what-might’ve-beens, nor did it allow for the sweetness of surprise. Happiness was as rigid in its demands to adherence as a calendar shouting about compulsory date nights. Happiness was for dogs, lovely creatures though they were. Ramola yearned for something more complex, something earned, and something more satisfying. If she ever felt lonely, it was a passing storm, not one she brooded upon, and it was easily banished by resolving to be better about seeing friends, seeing Natalie and Paul. What Ramola yearned for was not a gormless vision of happiness or a dewy romantic relationship but a future when she was financially stable enough to travel wherever she wanted on holiday. In some daydreams she traveled with friends, in others she traveled alone. That was the life she desired to live. As a promise to herself, she decorated the bedroom of her Quincy flat with travel posters and those posters multiplied and moved with her to the townhome in Canton.