Survivor Song

by Paul Tremblay

  As a pediatric resident Ramola had to complete newborn nursery rotations and was often on call nights. When summoned to the OR for C-sections her job then was to take the newborn, ensure the baby was stable, and to perform any resuscitation that might be necessary. She was not standing at the operating table in those instances, but in those hazy, overworked, late hours, she would often fight to keep focus by following the discussion/instructions between the obstetrician, the OB resident, and nurses.

  Ramola retells the fairy tale. And then retells it again.

  “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.”

  Ramola retrieves Natalie’s phone from the sweatshirt pocket. As she does so, Natalie turns her head and opens and closes her mouth like a goldfish. It’s a myth that goldfish retain memories for only three seconds.

  Getting to the home screen does not require a password. Natalie must’ve turned off the lock-screen setting prior to succumbing to infection. Her phone’s battery is at thirty-one percent, still plenty of charge; a cruel reminder of how little time has passed since Natalie was bitten.

  Ramola opens the Voyager app to hear her friend’s voice again. She doesn’t make it through the first message.

  Natalie’s breaths are shallow and she is no longer speaking, crying out.

  Ramola returns to the kitchen, tries her phone. She sits with her eyes closed, and breathes deeply. Attempting to still her shaking hands and galloping heart rate, Ramola leans on her stress-reduction technique as she did on Bay Road when attempting to get Natalie to drink water. She imagines a whiteboard, this one bigger than any other she’s used before. The broad, blank board is there for her now. She was unable to imagine it while in the same room with Natalie.

  She begins the handwritten list of instructions using black marker and her careful, looping cursive: The first incision, horizontal near the pubic hairline, a six-inch cut. It could be longer if necessary. (This line is written shakily on the board with the implication that the cut can be longer because Natalie does not have to be stitched up afterward.) The rectus muscles are normally retracted and pulled out of the way. (She will not have that luxury here and her cursive m’s and l’s are sloppy, indistinct.) Cut through or split the rectus sheath and the muscles themselves. (This will result in more blood loss, which is reflected in her misspelling of “muscles.”) There will also be the peritoneum to contend with prior to reaching the uterus. The bladder and intestines might need to be pushed aside. (She cannot just hack and slash her way through if Natalie is to remain breathing throughout as much of the procedure as possible. For the baby to survive, Ramola needs to keep that four-minute oxygen clock from winding down to zero. Because of all this she writes in a harsh slant, the letters avalanching downhill, and she crosses out “intestines” and inexplicably rewrites it in printed capital letters.) Cut through the three layers of the uterine wall without injuring the baby. (Neither hunting knife nor paring knife are meant for the tough, delicate, precise cutting, and this final line is an illegible smear as though she erased it with the flat of her hand.)

  Ramola tries to envision a successful surgery resulting in a live birth, and she tries to envision an after. But she can’t see anything beyond her dying friend strapped to the bed.

  What am I going to do? I don’t want to do this. I can’t do this.

  How can I possibly do this?

  Ramola first cuts the tape between Natalie’s ankles and pushes her legs apart. Natalie doesn’t stir.

  She cleans Natalie’s face with wipes and a kitchen towel. Carefully slipping the elastic band over her head, Ramola covers Natalie’s nose and mouth with a painter’s mask. Natalie doesn’t stir.

  Ramola deposits the used tape and soiled towels into a garbage bag along with the leggings, underwear, and blue shirt-dress she scissored away. After spraying Natalie’s body and bed with aerosol disinfectant, Ramola returns to the kitchen, de-gloves, washes her hands one more time, puts on the last pair of latex gloves.

  Folded sheets and towels Ramola found in a linen closet are draped over Natalie’s chest and her legs, edges tucked under her hips and thighs. The two remaining towels are folded on top of a kitchen chair Ramola dragged into the room, a cushioned platform upon which she’ll inspect the baby.

  Ramola cannot perform the surgery while standing on the floor. Her reach isn’t long enough. She hovers at the foot of the bed and watches the slight rise and fall of Natalie’s covered chest. What if she stays there, does nothing, and simply watches until there is no more rise and fall? No one would know she didn’t try.

  She can’t do this. She stands and she watches. The house makes creaking and rattling noises, the kinds it saves for when someone is alone.

  Her mental whiteboard is a mess of cross-outs, circles, arrows, smudges, and the order of instructions is almost impossible to follow.

  Ramola climbs over the foot of the bed. As she settles onto her knees, she sinks into the mattress. Natalie’s belly pitches slightly forward. The angle for surgery is not ideal and the weight pressure is surely squeezing the child forward. Ramola’s every movement sends quakes through the mattress and jostles Natalie’s body. She should’ve found a way to get Natalie to the hard floor. It’s too late to do so now.

  On the bed, between the mattress’s edge and Natalie’s left leg, is a rectangular plastic container. Inside are hand towels and knives. She picks up the hunting knife. It feels top-heavy. The brutish instrument is not an extension of her hand.

  She whispers, “I’m sorry, but—” then stops before uttering, I can’t do this.

  “All right,” she says instead, then leans forward and allows the quivering mattress to settle. She anchors her left hand halfway up the belly and pushes it away from her. The baby reacts to the sudden force and pressure. Ramola says, “All right” again, this one not meant for Natalie, and she shakily inserts the fearsome knife tip into Natalie’s skin at the start of the planned incision line. Blood beads instantly. As Ramola slowly drags the knife to her right, a muffled low moan, one that could be wind outside until it cannot be, builds into a jagged scream from Natalie, and her body flinches and spasms.

  Ramola retracts the knife, scrabbles backward, her lower back ramming into the edge of the footboard. She screams, “I’m sorry!” and throws the knife at the wall to her right. It bounces off and clatters on the hardwood.

  “Please don’t make me do this.”

  Ramola paces at the foot of the bed.

  “Never leave me and I will never leave you. Neither now, nor ever.”

  Ramola climbs back onto the bed. She places one hand on the belly, the other holding the hunting knife. Natalie’s breathing is nearly imperceptible.

  As Ramola finishes the initial incision, Natalie’s earlier groans and screams ring so clear in her head as to be happening now.

  The light in the room is terrible. The clouded overhead fixture, the extra lamps, the flashlight on her phone do not illuminate enough. There is so much blood. Ramola switches out the knives. She switches them again and again and again.

  Her mental whiteboard goes blank. The blankness expands, becomes an infinite void of whiteness, one in which she might be lost willingly.

  She’s through to the thick, fibrous muscle of the uterus. With the mattress shaking, it’s impossible to see any rise and fall of Natalie’s chest. Has she stopped breathing even though her moans and screams continue in Ramola’s head?

  How long has Natalie been dead? How long has she been gone?

  How long has the four-minute clock been ticking?

  Ramola works as quickly as she can. The knives fight against their usage. Her fingers tremor and cramp up.

  The last of the cutting is done.The knives are away.

  She reaches inside and pulls the baby out.

  The baby is a girl. Her skin is ghostly gray.

  Neither Ramola nor the baby is breathing.

  Sh
e cries.

  Postlude

  No Care and No Sorrow

  This is not a fairy tale. Certainly it is not one that has been sanitized, homogenized, or Disneyfied, bloodless in every possible sense of the word, beasts and human monsters defanged and claws clipped, the children safe and the children saved, the hard truths harvested from hard lives if not lost then obscured, and purposefully so.

  This is not a fairy tale. This is a song.

  * * *

  Rising ocean levels conspire with a tidal surge from a storm stalled over northern England and Scotland. The River Tyne breaks over its banks and floods the Quayside in Newcastle. The low-lying area between the Tyne Bridge and the Millennium Bridge is hit the hardest, with floodwaters reaching up to five feet in height. Roads are washed out. Dozens of businesses are forced to close while hundreds must evacuate their homes and seek higher ground. Four motorists and one jogger drown in the flash flooding. It takes two weeks for the Tyne to recede from its highest level in recorded history.

  While flooding wreaks similar havoc in ten-year-old Lily’s hometown of South Shields, she is most upset—in the charmingly plucky way only ten-year-olds can be—that her school trip to the Newcastle is postponed for two months. It’s not that the Newcastle Castle is her favorite castle, not by any stretch. It’s actually quite small as castles or forts go, and Hadrian’s Wall and the Roman fort Arbeia [both in South Shields] are more impressive, even awe inspiring.

  It’s the creature that resides near the Newcastle Castle that Lily wants to show her snotty friend Robert. He doesn’t believe it exists.

  * * *

  Poor Mrs. Brehl and the overmatched chaperone Mrs. Budden [Gary’s fussy mum, who refers to her son as “Gare Bear”] have their hands full with the class. So, too, the uninspiring tour guide who is dressed as a Roman or Anglo-Saxon or Norman soldier, Lily is not sure which. She did not pay attention when he identified himself, and to be fair, she’s distracted by his voice cracking and the dusting of acne on his forehead, which doesn’t really lend him soldierly gravitas.

  Laird and John race each other from room to room, playing a two-person game of tag. Julia spits over the edge of the railing while on the roof. Lydia throws a wad of tissue into a hidden, nonfunctional pre-medieval toilet. Andy flicks his mates’ earlobes as the tour guide drones on and pinches ankles and the backs of knees as kids walk up the stairs. Camille taps on shoulders and then jams her flashlight directly into her victims’ eyes. Even Gare Bear gets into the act and repeatedly asks the guide about a ghost named Chauncey.

  The children don’t normally misbehave to this extent. The truth is, without being able to verbalize this, they are sensitive to the miasma of unease within the city. They felt it as soon as they stepped off the train: the weight and weariness of the flood and the resigned fear of more and worse floods sure to come. Being in the castle, this living bit of history, is actually ramping up this ineffable fear of the future; this structure that has survived for more than one thousand years now represents the impermanence of the city, of everything. In the face of this, the children react in the only way they can: they laugh and they fool around and they rebel because they have to live forever.

  The tour ends in a dark basement with a film and presentation that is to last twenty minutes. As the teacher and chaperone are distracted with the throng of giggling and hand-fighting kids, Lily tells Mark that if the teacher asks, she went to the toilet. Then she grabs Robert’s hand. Having been in the castle before and in possession of an unerring sense of direction and place, she leads him from the basement and out of the castle. No one stops her because she walks like she knows where she’s going, which is, in and of itself, an accurate assessment.

  Once outside in the cool, gray damp air, Robert repeatedly asks what she’s doing and where they are going. Last night he had dreadful nightmares in which the black waters of the river swallowed him and the city whole.

  Lily says, “Not far. You’ll see. Quit whingeing.”

  They make an odd pair. Robert is fair-haired and creeps along like a rodent in an open field echoing with the hungry calls of hawks and owls. He is a full head shorter than Lily, who could pass for a new teenager. Her long brown hair is woven into a thick single braid that no one dares pull on. Lily-punches hurt the most.

  Two streets from the castle they turn right and walk a narrow road behind the sprawling Cathedral Church of St. Nicholas.

  Robert whispers, although there’s no one around. “This is barmy. We need to go back.”

  Lily pulls Robert into the middle of the road, stops, and points up. “Have a look.”

  Across from the cathedral is a set of brick structures associated with the church. They’ve stopped in front of one building’s front door adorned with ornate stone arch work, colored pink and white. Perched at the top, front paws with nails wrapping over the arch, staring down from above a circular window and the front entrance, is the Vampire Rabbit of Newcastle.

  Robert laughs once. He looks at Lily as though seeing her for the first time. Then he laughs again. “That’s—that’s a rabbit, innit?”

  Lily crosses her arms over her chest; her smile could power a hydroelectric plant.

  The Vampire Rabbit is a stone gargoyle painted black. Its nails and teeth are blood-red. The eyes are wide and menacing. Its ears are long, like a hare’s, and if you stare long enough, you can imagine them as bat’s wings, or belonging to a demon.

  Robert jokes, “Look at its teeth. Does it have the rabies, then?”

  Lily groans and whacks his shoulder. Lily-shoulder-whacks hurt the most too. Robert doesn’t let on how much it smarts by not rubbing his arm. She says, “We’re not in America,” out of the side of her mouth, as though she’s embarrassed to be saying so.

  Lily tells Robert a brief and to-the-point story about the city once having had a big problem with grave robbers until there was a night when an actual eight-foot-tall creature shaped like a vampire rabbit [she does not commit to the creature actually being what it looks like] appeared in this same doorway and scared them off. The dutiful citizens then built a gargoyle version in its honor and it has since scared away all other grave robbers. She ends with, “It’s working, innit? See any grave robbers lounging about? Unless you’re one. If you are, I’d leg it before it nips your neck.”

  Robert laughs nervously again. “I’m not. Is that the real story?”

  She tells him some people think the vampire rabbit could’ve started as an odd representation of the Easter Bunny, a reminder of spring [Robert interjects, “The Easter Bunny gone mad.”], and other people think it’s a symbol of Freemasonry and others think it’s a cheeky two-finger salute to the cathedral and the Anglican Church in general. She adds, “No one really knows why. It’s all sassafras and lullabies.”

  Robert pulls his gaze away from the rabbit. He says, “Sassa-what?”

  Lily turns red. “Sassafras and lullabies. It—it’s an old saying. Means everything is bollocks.”

  “Say it again.”

  “No.”

  “Your accent changes when you say that. You sound like someone else—”

  “And you sound like a tosser. Always and forever.”

  * * *

  Lily insists she’s old enough to walk the ten minutes home from school by herself. She engages in a semiweekly, one-sided argument with Gran. She has taken to employing charts and video presentations accompanied by music and sound effects [she wants to make films one day] outlining increasingly elaborate reasoning as to why this small but earned bit of independence would not only benefit her character in the long run, it would also enhance the lives of everyone within the household. Gran patiently waits and smiles warmly until Lily is done with her presentations before she says, “No.” Appeals from Gramp and Auntie, both of whom having been won over [or worn down] to Lily’s side, hold no sway with Gran.

  Upon returning from the Newcastle trip, Lily walks home from school with Gran. While their battle of wills in regard to the walki
ng-home debate is building to an epic confrontation, if not a conclusion, Lily adores and is slightly in awe of Gran. She lives to make her laugh that closed-eyed, I-disapprove-but-you-are-too-much chuckle.

  Lily doesn’t lie to or hide things from Gran. She tells her about the school trip and successfully sneaking out to see the Vampire Rabbit. Gran does not approve and tells her as much, but Lily, in describing her unwitting accomplice Robert as being as timid as a dormouse and twice as twitchy, elicits the laugh she craves.

  Lily has to work to keep up with Gran. They are soon upon their semidetached home with the brick walls and a white trellis.

  Lily asks, “Is Auntie home too?”

  “She is.”

  Lily enters the kitchen first. Auntie and Gramp are in their usual spots, sitting at the intimate round table with the sunny vinyl tablecloth. They both glance over the frames of their glasses, likely reading the same news stories; Gramp clutching his newspaper, Auntie hunched over her tablet. Before they say their hellos and come-give-us-a-hug-and-kiss and how-was-your-day, they smile their wan I-see-you-dear smiles.