The Blondes (16 page)

Shaking her head, my medic exclaimed, “Good thing it wasn’t a Macy’s sale.” She said it to distract me right when she was sticking me with the needle. I didn’t laugh. I bit my lip. I watched the green thread zipping under my skin, tattoo-like.

The woman getting her fingers splinted said, “It’s bio-terrorism.” She said she’d been reading an article about it that very morning in the limo to the airport. She stared blankly at her hand as her medic looped it up in gauze.

Her medic said through his mask that every time something happened at the airport, people would yell “the T word.” He had a pleasant voice. The medics were trained to be cheerful in emergencies, I think.

“It’s a big place,” her medic told her. “Sometimes things just happen here. It’s not always terrorism.” He tied the end off and told her she was done. Then, squatting, he looked at my shin and watched my medic go under the skin a fourth time while he waited for another patient. The line of injured people had run out and they were about to start a new line, I guess. I found myself staring at the broad, good-looking
face above his mask, and I said, “I think I’m gonna be sick.”

“Hold it down,” he instructed me. The softness that I had liked about his voice was gone.

“Hold on. Tying off,” my medic said, and I felt a hard tug on my knee. We were two stitches short.

The male medic grasped my head and he and his partner lay me down on the ground. “Are you experiencing any pain? Dizziness? Do you have headaches?” he interrogated.

“No,” I gasped, rolling onto my side to fight the nausea. I had noticed that lately I felt sick when I ate too much or too fast, and also when I hadn’t eaten enough.

“Were you nauseous before the attacks?” the female medic asked, a flatness in her voice. They were a little bit afraid of me, I guess. Afraid that I would contaminate them.

I told them I was pregnant.

“Shit,” my medic cursed. “Green sticker here!” She pulled her mask down slightly and yelled it again, louder, over her shoulder. Someone in the ambulance came running over with a sheet of stickers, and above me they ripped a tab off and a hand came down and thumbed it onto my shirt. “You didn’t put it on your form,” my medic chastised me, glancing over my questionnaire, her mask back in place.

“I didn’t think it was important.” The nausea was gone; fear had taken its place.

The female medic left abruptly and I could see her and the sticker-runner back by the ambulance, speaking to someone else in an EMS uniform and gesturing.

“I didn’t think it was—” I said again to the other medic.

“Of course it is.” He took my hand and yoked my arm around his neck. He told me that
we
were going to stand now, that we had to get me out of here. “Being in this area could still infect you,” he told me.

He walked me over to the far end of the hangar, near where the officers were. It wasn’t easy going because he was about six-two and my knee was swollen. One of the officers got up and gave me one of two chairs in the place; the other chair was back in the medical area.

“Sheppard is arranging transport for you as quick as she can.” The male medic tapped the green sticker above my left breast. It already had a signature on it across a white stripe, and a UPC code. “This is your clearance if anyone asks. Wait here.”

I felt like a piece of produce. A melon, to be precise.

The medic went back to his station and a cheer went up at the far end of the hangar. The pizzas had arrived. I could see stacks of thin white boxes being driven in by a figure in a hazmat suit. Another flatbed had trucked in a couple of port-o-johns, which were being erected along the far wall. Two, it looked like, for a crowd of three hundred.

Sheppard of the Radio Flyer-coloured hair jogged toward me like a stout but fast-moving tank. My laptop bag swung from one hand, a set of forms in the other.

It occurred to me that I wouldn’t see Mae or Kate again.

“My friends—” I said to Sheppard, as she pressed my things into my hands. Then I realized they weren’t really my friends, just two young women I’d imposed upon. Maybe on other days they weren’t even friendly with each other.

“I don’t know who you were with, dear,” Sheppard said through her mask. “But if they come searching, I’ll tell ’em where we sent you.” She turned and trotted back toward her station.

A Jeep came promptly for me. It sounded its horn, and the officers let me out of the hangar through a side door. My driver wore a face mask, gloves, glasses; his hair was covered by a surgical scrub cap. I was taxied silently and speedily across the tarmac, where we were met by a minibus.

I climbed up into it and took my place among six or seven women, all much further along in their pregnancies than I was. Some barely fit in their seats. I’ve read somewhere that you aren’t allowed to fly after seven months, and now that I’m at that point myself, I can say that most of those women were between five and seven months along. But at the time they sure looked huge. Maybe they loomed large also because they eyed me suspiciously—I had kept them waiting, or possibly even brought them back from the airport’s far reaches. The driver put the vehicle into motion and we rolled out, trucking across the tarmac to a roadway, then curving around the airport before exiting and heading back toward the city.

PART TWO

LISTEN, BABY, THIS IS HOW LIFE WORKS
. It’s one thing and then another, and sometimes they go together, and sometimes they don’t. I sound like my own mom when I say that, but these days I’m finding out maybe she knew a lot more than I ever thought she did. I got sprung from the airport because of my condition; if I hadn’t been pregnant, or hadn’t admitted to it, I’d have been back there in quarantine for three more days. There are reasons you’re still here, but they aren’t the reasons you think. I’m getting ahead of myself, though.

I remember the minibus let us out in the parking lot of a long, low building made of pale brick. There was a real estate office across the street and a fenced-off lot containing vehicles and scrap metal, the kind of spot where construction might be about to happen. There was a grade school and a Sunoco
station. There were modest, very uniform houses with TV antennae and satellites, a KFC wafting its delicious deep-fried garbage in our direction, and billboards for cellular phone companies depicting cute animals at peace with technology. It was a place where people lived, and we had come to infect it.

Given my indelicate state, I was off the bus before the other pears, who were in various states of waddle. A woman in a pink uniform exited the low building and jogged over. She came right up to the bus and offered a gloved hand to the women, helped them down slowly, telling them, “Don’t rush. Careful there. Take your time,” and “I got you.” The driver just sat there. Apparently it was not in his contract to help pregnant women, or at least not during an epidemic. I watched the other women’s swollen ankles descend, their shirts ride up, their abdomens bump against the door’s rubber seal as they turned sideways for the final step, firmly grasping the stranger’s chalky glove. I took up the rear, and in we went, stopping to sanitize our hands at a dispenser like kids lining up at a drinking fountain.

I saw that one of the women wasn’t pregnant but in fact had an infant snuggled so tightly against her bosom in a scarf carrier that I’d just naturally mistaken it for being part of her. The carrier was beige and one of the infant’s feet made a small claw shape against the material, as if against a membrane, as though it wanted to break through. I remember how I stared at the toe impressions.

We filled out more forms inside. The same woman who’d helped the swollen ones off the bus brought us a bowl full of rinsed apples. We sat there, munching, ticking off boxes, and
watching a silent LCD screen report on the place we’d just come from. We learned that the others were being kept in quarantine in the hangar for three days. The disease was thought to have a two-day incubation period. One of the women watching began to cry. Her daughter and husband were still in the hangar. She cried and ate at the same time, tearing great chunks out of the red fruit and crunching the white pulp. Another woman handed her a tissue from a box on an end table. The first woman thanked her and used the tissue to wipe the juice from her fingers, ignoring tears that were spilling down her cheeks.

It turned out that three of the pregnant women had partners in the hangar. One was on business, and one was coming from a funeral and hadn’t wanted to fly at that stage. The woman with the sling freed her breast and fed the bundle before it could issue more than a few plaintive squawks. Even these were much too big-sounding for the shape of the thing that made them. Pink mouth and pink nipple latched together until the white orb of the woman was all that could be seen. The others chatted about due dates; about where they were from and where they were going; they asked about possible names. They complimented each other unfailingly, even when the names were terrible. They asked anything to avoid talking about the obvious: the reason we were together. I asked nothing and no one asked anything of me. The nurse called us one by one from the room.

After I had been seated in a small office, I asked the nurse what they would do with us.

“Do with you?” she repeated.

I asked if we’d be sent back to the airport.

“I don’t think so. I mean, I really can’t say. But I imagine if you have the sickness, they’ll isolate you, and if you don’t, they’ll send you home.”

She closed the door, leaving me alone with my sweat, which began to drip from my hairline down my neck and back, and behind my knees under my jeans. I hadn’t realized it would be so easy to tell if we had contracted the disease. Didn’t they have to wait for the two-day incubation?

The doctor came in and smiled weakly. She was younger than I had anticipated. She began talking right away.

“Antibodies bind to foreign invaders called antigens. They bind to them and neutralize a virus. Essentially consume them,” the doctor told me, as she must have told the others. That was the simplest thing she said. She kept talking, but I felt as if waves of static were zigzagging between my ears. The doctor held her forefinger and thumb apart, then pinched them together, as if there were a substance between them and she was checking its viscosity. I got the impression that something was supposed to stick to something else. She wanted to measure the antibodies, and somehow this would tell her if I had contracted the virus by showing her if my system was reacting in a binding fashion.

“So if it sticks, that’s a good thing?” I asked.

The doctor made a face I couldn’t interpret, continued to explain in language I didn’t comprehend. Apparently, this procedure was called an ELISA test, like a woman’s name. She
told me what the letters stood for. She just kept talking, but none of her words made sense to me.

“There are other tests we could do,” she finished, “but this one is faster, cheaper, and more objective.”

“It’s a better test.” I felt reassured.

“It’s a more objective test,” the doctor reiterated, as if she didn’t want to commit to anything.

“I see.” I asked if I was paying for it. No, she said. I signed the forms consenting to the test—or was I only saying I understood the test? The government had brought me here and the government was paying for it: maybe they didn’t need my consent.

When we were done, I said, “There’s something else I have to ask.”

The doctor said she’d be right back, then we could talk. She left swiftly and returned less swiftly.

The doctor came back, sat down, and gave me the same smile she had before she ran the test. How fast was the test, I wondered—could she know the result already? If she did, she said nothing.

“The thing about this pregnancy …” I tapped the desk with one fingernail and watched my finger instead of her eyes. “I don’t want it,” I told her.

“I see,” she said, a slight hitch in her voice. She asked me if I knew where I was.

“About ten miles from the airport …?”

“Yes, Jamaica, Queens,” she said, but that wasn’t what she meant. She told me the name of the medical centre. Then she said it a second time, stressing
Saint
.