Ananya places a free hand above her heart and shakes her head. Ramola is afraid tears might be coming from one or both of them.
Ramola says she should go and read through the training protocols (she has already done so, twice) and so she can pack. She’ll be working sixteen-hour shifts for the foreseeable future, and likely sleeping at the hospital. It’s an excuse; her overnight bag is already packed and on the floor next to the front door.
Mum clucks her tongue and whispers a one-line prayer. She makes Ramola promise to be safe and to send updates whenever she can. Mum turns the phone away from her and points it at Mark. He’s been there the whole time, off-screen and listening, sitting at their little breakfast nook, his elbows on the table, his meaty mitts covering his mouth, glasses perched on top of his head. His eyes always look so small when he isn’t wearing his glasses. He’s already been crying and Ramola tears up at the sight. Before she closes out the chat window, Dad waves, clears his throat, and in a voice coming from thousands of miles away, he says, “A right mess, innit?”
“The rightest.”
“Be safe, love.”
Ramola is thirty-four years old and lives by herself in a two-bedroom, 1,500-square-foot townhouse, one of four row units in a small complex called River Bend in Canton, Massachusetts, which is fifteen miles southwest of Boston. Her well-meaning parents encouraged her to buy the townhouse, telling her she was a well-paid professional and “of an age” (Ramola’s “Thanks for that, Mum” did nothing to deter her from banging on with the hard sell) and therefore she should own property and not insist upon throwing money away on renting flats. Ramola regrets buying the place and feels foolish for allowing her parents, ultimately, to sway her when she knew better. Functionally, the townhouse has more space than she needs, or wants. The dining area of the large common room goes unused, as she eats her meals at the granite-topped kitchen island or on the couch in front of the TV. The spare bedroom/office has become the dusty storage/dumping ground for stacks of textbooks she can’t bring herself to sell or let rot in a basement. The monthly association fees in conjunction with the high municipal taxes are more of a burden than she anticipated. With all the open space—the high cathedral ceilings, the second-floor loft overlooking the common area—the heating and cooling utility bills are twice as much as what she paid in her one-bedroom flat in Quincy. If that weren’t daunting enough, Ramola faces twelve more years of suffocating medical school loan payments. She has confided in Jacquie and Bobby, two nurses at her office, that she doesn’t feel clinically depressed when she goes home, she feels financially depressed. Jacquie and Bobby are her closest work friends despite their only having gone out together socially on a handful of occasions, usually to celebrate a birthday or impending time off due to the winter holidays.
The laptop is closed, the television turned off, her phone in her pocket. She knows she should leave one of the devices on, stay connected, but she also needs a break—even for just a few deep-breath-sized moments—from the news onslaught and its cat’s cradle of conflicting information. The house is eerily quiet, making her too-large home feel downright cavernous as though the digital media light and noise fills physical, exterior space.
Should she check in with her neighbors? She doesn’t know them well. On her right is Frank Keating, the recently divorced town selectman—the only things more relentless than his conspiracy-leaden political proselytizing are his four male cats who spray everything in sight. In the unit to her left is a late-middle-aged couple, the Piacenzas; empty-nesters with one adult son who frequently visits and referees their loud arguments. The first unit houses Lisa and Ron Daniels and their infant daughter, Dakota. Lisa is friendly enough, but always harried. Ramola has yet to have a conversation with her that didn’t involve new-parent worries about the health of their daughter. Her husband Ron is subverbal, barely capable of a head-nod acknowledgment in the parking lot.
Ramola parts the curtains from her bay window and peers out at the small parking lot walled off from busy Neponset Street by a row of trees and evergreen shrub hedges. A breeze sends dead leaves skittering like mice across the pavement. She watches intently for other movement, any kind of movement. She hopes Frank followed the Wildlife Service’s first recommendation (Bloody hell, how long ago was that? Seven days? Ten?) to keep all cats indoors. She doesn’t realize she’s holding her breath until she exhales and fogs up the window.
Ramola returns to the kitchen and wakes her laptop from sleep mode. No new emails. She enlarges the web browser with three open tabs. She refreshes the CDC’s website along with mass.gov and CNN.com. The government sites have nothing new on their pages. CNN’s panicked headlines and live-stream updates (including bloody images from overnight riots and looting of a shopping plaza in the affluent suburb of Wellesley) are alarming, overwhelming, and she closes her laptop again.
She thinks about what tomorrow will be like at the hospital and her head spins through worst-case scenarios. She closes her eyes and focuses on breathing deeply. She visualizes getting in her car, driving to either Logan or T. F. Green Airport and somehow boarding.
Returning to England has been Ramola’s oh-I-give-up plan for as long as she’s lived in the United States. She daydreamed about going home when she was stressed about her classes as an undergraduate and medical student, when she was a resident working eighty-hour weeks and came home too tired to even cry, during the fourteen months of her ill-fated cohabitation (his word) with Cedric and their tepid but never cantankerous relationship not so much falling apart as eroding under calm but relentless waves and tides, and whenever she was made to feel like an outsider, a foreigner. Ramola has always fought to persevere, to show herself and to show everyone else she can do it, and she has always fought to win (as her mum puts it). However, there is a small but undeniable part of herself that takes comfort in imagining the detailed journey home: landing in Gatwick, a train to Victoria Station, the tube to King’s Cross, another train that rolls through the countryside, small towns, and swelling cities, and eventually to Newcastle, then a forty-minute Metro to South Shields, a two-mile walk (her rolling luggage listing consistently to her left), and it’s warm and sunny even though it is never warm and sunny often enough in northern England, and finally she’s standing before their semidetached home with the brick walls and a white trellis, and she walks through the small garden and through the back door, then to the kitchen to sit with Mum and Dad at their ridiculous little table with the ugly yellow vinyl tablecloth and they both glance over the frames of their reading glasses and smile that wan I-see-you-dear smile. The final scene is so vivid that, as a younger woman, she luxuriated in the idea of her return truly having occurred in an alternate reality. As safe and as reassuring as the returning-home daydream is, it fills her with melancholy; a fear of the inevitability of mortality, as though if she allows the daydream to continue, it will speed into the future too quickly, one in which she and her parents remain rooted at the table, and it’s there they will molder until the three chairs at the table go empty, one by one by one. All of which is why she has resolved to never move back home, financial stresses and everything and anything else be damned.
Ramola clucks her tongue at herself and says, “Now, that’s enough of that,” and picks up her phone. She texts Jacquie and Bobby in an attempt to rally their spirits and hers. It backfires dreadfully.