The Blondes (28 page)

She told us that there were other quarantines, and that we were lucky to have a whole school, with only fifteen of us or so to a room. Others had been bused from the U.S.–Canada
border to a new outlet mall that was as yet unoccupied. The government had leased it and the school. They called these newly established centres Women’s Entry and Evaluation, or WEE. The outlet mall WEE didn’t have nearly the facilities we had, the woman said happily. I couldn’t understand how she would consider anything a triumph at that moment. She was one of those glass-half-full types, and I would’ve been ready to choke her at the end of the eight weeks if someone else hadn’t actually tried. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The woman’s name was Michelle Morell. I knew the names of all the other women while I was there, but, consciously or subconsciously, I’ve blocked most of them out now.

I fell asleep that night to a hollow wind and the sound of strangers sniffing and coughing and turning over. There were no curtains on our windows, but there was no moon either, so I stared up at an opaque sky and wondered how Larissa had reacted to my absence. I’d done it to her again: said I’d be coming, then disappeared.

The first illnesses came two to three days in. They took out a woman in room 3, tied down to a stretcher. I was outside on the playground at the time. The others told me that her mouth was foaming, and that they’d collected her sample bags of hair and taken those out with her. She was trucked off someplace else for observation, and/or tests, and/or—it was rumoured—termination. Room 8 buzzed with conspiracy theories and speculation, each as plausible as the next.

I decided afterward that the playground was a good, safe area, since the soldiers granted us a couple hours of outside time daily. The other women ignored this privilege and tended to stay indoors, or clustered in small circles up by the building. I spent time outside regardless of the weather. After a few days, one of the soldiers brought out a basketball. I didn’t know if he’d located it in the gym or brought it from home, and he didn’t tell me. He showed me how to do a foul shot, and also an outside shot without using the backboard, before returning dutifully to his post. It was one of the few humane acts I’d experienced there.

The only other time I saw the soldiers acting like normal teenagers—which some of them were—was when they were typing frantically into their iPhones. They weren’t supposed to use them while on duty, but once we heard one of the soldiers laughing quietly and telling his buddy about how he had just texted their commanding officer, “What’s up, sir!”

Michelle Morell tried and tried to persuade this fellow to allow her to borrow it to send a text or check the Internet for news, but whatever mirth he’d been showing before she entered the hallway disappeared quickly. He just snorted and pocketed the phone. “That one’s a hard, mean thing,” Michelle said when she returned. “But I
know
he’ll come around.” None of them ever did, though.

I’ve never been very skilled at sports, but I got pretty good with the basketball as long as I didn’t try to do anything ridiculous, like a layup. The soldier who gave me the ball was named Augustus, and he told me to call him August. I let
August do the layups, although he’d usually get only one or two in before he had to go back to his post. He must have liked me to break protocol like that, and that was fine by me because it meant I had one non-risk person I could talk to. I didn’t know why he liked me—although, now that I think about it, my chest had expanded two sizes in the three weeks since the pregnancy test. I had bought a couple new bras in a bigger size when I lost my bags at the airport, but already my cleavage was spilling out over the top of them.

Soon there was another outbreak in room 5: a woman didn’t get up one morning, and everyone said she had menstrual cramps. Then, at around 2 p.m., she suddenly stood up, lurched out into the hallway, grabbed Michelle Morell by the throat, jammed her against the wall, lifted her off the ground, and shook her. The army took the woman down in about two seconds, and carried her out. I remember the sound of the footsteps: the private running back into the library to gather the woman’s sample bags, and then chasing after the stretcher with them. Michelle Morell was treated on premises, mostly just tending to bruises and some counselling alongside a lot of blood tests and saliva swabs. The soldiers put her in a storage closet in case fluids had been exchanged in the attack, and after that, whenever I passed her in the hallway she bragged about having her own “room.”

I had told August about my pregnancy that first time he brought out the ball, but he said he didn’t know what to advise me. He asked if I’d talked to either of the medical staff, and I told him they’d promised to see what they could do.

“Well, then,” he said. And he arced the ball with one arm over his head right into the basket. There weren’t any nets; it was just the metal hoops. It had been two days since I’d visited Health Care about the pregnancy and nothing had happened.

“Can you help me?” I asked again.

August dribbled the ball around, turning his back to me like I was supposed to take it from him while he guarded it. He jumped and turned in mid-air, sinking another. “I don’t believe in abortion,” he said. But when he saw my face he said, “But I hear you.”

I went back to Health Care, even though I was afraid. It seemed to me to be a more high-risk area for SHV. No one knew if I was susceptible or not. Red was an in-between colour. There had been only one highly publicized case involving an infected redhead, although there were possibly others. The Health Care unit was in the principal’s office. There was an outer foyer where an assistant would have sat if there had been one. But since the school hadn’t been wired for Internet or phone lines yet, the foyer was being used as a storage area. A desk was covered in stacks of bandages, bottles of peroxide, and boxes of gloves.

The soldiers used the staff room across the way as a break spot, and as I waited my turn to talk to a nurse, I could hear a couple of them in there. Normally they were stone-faced, angry, and bored. But out of sight from us, they were cracking jokes about how you’d think being in an isolated place with a gang of suddenly single women would be more fun. That was probably the nicest thing they said. The rest was tougher in tone—one part repulsed, and one part lustful.

There were two nurses in the principal’s quarters. The one I was there to see was Nurse Ben. He called me into the VP’s office and said casually, “Sit down, Hazel.”

No one had called me by my name in a week, even though Augustus had asked it. Nurse Ben had an amicable manner that disarmed me. “Here’s what I’ve got for you,” he said. He opened my file. “I understand you’re pregnant and you believe you’re in the eleventh or twelfth week?”

“I didn’t think anything was going to happen.”

“You know this isn’t a hospital. We have to get the equipment and we’re going to get an ultrasound technician out here first to accurately determine how far along you are.” Nurse Ben said that’s where they had to start things, and unfortunately, he couldn’t make any promises about which day that might happen. He made some notes and closed the file, so I stood up. But Nurse Ben told me to have a seat again, please. He said he was going to tell me something I didn’t want to hear.

I never like it when people do that: prep you for bad news. It only makes it worse, because you have this horrible apprehension while they wind themselves up to it. I could practically feel my blood pressure rise—at my age! I remember I stared at the shelf above him, which, given his height, seemed positioned so that he’d hit his head on it every time he stood up or sat down. It was jammed with plastic bins containing assorted paper packets and bandages. He whistled to get my attention and I realized he was my age, no older. His face had turned very pink, like mine always does, and I knew that whatever he was going to say was hard for him. I looked
him in the eyes because I thought it might make him feel better, and as soon as I did so, I relaxed more than I had thought I would, and listened.

“You should prepare yourself to have this pregnancy. Mentally. It’s possible we will be able to get you the procedure, but the country has declared a national state of emergency. No one, at any level, was prepared for this epidemic. It’s possible, and we will do everything we can for you, but I do have to tell you it’s not probable.”

There was an uncomfortable silence. I leaned forward in my chair. Then I leaned back. Ben pushed a box of tissue at me, even though I wasn’t about to cry. When he realized I wasn’t going to, he said, “I know that’s not what you want to hear, and if you want to yell at me, I won’t blame you.”

I still didn’t say anything. I stared out the window and Nurse Ben shifted around on his chair. There was a Tim Hortons coffee shop across the field on the highway, in a little plaza that hadn’t opened yet. I could see it from his window and I could usually see it from the playground area too, even though my window in room 8 faced the back way. The shop’s big red sign shone in the sun even though it wasn’t lit up, just a scrawl of lettering on the squat brown building. The windows underneath the sign were always black. Like everything else out there, it had been built too soon.

Nurse Ben followed my gaze. “That’s my view,” he said. “Looking at that every day really sucks.”

“Yeah,” I agreed.

“I just want to walk across the field and find a steaming hot
cup of coffee in my hand,” Nurse Ben continued, telling me we were certainly not the only Canadians stuck in quarantine, and human rights groups were lobbying for better conditions for us. It might result in actual catering, he had read. Something more healthful.

I knew someone out there cared about us because even though we had no access to media, we were given clothing donations from the Goodwill. Garbage bags full of clothes had been trucked in and dumped in the gym. Brand-new packets of underwear were at a premium, and these were judiciously allotted. There wasn’t a lot of nightwear, so we mostly slept in our clothes, or the bolder ones in just T-shirts. There was a janitor’s mop closet where we showered on a strict schedule. SHV could be transmitted by blood, which meant that menses and all associated garbage had to be treated as if it were industrial waste.

Another two women got sick. They were both from room 3, the room the first frothing woman had been in. There was debate among the women in room 8, but eventually we decided that it was more likely they’d become sick here than arrived sick.

After that, everyone was on edge. We began to limit our social activities. One woman had a deck of cards, and before that point, there had been some marathon games. After, no one wanted to play.

I didn’t mind. I was never much good at cards anyway, never having had anyone to play with growing up except my
mom, so I continued to limit myself to basketball. Most of the time now, Augustus didn’t join me, but just watched from his post.

Room 3 was the first and only room to go. Four of the women were taken from it, and then, one afternoon, the guards realized it was going to spread to all of them. I heard one of the uniforms in the hallway say, “It’s looking bad. They’re looking ugly down there,” and another said, “Don’t talk in front of the blondes”—by which he meant us, all of us, the women.

The school was L-shaped and room 3 was around the corner and halfway down the other branch. I don’t know what the soldiers did. We didn’t see it and I’m grateful, but we heard it. A lot of shouting and hammering. Then we saw a couple soldiers come in the main doors by the reception-cum-medical area lugging welding equipment. Off they went down that hallway. I guess the outside windows had already been sealed. I won’t tell you what happened, but it was a dreadful din that seemed to have no end, and I hope you never hear anything like it in your lifetime.

Eventually, we were brought a bag of orange industrial earplugs. When the soldiers cleaned up the mess, they locked us in our rooms, and we thought they’d seal us in too. One of the older women in our room, her skin like turkey flesh on her bones, said she was going to break the window and run. She probably would have broken a hip if she’d tried. But she didn’t, of course.

Through that same window two days later we watched the hazmats arrive, and we caught sight of them going in and out with carts full of bags, bags, and more bags.

By the end of the week a truck arrived bringing better food, as if any of us wanted to eat after what had happened with room 3. But at the same time, we
did
eat. In fact, we ate a surprising amount, as if to remind ourselves to stay healthy and keep living. The government had caved to public pressure and we were brought top-notch stuff from a company whose truck had a film slate stencilled on the side and the name Take One Foods. We heard the soldiers complaining that our food was better than what they got.

As I ate an egg focaccia sandwich and drank urn-spewed coffee with brown sugar from a paper cup made from recycled materials, I wondered if I could fake a heart attack. That would get me on an ambulance and out of there. The soldiers might buy it after all the fast food we’d been given. I even gave serious thought to throwing myself into a psychotic episode, pretending to have SHV, but I was worried that would land me in a ward where I’d be at greater risk, if that were possible.

After a second cup of Seattle’s Best, blood firing, I decided to give the ultrasound one more day. If it hadn’t happened by Tuesday morning, on Tuesday night I would climb the fence and walk out. By this time, I want you to know, it wasn’t that I was so determined to be rid of you personally, but I wanted to
choose what to do, and I could feel that choice being taken—day by day, hour by hour—from me.

The men were intimidating, but I knew they’d acted as they did because of the dire circumstances in room 3. I don’t think they were expecting any of us healthy women to attempt to bust out. What would they do, shoot me? They might have, of course, but I wasn’t thinking straight at the time. There was only ever a half-squad (six to eight soldiers) on duty at night. I thought that at worst, they’d run out, grab me, and bring me back. At best, I’d slip past, they wouldn’t notice, and I’d walk or hitch to a hospital in town.