The Uninvited (16 page)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

....................................

Chapter 17

I
found the Red Cross ambulance parked alongside the curb outside Daniel’s store, rumbling, shaking, ready to drive.

Addie’s mask-covered face turned my way from the passenger side, and she sat up straight in the seat. “There she is.”

Nela’s eyes popped into view above her own swath of gauze beside Addie. “You can always bring him with you, you know,” she called to me. “It wouldn’t hurt to have a man around for the heavier lifting.”

I buttoned up my coat and wished my face didn’t heat up like a chimney every time anyone alluded to sex or Daniel.

“If you’re driving four blocks away from the Red Cross headquarters”—I hopped into the empty driver’s seat beside Nela—“then you can certainly drive down to Southside on your own. Why are you waiting here for me?”

Neither passenger answered. Nela fussed with the black Red Cross–issued necktie hanging down her chest. Addie picked at a spot of dirt or dust or something equally miniscule on the dashboard.

“You’ve helmed a massive automotive,” I said, “
and
parked it nicely alongside a curb, I might add. Not an easy task in the slightest. Why did you wait around for me when I know you must be longing to drive off as soon as possible?”

“I don’t want to cross the railroad tracks,” said Nela. She tugged on her necktie with so much nervous strength, she unraveled the knot. “I don’t want to stall in front of a locomotive ever again.”

“You won’t. You’ve gotten so much more adept at driving. You can get yourself over the tracks just as easily as you drove down this street. Here . . .” I jumped out of the vehicle and waved for Nela to do the same. “Let’s trade places. You drive, and I’ll be sitting right next to you if anything happens.”

“Oh, Lord, have mercy on our souls,” said Addie into the thick gray collar of her coat.

Nela slid across the seat, her mouth tight, her body rigid. She stepped out of the ambulance so that I could scoot in between them.

I’d never heard such a troubled sigh as when Nela dropped down into the driver’s position.

“You’ll be absolutely fine.” I nudged my arm against hers. “I promise.”

Nela lowered her face. “I’m just a stupid woman, Ivy. And a foreigner at that.”

“Poppycock!—as my granny Letty would have said.” I raised my chin. “I’ve been driving my family’s trucks and tractors since I was fifteen years old, and not once did my womb or my breasts get in the way of steering and braking.”

Both Nela and Addie laughed throaty chuckles.

“American birth certificates aren’t required to power the vehicles either,” I added. “You can do this, Nela. You merely require confidence and practice.”

“All right.” Nela released the emergency brake—as well as another sigh that seemed to derive from the bottom of her lungs. “Let us go.” She pulled on the throttle and spark advance levers with beautiful synchronicity, rolled the ambulance forward, and drove us four blocks west to Lincoln Street, just past the Hotel America. Her left turn around the corner felt brilliant, as smooth as a July boat ride on Minter Lake. The engine sighed with satisfied little
pop-pop-pop
s.

“You’re doing brilliantly, you see?” I asked. “Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

The steel tracks and railway-crossing sign glowed up ahead in the light of the moon. Nela’s breathing heightened. Her fingers whitened on the steering wheel. The ambulance slowed and whined.

“Keep driving,” I said in the voice I typically reserved for piano pupils whose fingers tripped over keys. “There’s no need to stop until just before we reach the tracks. We’ll look and listen for signs of any locomotives, and then you’ll guide the ambulance straight over those tracks, the same way you set off down Willow Street without a hitch. Keep the clutch lever straight up, in neutral.”

I heard the sounds of whispering beside me and realized Addie was reciting the Lord’s Prayer under her breath. The car jerked and sputtered with Nela’s dimming confidence.

“Keep the clutch pedal pushed all the way forward in first gear,” I said, “and you won’t stall. You’ll simply stop for a moment so we can listen for trains. Keep going a little farther.”

Nela propelled the ambulance forward with too much throttle. We came so close to those tracks, I could have practically reached out to touch them.

“Stop!” I cried.

She slammed her foot against the brake, and our heads whipped forward on our necks.

“
Cholera!
” Nela smacked the steering wheel with the palms of her hands.

“What?” I leaned forward and squinted into the darkness. “Do you see signs . . . ? Are people now sick from cholera, too?”

“No, it’s a Polish way to swear. I don’t like sitting this close to the tracks.
Cholera jasna!
”

“Oh, Jesus.” Addie braced her hands against the dashboard. “Don’t scare us to death with your swear words too, Nela.”

“It’s all right.” I gasped and rubbed a stitch in my left side. “The engine didn’t stall, so you’ll just need to adjust the levers and roll us forward. Addie, you keep your eyes and ears positioned to the right, and I’ll watch the left. There aren’t any patients in the back of the ambulance, correct?”

“Nope, it’s empty,” said Addie, scooting toward the open doorway.

“Where are you going?” I grabbed her by the arm.

“She doesn’t trust me.” Nela squirmed. “No one should trust me. I’m going to put us straight in the path of a train again.”

“I’m not leaving—I’m right here,” said Addie, but she twisted her body to the right and clamped her hand around the side bar, as if ready to eject herself from the ambulance at a moment’s notice.

I scanned the dark expanse of tracks to the left and strained to hear whether a whistle pierced the night air in the distance. A bat screeched its eerie cry from somewhere in the black sky overhead, but the tracks lay silent.

Just to be certain, in case Addie was getting too ready to jump to pay close enough attention, I checked the right side, too.

“I don’t see or hear any signs of a train,” I said. “We’re clear.”

Addie whimpered and started right back up with the Lord’s Prayer. Nela gasped for air like a fish thrown on land.

“Just relax. It’s all right.” I cupped my fingers around the back of Nela’s hand. “Sing a song to calm yourself if you need to.”

“I only know Polish songs. That damned America Protective League will drag me away if I start singing in Polish this close to North Buchanan.” She clutched the steering wheel with all her might and continued to breathe in a panic. She even burped from sucking in so much air. I worried she might vomit.

“ ‘Father and I went down to camp,’ ” sang Addie in a small voice beside me. “ ‘Along with Captain Gooding . . .’ ”

I turned my face toward her and saw her wide-open eyes peering at mine through the darkness.

Addie continued: “ ‘And there we saw the men and boys . . .’ ”

I nodded and joined in. “ ‘As thick as hasty pudding.’ ”

Nela’s left hand grabbed hold of the emergency brake.

“ ‘Yankee Doodle keep it up,’ ” I sang with Addie, and we craned our necks to see down the tracks. “ ‘Yankee Doodle dandy / Mind the music and the step . . .’ ”

With a squeal of rubber, Nela threw the ambulance into gear and launched us over the tracks as if shooting us to the moon. Wind tore through our hair and split across our faces, and the shimmering metal rails fell into the distance behind us.

Nela kept on driving with reckless abandon to the south side of town, and at the top of her lungs she sang out, “ ‘Mind the music and the step / And with the girls be handy.’
Cholera!
That was fun!”

W
E
D
I
D
N
’
T
F
I
N
D
any red-and-white influenza notices hanging on front doors that night. Nela drove the ambulance up and down the lamplit streets of houses clustered throughout Southside, but all indicators of the flu seemed to have lifted from the earth. Few lights shone behind windows. Less clothing hung from the web of lines crisscrossing the alleyways and side yards. An unnerving emptiness and silence inhabited the entire region.

I scooted to the edge of the seat in case I had simply missed the signs because of my new center position in the vehicle.

“Where are the notices?” I asked. “I can’t honestly believe people stopped getting sick that quickly. Can you?”

Addie shook her head. “I told you before, those influenza signs are as embarrassing as all heck. They tried to make us post one on our door right before we lost my sister Florence. Mama said it made her feel dirty as a dog.” Addie rocked against me to the beat of the ambulance puttering through the sleeping neighborhoods. “I bet people are pulling the signs down to keep their pride.”

Nela steered us onto a new road, where the wheels crunched across crisp autumn leaves scattered across dirt and gravel.

“I suppose we have to hope people will hear us driving by,” I said, “and come outside to wave us down.”

“That’s not good enough,” muttered Nela under her breath.

“How else are we supposed to find people, then?”

Neither of them answered my question. I couldn’t answer it myself. An air of defeat settled over all of us in that chilly, open driving compartment.

We crept through the streets for close to a half hour, and during that entire time we came across only one sign, posted on the door of a tiny wooden structure almost small enough to be a milk shed. The home sat on the southwesternmost edge of Southside, just before the land opened up to fields of autumn crops. Dark outlines of pumpkins lay just beyond a rusted collection of harrows and plows.

No one answered the front door. The knob wouldn’t budge when Nela jiggled it. We got back into the ambulance with wilted postures and frustrated breaths, and we pressed onward.

“Maybe we should just get out of the ambulance”—Nela steered us back onto the first street we had scanned—“and go door to door, knocking.”

“No!” said Addie. “Are you crazy? It’s the middle of the night. We’ll wake up both the sick
and
the healthy. No one needs that right now.”

“There is a daytime set of volunteers that drives down here, isn’t there?” I asked.

“Yes.” Nela gave a brusque nod. “But that doesn’t mean we’re not needed right now. The flu doesn’t care about night and day.”

“We had a fine doctor in our neighborhood.” Addie sank back into the seat and crossed her arms over her gray coat. “Before he answered the call for medical help overseas. Stupid, selfish war.”

“Benjie’s father?” I asked.

Addie nodded. “He would have been one of the first to help here in Southside. People of all colors trusted him.”

“This is madness.” Nela slammed her foot into the brake, and the ambulance skidded to a stop—miraculously, without stalling. “People must be lying in their homes, desperate for help.”

“Should we transport more of the sick out of Polish Hall?” I asked. “Like we did with Benjie?”

Both women spun their heads my way as if I’d just proposed carting the sick to Germany.

“We volunteered to fetch people from their homes,” said Nela. “We’ve got to keep doing what they sent us out to do.”

“I sort of feel . . .” I buttoned up my coat against the cold. “I just . . . I don’t think driving around all night in the dark is going to help anyone. I feel we should either relieve the emergency hospital of their work and take people to your house, where the recovery rate seems high. Or else stop for the night.”

“We can’t stop.” Nela released the emergency brake and set us driving again. “And we can’t show up at a hospital and steal their patients.”

“It’s not even a real hospital,” I said. “It’s more of a desperation ward. A ‘We Don’t Know How to Properly Take Care of Our Residents Here in Buchanan’ Ward.”

“We’re not even supposed to be driving this truck,” said Addie.

I swiveled toward her with a shift of my knees. “What?”

“Addie!” hissed Nela, and she stopped the truck again. “You were never supposed to tell her that. I warned you—”

“She might as well know the truth after coming this far with us.” Addie sank back into the seat, her arms still locked across her chest. “I’m not even a registered Red Cross nurse. This is my sister’s uniform.”

“But . . . what?” I turned back to Nela. “Have you been stealing this ambulance every night?”

“No, it’s not quite like that . . .” Nela unbuttoned a pocket on the breast of her coat. “I’m a card-carrying Red Cross volunteer with hygiene courses and hospital volunteer hours completed. Liliana had trained to drive ambulances in the hopes of volunteering overseas.” She pulled out a Red Cross card and shoved it at me. I saw an official Red Cross stamp and certification that referred to her as “Mrs. Fred Stone.”

“Who’s Mrs. Stone?” I asked.

“Me.” Nela grabbed the card out of my hand and wedged it back into her pocket. “I told you the first night I met you, my husband is American. I’m not lying about who I am, and I didn’t steal this ambulance.”

“Then why did Addie just say—?”

“Liliana and I answered the call for help at the end of September, after watching people suffer without anyone coming to save them. She fell sick one night when we were on duty, and I needed to drive her. No one else was there with me except for Addie—this crazy girl who was mad as the devil from losing her sister and desperate to help. So we jumped into the ambulance and went.”

“No one knows you’re driving this truck every night?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter!” Nela slammed her hands against the steering wheel and caused Addie and me to jump. “People need help. I don’t even care that this seventeen-year-old girl hasn’t had one single hour of hospital training. I don’t care that her skin is as black as coal. She’s strong enough to carry a stretcher. She’s willing to walk through Southside muck to save people’s lives. That’s all that matters right now, Ivy. Nothing else matters.”