Page 28 of It’s Me They Follow

EVEN LATER THAT EVENING

T wo big, burly EMT workers rushed to the back of the shack with their gurney. “Excuse me, ma’am,” one yelled at The Shopkeeper, who lay sleeping. “Excuse ME!” He almost touched her.

“ME?!” She startled out of her dream. In the dream, he was reaching for her, and she was just about to give him her hand when a shot of adrenaline in the form of a screaming EMT worker shocked her awake and sobered her up. “Yes,” she yelled, half dreaming.

“Someone said your water broke.” He softened.

Just then, Elle came waddling out of the bathroom toward them in her silk muumuu. “May I help you?” she said to the big, burly guys with her hands on her hips. She barely came to their shoulders.

“No, it’s the other way around.” He laughed at Elle. “Our job is to help you.”

“Thank you, but NO thank you.” She would not be helped.

She was not heading to a hospital. She did not want them to check her vitals.

She was having a home birth—at home with her grandmother!

She would let the chips fall where they may.

She’d had her first contraction. It hadn’t been so bad.

She let them know that. “Unless I’m being arrested, with all due respect, please help me by kindly getting out of my way. ”

Neither The Shopkeeper nor the EMTs could force anyone, especially Elle, to stay in the middle of nowhere to have a baby. Nor could The Shopkeeper let Elle drive the rest of the way home alone. Elle handed the shorter EMT some rolled-up money. “Consider this payment to leave us alone.”

He looked at the money in his hand. Put it into his pocket without hesitation and stepped out of their way.

Her sister waddled past the ambulance, toward the parking lot. The Shopkeeper followed. “If you’re getting in”—she looked at The Shopkeeper as she got into the car—“let’s go.” Suddenly The Shopkeeper was an accomplice to Elle’s getaway. This trip was a setup, just like she’d thought.

At night, the road along the route turned black.

Lights were fewer and farther between. There were trees, animals, rivers, and breeze, but you couldn’t see.

Radio silence played between the sisters, loud and clear, on repeat.

The smell of night air snapped The Shopkeeper back to reality.

It reminded her to keep her feet on the ground and her head out of the clouds.

Just breathe , she told herself. You’re gonna be someone’s auntie soon.

If you can teach the baby anything, teach them that. Just breathe.

“Thirty minutes,” Elle said, knowing what The Shopkeeper would ask. “They’ve been coming thirty minutes apart since my water broke.”

“We’ll just breathe,” The Shopkeeper told her sister, trying to relax them both.

“We have three hours to go,” she rambled, as if Elle didn’t know.

“That’s if we don’t stop anymore, and you probably have quite a few more centimeters to go.

The answer, when you have no other answer, is just breathe.

” The Shopkeeper wanted to be excited, but she was also aware of all the things that could happen along the way.

“Let’s sing ‘Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It’ to get us through,” she suggested.

“Us?” Elle questioned. “This isn’t affecting us. It’s me.”

“It’s us now,” The Shopkeeper disagreed.

They could sing their way through anything when they were younger.

It wasn’t until the third contraction—the one when the convertible was swerving while they were trying to shoulder shimmy, with people honking and giving them the middle finger—that they both began to question the viability of their plan to forge ahead.

On the last swerve, they hit a pothole, and The Shopkeeper felt her stomach drop between her toes.

“Pull over.” She couldn’t take it. The soul food would be coming back up if she wasn’t careful. “Please.”

“I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” her sister eked out in pain.

“I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.” The convertible was parked in a middle lane of a four-lane highway.

Her sister held her head back, her hands choking the steering wheel’s throat.

Her body stiff. Her legs extended and fully forced down flat on the brake and the clutch. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”

The Shopkeeper flipped on the hazard lights. “Okay,” she said in her softest customer-service voice. She was finding out she worked well under pressure. “We are gonna get through this together.” And as she said it, she believed. “Just breathe.”

Her sister nodded her head in an alarming and intense yes.

“Stars?” The Shopkeeper asked for a promise.

“Stars,” Elle agreed.

“This contraction is NOT gonna last forever. If you can breathe, that’s all you need.” They inhaled and exhaled in sync, the way The Shopkeeper had learned in class.

Elle shook her head yes sometimes and no sometimes and blew out puffs of breath without opening her eyes as the contraction intensified. It was as though it would last forever. “As soon as it’s over, you’re going to drive us right there onto the side of the road.”

This contraction was endless. The Shopkeeper stared at the glowing moon.

The contraction continued. She stared at the swaying trees.

It wouldn’t stop. She looked behind them for oncoming cars.

She wondered if the brooding clouds signaled rain.

She was calm on the outside, terrified on the inside.

“‘What makes this path most important are the footsteps that follow.’” A still, small voice whispered in her left ear.

“Did you hear that?” she asked Elle.

“Don’t even,” Elle replied, shaking her head no.

The Shopkeeper remembered having to ride on the back of Elle’s bike when they were kids.

Friends laughed as her teeny-tiny sister rode them both to school one morning in the pouring-down rain.

There was only one bike between them, and Elle would not leave her sister behind in a storm.

Elle stand-pedaled the whole way to school with The Shopkeeper gripping her seat tighter and tighter, legs out by her sides, eyes shut and afraid as the wind and rain smacked them around.

“Put your arm around my waist,” Elle had pleaded. It would help them balance. And though The Shopkeeper had wished she could, as usual she had been too afraid to hold on to anyone—including her own sister.

“Okay,” Elle said now, loosening her grip on the steering wheel and snapping The Shopkeeper back to their present reality. “Got it.”

“Got what?”

“Another thirty.” Elle turned off the hazard lights, turned on an audiobook about microeconomics, and began to drive as if nothing had happened.

“Microeconomics in the middle of nowhere... Doesn’t get better than this,” The Shopkeeper mocked.

Right then, she realized why her sister was so adamant about not letting her drive. Everything she had, she’d gotten on her own. Alone. She worked so hard that she was scared to lose the slightest thing, thinking it would set off a domino effect that would make her lose it all.

“You do realize you’re in LABOR?! Active labor.

I think whatever is going on with me is a whole lot simpler than what is going on with you.

I can drive; I just have to remember how.

It’s like riding a bike; it all comes back.

Shift. Gear. Clutch. Shift. Gear. Clutch. ” The Shopkeeper knew she could do it.

Elle’s eyes welled up and widened. She was afraid.

“Sister...” she cried. The year before, the two had been in a hospital room together, with a doctor telling them her sister’s baby wouldn’t make it.

“Promise you won’t make me go back.” It was the cold, isolated emergency room.

The rude doctor. The incompetent nurse. The beeping and prodding.

She remembered how poorly Elle had been treated, left alone to watch her infant take its last breath, and agreed. “I promise, no hospitals.”

Here they were again, and this time, The Shopkeeper was determined to give her sister what the doctor couldn’t—a healthy baby. She’d make it right.

“It’s okay to let me drive for once.” Maybe it wasn’t her own fear that made The Shopkeeper ride in the passenger seat of life when she knew she could steer; maybe it was others’ fears.

She’d convinced herself it was easier for others when she played small because they could play tall.

It was all make pretend , she rationalized.

“Trust,” she told Elle, pointing to the air around them—that had been the agreement.

“If you can’t trust me, trust that. Trust them.

” She always ignored what Elle said about make pretend. “Make pretend you can trust.”

Her sister didn’t respond. She was going faster and faster when they both felt the first drop of rain.

The Shopkeeper looked at the time. “Twenty more minutes. How long till it pours?”

“I got this.” Elle pressed the gas. Another few drops of rain fell from the opening sky. Rain was The Shopkeeper’s favorite.

“What do you do in a convertible when it rains?” The Shopkeeper asked, as if it were a knock-knock joke.

Elle stared at the road. “Park.” She smiled gently. “Surrender.”

Then, as if timed perfectly, they arrived at a Wawa. They turned into the gas station’s parking lot and rolled up the drop-top. The rain began to pour so hard that they could not see.

“Exactly.” The Shopkeeper hoped the rain would wash away a lifetime of tension. They ran into Wawa, laughing and wet and searching for water before the next contraction.

“I’m thirsty,” The Shopkeeper said.

“Me too,” Elle conceded. “Me too.”

For the first time in years, the two sisters agreed.