Chris Adrian - The Children's Hospital

Jemma, in a chair on the third floor, watched with Pickie Beecher on her left and Ethel Puffer on her right, with all nine of her children, Kidney in her lap. Rob was in the PICU, watching on a monitor. She had not had to do much to help with the production — the idea arose independently of her and the execution happened without her contributing anything except a suggestion that the extraordinarily wide-brimmed hats that Dr. Sashay would wear for most of the show would obscure her face and her voice from the high-sitting members of the audience. She was too full of Vivian’s spirit, anyway, to get too excited about it, and she could think of better shows, anyway, than Hello, Dolly, and suspected they were only doing it because it gratified some secret fetish of Dr. Snood’s. Her thoughts were elsewhere — with Vivian, with her baby, and in the PICU — during the planning (though she duly affixed her signature to the original resolution and every rider that was attached to it) and even during the show itself, which turned out to be just as spectacular as anyone had planned.

Kidney announced that she was bored hardly before the curtain fell away and promptly fell asleep, but Pickie seemed especially to enjoy it. Jemma would never have figured him for a boy who loved show tunes, yet he bounced in his seat and acted more like a child than she had ever seen him, clapping at every entrance of Dr. Sashay, and requiring three multiple shushings from all sides before he would stop singing along. Jemma divided her attention between the stage and the PICU, leaving the smaller portion for Dr. Sashay and her ostrich-feather hat, whose narrow brim revealed her face and her voice but left the whole artifice a little unsteady, and Jemma barely noticed when it tipped off her head and she kicked it out into the audience, like it was all part of the show. She sent drifting tendrils of thought up the ramp and down the hall, into the PICU, trying to sense how the six were doing — every day she could figure things from a little farther away, but two floors was really reaching. She thought she could feel Rob, a familiar and pleasant pressure against her mind, and imagined him sitting at his usual place at the work station, his elbow on the table and his chin in his hand, watching a scrolling screen of lab values.

The six faded into her awareness, one by one, three and three around the bed where the boy slept. She imagined that they were watching, too.

She looks like a crazy old whore, Cotton said.

She is a crazy old whore, said Karen.

A delightful, wonderful old whore, said Wanda. The most wonderful old whore there ever was. Don’t you know the story?

She’s going to break her neck in those heels, said Dolores. Look at how steep that staircase is.

No, she’s on a wire. It looks like she’s going to fall, but then she swoops out over the audience, sustained by her wonderful old age, and her lust for life.

She’s going to eat it, Dolores said confidently.

I can feel it, Aloysius said. Here it comes. Jemma put them in the air above the stage, five dying critics sitting forward in their floating beds while the boy in the middle went on sleeping soundly, as eager and curmudgeonly as the old men from The Muppet Show. Dr. Sashay, coming down the high staircase that reached all the way up to the third floor on the opposite side of the lobby, was just two verses into her show-stopper when her voice broke. She recovered and went on, stepping expertly in her heels, not having to look at her feet on the narrow steps even though her ankles and legs were doing a twisty little dance with every step. Halfway down her voice broke again, and she tried to go on. The orchestra stopped when she stopped again. She cleared her throat, lifted her head, and started over. “I!” she sang, strong and clear, but then she lost her voice entirely and was wracked by a cough. She had a handkerchief ready — she’d been waving it in a carefully orchestrated pattern. She held it at her mouth, and when she brought it away during a break in the fit it was easy to see, even from far away, how it was covered in blood and ash.

“Oh my,” she said, and fell, not before Jemma became aware that her femurs had fractured spontaneously under her own weight. She bounced down the stairs, oofing and screaming and coughing, and lay still in the middle of the restaurant set.

Brava! said Dolores. Brava! Jemma hardly heard her. She stood up, dumping Kidney out of her lap, stepped back from the balcony, and ran down the ramp. People screamed — their emotions already worked up by the elaborate show — and backed against the balcony as she streaked by, and then away from it as she hurried through the lobby and ran up on the stage. The diners fled their tables as Jemma stepped up next to Dr. Sashay and assaulted her with fire, calling up reserves that seemed equal to what had harrowed the hospital to burn at the rapidly spreading blackness in her. But her rage and her fire only seemed to make it worse — she could tell that was how it looked, though she couldn’t stop herself from trying and trying to win. Whole hospitals’ worth of fire, enough to fill the whole place, the sum of the whole harrowing and again — she called and it came, and Dr. Sashay screamed, lifted by the conflagration, not saying words, though people would swear later they heard her say, “Stop, stop, please stop,” until she was just an ashen image of herself that shattered against the stage when Jemma finally released her.

Every year the Fourth of July in Severna Forest began with a semi-official joyride; in the minutes just after dawn wild teenagers would fly over the hills in borrowed convertibles, honking their horns incessantly, hooting and shouting in a display of patriotic enthusiasm flavored with mischief and the fading drunk of the previous night’s long party. Jemma was standing at her window when they came. The car, small and black, stopped in front of the house. A girl with long brown hair stood unsteadily in the back seat, lifted an air horn, and blasted it at every house in range, handling the can like a gun. She spun it over her finger and slipped it back into her pocket, then, facing Jemma but not seeing her, lifted up her shirt and shouted something unintelligible. When the car leapt away again she fell back, so her body lay across the giant paper flag that was taped over the trunk, and her shining hair spilled down to lay against the shining chrome bumper. Jemma watched her face, upside down and laughing, disappear over the crest of the hill.

She’d been waiting for the horn. Like dawn on Christmas, it released her from parent-enforced stasis and freed her to run around the house proclaiming the holiday. She ran away from the window, out her door and down the hall to her brother’s room. Calvin was sleeping through the racket, curled up in his boat-shaped bed, entwined with Al, his stuffed snake. Five feet long and thick as a bolster, the snake was lime-colored, with big sad blue eyes and a pink tongue that had become frayed over the years along its edges. Jemma watched her brother sleeping for a few moments. His face was nestled against the snake’s face, and the pressure of his breath made Al’s tongue flicker and look as if it was tasting the air. Jemma was afraid of the snake; it seemed liable to come alive at any second and strike at her, but at the same time she wished that Joe or Alice or Emily or Ra-Ra the Conqueror, some of the other residents of her bed, could wrap around her and hug back like Al did.

“Wake up,” she said, tugging on the snake’s tail, the movement transmitting through all his coils so his face moved up and down against Calvin’s cheek. Calvin opened his eyes.