Chris Adrian - The Children's Hospital

“I wish! I don’t need to, not anymore. It helps nothing, to drink. But back to our story. You and I were going to move in together. Best Boy and Angriest Aardvark. Can’t you see it?”

“No.”

“But don’t tell me,” he said, “that you haven’t ever thought about it. Didn’t I just finish saying that I see all the places that nobody else sees?” He leaned over the table, and then climbed up on it one knee at a time, so even though Rob pushed back his chair, Ishmael could push his face right up against him, so his hair touched Rob’s hair and their noses were nearly touching. He put a hand right on Rob’s belly and said, “Don’t tell me you’ve never thought about it.”

Maybe he had, but that had nothing to do with the sudden panic that rose in him. All the late days in PICU, surrounded by a deadly illness whose rules of contagion were still unknown, had not made him feel suddenly so unsafe, so threatened, as he did now. It felt suddenly like Ishmael was pressed close against him, though he still lay atop the table. Chest to chest and hip to hip and thigh to thigh, Rob suddenly felt him pressing in. Ishmael whispered his proposition, and Rob shouted back the first thing that popped into his head: “I love my wife!”

That worked. Ishmael leaned back, and climbed back down into his chair, and then stood up. “So you do,” he said, now sounding very sad. “I can’t argue with that.” He gathered two handfuls of the scattered macaroni and put them in his pocket, and then walked away.

The morning of her impeachment trial, three weeks after the arrival of the boat and the boy, Jemma lay in bed, feeling weary and achy and depressed. She’d come half-awake when Rob had left, summoned back to the PICU by his pager, and pretended to be asleep, watching through slitted eyes as he rose from bed, stretched, and pulled on his scrubs. He washed his face with water in a bowl; Pickie was still sleeping in the bathroom, and Rob was too considerate of Pickie to wash there. Jemma stirred a little, arranging herself in an accessible position and closing her eyes tight. When he kissed her she brushed a hand lazily against his face. “I love you,” he told her, and she knew the highlight of her day had just come and gone.

Back during her surgery rotation she’d lain similarly abed, with the cold pre-dawn air spilling in her window, listening to the distant murmuring of her alarm clock. She smacked it across the room every day when it brought her the news that she must wake and travel to the OR. It would not yet be four a.m., but she could perfectly imagine the accumulating insults of the day, and her perfect exhaustion and depression when she came home again to sit in front of her window and watch the lights on the bay, thinking of nothing and feeling like a big pile of shit sculpted up into the shape of a girl. She lay that morning with her face in her pillow, a tiny corner of it stuck in her mouth, and thought of rounds and her late-afternoon trial, and how she would rather sleep than get up, rather hide on the roof than go help on the sixth floor, and rather gouge her eyes out with spoons than go to the trial. Maybe, she thought, they could just mail her the verdict, or shoot a flare where she could see it from her window, red for you’re out, blue for we still love you. She turned on her side and pressed her nose against the cool cement wall, thinking of witnesses, seeing Dr. Snood and Dr. Chandra and Dr. Pudding on the stand, and then imagining a series of special witnesses, raised from the sea or conjured form the air, her mother, her father, her brother, Martin, Sister Gertrude, Laura Ingalls Wilder, the Cat in the Hat, Bugs Bunny, and that curious and amusing Martian who wore a shoe brush on his head. I knew she was trouble from the moment I saw her, the Martian said, and her mother said, All the Claflins are fucking insane, why should she be any different, and her brother rose up out of the witness box, fifteen feet tall, to crouch over the whole assembly and kill them all with a single derisive snort.

She heard Rob slip out the door, closing it so slowly behind him that the click of the latch was drawn out to two syllables. She turned again in the bed wishing she could lie on her back and throw her arm over her eyes, but she was too afraid that the baby might sit on its own blood supply and strangle itself. She piled both pillows on top of her head and fell asleep again, into a sleeping dream — she had liked those, in school, because they made it seem like you were getting twice as much sleep as you actually were — where she was lounging on a table in the Council chamber, stretching and turning and spinning like the slow hand of a clock, so her head pointed at everyone in the room and she heard them murmuring about how peaceful she looked, and what a shame it would be to wake her. Eyes closed, still turning and spinning, she became convinced that she was riding in her parents’ car, feigning sleep, and hoping that her father would carry her into the house.

“It’s time to wake,” said the angel. “They’ll need you at rounds in thirty minutes.”

“Shut up,” Jemma said. “I’m asleep.”

“You’re awake now. I see it very clearly. Shall I tell you the state of creation outside?”

“Still wet, I know,” Jemma said.

“The water temperature is twenty-six degrees Celsius. The sky is overcast with a scattering of cirrus clouds. There are fifteen dolphins circling the second floor, a school of tuna outside the main entrance, and a large jellyfish outside the emergency room. Many children are watching it. Would you like to know who the children are?”

“I’m ordering you to be quiet,” Jemma said. “I have a busy day. I need to sleep through it.”

“You have a busy day,” the angel agreed. “Breakfast has already been prepared. I will shriek an alarm if you do not rise from bed in the next three minutes.” She began to count softly.

“They don’t need me up there,” Jemma said. The angel kept counting. Jemma flailed angrily under her covers, right to left and left to right, until the count had risen to a hundred seconds. When she rolled her legs out of the bed and touched her feet to the floor the counting stopped. It wasn’t comfortable, but she thought she could probably fall asleep again like that. When she didn’t move for another minute, the angel began to shriek, just softly at first, like a kitten horribly tortured but too small to make a very big noise. Jemma stood up before it got too loud.

“Good morning,” the angel said.

“Probably for somebody, somewhere,” Jemma said. She walked to the little table. Pickie had laid out breakfast for her, two boiled eggs, a kiwi, and a banana arranged in a hairy-nosed face. He’d written a note next to the tall glass of orange juice: it is breakfast.

“Would you like something else?” the angel asked. “The abomination touched that food. I witnessed it.”

“Don’t call Pickie names.”

“He is not yet clean.”

“Neither am I,” Jemma said, smelling her upper lip, then her hair, then her shirt: cat food, smoke, illness. Vivian was sick with the botch. Jemma had stayed late with her the previous night, and not washed her hair when she came back downstairs. She peeled the eggs but ate only the fruit, drank half the juice, then took a long shower, standing for fifteen minutes under the water, resting her head against the tile.

“They are waiting,” the angel kept saying, but no one was waiting for her when she finally got up to the sixth floor. The nurses barely met her eyes, and only the children, hurrying up and down the hall with bedpans or blood, or pulling bags of IV fluid in the little red carts in which they themselves used to be hauled, smiled at her. The younger ones were merely fetchers; the older ones were helping with jobs formerly performed by adults too sick now to work.