Chris Adrian - The Children's Hospital

Jemma closed her eyes, too, along with the fifty people crowded into the room. She saw differently with them closed, but it was just as plain: the botch in every body. She thought she could feel it, the strain in the minds as they tried to feel what Father Jane was feeling. Here and there someone let out a little peep of a groan. It was so quiet, but only Jemma marked it when Father Jane stopped breathing, and for many minutes no one but Jemma knew she was dead.

“Do you think she’ll come?” Jemma asked Calvin.

“She always comes,” he said. They were waiting for their ride to school, a woman named Deb who drove a yellow taxi. Their mother had hired her months before, to solve the problem of driving them to school in the winter, after a failed experiment with a carpool — she’d entered them in it enthusiastically, but pulled them out quickly when she realized she was expected to drive other people’s children into town. Now it was September, in the middle of a late heat wave, and there was no snow anywhere, but their mother liked the arrangement too much to have canceled it on account of good weather, especially during times like now when she had retreated into her darkened room to sleep and sleep. Jemma, not very far penetrated into the third grade, was eager to get to school, not least because she feared the wrath of her new teacher, Sister Gertrude.

“Let’s get the bikes.”

“Don’t be stupid, Jemma.” She put her head out the door to listen for the distinctive rattle of Deb’s taxi. The hot, wet air made her gasp a little. It was quiet, except for the birds, whose song seemed muted by the heat and humidity, and who walked slowly over the lawn, as if they were too exhausted by the weather to fly.

“We should get Mom,” she said a little later. Her brother shook his head.

“You try and wake her up,” he said. Jemma was afraid to do that, but after five more minutes of watching their empty driveway her anxiety pushed her down the hall and around the corner to the foot of the stairs and their parents’ door. It was closed, of course, and radiating the sense of forbidding that it sometimes did, so Jemma was sure that if she touched the doorknob she’d get a shock that would blow her across the hall, clear through the picture window in the living room, over all three ravines to land, dead and smoking, on Beach Road. She stared at the knob for a moment before she reached for it slowly, and let her hand hover just an inch from it before grabbing it. She got a little thrill, a tingle at the base of her spine, but no shock. She turned it, thinking it would be locked, but it wasn’t. The knob turned, but the catch did not disengage. She was about to turn it further when she heard Deb’s horn.

She ran back down the hall, picked up her bag, and quickly overtook Calvin, who was never in such haste that he didn’t walk along the narrow line of railroad ties that bordered both sides of the driveway. Jemma opened the door, threw her bag in, and clambered in after it.

“Hey kiddos!” said Deb, not turning around to look at them but smiling into the mirror. From where she was sitting Jemma could see an eye and a cheek, some teeth and a portion of her maroon lips.

“We’re kind of late,” Jemma said. Calvin climbed in beside her, hauling on the door with both hands to slam it enthusiastically.

“Don’t jostle the old lady,” Deb said, meaning the car, which was very old, but had broken down on just one occasion, back in the winter. Deb was old, too. She was the wrinkliest person Jemma knew, and had old eyes with big rims of wet pink on the bottom, caught between her white eye and dark eyeliner. She had a head of springy gray hair that was always pushing her hat up off her head, a baseball cap she wore all the time, sometimes under a wool stocking in winter. She’d got it, she told them, by sending in a hundred proofs of purchase from her cigarettes. It had been white, but now was a very lived-in sort of yellow, and said in blue letters across the front, Oh Yeah! “We’ll get there, little Jemma,” she said. “Mary Ann can hurry when she has to. Can’t you, honey?” She patted the dashboard, raising a little cloud of dust that floated with the cigarette smoke in the columns of sun that came through the windshield. “How ’bout this weather?” Deb asked them, turning around as they crested the hill and started to go down. “Like trying to breathe with a wet washcloth stuffed in your mouth, huh?”

“It’s an affliction,” Calvin said.

“Not so bad as that,” she said, turning back around as they drifted a little into the grass. “An affliction would be the summer of ’73. Or ovarian cancer and diverticulosis and a no-good husband.”

“That’s worse,” Calvin agreed. Jemma began to look on the floor for something interesting. She had found all sorts of things before, a broken calculator, a gold pen, various lipsticks, all sorts of change, and a condom, once, though she hadn’t known what it was till after she lost it, when she described it to Calvin. She’d unpeeled it from the floor mat and stuck it in her pocket back in March, while Calvin and Deb were having a conversation. She’d brought it out to examine it every now and then, not sure what it was but knowing it was important. She had planned to show it to some people at recess, especially Andrea Blake, a girl with whom she would have liked to be friends, but who always ignored her, and to whom Jemma never knew what to say. Now she would know. She’d ask her if she wanted to see something neat, and it would all begin from there. Years later Andrea would say, “Do you remember when you showed me that wonderful thing? That’s when we became friends.” But, like a living creature, it worked its way from her pocket during a game of tag — she was always it, and never able to pass on the condition to anyone else. She didn’t look for it long. If she’d looked longer she might have found it before Andrea, who named it a snakeskin, and dutifully informed Sister Mary Fortuna of the likely presence of a poisonous reptile in the schoolyard. It was shortly surrounded by an impenetrable ring of nuns. They came pouring out of the school to form an Ursuline condom-disposal squad, one ring standing facing out toward the children while an inner ring gathered it up for destruction. Sister Gertrude came out in yellow rubber gloves to pick it up and carry it to the boys’ bathroom, while Andrea made the observation that it must be a very poisonous snake whose skin caused such a fuss. Today there was only a penny, stuck with a trace of gum to the floor. Jemma put it in her pocket.

“Did you hear,” Deb asked, “the latest about the Strangler?” There was a murderer abroad around the river and the bay, who killed whole families, more by stabbing and shooting than by strangling them, but he always left bruises around their necks. “He strangles you,” Deb and Calvin had told each other while Jemma tried not to listen, “after you’re dead!” He’d been killing all summer.

“Was there something in the paper?” Calvin asked, sitting forward into the space between the front seats.

“Nothing. Not a word. That’s the latest — nothing. How many days is that without a word?”

“Twenty-nine,” said Calvin.

“I think he’s moved,” said Deb.

“I hope so,” said Jemma. She’d had nightmares about him and his big white hands, as big and white as the hands of Mickey Mouse, soft but strong and deadly.

“I bet he’s gone on to Buffalo,” Deb said with a sigh. “Or down south, to another bay. Down to Tampa.”

“Or San Francisco,” Jemma said. “That’s a bay.”

“Oh I bet he’d like it there. He’s probably one of those.”