Chris Adrian - The Children's Hospital

The last question was the hardest one. It was sort of a trick; Jemma didn’t like it. Bullies are punished in the seventh circle for _____ and _____ and ______. Jemma ran through all sorts of combinations in her head: a thousand years, then another thousand, then five hundred? She raised her hand and asked Sister Gertrude if there was a mistake with the question. She only shook her head. Five and five and five thousand years, she wondered. It was for always, but how to divide that up into three? Was this a religion test or a math test? Time was almost up when she finally got it. The tests were being handed toward the front as she scribbled in her answer, forever and forever and forever.

Jemma and her brother took a long detour on their way down to the beach. Their mother was awake and active when they got home. She’d blown up a pair of inner tubes for them to take down to the river, and was in the middle of preparations for dinner. She told them not to come home for at least two hours, because the cooking would require her absolute attention, and might be dangerous to little bystanders.

They rolled their tubes down the hill, but turned right instead of left at the Nottinghams, and went down a half mile into the woods beyond the fifth hole, wedging the tubes along the way in the branches of a live oak tree. There was a path that led down to a clearing and a pond, and the railroad tracks, which ran along the eastern border of the forest, but never crossed any road. Teenagers went down to the pond, sometimes, to drink or smoke or swim without their pants, younger kids almost never went down there. Lately, though, the teenagers had fled, driven away by the memory of friends, replaced by younger kids looking for gruesome mementos. Two boys had died down there early in the summer, Andy Nyman and Chris Dodd. They’d laid down in the train tracks to let the train pass over them. They were both quite tall, with big strong chins, and there was speculation that their noble chins were what had done them in, or that they’d lifted them too proudly. The cowcatcher caught Andy under the chin and took his head clean off, throwing it hundreds of yards into the bushes. Chris lost his head, eventually, but not as cleanly as his friend — his body was lifted and dropped again before the train, then crushed and mangled by the many wheels. Many parts of him had not ever been found, a couple toes, an eyeball, and the whole left hand. It was mostly for the hand that the children searched, because a rumor had grown up that it could, if ever found, grant wishes like the fabled monkey’s paw, five or less, as many as the number of fingers still attached.

David Tracy and Johnny Cobb, two of Calvin’s friends, were already there, and already looking. “If you find it,” Calvin told Jemma, “don’t touch it. Just come and get me.” He handed her a stick with which to poke in the bushes, and ran off to go greet his friends with punches to the stomach and shoulder. Jemma began to wander around, in and out of the clearing in little loops, beating the bushes with her stick, and calling out to the hand like to a kitty. She wasn’t dressed for bushwacking: she wore a pair of bright-yellow terry-cloth overalls over her bathing suit. It was getting to be the hottest part of the day. She undid the bib of her overalls to let it flop down over her belly, but felt no cooler.

She took longer and longer loops out of the clearing. Calvin and the other boys weren’t doing much looking. They were sitting on a mossy log that stuck out of the pond, passing a cigarette back and forth. Jemma called to the hand again, and this time thought she heard a stirring among the leaves and twigs on the ground. She walked in the direction of the noise, passing another split oak and some holly bushes, and coming in a few hundred feet to another clear space, littered with magazines and bottles. Someone had built a fire there, a long time ago. Jemma poked her foot in the ashes, uncovering a half-burnt latex glove, but no hand. She picked up some bottles and threw them against a tree. None of them broke.

A flash of yellow caught her eyes, a little bit beyond the little clearing. She thought it was a bird, and so went very quietly, thinking she could catch it in her hands, then run back to her brother, saying, I found a finger! When he peered over her closed hands she’d open them, releasing the bird right into his face.

But it was a twinkie. Someone had impaled it on a hawthorn bush, still wrapped up. Jemma wondered, just for a moment, if this could possibly be a twinkie tree just beginning to bloom, and considered running for her brother to tell him, but the other wrappers scattered on the ground, and an empty box she found half buried under the bush, spoke against that lovely possibility. She knew what had happened: someone had glutted themselves on soft golden cake, and played with their food when they could eat no more of it, instead of making the effort to bring it to somebody who needed it, or at least giving it a proper burial. It still looked quite fresh inside the wrapper, except where it was pierced by the thorn, where there was a little circle of green rot. She leaned close, and sniffed it, and saw how one edge of the plastic had been gnawed at unsuccessfully by some little animal. She pinched it and discovered how it was still very soft. It couldn’t have been there very long.

She went back to the big clearing, kicking an almost empty can of shortening in front of her. She kicked it toward the pond, and it would have gone in if Johnny, demonstrating an extra sense for kickable objects, jumped backward off the log, turned around, and sent it flying over Jemma’s head back toward the trees.

“What have you been eating?” her brother asked her.

“Nothing,” she said.

“There’s stuff on your face.”

“Oh. I had a cookie, from before.” He put his hand out at her. “I ate it all.” The boys searched her, patting all her pockets, David extracting and inspecting her little vinyl change purse, then returning it. “Told you,” she said. “I didn’t find the hand.”

“Us neither,” said Calvin. He lit up another cigarette and passed it around. Johnny could blow smoke rings. Jemma asked for a puff.

“Okay,” said Calvin, “but only pretend.” He held the filter an inch or so from her lips. Jemma pursed her lips and sucked in air, and held it in as long as she could, then stuck out her bottom lip and blew out straight up, hard enough to lift her bangs. It made her cough, and the boys laughed at her.

“Let’s go swim,” she said to her brother.

“My brother says they came down here to kiss,” said David, “and to dress up like girls to dance and have pillow fights, and talk about baking cookies.”

“And they put on makeup and played field hockey,” said Johnny.

“And they felt so bad about kissing that they laid down under the train. It was totally on purpose.”

“I wish we could find that hand,” said Calvin. “I’ve got some wishes.”

“I wish we could go swimming,” said Jemma.

“Go ahead,” said her brother. “You know the way.” Jemma looked over her shoulder into the warm shade beneath the trees.

“Come on,” she said.

“We’ve got more smoking to do. Go ahead. If you find the hand, don’t touch it and don’t make any wishes. Come right back here right away.” She stared at him a little while longer, but he just puffed on the cigarette and looked at the sky. She walked away, looking back a few times before they were out of sight. He was never looking at her. The path was clear all the way up, it had been trampled true by three generations of teenagers. Jemma found her tube and rolled it up the hill like a stone, going very slowly, hoping Calvin would catch up with her.

She had an imaginary brother that she could force to accompany her when the real one would not. He went with her now, leading or following, all he asked was that she not look directly at him. If he was following she could hear him stepping behind her, crushing leaves or sliding on loose dirt, and when he went ahead of her his shadow flashed across the shiny leaves of holly bushes along the path as they passed through breaks in the canopy of leaves. He called back to her that it was very hot, and she agreed.