Chris Adrian - The Children's Hospital

The beach was crowded, full of adults and kids on the sand and everywhere in the water, some standing in it up to their necks, some just to their chests, and some just getting their feet wet. Tiffany Cropp almost ran into her as Jemma rolled her tube down toward the water, passing by with her sister, a very fancy float suspended between them — it was a little island with an inflatable palm tree growing out of one side. Jemma tested the water with her foot before walking in. It was warmer than she had hoped it would be.

Kids swarmed to the tube like tadpoles toward a lump of bread, all of them clinging with their hands and arms, so they all faced each other over the hole, and Jemma had no room to sit. Jemma didn’t mind, though she didn’t join in their chatter. Jemma drifted, and watched her imaginary brother playing in the water, just from the corner of her eye. He sported like a dolphin or a whale, leaping in somersaults, or in high arcs that landed him on his back, and she got a glimpse of his foot, or of his hand, as he fell back in the water.

She realized she was daydreaming, and remembered what Sister Gertrude had said to her. She let go of the tube and stood in the water, submerged to her neck, thinking of the punishment she would get after she died, and then realizing she was daydreaming about that. She tried not to think about it, but found that she could not, and tried not to picture it, to consider the lesson but not the entertainment, but couldn’t do that either. She tried to focus just on the water against her neck and the wind blowing gently against her face, but Purgatory was unfolding in her mind, a gray wasteland peopled with dreamy sinners and little monkeys on tricycles with sidecars full of bananas. She began to cry.

Someone splashed water at the back of her head. She turned around and saw her brother. “What’s the matter, Bubba?” he asked her. She told him she was going to Purgatory for almost ever, and that there was nothing she could do to stop it. He frowned, then scowled, then slapped the water with his hand. “Don’t be stupid,” he said. “Only somebody stupid would listen to that crap. What does she know? She doesn’t know anything, or whatever she does know is all wrong.” Jemma protested that Sister Gertrude knew quite a lot, that she knew more about Hell than anybody Jemma had ever met.

“Why are you defending her?” Calvin asked. “Oh, come on, I’ll show you how wrong she’s got it.” He took her by the arm and pulled her after him out of the water. They knelt in the middle of the wet sand and he started to draw with his fingers. “I’ll show you,” he said. He drew another pyramid, this one with the pointy side down. “Okay, here it is. What is it?”

“Hell,” Jemma said in a very small voice.

“Right. Okay, level one. Who’s there?”

“Virtuous pagans,” Jemma said automatically.

“Wrong,” said Calvin. He drew a line a few inches form the base of the pyramid and wrote over it, harmless nuns. “See? How about level two?”

“People who kiss too much.”

“Not people,” he said. “Nuns.” He wrote it down: Kissy nuns. “On we go — level three.”

“The gluttons,” Jemma said.

“Close,” he said. Fat nuns. He took her down through every level, describing torments as they went; angry nuns, blabby nuns, ugly nuns, stupid nuns, creepy nuns, cruel nuns, beating nuns, thieving nuns, lying nuns, treacherous nuns, and finally Sister Gertrude cramped up in the tip of the inverted pyramid. “At the very bottom,” he said, “in her very own level where nobody lives but her. Do you know why?”

“No,” Jemma said, still sniffling, and somewhat ambivalent about the nuns burning and clawing their flesh in her imagination, feeling sorry for them but knowing too that their punishment was just, and didn’t Sister Gertrude herself say it went against God’s will to pity those he’d set aside for deserving punishment?

“Because she’s a dumb-ass, ass-licking, shit-eating, motherfucking, dog-fucking, lizard-fucking bitch. There’s only one of those and she lives right here.” He pounded his fist over Sister Gertrude’s chamber. Jemma’s mouth had fallen open at the incredible stream of bad language that had come out of his mouth. She was shocked, but delighted, too, to hear the forbidden words. Her heart raced and she drew in a breath, deeper and deeper, gasping, and then she laughed. Calvin was smiling but not laughing, driving his fist into Hell, grinding all the nuns deeper into their punishment. “Just wait,” he said. “Just fucking wait.”

Dinner was not much fun. Jemma’s twinkie was sullen in her belly; she wished she had not eaten it. It made her mother angry how little she ate. Her father was angry, too. He usually was, on the days their mother woke up late, though he was quite solicitous when she was sleeping, never screaming at her to get out of bed, and directing Calvin and Jemma to take care of her when they got home from school. But that night he found fault with the way the napkins were folded, and the fluffiness of the soufflé (it was too fluffy — fluffy like a cat, is what he said); and the meticulously constructed rib roast complete with immaculate little socks on every bone, he compared to a very fancy shoe. Jemma and Calvin left the table early and had dessert in Calvin’s room, watching television.

They watched a documentary about blood and a half hour special on the Severna Strangler, in which a shrill lady stood in front of the various houses of his victims while pictures of the murdered parents and children popped up around her in the air, and proclaimed the horror of what he’d done. She only stood in from of the houses in the dark, and the bright camera lights made her face shine as golden and unnatural as a twinkie. Jemma’s stomach still hurt. She let Calvin eat her sorbet.

“Moron,” Calvin said to the television, because the lady had proclaimed, like Deb, that the Strangler had moved on. “You’re just going to make him mad, saying that. You think he’s not watching? Now he’ll kill again tonight, and it’ll be your fault.” He turned to Jemma and said, “He’s going to do it tonight.”

“Shut up,” she said.

“Tonight. You better sleep in my room.” Jemma changed the channel, and found another documentary, this one about Mark Twain’s dog. “That dog better look out,” Calvin said shortly. “He’ll get him, too.”

“He’s in the TV,” Jemma said.

“You think that’ll stop him? You think his hands can’t pass right through the TV? They’re magic, killing hands. And thanks to that stupid lady, he’s coming for us tonight.”

“Please stop saying that.”

“Can’t help it, can I, if it’s true?”

“Stop it!” Jemma screamed.

“I’ll be ready, though,” he said. Jemma got up and ran downstairs to get their father. She stopped at the bottom of the stairs just in time to see her mother fling a dish at her father’s head. He was sitting on the couch, sipping at his drink. He ducked casually, leaning over to the side. The dish flew over the couch and shattered against a piano leg.

“Go on,” her father said calmly. “Throw another dish. That will solve everything. That’s your problem, really, the dishes.”

“Cocksucker!” her mother shouted. Her father put down his drink and lit a cigarette.

“Yes, yes. I’m a cocksucker all right. A great big cocksucker. That’s what I’m doing all day and half the night, sucking cock in the OR.” Jemma ran back upstairs and went to her room. It was almost as loud, there, and she could hear every word they said, even her father’s quiet responses. She would have stayed, though, if it weren’t for the thought of the Strangler at the window. She went back to Calvin’s room.