Chris Adrian - The Children's Hospital

“I found another one!” Rob said, startling her. It’s not what it looks like, she wanted to say, pulling up Josh’s pants. I was consulting the oracle! But he wouldn’t understand, and probably wouldn’t notice. She took a deep breath and spoke in a very soft voice. She didn’t want to see him cry again.

“You’ve got to learn to let them lie where they are,” she said, turning around. She didn’t cry out this time, but she made a little sound when she saw the dripping child in Rob’s arms, and smelled the ocean on him. It was Pickie Beecher, pale and naked, a strand of kelp wrapped around his legs and belly, foam still on his chest, and a spray of leaves caught up in his now full head of curly brown hair.

“He’s already wet,” Rob said. “Do we still have to clean him?”

Jemma held the twig, tracing with her fingertips the edges of the leaves and the rough surface of the bark. She didn’t know what it was — it wasn’t any of the few plants she could recognize, holly or mistletoe or pine or poinsettia, holiday bushes whose leaves she’d traced out on blots of construction paper in grade school. The leaves were waxy but not dark, and though she found two berries they were purple, not white, and looked like they might have dropped out of a box of cereal. It smelled like nothing she’d ever encountered before, a little piney and a little minty, a little bit of a deep, wet, earthy smell, a little bit of chocolate, but then mostly something she didn’t even recognize, and could not describe.

It was so thickly tangled in Pickie’s hair that it took her an hour to extract it. More time than Rob spent washing the sea-smell off of him Jemma spent unwinding strands from between the leaves. She could have cut it out in a moment, but she had a feeling that it would have been a crime to violate a single curl. It was the thickest, softest, shiniest hair Jemma had ever seen, the hair she’d always wanted, the very opposite of her own hair. When she had the twig out of it, she spent another twenty minutes washing the hair, and appreciating how it rejected Vivian’s luscious, sweet-smelling shampoo and conditioner — the shampoo wouldn’t lather and the conditioner seemed to just slide off his head — as if it were already too perfect to need any of that stuff. As she blew it dry she knew she was too interested in it, that it would be better just to be jealous than to be rapt and worshipful like this, and anyway it felt like being unfaithful to Magnolia’s admittedly less wonderful hair. Still, she couldn’t help herself.

“Where have you been?” Rob kept asking Pickie, as he washed him, then as he dressed him in a pair of pajamas, thick flannel and printed with trains, though it wasn’t cold anywhere in the hospital except on the roof, and as he situated a pair of caboose-shaped slippers on his feet. Jemma asked it of him too, if not out loud, and tried to read off him the history of the past twenty-four days. She couldn’t tell where he’d been. When she tried all she could see was a reprise of her own daydreams about him: she saw him chased by waves, and walking through drowned cities, but not where he’d actually floated to, and not the land where grew the tree that had given over the twig to him. More obvious than the story of his travels was the simple fact of his health — everything that was wrong with him before now was put right. He wasn’t any longer a nauseating blot on her mind but just a sleeping boy, as ordinary as Jarvis or Valium or Marcus.

“He smells nice now,” Rob said. “He smelled nice before. It was a waste of water, to wash him all up, but now he sure is pretty.”

“Yes,” Jemma said.

“Not prettier than you! I didn’t say that.”

“I know,” she said. “He is prettier, though. He’s prettier than anybody. Look at him.”

Rob whistled slowly. “Those are fine, fine pj’s,” he said.

“That’s not what I meant,” Jemma said, and trying not to compare them, but it was like trying not to notice the two sides of the horizon, or the difference between the moon and the night sky, it was so obvious. Rob was becoming an abomination, the image and shell of his old self. Here she was, finally stronger than death, it seemed, since she felt sure it was only the constant exercise of her power, conscious and unconscious, that kept him from falling apart entirely, and yet look what she got. “Let’s put him to bed,” she said, and Rob pointed out that he didn’t have a bed, yet, and shouldn’t they make him one?

Jemma made the frame; Rob stuffed the mattress, repetitive work that he couldn’t fuck up. There were still hundreds of hospital beds in the place, but she didn’t want to put Pickie in one of those. He wasn’t sick, and she wouldn’t put upon him any of the old or new accoutrements of the hospital, no monitors or embolism stockings or ventilators waiting to pounce on him. She had it half-done before she realized it was a copy of Calvin’s old bed, a wide canoe that came out of the replicator in ten easy-to-assemble pieces, with edges that stuck fast once pressed together. Rob had artificial feathers in his hair, and had somehow managed to stuff a lot of them down his pants, but the mattress was almost done by the time Jemma had finished the frame. She helped him with the last of it. They lay Pickie on top of it, his head on a pillow shaped like a life preserver. Just as Rob protested that he looked dead, lying on his back with his hands folded on his chest, he mumbled and snored, and turned on his side, flexing his knee and drawing a hand up under his cheek. They put his slippers at the bottom of the boat, along with a few things Jemma thought he would like, a teddy bear and a squeaky toy shaped like a flank steak and a leaf from the twig.

Rob said there was still something wrong, and stole a rabbit from Kidney’s bed, a creepy-looking thing with purple fur and yellow eyes. Rob put it under his arm and said, “That’s better.” Jemma bent down over the bed and pushed his hair back from his forehead, then kissed him there, the first time she’d ever been so tender with him — always before he had ducked away when she felt compelled by obligation to try, and before there was the horrible smell of his breath, and the simple wrongness of him that repelled her. Now there was just his soft hair and his pale skin, his wet pink lips and his breath that smelled of milk and salt.

“Goodnight Pickie,” she said. He opened his eyes and said, “Good morning, Mama.”

No one else woke up, though she ran from bed to bed, kissing them frantically, and Rob did the same, kissing Ethel and Jarvis from head to toe. He would keep trying over the next few days, kissing at random, always waiting with the same goofy, expectant smile, and always crying when he was disappointed, and saying again “They don’t like me.”

Pickie didn’t stay awake for long, either; he’d nod off in an instant, then come just as suddenly awake again, without provocation. Kissing him didn’t make any more difference, after that first time, than shouting his name, or tickling him, or pinching him, or even giving him a gentle sternal rub.

“I’m hungry,” he said. They could have just fed him right there, but Rob wanted to go on a picnic. So they went downstairs, Jemma in the middle as they walked, all holding hands. Pickie looked around at all the spaces empty of people, but didn’t ask where everybody was, and only asked once, looking down into Kidney’s bed, “Why are they all sleeping?”

He walked differently and talked differently than before; his steps wandered, and sometimes he put one foot in front of the other, or hopped for no discernible reason, and his speech was less fluid than before, he lisped a little and had trouble making irregular plurals. In the cafeteria he broke away and ran to grab at the fruit and vegetables still dancing at the salad bar, entertaining himself while Jemma put together their picnic basket and Rob synthesized gallon after gallon of ice cream. She let Pickie grab some apples and put them in the basket, and he put his finger on the squares of wax paper she folded over the sandwiches while she tied them down with bows of twine. “I want a hamburger,” he said, and she did not remind him that he was a vegetarian.