The Children's Hospital

29

“I told you,” she said to his swollen purple face in the PICU. “I told you this would happen.” She spoke out loud, but really she was talking to herself, because she never had told him why she had run so halfheartedly from his courtship. When he asked why she had been so jittery, back at the beginning, she said not, “Because I was afraid something absolutely fucking awful would happen to you,” but instead, “I guess I have a hard time trusting people.” For the longest time she’d only told him she loved him in the throes of an orgasmic tizzy; she’d shout it in utter distraction and then wonder, during the after, if she could take it back. Then, after practicing on houseplants and the neighbors’ pets, and seeing how they came to no harm, she’d woken him one blue pre-morning to say it, premeditated and deliberate. “Don’t I know it?” he’d asked her sleepily, and drawn her to him. She’d folded into him, limb over limb, until she felt like a ball wedged against his belly and under his ribs. Now she imagined the roach, afloat at some far latitude, scraping its legs at her and broadcasting reproach on its antennae: I told you, didn’t I?

She said it again, though—“I love you”—not able to help herself, or convince herself or fate or the furies or God that she had only been kidding, the whole time. She said it to the baby crying in his crib, and the boy weeping outside his house because he thought his family had moved away without him, and the adolescent weeping over the father he never met, and the man weeping for the drowned world. She was in love with every one of them, and she spoke the words to all of them like a fatal wedding vow.

Dolores had proved herself a champ. “I’ll get it,” she’d said to Dr. Walnut, as if Rob were a ringing telephone, and not a dying body. Before Jemma had unfrozen out of her horror, she’d stabilized his neck, rolled him over, and caught the laryngoscope and ET tube tossed across the room by the anesthesiologist. Jemma by then had crossed the room, ignoring Dr. Walnut’s cry to come back, come back and retract. “I’ve got it,” Dolores said, looking deep into Rob Dickens’ throat. She tubed him on the first try and hooked up a bag. “Get back to the table,” she said. Jemma, her tongue already turning to stone, said softly, lamely, “He’s my fiancé.”

News of his injury spread rapidly through the hospital, and in this place that could not tolerate new sadness, provoked a great lament — he was affable and handsome and only Jemma ever saw him in a bad mood, and for weeks he’d been cultivating new friendships about as eagerly and successfully as Jemma avoided them — not just because he was so well liked. Common opinion had it that everyone had suffered enough; added misfortune, even if it were relatively benign, was unbearable. And if just a broken nail or a bruised toe were bitter gall, then what was Rob Dickens, laid out in the PICU with diffuse axonal injury and a slowly expanding subdural hematoma? Jemma sat by his bed, not knowing or caring if she’d been excused from her duties, not moving even when the nurses came to roll him or give him mannitol or change his diaper, and not helping, either. Her stony feeling was such that she could barely move or speak. She thought of him as already dead.

She leaned over in her chair, resting her cheek next to his arm, not ever asleep, but neither entirely awake, breathing in time with his respirator. She’d lift her head every now and then to look at his monitor, or look for as long as she could stand at his face, his swollen lips and eyes, and the horrible bolt that stuck out from his forehead — it looked like an industrial mishap, but had been put there on purpose by Dolores, a sensor to gauge intracranial pressure. Sometimes she thought his face belonged to someone else; with the slightest effort, a little twitch of imagination, she saw her first lover, or her mother or father, or her brother, laid out on their backs with the bolt standing up obscenely, like a handle, from above the left eye.

People came and went all through the night and the following day — hours fifty through sixty. PICU people and visitors from all over the hospital, Jemma ignored most of them, unless they shook her hard. Synthesized flowers filled the room with their not-quite-right smell, and cards, crafted by children, appeared on the walls by the dozen, until there was no more wall to obscure, and then they began to darken the window. Vivian, Dr. Sashay, Ishmael, even Dr. Snood creeped solicitously into the room. “I’m fine,” Jemma mumbled at them, and would not talk anymore, no matter how they pestered. Sometimes she pretended to be asleep. Sometimes the voices did not register with Jemma until their speakers had left the room, but she always heard them:

“Will he be okay?”

“Will she be okay?”

“I hear that they’re trying to find someone willing to drill. Walnut’s scared he’d kill him. And he operates on hearts the size of jelly beans!”

“Who else except him?”

“Pudding? He’s IR, isn’t he?”

“IR doesn’t drill in your fucking head.”

“Dolores would do it. She’d think it’s fun.”

“Can she hear us?”

“I don’t think so. I think she’s sleeping.”

“They were going to get married. Isn’t it cute? Isn’t it sad?”

“Isn’t it enough already?”

“Maybe it’s never enough.”

“Maybe this is just the beginning. Maybe we’re all going to get it in the head.”

“Times like these I want my Buffy. I want something besides what’s here, you know, because what’s here is so awful. But when I go looking for her, it’s still just static. I guess I could just ask for her, but I’m afraid I’d get something dirty. I don’t want to see Buffy doing something dirty, but what if I wanted it, you know, secretly. Deep down? The angel would see it and give it to me. She knows that sort of thing. She really does.”

“That’s how all pornography happens. You ask her for one thing but she knows what you really want. Anyway, Buffy’s not coming back.”

“I know it’s true. But it’s hard, hard.”

“True things always are.”

“Can you hear me?”

“Jemma? Jemma? Jemma? Jemma?”

“Can I get something for you, Dr. Claflin?”

“She’s not a doctor yet. She’s not even a fourth year. Have you had to be with her at night? It’s a chore.”

“She just sits there.”

“I’ve peeped in once or twice and seen her move her head. Sometimes she whispers to him.”

“It’s time to change him again. Is that poop in her hair?”

“It’s blood. Jemma?”

“When does she pee?”

“She hasn’t been drinking.”

“If we put her hand in warm water I bet she’ll pee all over the place.”

“Such a handsome boy, even now. She’s a lucky girl. Was a lucky girl. You know what I mean, right?”

“Exactly. Look at him!”

“Dolores will drill. She just has to drill.”

“If you bring out what is inside of you, it will save him. If you do not bring out what is inside of you, you will kill him. In this hour, to not lift your hand is the same thing as to kill him.”

Jemma opened her eyes. The two magpies were gone, and Pickie Beecher, whose voice she thought she’d just heard, was nowhere to be seen. Rob looked the same, eyes swollen, bolt in head, unmoving. She wiped some drool off his chin and pushed his hair away from the bolt and fluffed up his pillow and was smoothing his gown over his legs — it was always riding up — when the code alarm began to ring. She ignored it, at first. It wasn’t her problem, but it rang louder and louder in the room, and the angel wouldn’t shut up—“Save him save him O save him please.” She went to see what was happening. It was the first time she’d left since Rob had arrived.

The bell was chiming for Marcus, the fat little five-year-old from the family with bad hearts. Emma and Dr. Tiller were already in the room, along with Dr. Chandra and a single nurse, Janie. The boy’s mother was standing in the door, calling out “Regresse Marcos, regresse mi amor!” Emma saw Jemma looking in.

“Jemma,” she said. “We need you.”

“Get someone else,” said Dr. Tiller.

“She’ll be okay. Right, Jemma? Remember what I said?” Jemma walked up to the bed, climbed up on a stepping stool, and took over compressions from Dr. Chandra. But rather than distracting her from all the really horrible shit, the compressions brought it all more clearly to mind. So the child underneath her hands became Rob Dickens, and as she pushed on his chest it was from Rob’s mouth that bloody froth bloomed, higher and higher, a complex flower made of interlocking red bubbles.

“More lidocaine?” Emma asked.

“More lidocaine,” Dr. Tiller agreed. Janie pushed it. Jemma kept compressing, trying not to look at the face, but always coming back to it. It was Rob, then Pickie Beecher, then Josh Swift, then Cindy Flemm. It was Ella Thims and Magnolia and Juan Fraggle, but mostly it was Rob, and as she pushed and pushed it became his face not just because her obsessive imagination was able to draw the lineaments of his jaw and brow over the fat face of the doomed child, but because she saw it, as certain and as unreal, as she had seen her own mutated body bouncing in Ella Thims’s crib all those weeks ago.

“Stop compressions,” Emma said, leaning over casually to deliver a shock. “All right!” she said as the rhythm normalized transiently, then “Fuck!” when it slipped back into v-fib.

“Some more amiodarone?” Dr. Tiller asked civilly, as if he were asking, One lump or two?

“May as well.” She motioned for Jemma to continue.

“It’s no use,” Jemma said. “He’s already dead.”

“Possibly true,” Emma said, “But not for you to decide.”

“Don’t you smell it? He’s already rotten inside.”

“Compress or go home,” Emma said. Jemma continued, pressing ever more violently on the thin chest.

“I just want to stop,” Jemma said. “I want it all to stop, right now.”

“Get her out of here,” said Dr. Chandra. “Jesus, Emma, you’re a fucking sadist.”

“She’s okay,” said Emma. The child underneath Jemma’s hands was changing with every push, the bloody flower in his mouth blooming in ever more intricate detail, rose, peony, zinnia — Jemma thought she caught the scent of flowers underneath the odor of ischemic gut. The mother called out again, “Regresse, regresse!” The whole family was outside the door now, mixed in with a crowd of residents and nurses and students and a few stray parents — codes always drew crowds. Pickie Beecher’s face peeked out from behind Marcus’s mother’s knee.

“It’s unbearable, what you’re doing,” Jemma said, softly at first, but then she looked right at Emma and shouted it at her face. “It’s unbearable! It’s fucking disgusting!” Emma finally called for someone to replace her. Janie, her only friend among the PICU nurses, who just two nights before had scolded Jemma for nearly writing a fatal potassium order, then hushed the whole thing up so Emma never discovered it, tried to take Jemma’s arm. She shook her off. “Don’t touch me,” she said, and Janie pulled her hand away.

“Hey,” Janie said, shaking her arm. Her hand hung at her side, limp as a filet of beef. “What’d you do?”

“It’s disgusting,” Jemma said again, “and not fair. What did he do to you? Why does he deserve this? Nobody deserves this. You’re torturing him.” And she wanted to ask, of the people in the room, of the air, of the hospital, of the great blue lidless eye of the sky that watched them suffering every day, What did we do to you? Why are you torturing us? She was complaining for herself and for the boy, though they were hardly kindred assaults, to be deprived of everyone you ever loved, and to be violated by well-meaning physicians and nurses, yet somehow in that moment she saw the two of them as suffering twins, laid out side by side, whaled upon by mortality, by long thick needles, and electric shocks.

She was almost crying — her parents and her lover rose again in her mind, mangled, bleeding, and burned, all three of them putting a hushing finger to their lips. Fuck you, she said to them tenderly. Don’t tell me that. And when her brother rose up out of the sea she said, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry! and began to weep bitterly.

“Do the fucking compressions, Jemma!” Emma shouted, reaching toward her. Jemma brought her hands down together, two fists, to strike at the boy’s chest. The room lurched and a light flared in her head. She thought it was the crying and the pregnancy, and was sure she was about to pass out. She reached for the passing out, trying to embrace it. If she just passed out then it would all be over, but she couldn’t do it. She was dizzy and lightheaded but not the least bit tired anymore.

“What was that?” asked Dr. Tiller, and Janie said, “I still can’t move my hand!” and Dr. Sasscock, standing way at the back of the crowd, asked, “What’s wrong with her eyes?” Maggie, who had left her bed as soon as she heard the code bell and now was standing near the crash cart, cried out, “I told you so!” and threw a laryngoscope at Jemma, who never even saw it coming, and only realized she’d been hit when blood began to drip down her forehead into her eyes.

“It’s not fair!” Jemma was shouting. “It’s disgusting!” She was striking the boy again, harder and harder, and no one moved to stop her. They were all leaning away from her, the code in full arrest now, shielding their eyes every time she struck his chest, and she realized finally that the flashes were happening outside of her head. Every time she struck, a green light flared out of her hands to light up the room. She held up her hands and looked at them through her tears. Her scalp was bleeding freely, and the blood was dripping down her cheeks to fall on his face and his mouth. She touched her hand to her forehead and understood suddenly that she could make it better. It was a piece of knowledge granted to her entirely apart from her reason. Deduced of nothing, a spontaneous fact, it was inserted into her mind and her heart. Any place else but in the extremity of a breakdown, she would have mistrusted it absolutely. If she had been more herself she would have known right away that it was too good to be true. As it was, temporary insanity provided her with enough faith to give it a try.

Even as she was fixing it, she became aware of the wound in her head as a wrongness. It was a like a note among notes; though she was not aware of it as a sound, she described it that way to herself. As it faded, and after it was gone, other wrongness, different wrongness, captured her attention. She knew it: with her new sense she recognized Jarvis two rooms down as surely as she would have had she laid eyes upon him. Similarly, she knew her cardiac kid upstairs and Brenda. The varied wrongness of the hospital, on the other floors, in the other wards, was a subtle presence in her head; the wrongness in Pickie Beecher, watching in the crowd, was loud as a shrieking mosquito; the wreck of the boy underneath her was a nightmare instrument, a cat-piano, a dachsophone, but the wrongness in Rob Dickens, four rooms down, was loudest of all. She felt the yearning again, understanding that it was not just wanting but wanting them to get better. She wanted them all. She wanted this boy so badly but she wanted Rob more.

“Get out of her way!” shouted Maggie. “Don’t look at the sparkles!” Only Pickie Beecher got in front of her as she passed through the door, but he didn’t try to stop her. He raced ahead, pushing people out of her way until she was standing by Rob’s bed. Pickie took up position behind her, facing the door.

Because she was confused, because she did not know how to manage what was in her, and because she just wanted to do it, she lay herself on top of him. She thought and whispered words that she thought should fix him: Let it be, let him be better. The green fire still flickered over her arm, but it did not touch him. She stood again and looked back at Pickie, who stood near the door, saying nothing now, and looked at her with a blank face. She turned back to Rob and pulled off his blanket; it was an insufficient uncovering. She took his gown and his diaper and tossed them on the floor.

As she laid herself on him again the nurses came into the front of the crowd, and stopped in front of Pickie. “Oh God, she’s trying to fuck him!” said one of them. “She’s gone crazy!” She wasn’t trying to fuck him, though she knew what she was trying to do involved a most uncommon intimacy. Let it be done, she thought. Let it be gone. Let something come down on him and make him new again. He lay under her, heart beating faster and faster, still unconscious, still only breathing with the machine. She stood up again.

A nurse was trying to get past Pickie Beecher. “Maybe we should just let her,” another was saying. “It’s not like she’s hurting him. Maybe we should just give them some privacy.” The crowd was still growing behind them, one by one. Jemma sensed them, wrongness added to wrongness, everyone wrong in ways different from the children, and from Rob, wrong in ways she could barely recognize as wrong, let alone describe.

“Get back, or I’ll kick you,” Pickie said. Jemma lay down again on top of Rob, taking his hands in her own and raising them, over her head, grinding her hips into his, pushing her face into his face. She spoke a different word this time, “No.” She spoke it to his swollen brain, his empty eyes, his spastic limbs. She spoke it to the staring dead eyes of her first lover, to her brother’s eyeless face, to the house burning up her mother, to her father’s livng corpse reaching and reaching for comfort. She spoke it to the drowning waters, to the correcting God. She’d spoken it before, on cruel nights, on crueler mornings in the days after each of the people she’d loved had died, waking with a corner of the pillow in her mouth, understanding she was awake in the same world she’d slept from, moaning No, no, no for an hour in her bed. She’d wanted so much, then, to have the power that the feeling ought to have given her, to shape her no into undoing, or at least into vengeance, cold comfort better than none. No and no, over and over, forever.

“You may not pass!” said Pickie Beecher. He inflicted a wrongness atop the wrongness that was one of the nurses; it bloomed at the edge of Jemma’s contracting perception, a strobe flash, or a single, high note, a piccolo played by a soprano with a lungful of helium. “No,” Jemma whispered, and “No,” she said. “No,” she shouted, and “No,” she screamed. It came suddenly, and seemed to happen apart from all her pushing and fretting. One moment she was grinding her body into his body, the next she felt like she was floating on top of him, a green sea between them. Cold green fire ran over them both. She pulled at his tube, flinging it across the room. She pulled the bolt from his head and flung it similarly, shattering the glass door, holding her hand up at the blood he spouted. It stopped like obedient traffic, turned around and vanished into his head. A blister of skin formed over the wound.

It was quick. In the time it takes to do up a long zipper she’d poured an ocean of fire into him, soothed his swollen brain, reunited sundered axons, and popped out the plum-sized dent in his skull. He sat up, taking in a deep, whooping breath and making clawing motions with his hands. He opened his eyes but did not notice the room, the crowd, the nurse writhing on the ground with a broken shin, his nakedness. Jemma could tell he only noticed her. “What happened?” he asked.