The Children's Hospital

37

When is a person not herself anymore, Jemma not Jemma, you not you? It’s the other question you ask yourself every day. Your brother had a theory, you remember, of radiating corruption — it proceeded, he said, out of him (and you) to ruin the whole world. Wasn’t it a change in you that changed this place, something inside you rising like seven hundred children from their sickbeds in a single night? Your brother said it comes back, the ruin, magnified a thousand times. All your corruption comes home to you, from the world, as sure as an echo. Something wonderful must be coming back to you, then.

Jemma lay awake, Rob snoring beside her. After exhausting him with sex she was not the least bit tired. “Oh, it’s totally normal,” Vivian had told her when Jemma asked what sort of problem her dreadful horniness represented. “Lots of women get like that. There’s no harm in it, unless you’ve got a previa or something. Except…” They were alone in an ER exam room, but Vivian leaned forward to whisper the precaution, “If he blows air up your little missus then you could get an air embolism and then — well.” She drew a finger across her throat.

“Who blows air up the little missus?” Jemma had asked, and Vivian had shrugged innocently.

She lay in bed, touching Rob’s arm every so often to make sure he was still there, and holding her hand up in the moonlight to see if it looked any different. She pinched her thumb and forefinger together, then pulled them apart, stretching a little line of fire, as stretchy and gooey as a gob of spit, between them. She put her fingers together again to put out the fire.

She turned and pushed her back up against Rob. He muttered something, backed away, then scooted forward and threw an arm around her, sighing against her shoulder. She lay with her face on her arm, staring straight ahead at their pagers where they lay stacked on the nightstand. They’d both been silent all week, but Jemma expected one to go off as she watched them. Her eye wandered to the wall across from the bed, papered with plush animals. They’d run out of room, lining them along the baseboards and stacking them on the bed, so Rob had started to fasten them to the wall with industrial staples through the ear or the neck.

They were evidence of the change, too, and whole, healthy Rob Dickens was evidence of the change, and the recent memory of pressing her forehead against the cool window while he spread himself over her back, reaching his hands up along her sides and her neck to gently clasp the sides of her face, it was evidence. The silent pagers were evidence, and the greater silence outside in the hospital — the night had always been full of stray noises, little bits of alarm, or voices raised in frustration, or the voice of the angel announcing a code. Now everyone was asleep except for the isolated nurse here and there, waiting for someone to get sick again. They might as well have been watching against landfall or the rise of a monster from the sea. But Jemma still couldn’t sleep. And she could not describe the change in herself.

She slipped out of bed, knowing just how quickly she could move without waking Rob, dressed in scrubs and clogs, and went out. It was dark in the hall. She had to follow the little orange strip of emergency lighting along the floor to get to the stairs. By the time I get to the roof, she said to herself as she took the first step up, I will understand completely how I am a different person than I was eight days ago. Every step will be a revelation.

But the steps were just steps. Proclamations had worked before. Back in college she’d climbed the stadium steps, a lesbian postulant at the bottom, a confident heterosexual at the top. She’d sorted her feelings about particular boys in a particular manner; every step of the way coming to a new conclusion about them — I like his teeth, but not his hair; I like how he smells; he is not a generous person; he is far too close to his cat — until all the little conclusions summed to a decision. This time, on the odd step here and there she made an observation — everything is different now outside of me; I hated medicine and if I really have destroyed it, then whee whee whee; I should be happier like everybody else; I’ll never be able to teach anyone how to do this; Rob can’t die now because of my loving him; I wish I could have done this years ago, when it really mattered — but understanding did not come settling on her, gold glitter from out of the sky.

On the roof, she stepped out of her shoes and walked around on the soft grass, asking herself the same question as she walked in a circle, Is it all different? When she was trapped in the slough of wishy-washiness over Rob, too weak to run away from him though she was convinced she’d ruin him, she’d asked the same question: Is it all different now, is it all over, am I just being stupid? Now the objective forecast was for continually lifting gloom, but Jemma found herself afraid that if she believed it, if she did not cherish and cultivate the dread that was in her, she’d ruin it for everyone, because the world, as soon as it knew she believed and trusted it, would not resist the chance to prove her a sucker, and punish her for being a sucker. She almost got down on her knees, not to pray, but because she thought it would help her consider things, and maybe become a person who trusted in the future. She thought it might be a good position, too, to kneel and consider her baby, and try to look again inside to see it. As always, it was like trying to look at the tip of your nose, and she could only daydream about the sex or the color of the eyes, or speculate on the nature of the world it would be born into, or worry that something was already horribly wrong, something that she would not be able to fix. She put her hands on her belly, and drew in a deep breath, trying to picture her baby again — it was as big as a chicken egg and had managed to grab hold of her colon, holding her poop hostage against some demand it was still too immature to articulate — and then she let out a great big sigh, huger than anything her mother, a champion sigher, had ever managed. A noise came, as if in answer, a high whine that she thought might be a bug before she saw the person sitting on the edge of the roof near the sandbox.

It was Ishmael fishing. He let his line fall all the way down to the water, then started to reel it up immediately. Jemma approached him from the side, afraid of startling him and precipitating a long fall back to the sea.

“It’s okay,” he said when she was still ten feet away. “I know you’re there. I heard you come out of the door.”

“Sorry,” Jemma said. “Do you want to be alone?”

“Just want to fish,” he said. “I thought I would like it, and I do.”

“Catch anything yet?”

“I don’t have a hook. Just a sinker.”

“You don’t think there’s anything in there?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere, probably, way down deep. My kids this morning asked about that. I said the fish were all sleeping. I guess they could be. Why don’t you sit down?”

“Oh, too scared.” But he pointed out that there was a ledge not ten feet below his feet, so Jemma sat, kicking her heels against the side of the hospital and looking out at the broken moonlight scattered over the water. There was hardly any wind, and the only noise was of the water breaking against the windows down below.

“Trouble sleeping?” he asked her.

“Yes. Always. You too?”

“Usually. I used to run up here. That helped, for a while. I think this is going to help.”

“Nothing helps me,” Jemma said.

“You can’t just… fix it?”

“I guess not,” she said, though she hadn’t tried.

“You could ask the angel for something. She must have something that would work.”

“No thanks. Why don’t you ask her?”

“I’d rather fish. Want to try?” He offered her the pole.

It took a while to draw the sinker up nine stories. As big as her thumb, it gleamed and dripped.

“Now for the fun part,” he said. She screwed up the first two casts, not keeping her finger on the release, so the first one only went about ten feet, and the second fifteen. But on the third try she sent the sinker flying out toward the horizon, and the line played out even after she was sure it must have hit the water.

“Trying to sound out the bottom?”

“Sorry,” she said. She started to reel the line in.

“It’s fun, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yes,” Jemma said, reeling frenetically. “But it’s not making me sleepy.” She had a lot of line to reel in. He let her concentrate on it for a little while, then asked her how Vivian’s campaign was going. “I don’t think I can tell you,” she said.

“I’m curious, is all.”

“Sorry. You’re the competition. Anyway, she’s still mad at you. I probably shouldn’t be talking to you at all.”

“Are you mad at me too?”

“She’s my best friend,” Jemma said.

“I didn’t mean to hurt her, you know.”

“I think everybody says that.”

“I didn’t even realize what I was doing, sometimes. It just happened. She didn’t believe me.”

“Neither do I,” Jemma said. The reel jammed. He took it from her briefly to fix it, then handed it back. She hadn’t quite understood the depth of Vivian’s wound. This was a girl who went through boyfriends like Jemma had used to go through sugary cereals, and yet Jemma had never seen her so angry as when she confirmed her suspicions by asking the angel if Ishmael was sleeping around, and she generated another list, name after name after name. “More evidence of the change,” Jemma said aloud.

“Pardon?”

“Nothing. Regardless of what I think, you’re the enemy. I can’t tell you a thing.”

“Okay,” he said, holding up his hands and smiling. “Sorry. I think she’s going to do very well, though. I get around, you know. And I listen. What else have I got to do? Teaching three-year-olds how to finger paint doesn’t take up much time. I’ve sort of been polling while I campaign, and everybody’s pretty excited about her.”

“If you say so.”

“Honest. Sometimes I don’t even know why I bother hanging my posters. But I have to try, at least. It’s only the second thing I’ve been sure about, since I woke up. The first one was Vivian. Now I know I have to run, even though I’ll probably lose. Queen Vivian. All hail. I like the sound of it. Thanks, by the way. I never said thank you, did I?”

“For what?”

“For everything. For what you did. I can’t tell you how glad I am not to be a fucking nurses’ aide any more. I kept hoping I’d remember what I did before, so I could do it again, that I’d have some incredibly rare skill that would just pop up one day… like yours did, I guess. They’re pretty mean to you, you know, when they think they own you, and they can order you around to do whatever they want. One of them tried to make me give her a pedicure. I haven’t got the nursing vote, that’s for sure. It’s all Vivian’s.”

“Nurses hate medical students,” Jemma said matter-of-factly. “They think we’re a big pain. It’s an old distinction. They’re already forgetting it. But I’ll just always be the bad help to them.” Jemma cast again. It really was quite pleasant, the big throw, and the whine of the reel, and searching the water to isolate the splash, and trying to sense through the line the moment when the sinker broke the water.

“Hasn’t anything come back?” she asked him.

“Not a thing. Not even a little thing. Something might seem familiar, like this. I must have fished before, but who hasn’t? I got the angel to spit out some law books for me, because I had that suspicion about being a lawyer, but it was all so horribly dull. I could barely stand to look at it. I give up, anyway. I spent too many days just trying — it just makes me feel mad. Really mad, sometimes. That’s stupid, to be mad enough to punch the wall and have no fucking clue what you’re so upset about. I think I’m not supposed to remember. Maybe that’s the whole point of me. The reason I lived. I’m the person who doesn’t remember anything. But if I’m the fresh start, then what am I so angry about?”

“You seem pretty relaxed right now,” Jemma told him.

“I’m keeping it inside,” he said. “I’m good at that.”

“You and my dad,” Jemma said. “You know, I could probably fix it, if you wanted. I mean maybe not, but probably. The not-remembering, I mean.”

“No thanks,” he said, after a pause.

“I was jealous of you. I think a lot of people were thinking it would be nice not to remember, and wished that they could have. Didn’t you hear about the nurse on seven who kept trying to get some propofol, just so she could stop thinking about everything?” She was reeling swiftly on the line, imagining the sinker tearing up through the water. She wanted it to jump and swing when it broke the surface, and maybe even crack a window. “How could they not be jealous?” she said. “Even now, when everything’s looking up. How much better and how much easier is it to just go, to just forget about everything and face forward, if you’ve already forgotten. Can you imagine… fuck!” The line stuck again, and something pulled at it, gently, then hard, then violently. Jemma didn’t think to drop the pole until it was yanked from her hands. She would have fallen if Ishmael hadn’t steadied her with a hand on her belly. Then they both leaned forward a little, trying to see what was down there. Jemma heard two splashes, one of them certainly her pole, but the other one certainly something else.