The Children's Hospital

10

Here and there, in blocks of two or three hours, she and Rob would sleep. He’d finish crying, his sobs quieting to little hiccups, and then he was snoring and already starting to drool. Jemma always fell asleep soon after him, but woke within an hour or two. She might watch him for a little while, note his eyes moving under his lids and wonder if he was dreaming of his mother and his sisters, but then she would rise and wander. Every night, passing by the patient rooms, she’d see nurses or parents or bleary-eyed residents, standing beneath the televisions and looking uselessly from channel to channel. She would have avoided the television in any disaster, anyhow. All the late junior disasters had made her stomach hurt to consider, and she’d actively run away from the screens everywhere that played them over and over again. She stopped once beside a nurse she didn’t know and looked up at the screen, imagining in the static an endless repetition of flood, a supremely high and distant vantage that showed the earth in space turning a deeper and deeper blue. If you flipped for long enough the angel-lady would offer you a cheery movie, whether you wanted one or not.

They wanted a voice and an image, she supposed. Someone to tell them what was happening, even after the windows cleared and it became so obvious what had happened. Never mind that the angel broadcast blessings in her buzzing, broken mechanical nose voice. They were as repetitious and horrible, in their way, as a television scene would have been. “Creatures,” she’d call out. “I will preserve you.” It sounded less comforting every time she said it.

Jemma wasn’t sure what she was looking for, the first time, when she went out from her room, not sleepy and not protected by work. She felt naked to the fact of the changed world in a way she did not when she was rushing from patient to patient, trying to make sense of their diseases and their progress, or wilting under the withering abuse of Dr. Snood or Anika’s remote, lizardlike gaze. She went out into the hospital, wrapped in the stony feeling that returned as soon as distractions failed. She knew that what she felt, or rather what she didn’t feel, was wrong. She knew that it was a sin, perhaps the first and worst sin of this new world, to look out on the water and miss nothing that was under it. It was uncharitable to feel so sharply lucky, that the only two people she cared about were in the hospital with her. So she would shadow a doorway when she heard weeping coming from it, and see a parent crying in a chair next to their child’s bed, or she might follow after a nurse when she slipped into the bathroom to break down. Everyone was weeping separately. There was not, like she thought there should be, a mass weeping, no mass gathering for catharsis on the ramp, though certainly at any moment there were any number of people crying at the same time. Sometimes they’d murmur names or words as they knocked their heads gently against the nearest hard surface, calling out Oh God, Oh God, and sometimes eliciting a reply of comfort from the angel. Jemma tried to open herself up to it, and make herself susceptible to the sadness — just hearing someone vomit could make her throw up, after all, and just looking at Cindy Flemm, eternally pale and clammy, made her feel nauseated.

It never worked, it was only wearying to listen to. Eventually it drove her back to sleep, but it never put anything so distinct as sadness in her. She’d lie down again next to Rob, her back turned against his back, looking out the window at the dark sea and beating her hand softly against her chest, as if that might make her heart hurt.