The Children's Hospital

18

Rob knew it was stupid, to miss someone who was still alive, when so many people were dead. Every day he spent time looking over the water, remembering his sisters and his mother — for ten minutes or twenty minutes or a half an hour he would stare, now and then mumbling a prayer very softly (he was praying over the water but didn’t want to give the appearance of praying to the water, though there were some who were doing that already, people who discovered once the world was drowned that worldwide catastrophe had all their lives been one of their secret desires, and who treated the killing sea like a god) until his pager went off, inevitably, summoning him to a phone or back to the unit. He never went more than a couple of hours without whispering a name, Gillian or Malinda or Gwen — the last his mother’s name, which he had never spoken while she was alive. He thought of them on the hour, but he didn’t pine for them like he did for Jemma.

Most of the time she was only three floors away, but it felt like she was on another continent, and if they happened to be apart for a whole twelve-hour shift, he grew sadder and sadder by the hour. He learned the difference between sadness and grief that way, missing his girlfriend and missing his family — it hurt in different places. Missing his mother and his sisters was a dull ache — he would never get used to it, but he was already living with it. Everybody was already living with that. But he felt Jemma’s absence more acutely, a sharp pain in the bones of his chest that, when it was raging, would only go away when he pressed her against him.

“I love you,” he’d say to her, in some closet or empty conference room or in the cold rooms where they stored the blood. It seemed so much more urgent now, to say it all the time. There was a pressure that rose from way down deep in him, which those words safely vented, and yet more and more that was not enough. He would put his cheek against her ear and say it, and still there would be the pushing from inside, so he’d have to add, “So much,” or “More every day,” or else just say it again and again, “I love you, I love you, I love you,” until she squirmed away.

He was on call in the new combined unit, and little urgencies kept him running up and down the stairs that connected the NICU and the PICU all night long, but when his need was great enough, he slipped away down the hall, telling the nurses he was just running down to the lab to track down some results. He and Jemma had failed to synchronize their call schedules, so she was home sleeping, or just as often sleeplessly wandering the hospital, when he was working. He went in very quietly. The room was dark and she lay quite still on their bed. He meant just to watch her for a while, to touch her would be to wake her, and then he would have to explain what he was doing there. But as soon as he sat down his pager went off. He was as quick as any intern on the draw, his hand flying to his waist to quiet the thing before it had barely peeped, but it was enough to wake her.

“You again,” she said, opening her eyes and then closing them again. She turned and put an arm across his lap.

“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Tell that fucking nurse I said to shove a preemie up her ass.”

“They’re being nice tonight.”

“Huh. Must be a full moon. What are you doing here?

“Nothing.” She was quiet again, and he was sure she had fallen asleep, and so he said, “Hey… hey… I…” But her hand shot up to silence him, quicker than he had silenced his pager.

“Don’t say it,” she said.

Down the hall and up two stories, Vivian and Ishmael were sitting chastely on the edge of her bed.

“You’re special,” he said.

“Not like you. Only one of you in the whole hospital.”

“I don’t feel very special,” he said. “Not in a good way, anyway. I just feel weird. Didn’t you see everybody looking at me?”

“Of course. You’re famous.”

“Who is that guy? What’s he doing here? Why did he live, instead of my brother?”

“Maybe they’re glad to see you. Glad that somebody else made it.”

“Or instead of my father. Or instead of my uncle.”

“Maybe you are somebody’s uncle. You haven’t met everybody yet, have you?”

“Why did he deserve to live?”

“I think we’re all wondering that,” Vivian said. “Each of us about everybody else, and each of us about ourselves. And maybe we deserve it like people deserve a punishment, you know? Maybe it’s not even a reward, to be bottled up here. Maybe somebody somewhere else is on the good ship.”

“Sorry to be sad. I didn’t mean to bring you down. I was having such a good time, until just now.”

“Me too. I still am. It’s okay. You don’t have to be happy all the time. You wouldn’t fit in here, if you were. We’re all fucking miserable, in case you haven’t noticed.”

He did not reply, but he took her hand in his, and they sat that way for a little while.

“Guess what?” she said finally.

“What?” he said, turning his face to look at her.

“You’re beautiful,” she said. Which was not at all what she had meant to say. That wasn’t something she was accustomed to saying to men, especially on a date. And when they said it to her, she would say, “I know,” a reply which effectively shut down such unprofitable and boring conversation. But Ishmael’s face seemed to her unaccountably lovely just then, so sad and so earnest and yet somehow more than perfect in every line, a collection of lovely shapes that added up, just in that moment, that actually made her feel as if her heart was skipping a beat.

“Not like you,” he said, and kissed her. They had kissed before, but not like this — as soon as his lips touched hers she knew that they would be having sex within minutes.

“I don’t usually get like this,” she said to him as she pulled at his shirt, trying to get it over his head, breathless at the prospect of seeing him naked, and thinking for some reason that she wanted to uncover him completely, clothes first, and then the layer of sadness he seemed to have wrapped himself under that evening, and then his very skin, because every covering layer was only hiding a more startling loveliness. She was practiced at sex — sometimes she felt like she’d been doing it forever, but she’d hardly ever been so excited as she was now.

“Me neither,” he said. “I mean, I don’t think so. Or I do… wait.” He put his face in her neck and then dragged it down her body, straight past her breasts and her belly and into her lap, and from down there he spoke again in a muffled voice. “I mean I think you’re my first. Oh yes, definitely.” And doing it, he said, “I’ve never done this before!”

Dr. Chandra lived next door, but he wasn’t listening. The walls weren’t thick, but they’d never permit a sound to slip through, though a couple might shout or sing together at the top of their lungs. He was sitting in his bed, which was just as nice as Vivian’s bed. He had leaped at one of the new rooms as soon as the angel had announced that they were available. This was the sort of thing he had always missed out on in the old world. He never got the bottom bunk, or the nicer apartment, or won the door prize. And this place was much nicer than anything he’d had in the old world — the big bed and the fancy sheets and the soft thick rug would have been out of his league. He finally lived someplace that had a balcony and a fireplace and a window in the bathroom. But he was hardly ever there, and even when he was, it did not make him happy, or even contented, in the way that he had supposed it would. This was his day off — not really even a day, it was only eighteen hours — and like with all of them he spent it decorating and redecorating, trying to get the place right.

“You just need someone to share it with,” the angel told him, because he had just been decorating again and telling her how it was all still not quite right. “Then it would be perfect.”

“Shut up,” he said, but fondly, because even though she got him in trouble not waking him up in time, and even though he strongly suspected that she was kind to him only because she had to be — because God forced her to be that way or because she was programmed to practice an utterly undiscriminating kindness — he still considered her to be one of his few friends.

“You’re a handsome boy,” she said. “And you have so much to offer. I can think of a dozen men who would feel blessedly lucky to date you.”

“Oh, please,” he said. “I do not like these walls. Saffron? Mustard is more like it. I wanted to feel like I was surrounded by Dalai Lamas.”

“Would you like to see these men?”

“Hell no,” he said. “Show me the paint samples again.” She did as she was told, flashing solid blocks of color on the television screen, but faces began to pop up between colors, a nurse from the NICU whose name he did not know, a physical-plant man, totally bald though he couldn’t have been older than twenty-five, the big Samoan from the lift team. “Stop that,” he said.

“How about this one?” She showed him Jordan Sasscock.

“Oh please,” he said. “Totally out of my league, not to mention totally straight.”

“Don’t be so sure,” she said. “Some of us can hear his dreams.”

“You’re too much.” He put a pillow over his face and closed his eyes. “Never mind the paint, just turn out the lights. I’m going to sit here and suffocate.”

“Let me help you dream, then. Just while you’re waiting for that special person.”

“None of that,” he said. But after she turned off the lights he took away the pillow, and he didn’t object when she started to show him pictures of an imaginary date, and an imaginary life, and imaginary comforts. Until he fell asleep he watched a slideshow, pictures of him and Jordan Sasscock on some kind of in-hospital vacation, at a fancy dinner in some dark room, walking close to each other on the roof, both of them too discreet to hold hands and yet in picture after picture Jordan was punching him affectionately on the shoulder. He would not look when she showed them in bed, except at the end, when he lay with his head on Jordan’s chest, both of them sound asleep, their faces slack and puffy, bathed in morning sun from the window on the balcony.

“Behold your happiness,” the angel said, “and do not cry.”