The Children's Hospital

31

“Did you hear?” Frank said to Connie over their customary breakfast. “A child was raised from the dead last night.”

“From the nearly dead, actually,” Connie said. “And it was a man. You have always got things just slightly wrong. Always just a little, but enough to totally miss the point.” She smiled at him and took his hand. Their marriage had been in a shambles when they entered the hospital with their daughter two nights before the storm, but the Thing had reintroduced them each to the other’s best qualities, and they had fallen in love again, feeling a little guilty for it, amid all the misery. Their daughter had Crohn’s disease, and came into the hospital to have a fistula repaired, accompanied by both parents not because they couldn’t stand to be away from her, but because neither had trusted the other to be alone with her. They had both been expert slanderers, in their old lives.

“But a miracle, nonetheless,” he said. The angel had made him the usual omelet, asparagus and mushrooms and havarti cheese.

“Well, there are miracles and then there are miracles,” she said. “Raising someone from the dead — that’s a miracle. Saving them from certain death, that’s just good medicine. Baba, did you salt my eggs?”

“Maybe,” said the angel.

“How many times do I have to tell you? Salt on the bacon, pepper on the eggs. What do you say? Was there a miracle in the hospital last night?”

“Every day in this place is a miracle,” said the angel. “You are seated upon a miracle. You live inside of a miracle.”

“A typical non-response,” said Frank. “Deborah! Get out of bed!”

“Leave me alone!” their daughter called back from her room. They had an outside suite on the seventh floor, with a balcony off the room that Frank and Connie shared, intact family-hood being a state of relative privilege within the hospital, and Deb having gotten well enough, after a post-Flood series of surgical complications, to be discharged to a residential section. She was not asleep, though her father accused her of being slothful, and called her schlaftier, German being their secret language, where with her mother it was Japanese. Each of them spoke a different language to her when she was a toddler, ostensibly for the sake of her edification, but she suspected that even then they were getting ready to hate each other with a grand passion, and laying up language in store for the day when they would need to talk shit about each other to her when they were all eating dinner together. Now they kissed at the breakfast table with their mouths full of bacon and eggs.

She wasn’t sleeping, but she wasn’t ready to join her father for Bible study before he traipsed off to his new job as an apprentice radiology tech, or her mother for her walk on the roof before she went to clerk in the NICU. She was watching a movie, one that she watched every day. It was her wedding video, or at least a video of what her wedding would have been like, if the world hadn’t ended, if her boyfriend had lived long enough to propose to her.

She lay on her belly on her bed, feet kicking in the air behind her, and said “Forward,” so the image in the monitor, as big as her window on the opposite wall, blurred and accelerated, until she slowed it down at the reception. Some days she just listened to the blessing of the minister, a big lesbilooking lady in a purple dress that made her look like Grimace the milkshake monster, and some days she just watched when the camera took a slow track along the buffet table, feeling nostalgic for the salmon fillet and miniature quiches that she had never tasted. And some days, when she was feeling up to it, she watched the dancing, hugging her pillow while her new husband — they were twenty-five when they were married and age only made him more handsome — spun her around to a bluegrass tune. She had never imagined that she would have banjos and autoharps at her wedding, and yet from the first time she heard them she knew the angel had got it all just right, just as it had been, and just as it never would be. The exchange of vows never got to her, but somehow the dancing always did her in. While her father called out that her sausage was getting cold, she cried and cried.

Down the hall, in the room she shared with her brothers and sisters, Kidney was lying under her bed, her favorite place to sleep, and the place to which she retreated when she was afraid, or when she wanted to think about something. She had started the night in her bed, cuddled up with States’-Rights, but just before dawn she had started to get a feeling like something important was happening, and so she went down below, realizing as the sleepless hours passed and the sun made its first appearance on the floor, that the thing she was feeling was the end of their time in the hospital. Nothing else could be so big, or make her feel like every next day was going to be her birthday, and everybody’s birthday, and like all the rest of their years everybody in the whole world would spend every day giving and receiving presents.

Finally! she thought to herself, and whispered it in a quiet voice, careful not to wake her brothers and sisters. She wanted to go and look out the window, and see the sun shining again on big rocks and wide green fields and giraffes and school fences, but she was afraid, too, to finally see it. The bar of sun crept steadily across the floor, and reached and passed the place that marked the time when the nurses came in to do morning vitals, and Kidney knew for sure then that they were all out playing soccer and softball on the new land. She rolled out from under the bed, then rolled again and again until she rested, back against the wall, beneath the window. Then she stood up, and shouted it out loud this time to wake everyone in the room, “Finally!” The nurses in their bright scrubs kicking the ball and doing flips and driving dump trucks full of fresh fragrant soil — she saw the land perfectly in her mind before she saw the water still outside the window.

“Finally what?” asked Shout, coming awake as he always did without any fuss, sitting up and rolling out of bed and putting his arms around Kidney. She didn’t need to turn around to know that all her brothers and sisters were awake and looking at her.

“Nothing,” she said.