The Children's Hospital

65

It was the last show, and had the feeling of being a last show even before everybody knew that’s what it was. It was grander and fancier and stupider than anything they’d put on before (the stage they made for the talent show never went more than a few days without hosting a play or a dance recital or reading of deadly boring poetry) and the only show produced with the full energies of the Council, which seemed by this production to come into its own as a mature political entity, or prove anyway that it could be swift and efficient in organizing its populace in an appointed tasks. As swiftly as other governments had tried and executed dissidents, and as efficiently as others had invaded a neighbor, and as gorgeously as others had built monuments to death or war or courage, the Council whipped up a Broadway-caliber production of Hello, Dolly.

Dr. Sashay took the starring role, surprising everyone when she turned up for auditions and brought Frank, the director, to tears with her rendition of “Don’t Let the Parade Pass Me By.” Maybe it was just that Frank, like everybody else, was rather depressed anyway, and might have been brought to tears by a troupe of dancing poodles — but nobody who heard her voice ringing through the auditorium could deny that she was loud, or emotive, or that she could carry a tune. The other roles filled so quickly and easily that Frank suspected the hand of God was working to round up his cast. “It’s like you were born to play this role,” he said to Anika, and to Dr. Sasscock, and to Dr. Pudding, and each of them confided in the hastily written and printed notes to the show that they had indeed felt their hearts respond to the Council’s call for auditions, and had felt a vocation for their parts when they watched one of the film versions (either the original Streisand or one of the over two-dozen pornographic variations), a correspondence and a rightness, as Dr. Sashay put it, that she hadn’t felt since she first heard the word neuroblastoma, or saw the quivering, firm white mass of the tumor in gross section. Suddenly, she wrote in the program, I knew what I had to do.

It wasn’t a holiday — the situation on board the hospital was too worrisome to proclaim one — but everybody there was familiar with the concept of respite care, and the Council had learned from the grueling exhaustion of their first few months at sea that caregivers have their needs, too, and that to ignore them was to invite early and perhaps avoidable burnout. So they billed it as a night of hope and respectful celebration of how far they had made it, and how much they appreciated that they could dance and sing and lift their hearts even in the middle of this new ocean, and even with the shadow of death falling over their toes, if not their hearts (Dr. Snood’s words). It was exactly the sort of thing Vivian now abhorred, and she and the ninth-floor squatters were the only people, besides the PICU staff watching over the six victims of the botch, who were not in attendance, either in the square field of chairs in the lobby, or in the risers and chairs set up all along the ramp. Way up on the ninth floor a tiny face appeared at the balcony ledge, now and then, during the show, but never for more than a few minutes.

Jemma, in a chair on the third floor, watched with Pickie Beecher on her left and Ethel Puffer on her right, with all nine of her children, Kidney in her lap. Rob was in the PICU, watching on a monitor. She had not had to do much to help with the production — the idea arose independently of her and the execution happened without her contributing anything except a suggestion that the extraordinarily wide-brimmed hats that Dr. Sashay would wear for most of the show would obscure her face and her voice from the high-sitting members of the audience. She was too full of Vivian’s spirit, anyway, to get too excited about it, and she could think of better shows, anyway, than Hello, Dolly, and suspected they were only doing it because it gratified some secret fetish of Dr. Snood’s. Her thoughts were elsewhere — with Vivian, with her baby, and in the PICU — during the planning (though she duly affixed her signature to the original resolution and every rider that was attached to it) and even during the show itself, which turned out to be just as spectacular as anyone had planned.

Kidney announced that she was bored hardly before the curtain fell away and promptly fell asleep, but Pickie seemed especially to enjoy it. Jemma would never have figured him for a boy who loved show tunes, yet he bounced in his seat and acted more like a child than she had ever seen him, clapping at every entrance of Dr. Sashay, and requiring three multiple shushings from all sides before he would stop singing along. Jemma divided her attention between the stage and the PICU, leaving the smaller portion for Dr. Sashay and her ostrich-feather hat, whose narrow brim revealed her face and her voice but left the whole artifice a little unsteady, and Jemma barely noticed when it tipped off her head and she kicked it out into the audience, like it was all part of the show. She sent drifting tendrils of thought up the ramp and down the hall, into the PICU, trying to sense how the six were doing — every day she could figure things from a little farther away, but two floors was really reaching. She thought she could feel Rob, a familiar and pleasant pressure against her mind, and imagined him sitting at his usual place at the work station, his elbow on the table and his chin in his hand, watching a scrolling screen of lab values.

The six faded into her awareness, one by one, three and three around the bed where the boy slept. She imagined that they were watching, too.

She looks like a crazy old whore, Cotton said.

She is a crazy old whore, said Karen.

A delightful, wonderful old whore, said Wanda. The most wonderful old whore there ever was. Don’t you know the story?

She’s going to break her neck in those heels, said Dolores. Look at how steep that staircase is.

No, she’s on a wire. It looks like she’s going to fall, but then she swoops out over the audience, sustained by her wonderful old age, and her lust for life.

She’s going to eat it, Dolores said confidently.

I can feel it, Aloysius said. Here it comes. Jemma put them in the air above the stage, five dying critics sitting forward in their floating beds while the boy in the middle went on sleeping soundly, as eager and curmudgeonly as the old men from The Muppet Show. Dr. Sashay, coming down the high staircase that reached all the way up to the third floor on the opposite side of the lobby, was just two verses into her show-stopper when her voice broke. She recovered and went on, stepping expertly in her heels, not having to look at her feet on the narrow steps even though her ankles and legs were doing a twisty little dance with every step. Halfway down her voice broke again, and she tried to go on. The orchestra stopped when she stopped again. She cleared her throat, lifted her head, and started over. “I!” she sang, strong and clear, but then she lost her voice entirely and was wracked by a cough. She had a handkerchief ready — she’d been waving it in a carefully orchestrated pattern. She held it at her mouth, and when she brought it away during a break in the fit it was easy to see, even from far away, how it was covered in blood and ash.

“Oh my,” she said, and fell, not before Jemma became aware that her femurs had fractured spontaneously under her own weight. She bounced down the stairs, oofing and screaming and coughing, and lay still in the middle of the restaurant set.

Brava! said Dolores. Brava! Jemma hardly heard her. She stood up, dumping Kidney out of her lap, stepped back from the balcony, and ran down the ramp. People screamed — their emotions already worked up by the elaborate show — and backed against the balcony as she streaked by, and then away from it as she hurried through the lobby and ran up on the stage. The diners fled their tables as Jemma stepped up next to Dr. Sashay and assaulted her with fire, calling up reserves that seemed equal to what had harrowed the hospital to burn at the rapidly spreading blackness in her. But her rage and her fire only seemed to make it worse — she could tell that was how it looked, though she couldn’t stop herself from trying and trying to win. Whole hospitals’ worth of fire, enough to fill the whole place, the sum of the whole harrowing and again — she called and it came, and Dr. Sashay screamed, lifted by the conflagration, not saying words, though people would swear later they heard her say, “Stop, stop, please stop,” until she was just an ashen image of herself that shattered against the stage when Jemma finally released her.