The Children's Hospital

69

The morning of her impeachment trial, three weeks after the arrival of the boat and the boy, Jemma lay in bed, feeling weary and achy and depressed. She’d come half-awake when Rob had left, summoned back to the PICU by his pager, and pretended to be asleep, watching through slitted eyes as he rose from bed, stretched, and pulled on his scrubs. He washed his face with water in a bowl; Pickie was still sleeping in the bathroom, and Rob was too considerate of Pickie to wash there. Jemma stirred a little, arranging herself in an accessible position and closing her eyes tight. When he kissed her she brushed a hand lazily against his face. “I love you,” he told her, and she knew the highlight of her day had just come and gone.

Back during her surgery rotation she’d lain similarly abed, with the cold pre-dawn air spilling in her window, listening to the distant murmuring of her alarm clock. She smacked it across the room every day when it brought her the news that she must wake and travel to the OR. It would not yet be four a.m., but she could perfectly imagine the accumulating insults of the day, and her perfect exhaustion and depression when she came home again to sit in front of her window and watch the lights on the bay, thinking of nothing and feeling like a big pile of shit sculpted up into the shape of a girl. She lay that morning with her face in her pillow, a tiny corner of it stuck in her mouth, and thought of rounds and her late-afternoon trial, and how she would rather sleep than get up, rather hide on the roof than go help on the sixth floor, and rather gouge her eyes out with spoons than go to the trial. Maybe, she thought, they could just mail her the verdict, or shoot a flare where she could see it from her window, red for you’re out, blue for we still love you. She turned on her side and pressed her nose against the cool cement wall, thinking of witnesses, seeing Dr. Snood and Dr. Chandra and Dr. Pudding on the stand, and then imagining a series of special witnesses, raised from the sea or conjured form the air, her mother, her father, her brother, Martin, Sister Gertrude, Laura Ingalls Wilder, the Cat in the Hat, Bugs Bunny, and that curious and amusing Martian who wore a shoe brush on his head. I knew she was trouble from the moment I saw her, the Martian said, and her mother said, All the Claflins are fucking insane, why should she be any different, and her brother rose up out of the witness box, fifteen feet tall, to crouch over the whole assembly and kill them all with a single derisive snort.

She heard Rob slip out the door, closing it so slowly behind him that the click of the latch was drawn out to two syllables. She turned again in the bed wishing she could lie on her back and throw her arm over her eyes, but she was too afraid that the baby might sit on its own blood supply and strangle itself. She piled both pillows on top of her head and fell asleep again, into a sleeping dream — she had liked those, in school, because they made it seem like you were getting twice as much sleep as you actually were — where she was lounging on a table in the Council chamber, stretching and turning and spinning like the slow hand of a clock, so her head pointed at everyone in the room and she heard them murmuring about how peaceful she looked, and what a shame it would be to wake her. Eyes closed, still turning and spinning, she became convinced that she was riding in her parents’ car, feigning sleep, and hoping that her father would carry her into the house.

“It’s time to wake,” said the angel. “They’ll need you at rounds in thirty minutes.”

“Shut up,” Jemma said. “I’m asleep.”

“You’re awake now. I see it very clearly. Shall I tell you the state of creation outside?”

“Still wet, I know,” Jemma said.

“The water temperature is twenty-six degrees Celsius. The sky is overcast with a scattering of cirrus clouds. There are fifteen dolphins circling the second floor, a school of tuna outside the main entrance, and a large jellyfish outside the emergency room. Many children are watching it. Would you like to know who the children are?”

“I’m ordering you to be quiet,” Jemma said. “I have a busy day. I need to sleep through it.”

“You have a busy day,” the angel agreed. “Breakfast has already been prepared. I will shriek an alarm if you do not rise from bed in the next three minutes.” She began to count softly.

“They don’t need me up there,” Jemma said. The angel kept counting. Jemma flailed angrily under her covers, right to left and left to right, until the count had risen to a hundred seconds. When she rolled her legs out of the bed and touched her feet to the floor the counting stopped. It wasn’t comfortable, but she thought she could probably fall asleep again like that. When she didn’t move for another minute, the angel began to shriek, just softly at first, like a kitten horribly tortured but too small to make a very big noise. Jemma stood up before it got too loud.

“Good morning,” the angel said.

“Probably for somebody, somewhere,” Jemma said. She walked to the little table. Pickie had laid out breakfast for her, two boiled eggs, a kiwi, and a banana arranged in a hairy-nosed face. He’d written a note next to the tall glass of orange juice: it is breakfast.

“Would you like something else?” the angel asked. “The abomination touched that food. I witnessed it.”

“Don’t call Pickie names.”

“He is not yet clean.”

“Neither am I,” Jemma said, smelling her upper lip, then her hair, then her shirt: cat food, smoke, illness. Vivian was sick with the botch. Jemma had stayed late with her the previous night, and not washed her hair when she came back downstairs. She peeled the eggs but ate only the fruit, drank half the juice, then took a long shower, standing for fifteen minutes under the water, resting her head against the tile.

“They are waiting,” the angel kept saying, but no one was waiting for her when she finally got up to the sixth floor. The nurses barely met her eyes, and only the children, hurrying up and down the hall with bedpans or blood, or pulling bags of IV fluid in the little red carts in which they themselves used to be hauled, smiled at her. The younger ones were merely fetchers; the older ones were helping with jobs formerly performed by adults too sick now to work.

“I only have three patients,” said Cindy Flemm when she saw Jemma coming down the hall, “and I’m late for rounds. It’s my first time being late. Josh said they take away your patients, if you’re late.”

“Wouldn’t that be great?” Jemma said. “I think they give you more, though.” They walked together down the hall, Cindy going over the numbers on her three face-sized index cards.

“Josh has this fancy PDA, but I like the cards better. What’s your system?”

“Toilet paper,” Jemma said. “Slow down there, Speedy.”

“Sorry,” Cindy said, not slowing. She got to the conference room a few paces ahead of Jemma, darted in, then popped back out to hold the door. “Sorry,” she said again, and Jemma heard, Sorry you’re pregnant, Sorry everyone is afraid of you, and Sorry you’ve become useless.

Dr. Tiller looked up at her and gestured toward an empty seat. Timmy looked at her, too. Ethel Puffer, pulling a plate of brownies toward herself, waved. Josh was presenting a patient.

“She looks a little yellow this morning,” he was saying. “Do you think the botch could be getting to her liver?”

“Many things are possible, Dr. Swift,” said Dr. Tiller. “And some unpleasant business impossible today might be tomorrow’s reality. But finish your presentation and then we’ll consider those things.” Josh blushed. Jemma broke in before he could go on.

“Anika has a pneumo,” she said.

“I just looked at her film,” said Timmy. “It was fine.”

“When was it taken?”

“This morning, of course. It was fine. I went over it with Dr. Pudding.”

“Well, she’s got one now — it’s probably too small to warrant a tube but somebody should keep an eye on it. And Janie has a renal abscess and a little fluid in her pericardium and Dr. Neder is about to dissect her aorta. She should go to the unit right away. I’m going down there next. Want me to see if there’s a bed?”

“Have you examined the patients, Dr. Claflin?” asked Dr. Tiller.

“Of course,” Jemma said, which was true; she had examined them in her way, walking by every room and pausing by the door to direct her attention inside.

“And you’re quite sure about these assertions?”

“Sure as ever,” Jemma said, getting back up.

“How much fluid is a little fluid?” asked Timmy.

“About ten cc’s,” I think.

“Rounds aren’t over, Dr. Claflin,” said Dr. Tiller.

“I’m a busy lady, Dr. Tiller. If I notice anything else I’ll give you a call.” She waddled to the door, staring straight ahead.

“Don’t you want a brownie?” Ethel asked. Jemma reached behind her back, waved and hurried out, but she slowed as soon as she was in the hall. She wasn’t really a busy woman. She had nothing to do all day but her mystic snooping, and rounding took only as long as a walk through the wards. She couldn’t bear to go to the Council chamber yet, though she had a pile of papers to read and sign there. Instead she went downstairs, avoiding the ramp because she didn’t want to get caught up in a string of conversations. It was like a poll, she supposed, how every third person stopped her to say, I think you’re doing fine — this is all just craziness, but every second person scowled or turned their eyes to the floor or actually scolded her or lectured her on the fate of tyrants. The angel put her approval rating at 47 percent, not, Jemma figured, enough to save her, though the process that would decide her political future was not so grossly democratic as a recall.

Connie’s bar was open all the time now — Karen’s had closed, not just because she was dead but because no one else could make coffee like she did, and the wet black espresso grounds looked too much like what was leftover after the botch finished with a body — full of daytime lushes and shirkers, extra people who were too depressed by the new circumstances of their community to dance or stand on their heads in front of their class, but unwilling to leap back into the business of taking care of the sick. They were rare and distinctly unpopular. Among Jemma’s unfinished work in the Council was a resolution that would draft every last one of them into service again, but for now they were miserable and free, and this morning she was one of them, too.

“Hey, honey,” said Connie, as Jemma took a seat next to Dr. Chandra, the only other patron. “Shall I surprise you?” Jemma nodded, and Connie served her up a tall glass of alcohol-free Impeachment Punch, complete with a tall stick of fruit-kebab and a twirling umbrella. “Drink it all down,” she said. “It’s good luck.”

“Does that mean I’ve got your vote?”

“Honey,” Connie said, tossing her stringy hair over her shoulder and shaking her wattle in a way that Jemma knew she saved for very serious pronouncements. “You know I’ve got to hear the evidence. We all do. We’ve made our rules and now we have to lie in them.”

“You’ve got my vote,” said Dr. Chandra. “Not that it matters. Not that anything matters.”

“Darling,” said Connie. “Darling, don’t put yourself down. Of course it matters. Not very much, but it does. You just have to hang in there and try not to put yourself down to much, until you’re recovered. Then you’ll see. You’re going to stand so tall your head will scrape the skylights.”

“Whatever,” said Dr. Chandra. That was her line, the same one she spoke to all the sad souls she ministered to down here. The botch had put them in a slump like it put others into respiratory failure. They just had to be patient, and keep in their heart a willingness to let the sun shine in when it rose again, as it surely, surely would, Honey. To Jemma it was as viable and stupid as any other sort of pep talk, colder but just as effective, which was to say not at all, as the ones that Rob gave her.

“Thanks,” Jemma said to Dr. Chandra. “It does matter.” She looked at her watch: there were still five hours until her trial.

“Everyone’s going fucking crazy,” he said. “What they’re doing to you is crazy, and all the other shit is crazy, too. It’s the Program, back again to claim us all. Why would they let us out, just to start it all over again? What am I supposed to do now?”

“That’s botch-talk, Honey,” said Connie.

“Maybe,” he said. “It’s probably in my brain. Sometimes I think I can see it, when I close my eyes. It’s big and tall and hulking. It looks just like Tiller. It’s probably there… Do you see it?” He spun on his stool and grabbed Jemma’s hand. She did see it, not in his brain but tucked away in his abdominal organs, a seemingly impotent series of shadows.

“No,” she said.

“Lighten up, Botchcake,” said Connie.

“Lighten up,” she says. “Tell it to Dr. Tiller, coming for me with her red dripping claws.”

“They need everybody they can get,” Jemma said.

“Don’t give me that,” he said, tearing his hand away from her. “Any moron will do in a hopeless situation. Anybody can ask the angel for anti-arrhythmia potions. And I may be just another moron, but I’m not her moron, not yet. She can just fuck off.”

“Well,” Jemma said, taking another sip of her punch. She was about to whisper, A little fucking off might do her good, when she felt a hand on her shoulder. It was Ishmael.

“Hello, handsome,” said Connie. Dr. Chandra blushed and looked into his drink.

Ishmael ignored them both. “We need to talk,” he said to Jemma.