It was never like the fall that had brought her here. It was slower, for one thing, and it did her no harm whatsoever. In fact, she fell so slowly that she had time for reflection on various subjects, and this time as she floated down, she watched the snowflakes passing her and thought about her very first boyfriend. His name was Boukman. They had been eight years old together. Her parents had disapproved of him because he was black. They would not let him swim in their pool. This was in Miami, where in the summer it was practically a medical necessity to swim every day.
So she swam in his family’s pool, and exulted in his strangeness. Boukman claimed to have been born of a dog, and that he could fly. These were not his parents who applauded when he and she did synchronized back dives into the pool. His real mother’s name was Queenie, and she was a Great Dane, just like Scooby-Doo. He was from Haiti. He said such things were common there. She believed him all through the summer, and looked forward to the flying lessons he promised her.
On the day of the first lesson, she gave him a lingering kiss on the mouth, and then they ran hand in hand along his flat roof. She balked at the edge and watched him go flying out alone. He went out and straight down to fall directly on his well-formed, closely shaven head. She looked down at the gruesome angle of his neck. Because she was a child, she did not realize right away that he was dead.
In later years she wondered if it had been her doubt that cost him his life. If she had jumped with him, would they have flown over all the low houses of their respectable neighborhood, and scraped their toes against the tops of the highest royal palms?
As she approached the ground, Beatrice realized that Boukman was not the great sadness of her life. It was not for him that she had made her leap, though she would always think of him as the beginning of a long arc of sadness, as the person who taught her that there’s no such thing as a boy who can fly, and that nothing is born of a dog but puppies and blood.
Beatrice walked into the ER, following behind a pair of EMTs who were wheeling in a motorcycle accident victim. The few people in the waiting room looked up as the man was pushed past them. He was crying out, “Louise! Louise!” at the top of his lungs. Beatrice watched as they rushed him down the hall to the trauma center. Snow swirled in around her before the doors closed again, and the waiting people went back to staring absently at their entertainment magazines or the television. Walking unseen through the restricted area, Beatrice could hear people having their various emergencies behind the curtains that separated the exam beds. She did not pause to look at the shattered kneecaps or the scalp wounds, or the blue and gray asthmatics wheezing desperately. She walked as quickly as she could, trying to catch up with the flight nurses who were carrying her liver up to surgery.
She didn’t catch them. Her fall had given them a long head start on her. But somewhere near the cardiovascular intensive care unit she happened upon Olivia, who was striding confidently down the hall carrying a phlebotomy basket and singing “Maria.” Beatrice followed her clear across the hospital to the nurseries, where Olivia had been called to perform a blood draw on a brand-new baby. Olivia did not mind being called to do phlebotomy. In fact, she liked very much to escape the confines of the lab, but sometimes it disturbed her to have to cause an infant pain, even if it was for its own good. They entered the nursery and saw a large nurse rocking and feeding a baby. The flesh of the nurse’s thighs spilled out from under the armrests of her rocking chair.
“There she is,” she said, pointing to a warming bed in a far corner of the room. Beatrice took a moment to admire the cheery decorations: rabbits and ponies and kittens, and a fine triptych of three dogs under a candy bush. The first dog’s eyes were big as saucers, the second’s as big as dessert plates, and the third’s as big as dinner plates. This last picture made Beatrice feel sad.
Next to the warming bed, Olivia was preparing the baby for her blood draw.
“Hello, darling,” she said. “You’re so beautiful!” She scrubbed vigorously at the baby’s foot with an alcohol-soaked cotton ball. The baby found this a not-unpleasant sensation. Olivia, full of regret, unwrapped a lancet from its sterile foil package and drove it into the fleshiest part of the baby’s heel.
“Sorry, darling,” she said. The baby, who did not yet have a name but would one day be called Sylvia, did not immediately begin to scream. First a look of perfect incredulity passed over her small face. Only when that had been replaced with an expression of outrage did she begin to scream with such force and volume that Beatrice thought it would blow Olivia’s hair back like a hot wind.
“Yes, yes,” said Olivia. “Life is hard. Don’t I know it?” This is only the beginning, Beatrice whispered behind her.
Olivia had caught the heel in the well between her thumb and forefinger, and now she began to squeeze with the full force of her hand. Sometimes Olivia thought she heard the heel bone making crunching noises under the pressure, but Bonnie had assured her that it was all in her head, and that it was quite impossible to crush a baby’s heel because the bones were so fresh and green.
A dark red pearl of blood had formed from out of the wound, but Olivia wiped this away with a piece of gauze because it was too full of clotting factors to be useful for analysis. She continued squeezing, and caught the next drop in a tiny plastic tube, and the next drop, and then the next. She counted twenty-five of them before she had collected the requisite 250 microliters.
It took a very long time. The blood was slow to come. Olivia began to suffer because of the heat lamps that kept the chilly babies warm like so many hamburgers. There was a lamp in the roof of the warming bed, directly above Olivia’s neck where she bent over the baby. She wished for an assistant to wipe away the sweat from her brow before it dripped down onto the baby. Beatrice would have been happy to help her, if she could have.
“Like the Sahara under there, isn’t it?” said the fat nurse, who was watching Olivia sweat.
“I think I’m getting dehydrated,” said Olivia, squeezing out the final drop. She capped her tube and put a festive adhesive bandage across the heel. The baby continued to scream, even though both Olivia and Beatrice stroked her arms and belly to try to calm her. Even after they were gone out the door she screamed. Beatrice lingered at the observation window and watched the beet-red baby writhe and scream while the cooing blob of a nurse burped her nursery mate. Beatrice put a hand on the window and said, It only gets worse and worse and worse.
When they got back to the lab, Beatrice and Olivia found the others clustered around a table, getting ready to draw each other’s blood. Bonnie looked up at Olivia from where she sat with her bare arm spread out before her.
“How’d it go?” she asked.
“Tough. That baby had blood like glue, but I got it.”
“Congratulations. Have you seen a blue-top floating around? Denis says he’s missing one. He’s all upset.”
“I thought we got one on the jumper. I know I labeled one.”
“Well, he didn’t get it. I guess it’s with Jesus now.”
“Want to get drawn?” asked Otto.
“Sure,” said Olivia. “Just let me get this back to Denis.”
“Bring him back with you!” Bonnie called out after her. Beatrice stayed behind and watched as Luke stroked the crook of Bonnie’s arm with his gloved hand, trying to get the vein to rise.
“Hurry up,” Bonnie said. “This tourniquet is killing me.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I think I have it now.” Beatrice stood next to him and observed closely as he slipped the needle into Bonnie’s vein. His motion was certain and swift. Bonnie, looking away like she always did when she got her blood drawn, did not even notice the entry.