Supervising Rob was a job in itself. She’d find him scrubbing too hard or trying to dunk a toddler head first into the bucket, or distracted by a jellyfish at the window, Kidney naked and half-washed, forgotten on the floor beside his feet. More than forgetful, he heard things differently than she intended them. She’d found him the day before writing on Ella Thims with a thin-tipped permanent marker, his same backslanting lefty cursive flowing across the child’s chest and belly, arms and legs, around and around in a spiral on his back: once there was a boy named Rob he had a dog named Joe, once there was a boy named Rob he had a dog named Joe, once there was a boy named Rob he had a dog named Joe.
“What are you doing?” she’d asked him.
“Making her a story.”
“You were supposed to tell her a story,” she said. “They like it when you do that. They like your voice.”
“Uh huh. Like this.”
“Not like this,” she said, her tone gentle and patient, but he started to cry as soon as he understood that she was correcting him. It didn’t take much to make him cry; reminding him to brush his teeth or pointing out that his shoes were untied or that he wasn’t wearing any pants. “You don’t love me,” he would say to every perceived criticism. “Of course I do,” she’d say, and it would only take a kiss to make him forget that he had felt sad.
“I found another baby!” he said that morning, rushing up to her when she came into the conference room, her old classroom, where Josh and Cindy and Ethel and Kidney and all the rest of her old class, except Pickie, were housed, laid out in a row, a little ward of friends, heads to the window and feet to the wall. If their room was nicer than some others it was only because she had been decorating in there the longest, and not necessarily because she liked or knew them all better than the other sleepers. There were mobiles for every bed, each one different, appropriate to the age or personality of the person beneath it, so Valium had a string of winged donkeys while Josh and Cindy had pictures of the two of them together, with music that played only within a spherical field three feet in diameter. On the wall there was jungle; on the ceiling a sky. When it was dark you could cover the windows and play the holobox, and manufacture any environment you liked: desert or forest or endless grassy plains, anything but the ocean.
“It’s Kidney,” she said. “You should put her back in her bed.”
“But I found her. Another one! They’re everywhere, aren’t they?”
“She needs her sleep,” Jemma said. “Why don’t you put her back?”
“Okay,” he said. “If you say so.” He didn’t cry, but he looked at her like she was crazy. He was always picking up the smaller ones and presenting them to her, as if there was something else he thought she should be doing with them or for them. He never said, Wake this child or Make him better or Make it happen, but those were the words that she heard in her head whenever he ran up, as proud as a retrieving dog, to present her with another.
She washed them in order, Kidney first, unfolding her arms and legs out of her pajamas while Rob peered in the other beds and settled on Ethel, starting with her left foot. If she directed him he’d do a better job, but today she was tired of it, and rather than give him a plan, she just let him wash the foot over and over. When she got as far as Ethel, they could talk. She dipped her sponge in the water — the bucket kept it warm — and washed the little feet, always the dirtiest part, though the child hadn’t walked anywhere in weeks. Her round calves and knobby knees, the thin legs and the bottom, all areas covered by clothes but the dust crept in everywhere — she even had to brush it out of her mouth, a tricky business. She usually just combed her hair, but today she washed it, fetching a special basin from the replicator and lathering up two big handfuls of fancy-shampoo suds made from one of Vivian’s recipes. “It’s almost fun,” she said to Rob. “I’m almost enjoying myself.” When he didn’t respond she turned to look at him but he wasn’t in the room.
She found him without leaving. She could feel him upstairs, puttering in the PICU. Sometimes he went back there to stare at all the machines, pushed up into corners, or to hold his hand over one of the kids — it was mostly teenagers — and say, “I need to do something for him.” “There’s nothing more to do,” she’d tell him. “You’re all done.” He never believed her, but he always let her lead him away. She’d go fetch him out when she was done here.
Kidney, then Valium, then States’-Rights, then Magnolia. Everybody had their bath, and Jemma had another hundred minutes of good work. It was stupid to feel such a sense of accomplishment, when they were all spiffed up, when Kidney was changed into a new set of pumpkin pajamas, Ethel’s head was freshly shaved and painted, no longer a morose black spot but something else, always more cheery but different every few days, a plane-face with a propeller nose or a shark mouth, and today a yellow flower-face with blue eyes and a wide green smile. It was like making one’s bed — they would only get dirty again like a bed would be slept in again, but there was something so satisfying in it that it really did cheer her up more than anything had in weeks. She found she could almost forget about mad Ishmael wandering and shouting, about Rob, ruined and preserved, about all the uniquely gruesome deaths — John Grampus’s howls of outrage and accusations of betrayal directed at every surface of the hospital, Dr. Snood’s bright eyes glistening in the ash-filled cavity of his face, and the never-solved mystery of what lay under Dr. Tiller’s headdress; Jemma had paused forever with her finger on the fabric, ready to finally lift it, but in the end she left it alone. She knew she could do this final work for as many days as were left to her.
Josh was last, his body almost as familiar to her now as Rob’s. She was wiping idly in his groin, lingering a little too long there — she’d convinced herself that he was a gauge, that the oldest would wake first, and that his penis would wake up before he did, and when it rose he would rise shortly after it, and then the next thing would happen — all the children awake again and her baby would be born and… something else. Dry land or the hospital taking to the sky instead of the sea or something she couldn’t even imagine, not even her — something the children were all dreaming about, something they say with their darting closed eyes, something she was too old to hear or know or understand. “Five,” she said, counting the swipes. “Six, seven, eight.” The penis slept.
“I found another one!” Rob said, startling her. It’s not what it looks like, she wanted to say, pulling up Josh’s pants. I was consulting the oracle! But he wouldn’t understand, and probably wouldn’t notice. She took a deep breath and spoke in a very soft voice. She didn’t want to see him cry again.
“You’ve got to learn to let them lie where they are,” she said, turning around. She didn’t cry out this time, but she made a little sound when she saw the dripping child in Rob’s arms, and smelled the ocean on him. It was Pickie Beecher, pale and naked, a strand of kelp wrapped around his legs and belly, foam still on his chest, and a spray of leaves caught up in his now full head of curly brown hair.
“He’s already wet,” Rob said. “Do we still have to clean him?”
Jemma held the twig, tracing with her fingertips the edges of the leaves and the rough surface of the bark. She didn’t know what it was — it wasn’t any of the few plants she could recognize, holly or mistletoe or pine or poinsettia, holiday bushes whose leaves she’d traced out on blots of construction paper in grade school. The leaves were waxy but not dark, and though she found two berries they were purple, not white, and looked like they might have dropped out of a box of cereal. It smelled like nothing she’d ever encountered before, a little piney and a little minty, a little bit of a deep, wet, earthy smell, a little bit of chocolate, but then mostly something she didn’t even recognize, and could not describe.