“Look at those arms,” she said. “Look at those hands. He looks nice. I bet he’s nice. Is he nice?”
“Nice enough,” Jemma said. “So far. We all just met him.”
“Well God damn,” Vivian said, staring and shaking her head and idly rubbing her belly in the same way she always did on one of their nights out, staring in a bar at some new galoot.
Jemma might have given her proprietary lecture, the same one she’d shouted in nightclubs at her unlistening friend, with the added caveat that this was a man who had just washed out of a killing sea, a miracle and a mystery and a danger, but just as she opened her mouth to give it she noticed Rob, still sitting up to his chest in round plastic balls. He had been staring at her, for how long she did not know, one finger resting precisely on the top of his head.
“I’ve been praying,” Rob said to her in the call bed. She lay against him, her back to his chest. His big hands were folded neatly across her belly.
“I think I noticed,” she said, thinking of the times when she knew he was not sleeping, but he would not answer when she called his name in the dark. Sometimes she would hear a stray whisper from him, words that sounded like the names of his sister or his mother.
“Not something I’ve ever done before.”
“I know.” He came from a family of supremely rational atheists. Jemma had found them difficult to get used to, the way they said just what they meant, proposed every action before executing it, and kept their promises.
“I wonder if I’m doing it right.”
“Is there a wrong way?”
“There must be. Doesn’t there have to be? Something’s been going wrong, hasn’t it?”
“You’ve been listening to Dr. Sundae.”
“Would you like to pray… together?”
“No,” she said simply. “Maybe you could ask Father Jane.”
“We could just say a little one.”
“Or we couldn’t.” She hadn’t said a prayer since Calvin died, and even before then it was only the ones he taught her that she said regularly. She thought of his book, and wanted suddenly — the desire came as swiftly as a cramp, and was as much of a surprise — to read it. She’d thrown it away as soon as she read it, and now remembered nothing except for a few scattered phrases like blasphemy is the straightest route to God and Grace is perfectly violent, raving testimonials to his most secret insanity. When she’d thrown it in the river it had felt like the first right thing she’d ever done, but now she wished she had it with her, and pictured him sometimes, kicking Father Jane in the face and taking her place before the podium to read from it until everyone in the audience bled from their ears.
“Maybe later,” he said.
“Maybe.” She tried to imply maybe never.
For a while they were quiet, Jemma watching the window. Every so often a wave would splash against it, but mostly it just showed the darkening blue sky.
“This was nice,” he said, squeezing her.
“Very,” she said, though it had not been one of the great ones.
“It seemed like we should wait forever, before. And then after today I didn’t know what we were waiting for.”
“I’m not sure either.”
“It seemed wrong, to do anything like celebrating.”
“Oh,” she said, thinking but not saying how there was such a thing as miserable desperate fucking, and a sort of fucking you did when you felt bad that was not necessarily meant to make you feel better about anything.
“Do you think anybody else… do you think this was the first time?”
“Who knows?”
“Well I hope it gets things going all over the hospital. I want everybody else to feel better like this.” He squeezed her again.
“What was the water like?” she asked after a moment, thinking of how warm it was on her foot.
“Like soup. I should have washed it off. It’s disgusting, when you think about it.”
“Don’t think about it.”
“Do you think that anybody else could come up?”
“I guess. Maybe.” She thought of his mother and sister, rising entwined through the blood-warm water, passing through the shadow of the hospital. She closed her eyes and saw a hand and a face at the window.
“Maybe they’ll all come back. Maybe they’re just waiting.”
“For what?” she asked, but he didn’t have an answer, or didn’t care to answer. He put his face in her neck.
“Once when I was little,” he said finally, “I think I must have been three or four, my sisters and my parents went to dinner and left me behind. They didn’t notice that they’d forgotten me. I was pretty quiet then, especially in cars. I hated to talk while the car was moving. I was next door with a friend, making mud pies. When I came home and the door was locked, I thought they were inside and had locked me out because they hated me. My sister had said she hated me, the week before, because I cut her hair while she was sleeping — I never knew why I did that. It was just a little snip, and she forgave me, but no one had ever said they hated me before, not that I remember. So I thought she’d been pretending, and that she still hated me, and everyone hated me, so they had shut up the house against me, and would never let me in again. But then it got dark, and the house stayed dark, and I realized that the car was gone, and that they had gone somewhere without me. I was sure that they had moved away, and that they were never coming back. So I sat on the front steps and put my head in my arms and cried for an hour straight, until they came home. My mother said she had to scream my name at me to make me stop crying, and shake me to make me understand that she was there, and that they were back. I remember that. When they came back it was like they had been there all along, but I had gone someplace where they weren’t. I cried and cried. The house disappeared, and the steps disappeared. The noise of the crickets and even the noise of my crying disappeared, all I could think of was how they were gone and never coming back. I didn’t even know what death was, back then.”
She could tell he was waiting for her to answer him somehow, so she told him something she’d already mentioned in another bed-bounded conversation. “Sometimes,” Jemma said, “if I put my head down in a dark room I get a feeling like Calvin is right behind me, reaching out his hand to touch my shoulder. If I would just wait long enough he could touch me. But I always turn around, and he’s always not there.”
Rob’s breathing became so deep and even that Jemma thought he must be sleeping. Then he spoke again.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like to pray a little?”
15
Jemma kept catching glimpses of the boy whom she’d literally run into on the night of her trip with Vivian. But no one else had ever seen him, and she could never find him when she went looking for him deliberately on the wards. After many days of unsuccessful searching, she finally became convinced he must be a seven-hundredth child. She’d encountered him, always unexpectedly and by accident, a total of three or four times, depending on whether or not one counted his appearance during her trip, which she was inclined to do.
Lying next to Rob, she could not sleep. There was so much else to worry about, but she worried only about this boy. Night after night it kept happening: she would lie and imagine him in some sort of gruesome trouble, stuck with his foot in a bear trap or pursued by a hungry land-shark or just crying himself to sleep somewhere, until finally she would rise and go look for him. This time she brought a camera with her, having borrowed the one that usually lived in a drawer on the general ward, kept for the sake of recording interesting physical findings, distinctive rashes and tuberous growths and birth marks in the shape of Jesus or Italy. She took a picture of Rob sleeping before she left, and he startled but did not wake at the flash.