She started at the gift shop on the first floor and walked all the way up to the garden on the roof. A week and a half before, passing by the gift shop on another late-night walk, she had noticed a pair of red bolt cutters leaning casually against the aluminum gate that had been rolled down over the entrance since the night of the storm. It was one aspect of the hospital that had not changed at alclass="underline" the gate did not roll up, and the inventory lay inert, the licorice and teddy bears were locked beyond the reach of the children who wanted them, and the flowers wilted in their humidified refrigerators, because the little old lady who’d minded the store for the past twenty years was drowned with the key to the gate. The lady had stopped Jemma once as she hurried through the lobby, late for pre-rounding in the nursery. “You must see this!” she said, putting a claw on Jemma’s shoulder. She took a little key from around her neck and turned it in a panel above the height of her head on the wall outside the shop. “Open sesame!” she cried, and hopped back and forth on her feet, looking so much like a little bird that Jemma expected her to start pecking at the ground between her legs. After the Thing the angel would not roll up the door. “The shop is still closed,” was all she would say whenever people asked her to do it.
He had cut his own silhouette out of the door, but he was not a small child, so Jemma could slip through, though she tore the edge of her yellow scrub gown on a jag of aluminum. Some light from the lobby came through the door, so it was bright enough for her to see him feeding at the candy trough, scooping up handfuls of gummy bears and jelly beans to his mouth and then gazing around the place, like a thoughtful ruminant, as he chewed. He saw her and froze, his cheeks puffed up with candy.
“I won’t hurt you,” she said quietly, squatting down and bringing her hands up, palms out like she was surrendering to him. “What’s your name?” He only stared at her. She could hear him breathing loudly through his mouth. “Do you have a cold?” she asked him, because he sounded terribly congested. “My name’s Jemma,” she told him, when he did not answer her. He chewed and swallowed, then brought his fist up to the level of his face and opened it to show her a pile of glistening red candy. “No, thank you,” she said politely, and he cast the candy in her face. She knew what they were as they struck her and she smelled them: hot candy tamales, shaped like giant bacilli, made spicy with artificial cinnamon flavor. They were sopping wet from the warmth and sweat of his hand, and they stung her eyes. She fell back out of her squat, clutching at her face. He ran over her, stepping square on her sternum with his shoe and knocking out her breath. He was very heavy, for all that he was very thin. As her breath was pushed out of her it occurred to her that he must be incredibly dense. By the time she recovered and stood up he was long gone.
Tonight the gate was open — the next day the men from the lift team had cut away the rest of the gate, and ten minutes after that the remaining pieces had fallen out of the wall. Everyone had access to the gift shop, where the candy and teddy bears were free now, restocked every evening by the surviving hospital volunteer, who had moved away from his old haunt on the eighth floor to make the shop his stake.
The boy was not there. Jemma wandered in and picked up a white angora teddy bear, idly combing its long hair with her fingers. The volunteer was one of the most creative replicators in the hospital, making candy more fantastic than anything from the fevered imagination of Willy Wonka, and bears with long white hair or dancing feet and dancing eyes, or who would moan at you from the utmost depth of their affection. She replaced the bear, though there was no such thing as stealing from the shop. “Do you like it?” the slow, quiet man would ask if you touched something or looked at it twice. “Then take it. It is for you.”
She was not sure exactly why she felt compelled to pursue this child. Rob pointed out that he was probably doing fine, and would come forward if he should ever need taking care of. Breaking and entering might very well be a sign of self-sufficiency, Jemma admitted, but still she felt like she had to find him. Not to justify herself in the face of his rude accusation, though she imagined herself detailing to him all the reasons she was in fact not a junkie whore. She had a sense that there was something wrong with him, something she or someone must address, entirely aside from his bad behavior. But she could not say what this was. “You’re neurotic,” Vivian said, “which is okay.” Other people prayed or broke down at regular intervals or lost themselves in the rigors of the PICU: Jemma worried in her gut about a possibly imaginary child. “I’m fucking crazy,” Jemma said to Vivian, but that had nothing to do with this kid.
She searched randomly, ward by ward, camera always ready, and finally saw him in a research wing of the sixth floor. There were fifteen rooms set aside, down their own special corridor, for patients who were enrolled in clinical trials. The research ward, like the rest of the hospital, was full, nurses continuing to execute the protocols because Dr. Snood insisted on it. It would have been a sort of defeat, to abandon the studies only because the principle investigators had all perished.
After peeking in on the fifteen patients and the two nurses, neither of whom gave her a second look, she turned to leave the ward, and saw him standing at the end of the hall. He made a gesture at her, nothing as simple as a single finger — he kicked out a foot and threw out both hands and twisted his head, but she knew what it meant: Fuck you—then fled, too quick for her to get a good picture. All she caught was the end of his leg and his shoe. She looked for a long time on the sixth floor, but could not find him again, not there and not on any of the higher floors, though she hunted slowly and carefully. It was past two when she came to the roof garden. She climbed the sycamore tree and reclined in the lower branches.
The garden was always quiet. Jemma wanted the singing of crickets, but there were no insects, no birds, no spiders or worms, only the grass, flowers and bushes, and the very climbable tree. She lay with the camera in her lap, looking out at the dark water, calm and flat. The moon was not yet up, the sky was full of stars. She looked into her lap at the camera, flipping through its memory to get to the picture of the boy. There was the rash of erythema migrans; some dramatically clubbed fingers that she knew belonged to the pudgy CF boy who had his eye on Cindy Flemm; the tamale lady solemnly presenting her product; Brenda squinting and looking irritated; Rob sleeping; a picture of Vivian and Ishmael. Jemma had run into them on the fourth floor. “Oh, it’s the cruise photographer!” Vivian said. “Take our picture, lady.” They posed in front of a giant photograph of the lost landscape of Hawaii, blocking out a pair of island children at play in the sand. Vivian grabbed Ishmael around the waist and pulled him tight against her. In the picture they seemed to be standing on dry land, and looked like honeymooners.
Then there was the shoe. Jemma fiddled with the camera controls, isolating and enlarging the view, thinking it might yield some information, but all she saw was the brand and the grime, the worn tread. He was not wearing any socks. She looked up from the camera into the sky.