She found Rob when she came out of the bathroom. In front of Timmy, he said there was a chest tube for her to help with in the PICU — chest tube trumps G-tube, Timmy admitted — but what he really wanted was to take her into the meditation room. It was meant to contain parents made contemplative or just miserable by their children’s illness, but they used it for a daily afternoon smooch. Nor could she tell him when he came to her after dinner, and found her on the sixth floor, hiding in a cubby, finally finishing her daily progress notes.
He brought her coffee, which she pretended to sip once, then put aside. “Why do we still do all these damned notes?” she asked him. “Who’s ever going to read them?”
He looked over her shoulder at her cramped writing, and her page and a half note on Ella Thims. “That’s probably a little long,” he said. Third-year medical students were ridiculed for their long, overly detailed progress notes, and scolded if they ever dared write a note that was too short by even a sentence.
“This is short for Ella. She’s got something wrong in every system.”
“I have three words for you: continue current management.”
“I’m not senior enough to write that,” she said, thinking, I have three words for you, too.
“Sure you are. You’re an intern now, remember?”
“Maybe you are,” she said. But for Ella’s second-to-last system she wrote, Continue current management, and for the last she wrote: OB-GYN: No ovaries, not pregnant! Rob didn’t notice. She shut the chart and filed it away with the others.
She went to pee and vomit, and then went to the roof. He’d told her to meet him by the sycamore tree, because he had something to show her. The moon was up, so the shivering leaves cast a shadow on the ground, and she could see pretty clearly beyond the shrubs and flowers that there was no one around anywhere. She was just about to pee again when she heard his voice.
“Up here,” he said. She went to him, climbing higher than she was used to going — he’d gone up to the highest branches that could support his weight. He struck a match as she climbed up next to him, and lit a circle of candles glued by their own wax in the ring of branches above their heads.
“You’ll set the tree on fire.”
“I’m watching them,” he said. But they soon distracted each other, smooching precariously, one hand on the branch and one on each other. They repositioned, and proceeded, Jemma wasting another opportunity to tell when he fiddled unnecessarily with a condom. As she lowered herself it occurred to her that she should not be up in a tree — she imagined the fall, and imagined a thousand girls falling down miles of stairs through the centuries — but that didn’t stop her. Her symptoms fled away while she moved. She imagined the collection of cells afloat inside of her, its peace disturbed by pleasure. “Hush,” she said to it.
“Hush yourself,” said Rob.
They sat for a while after they had finished. Two branches grew out close together about ten feet up the tree. He sat on them, with his back against the trunk, and she lay against him. The candles had burned down half their lengths before he spoke again. “It’s not strange. Strange is the wrong word. But it’s… something else. Part of me keeps saying that everything’s gone, and then part of me keeps asking, What’s left, and then noticing that there’s actually a lot. The hospital, the kids, the work, the water, the hope that we’ll get out of this, eventually, maybe to something else or even something better. And there’s you, but you’re the best of everything. The longer we go, the more I know that. I love you even more than before.”
She wasn’t a weeper. She never cried but did this other thing instead, a dry sob, and her face twisted up like someone who was crying but she never dropped a tear. She did it now. She’d met pregnant women who cried when they tried to decide on what shoes to wear in the morning. She hoped she wouldn’t become one of those. No matter why, though, she knew she must get away from Rob. She fell away from him, and swung down from branch to branch. He chased her, but she outdistanced him easily. In all her wandering she’d learned very well the new geography of the hospital, and he had to find his pants before he could follow her. Down the stairs, across the eighth floor, three spiraling circuits down the ramp, and down a more obscure staircase that only led from the fifth to the fourth floors, she ran hiding her twisted face from Dr. Snood, John Grampus, Dr. Sasscock — roadside witnesses whose stares she could feel, whose thoughts she could hear: There goes the crazy fat girl. Man, she can really move when she wants to.
She went to their room, no secret place. When he caught up with her she’d been doing her dry sobs, harder and harder, into a pillow for five minutes.
“What’s wrong with you?” he asked, angry and tender.
“What’s wrong with you? Why do you have to say shit like that?”
“Are you kidding? What do you want, then? I should say I hate you? I should say, I’d be all right, if it weren’t for you. You ruin everything. I can’t stand you. I can stand anything but you. All that”—he pointed at the window without looking at it—“is fucking fine, but you, you’re unbearable.”
“You know what I mean!”
“I have no clue,” he said, quiet but furious. “I have no clue what you mean, or what you want — why all the good stuff has to be bad. What would you prefer? You want a kick in the head instead of a kiss? I don’t get it, Jemma. I don’t get it at all…”
He had a fist raised, shaking it at her. She closed her eyes and put out her face, still sobbing, ready for a punch — she suddenly knew it was time for that. Go on! she thought, but didn’t say a word. The noise, when she heard it, was perfect, and perfectly remembered, a crack and a thud — her brother would have hit the wall harder, but Rob’s sigh was forceful and deep. She opened her eyes and saw him shaking his hand.
“Fuck,” he said, rubbing his knuckles and looking at the floor.
“It’s not that simple,” she said, trading her sobs for hiccups, and then coming to a loss for words. He didn’t know the half of it, she wanted to say. She herself didn’t know the half of it. She sat there hiccupping; he sat next to her rubbing his knuckles. When her hiccups had stopped, she reached under the bed and found the little kitty case. She took out a pencil, and the wrote the news on the wall behind the bed.
He had to lean close and squint to read her writing, which was even more cramped and scratchy than usual. It was like watching him get hit with an invisible pillow or pie. He looked back and forth from the wall to her face, then took the pencil and wrote his own message under hers. Jemma watched every letter as he laid it down: You must marry me.