“Sorry,” Jemma said. Magnolia gave her PCA button a push.
“Are we done here?”
“Almost,” Jemma said, listening to her chest and her belly, and catching a glimpse of her My Little Pony panties, a revelation, as she ranged her hips. How stupid, to think you could know anything about anybody in five minutes, even if you were pawing at them like a confused, horny monkey. But even if it was all pretend, it was nice to know, in that moment, that Magnolia was no hollow-eyed demerol fiend of the sort who are hated and pitied for their need, ER ghouls who pass from hospital to hospital, generating huge charts and huge ill will. With her menagerie of stuffed animals, and shelf of middle school romance novels as wholesome as the odor of her hair, and her innocent panties, she was suddenly one of the youngest fifteen-year-olds Jemma had ever met. It was something Vivian had taught her about adolescent girls, that an old twelve was older by far than a young fifteen or sixteen, and that the quickest, if most cursory way, to gauge this true age was by looking under their skirts, not for the Tanner stage but for the panties of innocence or experience.
“Are you all right?” Magnolia asked, because Jemma had paused with her hand on the girl’s neck, palpating and palpating and swaying a little bit. “I don’t hurt there. I never hurt there.”
“All done,” Jemma said, feeling herself blush. “Thanks for being patient.” She’d been having a daydream — prancing panty-ponies had shown her that Magnolia’s joints were glowing blue under the skin and she felt very certain that the cartilage was… depressed. It only needed an infusion of vigorous hope to bring the pain down to zeros all across the board. Was it a symptom of pregnancy, she’d asked Vivian, to lose control of your imagination? Stories kept creeping uninvited into her head — Ella and the thousand Arabian ostomy bags, Kidney and the Giant — and illnesses took on colors and shapes and causalities ridiculous and fantastic and plainly stupid. Cindy’s gut had been nibbled short by the worm of dissatisfaction; Jeri’s liver was shot through with veins of coal; Tir had a mouse in his head, nibbling the connections between hand and mind. “Schizophrenia, maybe,” said Vivian. “Pregnancy, no.”
“Thanks for not being the bitch,” Magnolia said. “Can we turn up the PCA?”
“I’ll talk to the team.”
“That would be a no, then,” she said, and turned over again, drawing the blanket up over her head. She wouldn’t say another word, though Jemma stayed another five minutes trying to draw her out. The only answer she got was the happy chirp of the PCA when Magnolia pressed her button.
Juan Fraggle was next, a boy who had failed despite great effort to die on the night of the storm. Harsh, unremitting AML chemo had decimated his immune system, and made him host to a nasty fungus which Dr. Sashay and others had only managed to tickle with the antibiotics they’d chosen. “Mucor,” she said of the fungus. “It even sounds like a fucking monster, doesn’t it? I could hear it snapping its fingers at me.” She tended to personify aspects of any illness, and then take personally their assaults, so this fungus was sassy, and that mutated cell was crazy, just as the ocean was critical, or the thunder was full of wrath. She’d hurried in that night through the storm, with saving him in mind. But when she consulted with Cotton and the resident on call and saw the boy, who on cursory inspection already appeared quite dead, she’d had the conversation with his parents — this is the time we’ve been talking about all these months, and now you must say goodbye. His family stood around his bed in a circle, eyes closed and heads bowed, some of them not understanding Dr. Sashay’s words but all of them appreciating her earnestness. They prayed for him, hands together until the hospital rose and they all fell down.
In their first hours afloat, the eighth floor behaved no differently than the rest of the hospital. The children there, like those in NICU, all tried to die. Blood pressures bottomed out, blood was vomited or defecated by the pint, lungs blew out as suddenly as a tire on a quiet highway drive. Dr. Sashay and Cotton and all the nurses were distracted from Juan by these other emergencies; they had to tend to them themselves, since every child in the PICU was behaving similarly. Even some of his family went out to help — his two oldest sisters were premed and one of his brothers was a nurse. Juan slept, oblivious to the change in the world. His fever broke. His blood pressure climbed out of the toilet. His cold, purple hands and feet and his black lips all lapsed pink. His sassy fungus had retired from its deadly mischief. No one noticed until the next morning, when he woke and asked his grandmother to go across the street to fetch him a cheeseburger, sending her into hysterical sobs.
That morning he was surrounded by his family in his very crowded room. His incipient death had called every available relative to him — his mother and grandmother were with him, his three sisters, his brother and brother-in-law, his twin eight-year-old cousins, and his aunt and his uncle. Only his father was missing, stuck in Bolivia, from whence he had been trying to come since his son had been diagnosed three months previous. So there were bodies everywhere in the room, though since the Thing the hospital had grown enough new rooms that everyone could have moved out. They lay on the floor or in the window seat, in cots and reclining chairs. One of the little cousins was stretched out beside the patient, the other one was curled at his feet.
Jemma examined him without waking him, something she did not like to do because it felt akin to molestation, pressing on a sleeping body’s belly, and slipping your hand under his shirt to guide your stethoscope over his heart. He looked just like a chemotherapy victim, puffed out with steroids, the same length of hair growing over his head and his chin. One arm was shoved down his pants, the other was thrown over his cousin’s neck. When Jemma whispered his name and shook him he would not respond. She had met teenagers before who feigned sleep no matter how hard you shook them, because they were tired of being woken at six in the morning to talk to a doughnut. She called his name once more, rather loudly, and a stirring passed from body to body all around the room, a shudder, as if the same nightmare creature had gone skipping from dream to dream to disquiet the sleepers. She took his vitals sheet and stepped carefully among the bodies and out of the room.
Josh Swift was next on her list. She had the chart story: sixteen-year-old boy with trisomy 223 who’d manifested every possible unfortunate association of that syndrome in his short life — duodenal atresia and an endocardial cushion defect and acute myelogenous leukemia — as well as a number of entirely separate afflictions, admitted this month for a big clot in his head. He’d complained of a headache to his primary-care doctor, a lady familiar enough with his disaster-prone protoplasm that she immediately scanned his head, and discovered a venous sinus thrombosis that extended all the way to his jugular. “He’s a freak,” was all Maggie had said about him, “a freak’s freak.”
But that description dismissed his complexity. He was, in clinical parlance, delayed, a term Jemma found a little curious, because it seemed to imply that the children so described would one day catch up with the normal children, yet they never would. But he had just enough insight into his condition to understand that fortune had treated him very badly — there was a note in his chart from a consulting psychiatrist who’d come by weeks before to evaluate him for depression. Jemma had always thought the extra twenty-first chromosome must code for an abundance of some protein responsible for contentment and sweetness, because all the Down’s syndrome children and adults she had met were smiley and gentle, or that on account of their diminished capacities all the existential sadness of the world passed harmlessly over their heads. Not so with Josh Swift; he knows there is something wrong with him, the psychiatrist had written, and he wants us to do something about it.