“How’s your head feel today?” Jemma asked him, after she had introduced herself. She found him awake, staring out at the sunrise with his blanket drawn up to his neck.
“Yuck,” he said, putting out his tongue so it hung over his chin.
“Worse than yesterday?”
“Much worse. Much, much worse.” When he frowned at her his big tongue made it look like he had three lips. Jemma hated headaches, especially in patients who had things happening inside their heads, because they made her feel compelled to do a complete neurological exam, the weakest part of her physical next to listening to hearts. She took out her penlight and approached him, ordering the cranial nerves in her head, trying to remember if the glossopharyngeal nerve was number nine, or twelve. She shined her light in his eyes and had him follow the beam as she swung it back and forth across his face. He wrinkled his forehead and smiled for her, stuck out his tongue again and said, “Ack!” She put a hand against his face and had him turn his head into her palm against the strength of her wrist, once on the left, then again on the right. When he did it on the right he touched her palm with his tongue. She thought this was an accident.
The last one she tested was number eleven, the shruggy nerve — she could never remember the proper name for it. She asked him to turn down his blanket so she could test his shoulder strength. She meant for him just to slip it down below his chest, but he threw it down to his belly, then gave two scissoring kicks to throw it to the floor.
Had Maggie told her he slept naked? Jemma didn’t think so. She stared at him for a moment, at the thumb-wide sternotomy scar that ran down his chest, and the mass of scars on his belly, and his little bitty penis, lost in a thatch of hair as thick and coarse as a mass of bean sprouts. It was as small and stiff as a pinkie.
“Put it in your mouth,” Josh told her matter-of-factly. Then he laughed, so his belly scars writhed like sporting worms. “You need to examine it,” he said, reaching toward her head, “with your mouth.” Jemma dodged his hand, and moved to retrieve the blanket. When she tossed it over him he started to cry, and said “You don’t like me. You don’t like me at all!” This was a true statement, but she didn’t tell him so. She just ran. The nurses giggled at her when she sat down at the station to recover. “You guys got a date?” one of them asked her. “When’s the wedding?” asked another. Jemma bent and vomited briefly in the garbage can beneath the desk. “Oh please,” said the first nurse. “He’s not that bad.” But the second nurse patted her back, and wouldn’t hear of it when Jemma offered to change the trash bag.
Ethel Puffer, a fifteen-year-old girl with rhabdomyosarcoma, a malignant tumor of striated muscle that had popped up in her left thigh and nearly killed her, was more pleasant, if a little weirder than Josh. She went early to the doctor but came late to diagnosis; her pediatrician had thought it was the usual misery of adolescence somatasizing into limb pain. She had been a peppy and inspiring cancer victim, the sort to paint a smiley face on her bald head, bring homemade cookies for the nurses every time she came in for chemotherapy, and spend her time between retching spells boosting morale in the other kids on the floor by means of a rather sophisticated sock puppet show whose degree of obscenity depended on the age of her audience. Before her illness she had been a diver and a gymnast, and up until the Thing she could still be seen walking up and down the halls on her hands.
Now she was changed. She’d crashed the night of the storm; an occult bacteremia had made her septic, and she’d been nearly as sick as Juan Fraggle for a few days. When she recovered, and woke up again, and understood what had happened, she crashed again, differently. For a few days she would not speak or eat or drink, so Dr. Sashay put her on TPN and searched fruitlessly among the surviving staff for someone who could do a psych consult, coming closer every day to letting Dr. Snood inflict his amateur best on her patient. Then one night Ethel had rung her midnight nurse to ask for a bucket of black paint. He’d obliged her, thinking she was going to craft her way out of despair. When Maggie went in the next day she found that Ethel had blacked out all her windows, and painted a black skullcap on her bald head, and made herself the most incredible pair of raccoon eyes, and rinsed her mouth with paint so her tongue and her teeth were black. “Let me do you up,” she’d said to Maggie. “You’ll feel better.”
When Jemma went to see her, Ethel’s room was blacker than ever. Dr. Sashay would not restrict her access to black paint, so every day she added another layer to her windows. The sun was well above the water, but when Jemma went in at first she could hardly see her own hand in front of her face. It was fifteen minutes since her last trip to the bathroom, but once again she felt a terrible urge to pee. It occurred to her that she could squat in a corner of the room and wet the carpet and the patient would never know.
“Hello?” she said into the darkness. “Ethel?”
“I am here.”
“I’m Jemma. I’m your new student. Like Maggie, but not Maggie. How are you feeling this morning?”
“I am here.”
“Is your leg hurting at all?”
“I am here.”
“Okay,” Jemma said. She moved on to the exam. “She’s just working through it,” Dr. Sashay would say of Ethel. “Think of what she’s gone through, and what she’s lost. Think of what we’ve all gone through, what we’ve all.…” She’d turn to Jemma and put a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t you want to paint your head black?”
Ethel tolerated the exam. The longer Jemma was in the room, the better she could see her; there were places on the glass where the thick paint had cracked or flaked, so a few motes of light slipped in, and a few more from under the hall door. The way her painted skin blended with the dark, it looked like her face ended just above her eyebrows.
“Put your hand under my thigh,” Ethel said suddenly, just as Jemma was finished listening to her belly. Jemma hesitated, visions of Josh Swift still belly dancing in her head. “Please,” Ethel said. “Do it.” Jemma put her hand under the covers, and under a firm, muscular leg.
“Wrong thigh,” said Ethel. Ethel moved Jemma’s hand with her own until it rested under a hollow under the other leg. It sat there for a few moments, between the warm flesh and the damp sheets, before Ethel spoke again. “Do you feel it?”
“Feel what?” Jemma asked.
“My lump. Do you feel it? It’s what I’ve got. It’s my thing, what’s with me. It’s mine.”
“Yes,” Jemma said. She wasn’t sure if she did or she didn’t — it might have been a stringy muscle belly rolling between her thumb and her finger under the thin scar, but it was hard to suppress the reflex that made her, when asked Do you hear this murmur, Do you see that cotton wool spot, Do you feel my lump, say Yes, Dr. Snood, Yes Dr. Sashay, Yes Ethel Puffer. Ethel reached a strong claw around to clutch at the back of Jemma’s thigh.
“I feel yours, too.”
24
Laziness used to protect her from extreme anxiety. It was so exhausting to fret; at a particular threshold of worry she simply gave up — before the Thing, she’d always thought nothing worse could happen to her or to the world than the death of her brother and parents — and then whatever happened, happened. But since that anniversary day with Pickie she’d known no ease, and as the seventh week in the hospital had passed she woke every morning with an increasing sense that something was terribly wrong somewhere. Something was wrong everywhere in the hospital, on every floor and in every bed — even the well sibs were falling ill, one of them coming on the one service just as Jemma did, a hopeless new diagnosis of metastatic medulloblastoma — but Jemma had a strange feeling like she was missing something very particular. Yes, I know, she said to herself, and to this feeling, I’m fucking pregnant, and assumed that it was something wrong with the baby, and that the feeling heralded a pending miscarriage. She ran to the toilet a few times when she got a weird burning low in her belly, and looked through her legs at the water, expecting to feel the gruesome drop and see a swirl of blood and parts, surprising herself by whispering, “No, no, no, no.” But the toilet water stayed the same pale blue-green color it had turned ever since the angel took over the hospital physical plant, and the days passed, and every indicator, including Vivian, who as a gunning future obstetrician was the closest thing Jemma had to a gynecologist, said the baby she carried was fine. She went visiting her old patients, checking up on them. They had all taken turns for the worse, just like Maggie had said, but no one was actively trying to die. So she checked instead on acquaintances, making a round of nosy visits, to Vivian, to Ishmael, to Monserrat the Tamale Lady, to Anna and Brenda up in the nursery, asking of them, “Is everything okay? I mean really okay?” Nothing was okay, anywhere, but it was no worse than usual.