And she looked, of course, for her pal, child number seven hundred. She had not caught even a glimpse of him in more than a week and a half, so she started to look for him in all her spare time, hiding in all the places she’d seen him before, waiting to pop out and accost him, but he never showed. The longer she looked, the more the feeling grew, until she convinced herself that it was just him — not her baby, not the pending death of her patients, not fighting with Rob all the time, not the end of the world. He alone was the source and the target of her worry.
By the end of her first day on Dr. Sashay’s service, though she was worn out by all the new illnesses and by the attending’s unrealistic expectations and by Rob’s repeated proposals, she was so worried about the foul-mouthed kid that she couldn’t sleep. Rob lay still beside her, but she didn’t think he was asleep, either. “Marry me,” he’d said again that evening, as they settled into bed, she for the whole evening, he for whatever sleep he could grab before the first call came from the one floor.
“No,” she said.
“Marry me. Let’s just get married.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to have this conversation.”
“That’s not even an answer.”
“Sure it is.”
“What are you… why won’t you… God damn.”
“God damn is right,” she said, and turned away from him, thinking of the boy, and not her boyfriend, so it was him laying beside her, frustrated and confused, thinking he didn’t know her at all, and he didn’t, if he thought she could just up and marry any old body when she was already married. It had been enough of a ceremony to last a lifetime, when Calvin gathered up leftover blood from one of their parents’ fights and ashes from their cigarettes, and mixed them together in a paste that she only just barely let him put on her tongue. It was Calvin at his ritual-making best — he had a ceremony for everything, after all — who made her swear, clothed in her mother’s old prom dress at the age of nine, to take him as a husband. “It’s not incest,” he said, though she did not know enough to raise that objection. “It’s protection.” He meant to protect her from the misery of matrimony by taking her as a bride himself, and then making her swear, on pain of utter doomsday punishment, never to forsake him. It was easy enough to swear, back then. He was still the most important boy in her life, and she could never have imagined that anyone would supplant him. She got up to look for the boy. Rob didn’t say a word.
Exhausted with worry, sick of worrying, angry at herself for enslaving herself to anxiety, and angry at the elusive boy for making her worry, she walked the whole length of the hospital. She’d grown a superstition — if she behaved all day and tried hard at work and didn’t have ice cream for dinner and thought one charitable thing about every third person she met out on the ramp or in the lobby or on the roof, then she’d be rewarded at the end of the day with a glimpse of him. Never again to speak to him, never to touch him and never, ever to hear him answer what was wrong and ease her worry, but if she was good she could see him, and that was its own small relief. That night she searched and searched for hours and got nothing. She covered all the usual places — she loitered in the research wing and threw open the door to a dirty utility room in the endocrine ward and slipped quietly into a meditation room on the psych ward — and a dozen unusual ones, even under Pickie Beecher’s bed. There was not even a discarded blood pack there.
On the roof she finally resigned herself to failure, to lying awake all night, trying to tolerate this intolerable feeling, and was drifting back down toward her room when she noticed that the worry was increasing as she went lower and lower into the hospital. On the ninth floor it was a bother, on the seventh a weight, on the fifth a burden. As she passed the fourth floor she noticed that she was breathing fast. On the second she began to sweat profusely. Outside the gift shop she took her pulse: one hundred and twenty beats per second. She walked around the lobby, following her worry, and it led her to the door to the basement. It opened to her hand, and she went down.
Two, then four flights passed before she even reached a landing, let alone a doorway. The walls opened up after the first flight of stairs, or rather, they were replaced with walls of pipes and wires through which Jemma could make out the shadows of more pipes and wires. A breathing noise was rising up from the stairwell. Jemma stopped, because her worried feeling grew suddenly a little bit duller. The light stopped another flight down; she saw more stairs descending into the dark. She turned around and went up another flight. The feeling came back, and worsened as she stepped out onto a ledge among the pipes. It ran in either direction for fifty yards under a straight row of yellow lights. Jemma went left.
The lights were not as bright as they were on the stairwell. When something crunched beneath her feet she thought she’d stepped on a bug, but when she stooped down she saw it was a candy-bar wrapper. She encountered them more frequently as she walked, scattered on the floor, or stuck to a pipe by a piece of dried residual chocolate. Her worry mounted, but she didn’t need it anymore to guide her. She had the wrappers, and also a scent she remembered from the days when she’d shared a bathroom with her brother: old pee. It became overpowering as she walked on. The platform stopped at a row of thick pipes seven abreast, but opened on her right. Garbage lay thick before her. She stepped on a plastic bottle and it curled around her foot, an accessory shoe that she had to sit down to remove. The space grew closer as she moved forward. She had to duck under and twist around the pipes, and she thought she would not be able to go any farther, though her worry was all but pushing her ahead, and an odor of much fresher pee was wafting toward her. Then the pipes and wires opened into a little clearing.
It was a rectangle, about ten by fifteen feet. At one end the trash was heaped up in a nest; a dirty hospital blanket covered part of it. Beside the nest was a smaller pile of comic books and gift-shop books of the sort to enthrall bored parents. At the other end of the clearing was a pile of clothes, scrubs and gowns and institutional pajamas. Jemma bent to examine them, and pressed on the topmost layer with her finger. A bit of urine seeped out. She wiped her finger on her thigh, and then someone struck her on the head. For a second or two she saw nothing but the bright white flash of pain, but she didn’t lose consciousness.