There now; goodnight, Jemma. Sleep well, for you’ll not sleep long, and since I am not a preserving angel I’ll not be able to catch you when the drop attacks come during walk-rounds, the creeping sleepiness that you feel coming more completely over you as the endless seconds pass and Emma tries to make you understand the differences between the three types of total anomalous pulmonary venous return. The big velvet sheet drops down over you, somehow managing to cover your feet and legs and belly and chest and shoulders before it covers your head and your eyes, and then you’ll be on the floor, awake already as soon as you’ve hit, all the insensitivists peering at you, disappointed at the already dissipated scent of a likely intubation. Sleep on, hard and deep. The customary morning bustle of the NICU will proceed around you, and the nurses will pay you, for the most part, only cursory attention. Nobody bears you any ill will, though one or two of them understand that you must have a pile of work to do, and yet they do not wake you because the prospect of your suffering pleases them just a little. Anna, arrived to feed the baby, doesn’t wake you, either, but her motives are pure: she thinks you need your rest, thinks you look worn out and a little ugly, and while she is waiting for the formula to run down through the tube, does your hair for you, and you will wake in half an hour with none of your morning work done but with a hairdo, three braids coiled on top of your head in a pattern that seems to your fuzzed-up mind as complex as the worst congenital heart lesion, that makes you, in your blue-green scrubs and dancing clogs and canary-colored robe, the very picture of post-call glamour.
28
After rounds, Jemma hid in the PICU staff bathroom rubbing on her eyes, a measure usually sufficient to drive a headache away, but one that looked so alarming to people who saw her driving the heel of her hand into her orbit, and who heard the curious, wet noises that her eyeball made when she did it, that it required privacy. She sighed, pressing harder with both hands, and saw floating bits of color in the dark behind her eyelids, here and there an emerald sparkle among them. She saw her brother’s face flash unbidden in the same darkness, pale and dead, how she imagined that his open-casket funeral face would have looked — the face a natural death would have given him. She did not understand why she was suddenly so angry; Maggie had been annoying her and countless others for years, and had never before evoked much from Jemma besides horror and pity. For a moment the spirit of her brother threatened to possess her, his face loomed larger before her closed eyes, his mouth opening to show a deeper blackness, and she knew if she fell into it she would lose her temper in a way that would make her his imperfect avatar, as angry as him but expressing it in a hissy fit rather than sublime fury. He faded away before he touched her.
“It was horrible!” Maggie had said, slurring a little, after waking from her extended postictal snooze just as they were rounding on her. “She made this nasty sound, and horrible green sparkles shot out of her eyes, and then I couldn’t move, and then I was seizing, and I knew I was but I couldn’t do anything about it!”
“Sometimes people hallucinate before their seizures,” said Emma. “You had a lot of activity in your temporal lobes, even on the pentobarb. Want to see your EEG?” The whole team was gathered around the bed, Drs. Tiller and Grouse and Chandra and Jordan Sasscock and Emma, everybody staring at the patient with expressions of fixed beneficence. Jemma was smiling even as she was being slandered.
“I want my brain back. She damaged it — I can feel the damage. How many deletions are there in alpha-thai minor? I don’t think I know any more. That part of my brain was damaged. I want to stop her before she does it again. I want justice, is what I want.” Jemma had dashed off to replicate a batch of festive cupcakes when she heard that Maggie was awake and extubated. Now she put them down on the trash can and backed out of the room. Maggie kept talking, her soft hoarse voice at odds with the fury in her words. “You’re on the list!” she called after Jemma.
“I’m giving you a little ativan,” Emma said. “One, two, three … relax!”
Jemma sat down at one of the station desks and tried to calm herself by going through one of her patients’ charts, trying to figure out how many days her platelet girl had been on each of her eight different antibiotics. “Septra number forty-seven,” she muttered. “Ceftaz number ten; vane number fifteen; tobra number seventeen; ampho number five.” But instead of becoming calm she just got more agitated.
Hour twenty-six, hour twenty-eight, hour thirty — the endless day went on and on. Rob came in and out of it, checking in on her in the morning to see how she’d done her first night in the unit. Recognizing her bad mood, he returned again and again, trying to cheer her up, bringing a succession of gifts: a bit of unusual candy from the gift shop; some ice cream; a cold salad-bar plum; a little song about Maggie, new words set to the tune of “I Got No Strings” (I got no chin to shape my jaw, nor sweetness in my soul!); a shoulder rub, then a back rub, then a thigh rub, and finally his face between her legs. They were paged before he could transform her — she was on officially until five o’clock, and he’d be on all through the night with the surgery team — though it would not have transformed her or the day unfolding with unpleasant surprises, even if he had made her sing. But it did provide a bit of shelter, to lie across the call-room bed, her hand resting on the back of his head, feeling the new sweat gathering atop his scalp, and feeling his gasping breath against her skin. Hand on the doorknob, he ruined it all just as they were leaving the room. “Marry me,” he said again.
“Not that again,” she said.
“Again and again,” he said. “Until you give me a good reason.”
“I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man in the world, which you practically are. I wouldn’t do it with anybody. How many times do we have to have this stupid conversation?”
“As many as it takes,” he said, and stared at her, annoying fool, with his back against the door and his hand still on the knob.
“Can I go?” she asked. “I have antibiotic dosages to adjust. It’s very important. No one else can do it. No else has a calculator. No one else has the incredibly sophisticated grasp of arithmetic. They’re waiting for me, can I please get by?”
“We’re already a family,” he said. “I just want you to say it — I just want you to understand it, too.”
“Don’t say that word,” she said, shouldering past him, aware that he was staring at her as she walked away down the hall. She stopped on a set of preemie prints and shook her ass, meaning the gesture to be somehow conciliatory. Maybe it was her bad mood that made it feel taunting and cruel, but sometimes a boy should know when to just be quiet.