She’d had so many bad days, before and after the Thing. Why this day should seem like the culmination of every bad day, she did not know, unless it was on account of the pregnancy. At eleven weeks she was almost always nauseated, though the really horrible gut-twisting retching only came at night — it was such a horrible sound, something that started out deep in her rectum and spurned the easy way out, making the long journey up to her mouth, gathering volume and a truly ass-nasty assortment of tastes to fill her mouth and vapors for her to spray around the bathroom. She knew it was the single most unattractive thing she’d ever done. She ran every faucet while she performed, and had the angel play loud music, and flushed and flushed and flushed the toilet, all to keep Rob from hearing, and she would never let him in with her, though he wanted to hold her hand while she did it. She could deal with it. Vivian swore up and down that it would pass, and Jemma didn’t mind being tired all the time, or how some foods — asparagus and potatoes and apple juice — were suddenly unpalatable, but the agitation, if it continued at such a pitch, would surely wear her down. She’d met a string of pregnant ladies who all seemed perched on the brink of a particular type of madness. “I just want to rip off my own leg and then beat everybody around me to death with it!” was how one patient described the feeling to Jemma. “Yes,” Jemma had said, drawing on a store of vaguely remembered and possibly made-up information, “I think it can be quite normal to feel that way.” It was as if the little hurt which Maggie had done her in the morning had marked her equanimity in just the right place to weaken it fatally, so all the subsequent wrongs of the day were exacerbated.
Through hour thirty-one she sat at one of the nurses’ stations in the PICU wrestling with the antibiotic dosing on her septic teenaged friend while Dr. Chandra and Dr. Sasscock played hangman across the table from her, waiting for the afternoon labs to come back. The girl’s creatinine had been sky-high at the late-morning draw; her kidneys were failing and if Jemma didn’t lower her doses she risked knocking them out completely.
“You’re just going to have to do that again,” said Jordan. “You may as well wait for the evening labs.”
“I almost have it,” Jemma said, though once again her calculations were yielding doses more appropriate to large-animal medicine. “And the drugs are due soon.”
“An hour delay won’t matter,” he said.
“In an hour Tipper will be down here,” said Dr. Chandra. “He does that shit in his sleep. You obviously haven’t learned how to profit by a timely consult.”
“I pretty much have it,” Jemma said.
“You’re probably right,” said Dr. Chandra. “But he’ll do that thing, anyway, where he laughs like your incompetence is cute but really he’s furious because you’re so stupid, and he won’t look at you. He looks at your feet or at the ceiling or at your ear or at your crotch but you have to be the queen for him to look you in the eye. He’s part of the program. He was always part of the program.”
“Pick a letter,” said Dr. Sasscock.
“Y,” said Dr. Chandra, “as in why am I here anyway? There’s a whole hospital worth of misery out there, better wallowing than here. It was never going to be part of my life, taking care of kids with a piece of soggy fucking origami where their heart should be. Why do I have to deal with it now? What’s the point? What are we being trained for, anymore? What?” He was looking right at Jemma, and made a gesture at her, folding his hands together and shaking them over the table. “Why, why, why?”
“Can you dose tobra every twelve hours in someone with a creatinine of two?” she asked him.
“Go ask Dad,” he said. “We may as well ask Dad. You get the same goddamn answer, that zombie smile, whether he’s alive or dead, here or gone, and no matter that he’s dead and the whole world is gone with him, we’re all still in the program and we’re all still under his thumb.”
“Do q twenty-four,” Dr. Sasscock said to Jemma, and to Chandra, “Dude, shut the fuck up. Pick another letter and stop badmouthing Dad. The man was a saint.”
Dr. Chandra shook his head, but stopped complaining, and they played on in peace, leaving Jemma to her work, until the labs came back and sent them scurrying. Jemma got three new quasi-emergencies — a low k and a high k and a low phosphorus — but decided to ignore them for five more minutes until she got the damned dosages set. Dr. Tipper snuck up on her just as she was finishing and pointed out that she’d got it all wrong. He looked at her shoes and her left boob and her belly and each ear, and spoke his mocking chortle, and she became more furious and more depressed and more weary, and all she could do, when he flew through the calculations and wrote out the orders and hummed her a snatch of the Mikado, was sigh at him, and say “Thank you.”
At hour thirty-three she encountered Monserrat and her tamale wagon, making her afternoon snack rounds. “You look awful,” she told Jemma.
“Everyone keeps telling me that.”
“Are you hungry? Have you eaten?”
“I had some juice… earlier,” Jemma said, not able to remember when she had last eaten.
“Strange, strange girl,” she said. “How do you think you can keep going with no gas in your engine, with no hamster in your wheel? Come here to me.” She took Jemma by the hand. Her wagon had been souped-up by the angel — motorized and decked out with moon-rover tires and a folding table and inflatable chairs, and a cooler/replicator that only made supremely exotic horchatas.
“You need to take care of yourself,” she said. “A cat takes better care than you do. Look at you!”
“I know,” Jemma said, as Monserrat lifted a cold bottle of soda from the cooler. Instead of opening it for her she rolled it back and forth across her face. “I should keep going,” she said. “I have some bad labs to fix… That’s nice.”
“First the cold, then the hot,” she said, guiding Jemma’s face over the steamer and stepping on the pedal to generate a blast that lifted her hair and left drops of water condensing on her nose. She nearly fell asleep while the lady massaged her face with a corn husk.
“It’s been a good day,” Monserrat said, while Jemma started to eat, hushing her every time she tried to say something. “Not so pleasant outside, and ugly days used to never turn out well, but already today I’ve captured five others just like you, dragging their big bottoms and looking like they’re about to cry. I do an intervention and it goes a little better. I like the word — intervention. My son did one for my high salt and my blood pressure. It was swift and cruel — he threw it all away and I wanted to wander into the woods like a deer and lick rocks, but he was right, and I am right. How do you feel? Would you like another?”
“Tired,” Jemma said. “And late. And thanks. I’ve got to go.”
The lady put another warm tamale down Jemma’s pants, catching it in the band of her scrubs and adjusting it so it settled in the small of her back while Jemma just stood there, reflexes slowed by fatigue so that by the time she jumped away it was already done. “If you don’t eat it then give it to someone you love,” said Monserrat, and pressed the button that folded up the table and deflated the chairs. She walked off behind the wagon, steering it nimbly with a little black joystick.
Hour thirty-four she spent with Vivian, who came down to do a consult — her second day on the service and she was already trusted with them — on a Down’s syndrome baby in the NICU who’d been persistently throwing blasts on his smears for the last three days. “You look awful,” she said to Jemma, pausing in the middle of her note.