“I know,” she said. “Everyone’s told me. Really, everyone. Somebody wrote it in the bathroom up here. Jemma Claflin is one hideous bitch.”
“Sorry,” Vivian said. “You just look tired. A little worse than post-call. Was it a bad night?” Jemma shrugged and put her head down on her arms. “Don’t go to sleep. You’ve got another two hours yet. Tiller’s going to page you, you know, for her own fucked-up signout. What did you learn, Dr. Bennett, from the trials of the night? It’s like rounding all over again, but for absolutely no reason at all.” She sighed.
“Are you all right?” she asked, continuing the note — Jemma heard the nib of her fountain pen scratching across the page — but reaching with her non-writing hand to massage Jemma’s scalp. Jemma nodded. “I was worried about you, last night. I should have come to visit. I meant to. But the list was pressing. It’s so strange — it leaves me alone for a couple days and then it’s like, of course! How could I have missed that one! I have to work on it, and every item has a related item, every paragraph a subparagraph — within and within and within, but I never seem to get to the heart of anything. And then the next day I look at it and it all seems so petty and stupid and totally not worth it. Not worth even thinking about. It’s like I was drunk, but I haven’t been drunk, much, and I haven’t been shrooming since way back, honest.”
“Everything’s strange,” Jemma said. “At least you’re not throwing up all the time.”
“That’ll pass, and even if it doesn’t, I’ve got some plans. That reminds me, we should check an hCG. What if it’s a mole? Wouldn’t that be disgusting?”
“Three moles are walking in a tunnel, single file, on their way to raid a farmer’s kitchen,” Jemma said, though she could see the other kind of mole, the one that Vivian was talking about, a placenta corrupted to the point of malignancy.
“We’ll do a sono if it’s high,” Vivian said. “I was up all night with the list, even though I knew I was on call today and should sleep, and the boy wasn’t snoring for once, and we had this incredible session before bed. I should have been exhausted.”
“‘I smell sweet candied carrots!’ said the first mole.”
“I actually was exhausted, but it came to me. Local news. How could I have missed it? It was always so awful, no matter where you went, but worse than that was how it demeaned everything it touched. Part the bad hair and there it is, a thoroughly belittling but tireless regard. Even when they tried to praise something, they condemned it.”
“‘I smell apple pie!’ said the second mole,” Jemma said, trying not to think about the extensive coverage, or see it replayed across the white static behind her eyes — a shot of Calvin’s blood on the ice, a burned hand reaching out from beneath a tarp, the string of idiot commentators speculating on the nature of the devil-cult that supervised the black ceremony. There was her house burning and the wreck of Martin’s car wrapped around an impervious tree. It all conflated into one supremely horrible story about which the now slack-jawed bimbo had nothing to say.
“It’s not even the extreme lameness, how lame they look or how obscenely they fondle things. Here’s the within: it’s temporary. It’s the rage of every story — I was never even meant to be told but now you have forgotten me. Why did you disturb my rest? Why did you wake my curse? You never even really cared. Something like that — all that pathetic lame shit banding together and praying for vengeance.”
“‘I smell mole asses!’ said the third mole.” Jemma saw empty white static again. She sat up and started to rub her eyes.
“Now it seems stupid already, like I said. Don’t do that, you’ll detach your retina and anyway it’s disgusting.” She wrote a few more sentences while Jemma kept rubbing, then shut the chart. “Heme-one is fun,” she said. “My guess is leukemoid reaction, but it’s a little late. She’s so Downsie, though. AML? That would suck. Anyway, I’ll talk to Sashay about a bone marrow and set it up with Wood tomorrow morning after rounds if it’s a go. Are you even listening to me?”
“AML,” Jemma said. “Sashay. Bone marrow tomorrow.”
Vivian looked at her watch. “Two more hours — hang in there. Just picture Tiller blowing Snood if she tries to make you cry.”
“I never cry,” Jemma said, “and don’t spread rumors.” She took the chart back just as her pager sounded. Jarvis was bradying and desatting. She had no idea what to do about that, and the rest of the hour passed before she and Emma figured out together that his ET tube was too low.
The sun came out at hour thirty-four, and as hour thirty-five closed Jemma paused many times by the windows, wanting to get out of the hospital, looking at the green water and wondering what it would be like to go floating in a dinghy. Trailing behind the hospital would not be the same as being inside it, and she wondered if it would give her the same relief as she’d get after being inside for a thirty-six-hour run of suffering back in her surgery rotation, when she’d leave the hospital, blinking in the sun like a newly sprung prisoner, and walked very lightly for all her exhaustion, because her steps were buoyed by that I’m-not-in-the-hospital feeling. It would fade, even before she got home, even before she sat down at her computer to look at applications for cosmetology school or garbage-man school, replaced by the dread of certain return. At a window on the stern side of the NICU, she watched herself, standing upright in the dinghy, clothed quite dramatically in a winding, flaring hospital sheet, or a dress sequined in colors exactly matching the sunset-sea, or wearing the most gigantic fruit hat ever. She receded, hand up in benediction, swallowed by the horizon.
“Hey baby,” Anna said, stepping up next to her at the window. “I need you to come look at the baby. See something good out there?”
“Just… water,” Jemma said. She let Anna take her hand and lead her to Brenda’s isolette.
“All of a sudden she just looks like shit. Don’t you think? And she was having such a good day. She tolerated the feed advance and weaned her oxygen again and she sat out with the volunteer for twenty minutes listening to a story. It was all fine until all of a sudden.” Jemma looked down at the mottled child, who tried to lift her arm to point but only succeeded in extending her wrist a little. She reached her hand into the isolette to feel the belly, because it looked a little rounder than usual. It was as smooth and stiff as the surface of a bowling ball.
“Oh fuck,” Jemma said.
Every time she went into a surgery, Jemma suffered forebodings of doom; she knew something awful was going to happen. She’d never seen anybody die on the table; she hadn’t even seen a particularly nasty complication. She’d seen no exsanguinations, no confused amputations of the wrong limb, no mad surgeons carving their initials on the patient’s hide, no beheadings. Still, she believed that something awful did happen in every surgery; someone would be flayed open, a stranger would be rummaging about in their innards. Someone would suffer an assault no less violent for how slow it was, or how practiced, cool, and methodical.
Hesitating to enter the operating room, she scrubbed longer than was necessary. The distinctive odor of the soap, and the noise of the water drumming in the steel sink, brought back memories of the long eight weeks she’d spent in her surgery clerkship, and the longer eight weeks she’d spent repeating the clerkship after she’d failed. The people who had tortured her so vigorously then were all dead now, but she felt no safer, for that, in this place. She could feel the hair at the nape of her neck standing stiffly erect, and she felt a nausea that was distinct from her morning sickness. The spirit of her father, the only kind surgeon she’d ever met, ought to protect her, she thought. But when she closed her eyes she only saw him shaking his finger at her.