News of his injury spread rapidly through the hospital, and in this place that could not tolerate new sadness, provoked a great lament — he was affable and handsome and only Jemma ever saw him in a bad mood, and for weeks he’d been cultivating new friendships about as eagerly and successfully as Jemma avoided them — not just because he was so well liked. Common opinion had it that everyone had suffered enough; added misfortune, even if it were relatively benign, was unbearable. And if just a broken nail or a bruised toe were bitter gall, then what was Rob Dickens, laid out in the PICU with diffuse axonal injury and a slowly expanding subdural hematoma? Jemma sat by his bed, not knowing or caring if she’d been excused from her duties, not moving even when the nurses came to roll him or give him mannitol or change his diaper, and not helping, either. Her stony feeling was such that she could barely move or speak. She thought of him as already dead.
She leaned over in her chair, resting her cheek next to his arm, not ever asleep, but neither entirely awake, breathing in time with his respirator. She’d lift her head every now and then to look at his monitor, or look for as long as she could stand at his face, his swollen lips and eyes, and the horrible bolt that stuck out from his forehead — it looked like an industrial mishap, but had been put there on purpose by Dolores, a sensor to gauge intracranial pressure. Sometimes she thought his face belonged to someone else; with the slightest effort, a little twitch of imagination, she saw her first lover, or her mother or father, or her brother, laid out on their backs with the bolt standing up obscenely, like a handle, from above the left eye.
People came and went all through the night and the following day — hours fifty through sixty. PICU people and visitors from all over the hospital, Jemma ignored most of them, unless they shook her hard. Synthesized flowers filled the room with their not-quite-right smell, and cards, crafted by children, appeared on the walls by the dozen, until there was no more wall to obscure, and then they began to darken the window. Vivian, Dr. Sashay, Ishmael, even Dr. Snood creeped solicitously into the room. “I’m fine,” Jemma mumbled at them, and would not talk anymore, no matter how they pestered. Sometimes she pretended to be asleep. Sometimes the voices did not register with Jemma until their speakers had left the room, but she always heard them:
“Will he be okay?”
“Will she be okay?”
“I hear that they’re trying to find someone willing to drill. Walnut’s scared he’d kill him. And he operates on hearts the size of jelly beans!”
“Who else except him?”
“Pudding? He’s IR, isn’t he?”
“IR doesn’t drill in your fucking head.”
“Dolores would do it. She’d think it’s fun.”
“Can she hear us?”
“I don’t think so. I think she’s sleeping.”
“They were going to get married. Isn’t it cute? Isn’t it sad?”
“Isn’t it enough already?”
“Maybe it’s never enough.”
“Maybe this is just the beginning. Maybe we’re all going to get it in the head.”
“Times like these I want my Buffy. I want something besides what’s here, you know, because what’s here is so awful. But when I go looking for her, it’s still just static. I guess I could just ask for her, but I’m afraid I’d get something dirty. I don’t want to see Buffy doing something dirty, but what if I wanted it, you know, secretly. Deep down? The angel would see it and give it to me. She knows that sort of thing. She really does.”
“That’s how all pornography happens. You ask her for one thing but she knows what you really want. Anyway, Buffy’s not coming back.”
“I know it’s true. But it’s hard, hard.”
“True things always are.”
“Can you hear me?”
“Jemma? Jemma? Jemma? Jemma?”
“Can I get something for you, Dr. Claflin?”
“She’s not a doctor yet. She’s not even a fourth year. Have you had to be with her at night? It’s a chore.”
“She just sits there.”
“I’ve peeped in once or twice and seen her move her head. Sometimes she whispers to him.”
“It’s time to change him again. Is that poop in her hair?”
“It’s blood. Jemma?”
“When does she pee?”
“She hasn’t been drinking.”
“If we put her hand in warm water I bet she’ll pee all over the place.”
“Such a handsome boy, even now. She’s a lucky girl. Was a lucky girl. You know what I mean, right?”
“Exactly. Look at him!”
“Dolores will drill. She just has to drill.”
“If you bring out what is inside of you, it will save him. If you do not bring out what is inside of you, you will kill him. In this hour, to not lift your hand is the same thing as to kill him.”
Jemma opened her eyes. The two magpies were gone, and Pickie Beecher, whose voice she thought she’d just heard, was nowhere to be seen. Rob looked the same, eyes swollen, bolt in head, unmoving. She wiped some drool off his chin and pushed his hair away from the bolt and fluffed up his pillow and was smoothing his gown over his legs — it was always riding up — when the code alarm began to ring. She ignored it, at first. It wasn’t her problem, but it rang louder and louder in the room, and the angel wouldn’t shut up—“Save him save him O save him please.” She went to see what was happening. It was the first time she’d left since Rob had arrived.
The bell was chiming for Marcus, the fat little five-year-old from the family with bad hearts. Emma and Dr. Tiller were already in the room, along with Dr. Chandra and a single nurse, Janie. The boy’s mother was standing in the door, calling out “Regresse Marcos, regresse mi amor!” Emma saw Jemma looking in.
“Jemma,” she said. “We need you.”
“Get someone else,” said Dr. Tiller.
“She’ll be okay. Right, Jemma? Remember what I said?” Jemma walked up to the bed, climbed up on a stepping stool, and took over compressions from Dr. Chandra. But rather than distracting her from all the really horrible shit, the compressions brought it all more clearly to mind. So the child underneath her hands became Rob Dickens, and as she pushed on his chest it was from Rob’s mouth that bloody froth bloomed, higher and higher, a complex flower made of interlocking red bubbles.
“More lidocaine?” Emma asked.
“More lidocaine,” Dr. Tiller agreed. Janie pushed it. Jemma kept compressing, trying not to look at the face, but always coming back to it. It was Rob, then Pickie Beecher, then Josh Swift, then Cindy Flemm. It was Ella Thims and Magnolia and Juan Fraggle, but mostly it was Rob, and as she pushed and pushed it became his face not just because her obsessive imagination was able to draw the lineaments of his jaw and brow over the fat face of the doomed child, but because she saw it, as certain and as unreal, as she had seen her own mutated body bouncing in Ella Thims’s crib all those weeks ago.
“Stop compressions,” Emma said, leaning over casually to deliver a shock. “All right!” she said as the rhythm normalized transiently, then “Fuck!” when it slipped back into v-fib.
“Some more amiodarone?” Dr. Tiller asked civilly, as if he were asking, One lump or two?
“May as well.” She motioned for Jemma to continue.