She’d dart, in her slow, blind, guided way, into Brenda’s bay and fix one on the periphery: the baby with leprechaunism, small, hairy, with pointy ears that Jemma tapped with her finger into a round shape. An anencephalic that would have been let to die in the old world; here it was treasured and trapped with the respirator and a hanging tangle of inotropes. Green fire spilled like long hair from the back of its open head. Its pointy black eyes collapsed in their sockets and grew back as orbs of flame that preserved, when they’d cooled, the color of Jemma’s fire. Two conjoined twins, whom Dolores and Dr. Walnut had not dared touch because they shared a bowel and a liver, Jemma separated as easy as the halves of a cream cookie, with the same simultaneous clockwise and counterclockwise twist of the wrists that she’d practiced a thousand times as a child. And, almost finally, she fixed an awful Harlequin Fetus, who’d toddled precociously through the nightmares of generations of medical students. Jemma had stared obsessively at the pictures in her embryology book, fascinated by the horny skin gashed with deep fissures, so the child seemed to be wearing a costume of continents, and by the eyes, twin bulging black puddings. Jemma was fascinated and repelled by the skin, compelled to touch it more often than was probably good for her or for the patient. Rubbing your cheek against him was like rubbing it against a tree. Jemma lifted him with both hands, pulling him out of his isolette, pulling him free of his monitoring leads and of the precious PICC that was his only access. She looked for a moment into his big eyes, as black and lusterless as the eyes of a crab, and then gave him a gentle shake. Everyone knew you weren’t supposed to shake a baby, no matter how they were so eminently shakable, or how much you wanted to do it, to silence their endless complaint. So one of the more sensitive spectators gasped at the first shake. Others, less delicate of sensibility, shouted as Jemma shook the baby harder and harder, its head lolling on its limp neck, but the arms and legs barely moving on joints that behaved like they were immobilized by leather casts. The little brain sloshed in the skull, relieved by fire of injuries as they were sustained. Fire shone from the crevices between the plates of skin, and jumped up in eruptions as Jemma shook. The baby seemed to be making a joyful noise as she shook it, and she found herself falling into a rhythm — cha cha cha—when the skin came flying away in rough, heavy pieces. There was warm, soft skin underneath. The puddings swelled and popped, revealing a pair of hazel eyes. Jemma put the steaming baby down and turned away. She took a deep breath and held it, treasuring the ordinary air in her lungs like the finest marijuana vapor, and looked out over the unit. Every nurse, physician, and parent of the NICU was crowded into the middle bay, some of them holding well children, all of them staring at her. A crowd pushed gently and fearfully from the door, making ripples of pressure that pushed the nearest observers out of line toward Jemma, people who stepped back again as soon as they came forward. Jemma let out her breath and reached beside her for Rob, her hand closing on the square bulk of his shoulder. She did not lean on him, but tipped forward instead, saving herself from falling by taking a few clumsy steps. She stopped, stood straight, then did it again. In this way she traveled to the center of the room, through the parting crowd, until she stood before the little dais where Brenda was raised in her isolette. She looked up the steps — there seemed to be a few more now than she remembered — and paused, feeling suddenly depressed and intimidated, the exultation in her soul collapsing suddenly away somewhere inside of her, folding, brilliant and shining, into an encompassing darkness. She’d had this feeling before, standing before dawn in front of the hospital, feeling like it was going to tip over and crush her, not wanting to enter but knowing that she must.
Rob walked up against her, and put his arms around her, and gave her a fortifying squeeze. “Just one more,” he said. “You can do it.” She stumbled on the first step. He failed to catch her when she fell, though his hands grabbed at her. She climbed the steps with both hands and feet, like a child. She raised herself up at the top, hands pulling on the frame of the isolette as she pushed with her feet, tipping the whole device a little, so the baby rolled inside, and Jemma came face to face with her through the plastic wall. As Jemma stood the black aniridic eyes held her own. They seemed to suck at her; Jemma thought she could feel something passing out of her own eyes and traveling the line of her sight to disappear into the baby’s, and she could not name what was being drawn out of her. Jemma gave a little cry of distress, the first she’d uttered that night.
“Are you all right?” Rob asked behind her.
“Open it up,” Jemma said to him quietly. He flipped the latches at each end of the box, and the plastic wall fell open. When he pressed a button the baby emerged automatically, born on a broad tongue of plastic. Still holding Jemma’s eyes, the baby lifted a hand and brought it over her body to point squarely at Jemma. Close to her, and with the baby lying in the open air, Jemma could finally see that she was pointing squarely at her belly. Jemma reached out and took the seven-fingered hand. Brenda grasped hers and brought it to her mouth.
The fire came, a trickle at first, then a flood, and then a torrent. Jemma felt like the child was executing an operation on her, not the other way around. Brenda sucked so hard on her finger that it ached, and the way the fire raced up her spine and down her arm made her feel like the child was consuming her very essence. The obvious things were relatively easy to fix: extra fingers dropped off and got lost in the blankets; the rabbit mouth fused and pursed; the teratoma pinched away and rolled off the platform, making a noise as it fell like a balloon full of oil and marbles. The deeper wrongness: heterotaxy; the double-outlet right ventricle; the sequestered bits of lung, the blood infection and the endocarditis; the chromosomal microdeletions; all yielded with scarcely more effort. But the deepest wrong, something even Jemma’s deep sight could not properly delineate or describe, but only sense, was different. Trying to scorch it was like trying to light a wet sponge with a warm rock. Jemma would have failed if the child had not revealed to her, with her greedy sucking, that there were reserves of fire she had not tapped for any of the other children. Even as Jemma was drained she was filled again, brighter and hotter, until no one could look at her, and Rob, pushed back, had to crouch halfway down the steps. Jemma thought she felt her baby touch on the inside of her belly as wave after wave of fire washed from her and into the mouth of the child before her. At the end she had become angry — she did not know if it was at the child or the wrongness in it, and she was cursing roundly at the top of her lungs, all sorts of obscenity and nastiness leaping from her mouth. She fell to her knees again, furious and weak, pulling the child, still attached to her finger, on top of her. Jemma found herself wanting both to preserve the child and destroy the unnamable thing inside it. It occurred to her that she must look like she was wrestling with a rabbit or a teddy bear.
The struggle ended suddenly, after Jemma had thrown her rage and fire-subsidized will at the unnamable in an attack so vicious and huge she knew it must be the last and best she could do, and she imagined herself dashing the child against a stone in her mind, releasing another child, a well child, the monster’s flawless twin, the longed-for image of its unruined self made real. Jemma opened her eyes on the baby’s, so close that their lashes were touching. The child opened her mouth and Jemma’s finger, the skin all pruny now, slipped out. Brenda took a few deep, huffing breaths, and began to cry.