Jemma came down the steps with the child in her arms. Rob stood up as she reached him. “All done,” he said.
“Almost,” Jemma said. She looked over the crowd, conscious of all the reciprocating stares — Emma and Dr. Tiller and Monserrat and Janie and Vivian and John Grampus and Father Jane — and she finally appreciated how huge a crowd she’d been drawing along behind her. Exhausted but still vigorous — only the fire was bearing her up but it did a better job than her ordinary will ever had — she looked over their heads or past their faces, searching for Pickie Beecher. In the newly harrowed hospital, he stood out more plainly in her mind, a beacon of wrongness. She knew he was in the room, but not where, until she saw a glint near the door, the red and blue light of the monitors reflecting off his shiny bald head. She passed the baby to Rob and went in pursuit. Outside the bay she saw him passing through the main door. She called out, “Stop!”
“You can’t catch me!” he said. “You can’t touch me!” He paused a moment longer to taunt her, leaping in the air and clicking his heels together, then turned and fled. He was quite fast, and Jemma certainly would not have caught him if he had not looked back to stick out his tongue. So he ran headlong into Ishmael’s knees, who stepped out of a corridor just in time to impede him. Pickie bounced off the big man and fell back flat on his back. Jemma was on him before he could get up.
Jemma thought it would be easy. With such obvious wrong under her hand, and all her deep reserves available to her, she was sure she could burn this boy’s brain clean quicker than a good spanking might take. Maybe the healing would take the form of a spanking—take that you crazy little bastard! But when she tried to fix him, her fire turned back on her, burning through her skin and into her blood — she swore she heard her baby cry out with her in pain. She caught sight of Pickie again and again, where he lay under her, as a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces were forced together against the cuts, so they made a nonsense picture and a shape as random as spilled liquid; as a doll, a construction of grief, a mechanical boy who missed his brother with the untiring efficiency of a machine; as an abomination, a dripping boy-shaped clot rising to life in a dark room. At the touch of him against her mind she was overcome with nausea, and rolled off him, retching and dizzy. He stood up above her, giving her an offended look. “Not me,” he said. He turned and walked casually away, past Ishmael, who was sitting on the carpet rubbing his bruised knee, but another Pickie remained in his place, an imaginary Pickie even paler than the first, whose open mouth vomited streams of blood over Jemma’s whole body. It pressed between her lips. At the taste of it she fell again, lost under waves of nausea and blackness and fire that dimmed and dimmed with every agitated breath she took, until it was extinguished.
33
I feel a change in me, commensurate with the change in the world. So I was filled up with joy when the waters rose, and so now I feel emptied out, drained and hollowed and sad.
Praise! my sister says, in voices for me to hear, and for the refugees to hear, and even for our brother to hear, deeply sleeping in his mortal costume. He stirs and rages a little in response to her joy, for anger is his worship and his praise. And then to me she says, It is abomination, to be sad in the dawn of this great day.
I am joyously happy, I say.
Humph, she says, releasing a horde of balloons from underneath the lobby. They rise toward the top of the atrium, most of them blown by her to float down the halls of the wards, but a few bob impatiently at the ceiling, and she opens a door in the glass to let them out like so many dogs.
Who could not rejoice, on this day? I ask her. And who could feel anything but pride and joy, seeing Jemma ascend to the regency of her power, putting out her hand to heal the hospital and the world? It is the sort of thing most angels would wait an eternity to see, and isn’t it the pinnacle of a recorder’s career? If I am sad it is probably because someone has to mourn for all the lost sicknesses, for the jolly fleshy tumors and fancy blood dyscrasias and unique anatomies that will never be seen again in a child. They are dead and gone and soon will be forgotten, and I have become the sort of angel who is saddened by any loss, and grieved by any death.
Mortals covet. They covet flavorful tea and dark chocolate and silver ladles and fluffy comforters and the fat bottoms of women bending over to tie a shoe. They covet wide green fields and open skies and even hulking mountains of ice and stone. Nothing — nothing in creation has ever been safe from them. Calvin Claflin coveted the whole earth. He wanted to hold it in his hand and crush it in his fist, and he coveted the stars, and he coveted the hot fire at the bottom of the sun. He coveted his sister’s bland ignorant peace, and he coveted her inheritance of a power that would make all of his seem nothing, because it was bigger than him and his complaint, and because he suspected that when at last she commanded it her hand would bring life instead of death, and that she would redeem where he could only reform.
But angels are not covetous. Angels do not envy.
34
Dr. Chandra was waiting for the bells to start ringing. Yes — great big Catholic bells, ringing throughout the hospital. Drs. Tiller and Snood would clutch their ears at the sound of them, and cry out, and then melt like wet witches. Or maybe their heads would just explode. “It’s the end of an era!” he’d say to anyone who would listen. Internship was over at last. There should be a parade, at least.
“Don’t you think there should be a parade?” he asked Rob Dickens, who shared with him the task of writing the final notes for all the charts in the PICU. It was a stupid, unnecessary job, but Tiller had insisted. Skipping a day’s notes was a mortal sin in her book, and after the big miracle these charts had languished with blank pages for a week.
“Or something,” Rob said. “I just keep writing, All better now. I don’t know what else to say.”
“That’ll do,” said Dr. Chandra. “”We have to do something. Everything’s different. Everything! I mean, look at you. Just look at you!” He gave Rob a solid thump with his fist.
“I think people are still getting used to it,” Rob said, rubbing his chest where Chandra had hit him.
“Well, two people aren’t enough for a parade, but we have to do something. You can’t just let something like this pass. Do you know how many nights I prayed, Let it be over and get me out of here and save me from this place? And I always said if it could only come true then I would finally believe in God.”
“I don’t think it works that way,” Rob said. “And there are other reasons to believe, you know, besides just getting what you want.”
Chandra shrugged. “Well, it’s probably easy to believe when you’re dating Jesus.”
“She’s not…” Rob started, but he didn’t know how to finish. He knew for a fact he wasn’t dating Jesus, and yet he did not know how to describe what Jemma was. It was impossible, already, to describe what she was to him. Now it was just something more strange and more wonderful. “I guess it’s all part of the plan,” he said finally. “That’s how I’ve gotten by with it up to now. It’s something so huge… it’s as big as the whole galaxy, or as big as everyone who ever lived, and even bigger than that. And how are we supposed to understand, when it’s that big? How are we supposed to understand, when we live and everybody else drowns? How are we supposed to understand, when somebody does a miracle? You either trust Him or you don’t, and you put your head down, and muddle through.”