The children started up a begging chant, to get Rob to do a flip for them. He demurred at first, for its own sake, Jemma could tell, and extracted a few goofy promises from them regarding their homework, treatment of each other, and their dedication to math in the coming years. They made a circle around him on one of the mats, hiding him from the waist down from Jemma’s eyes.
“Are you ready?” he asked them. They shouted that they were, but he asked three more times, until all the girls and half the boys were jumping with frustrated desire. He faked them out with a couple short leaps, then did it for real, swinging his arms back so they were parallel with the floor, then bringing them forward and over his head. From where Jemma was standing it looked like his hands were pulling his feet on invisible strings. He curled into a tight ball, his chin tucked precisely into the space between his knees, and seemed to uncurl in that same instant. She felt herself flying with him. Somehow the exuberance of his spin sucked her off her feet, and carried them off to a place that was quite free of the influence of gravity, and they spent a while suspended away from the world, before he landed on his feet again, taking one step forward to steady himself. The children clapped and cheered, and asked for another but he said, “Not till tomorrow.”
Jemma stepped into the room once the class was over. She waved and said hello to the sweaty, still-excited children as they passed — Ethel and Juan and Shout and Wayne and Cindy and Pickie among others — some of them still jumping and three or four rolling into somersaults as soon as they got out into the hall. Rob had started rolling up his mats, and hadn’t seen her. He rolled one up to the window at the far end of the room, and paused there to look out over the water. A clear morning had become a cloudy afternoon, and the water had darkened every hour of the day.
“Do another flip,” she called out.
“There you are,” he said, turning away from the window. “Stay right there!” He ran at her, five or six steps, then fell forward into a round-off, which he followed with two back handsprings and a backflip with a half twist. He judged the distance precisely, but Jemma, afraid of being landed upon, leaped back. He had to take a step to reach her, but still the whole thing seemed like one movement, from the first step he’d taken away from the window through the flip and the ta-dah! motion he made with his arms after he landed.
“Hot damn,” she said.
“I think I’m getting the hang of it all again. It’s coming back a lot quicker than I expected.” He jumped in place a couple times. “Do you think my legs could be springier since… you know?”
Jemma shrugged. “Not on purpose, anyway,” she said. He stopped jumping and kissed her. As they walked hand in hand through the halls and down the spiral ramp to the lobby she considered how he could be the poster boy for the new order. He’d made the transition from procedure-obsessed pseudo-intern to gymnastics and calculus instructor with more than just resignation or even good humor — it was like he’d wadded the old life up in a ball and punted it far away. And this a life that he had always enjoyed more than anyone, pre-Thing and post-Thing. “Do you know what this means?” he kept asking her, that first night, after they’d run back to the room and locked themselves in, as she listened to the muffled noises at the other side of the door that they’d discover in the morning were made by people piling up flowers and plush animals in heaps. She thought she knew what it meant, or that she was beginning to know — she didn’t want to think about it too much at once. Lying against him she knew he was outdistancing her, that his mind was rushing ahead into weeks and months and even years of possibility for the first time since the storm.
They walked down the ramp, holding hands.
“I like Father Jane,” Rob said suddenly.
“Everybody likes her.”
“I mean I really like her. Watching her talk, I get this feeling. It’s quite new. You’ll see.”
“You’re not her type.”
“Not like that,” he said, punching gently on her arm. “I just… believe her.”
“She’s very sincere.”
“Not just that,” he said. “My mother was very sincere, but I never believed half the shit she told me about my dad.”
Someone yelled behind them, “Get out of the way!” Rob flattened himself against the balcony, swinging Jemma in an arc to collide with the railing. She stumbled and caught herself, one hand sinking deep into the soil in a pansy-box. Tiresias Dufresne flew by, riding an IV pole, his feet on the casters and his hands wrapped around the pole, followed by four others, Ethan the heart kid, the two former Panda syndromes, and Sylvester Sullivan bringing up the rear, slaloming expertly around a planter.
“Watch it!” Rob called out. Sylvester slowed, dragging his foot to brake, and gave them a little wave before he rounded the corner.
“Pretty skillful,” Jemma said.
“They’re fixed,” said Rob. “Cindy Flemm designed them. You can steer them with your feet. Anyway, I had this uncle who liked to go to church — Uncle Stuart. He used to come over for lunch afterward and I think I finally understand what he was smiling about all the time.”
“Uh huh,” Jemma said absently, and began to occupy herself, especially after they had found a place to stand in the lobby, with waving back to people. She waved to Dr. Chandra and Anna and Jordan Sasscock, to Timmy and Anika and Dr. Sashay. Everyone liked to wave at her, or say hello — whenever she walked anywhere in the hospital it was from greeting to greeting to greeting. Friendly waving was everywhere to be seen in the last week, but toward Jemma more than anyone people made gestures of fellowship. No one wanted to talk to her, necessarily — and she considered this a good thing — they only wanted to acknowledge her, and to smile. It made her feel like a school principal, and she would have gone about with a veil over her face, if she thought that would have been any disguise.
Right on time Father Jane stepped up on a little box under one of the leaning pieces of the toy and raised a cordless microphone to her face.
“Good afternoon, everyone,” she said. “What a lovely afternoon, and how lovely to see you all gathered down there. I got up this morning and there was a message burned into my bagel. She might have just said it: Today is the day, Jane. I’m babbling already. My old homiletics instructor always told me I drew fine the line between preaching and babbling, but it’s really only when I’m nervous. My old congregation was much smaller than this. Not that you are a congregation. Not exactly. But what are you, then? That’s part of what I want to talk about. In the past days I have been thinking about some particular things, asking some particular questions, and I think everyone would profit by my sharing them.” She wiped her hands against her leather pants, back and forth, so the sides of her legs began to gleam with sweat.
“If I’d come up here a week ago, then I would have had some different things to talk about. I had different questions before: Why me? Why them? Why at all? How long? Where to? What next? These have mostly fallen away. It’s very strange, isn’t it, to have questions burn and burn and then something happens and you discover that these questions have simply gone out. All except one.