The Children's Hospital

by Chris Adrian

  He stopped and waited in the usual place to see if someone was following him, picking up the bottle from where he kept it, ready to brain some motherfucker, but no one was behind him. He was too quick and too quiet for that. He peed and moved on, speaking the code words at the blue pipe and the orange pipe, disabling the booby traps that would have killed him dead. When he got home he ate a candy bar and looked through pictures. “That’s my shoe,” he said when he saw it, as if she had stolen it.

  “Child, child,” said the lady in the walls. “Let me comfort you. Let me come to you. Just name me and all will be well. I will gather you up with a hundred arms.”

  “Fuck off,” he said absently. He erased the picture of his foot and took a few furious pictures of his place, feeling like he was making it more his own with every shot. When he’d used up the memory he turned it off, then went around turning off all his flashlights until just the one by his bed was lit up. “Goodnight, God,” he said, turning it off, then wishing he hadn’t, because he started to make the noise almost as soon as it got dark, the little cough and gag that was like he was trying to throw up, but it was just stupid crying that came, as useless as ever, and though he had promised himself on every other night that he wouldn’t he called out for his mother. She might come, after all. That was all it used to take, and all sorts of things could happen, when it was absolutely and totally dark.

  When Jemma was four her mother rescinded a ban on birthday parties, instituted just before she was born, when her brother was three. He’d choked on a penny hidden in a cupcake, and turned as blue as the beautiful birthday sky above him. He always had good weather on his birthday.

  Worn down not by Jemma’s as-yet-unskilled nagging, but by the pressure of the first Severna Forest birthday season, her mother reversed herself. Birthday parties had always happened, but this year the party as adult social event had declared itself unbidden. No one knew where it came from, or who summoned it, exactly—no one could recall which parent was the first to serve daiquiris with the cake, or hire a clown who, after the sitters had come to take the children home, slipped out of her big red shoes and baggy blue overalls to belly dance on the dining-room table. Like other transient Forest institutions, it was as suddenly there as it suddenly would be gone, when people would look back at pictures that captured them trying to fellate the ride-pony and wonder, Have I ever been drunker in my life?

  In the supermarket Jemma trailed behind her mother. Her brother rode the front of the cart, his back to their mother, hanging on with his fingers and his heels, his back arched and his chest thrust out, a ship’s figurehead, exhorting his captain to go faster and faster, the groceries were all getting away. Jemma followed the white hollows behind her mother’s knees, looking away only to watch when men, and some women, turned their heads to watch her mother step crisply down the aisle. That rainy season she often looked naked under her raincoat. She tended to wear short polyester dresses, hems falling at mid-thigh. Her shiny yellow raincoat fell just above her knees. She always wore heels in the rain.

  Jemma cowered away from the shelves. Other children, her brother among them, liked to paw at the variety, and worship clutchingly in the candy aisle. Not Jemma; the tall rows of boxes seemed always about to fall on her, and chocolate packaged bigger than her head made her frightened. From within the glass door of the freezers her image beckoned to her, Come in Jemma, come into the cold. Come eat popsicles and be dead with me!

  Also, no matter how hard she tried to keep her mother’s legs directly in front of her, she often became as lost as she’d been in the museum, an experience never any less traumatic for its frequency. It happened this trip, too. She looked away from the legs for a little longer than usual, at a man with a pointy beard who put out his tongue and waggled it at her mother. When he noticed Jemma waggling her tongue back at him, he made a deft motion, sliding a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn with his cart and hurried away, pushing at double speed. Jemma’s mother was nowhere to be found when Jemma turned around, no legs, no body, no shining yellow hat. She turned around again and saw the man’s fleet foot disappearing from the aisle, and then she was alone in the vast canyon of breakfast foods. She froze, tears welling in her eyes but not actually crying. She proceeded cautiously in the direction her mother must have gone, sure that a sudden movement would bring that leering cereal vampire leaping from out of the box to poke her with his sharp fingers.

  Out of the canyon, she spotted a yellow hat in the produce section. She hurried that way, sighing at the fake thunder that sounded just as a cool mist began to fall on the vegetables. The hat belonged to a lady expressly not her mother. She was old, and without a raincoat, and wore a housedress that swept to her ankles. Her hairy feet were bunched into a pair of wooden sandals. Jemma, running the last few feet toward the hat, a beacon just above a small hill of peaches, almost collided with her. She caught her devouring a peach, gnawing with her two remaining teeth at the dripping flesh, a little puddle of juice between her feet. She saw Jemma looking and mistook her dashed-hope look for admonition. “I was going to pay for it,” she said, and stalked off, gnawing and sucking.

  Jemma looked up to the hill of peaches and saw how all those in sight had been violated, two evenly spaced holes in each one, the flesh poking raggedly through the skin, and juices leaking all down the pile. She thought, I’ll never find my mother, and all the peaches have been murdered, and then she began to cry. Adults descended, as always, as soon as she sent up her signal. “Are you lost?” one asked, as if she could answer them, or needed to. The manager, a familiar face, and almost a friend though he called her Jemima, fetched her and walked her to the front of the store. He was going to let Jemma call for her mother on the public-address system, but just as he put the microphone to her lips she was overcome with her tears again, so it was only her hiccupy little sobs that were broadcast through the store, but that was enough. Her mother came, and Jemma spent the rest of the trip in the cart, among the pounds of flour and sugar and chocolate. Her mother, against the advice of the caterer, was going to make the cake.

  They rode home, Jemma with her head against the window, listening to wet-tire noises. Jemma had only rainy birthdays. She’d had a storm as a guest, or a present, on every birthday she could recall, and there was a picture of her unremembered first birthday, Jemma conditioning her hair with cake while lightning flashes in the picture window behind her, a big National Geographic-style strike, forks leaping up from the river to a low belly of cloud. After they were home, as her mother mixed batter in a giant rented bowl, Jemma looked out the window, frowning at the gray sky. “Don’t fret the rain,” her mother told her. “It won’t spoil anything. Come and help me with the cake.”

  Her mother gave her a wooden spoon and showed her how to attack the lumps, sweeping them against the side of the bowl and crushing them there. It was fun work, and it calmed her. Jemma forgot about the sky and the rain, captivated by the spiraling motion of her spoon, the furrows in the batter, and the dedicated pursuit of the lump. The great big bowl—the greatest and biggest, her mother said, ever to enter the neighborhood, fetched from a bakery in DC—was set in the middle of the dining-room table. The night previous they’d eaten their dinner around it, plate lips pushed off the table and hovering over their laps, because the bowl hogged so much space. They’d filled it over and over in a dinner game. It was big enough to hold: five hundred eggs, one hundred bottles of beer, a disassembled igloo, the extracted brains of the Senate, this year’s take for the East Coast tooth fairy, six months of poop from the average seven-year-old excreter—this last suggested by her brother, and then her mother declared the game (and dinner, already over anyway) effectively ruined. Jemma could reach to stir only by standing on a chair and leaning over. While her mother was greasing the cake tins, Jemma, chasing after lumps she could barely see in batter that was growing as smooth as cream, leaned too far, lost her balance and her chair, and fell in, hands, arms, shoulders, face, and head. She’d leaned so far that she
fell in the center, and the heavy bowl did not tip. It was very quiet in the batter. Opening her mouth, she took a nip, and then another, pleased with the taste, then remembered to breathe, and finally started to cough and struggle. Then her mother pulled her out, Jemma’s hair whipping in a batter-spattering arc, clutching her to her and administering a few unnecessary abdominal thrusts.

  Her mother debated the question of continuing with the party, with herself and with silent Jemma as she bathed her. Jemma and Calvin, expelled in their slickers to fetch another pound of flour from Mr. Duffy’s store, left their mother in her thinking position, seated at the dining-room table, among the drying batter, chin on fist, trying to make the serious distinction between omen and accident, to decide between a party the likes of which had not been seen in the world since the last dauphin turned four, or a quiet evening of Chinese food and mere birthday cupcakes. “If it starts to thunder,” she called out after them, “you know what to do!”

  A dog leaped out, straining on its chain, all mouth and few teeth, but loud. It belonged to the Nottinghams, who lived at the bottom of the hill in a house too small for their big family. The dog was an old Doberman, quite evil-looking in his prime, now palsied and arthritic and always leaking. But he retained, if not his dignity, at least the one trick of lying in wait for pedestrians or cars coming down the hill, and launching himself out of the tall grass to howl, and hurl spittle, and display his speckled gums. When he presented himself to the two children, Calvin, used to him, stood fast, but Jemma fled across the street, not looking right or left, but running at top speed, her arms flung out to each side and her hat trailing by the chin strap, emitting a high, pure shriek. “Hush, puppy,” her brother said to the dog, who was still baying, snout split almost in a straight line. He bent at his knees and gathered up some wet earth from the side of the road. Winding up, he hurled it straight between the teeth, hard into the gullet. The dog retired back into the tall grass, to cough, gag, and vomit. “It’s okay,” her brother called to Jemma, who was watching from the other side of the street. He held his hand out to her, but she would not come. He had to cross to her.

  They walked without speaking, and without speaking her brother added two cherry lollipops to the purchase of the flour. They were halfway home again before he started to talk. He took his lollipop out of his mouth with a wet little pop, and held it at arm’s length. “I remember when I was four,” he said. “That was a good age to be. You’re lucky.”

  “I’m lucky,” Jemma agreed, though she did not feel particularly lucky or unlucky.

  “Seven is so old. I wish I was four again. That was before I knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “Oh, things. You don’t know. You’re too young.”

  “I am not.”

  “You’re a baby. Lucky baby.” He led her off the road to sit in the wet grass and finish their lollipops, candy being generally discouraged by their mother, and forbidden entirely before the cocktail hour when the whole family would indulge in equivalent vices, Mother and Father in their customary pitcher of martinis, Calvin and Jemma in a single piece of thick, hard chocolate or a piece of hard candy bright as a jewel, everyone sipping or gnawing urbanely in the slanting late-afternoon light. “Listen,” her brother said to her, knocking his lollipop hard against hers to stimulate her attention. “When you’re one you learn to walk. When you’re two you learn to talk. When you’re three you get out of your crib. When you’re four you learn the secret words to command the toilet, to make it come to you. When you’re five you learn how to whistle. When you’re six you learn how to lie. When you’re seven you learn that everyone is lying to you.”

  “Nobody’s lying.”

  “Everybody’s lying. Mom and Dad, Mrs. Axelrod, Sister Gertrude, Mr. Duffy…” He pointed back down the road toward the store.

  “Stop it.”

  “I’m lying, too.”

  “No you’re not!” Jemma said, shaking her lollipop, trying to hit his lollipop back, but he flicked it back and forth with his fingers, so she kept missing.

  “How would you know? You’re too young to tell.”

  “Shut up!” She connected violently with his lollipop, cracking it and sending a wedge of it flying off, so the candy center lay exposed. Her brother bit in.

  “That’s the spirit,” he said as he chewed, sounding just like their father.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Never mind it. Guess what I’m getting you?”

  “Who cares,” she said, angry at him now.

  “You will,” he said. “Everybody will. It’s only the most important present anybody ever gave anyone. It’s only the most important thing that happened ever.”

  “Can I eat it?” she asked.

  “Stupid!” he said, and it happened that there was thunder behind him as he spoke, so she dropped back and sat on the grass and raised her arms in front of her face and cried. “Stupid,” he said again, but more gently. “It’s only going, that’s all! Only the most important thing in the world.”

  “Will I go too?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “But just watching me will make you the most special girl in the whole world.”

  “Will you be able to fly?”

  “Certainly,” he said.

  “Will I be able to fly?”

  “Only when you’re holding my hand.” The thunder rolled again, and he ran off home, dragging her behind him.

  “What’s the word?” she asked him before they went in the house, as he wiped the candy stains from around her lips.

  “What word?”

  “For the toilet. I want to know.”

  “Oh. That.” He took her hands and looked at her seriously. “Only the toilet can tell you.”

  The party was not canceled. Their mother decided Jemma in the batter had been only Jemma in the batter, and not compassionate fate speaking warning of a greater disaster coming. The perfect rise of the cake in its composite pans, and the way the great J took perfect shape out of the four parts, was a further affirmation, and she welcomed into the house her children, husband, the caterers, the moonwalk technicians—everyone but the clown—with ever-increasing exuberance.

  Jemma spent the afternoon in the bathroom, in her new underwear and new shoes, waiting for the toilet to speak. It was one of the chief tortures of her life, waking at night with a full bladder, and facing the choice of having an essentially deliberate accident, or venturing from bed into the dark hall and walking the miles and miles down the telescoping corridor to the green night-light in the bathroom, always so certain that indescribable horror lay on the other side of the door. How perfect, then, and how right, that the toilet should come to her. She’d speak the word into the dark, and it would go whispering out the door and down the hall while she lay safe in bed. The toilet would come thumping down the hall, and nudge the door open like a dog, and sidle up to her bed, the lid rising silently in friendly salute.

  “Speak!” she said, again and again, and “I am four today!” but Monsieur Toilet was silent. Her mother had named him that, during Jemma’s vividly remembered toilet-training days. She’d had a fear of him, of being consumed—he was so big, and made such an awful noise, and after the last gasp of the flush the old pipes would moan horribly. Jemma’s mother found a kit in a store, a big plastic smile, flat, friendly blue eyes, a big nose that she thought looked French. A beret from her own collection completed the disguise. Jemma fell in love, or at least into a deep, abiding friendship with the smiling eyes and the unchanging grin. When her mother saw her dancing, Jemma aware that she had to poop but unable to understand it, or how to address it, she would call out in an accented cartoon voice, “O, Jzemma, I am so ongree, so very ongree!”

  The face and beret were gone now; he was just a green toilet full of clear green water redolent of fake pine. But Jemma still thought of him as a friend, so it was with a particularly heavy heart that she finally gave up and went back to her room to get into her party dress. She pulled it over her
head and went looking for her mother to do up the back. She found her in the basement, overseeing installation of the moonwalk. The rain was increasing when the men tried to inflate it in the side yard. Jemma’s mother threw open the storm doors and beckoned them inside. She was still convincing them to bring the thing in when Jemma found her.

  The air pump ran off a little gas engine, but their scenarios of carbon-monoxide poisoning did not discourage Jemma’s mother. “Look around you, gentlemen. Isn’t this room just full of windows? Vent! Vent your hose!” She even helped, a little, with the assembly, though it went against her principles even to twitch a finger in support of a deliveryman. She kicked a screen out of a bottom window, and shoved a hosepipe through. With smudged fingers she buttoned up Jemma’s dress and braided her hair while the castle-shaped moonwalk rose in the eastern half of the room to press and stoop against the ceiling, its highest towers bent perpendicular against white stucco.

  “So lovely,” her mother said, turning Jemma around to appraise her. She stared at Jemma dreamily for a few moments, then started from her reverie with a cry, announcing the time. She was still wearing her shopping dress. Her hands were filthy, her hair matted in places with batter, and a thin layer of flour over her face made her look like a corpse. She rushed upstairs, tailed by Jemma. Layer by layer she put on her party clothes and her party face, breaking between steps to finish the preparations. So she admitted the caterers with only half of her pair of eyebrows drawn, and only one set of eyelashes in place; squeezed out a bouquet of white, yellow, and red roses onto the cake in her slip with hair teased high into horns. She passed through many frightening incarnations on her way to the final beauty. It was hard to reconcile the end product, a smooth, pink look only slightly too studied to be natural, with all the stops along the way: Minnie Mouse, Cruella DeVil, Mr. Heat Miser.