The Children's Hospital

by Chris Adrian

  Jemma, in a chair on the third floor, watched with Pickie Beecher on her left and Ethel Puffer on her right, with all nine of her children, Kidney in her lap. Rob was in the PICU, watching on a monitor. She had not had to do much to help with the production—the idea arose independently of her and the execution happened without her contributing anything except a suggestion that the extraordinarily wide-brimmed hats that Dr. Sashay would wear for most of the show would obscure her face and her voice from the high-sitting members of the audience. She was too full of Vivian’s spirit, anyway, to get too excited about it, and she could think of better shows, anyway, than Hello, Dolly, and suspected they were only doing it because it gratified some secret fetish of Dr. Snood’s. Her thoughts were elsewhere—with Vivian, with her baby, and in the PICU—during the planning (though she duly affixed her signature to the original resolution and every rider that was attached to it) and even during the show itself, which turned out to be just as spectacular as anyone had planned.

  Kidney announced that she was bored hardly before the curtain fell away and promptly fell asleep, but Pickie seemed especially to enjoy it. Jemma would never have figured him for a boy who loved show tunes, yet he bounced in his seat and acted more like a child than she had ever seen him, clapping at every entrance of Dr. Sashay, and requiring three multiple shushings from all sides before he would stop singing along. Jemma divided her attention between the stage and the PICU, leaving the smaller portion for Dr. Sashay and her ostrich-feather hat, whose narrow brim revealed her face and her voice but left the whole artifice a little unsteady, and Jemma barely noticed when it tipped off her head and she kicked it out into the audience, like it was all part of the show. She sent drifting tendrils of thought up the ramp and down the hall, into the PICU, trying to sense how the six were doing—every day she could figure things from a little farther away, but two floors was really reaching. She thought she could feel Rob, a familiar and pleasant pressure against her mind, and imagined him sitting at his usual place at the work station, his elbow on the table and his chin in his hand, watching a scrolling screen of lab values.

  The six faded into her awareness, one by one, three and three around the bed where the boy slept. She imagined that they were watching, too.

  She looks like a crazy old whore, Cotton said.

  She is a crazy old whore, said Karen.

  A delightful, wonderful old whore, said Wanda. The most wonderful old whore there ever was. Don’t you know the story?

  She’s going to break her neck in those heels, said Dolores. Look at how steep that staircase is.

  No, she’s on a wire. It looks like she’s going to fall, but then she swoops out over the audience, sustained by her wonderful old age, and her lust for life.

  She’s going to eat it, Dolores said confidently.

  I can feel it, Aloysius said. Here it comes. Jemma put them in the air above the stage, five dying critics sitting forward in their floating beds while the boy in the middle went on sleeping soundly, as eager and curmudgeonly as the old men from The Muppet Show. Dr. Sashay, coming down the high staircase that reached all the way up to the third floor on the opposite side of the lobby, was just two verses into her show-stopper when her voice broke. She recovered and went on, stepping expertly in her heels, not having to look at her feet on the narrow steps even though her ankles and legs were doing a twisty little dance with every step. Halfway down her voice broke again, and she tried to go on. The orchestra stopped when she stopped again. She cleared her throat, lifted her head, and started over. “I!” she sang, strong and clear, but then she lost her voice entirely and was wracked by a cough. She had a handkerchief ready—she’d been waving it in a carefully orchestrated pattern. She held it at her mouth, and when she brought it away during a break in the fit it was easy to see, even from far away, how it was covered in blood and ash.

  “Oh my,” she said, and fell, not before Jemma became aware that her femurs had fractured spontaneously under her own weight. She bounced down the stairs, oofing and screaming and coughing, and lay still in the middle of the restaurant set.

  Brava! said Dolores. Brava! Jemma hardly heard her. She stood up, dumping Kidney out of her lap, stepped back from the balcony, and ran down the ramp. People screamed—their emotions already worked up by the elaborate show—and backed against the balcony as she streaked by, and then away from it as she hurried through the lobby and ran up on the stage. The diners fled their tables as Jemma stepped up next to Dr. Sashay and assaulted her with fire, calling up reserves that seemed equal to what had harrowed the hospital to burn at the rapidly spreading blackness in her. But her rage and her fire only seemed to make it worse—she could tell that was how it looked, though she couldn’t stop herself from trying and trying to win. Whole hospitals’ worth of fire, enough to fill the whole place, the sum of the whole harrowing and again—she called and it came, and Dr. Sashay screamed, lifted by the conflagration, not saying words, though people would swear later they heard her say, “Stop, stop, please stop,” until she was just an ashen image of herself that shattered against the stage when Jemma finally released her.

  Every year the Fourth of July in Severna Forest began with a semi-official joyride; in the minutes just after dawn wild teenagers would fly over the hills in borrowed convertibles, honking their horns incessantly, hooting and shouting in a display of patriotic enthusiasm flavored with mischief and the fading drunk of the previous night’s long party. Jemma was standing at her window when they came. The car, small and black, stopped in front of the house. A girl with long brown hair stood unsteadily in the back seat, lifted an air horn, and blasted it at every house in range, handling the can like a gun. She spun it over her finger and slipped it back into her pocket, then, facing Jemma but not seeing her, lifted up her shirt and shouted something unintelligible. When the car leapt away again she fell back, so her body lay across the giant paper flag that was taped over the trunk, and her shining hair spilled down to lay against the shining chrome bumper. Jemma watched her face, upside down and laughing, disappear over the crest of the hill.

  She’d been waiting for the horn. Like dawn on Christmas, it released her from parent-enforced stasis and freed her to run around the house proclaiming the holiday. She ran away from the window, out her door and down the hall to her brother’s room. Calvin was sleeping through the racket, curled up in his boat-shaped bed, entwined with Al, his stuffed snake. Five feet long and thick as a bolster, the snake was lime-colored, with big sad blue eyes and a pink tongue that had become frayed over the years along its edges. Jemma watched her brother sleeping for a few moments. His face was nestled against the snake’s face, and the pressure of his breath made Al’s tongue flicker and look as if it was tasting the air. Jemma was afraid of the snake; it seemed liable to come alive at any second and strike at her, but at the same time she wished that Joe or Alice or Emily or Ra-Ra the Conqueror, some of the other residents of her bed, could wrap around her and hug back like Al did.

  “Wake up,” she said, tugging on the snake’s tail, the movement transmitting through all his coils so his face moved up and down against Calvin’s cheek. Calvin opened his eyes.

  “It’s too early still.”

  “It started. It’s the day, now. It’s the Fourth of July!” Jemma proclaimed all holidays with almost perfect equability; Christmas reigned supreme and drove her into the most fervent tizzy, so she’d run shrieking like a madwoman all over the house as soon as the first blue light of dawn ended her practically sleepless night. But she’d shout and stomp with not much less energy over Thanksgiving, Halloween, the Fourth of July, and Easter. Other holidays she was less familiar with, but she celebrated them as she discovered them in school, and had been known to invent associations and ask her parents why there was no Memorial Day feast upon the table, or why the Labor Day Puppy had left no treats beneath her bed.

  “Not yet. I’m still asleep. This is all a dream, right now. It’s still pitch black outside, if you’d just wake up and look.
Go back and lie in your bed and count to ten, then open your eyes.”

  “Come on,” she said, pulling now both on his leg and Al’s tail. “Come on. It’s right now!”

  “This is a dream, and Al is going to bite you, and his poison will make you burst into flame.”

  Jemma hesitated then, reaching around with her left hand to pinch herself on the bottom, making it smart but not crying out. Then she jumped up on her brother’s bed and bounced vigorously, her feet touching against him every third or fourth bounce, until she missed her footing and stepped right on his belly, and fell down against him. “The sawdust,” she was saying, “and the turtles and the Red Rover and the fireworks and George Washington, we’re going to miss them if you don’t get up!”

  He opened one eye. “Go get me a drink of water and then I’ll get up.” Jemma scrambled off the bed and hurried down to the bathroom. She emptied a cup of a year’s worth of accumulated toothbrushes—she and Calvin each had three or four, because the older models wore out or were superceded by fancier shapes or prettier colors—filled it with water, and hurried back to the room, careful not to spill. But when she arrived the door was closed and locked.

  “Hey,” she said, knocking with her foot.

  “It’s too early,” Calvin said, and then he would not respond no matter how hard she knocked. She wanted very badly to pour the cup of water over his head, and waited silently at his door for a little while for just that opportunity to present itself, patience losing out eventually to a growing thirst. She drank the water and went downstairs.

  Her parents’ door was closed; she did not try the knob but listened at the wood, hearing nothing. She went into the living room, already the warmest and brightest room in the house, the peach walls and carpet glowing, and climbed into the bay window. She could see all the way down to the river. A thin line of mist hung over each of the three ravines; the haze over the river lifted even while she watched a boatful of tiny teenagers leave the docks and go swiftly over the water. She heard their horns, and the other horns echoing overland from every direction, and then the boat passed the bend in the river and all became silent. But still everything, the rising sun, the glare off the water, the thinning mist, seemed ready to shout. Even the air seemed about to proclaim the great day. She went into the dining room, sat at the table, put her fists under her chin, and waited.

  She followed Calvin down the hill, walking in the rough of the fourth hole and kicking at dandelion heads. In an aerated shoebox under her arm she carried her racing turtle, #40, Mr. Peepers. Every so often she’d hold the box up, lining up her eye to check on him, watching the steady progress he made consuming the lettuce leaf she’d put in there to keep him happy on the trip. Calvin said eating before the race would make him slow. Her father said he’d race faster because the lettuce would make him happy, and because he’d sprinkled a dash of cayenne pepper on the leaf.

  The Nottingham’s new dog leaped out at them. The old one had died in the spring. Now they had a puppy who, chained in the place of his predecessor, inherited and modified his habits. So he whined instead of roaring, and slapped his big paws in the grass instead of beating the air with them. When Jemma bent down next to him he turned on his back and offered her his belly. She scratched it.

  “Come on,” said Calvin. “We’ll be late.”

  “Now who’s hurrying?” Jemma asked him, but she rose and followed. They wound around the fifth and seventh holes, around the sheriff’s house and past the staircase that led to the deep hidden playground, Jemma now looking in on Mr. Peepers and now smelling her fingers, savoring the lingering odor of maple syrup. Their father had made pancakes for breakfast decorated with strawberry mouths, blueberry eyes, and great masses of whipped cream hair. Standing at the stove in his red-white-and-blue-striped trousers, he’d flipped the cakes halfway to the ceiling, whistling “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and cursing mildly when a bit of hot batter struck his bare chest or belly. Jemma’s mother, dressed in a blue bathing suit, came in and out of the kitchen, stealing bites from her pancakes, more and more green every time she made an appearance, until she was patina’d from her ears to her fingers.

  Cars passed them, some open-topped and some not, all full of parents and children dressed in red, white, and blue, all decorated with flags and dragging some sort of red-white-and-blue noisemaker, a few decked out as floats for the parade. Jemma waved with her whole free arm every time someone passed. Calvin, his gaze fixed on his shoes, just kept walking, not looking up until, as they were passing along an empty stretch of road in front of the clubhouse, they were both startled by an explosion in the grass.

  Jemma jumped, dropping her box but catching it again before it could hit the ground. She heard a funny whistle before the next explosion. It seemed smaller than the first, just firecracker-sized, but she jumped just as high. Calvin was already looking at the clubhouse roof when the laughter broke out. There were two older boys up there, armed with bottle rockets. Jemma recognized them, but didn’t know their names. Each of them wore a single lacrosse glove to protect their hand while they aimed and launched their rockets.

  “Got to pay the toll,” said the one on the left.

  “One box of stuff,” said the one on the right, pointing at Mr. Peepers’ box. Jemma held it to her chest.

  “You all are morons,” said Calvin, and started walking again. A rocket exploded in front of him before he’d taken five steps. He stopped again and Jemma ran up behind him.

  “Got to pay the toll, kiddo,” the two boys said. Calvin just stared at them, even while they lit and leveled another rocket. As far away as they were, Jemma still thought she could see the fuse burning down. She had time to run away, but she just stood there tugging on Calvin’s shirt. They had wonderful aim. Jemma was sure the rocket would have flown just inside the space Calvin made with his arm by putting his hand on his hip, and slide precisely through one of the holes in Mr. Peepers’ box. She imagined the flare of light, the box leaping in her hands and the lid leaping off the box, the turtle parts scattering toward every corner of the ninth tee. In a flash of useless, stupid prescience she knew what would happen, and yet she did nothing, did not move, did not shield innocent Mr. Peepers with her own body, did not even cry out until something happened that she did not expect. Calvin moved his arm, releasing his hand from his hip and waving it in a circle, a gesture of utter dismissal that knocked the rocket out of her path. It fell on the ground and slid through grass still wet with dew to explode some twenty feet from where they stood. My own concern flexes at this same moment in a useless spasm, but it is only your brother’s arm that saves you. In this moment it would not surprise you if he cleared the space from the ground to the roof in one leap and knocked both boys, with two short simultaneous punches to the chest, clear down to the river, or if from that place on the roof he reached up and, tearing the sky from its moorings, wadded it up like so much blue tissue paper to throw at your feet.

  “Morons,” Calvin said, and walked away. Jemma followed so close behind him she gave him two flats, which he did not comment on, but just kept walking with his heels outside his sneakers like they were sandals, and her head bumped repeatedly into his shoulder while she talked. “You saved Mr. Peepers’s life!” she said. “They were going to kill him, or kidnap him, or torture him, or eat him!”

  “They were morons,” he said quietly, but he was trembling, and he made her swear by the red heart of Mr. Peepers not to tell their parents what had happened. Jemma swore, but she kept thinking about that gesture all day long. In the odd still moment it would come back to her, and she would make that circle herself, over and over until her brother saw it and made a shushing motion at her.

  After they passed the clubhouse and the general store the golf course opened up on their left and the first through fourth tees, where they rolled all the way down to the river, were full of tents and people, and the parade was already well advanced along the road that wound down to the beach. Beneficent strangers pushed them forward
when they stood at the back of the crowd lining the road, and they emerged among other children just as the first float was passing by, and the first portion of candy and fireworks went flying over their heads. Jemma leaped awkwardly, grabbing in the air with one hand and managed to nab a single bottle rocket. She cast it on the ground.

  The floats passed: Betsy Ross working on the flag in the back of a festooned pickup truck; Ben Franklin flying a kite on a stiff wire with one hand and scattering roman candles with the other; a Liberty Bell made all of daisies and violets; the local Young Republicans beating on dead-donkey piñatas; delegations from each of the summer-camp classes, Nit through Gold Senior, riding high on the floats upon which they’d labored all through the summer, riding by in crepe-paper splendor, alternating Roman and Spartan, so insults were hurled from the stern of one float to the bow of the next, and candy flung hard enough to sting. Last of all came the Chairman and his Lady, both honorary but elected offices, whom Jemma had been awaiting with breathless anticipation. They rode on the finest float of all, constructed by labor contributed by every camp class: they sat on white thrones above a papier-mâché model of DC. Jemma longed to see them rise and stomp like monsters among the stiff paper capitol and monuments, but they only sat, their father in his blue waistcoat and red-white-and-blue pants; their mother in her green toga and spectacular tinfoil crown. Their bags contained the best candy, and the fanciest explosives, and both parents threw more than a fair share at Jemma and Calvin as soon as they saw them.

  When their float stopped in front of the clubhouse they climbed up on the stage set up on the lawn and together rang the daisy and violet liberty bell with careful strikes pantomimed in time to a recording of the actual bell sounding. Then they set off a single rocket, an explosion lost in the glare of the sun, and declared the games open. These were the midsummer games, not to be confused by anyone with the end-of-summer annual Olympiad, but still quite important in the competition between the two summer-camp teams. Points could be gathered on this day such that the opposing team would never catch up, even if they won the decathlon or had both the boy and girl of the year chosen from within their ranks to receive the Field Medal. Every child, even Jemma understood the seriousness of the day and schooled their turtles accordingly.