A Better Angel

by Chris Adrian

  She heard the helicopter before she saw it. It was incredibly loud. Covering her ears with her hands, she watched as it came out of the snowstorm and settled onto the helipad. She watched the flight nurses scramble out, one of them with a Styrofoam cooler held between his hands. Just as they had with the kidney, they would take it downstairs, where doctors would examine it and make it ready for her. After the nurses had disappeared inside the hospital, Beatrice turned and stepped off the roof.

  It was never like the fall that had brought her here. It was slower, for one thing, and it did her no harm whatsoever. In fact, she fell so slowly that she had time for reflection on various subjects, and this time as she floated down, she watched the snowflakes passing her and thought about her very first boyfriend. His name was Boukman. They had been eight years old together. Her parents had disapproved of him because he was black. They would not let him swim in their pool. This was in Miami, where in the summer it was practically a medical necessity to swim every day.

  So she swam in his family’s pool, and exulted in his strangeness. Boukman claimed to have been born of a dog, and that he could fly. These were not his parents who applauded when he and she did synchronized back dives into the pool. His real mother’s name was Queenie, and she was a Great Dane, just like Scooby-Doo. He was from Haiti. He said such things were common there. She believed him all through the summer, and looked forward to the flying lessons he promised her.

  On the day of the first lesson, she gave him a lingering kiss on the mouth, and then they ran hand in hand along his flat roof. She balked at the edge and watched him go flying out alone. He went out and straight down to fall directly on his well-formed, closely shaven head. She looked down at the gruesome angle of his neck. Because she was a child, she did not realize right away that he was dead.

  In later years she wondered if it had been her doubt that cost him his life. If she had jumped with him, would they have flown over all the low houses of their respectable neighborhood, and scraped their toes against the tops of the highest royal palms?

  As she approached the ground, Beatrice realized that Boukman was not the great sadness of her life. It was not for him that she had made her leap, though she would always think of him as the beginning of a long arc of sadness, as the person who taught her that there’s no such thing as a boy who can fly, and that nothing is born of a dog but puppies and blood.

  Beatrice walked into the ER, following behind a pair of EMTs who were wheeling in a motorcycle accident victim. The few people in the waiting room looked up as the man was pushed past them. He was crying out, “Louise! Louise!” at the top of his lungs. Beatrice watched as they rushed him down the hall to the trauma center. Snow swirled in around her before the doors closed again, and the waiting people went back to staring absently at their entertainment magazines or the television. Walking unseen through the restricted area, Beatrice could hear people having their various emergencies behind the curtains that separated the exam beds. She did not pause to look at the shattered kneecaps or the scalp wounds, or the blue and gray asthmatics wheezing desperately. She walked as quickly as she could, trying to catch up with the flight nurses who were carrying her liver up to surgery.

  She didn’t catch them. Her fall had given them a long head start on her. But somewhere near the cardiovascular intensive care unit she happened upon Olivia, who was striding confidently down the hall carrying a phlebotomy basket and singing “Maria.” Beatrice followed her clear across the hospital to the nurseries, where Olivia had been called to perform a blood draw on a brand-new baby. Olivia did not mind being called to do phlebotomy. In fact, she liked very much to escape the confines of the lab, but sometimes it disturbed her to have to cause an infant pain, even if it was for its own good. They entered the nursery and saw a large nurse rocking and feeding a baby. The flesh of the nurse’s thighs spilled out from under the armrests of her rocking chair.

  “There she is,” she said, pointing to a warming bed in a far corner of the room. Beatrice took a moment to admire the cheery decorations: rabbits and ponies and kittens, and a fine triptych of three dogs under a candy bush. The first dog’s eyes were big as saucers, the second’s as big as dessert plates, and the third’s as big as dinner plates. This last picture made Beatrice feel sad.

  Next to the warming bed, Olivia was preparing the baby for her blood draw.

  “Hello, darling,” she said. “You’re so beautiful!” She scrubbed vigorously at the baby’s foot with an alcohol-soaked cotton ball. The baby found this a not-unpleasant sensation. Olivia, full of regret, unwrapped a lancet from its sterile foil package and drove it into the fleshiest part of the baby’s heel.

  “Sorry, darling,” she said. The baby, who did not yet have a name but would one day be called Sylvia, did not immediately begin to scream. First a look of perfect incredulity passed over her small face. Only when that had been replaced with an expression of outrage did she begin to scream with such force and volume that Beatrice thought it would blow Olivia’s hair back like a hot wind.

  “Yes, yes,” said Olivia. “Life is hard. Don’t I know it?” This is only the beginning, Beatrice whispered behind her.

  Olivia had caught the heel in the well between her thumb and forefinger, and now she began to squeeze with the full force of her hand. Sometimes Olivia thought she heard the heel bone making crunching noises under the pressure, but Bonnie had assured her that it was all in her head, and that it was quite impossible to crush a baby’s heel because the bones were so fresh and green.

  A dark red pearl of blood had formed from out of the wound, but Olivia wiped this away with a piece of gauze because it was too full of clotting factors to be useful for analysis. She continued squeezing, and caught the next drop in a tiny plastic tube, and the next drop, and then the next. She counted twenty-five of them before she had collected the requisite 250 microliters.

  It took a very long time. The blood was slow to come. Olivia began to suffer because of the heat lamps that kept the chilly babies warm like so many hamburgers. There was a lamp in the roof of the warming bed, directly above Olivia’s neck where she bent over the baby. She wished for an assistant to wipe away the sweat from her brow before it dripped down onto the baby. Beatrice would have been happy to help her, if she could have.

  “Like the Sahara under there, isn’t it?” said the fat nurse, who was watching Olivia sweat.

  “I think I’m getting dehydrated,” said Olivia, squeezing out the final drop. She capped her tube and put a festive adhesive bandage across the heel. The baby continued to scream, even though both Olivia and Beatrice stroked her arms and belly to try to calm her. Even after they were gone out the door she screamed. Beatrice lingered at the observation window and watched the beet-red baby writhe and scream while the cooing blob of a nurse burped her nursery mate. Beatrice put a hand on the window and said, It only gets worse and worse and worse.

  When they got back to the lab, Beatrice and Olivia found the others clustered around a table, getting ready to draw each other’s blood. Bonnie looked up at Olivia from where she sat with her bare arm spread out before her.

  “How’d it go?” she asked.

  “Tough. That baby had blood like glue, but I got it.”

  “Congratulations. Have you seen a blue-top floating around? Denis says he’s missing one. He’s all upset.”

  “I thought we got one on the jumper. I know I labeled one.”

  “Well, he didn’t get it. I guess it’s with Jesus now.”

  “Want to get drawn?” asked Otto.

  “Sure,” said Olivia. “Just let me get this back to Denis.”

  “Bring him back with you!” Bonnie called out after her. Beatrice stayed behind and watched as Luke stroked the crook of Bonnie’s arm with his gloved hand, trying to get the vein to rise.

  “Hurry up,” Bonnie said. “This tourniquet is killing me.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I think I have it now.” Beatrice stood next to him and observed closely as he slipped t
he needle into Bonnie’s vein. His motion was certain and swift. Bonnie, looking away like she always did when she got her blood drawn, did not even notice the entry.

  “We haven’t got all night, you know,” she said.

  “Yeah,” said Luke, biting his lip as he pushed a vacuum-filled test tube up into the plastic sheath that covered the bottom of the needle. Inside the sheath was the sharpened back end of the needle, and they could all hear a dull popping sound as it broke the vacuum in the tube. Beatrice watched, fascinated, as Bonnie’s living blood beat into the tube. She imagined herself in Bonnie’s place, imagined Luke’s sure fingers caressing the crook of her arm. She stood closer to him and pretended that the growing erection that shamed and disturbed him was inspired by her. He pulled out the needle and pressed a pad of gauze against the wound.

  “You big smoothie,” said Bonnie. “I didn’t even notice.”

  “That’s the idea,” said Luke. “Who wants to draw me?” He hoped it would be Bonnie, but she was absorbed by her own blood, holding the tube up to the fluorescent light from the ceiling and swirling the contents.

  “Sit down, Luke,” said Otto. “I’ll take care of you.”

  Otto put on a pair of extra-large gloves and proceeded to draw Luke’s blood. He used a new needle, but Luke almost wished Otto would use the same one he had used on Bonnie. That would be a certain type of closeness, he thought.

  Olivia came up behind them with Denis just in time to observe the penetration. As she watched Otto execute a flawless phlebotomy procedure, she imagined him, with his swollen muscles and great strength, driving the needle straight through Luke’s arm and out the other side.

  “You’re getting good at this, Otto,” she said, patting him on the back. She left her arm resting on the back of his shoulder and felt the subtle workings in the great muscle as he switched tubes, then finished the draw.

  “Thanks,” he said. He drew her next, then Denis. It was something of a thrill to watch Denis roll up his sleeve and expose the vein that stood out in bold relief all the way down his arm. As he felt the vein under his thumb, he imagined his own heart beating in exact time with Denis’s, then had a vision of their two bodies, especially their chests, pressed up against each other, and both of them marveling at the synchronicity of their hearts as they held each other.

  When he was finished, Otto sat down and tried to roll up his sleeve, but he could only get it as far as his upper forearm. Beyond that, his arm was too thick for the cuff, so he was forced to remove his shirt. Beatrice stood by Denis as he performed the draw, and admired the pattern of black hair that spread from Otto’s belly up his abdomen, over his chest, and under his arms. It looked soft and well cared for, as if he used expensive shampoo on it instead of soap.

  Olivia admired it, too, fiercely, and pictured her face against it, and even went so far as to position herself next to Otto to see if she could catch a scent from under his elevated arm. Bonnie found herself appreciative of the flat lines of Otto’s stomach, and the wide stretch of his chest, and especially the thick, winglike extension of the muscles along his sides. Luke watched Bonnie watching Otto, and envied him. Denis thought solely of his jumping lady.

  He thought of her lying in the OR, perhaps already opened up, and prayed silently that her operation would come off without any complications. Beatrice muttered a prayer of her own to thwart Denis’s: She prayed for a power outage or an incompetent anesthetist or that someone would drop the liver.

  She waited a little longer in the lab, while Denis and Otto performed the analyses on all the blood, because she wanted to make sure her friends were healthy. It turned out that Luke’s iron level could have been higher and that Bonnie’s glucose was dreadfully low.

  “Time for lunch!” Bonnie said when she learned this, and went to go find Denis to convince him to help her hunt down the traveling food cart. Luke watched her go, then picked up the phone, which had just begun to ring. He listened with a grave expression and said, “All right,” then hung up. He folded his arms across his chest and said to Olivia, who was busy entering results into the computer, “Transplant’s canceled. The jumping lady is dead.”

  Beatrice, upon hearing this, did not stay to see Olivia’s reaction but made directly for the river. She was severely disappointed when she realized that she still could not pass over the bridge. She puzzled over this the whole way back to the hospital. She wondered, Will I be stuck here forever? She went looking for her body.

  When she found it her questions were answered. It was still in the SICU, though now in a different room. Outside she saw a team of doctors arguing with each other. “What am I supposed to do with this liver?” one of them wanted to know.

  Another doctor was interrogating Judy, who felt close to weeping with frustration. She repeated her story, that Beatrice had coded while she was brushing her hair.

  “And who told you to go around brushing people on their hair?” a doctor asked her. He was from Iran. Judy had never liked him.

  “For God’s sake, I was trying to be nice!” said Judy. “And if you don’t like that you can just go fuck yourself!” She turned and stormed away, damning the consequences of her outburst. As she ran out of the bay, Frank turned to a fellow nursing assistant and said, “The mouse roars.” Beatrice went and looked at her body.

  This was not the first time that her body had experienced a spontaneous and universal shutdown of organ systems, but every other time somebody had revived it. Her body looked the same to Beatrice as it ever did, but she knew from the conversation around her that she was certifiably brain dead. Now machines gave her a semblance of life, keeping her unruined organs alive for transplant to someone else.

  Beatrice turned away from her body and wandered out of the bay. It would be a while before they took her off the machine and began to remove her organs. There were blood tests to run, and the organ harvesting team would need to be roused from their beds. She went and found her liver, still waiting for her in the OR. It was the sole occupant of the room. She went and looked at it where it lay in a volume of pale pink fluid that was not blood. But the whole thing reeked so strongly of blood that she thought she might faint.

  Be happy, liver, she said to it, and went back up to the pathology lab because she wanted to spend her last hours at the hospital among friends.

  Halfway back to the lab she heard music and followed it. It took her downstairs, through many different hallways, always sounding very close because the acoustics in this part of the hospital were strange. It was not unusual for a stray groan to come floating down the hall to disturb a candystriper on some innocuous mission.

  The music led her to the third-floor balcony over the atrium, where she looked down and saw Bonnie playing on the big piano while Denis sat glumly beside her. Bonnie played sprightly in a high octave and sang:

  Fingers are fun,

  Toes are nice,

  Brains are soft

  And gray like mice

  But blood is best.

  Yes blood is the best,

  Oh blood is the best,

  Even your mama will tell you

  That blood is the best because

  Blood is the sum of our parts.

  She stopped singing but continued to play softly. “My mother the nurse taught me that song. A crazy lady in housekeeping taught it to her. She—the housekeeper, not my mother—got fired for slurping clotted blood out of used specimen tubes. Said it tasted like oysters.” Bonnie was trying to amuse Denis because he was so sad. When she went back to ask him to lunch, he was just putting down his phone. He stood frozen over his machines for a moment, then burst violently into tears. For a moment Bonnie was uncertain what to do, but then she ran to him and threw her arms around him, saying, “It’s okay, Denis,” which was the first thing she could think of.

  Denis didn’t particularly want to be held. He hated Bonnie briefly, because she was alive and his lady was dead, and if in that moment he could have traded one life for the other, he certainly would h
ave. Bonnie held him, and he cried into her lab-coated shoulder for a few minutes, then stood back from her. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he said.

  “It’s been a long night,” she said, though it hadn’t, really. It had been almost relaxing, so far, because it was so slow. I’m holding him! she thought. What else matters?

  “It’s the jumping lady,” he said. “She’s dead.”

  “I didn’t know!” Bonnie exclaimed. “I didn’t know you knew her!”

  “I didn’t,” he said. A fresh sob rose up from his belly and burst out of his mouth.

  Bonnie looked over Denis’s shoulder and saw Luke staring at them from the hall. He turned and walked away. “Let’s get out of here for a minute,” she said, taking him by the hand and leading him out the back door. He did not protest, even as she led him all the way to the piano, sat him down there, and began to play.

  Above them, while Bonnie moved her fingers over the lowest section of the keyboard and started a new song, Beatrice stepped off the balcony and began to float down. She managed a perfect landing on the piano, and sat down cross-legged on it, staring intently into the faces of Bonnie and Denis, who were not looking at each other. Bonnie stopped playing.

  “Are you feeling better?”

  “Sure,” said Denis. “Thanks. It’s weird how it got to me like that.” He did not plan ever to tell anyone that he had been in love with the jumping lady. He could not explain the attraction to himself; how would he ever explain it to someone else?

  “I think it’s a good thing,” she said. “You’d make a good doctor.”

  “No thanks.” A nearby elevator opened its doors and a security guard emerged from it. He approached them warily.