forty-five
The Nightmare

Cohen thinks it might take him some time to find Ava and Thatcher, wandering as they are through the entire hospital looking for Thatcher’s mother, but he pushes the button for the elevator, the doors part, and there they stand.

“I was on my way to find you two,” he says.

Ava smiles in surprise. Thatcher takes off his hat, scratches his head. He looks tired.

“We went down a few floors but didn’t see her,” Ava says. “So we thought we’d check out the floor above us.”

Cohen steps inside. The back of the elevator is lined with mirrors while the sides and front on either side of the door are stainless steel. There are small sections of mirror around the buttons, so that when he looks at them he sees mirrors of mirrors on into infinity. One thousand Thatchers. One thousand Avas. One thousand versions of himself, all of them Cohen Marah, all of them about to help the boy look for his mother, all waiting for Calvin to die.

“Any leads?” he asks Thatcher, pushing the button.

“A few nurses think they’ve seen her.”

“Where?”

“Mostly around my grandfather’s room.”

“Recently?”

“Yeah, but mostly at night.”

“So she’s holing up during the day?”

Thatcher nods. “I guess. That’s what Miss Ava seems to think.”

“Shouldn’t we sit somewhere quiet and wait for nighttime? Sounds like it would be pretty easy to find her in the evening.”

“Thatcher’s father is in the room right now,” Ava says hesitantly.

Cohen gets the message. “Alright. Well, let’s keep looking.”

The doors part and the three of them walk out onto the tile. They’re on the floor directly above the one where his father and Thatcher’s grandfather are both taking their last breaths. But this floor is different. Cohen can’t figure it out at first, what it is about this floor that feels so far from all the other ones. But then he realizes.

It’s a wing only for children. Many of them have bald heads, wear medical masks, and carry stuffed animals. The nurses bend at the knee and talk to them on their level, smiling, their voices soft, an octave higher. A blue soccer ball bounces toward them and Thatcher instinctively snags it.

A tiny voice cries out from down the hall. “Hey, man, over here!”

Cohen spots the owner of the voice, an eight- or nine-year-old boy with light brown hair and dark eyes lost in sunken sockets. He pulls himself along on a walker, determined. “C’mon, kick it back!”

Thatcher glances at Ava, drops the ball, and kicks it in the direction of the boy.

“Thanks, man!” the boy shouts. He turns and swings his foot at the ball, sending it flying to the opposite end of the wing. A nurse protests and the boy laughs, a weak chuckle, before scooting down the hall.

The walls in the reception area are covered in drawings and paintings and sketches created by a hundred hospitalized children. Cohen is drawn to them like a moth to the flame, and Ava and Thatcher fall in behind him. He makes his way from one end of the display to the other.

He sees a picture done in almost all orange, and the searing brightness of it draws his attention. He steps closer. There’s a house in the middle of the orange paint, a house made of thin brown lines, and inside it is a stick figure, a little girl. Beside the little girl is a baby. The girl has a tear in her eye, and the baby has been colored in all black.

Farther down the wall is a picture in crayon: green grass, a brown tree with no leaves, and puffy clouds outlined in blue. Under the tree is a little girl who appears to be waving. In the clouds are small houses, and beside one of the houses is a person waving down at the little girl.

There are finger paintings of families and pencil sketches of houses and trees and rivers. There are crayon drawings in their speckled wax, faces and snowmen and one that looks like the hospital.

Close to the opposite end, after he has looked at nearly all the drawings, Cohen sees one that makes him stop: it’s a well-drawn colored-pencil sketch of evergreen trees. In the middle of the evergreens is a round hole, and in the hole is a little girl. Beyond the trees, high on a mountain, is a black smudge, terrible in its ambiguity.

The Beast.

He shakes his head. It can’t be. He looks closer.

“What does that look like to you?” he asks no one in particular.

“What?” Ava asks.

He points at the black smudge in the picture.

“That’s a boulder,” Thatcher says.

“A boulder?” Cohen asks skeptically.

“A shadow?” Ava guesses.

“I guess. Maybe.”

“What do you think it is?” Ava asks.

Cohen traces the dark smudge in the mountains with his fingers. It is the size of his thumbprint.

“A nightmare.”

They walk the hall and feel the weight of emotion floating in that sea of sick children, the desperation, the lightness of hope being lost and found, given and taken. They’re on the top floor of the hospital, and there are large windows at each end of the hall, and through the windows Cohen sees light and sky and the city. Again he feels the relief that comes with morning, as parents wake up and find their children still with them, as breakfast is served and children eat, as doctors make the rounds and nurses check vitals. The wing grows louder in the time it takes them to walk from one side to the other.

“Anything?” Cohen asks Thatcher.

He shakes his head. “Naw,” he says, trying to rebuild his tough exterior in the face of disappointment. But when Ava puts her arm around him and gives him a squeeze, he doesn’t shrug her away. He sighs, takes off his hat again, and pushes his hair to the side.

“Wait,” Cohen says, looking over Thatcher’s shoulder. “Is that your mom?”

Ava and Thatcher look down the hall. A small crowd of children have come out of an activity room and are milling about, waiting for nurses and parents to demand they go back to their rooms. The outside light grows brighter, and the lights in the ceiling dim to compensate. Beyond the children, halfway down the hall, a woman dressed like all the other nurses holds a clipboard, writing. She hangs the clipboard up on the wall beside one of the rooms and turns to walk away.

“Mom!” Thatcher shouts, but his voice gets lost in the sound of all the children. “Mom!” he shouts again, louder this time.

The woman stops. She seems to consider turning around, but instead she walks away, walks faster.

Thatcher starts after her, trying to navigate the constellation of children.

“C’mon,” Cohen says, but Ava is already ahead of him, and then she’s ahead of Thatcher.

They make it through the children, and the woman, still off in the distance, ducks into a different stairwell. Ava runs in after her, with Cohen and Thatcher right behind.

“Mom!” Thatcher shouts, and his voice echoes off the painted cinder blocks. The sound of it vanishes along the endless cycle of stairs that fold back on each other and down, down, down. Cohen peers through the opening between the handrails and can see Thatcher’s mother running down. Ava is behind her.

Floor after floor, Cohen and Thatcher and Ava chase the woman. The stairwell goes darker the farther they descend, and Cohen’s legs start to burn. He stops to catch his breath, waiting for Thatcher. He leans back against the wall and puts his hands up on his head, looking back up the stairs. But Thatcher is nowhere to be found.

“Thatcher? Are you coming?”

No answer. His voice floats up the stairs, comes back to him, floats away again. The light is so dim that when he peers in between the handrails he can only see up a few floors.

“Thatcher!” he shouts again. Nothing. He looks down. Strange—it’s completely dark and he can’t see the bottom, but he can still hear Ava and the woman running farther and farther away. He runs down one more floor and looks around. There are no doors leading out of the stairwell. How many floors down has he gone?

He hears a bellowing sound far below, and he freezes in place, everything in sharp contrast. His ears strain to hear it again. His heart rate soars, and it takes everything in him not to turn and run back up as fast as he can.

Where is he?

The stairway seems endless. He continues down, but now he’s not going so fast, and the sound of the women’s footsteps fade below him, replaced by another sound. He stops at each floor, looking down as far as he can into the darkness, waiting, listening.

He reaches the bottom, the stairs end, and he arrives in a long, narrow room that’s dimly lit. The floor is concrete, the ceiling pale white, the walls dark and shimmering like heavy curtains. He shakes his head. What is going on?

The air is heavy, cool, and damp, like the air in a cave. He walks slowly through the open space, preparing himself to run in the opposite direction. Ahead of him, at the other end of the room, someone is waiting for him. He gets closer and realizes it’s Ava. She is facing him, not saying anything.

“Ava,” he says, but she doesn’t answer. She doesn’t blink. She doesn’t move. There’s another woman in the shadowy corner of the room, but she won’t come closer, and she doesn’t answer when he calls to her. Why did she lead them all the way down here? Why did she run from them?

“Who are you?” he asks. Nothing. “Ava, we should go. I don’t like it here.”

Ava nods, still without blinking, but she doesn’t move to join him.

“Ava,” he says again. This time the fear is thick in the back of his throat. “Ava. Come on.”

The shadows from the corners gather together, and the Beast rises, bearing down on them.