What you need after a shock is repetition of detail, the telling and retelling, so that a manageable story emerges with clear, easy outlines. It’s the normal way of understanding an unexpected death. After a shock we reassure ourselves in low voices, while others continue passing quietly all around. Routine continues, and we take encouragement from all the comforts that give peace, without now disguising the fact that we are being looked after, and looked at, constantly. That is how it felt; we hoped the routine would explain. We hoped we could pass our days unwinding in the seclusion of our rooms, or in the Green Room among the plants, or on a sofa in the Radiant Room, among others or not, and it could be easy to wait, but we never thought being sick might actually end our lives. Now Julia reminds us that we’re also going to die, sometime. And it doesn’t seem to matter that much, because everything and nothing is important in the newly serious world.
But even in the days before the thaw, even when one could still see Julia moving in her room, whistling perversely, even when one could still feel the pressure of her cane, wasn’t there a persistent feeling in retrospect that something might happen? And now of course something has. And we’ll grieve, whether we liked her or not.
Drinking too much coffee, her eyeballs singing in her skull, Sunny nonetheless pours out another measure, thick and dark. There is a layer of something floating, something sliding off onto the rim of the cup. Add milk and it will run ahead like oil before soap, climbing the sides. A residue from the pot, she suspects, though it has been scalded and scoured many times. She can’t sleep again. It’s best to keep moving. Of course the staff are human. Of course she is affected. Not in the same way as the others, because she sees such happenings more often and is better able to step back. This is what the residents want, even as they fall into weeping; they want Sunny there with them to maintain order in the face of precisely this. And so she will fall into routine, into role.
But later, awake in her bed, she feels the demands of other lives on the floor beyond the privacy doors. All the moments of that day come through the walls to pierce her where she lies, connecting her to those women lying in the other beds. It is not so fine or so strong a connection that one of them suddenly awakening might twitch Sunny’s muscles; it is more like an imprint of Sunny’s own movements during that day, from the early preparations in Julia’s room to the later ones, tugging her in memory, tugging her up and down the hall, in and out of Julia’s room, past all of the other doors, and finally leading back here to her quarters. She is aware of Julia’s empty bed. She is aware of Mrs. Minder in her own bed, morosely rubbing petroleum jelly into her cuticles, into her nails, with hands as plump as starfish. She’s been crying, and wants to sleep in white cotton gloves, to seal the comforting softness in. Well, the gloves were white at one time. Now they are suspiciously yellowed, and if only Sunny could tune such images out, she’d be able to fall asleep.
But no one sleeps well. The up-patients are perhaps a little infatuated with Julia’s death, seeing her now only in that certain light of posthumous forgiveness of any human vexatiousness. Those who were not fond of her feel guilty now. As if it can’t be true that they really did dislike her. As if, in the true light of mortality, one doesn’t really dislike anyone, as though dislike is only ever on the surface, only an illusion obscuring the bright dark center of each of us. Differences and dislikes will grow weaker from now on, eventually fading away in memory. Isn’t that right?
That’s the pattern. And how much easier it is to turn to a pattern. And thus: She had been so beautiful, in her time, you can see it in the photos, she had been so talented, though none knew precisely in what way… some suspected that she only liked to pose for photographs taken by Mr. Dey, with costumes and with props such as musical instruments, possibly never used at all. No, stupid, she was a dancer, she was a teacher, she taught tango in the ballrooms and the cafés in Helsinki, in Turku, in Tampere, years ago. Now because she is dead her behavior is understandable, forgivable, and even brings a tearful smile. Because in any case, talent or beauty or whatever, it had all been taken away, though none knew when or how… the misfortune of the illness… which illness, exactly? Perhaps (some cannot control themselves and so it is said) perhaps it is better like this, quickly, and now she will not suffer? Please, my dears, no; is that how you’d like to go?
Sunny does not exactly despise the residents for making such easy statements or for falling so predictably toward the pattern, because she recognizes nature’s way of protecting them. And she knows that to fall toward the pattern does not mean that they are insincere. It only means that they need a rope in the hand, a way to describe the person who has died so that others can grasp in a moment the reasons that Julia was, or now seems to have been, special. Privately, it is not the death (in any case inevitable, one could argue, for all of us eventually) that is difficult for Sunny. It is the small array of humiliations before death, that Julia was hungry and not allowed to eat, that she wanted to wear her rings and was told that she could not, that she was barefaced and embarrassed… but memory is merciful and eventually Sunny will think of the final day only as an echo, the smallest part of having known her, of looking after her in as as kindly a way as possible.
And isn’t that a consolation? Absolutely, to have certainty of past kindness is the only consolation in such times. She’s glad now for having kept her temper, for having almost always been level and good. Of course in any normal circumstance you couldn’t live like that, not all the time, how could you, how could anyone? The up-patients, having responded to Julia more naturally, now feel ashamed; they use the endless repetitions to explain themselves, to assuage guilt about moments of unflattering candor. But it’s not their fault. They know that what happened to Julia isn’t their fault. Eventually it becomes a welcome diversion, to begin to speculate about whose fault it is. To speculate about Dr. Peter: what he’d done to her, and why he hadn’t done it better.
It would be rather cruel, had this not been a hospital, to fill Julia’s bed again so soon with another patient. But it is, after all, a hospital. The ward maids do their work and everything is made ready for the woman who has slept overnight screened away in a semiprivate room downstairs with plugs in her ears and a shade over her eyes to protect her from any sudden stimuli, any light or sound that could provoke the convulsions to be feared in a dangerous pregnancy, when the blood pressure is so alarmingly high. The arrangement has been unsatisfactory and worrying to Dr. Peter, but there was no private room available except that of Pearl, which he had already, of course, decided to take, and had accordingly scheduled to be cleared out the following day. But now Julia’s is available. Even this is not ideal, because the new woman will be so far away from the clinical wing, from Dr. Peter and Nurse Frida. But here she is; the woman is very pregnant, and those caring for her are concerned by her slight, persistent headache and especially by the way her tissues have begun flooding with brine, swelling her feet, her legs, her vulva, and her pretty, twitching face. This woman needs the quiet and the suspension of life on the upper floor; she must drowse in the bed with the lights dimmed down as low as possible.
The woman must be watched, and because she now occupies Room 527 it will be Sunny who becomes temporarily responsible. It will be Sunny who must regularly watch her blood pressure, and who must double-check her meals to see that only unsalted chicken and vegetables are brought. Who must monitor her scanty urine for smokiness, for albumin, for any sign of kidney distress, who must pay close attention and send for help immediately if anything, anything at all changes during the day, in the hours while she is there, or during the night, because she is still the head nurse of her floor.
It is after midnight on the day after Julia’s death that Sunny is summoned from her rooms. She takes a moment to get into her uniform and reaches the hall in time to see the orderlies moving to the elevator with the woman on a trolley, but unlike the departure of Julia, this is not quiet: Nurse Frida’s voice is loud, Nurse Frida doesn’t care about protecting the sensibilities of the up-patients or about letting them sleep, and doors are beginning to open along the corridor. The pregnant woman’s eyes are fixed and her teeth are outlined in blood—she has bitten her tongue. Even the wheels of the trolley are jittery under her trembling body.
“Come with me now, Dr. Peter’s on the way,” says Nurse Frida. Her nursing cap is different, fancy, tied on quickly with two wide ribbons under the chin.
“I have no obstetrics training,” says Sunny. “I’m no good to you.” And what she means is, I can’t, I won’t, don’t force me, please.
“Shush,” says Frida; she is Dr. Peter’s own nurse from town and doesn’t answer to Sunny. “I might need you.” she says. “You’re better than nothing.”
This is how it happens that Sunny is there in the operating room, an unfamiliar place very much out of her territory, where she knows that she is a useless witness to the rubber flesh of the woman’s hips and outer thighs as the nightgown is lifted.
“Voi Jumalauta,” says Nurse Frida, “she’s in labor, the seizure brought on labor.”
Sunny looks away. Some effort has already been made to convert the room. She sees a suction cup and three pairs of forceps, at least one of which Dr. Peter will almost certainly use. He’ll slide them in and fasten them around the baby’s fragile skull, and he’ll squeeze as gently as he can and he’ll pull and he’ll draw the weight of the baby right out through the area of her mother’s injury, through dark soft flesh the bruisy color of rotten fruit, and Sunny knows that she’s about to be sick again, and this time she can’t hide it. The insides of her ears feel hot and wet with the warning of imminent nausea. She is trying to slip out of the room when Dr. Peter comes in through the swinging door and hands her something as he passes.
Dr. Peter is calm, gentle. Frida moves the cart and hands over a speculum.
“Don’t worry, we have time,” says Dr. Peter, looking up to the woman, who may not hear him at all. “You’ll be fine, the baby will be fine,” he says, patting her knee with one gloved hand. Still, Frida translates. “Don’t worry. You’re going to have a normal birth, right now, don’t worry, everything is fine.” Frida looks at Dr. Peter, with a question on her face. A normal birth?
“Baby’s on the way,” he says. “No section here tonight.”
Frida holds a catheter. Dr. Peter draws off amniotic fluid, but Sunny can’t see what he’s doing, how he does this, and she fears that he’ll hurt the woman; she presses her fingers over her mouth but the feel of anything near her face makes her instantly sicker. Suddenly there is a new smell, sweet and powdery, coming from the woman, and it is like the smell of babies. Frida takes the woman’s bare foot in her hand and leans toward her, bending the knee gently outward with the weight of her own body. She holds the woman’s foot firmly and warmly, like holding her hand, comforting. And Dr. Peter holds the other foot, pressing in the same slow way. And then you don’t see the woman’s legs anymore, not as part of her body anymore; she is only round then, only round, strange and not strange, all the contours have shifted and her body is not the same, and maybe this is normal, but how can this be normal? That the woman’s flesh folds when they reposition her, that her legs are boneless and heavy and have to be moved for her? Her hips, thinks Sunny, her hips are going to be popped from their sockets.
“I see hair,” says Frida. “I can see hair…”
Nothing looks like it is supposed to look, all the angles are wrong. Sunny looks away, looks down at what she’s been clutching tightly against her chest; it’s Dr. Peter’s overcoat. He’d been at his house, and had evidently run the length of the covered walkway and into the building without stopping long enough to drop it at the door. Sunny moves again, incrementally, and then there is the dark hair, crowning, the little skull—little and frighteningly large at the same time, and completely the wrong color—the head, one shoulder, Dr. Peter gently turning him, rotating. Face compacted and blue. Suddenly the baby is coming. They pull him out so quickly. And then there’s the high cry of air moving for the first time in the baby’s tender, tiny lungs.
It will be said after that the birth came quickly.
“She only had the one fit,” says Frida. “Dr. Peter says she’ll be fine if her blood pressure drops.” Her voice is normal again; she’s young, without the shell that anyone will develop in time. She takes the baby, wants to keep him warm, bathes him under warm water in the large echoing sink, and she is infinitely gentle. At first to Sunny the baby does not look human, facing downward in the beginning of independent life, blinking and jerking in small spasms. He looks like he’s been buttered, and fresh red blood smears glancingly over the wax. Frida rubs water over the baby’s body, holding him from beneath with one hand and lightly, affectionately scratching the grease out of his hair with her fingertips. It is her matter-of-factness that shocks Sunny, her natural handling of the heavy bluish body. And the baby’s face, the black and limpid eyes, the life all internal, a moment of extremity disappearing even as it is happening, disappearing without memory… his eyes, his privacy. In Frida’s hands he has the visible weight and the significance already of another human being. Sunny feels a rushing, a weakness because of his life, because of his luck, because he would be taken home and this moment of redness, of exposure, would seal up behind him like a scar, abjection covered, folded in. His eyes, as Frida turns him, do not register Sunny or anything else, not yet. He jerks, throwing his arm over his face without intention. There is a small red scratch on his head, curving like a crescent moon. Sunny cannot look away from him, though the floor and the walls are shining, shining unbearably. Keep him down here, Sunny wants to say. Don’t take him upstairs.
She will see this baby again. His mother will be returned to 527 with a drip bag in her arm and the heating panels in the ceiling will be turned up to the level they call Tropicana. The baby will next appear in a lace cap, a vest, swaddled tightly to hold his shoulders down from his head, his arms to his sides. And this sight makes the blood move painfully in Sunny’s head, to see him lying there, corseted, pinned; it seems to her that he is barely able to draw breath. Frida is the one who wraps him, smiling down at him, touching his nose with her fingertip, kissing his flaky temples, swaddling him like the folding of a paper angel, and then on the first day of the family visit adding a broad blue ribbon tied in a bow and lifting him to his father. Who says thank you, as if Frida has helped to make the baby.
Sunny watches as the father carefully receives the warm solid weight of the baby. His wife is sitting up in bed—Julia’s bed—with the blankets tucked neatly all around and a small pitcher of warm cocoa waiting on her nightstand. She’s smiling. This is, of course, a good outcome, something to be glad about, and Sunny folds her arms as she turns away. They’ll do it again. They’ll have another, in no time. Even with the blood pressure. Even if it kills her.
Sunny’s experience with infants is limited, it’s been too long, she does not want to be involved with the baby, either. She only knows that she feels the impulse to slip scissors under the wrappings and clip the baby free.
“No, no,” says Frida. “Babies love to be swaddled. It’s more comfortable for them. It reminds them of being inside, squeezed and safe, like he was before.”
The soundproofing cannot muffle the normal crying, the piercing vibrato of a newborn. The doors to the other rooms remain closed. Some of the women love babies, of course, many women love babies, but the situation is strange. The mother is a stranger who has suddenly, too soon, replaced a companion. Nonetheless a few pairs of booties are given by the knitters, perennially knitting for such surprises, and the shawl from the case downstairs is removed, shaken, and presented as a gift for the first baby born in the hospital; shortsighted, restless-fingered, the knitters are often surprisingly ready to seize the moment.
Mrs. Minder is packing and preparing to leave. A question of migraines, mostly, she says, but her tiny muddy teeth have been chattering from shock for days, and her fingers tremble as she strikes long sulfurous matches, furtively smoking on the promenade for peace and quiet. Even when the baby is asleep one stops to listen for the sound of crying, especially during the night. It is too much, too much at once. Julia is dead, that would be enough. But Pearl is gone, and Frida’s shouting and the woman’s condition scared them and reminded them again of sudden danger, and now there is a baby crying, and the husband of the woman is there, visiting, it’s understandable, but he’s a stranger as well and it’s uncomfortable. It’s messy and it’s too much. Unfamiliar people move too quickly, between the room and the elevator, and Mrs. Minder no longer wants to run in the hall in her nightgown. There is a rumor that Pearl’s room is going to be given to another maternity case. Please don’t go, Mrs. Minder, we know what will happen to your room…
The new mother’s room is filled with flowers and a box of imported oranges wrapped in stiff scarlet tissue paper. And when Pearl returns, unannounced and unexpected, and stops in the doorway with a silk scarf wrapped around her hair, she sees the woman wanly propped in the bed in an open pink dressing gown, nursing the baby at her large, soft, green-veined breast.
She stands and looks and sees that the safe existence of the upper floor is over, and her smile appears as natural to her face as the lipstick patted over her lips.
“Where is Julia?” she says.
Nurse Todd steps forward to explain.