Mom and Aunt Irene have gone to bed. I slip down from the ladder and dig out jeans and a grey sweater from my closet—comfortable, invisible clothes. My hands shake as I scrub my face. The girl I see in the bathroom mirror is like a wraith.
My nerves tingle the way they do before a big test. My feet prickle with sweat, excitement thrumming through me. I try smiling at the mirror, a trick Jaina taught me. Smile and you can trick your body into believing it. But the grin in the glass is jagged and unsettling. This is crazy. What am I doing?
When I squeeze my eyes shut I’m convinced I’ll climb the ladder up to my bed. Like Dorothy in Oz clicking her heels together. There’s no place like home, there’s no place like…
But something tugs at me, a singing in the blood. It’s hypnotic. My movements are dreamlike and slow. I open my eyes and I’m in the kitchen. The jangling mass of Aunt Irene’s key ring is in my hand. House keys, university keys, hospital security chits. Most I don’t recognize but one is familiar. Five minutes later it fits snugly into the Renault’s starter. My fingers shake with adrenaline. Sweet, sweet, sweet whispers my body.
For the first time since Kira died I feel strangely excited. Almost happy.
The road to the JR Hospital is deserted at this time of night but I take it slowly anyway, watching the streets grow less and less familiar further from the city centre. The view through the windshield looks all wrong from the driver’s seat on the right side, a weird sense of dislocation. I haven’t practiced driving since I got here. The car nudges over too far, the centre line a thick blur as the night rushes by like water.
There are more scattered cars than I would’ve thought outside the trauma ward. I park about fifty metres from the entrance, in the gloom of a broken overhead light.
Inside the foyer the glare of lights blinds me. I pass by orderlies moving supplies and more than a couple of volunteers who look dazed by the late hour. It’s strange that they’re here but the more I wander the more I get the sense of the scale of the crisis. The patient bays are mostly full and more people are trickling in, clutching snotty kids complaining of bad stomach aches. One father grabs an orderly by the arm. “For Christ’s sake, my daughter won’t stop bleeding,” he’s shouting. His shirt is stained with red.
I follow a long hallway past the triage station. Head tucked down, dodging the glance of the on-duty nurse. The chaos helps. No one stops me.
At East General the morgue was in an unmarked room in the basement. The philosophy was that no patient wants to be reminded of unpleasant possibilities. From the hall you’d see a door that led to an office like any other—except several metres down was a large metal slide door leading to the adjoining fridge where the bodies could be wheeled in. All I have to do is watch, wait, listen for the hospital codes. At Toronto General, code black meant a death on the ward. But the meaning would be different here. I have a hazy memory of the ER after Kira’s death—code green, the covered stretcher.
It’s easy to be a ghost here: thin, insubstantial. I float through the hallways, keeping close to public toilets where I can slip in if someone looks at me too closely.
I check out the exits. It’ll be difficult to get past the waiting rooms near the trauma ward without being seen. The hospital map shows nothing but the outlines of buildings. No help at all, so I range through the corridors furthest from the outpatient areas and head down the stairs. The traffic is lighter here, good. I’m near the Resonance Imaging Department when a tinny voice announces over the PA system: “Attention, code green, bay four.”
I freeze and glance around. This is my chance.
The back elevators are largely unattended. Only a few orderlies in drab uniforms and the odd nurse. Restlessly I circle the area until I see someone wheeling a stretcher with a white sheet draped over a bulky form.
The orderly is a few years older than me, nut-coloured hair tied back loosely. She hardly glances at me as she passes by, one wheel of the stretcher squeaking. What’s one more ghost in a place like this?
I follow about twenty paces behind her, tracking her when she turns corners by the sound of that squeaking wheel. She arrives at a sliding metal door, waves a plastic chit across the sensor pad and carefully hauls up the door. A cold breeze wafts into the hallway and the hairs on my arms prick up.
After a few minutes she’s back in the corridor, sans stretcher. She closes the sliding door behind her, then pauses to stretch the muscles in her back. It looks like it’s been the longest day of her life. Then she’s gone.
The hallway is empty. I pull out Aunt Irene’s keys again and work my way through the plastic security chits. Most of them are emblazoned with the university’s blue coat of arms but there’s a chit here without any markings on it at all. I take a breath. If I swipe this chit and nothing happens then I’m done. And standing here in the hallway, nostrils sharp with the faint whiff of disinfectant, I almost want to fail. At least then it would be over, just like Dr. Varghese said.
I do it and wait. One second passes, two. Relief floods my system. That’s it then. Fine.
Then a faint snick startles me. The light on the pad flashes green.
I lift the door, duck inside and carefully lower it behind me. The morgue feels slightly warmer than a meat locker. Its ceilings and walls are covered in galvanized steel. Cold bites the inside of my nostrils, my lungs. I remember a news story in Canada about a toddler leaving her house on a frigid winter night, being found the next morning frozen nearly solid. But she was resuscitated, brought back to life. For dead flesh a place like this would be protective. Decomposition slows as the fluids in the body begin to gel and eventually harden but it doesn’t stop. I can still smell rot mixed with formaldehyde: vinegary, like day-old wine, spoiled meat.
Two of the walls are filled with steel drawers, and there is a closed door and clouded glass window leading into what I assume to be the office. The orderly’s stretcher sits in the middle of the room. Several sets of portable mortuary racks, heavy duty shelves on wheels for extra body storage. A quick tally shows me there are close to thirty bodies here. Each is bound in shiny black vinyl with three straps tightened against the chest, the waist, and the thighs.
I examine each bag for a label that says KIRA PERELLA. It takes me a minute to find it. Her age and date of death have been noted in blue pen.
With numb fingers I unbuckle the straps. Start to tug the zipper along the J-shaped path. Then a sound comes from the office. Oh no, Jesus. I crouch down beside the rack and glance toward the window. Someone has entered the office from the other side. A lab technician? The shape lingers and I will it not to enter the morgue. “Go on,” I whisper. My breath is a bright cloud of white. “Go back the way you came.”
At last the figure does head back into the hallway. I slip into the office, desperate for the heat. There’s a lab coat on a hook and I put it on, rolling back the too-long sleeves.
Then I head back to the fridge. Staring at the mortuary racks, the flesh on my arms goosebumped. My grief has hardened into a thick, immobile mass: I can do this.
Her body bag is light, so much lighter than I expected. It reminds me of Jaina’s thirteenth birthday party. We’d stood around her chanting “light as a feather, stiff as a board, light as a feather, stiff as a board” while we tried to raise her up with nothing but our fingertips. It didn’t work. Of course it didn’t work. But Kira is weightless. I wrestle her onto the orderly’s stretcher and cover her with a sheet. There.
It isn’t enough. What if they notice her body is missing?
CHRISTINA VASCO is the name on the bag beside Kira’s. Aged nine, died the same day as her. She looks roughly the same size too. She must have been tall for her age.
There is a set of small shears on a shelf. I snip off the identification tags and tie Kira’s information to Christina’s bag, tucking her label into my pocket. Let them ask about Christina Vasco. Let them wonder what happened to her, if they ask anything at all. As many new people as there are here, and with the increasing number of JI2 diagnoses, it could be days before anyone notices.
I lift up the sliding door and peek out into the hallway. Bright lights and clean, pastel colours. Empty. I gently pull the stretcher through the door, pausing as the wheel lets out a long, vicious k-k-kreeeeeeeech. My stomach drops but I quietly lower the door and push the stretcher through the hallway.
The blue line marked PARKING guides me through the maze of corridors back toward the trauma exit. There must be back ways for the movement of bodies, but I don’t know them. People whisk past me and I keep my head down, hope no one can see how badly I’m shivering.
The double doors are visible at the end of the hallway. I’m almost there, almost there, when—WHAM!—a heavy mass slams into me.
“Sorry, bloody hell, sorry!” he murmurs.
I’m yanked up by the arm. Staring face-to-face with a volunteer, maybe a couple of years older than me. His dark eyes blink slowly with concern.
No no no…
He takes in my sneakers, jeans, the oversized lab coat, my face. I watch the recognition travel through his synapses. “You…”
What’re you staring at, freakazoid?
I squeeze the hand that’s pulling me up, squeeze it hard. “Please. She’s my sister.”
His mouth opens. He seems to be listening to some voice that isn’t mine, a voice far away. Then, very slowly, he nods.
He points down a turn-off to the right. “That way,” he whispers, “no one uses that exit at this time of night.”
I don’t know what to say to him.
“Go on. Hurry!”
I’m shaking but I turn right again, then left. Walking as fast as I can. The stretcher squeaks past signs for the Co-operative Childcare and the Eye Hospital. He was right. This wing is mostly empty.
There—the exit leads out to a bus parking lot. I keep to the far edge where the street lamps don’t cast their light. I manoeuvre the stretcher under the parking gate, then I head around to the back to the lot where I left the Renault. I wrestle the plastic sheeting into the back. Tears slide down my cheeks, the wetness cool on my skin. The lot is empty.
Except there, watching me. A silhouette standing outside the trauma exit. I recognize his face, his broad shoulders. It’s him. His fingers rise as the Renault glides by, a partial salute which I don’t take the time to acknowledge.