“Here, so many bad thing. You can protect from some but never all.”
“Here and everywhere.” This was true. But here it was truer. “And always. You’ve done well by your family. Her burns will heal, and someday she will see real snow. You’ve saved that for her. And you’ve saved her for that. You’ve done very well.”
When she emerged at the end of that first shift to find the morning gone and the afternoon gone and the night come on, she also found the crowds of people—the waiting-patiently patients, the waiting-patiently families, the people waiting patiently for nothing in particular—gone. Admitted by other doctors? Absorbed into other departments? Healed and sent home? Just sent home? She did not know. It was hard to imagine where they’d all gone. It was even harder to imagine they’d all be taken care of. But Rosie was too tired to puzzle it out. She needed to find Claude and know all about his first day. Had it been as foreign and familiar as hers? As known and unknown and whirling? Was he okay?
But as she took her first steps toward the tree where she’d left her bicycle, what she found she lacked more than the machines and a lab and a pharmacy and sterile bedding was Penn. There was no waiting room as such, but had there been, he would not have been in it, waiting to tell her stories and listen to hers, waiting to take her home at the end of a long day of patients and prose so they could talk together and be together and make love and family together. Instead, there was a wall of humidity and an infinity of screaming insects and a daughter—son—nowhere in evidence. And this was a poor trade indeed.
Novice
Claude’s first day at the clinic began with breakfast, which was actually, literally called “joke” and probably was one since it looked like watered-down kindergarten paste sprinkled with grass clippings and had a raw egg cracked right into the middle of it. The sight of it made Claude woozy. Or maybe it was the smell of it. Or maybe it was just the fact of it. He had not been hungry since what had happened, happened. He thought it was possible he might never be hungry again. But he managed to eat at least a little bit of it. He didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. And now that he knew they ate still-jumping shrimp in Thailand, he thought it prudent to force eggs when they were on offer, even raw and in jest.
There were infinity people who wanted to meet and thank and say nice things to and about his mother and then take her away. “Do not worry,” a woman with white smears painted on her cheeks and nose called after his mother. “We take good care your child,” but his mother evidently was already not worried because she didn’t even turn around. “So”—the woman squinted at Claude from under a ratty straw hat—“what we do with you all day?”
Claude couldn’t even guess.
“Your mama is big helping us. Maybe you big help us too.”
It took Claude a little while to understand that the building he’d been brought to was a school. Schools had classrooms, desks, whiteboards, computers, art projects, homework trays, and playground equipment. This place had a dirt yard out front with a bunch of old tires sinking into dust and one big, open room with a falling-apart bookcase piled with papers spilling out of folders and small heaps of ancient-looking books and a stack of dog-eared, water-stained flash cards in English. The students were mostly younger than he was, and there were a lot of them, spread over the thin, tatty linoleum, its bluebells and buttercups faded to rumor, chatting in small groups or napping curled up against the wall or just sitting and staring into nothing. If Claude sat on the floor at school staring into nothing, he’d get in trouble for being off task, but he could see that there were not many more productive alternatives available here.
“You teach?” the painted woman asked.
What did this mean? She could not possibly think he was a teacher. Even people who imagined this worn, wounded room a school would not imagine a ten-year-old a teacher. Would they? “No?” Claude guessed. “I don’t teach?”