When Rosie came out just after two one morning and collapsed into the seat next to him, too exhausted to feel surprised, never mind grateful, to find him still there, Penn took her hand gently. “Romeo and Juliet didn’t give a crap whether their parents got along.”
“Sure.” Eyes closed. Probably not even listening.
“In fact, Romeo and Juliet thought it was kind of sexy that their parents hated each other.”
“Who wouldn’t?”
“They weren’t willing to die to put an end to the feud. They were willing to do anything to live. Juliet died so they could live. Romeo killed so they could live.”
Rosie nodded. “What’s your point?”
“There’s nothing good that can come out of a child being sick.”
“No.”
“There’s nothing that makes that fair or worth it.”
“No, there isn’t.”
“It’s narratively insupportable,” Penn explained.
“It’s weird how little narrative theory there is in hospitals,” said Rosie. “Yours might be all there is.”
“Then it’s a good thing I’m here,” said Penn.
The waiting room stories weren’t the ones that stuck though. Some nights later, Rosie arrived for her shift to find Penn already installed in the waiting room. He was typing furiously on his laptop and didn’t even look up as she scooted through on her way to rounds.
“Figured out a new narrative theory?” she asked on her way past.
“New genre.” He barely looked up. “Fairy tales.”
“Sure,” said Rosie. “Because nothing bad ever happens to kids in fairy tales.”
Her shift was twenty-eight hours. Penn sat and wrote for every one of them. They took a coffee and breakfast break together toward dawn. Penn tried every flavor of corn chip in the vending machine. When she emerged the following night, changed back into street clothes but with something alarmingly viscous tacking her bangs, Penn had closed the laptop and was writing marginalia about the progress being made in Pilgrim’s Progress.
“Come on,” said Rosie.
Penn looked up, a little bleary-eyed himself. He might have been napping between words.
“Where?”
“Dinner,” said Rosie. “Then bed.”
He was awake.
They went to the Eggs ’n’ Dregs Diner, despite its coffee being about as good as advertised, because they served the best late-night waffles in town. Rosie talked about her patients. She talked about her program, her fellow residents, the attendings, the nurses. She talked about the difference between medical school and medical practice, between what she’d thought being a doctor would be like and what it in fact was, between anatomy textbooks and actual anatomy.
“What did you do?” she asked.
“Same.” Penn tried to say as little as possible. He liked to hear her talk. And he was too tired to make conversation.
“Same?” Rosie tried to say as much as she could. It kept her from falling asleep at the table. “It’s true you’ve spent a lot of time at the hospital lately, but I’m not sure that qualifies you to treat patients.”
“Not treating patients. Thinking about the difference between school and practice, books and life. What you think things are going to be like and how they actually are.”
“Is everything in your life a metaphor?”
“As many things as possible,” Penn admitted. “So what now?”
“Bed.”
It was important to keep his face exactly neutral. He froze his eyes and eyebrows and lips and mouth and cheeks. He tried hard to go into a coma.
“Don’t look so excited,” she said. “I’m too tired to do anything but sleep. So are you.”
“What makes you say that?”
“You’ve been awake for thirty-seven hours. Your eyes are glassy and bloodshot. You’re losing brain tissue as we speak. I know the signs. I’m a doctor.”
“Barely.”
“You took a nap while they made your eggs. That’s the first sign of exhaustion. They covered that our first year of med school.”
“I can rally,” said Penn. “I can get a second wind.”
“You need to sleep,” Rosie insisted. “First we sleep. Then we’ll see.”
Penn thought “we’ll see” sounded like a good start. He agreed to these terms. He couldn’t remember another time when his first foray into the bed of a woman he was wooing was for sleep, but he was willing to give it a shot. Her sheets had pictures of basset hounds and that softness you get not from thread count but from washing again and again and again. They were well-loved sheets. Among those basset hounds, just as his eyes were closing, she said, “Tell me your story.”
“What story?”
“The waiting room story.”
“You just lived that one.”
“I wasn’t waiting,” she said. “I was on the other side.”
He couldn’t keep his eyes open, but he didn’t think he’d need to. “How about a bedtime story?”
“A bedtime story would be perfect,” she said.
“Once upon a time…”
“Not a very original opening.”
“There was a prince.”
“Aren’t you supposed to start with a princess?”
“Named Grumwald.”