This Is How It Always Is Read online

  At first Penn wouldn’t write about the sick kids and their sick parents, the kids struck with cancers and heart diseases and accidents and violence in their homes, the parents struck with sick kids. Sick kids defied all narrative theory he’d ever known. There was nothing redemptive about a dying child. There was nothing that could be learned from a kid coming in shot or beaten that made it worth a kid getting shot or beaten. This had always pissed him off about Romeo and Juliet, its ending platitude that at least the feud was laid to rest and the fighting families had come together as if this somehow made it worth losing their teenagers. As if Romeo and Juliet would have been willing to die just so their parents would get along.

  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.”

  “Grumwald?”

  “Who lived in a far-off land where being a prince was, well, just not that fulfilling. Or impressive. He hadn’t been elected to it. He hadn’t earned it with good deeds or quick thinking, clever problem solving or hard labor. He was the prince for the same reason princes are always princes. Because their fathers are kings and their mothers are queens. And yes, he had his own wing in a castle with that funny roofline that looks like bad teeth.”

  “Crenelated.”

  “And yes, he had robes and crowns and those sticks with balls on the end.”

  “Scepters. God, Penn, I thought you were a word guy.”

  “I’m tired.”

  “What are those things even for anyway?”

  “That was Grumwald’s question too. What was the point of any of it? It’s true there was an actual suit of armor in the hall right outside his bedroom. But otherwise, he was a fairly ordinary guy. He cleaned his own bathroom. He saw no use for sticks with balls on the end. The crown gave him a headache.”

  “Cranial neuralgia due to continuous stimulation of cutaneous nerves.”

  “And it seemed that his friends, with their ordinary lives, who had summer jobs, whose rooflines were flat or at least roof-shaped, were a lot happier than he was.”

  “How did he meet these friends with ordinary lives and roofs?”

  “High school,” said Penn.

  “He went to public school?”

  “His parents—”

  “The king and queen.”

  “—were progressives who believed neither money nor class nor royal status meant that one child deserved a good education while another child did not. They realized the world would be a better place if all children had knowledge, intelligence, problem-solving and critical-thinking skills, and a fair shot at a good career which supported them financially as well as spiritually.”

  “Enlightened.”

  “Yes. But hard for Grumwald, who had no career to prepare for, who would not be going off to college, who thou
ght it unlikely his parents, no matter how liberal, were going to be wild about his dating a peasant, no matter how impressive her bootstraps. He was allowed to play sports but couldn’t because no one would throw a pitch inside to the prince or try to sack him or block his shots. The school dances that so thrilled his friends with their opportunities for fancy dress and limousines and expensive meals were just an ordinary Tuesday night for poor Grum. He skipped graduation altogether because he couldn’t stomach one more moment of pomp and circumstance in a life made up of little but. His world, though beautiful, shrouded in layers of purple mist, warmed by a sun that seemed to shine just for him, smelling of forest and the promise of adventure and the possibility of magic, proved, however, very small indeed. Education served only to show him what was out there, not to offer it as an actual possibility.”

  “But the birds were his friends?” Rosie asked hopefully, sleepily. “He had long, deep, middle-of-the-night chats with the mice who were his bosom companions?”

  “This is a fairy tale, Rosie. A real one, not a Disney one. The mice can’t talk. The birds seemed to mock him by being so much more free than he was. He had friends from school, sure—he was SGA president, of course, and met a lot of kids that way. Plus Mathletes—but no one who really understood him. Until he looked in the suit of armor.”

  “What suit of armor?”

  “The one in the hall outside his room.”

  “Did you tell me about that before?”

  “I did. Pay attention.”

  “I was paying attention. I was falling asleep because you said it was a bedtime story. If I’d known it was a fairy tale with hidden information, I’d have tried harder to keep my eyes open.”

  “It wasn’t hidden information. I told you: roofline like teeth, sticks with balls on the end, suit of armor in the hall, cleans his own bathroom. The whole story’s right there. That’s all you need to know.”

  “What was in the suit of armor?” She had her hands pressed together underneath her cheek like a little girl going to sleep on a greeting card, smiling at him sleepily and trying, failing, to keep her eyes open.

  Penn reached out and smoothed her hair, her forehead. “I’ll tell you the rest of the story in the morning.”

  “Is this just a ploy to keep me here?”

  “You live here.”

  “Like Scheherazade?”

  “Scheherazade lives here?”

  “Don’t forget where you are in the story,” Rosie said just as she was falling finally asleep. “When we wake up, I want to pick up right where we left off.”

  When they woke up, however, they picked up somewhere else.

  “Last we discussed the matter,” Penn reminded her helpfully, “you said ‘we’ll see.’”

  “Well, let’s see then,” she said.

  * * *

  It was one of the enduring ironies of their relationship how well the residency schedule worked for Penn. Even once she was wooed, Penn remained camped out in the waiting room, reading, writing, telling her stories in installments during her breaks between patients. He was happy to sleep when she did and to stay up when she had to. She’d have traded anything toward the ends of those thirty-hour shifts—her place in the program, her career prospects, her eyeballs, say, and even Penn—for eight hours of sleep, and she knew in her heart that had their roles been reversed, she’d have been comfortably in her bed at home while he worked inhumane stretches of days and nights and days on end.

  It was good preparation for parenting, though of course that didn’t occur to her until years later. At some point midway through Roo’s sleepless, staccato first month, she thought what an effective screening process a waiting-room residency had been. Here was a husband she knew would get up every two hours with the baby through the dark middles of the nights. Here was a partner who would wake for predawn breakfast with the first and second children, never mind having been up with the third and fourth well past midnight the night before. It wasn’t why she chose him. But it wasn’t a terrible reason either.

  Now, all these years later, she found herself in the hospital’s wee hours all alone with no one to tell her stories. It had been years since her residency—the hideous carpet and uncomfortable furniture had turned over and turned over again since then—but she still emerged from the swinging doors into the waiting area expecting for a beat to see Penn’s face. It was one of the strange things about having stayed where she’d trained. The folks who had been there for decades still thought of her as a resident no matter her title or accomplishments. What was the same always outweighed what rotated and rostered and changed. And Penn’s absence from a chair in the corner of the waiting room, never mind his sheer presence in her home, her family, her bed, her life, never failed to stop her for a moment.

  Staying had been another thing she was wooed to do. An Arizona girl, she was not remotely prepared for Wisconsin in February. Her car freezing during her second semester had seemed a clear sign that as a human she should probably have stayed inside. She nearly failed endocrinology because she missed so many lectures, not because she wanted to cut class per se but because she could not bring herself to go out of doors. She was a visual learner who closed her eyes in order to picture nerve charts and skeletal layouts and muscle patterns. One morning, on her way from the parking lot to an exam, she kept her eyes closed too long and they froze shut. She vowed to get out of Wisconsin the moment she graduated.

  But the program was too good. Her teachers wanting her to stay, wanting to work with her, had been too flattering to say no to. And Penn liked the waiting room. She’d been wooed to stay so she stayed. Just for a fellowship year, she told herself. Just a small stint as an attending. After that, she’d be unwooable. After that, she’d have to go elsewhere anyway for breadth of experience, a different part of the world where she’d develop expertise in more than frostbite and lost toes and idiots frozen to their fishing poles.

  But Roo followed by Ben followed by Rigel and Orion had put a stop to that plan too, children being the enemies of plans and also the enemies of anything new besides themselves. UW knew her work ethic and track record, never mind her taking yet another maternity leave, never mind the final months when she couldn’t even fit bedside, or the months before that when she couldn’t lift patients or much of anything else, never mind the mornings she was too nauseated to work and the nights she called in sick because the only place more germ laden than a hospital is an elementary school. She was worth it. But no one outside UW Hospital knew it. And so she stayed.

  And she was worth it. On the night that Claude became, she caught a pulmonary embolism masquerading as a sore back, a teenage pregnancy—or, if you prefer, severe denial and extreme delusion—masquerading as irritable bowel syndrome, a stroke masquerading as “probably nothing but my tongue feels kind of weird,” and a first-year resident masquerading as a knowledgeable surgical consult. This was another thing parenting boys had prepared her for: ferreting out. She also, that night, waited with a little girl who’d fallen down the stairs at a sleepover party. Her leg hurt and her arm hurt, but that wasn’t, Rosie knew, why she was crying. She was crying because she was alone and scared. Her parents had taken the opportunity to go away for a night, so they were a couple hours getting back, and the party hosts who brought her in had a house full of six-year-old girls they needed to return to. Crying little girls, even ones who were going to be fine and whose parents were on their way, broke Rosie in a way none of her other cases did. The terminal ones, the ones in pain she could not control, the ones she could do nothing for, the ones she had to let go, none of these felled her quite the way the little girls did. So when an hour after she’d called Transport, no one from Transport had come, she took the girl to X-ray herself. The tech let her stay with the patient so the child had a hand to hold, and though the wrist was just sprained, the tibia had a greenstick fracture. Once Rosie knew that, she knew what else to do for the girl, and she gave her pain meds and three oatmeal cookies and made her laugh. Those
were the people Rosie was the night of Claude’s becoming: mom, wife, emergency-room doctor, mystery ferreter. But also little-girl comforter. And also X-ray tech.

  She knew that wasn’t why. But she always wondered anyway if that was why.

  Bedtime Story

  That night that Claude became, while he and Rosie were being X-rayed, Penn was home putting children to bed. Bedtime was a study in chaos theory. Roo liked to soak, but a bath just riled up Orion, who thought all Ben’s stuffed animals might like to snorkel in the tub. Ben was mollified by a warm milk, but it came out Rigel’s nose when Roo ran through the kitchen wearing only a towel (and only around his shoulders), singing, “Penis Maaaaan! Able to leap tall buildings … owing mostly to his profound motivation not to get snagged on a lightning rod.”

  Penn closed his eyes and took deep breaths, removed Rigel’s snot-milked pajamas, drained Orion’s bath with Orion still in it, dug clothespins out of the junk drawer and used them to set Ben’s stuffies to drip dry in the Proving Ground (the laundry room—Rosie felt it wanted a name more in keeping with its usual state). Three of his four children were naked, which, while one step closer to pajamas, was still a long way off from bed. Ben was wearing PJs, admittedly, but also rain boots, rain hat, raincoat, and an umbrella, singing à la Gene Kelly in the raindrops of his stuffed-animal storm.

  For variety, Penn lined them up tallest to smallest and made a PJ bucket brigade, tops, bottoms, blankies, and sippy cups passed one boy to the next until each found a home. Yes, Orion ended up in Roo’s pajama top, which came down to the floor like a Victorian nightgown, and so Roo himself was topless, and so Rigel refused to wear pajama bottoms and therefore needed socks so that his underpants would not feel lonely. And yes, Roo snagged Ben’s blankie for a cape and ran up and down the stairs three times singing, “Penis Maaaaan! Able to slide down banisters … but not especially likely to do so all things considered.” But Penn thought it close enough and declared it a bedtime victory.

  “Which room tonight?”

  “Shark Cave!” four boys chorused. Roo, aged eight on the night Claude became, had named his room himself. Rigel and Orion, aged four and a half, were just next door in a room everyone called POH but which only Penn and Rosie knew to stand for Pit of Hell. Again, her christening. Ben, aged seven, lived in Ben’s Room. Ben was a literalist.