“Change you how?”
“That’s just it! I don’t know. Get me to settle down with someone, maybe. Put me on a more secure path in the wake of . . .” Joe. “But babies are scary!”
“No they’re not.”
“They’re not?”
“No.”
Patrick considered this counterpoint, but didn’t find the merit. “Well, I beg to differ. They’re really small, for one. You have to support their necks. And they don’t talk to you, they just scream. I never knew what you wanted. Which was, as it turns out, just fine with your mom. I don’t think she really wanted to let you go.” Maisie took his hand and held it. Patrick swallowed hard to clear his throat. “But everyone else. They just looked at me, holding you.” Patrick glanced up at the television. It was tuned in to KMIR, a local station. They played the same shaky footage, mostly captured on cell phones, over and over on a loop. Traffic lights swaying. Jars and cans knocked off the shelf at Albertsons. That sort of thing. Occasionally they mixed in some footage of a needle going haywire on whatever the machine was at Caltech that measured seismic activity, and put up a graphic of a tweet from seismologist Dr. Lucy Jones.
“Why are there earthquakes, anyway?” Maisie sounded completely depleted, like she was struggling to remain interested in something that terrified her an hour ago.
“You don’t like them?”
“No, I do not.” She crossed her arms in protest.
“Well, the earth is made of different shifting plates and they sometimes rub together. This creates tension, and every so often that tension is released as energy. Like when I make you and Grant go run around the yard to calm you down. And when they do, that energy release is an earthquake.” An older man in oversized glasses sat a few seats down in a row of chairs back-to-back with their own. Patrick grimaced. Was that right? Certainly it was sufficient enough for a child—even one as versed in science as Maisie. He hoped the man wasn’t a geologist; Patrick’s explanation might be lacking. But the man didn’t look up from his newspaper.
“People cause earthquakes by running around?”
“No, no, no. It’s the different-plate thing. I was saying it’s like that. Never mind. Forget it. Guncle Rule number twelve: Every now and again it’s good to relieve a bit of pressure.”
Maisie nodded. “My shoes don’t match.”
Patrick looked down at his T-shirt. “My shirt is inside out.”
The large swinging doors opened and they both strained their necks, hoping for news. Two doctors emerged, but they were deep in conversation and instead of approaching the waiting area, they walked away from it down a hall.
“How do you know about air pressure and not geology?”
“I think I was out that day,” Maisie offered, as if natural disasters were all lumped together and taught in one afternoon, never to be spoken of again. “We missed a lot of school last year.”
“Because of your mom?”
Maisie didn’t reply. Through the sliding doors Patrick could make out the soft pink glow of the rising sun and it filled the waiting room with new hope. Then a loud BEEP rattled their nerves anew.
“You’re right.” Patrick gave her a little nudge with his shoulder.
“About what?”
“I don’t like hospitals either.”
Well before the sun reached its full height in the sky, Grant had been moved to a room in the pediatric wing. They were lucky; Grant didn’t require anything more than a large bandage and a few hours of observation to see if he had a concussion. No one called Greg, as there wasn’t much treatment requiring authorization, and Patrick didn’t have to further play the celebrity card. The three of them seemed to slip through the cracks of an unusually busy night in the ER. Grant wasn’t even formally admitted, as far as Patrick could tell; doctors found him a bed simply because the emergency room was at capacity and it became difficult for the nurses to properly observe Grant in the midst of overwhelming stimulus.
A nurse arrived to take Grant’s temperature, sticking a thermometer in the boy’s mouth. “How’s our patient doing?” Her scrubs were aggressively happy, pink with little cartoon bears that seemed to be giving Patrick the finger. They weren’t, of course; on closer inspection the bears were holding balloons.
“Good. Good. Groggy, I think. Perhaps from being up half the night.” After they were first moved, Grant struggled valiantly to keep his eyes open, but his eyelids were unusually heavy. When he relented and closed them, Patrick would make a grandiose pronouncement—dinosaurs probably had feathers, some cats like to eat soup, sometimes sandboxes were filled with quicksand—to garner his attention, wake him up so that he could remain under strict observation. Patrick assumed Grant’s ears did most of the work to keep him conscious, listening for scraps of conversation, beeps from machines, announcements over the loudspeaker. Despite his weariness, he seemed desperate to be present for it all.
“Does he seem confused?” This woman seemed rested and alert, less spent than the staff last night. She was wearing fresh lipstick, something Patrick found at odds with the other weary faces they’d encountered. Perhaps she’d just started working, the day shift her normal rotation.
“He fell asleep in his bed and woke up in the hospital. That’s pretty confusing.”
The nurse smirked, perhaps masking a more frustrated expression. “Abnormally confused.” She took the thermometer out of Grant’s mouth and looked at the result.
“Grant, where are you?”
Grant turned his head away from Patrick. “Hothpital.”
“Which hospital?”
“Connecticut.”
Patrick shrugged. “Seems like the regular amount of confused to me.”
“Temperature’s normal. Any nausea? Vomiting?”
“No.”
“Irritability?”
“Yes, but that’s just my default disposition.” Patrick winked, hoping she’d be amused. She wasn’t. “Let me ask you something.”
“Shoot.”
“This pediatric wing. It’s so quiet. Clean. More so than any other hospital I’ve ever been to.”
“That’s not a question, but thank you.”
Patrick scratched several day’s growth under his chin. “No, I was just curious. Is there an age
