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.