After dinner was more TV, and then story time. I had a big book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales—not the Disney versions but the original stories, where Cinderella’s wicked stepsisters cut off their heels and toes to cram their feet into the glass slipper and the illustrations showed the blood. “Are you sure this won’t give you bad dreams?” my mother would ask. I shook my head, not mentioning the dream I’d had about Alice, not asking her any of the questions I had. It would upset her to have to think about a kid dying, even if it was someone else’s kid.
Finally, the echoing loudspeakers would deliver the news that visiting hours were over. My mother would stand up and stretch, throwing her arms over her head, twisting from side to side so that her back made popping noises. She’d retuck her shirt, pull out a mirrored compact to put on more lipstick, then bare her teeth in the mirror to make sure they were clean. “Be a good girl,” she would say before she’d leave, her heels clicking briskly, the scent of Giorgio trailing behind her.
I’d start out in Alice’s room. After dinner was a good time for her. “Sarah baked cookies,” she’d say, pointing at the tin her mom had left, or “Mike brought library books.” She called her parents by their first names, which I thought was daring and very adult. She would teach me cat’s cradles or we’d play with the Ouija board that Alice had somehow convinced Sarah and Mike to bring her. “Will I ever get married?” she’d asked it, and I’d pushed the planchette, practically shoving it into the YES corner, while Alice shook her head and said, “You’re not supposed to do that!”
Shift change was at eight o’clock. If Alice was up to it, she and I would sit quietly on the couch by the intake desk, watching as the nurses hurried to finish their paperwork before they’d pick up their lunch bags and purses and, sometimes, use the staff bathroom to change out of their scrubs, shedding their nurse-skins, turning back into regular ladies. Once, we saw Sandra emerge in a tight black dress and high heels. She’d put on red lipstick and makeup that made her dark eyes look like deep pools. “Hot date tonight?” another nurse had said, and Sandra gave a small, pleased smile as she tucked a flat gold purse under her arm and walked toward the elevator.
With all of the confusion—day nurses leaving, night nurses starting their shifts, different doctors arriving to visit their patients—it was the easiest thing to slip into the elevator and stand close enough to one of the nurses that people would assume she was taking me to another floor, but also near another adult so that the nurses would think I was with a parent. Alice couldn’t go, so I was her emissary, the spy she sent out into the world. “Come back and tell me a story,” Alice would say, and most nights, that’s what I would do. I’d go down to the first floor, find a child-sized wheelchair, clip my IV pole to the hook in back, and wheel myself up and down the halls, slow and steady, like the doctors told me, sometimes peeking into open doors to get a look at the scenes they revealed—an old man sleeping, the wires and IV lines attached to his body making it look like he was being attacked by an octopus; two women whispering at the foot of a bed; two interns taking advantage of an unoccupied room to kiss.
One Wednesday night I stopped by Alice’s room, but the door was shut. I heard voices and wondered if her parents were still in there, even though visiting hours were over. A new sign was taped where the one about hand-washing and mask-wearing had been: DNR, said the letters; DO NOT . . . and then there was a long word I couldn’t figure out, with a lot of smaller print beneath it. I didn’t see Sandra, so I stopped the first nurse who came down the hall, a skinny woman with short gray hair and a wrinkly face.
“Excuse me, what’s that say?” I asked, tapping the big word. Her wrinkles got deeper.
“Why are you out here wandering around? It’s bedtime.” In the harsh overhead light, I could see three silvery hairs glinting from her chin. That was a detail Alice would have loved.
The nurse pointed down the hall. “Bedtime. You don’t want to make things harder for the doctors, do you?”
“No, but I just want to know . . .”
She bent down. I spotted another hair, right in the middle of her cheek. I wondered if she didn’t have mirrors in her house, or anyone to tell her that she needed some tweezers. “Sweetie, there are very sick kids here, and if the doctors or nurses need to get to their room in a hurry, you don’t want to be in their way.”
By then I had been in hospitals long enough to know when you could get what you wanted and when it was hopeless. “Good night,” I said, smiling sweetly. Back in my room, I decided to go downstairs and see if I could find something interesting to tell Alice about once her parents were gone. I selected a package of chocolate-covered Hostess Donettes from the latest gift basket my mom had sent for the nurses. I wrapped my treats in napkins and bundled up the pink-and-purple afghan my nana had made me. Armed with provisions, the blanket, and my newest stuffed animal, a little teddy bear, I stuck my head out of my door, looked up and down the hallway to make sure that it was empty, then took the elevator down to the emergency room.