Chapter Forty

A perpetual chill gripped the hospital, the cool AC and arctic white-and-blue décor conspiring to settle an aura of cold upon the whole building. Olivia felt it the instant they entered, the chill in the air matching the detached demeanors of the staff who brought them through to surgery. Jude was uncannily calm too, impassive while the doctor explained for the umpteenth time the schedule and procedure.

Inwardly, Olivia whirled out of control. Her mind raced, darting ever away to other problems only to be jerked forcibly back to the present moment.

Jude was going into surgery. He might die. Thinking about Owen, work, or anything else was pure stupidity, a selfishness Olivia in her right mind utterly abhorred. And yet, her mind did wander, as if compelled by some command to ponder the most mundane trivia. It was all utterly irrelevant to the life-or-death battle about to be waged in the body of a child.

The troops were assembling, a phalanx of nurses marching escort on Jude, his wheeled hospital bed a chariot to the frontline. Doctors gathered, officers debating the battle-plan one last time. Then the surgeon strode past Olivia, ignoring her entirely to speak to Jude. She did not hear what was said because of the rushing in her ears. Jude and the surgeon seemed far away, as if Olivia watched on a screen some performance of an ancient and majestic play, a tragedy familiar to humanity since the dawn of time.

Jude listened and nodded, responding briefly, his eyes on the doors to the surgery itself like a prizefighter attentive only to the approaching combat. The surgeon patted him once on the shoulder, and for a moment, Olivia saw not a lean man in modern medical scrubs speaking to an ailing boy, but the high priests of some timeless law beyond god or man offering final benediction to the young hero.

The procession started forward, nurses wheeling Jude’s bed towards the swinging double-doors beyond which Olivia could not follow.

Right before he went in, Jude gripped her hand and said, “You’ve got my bag?”

“Yes,” Olivia answered unthinking, Jude’s small backpack clasped forgotten in her hands.

The hospital bed rolled forward, the surgery doors parted and swung closed again, and Jude was gone, vanished as surely as if already across the threshold into death.

Darkness edged Olivia’s vision, and she swayed, reaching out to lean on the wall for support. A row of chairs lined the corridor for people in precisely her position, and she sank down on to the nearest of them. Jude’s bag trailed in her hands until she lifted it to her lap and unzipped it.

Within the bag, carefully wrapped against any accident, was the Fatemaker. Olivia sat cradling the unzippered bag and half-revealed model within. The painted wings of the plastic demon spread out from the forest of Jude’s bundled spare socks and clothes. Of all the things he might need, should his operation succeed and his stay in hospital extend beyond a day, he had brought this.

Olivia took the figure out entirely and studied it, eyes unfocused, seeing not the painted plastic, but the hours of attentive effort gone into its making. Jude had worked on it meticulously with a calm cold obsession that only intensified as the date of his operation drew nearer.

The Fatemaker stared back at her, its tiny avian eyes and contorted expression frozen forever in a lopsided leer. Olivia caught herself wishing that it truly was the idol of some unknown god, mighty enough to heed mortal prayers and change a doomed child’s destiny. But it was only a plastic thing, a symbol of Jude’s patiently determined pursuit of the life that fate threatened to deny him. Perhaps the cruelest thing, worse than taking from a child the full span of life, was that every minute permitted him demanded that relentless implacable patience.

She wondered where Jude got it, that certainty of will that neither she nor their parents possessed. Perhaps it came solely from facing such trauma so young, from the call to fight for his life before it had fully begun.

Soonja’s story about the thousand paper cranes recurred, and Olivia saw in memory the old woman’s clear, shrewd eyes. Soonja was somewhere in the same hospital, on another floor, in another wing—Olivia had only the vaguest notion where.

Without thinking, Olivia stood up and wandered down the hall, Jude’s bag and the Fatemaker still cradled in her arms. A vague thought trickled through the haze of her perceptions, that Jude would be in surgery for hours. At the end of the corridor, she stopped and forced herself to focus long enough to get her bearings. Colored lines on the walls and floor marked out routes about the hospital complex. Olivia followed the blue line from the pediatric surgery, back through the labyrinthine crisscrossing ways, to the main lobby. Here, she picked the red line and followed that in search of Soonja.

That she was in a daze was reinforced when Soonja found her instead. Olivia was wandering down a corridor somewhere on the fourth floor when a voice called her name. She looked about, and then saw Soonja waving from a bed in a private room. Only that the door was propped open let her see out; Olivia would have wandered straight past otherwise, lost in a haze of conflicting pressures.

“Come in, don’t dither about in the hall,” Soonja demanded bluntly. “There, sit.”

Olivia sat in the chair indicated, beside Soonja’s bed.

“I’d rather hoped you’d come and see me,” Soonja said. “Didn’t know if Jude’s operation was today, tomorrow, or when, but that it was soon. They dosed me up on painkillers when I arrived, rather lost track of time. How are you coping?”

Oliva could only blink and stare.

“Tch, that bad? How long ago did he go in?”

“A few minutes, an hour? I don’t know.”

“Hm. Got the Fatemaker there, I see. Has the gribbly-looking thing made any promises?”

Olivia shook her head.

Soonja smiled tightly. “Perhaps he just speaks too softly. Have you heard from Owen? Too much to expect he’d remember one person in hospital, but forgetting two? Ah, there I’m being unfair; someone has to hold down the fort at the office, and I’m sure he’s worried sick about us all. It’s hard, being helpless, especially when we’re used to being in control.” She looked bitterly around at her bed and the hospital in general.

Olivia nodded distantly, only half following along while Soonja talked on, skipping topics freely.

“Sometimes, I just want to scream at the nurses. Not for any fault of theirs, just out of sheer frustration at being stuck in here. They tell me I can go home tomorrow. I can’t wait.” She paused and glanced at Olivia, adding, “Call him.”

“Jude?”

“No, Owen. Call him. You know how he is, a damn fool for brooding on very simple decisions. So are you. You’re afraid and confused; forget whatever silliness has gone between you two and call him.”

Olivia took out her phone, only to recall where she was. Seeing her frozen again, Soonja said, “I’m sure a text message won’t interfere with any essential hospital things. A phone call now, oh-ho, disaster for certain!”

Olivia was in no state for humor and numbly began tapping out a text to Owen.