Do you ever get our memories mixed up? For me they bleed over sometimes, like when I think of your ambulance and see my own body instead, thudding down an endless sidewalk on a stretcher as frat boys spill out of their houses and line up to watch

Sometimes when they all go to the hospital together, their dad takes Amy to the maternity ward to see the babies

Amy loves to look at the babies. Amy is tall for her age, in the ninety-ninth percentile, and can, when she stands on tiptoes, peer inside the big window that shows the cradles all lined up with the babies asleep in them. Amy knows that babies sleep a lot. Their dad says when her sister was born Amy wanted to hold her all the time, but sometimes their mom had to hold her, to feed her, and then Amy would get angry and stomp around and throw tantrums. This makes Amy smile because she knows she ended up with Zoe as hers anyway.

Amy doesn’t like the food at the hospital cafeteria, which is mushy and cold. Most of the people sitting in the cafeteria are either doctors or nurses or sad. Sometimes their parents make Amy stay there for long stretches coloring in her coloring book or practicing her secret alphabet, writing notes to Zoe. Sometimes she has to wait outside her sister’s room in the pediatric ward with the children who are terminal. What terminal means is going to die, but their dad says not all of them are, but then their mom says, Rick, what’s the point, which Amy takes to mean they are because their dad just looks down at his big old boots and doesn’t answer.

No matter how hard she tries to only look at her notebook, the dying children’s parents always start to talk with Amy. Sometimes she’s even doing Kumon. But the parents of the dying children interrupt her and tell her she looks just like a little doll. Everyone says the same thing, that she looks like a doll. Amy feels funny when they say it, a little sick to her stomach. She doesn’t really know what they mean. Why would she look like a doll when she is a person? Or do they just mean she doesn’t have any scratches on her skin like the dying kids do? She doesn’t ask their mom because their mom seems annoyed when people say it when she’s there. From this she deduces that she is right to feel uncomfortable.

Their mom takes her to see the babies and tells her about when she was born. Amy was born early because their mom stepped on a snake in the garage and got scared, and that induced the labor. Because of the snake Amy had to stay in the hospital a little bit longer, in a cradle just like these ones. Amy asks if the snake got away, hoping the answer is yes. The answer is no.

Amy, liberated by a snake that died, feels guilty and important. Their mom takes her to the cafeteria for lunch but gets mad at her in the middle and goes back down to the pediatric ward without her. She doesn’t give Amy any instructions on what to do next, so Amy decides to find the maternity ward by herself. She remembers never eat soggy waffles, and anyway, she remembers where it is. She stands at the window for a long time, watching the babies sleep. She fogs the glass up with her breath. She draws a tiny heart in the mist with her fingertip, and she loves the squeaking sound this makes, so she moves a little to the left and fogs up the glass again, on purpose, and draws a slightly bigger heart.

Then she gets in trouble for disappearing, but it is worth it.

4

Amy was found curled up in the corner of her room. It was Tommy who found her. He had been looking for her all day. She expected him to pick her up, but he kept asking questions instead.

What have you done? he kept on saying.

She didn’t know. She fell back asleep. She woke back up again, sort of, when the paramedics came, because the paramedics shook her and shouted in her face saying if she didn’t go with them she’d spend three days in lockdown.

Amy didn’t know what lockdown was. She reached out for her octopus. It was filthy now, its arms worn down to loose nubs of fabric. Now she tried not to get any blood on it, but she held it to her and buried her face in it and stayed that way as they carried her down the stairs and out the door, and she ended up getting blood on it anyway.

Amy awoke in a white room with a minister who was holding her hand. Her eyes struggled to stay open.

The minister kept on talking. Amy thought she hadn’t changed her pad in a long time, and she didn’t want to mess her dress up.

But then the dress was gone. Instead of it, a paper-thin blue tunic. Plastic bracelets with words on them she could not read.

All music is important, said the minister, as though in response to something Amy had said. From the silence that followed you could tell she had been asked a question.

She passed back out.
 

Amy tried to get out of bed but found she was tethered to machines. Surrounding her bed there was a big metal railing. The machines made sounds at intervals, like codes. Amy tried to make it out but couldn’t. Every stressed syllable hurt her arms and hands and split her head.

There were curtains to keep her from seeing, but she could hear all the babies who had to be next door. They cried and cried, so hard she thinks they must have been getting strangled, and yet they kept on crying.