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Homer Wells slipped away. It was the end of the chapter, anyway. He was due at the boys' division. This time the giggles attendant on his departure were mixed with sobs and with Melony's derision.
"Gleams!" Melony called after him.
"How this hurts us all," Mrs. Grogan said more firmly.
Outside, the night seemed full of new scents to Homer Wells. Mingled with the sawdust smell and the rank cigars, was that a waft of the raucous perfume drifting over him from the former whore hotel? And something like sweat from the bingo-for-money room? The river itself gave off a smell.
In the boys' division, they were waiting for him. Some of the smaller ones had fallen asleep. The others were open-eyed--seemingly, open-mouthed, like baby birds; Homer felt he was rushing from nest to nest, his voice feeding them as they always cried for more. His reading, like food, made them sleepy, but it often woke Homer up. He usually lay awake after the nightly benediction--the ince in "Princes" and the ing in "Kings" still rang in the dark room. Sometimes he wished he could sleep in the baby room; the constant waking and crying there might be more rhythmic.
The older orphans had their irritating habits. One of Nurse Edna's John Wilburs slept on a rubber sheet; Homer would lie awake, waiting to hear him wet his bed. Some nights Homer would wake the child, march him to the toilet, point his tiny pecker in the right direction, and whisper, "Pee, John Wilbur. Pee now. Pee here." The child, asleep on his feet, would hold it back, waiting for the welcoming rubber sheet, that familiar dent and warm puddle in the bed.
Some nights, when he felt irritable, Homer Wells would simply stand by John Wilbur's bedside and whisper his command in the boy's ear: "Pee!" With almost instantaneous results!
More upsetting was Nurse Angela's name-child, the sickly little Fuzzy Stone. Fuzzy had a cough, a constant dry hack. He had wet, red eyes. He slept inside a humidified tent; a waterwheel cranked by a battery and a fan to distribute the vapor ran all night. Fuzzy Stone's chest sounded like a tiny, failing motor; the damp, cool sheets enclosing him fluttered through the night like the tissue of a giant, semi-transparent lung. The waterwheel, the fan, Fuzzy Stone's dramatic gasps--they merged in Homer's mind. If one of the three were to stop, Homer doubted he'd know which two were still alive.
Dr. Larch told Homer that he suspected Fuzzy Stone was allergic to dust; that the boy was born and slept in a former sawmill was doubtlessly not the best thing for him. A child with chronic bronchitis was not easily adoptable. Who wants to take home a cough?
When Fuzzy Stone's coughing was too much for Homer Wells, when the various engines that struggled to maintain Fuzzy were too much on Homer's mind--lungs, waterwheel and fan--Homer would quietly seek out the baby room. Nurse Angela or Nurse Edna was always there, usually awake and tending to one of the babies. Sometimes, when the babies were quiet, even the nurse on duty was sleeping, and Homer Wells would tiptoe past them all.
One night he saw one of the mothers standing in the baby room. She did not appear to be looking for her baby in particular; she was just standing in her hospital gown in the middle of the baby room, her eyes closed, absorbing the smells and sounds of the baby room through her other senses. Homer was afraid the woman would wake up Nurse Angela, who was dozing on the duty bed; Nurse Angela would have been cross with her. Slowly, as Homer imagined you might assist a sleepwalker, he led the woman back to the mothers' room.
The mothers were often awake when he went to peek in on them. Sometimes he would get someone a glass of water.
The women who came to St. Cloud's for the abortions rarely stayed overnight. They required less time to recover than the women who had delivered, and Dr. Larch discovered that they were most comfortable if they arrived in the morning, shortly before light, and left in the early evening, just after dark. In the daytime, the sound of the babies was not so prevailing because the noise the older orphans made, and the talk among the mothers and the nurses, confused everything. It was the sound of the newborn babies that, Dr. Larch observed, upset the women having the abortions. At night--except for John Wilbur's peeing and Fuzzy Stone's cough--the waking babies and the owls made the only sounds at St. Cloud's.
It was a simple enough observation to make: the women having abortions were not comforted to hear the cries and prattle of the newborn. You could not plan the exact hour for a delivery, but Larch tried to plan the abortions for the early morning, which gave the women the whole day to recover and allowed them to be gone by evening. Some of the women traveled a long way--in these cases, Larch recommended that they come to St. Cloud's the night before their abortions, when he could give them something strong to help them sleep; they'd have the whole of the next day to recover.
If one of those women spent the night, it was never in the room with the expectant or delivered mothers. Homer Wells--in his insomniac tour
of St. Cloud's--saw that, in sleep, the expressions of these overnight visitors were no more nor less troubled than the expressions of the women who were having (or who'd already had) babies. Homer Wells would try to imagine his own mother among the faces of the sleeping and the wakeful women. Where was she waiting to get back to--when the pain of her labor was behind her? Or was there no place she wanted to go? And what, when she was lying there, was his father thinking--if he even knew he was a father? If she even knew who he was.
These are the things the women would say to him:
"Are you in training to be a doctor?"
"Are you going to be a doctor when you grow up?"
"Are you one of the orphans?"
"How old are you? Hasn't anyone adopted you yet?"
"Did someone send you back?"
"Do you like it here?"
And he would answer:
"I might become a doctor."
"Of course Doctor Larch is a good teacher."
"That's right: one of the orphans."
"Almost sixteen. I tried being adopted, but it just wasn't for me."
"I wanted to come back."
"Of course I like it here!"
