BEFORE
She’s the size of a stick of butter. Nurse Ella calls her butter baby. She was born six weeks ago, six weeks too early. Today would’ve been the day she was supposed to be born.
Her mother is a nurse too. Unlike Ella, her face is satin. Her belly fills out her dress, her arms, and legs heavy. She takes Sam’s vitals when Nurse Ella is home, a much gentler creature who bribes with lullabies rather than lectures.
Her baby takes after her softness.
“She’s so small,” I whisper.
“Be careful. That’s it, cradle her just like that,” her mother says. She twiddles with the braid cascading down her shoulder.
I’ve never held a baby. I’ve met so many, seen them swaddled in blankets and fed at their mother’s breast, but I’ve never had the responsibility of carrying one.
I adjust the cloth cap more securely over her head, supporting her neck in the crook of my elbow. She coos. Her pudgy little hands close around my finger.
What an incredible creature she is. A new life that knows only how to breathe and suckle encased in a body fragile as ceramic. I lay her back in her crib, but she’s a greedy thing. She pulls my hair, squealing out her laughter, little fat legs kicking.
“She likes you,” her mother giggles. She presses a chaste kiss on my cheek. “Come see her anytime, alright?”
“Goodbye, butter baby,” I whisper. I bow my head, and even once I leave the room, the baby grins toothlessly over her mother’s shoulder till I’m gone.
—
“Bam! Another win!”
Henry is a regular, Nurse Ella says. He lives in a cabin neighboring the river. No children or family to speak of. So when his 80th year struck with a leg infection, he had nowhere to stay but with us.
I like Henry. His hair is gray like pale smoke rising from the pipe that dangles between his lips. That thing is an extension of his body, another limb. He’s never without it. All its ashes nearly fall from the tobacco chamber when he laughs at his own jokes.
“You damn old man,” Sam says, tossing his cards down on the table between them.
This is the nurses’ break room. Technically, patients aren’t allowed in. However, Sam and Henry are resident troublemakers, me, their right hand. Where else could they gamble uninterrupted but where their nurses would never expect them to be?
Henry shimmies his shoulders back and forth, a victor’s chuckle wafting smoke in Sam’s face.
“Luck of the draw, my boy. Luck of the draw,” he sings.
“Yeah, right,” Sam throws one arm over the back of his chair. “You were hiding that king in your wrinkles, admit it.”
“Uh oh,” Henry takes a drag from his pipe, gathering the cards. “Looks like we have a sore loser in our midst. Quick! Get him some ice. The boy’s getting absolutely flamed.”
Sam tries not to laugh.
He likes Henry too. One night, Sam was walking past his room, mask, and gloves handy, when he heard a series of angry mumbles through the wall. Sam peeked in to find an old man staring at nothing, just talking to the air, two wooden crutches tucked under his armpits.
“You there!” he yelled, using one to point at Sam. “Come in here at once, this is an emergency.”
“Are you hurt?” Sam asked, rushing in to aid him. “Do you need a doctor?”
“A doctor? Are you trying to get me killed? No, no boy, this is much worse than mere injury. I am bored. Dreadfully bored. If I have to be in this room one more second without something interesting to do, I might just drop dead.”
“Well,” Sam scratched the back of his neck, exhaling in part relief, part amusement. “We can’t have that.”
“We cannot!” Henry tapped his crutch’s end on the ground. He removed a pile of coins from his pocket. “Do you like cards, boy?”
“Sure, sir.”
“Excellent!” Not bothering to count the change, he dropped the money in Sam’s open palm. “Go buy us some, that witch of a nurse took my last deck. Buy yourself some sweets while you’re at it.”
Sam was never one to deny running an errand. He didn’t ask Nurse Ella. He simply hauled me along, feasting on any excuse to feel the wind on his face and run a race down the street. We came back with a fresh deck of cards from the corner store. When Sam tried to give Henry the change, he waved him off, said Sam ought to use it for something useful, like gambling.
Although Henry, like Sam, never really left the hospital.
Bodies strengthen with age, then, they wither, return to their state of weakness when they were little as butter sticks. Henry disagrees with this view of existence. He is all mind and all memory. Beneath the pipe and the gray, he’s as young as they come, a boy still in his prime ready to dance, party, and gamble with the best of them.
“Sweet child,” he says, waving me over. “Come shuffle for us, my arthritis is acting up.”
“No, no, don’t come over here,” Sam says. “I don’t want you to see me getting humiliated.”
But I do anyway. Sam eyes me over his mask as I shuffle the cards. Yellow shines in the flares like amber. The only language that light knows is mischief. He winks at me, sliding a hand beneath the table and running it up and down the back of my thigh.
“I’ve barely put a dent in you, boy,” Henry says. “You should’ve seen me during the war. We played blackjack for whiskey flasks. Even my sergeant couldn’t beat the likes of me.”
“Yeah?” Sam teases. “How’d a great player like you end up in a place like this?”
“Oh, time is a rotten old friend and crafty card player. Only gambler that could ever best me, that one.”
I give Henry back the cards. A few spill through my fingers.
“Hah, a clumsy dealer. Thank you, dear.” Henry’s constant laughter falters for a moment. He thins his eyes, tilting my chin gently to get a better look at my face.
“Have we met before?” he asks, searching.
I smile at him as I did at my butter baby, shaking my head. “I don’t think so, sir.”
“Ah, that’s too bad.” Henry pats my cheek. “Such a pretty face.”
Henry’s said that to me before. He’s asked me that question before too. Because in a sense, he and I have met, a long time ago.
Henry is dear to me. His stories of army days and the war are echoes of memories we share. After all, Henry didn’t buy that pipe, he stole it from a friend. A friend he lost on a bloody day, along with all the flesh and bone under his right knee.
“Another game!” Henry orders, pushing his chair in, tapping his one leg.
“Alright,” Sam sighs. “But only one.”
“What are ya?” Henry teases, tossing him a hand. “Scared?”
“Scared of losing all my change.”
Sam and Henry play another game. All the while, Henry hums old songs, smoking, talking to himself. At times, I’ll catch him having entire muttered conversations with the air. I wonder if that is a habit one develops living alone. I wonder if he’s talking to someone in particular, a ghost with which he shares that pipe.
“Hah!” he cheers, throwing his arms over his head as high as they’ll go. “I’ve still got it.”
“He’s cheating,” Sam says, throwing himself back in his chair. “Isn’t he? He’s got to be cheating.”
“I think you’re just a lousy card player,” I tease.
Sam reaches under the table and pinches the back of my knee. I flinch, smacking him away. He licks his canine, running a hand through his hair, the locks unruly, sprawling over his forehead.
Sam’s gained a boyish confidence. He still acts the kid, only now with strut in his step. His doctors and nurses call him handsome, a soon-to-be heartbreaker. He’s become confident from the praise and the deviousness of his childhood has turned fatal.
“Hooligan!” Of course, Nurse Ella doesn’t take days off. She marches into the room, fists at her sides, steps quick and tempered. “Did I not tell you to leave him alone?”
“Sorry, Nurse Ella,” Sam says. “We’ll go soon.”
“She was talking to me,” Henry beams.
“Shut up, you old pest. You have to wear a mask around him, you hear me? Put that wretched thing out.” Nurse Ella flips a needle out from her apron, flicking it with her middle finger. “Take your medicine.” She sterilizes a spot on his arm, finding a vein with machine-like efficiency.
“Such a demanding woman,” Henry says, not so much as wincing from the injection. He cranes his head back, taking in Ella’s stony features. “I should marry you.”
Ella’s displeased grunt sounds. “As if I’d ever marry a gambler.”
“Everything in life is a gamble, my dear, even love itself.” Henry sighs. He reaches for something on his other side. His crutches lean against the chair’s back. His pipe is in his mouth. He reaches for the air, muttering to his ghost, something sadder taken to him.
I kneel, his empty hand settling in mine.
“Would you like to play another game tomorrow, sir?” I ask.
“Sweet child you are,” Henry says, patting my face again. “Aren’t they, Sam?”
My knight and I exchange a glance.
A proud look flickers in his yellow.
“Yes,” he says. “They are.”
—
I walk Sam back to his room when the sky grows dark. Henry hassled Nurse Ella to let us stay a little longer. She agreed so long as we promised to get to bed without argument afterward. Henry told us his stories, his adventures, the kind of fairy tales with a touch of reality that held Sam’s attention the whole way through.
“I’ll see you in the morning?” I ask as we reach Sam’s room.
Sam and I are rarely apart. From sun up to sun down we’re eating, playing games, doing lesson work with the other kids, sitting through treatments and exams together, going outside when we aren’t supposed to, getting scolded, visiting other patients, and gambling with Henry. The nurses say we’re joined at the hip.
When Sam heads to sleep, he demands attention beforehand. He wraps his arms around my waist, his hands spanning my shoulder blades, pressing me into him. At times, he’ll hold me for a few minutes, murmuring silly things– that I smell nice, that he wants to bite me through his mask for no reason at all, that I should sneak into his room so we could sleep in the same bed like we did as little kids.
Tonight, Sam doesn’t embrace or murmur. He tells me to be quiet, grabs me by the wrist, and drags me with tip-toeing silence down the hall.
“Sam?” I stumble into the nurse’s rest break room after him. “What are we doing?”
“Shh,” he whispers. It’s completely dark. Sam maneuvers blindly till he reaches for a doorknob to what I always thought was a closet.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“Henry told me about this exit. It’s a surprise,” he says.
He unlocks the door which, miraculously, opens to the outside world. The night casts a blue shadow. Sam closes his hand around my wrist like a baby would around my finger, the skin around his eyes so creased I know he’s smiling with an open mouth. “C’mon.”
Sam’s shoes beat against the water on the empty sidewalk. Street lamps lay gold halos on the concrete, making the puddles seem like a sheen layer of oil. Sam tows me through them, hopping to avoid the ones we could sink into.
His legs are long, thin, but powerful. His muscles stretch like rubber bands to accommodate the impatience of his bones. They carry him and I down the street and into a clearing, the grass wet with fresh rain.
A few years ago, Sam couldn’t run long distances. His lungs weren’t used to the heat under his mask, but Sam aged like any other boy would. Now, he helps Henry out of bed in the mornings. He carries boxes from the back doors to the front desk. He carries me sometimes, says he remembers the days I was the one who used to carry him.
The clearing ceases just beside a building that resembles our hospital. Adorned in bricks, a few stories high, with checkered windows. Only, rather than stretches of city at its front doors, this place folds out into a courtyard, one with string lights, tents, and a hundred adolescents dressed in evening wear.
Sam brings me to the edge marked by a fence and short line of saplings. The band’s music travels to us, voices and instruments faded by the distance.
“What is this?” I ask, some aftermath of adrenaline shaking in my voice.
“A school dance,” Sam says, amused by my amazement. “I heard some girls talking about it at the park the other day. I know we can’t go in, but I thought–”
Sam swallows. The party wanes at the fence line. It illuminates his clothes that I didn’t notice earlier: slacks Nurse Ella just got him and a dress shirt buttoned to the crest of his collarbones. The boys out there are wearing suits, ties, clothes Sam’s never even touched the likeness of. He mutters curses like he’s done something wrong and tries to fix his sleeves.
“Sam,” I say, taking his hands, stilling them. He stares at the gloves, the separation it marks. I slip my fingers beneath them at his wrists. “What did you think?”
“Um–” he stutters, and the sound rouses warmth in my chest. His newfound confidence sometimes falters. Sometimes, his childish bouts of shame return with rosy shades on his cheeks.
I have the urge to tease him for a change.
“Do you want to dance with me?” I ask, taking a single step forward, mimicking the scene we’ve trespassed. Sam blushes harder, the heat solid. I move his hands to my waist and hold his shoulders.
“We’ve never danced properly before,” he says, his breath catching on the air as I start to sway.
“Yes we have.”
Nurse Ella used to leave the radio on for us. Sam rocked his head to the beat. He jumped on the bed. He pulled at Ella’s skirt, asking her to dance with us. When she shooed him off with her newspaper, he taught me little moves he’d read about in his fairytales, said we were knights in a great ballroom.
“Did you forget?” I ask.
“No, I just–” Sam’s fingers flex, like he wants to touch me more, like there’s still too much between us. “Hold on.”
He takes off his gloves, shoving them in his back pocket.
“Sam, we’re outside,” I warn, my fingers closing around his shirt collar.
“Shhh–we’ll get caught if you keep talking,” he smiles. He sighs in relief, feeling my jaw, my neck, sliding his hands back down to my waist and pushing me into him. He recreates a memory from a few years ago when he was a tad smaller but just as mischievous. One where we hid in the bushes from our jailor and leering onlookers.
“You’re silly,” I whisper. Sam moves me with the music, a gentle rhythm we follow together.
“You’re bad at this,” he teases.
“So are you,” I tease back.
We dance and banter for a few songs. Needless chattering and clinking glasses don’t distract us. Even if Sam and I are rarely apart, we are rarely alone too. We take advantage of the time and the dark.
“Sweet Sam,” he whispers.
“Yes?”
His touch runs up my spine, his eyes soft and melting. “Let’s run away together like we talked about,” he says. “Just you and I.”
My body tenses.
“All those kids out there, I don’t envy them,” Sam keeps talking, his voice in my ear, his mask rubbing against my temple. “I don’t need anything ordinary. Henry ran away with his friend to join the army when he was only a little older than us. I don’t need anyone but you. So let’s just run away. We can dance every single night, we can raise the little plants you like and share a bed and see the world. Let’s run away, my love. Like this, but forever.”
“What about our castle?” I whisper. My limbs feel stuck in a loop with the music. But I’m no longer there. I’m spreading through the ground, the hospital’s body, it’s bricks, it’s concrete, it’s souls pulling me back. “We have to protect our patients, remember?”
Sam doesn’t respond. His breath gains another kind of quality. A quieter sort of disappointment that sags against my shoulder.
I bury my face in his neck. I breathe in his scent, the comforting notes of our home embedded in his skin. We sneak out, we trail the outskirts, but we’ve never strayed forever. Sam can’t stray forever. Even with barriers, his mask, his gloves, he can’t survive without his medicine.
He can’t be like the people on the other side of the fence.
“You’re right,” Sam says, rubbing his hands up and down my sides. “We’ll wait till we’re older, till I’ve gotten stronger.”
“Are you sad?” I ask, peering.
“No.” He presses my palm to his covered cheek.
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
“I want you to be happy,” I say, desperation behind it. “We can still go on adventures,” I say like I’m trying to make up for the regret wallowing on Sam’s face. “We can eat sweet bread and pudding every day and–and play card games. We’ll sunbathe every morning and play in the park and–”
“Sweet Sam,” he interrupts.
“Yes?”
Sam leans in till our foreheads touch. The air is humid, thick, and cool. Sam breathes it in, slipping the mask below his chin. I shudder, but I know better than to stop him. His eyes become half-lidded, like suns setting beneath a hill.
“Can I kiss you?” he asks.
The couples dancing across the line hold each other close. They lose themselves in the music. They might even peck each other’s cheeks and let their noses brush.
But none look at each other the way Sam looks at me.
“Yes,” I say. And Sam doesn’t hesitate.
He’s sloppy at first, hungry, but his tenderness doesn’t waver. He hooks his arm around my back, the other cradling the back of my neck. I slip my fingers into his locks, the heat traveling through us like steam. The talking, the dancing, the singing–the noise of anything that isn’t us–disperse till we’re convinced no one else exists.
Sam’s never kissed before. Neither have I. Yet it isn’t like either of us imagined it would be. Like all things between us, it is electric at first, grand and revelatory, a flame settling in a comfortable fire. Soon enough, Sam is smiling, his eyes rolling on a high.
“You’re bad at this,” he teases.
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m joking.” He picks me off the ground, purposefully falling backward into the wet grass. I shriek against his mouth, his chuckles vibrating through his chest beneath me.
“Wow,” he sighs, kissing me again, kneading the flesh of my legs and sides.
“What is it?”
“Nothing, keep kissing me,” he orders, pecking my face like a bird. On my brow, my cheekbone, my chin, my nose, my eyelids.
When he lays down, he keeps me with him, our sated hearts beating together.
“Look,” I whisper, pointing at the sky. “Our stars are out.”
“Yes, sweet Sam,” he whispers. He stretches his limbs like a cat on a rooftop and kisses my cheek. “Our stars are out.”
