Scenes From the Children’s Hospital

Like Christiansen’s hound who wanders between two stark peaks to track the meal-marking blare of trumpets, my mind moves between trying to ignore the present and feeling sick about ignoring it. I kneel by a pond of orange koi that spark like hope against the algae-slick edges of stones, as an aging surgeon tucks in a packet of delicate nerves, then stitches up the fabric of my daughter’s back like the popped seam of a teddy bear. A reverent couple, white sunlight in their faces, casts twin shadows across the bulk of a red wagon. Propped by pillows, a blue ball cap to protect her pale and fallen head, their silent toddler glides in tow. I watch them pass and remove a handful of chalks from a black plastic tub coated in fine dust and faded fingerprints, to scrape out on the pond’s concrete bank a bold superhero, then her tagalong sidekick, the latter a blonde darling whose speech bubble pleads, “Can I help? Please? I want to save the day too!” And somewhere in the valley between my shaking faith in a doctor’s entropic hands and my need to do anything but think, I color in her yellow boots, her powder blue cape, the pink tutu cinched about her waist.