PERMAFROST

1 4 3 P E R M A F R O S T A M Y B L O O M Terrible is terrible, Frances thought. There’s no comparing one bad thing to another. Whatever it is – hands blown o√ in Angolan minefields, children in Chernobyl with tumors like softballs, a car accident right around the corner – there’s no measuring su√ering. Mrs. Shenker disagreed. At night, while her daughter Emily was knocked out by morphine, Mrs. Shenker sat in the solarium, the waiting room for the adolescent medicine unit. She sat back in a recliner and read aloud from her stack of printouts about the flesheating bacteria that had attacked Emily nine days ago. ‘‘Listen to this one,’’ she said to Frances. ‘‘And hold on to your hat. ‘I was diagnosed with necrotizing fasciitis after a vacation in the Bahamas. We still don’t know what caused it. Even though I’ve had approximately thirty-four operations and three skin grafts on my legs and groin and continue to have some trouble with my lungs and kidneys, I consider myself lucky. My wife and I have run into some financial di≈culties and I am unable to drive but we count our blessings every day.’ Can you fucking believe this? Well, you probably can, you’re a social worker.’’ Frances could believe it. Frances’s father had raised Frances and her sister, Sherri, on stories of Polar expeditions that began with 1 4 4 B L O O M Y terrible errors in judgment and ended with men weeping over frozen corpses, with people su√ering horribly and still thanking God for not having killed them outright when they got on the ship. When Sherri was eighteen and Frances was eleven, Sherri said, ‘‘I want to experience Jesus’ love and I want to help other young people know that they are not doomed.’’ ‘‘Doomed to what?’’ Mr. Cairn had said, but he said it to the front hall because Sherri had already run out the door, and it was no di√erent, really, from a girl going o√ to be a Deadhead or driving to Los Angeles with some badass to become a porn star. When people in the neighborhood asked where Sherri was, Mr. Cairn said, We lost her, and nobody pressed him and they certainly didn’t know he meant she’d gone to join the Exodus Ministry in Indianapolis. Sherri sent a Christmas card every year, and other than that, it was just Frances and her father, the storyteller. S.S. Terra Nova ‘‘This one’s a day brightener,’’ Mrs. Shenker said. ‘‘This guy’s an amputee himself, and a world-class athlete . . . ’’ Mrs. Shenker skimmed ahead a few lines. ‘‘Well, not a world-class athlete, clearly. But athletic, and he’s invented these special responsive feet that give energy back to the leg, so you don’t just walk around, clump, clump, clump and there’s a special suction cup so the whole leg just goes on – ’’ and she made a sharp, sucking sound. Mr. Shenker stood up. ‘‘I’m going to take a little walk,’’ he said. Mrs. Shenker and Frances saw him through the glass block wall of the solarium, chatting with Theresa, the charge nurse, and like magic two more nurses showed up, and they passed a box of doughnuts around, and Theresa disappeared for a moment and then reappeared, carrying real co√ee cups and giving one to Mr. Shenker. Mrs. Shenker had the solarium and the doctors and Mr. Shenker had the nurses. Frances bumped into him a couple of times when he was walking out of an empty exam room, straightening his tie, and when she looked over her shoulder, she saw a nurse come out and lock the door behind her. The nurses looked transformed; they looked as if they had been handed something immensely valuable and fragile, whose care could not be entrusted P E R M A F R O S T 1 4 5 R to ordinary women. Mr. Shenker looked as he always did, handsome and doomed. Frances said to Mrs. Shenker, ‘‘I have a few patients to check on. Do...