In a courtyard behind the hospital, with cold metal benches and leafless trees strangled by Christmas lights, Eva came upon a doctor smoking a cigarette. He sucked on it hungrily. He exhaled out of the side of his mouth and glared at her—defiant, adolescent—as if daring her to point out his hypocrisy.
She was the actual adolescent: sixteen years old. She could have told him that she enjoyed hypocrisy. No, not in herself; her own contradictions made her seem strange and ugly, like dressing-room mirrors that revealed angles of her face she couldn’t usually see.
But in other people, inconsistency was interesting—a mark of complexity, maybe maturity. She smiled at the doctor. He crushed the cigarette under his shoe, an elegant pivot with an inelegant sneaker, and went back inside.
You weren’t supposed to like hospitals, but secretly Eva did. She liked being close to so many extremes. Birth, death.
It was surely the cleanest place she had ever been—surgeons, she learned, scrubbed their hands for two to six minutes, all the way up to their elbows—and also the dirtiest: blood, shit, infectious disease. (She timed six minutes. It was a long time.
) People yelled in hospitals and people whispered. They limped or they hobbled or they sprinted from one emergency to the next. She had watched a man fall asleep standing up.
There was good news and bad news. Miracles happened, but sometimes—a lot of the time—life simply dealt you a bad hand. Whenever she heard an ambulance .
