Fractals

She took off her nametag and pale blue coat for the train ride, but other passengers could still tell that she worked at the hospital. Her pressed khaki pants, pastel colored cotton shirts and white sneakers were dead giveaways. Other people from the hospital took the same route she did. Everyone from the hospital looked the same. They’d always try and talk to her.

“Do you work at Children’s?” a pastel woman asked one day.

“Yeah, I’m a volunteer in the playroom,” she replied with a feeble smile.

“Oh really, I’m a nurse on the second floor. That must be fun, in the playroom…” the woman said. 

“Yeah, it’s, um, fun...” she said, trying to think of a less awkward response. “I mean, it’s nice to do the arts and crafts with them and stuff. I’ve only really been doing it a month – my high school’s break starts later than most places.”

The woman just nodded and they both turned away – letting the silence wash over them.

*          *          *

The playroom smelled like a mixture of Elmer’s glue and hospital cleaner. The small room was light and airy, with inviting colors gracing the walls and plastic furniture. There was a craft table to the right of the door, with felt scraps, dyed feathers, plastic gems, googly eyes and pom-poms ready to be glued on to paper bag puppets. On the left was a game table, next to a cramped closet full of every Milton Bradley, Parker Brothers and Hasbro game ever produced. In the back were medical dolls and accessories, cars, plastic dinosaurs and bookcases. The wall closest to the door was covered in pictures of nature – rainbows, sunsets and swarms of monarch butterflies.

“The movements remind me of fractals, kind of cascading down the stage,” the guest said to the dancers.

“Why don’t you tell us what fractals are?” the dance teacher said.

“Oh, fractals are these repeated shapes in nature. Snowflakes are fractals, ferns are fractals, they’re repeated shapes that get smaller and smaller until they make one object. There are pictures of them in Ms. Glacier’s office,” he said.

Her volunteering tasks at Children’s Hospital for the summer weren’t exactly what she had expected. She was used to babysitting and playing with little kids, but the hospital playroom was different. It was, well…sedated. Everything was controlled and watched over. Her normal wit and Hotwheel racing skills didn’t work with these kids. The ones it did work with didn’t stay long – the older brothers and sisters and cousins. They were the kids that didn’t belong and brought a fury of energy and life to the normally anesthetized room.

She figured it could have been worse; it wasn’t morbid or anything. The patients didn’t seem afraid, or in pain exactly; but how could they not be scared?

It was the parents. They were scared. They had sick kids and the hospital-grade coffee wasn’t as potent as needed. The nights they spent cramped in bedside chairs seemed to be creeping up on all of them. They had every reason to be scared.

*          *          *

She spent the three-hour shift gluing together popsicle picture frames for tomorrow’s craft project and delivering movies and video games to the kids stuck in their rooms. She brought the latest action movies to the boy on the second floor who just recently undergone brain surgery. He was a wise cracking nine-year-old who had been in and out of the hospital since he was five, when he first started having the seizures. Every time she visited, he would give her a review of the previous day’s movie then have her read a summary of the movies she brought, and try to guess which one he wanted to see. She almost always guessed right. He was one of the only kids whose personality was able to push through the painkillers.

At the end of her shift, it was time for clean up. All the art supplies needed to go back in their bins. Everything else needed to be wiped down with hospital-grade disinfectant wipes. When she and the other volunteers were done, the whole room – including the Tonka trucks, color markers, hardcover books, and medical dolls – was slick with wet chemicals. 

She’d log her hours and take the shuttle to the train. She couldn’t stop thinking about the boy still in the hospital – with his worn out parents by his side, still there long after everyone else had left. She was scared for him. As a volunteer she wasn’t allowed to know very much about why patients were in the hospital or how serious their situations were, but from the snippets of conversations she did hear, she could tell that the boy’s outlook wasn’t good. He probably had a year at most.

She didn’t really know how to react to the whole situation. His family believed in God and was praying for a miracle. But, she knew it was science that had given him this extra year – science that taught his doctors about the brain and tumors and probes. She was born into the belief that there was nothing out there but science and reason, and yet she couldn’t help but wonder if there was something more. What if the boy’s parents were right to pray?

“Holy God, we praise thy name; Lord of all, we bow before thee; all on earth thy scepter claim; all in heaven above adore thee. Infinite thy vast domain; everlasting is thy reign,” sang the teenage choir. They were wearing red robes and the midmorning sun, streaming through the stain glass windows, illuminated the church.

 “…fill the heavens with sweet accord: Holy, holy, holy, Lord,” her grandma sang along, her low steady voice matching the notes in every verse. She tried to make her lips mimic her grandma’s, as if she knew the words too, but soon she stopped and just watched the congregation singing and smiling.

When she reached her stop, she found her mom was waiting for her. They drove home silently. Her mom returned to work in the downstairs office and she hopped in the shower. After rinsing away the hospital smells and getting into pajamas, she burrowed into bed, clicked on the television and opened her laptop. She logged on to her e-mail account and was greeted by four new messages from her friends who were taking the seemingly college pre-requisite foreign exchange trips over summer. She looked at the pictures they sent her and read the short paragraphs. Nothing was on any of her favorite channels and she didn’t feel like doing the online driver’s training her dad had downloaded the month before – urging her to get her permit before the summer was over. She was still wrapped up with the thoughts she had on the train. What was waiting out there for the boy? She knew she believed in something soul-like, but did she have to commit to the idea of heaven?

She sunk further into her comforter and gazed up at the glow in the dark plastic galaxy her mom and her had stuck on the ceiling when she was little.

“What creates gravity, do we know?” the student asked.

The teacher smiled, he was always excited by these big questions, “Well, we know mass attracts mass, which is part of the definition of gravity – but we don’t exactly know why…”

The student turned to her lab partner. “I guess that’s God, right?” she said.

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” he said.

She refocused her attention to the glowing television and watched a balding chef deglaze a plan of sautéed onions. Her mom would probably be calling her down for dinner soon. She checked her e-mail again and started a new message to the reverend at the church her grandma attended. She told him everything. She told him about the hospital and the boy who had seizures. She told him about how she had been thinking about God and was trying to figure out what she believed in. She told him about fractals and gravity and her grandma and how she wanted to believe in God, but didn’t know if she could. She asked him for help – to give her an answer. She pressed send and watched the message switch from draft to outbox to sent items, then she headed downstairs to help set the table.

*          *          *

She didn’t expect to get a response right away, but by the time she did get a response, summer was almost over and her inbox was inundated with back-to-school e-mails and her friends’ return dates. The actual response was short and disinterested, recommending that she come to one of the congregation’s teen discussions. It wasn’t the answer she was hoping for; it wasn’t really an answer at all. Join a teen discussion group?

She closed her laptop and pulled on her light blue hospital coat. It was her last day in the playroom – and her last day of choosing movies for her nine-year-old pal. But, when she entered his room, he wasn’t there. Everything was recently cleaned and the bed was stripped. She quickly left the room, her thoughts turning to the worst, and was surprisingly greeted with a smile; it was the pastel woman from the train.

“He was discharged yesterday,” the pastel woman said. “The surgery appears to have worked, for the time being at least.”

“That’s good news,” she said, mustering up a smile.

“He wanted me to tell you thanks for all the movies,” the pastel woman added.

“Oh,” she said, actually smiling now. “Well, I have to get back.”

“Of course,” said the pastel woman, “Have fun in the playroom!”

At the end of the day she returned her hospital uniform and badge, had her exit interview, and left. When the train reached her stop, her mom was there to pick her up. Instead of riding together silently, they talked about the dinner that they were going to make that night. Their new-found tradition of over-the-top cooking sessions reminded her of when they used to spend days over Christmas break making pumpkin pies for the holiday dinner the church around the corner hosted – well, they put one on every month, but she only remembered donating at Christmas.

They stopped by the grocery store on their way home and her mom let her drive the few blocks back to their house – finally allowing her to use her new permit in normal traffic instead of in an empty parking lot.

*          *          *

"Hot pan, watch out!" the church volunteer hollered at the servers. He swiftly removed the empty dish from the line-up and replaced it with a bubbly lasagna.

She started cutting it into squares and served the next person waiting in line.

"You're in luck," she said to the weathered looking man. "It's a corner piece, they're the best."

"They sure are," he responded, with a smile.

She smiled back and continued serving.