We have to hold our breath inside the hospital. On the roof, I take my brother’s small hand and remind him of the rules.
“Twenty breaths on the top floor. Take one less on each next one.” At his sour, puckered-lip frown, I add, “It’s good practice for counting.”
In the time before we could stay wherever we pleased, in the nicest penthouse apartments always on top floors, Mom lived in a house with Grandma that was only double wide. Back then, the buildings weren’t broken egg shells with holey roofs. Towns like this one were bustling full of people, and not every bed had padded buckle restraints like roller coaster seats.
Mom said her old home was near the building site of the hospital. Some nights her and her brothers and their friends from their park would sneak past the construction workers’ earth-moving equipment. Beyond pyramid stacks of rebar, steel joists, and mounds of dirt, her big brother had dared her to climb the construction tower crane. She told us her hands slipped on the last rung, but the fear was worth it for the highest view of San Reena at sunrise. When the building’s foundation was still setting, they’d written their names in the wet cement at the basement level, near a tie beam. I’m not sure I’d recognize her name even if I saw it, but I always still search.
My mom never visited this hospital when it was staffed with nurses and doctors and still smelled antiseptic sterile—it was too expensive. At an older, run-down clinic, Mom had me. She gave birth without medicine stronger than a couple Tylenols. When she had my brother at Grandma’s house, she screamed through the pain. But now we’re lucky, and can come here whenever we need more laughing gas.
“Don’t forget,” I remind my brother, “when we get to the basement, only take three breaths.” If he forgets, I’ll never forgive myself.
I take a gulping lungful of the stale outside air and shoulder open the stairwell door. My brother isn’t yet tall enough to stretch up on his tiptoes and reach the handle. My first breath inside is damp-musty, and what little light comes in from outside barely filters the darkness. The ground is slick underfoot. One hand trails the rail; the other grasps my brother’s fingers tight, as if he might slip through them.
We round each bend and walk down ten flights, our footsteps echoing. Against my will, my grip loosens as my nerves unwind. Every breath feels like painkillers easing all my aches, and the voices whispering warnings in my head quiet down just a bit. The stinging cuts of my skinned knees, burnt palm, and pus-oozing toothmarks in my shoulder all fade to dullness. It would be easy to grow giddy and careless. Instead, I strain to listen for each of my brother’s quiet breaths. I’m always looking out for him. Mom used to tell me I was a good big sister.
On the ground floor, we have to cross a hall to reach the personnel stairs. It’s how maintenance workers once accessed the basement level. In the hall, the space between crumbly walls is thick with ghosts, and plants grow on the floor in sunlit spots. Up above, the roof is Swiss cheese letting in swathes of sun. On all sides, the drywall sheds mold spores and snowflakes of plaster. I squeak in surprise when my brother wriggles his chubby fingers out of mine.
“Nine,” I gasp for him, because when he counts to ten, he always adds a few extra sixes. He’ll follow me, though, and not wander too far away.
We weave around IV stands that look like coat racks on wheels. Sacks of cloudy liquid and blood bags are still connected to tubes full of congealed brown. My second breath is a shallow, wasted one, as I stoop for a little glass bottle with a rubbery lid. I pocket it, since it’s unpunctured and pristine, free of cracks. Maybe it’s one of the kinds of drugs there’s still a use for. Mom once warned us if anyone gets sick, we can’t use most of the medicine because it’s unrefrigerated, and like bad food, it’s gone stale. For a while, the hospital had more supplies than the superstores with their toppled shelves, and Mom used to send us to the top floors to collect rolls of sterile gauze.
“Not the stained, ripped ones,” she would tell us, and pills were okay to pick up but not to swallow without asking first.
In all my memories, she’s tending bite wounds and fingernail claw marks using the supplies we scavenged. Grandma, sitting in her chair, would always interject, “The best medicine is good, clean air.” But people bartered for Mom’s doctoring, trading her vegetables from rooftop gardens and canned goods with barely corroded lids.
So I’ll take this medicine, and when we’re safe I’ll test a dab on my tongue. If it helps the hurt, I’ll share it with my brother in careful, measured doses.
“Seven,” I say, snatching up his wrist again. I want to warn him to be careful, but I can’t spare the breath. He’s barefoot, scurrying around needles and bits of broken glass. He pads mindfully around pokey bits of metal from a collapsed wall. I never have to pluck splinters out of his pudgy baby skin. That’s good because he hates wearing shoes, and it’s getting harder to find ones that fit as he sprouts up. His clothes are overlarge, baggy and belted, so he’ll grow into them. But they’re already stained and torn, baring broken skin underneath.
“Does God make hospitals?” he asks, all in one breath.
I shake my head. “People make hospitals.” Made. God probably didn’t make anything. When she drank Grandma used to say “We’re living in hell.” She used to warn us not to descend into darkness, to resist temptations of the flesh. She’d hit us hard with a flyswatter if we forgot and needed the reminder.
We pass a stretcher, one of the kinds with padded over-the-shoulder restraints. A rust-colored stain shaped like a shadow sleeps on the gurney. One of the wheels squeaks and spins. Inside the rooms, the beds and testing machines have metal bars so that all the aggressive patients could be wrestled in and locked in place during procedures.
Though it’s still diluted on the first floor, the gas is stronger than anywhere else on the ground level outside. The air is thick enough to wade through. It tastes so good it takes everything in me not to hold out my tongue and chase the flavor, sweet, like the Skittles we used to find amid rat droppings at gas stations.
I have three breaths left, and the smell is so crisp it stings inside my nose. At the end of the hall, we pass a mural and the doorway leading to a nursery full of plastic-tub bassinets. Behind us, footsteps slap, wet against the vinyl floor. I stiffen. I drag my brother forward, faster, pulling his arm so hard he cries out, a stollen breath.
We’re being chased.
My pulse spikes, heart fluttering like dragonfly wings, choking in my throat. I take my last breath and push hard against the door at the end of the hall. We hurry faster down the last flight of stairs.
It’s all just a trick of the air.
Once, we had been chased inside the hospital. The man didn’t know the rules, and the air turned him angry. First it feels so good; then you start hearing things. The black edges of your vision become scuttling insects, and shadows sharpen into fingers reaching for you. Ghosts take on the shapes and faces from your nightmares. The paranoia makes you mean.
Mom would be furious if she knew we were here, that I lead my baby brother this far down. The air down here could kill us, but we’d die if we didn’t breathe. Moving through the basement was just like diving deep in the retention pond at the water treatment center and judging when to come up for a breath. I was always good at swimming—I even had lessons. Floaties and a kickboard, chlorine, and puckered prune fingers. My brother was born at the end, when all the public pools were closing, but I’ll always try to teach him everything I’ve learned.
I steady myself.
A dripping sound echoes, leaking from a broken pipe that used to be connected to a water heater. My little brother pinches his nose closed to save his three breaths for when we’re right at the Source. The cement in the basement is fissured with splitting-canyon cracks. Suffusing from the pits is a colorless gas that makes the scarce light tremble. There are countless holes. The biggest opening is wide enough for a grown man to fall—or dive—into, extending deep into the earth. The smallest are fingernail-sized dimples.
Fists pound on the door at our backs, and then those big, slappy feet scramble against the wall as our pursuer climbs around like a spider, looking for an access point in the hospital rubble. I count twenty scraping noises nested inside every breath of mine. But none of it’s real.
“Three.” Yes, it’s dangerous to breathe this air, but we’re still young, and nothing else pauses the pain. Besides, when I was my little brother’s age, I didn’t see the scary things anyway. It’s only that I’ve gotten older.
He giggles. The nightmare I conjured outside makes a screech, just like the sound of a steel door being torn in two. My mouth pulls into a smile, even as a voice in the back of my head urges me to check if the skeleton of a man lies in a heap of bones at the bottom of the drop, with all the others. The dead are silent and calm, grinning forever in ecstasy, so I can’t even feel bad for them.
We’ve been here long enough. We need to go back, up above, to our real life. To the tent that I move out onto the roof on sunny summer days, to our strawberry plant growing wonky in a pot wrapped with chicken wire.
Breathing the good air down here reminds me how nice it can still be up there.
“Two.” I gather my brother into my arms, carrying him back to the door. He always drags his feet on the ascent, so this is easier.
Outside, we’ll laugh through ten breaths and add another on each level up. Our legs won’t burn from the climb, but we might be a little mean back on the roof. I’ll grumble at him to stop squirming around, and he’ll pout and scream, and I’ll tell him to shut up. Mom and Grandma would tell me I’m still a good big sister, even if sometimes I get sharp with him. Even if sometimes I break their rules. In a few hours, I’ll stop seeing things. In a few days, the pain will come back, fresh as ever.
I freeze, searching the shadows.
There are initials pressed into the floor near one of the roof supports—S.G. I lean down for a closer look, wanting to touch those letters and feel close to Mom. When I squat low, the little glass bottle of medicine in my pocket falls. I reach for it and drop my brother, and two things crack against the ground. His third breath comes fast, then a fourth, fifth. There’s sticky wet red on my hand when I cradle his head. Stop, stop.
“Stop!” I shout and lose my count entirely. He bites me, but I don’t hit him. I won’t get that angry. Not like Mom and everyone else. He clamps down hard enough his loosened baby teeth imbed in the meat of my arm. I’ll pull them out and put them under his pillow tonight, for the tooth fairy. She’ll leave him the last mini Snickers from the wiped-clean gas station. I’d been saving it for him. I’m a good big sister.
I take one breath, then another.
