When Ella first started working at the hospital, three months ago, Marcus would see her in the cafeteria, and say, “When you headed back to the vegetable garden?”
To her this helped explain their silence, the way their blind eyes shifted. They were all severely brain damaged; in most cases only the brain stem still functioned. Many had never been outside the hospital walls, yet they’d been alive for months, sometimes years.
Ella smiled at them cautiously. She was 20, and plump in contrast to their leanness. She, too, had a tattoo, a butterfly on her right ankle, although it was hidden under her baggy uniform. Because of the tattoos she felt a small solidarity with them.
“Why do you force it?” the father said, glaring at Ella.
“It’s my job to feed him,” Ella told him.
“Little lambs,” her mother called them when Ella talked about them after work. “They must be on this earth for a reason.” And that was when Ella developed her theory that the babies were angels, on earth to teach us something: otherwise, how could this be endured?
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Ella had seen the certificate program for care assistants advertised on television a year ago. It had seemed better than working in the deli, and it was. Yet there were moments when she wondered if she was in the wrong occupation. Unlike the deli, where a simple list of rules was stapled to a wooden post in the stock room, the hospital’s employee binder was two inches thick, and those were just the official regulations. There were vast and shifting numbers of unspoken rules as well: each doctor’s and nurse’s preferences needed to be catered to. Then there were the parents, some who rarely visited, some who arrived sedated, all of them in states of unbearable grief.
