The Blue Nowhere

he let his mind wander where it wished.
    J ennie Bishop was wearing one of those terrible, open-up-the-back robes they give you in hospitals.
    And what exactly, she thought, is the point of those tiny blue dots on the cloth?
    She propped up the pillow and looked absently around the yellow room as she waited for Dr. Williston. It was eleven-fifteen and the doctor was late.
    She was thinking about what she had to do after the tests here were completed. Shopping, picking up Brandon after school, shepherding him to the tennis courts. Today the boy would be playing against Linda Garland, who was the cutest little thing in fourth grade—and a total brat whose onlystrategy was to rush the net every chance she got, in an attempt, Jennie was convinced, to break her opponents’ noses with a killer volley.
    Thinking about Frank too, of course. And deciding how vastly relieved she was that her husband wasn’t here. He was such a contradiction. Chasing bad men through the streets of Oakland, unfazed as he arrested killers twice his size, and chatting happily with prostitutes and drug dealers. She didn’t think she’d ever seen him shaken up.
    Until last week. When a medical checkup had shown that Jennie’s white blood cell count was out of whack for no logical reason. As she told him the news Frank Bishop went sheet white and had fallen silent. He’d nodded a dozen times, his head rising and falling broadly. She’d thought he was going to cry—something she’d never seen—and Jennie wondered how exactly she’d have handled that.
    “So what does it all mean?” Frank had asked in a shaky voice.
    “Might be some kind of weird infection,” she told him, looking him right in the eye, “or it might be cancer.”
    “Okay, okay,” he’d repeated in a whisper, as if speaking more loudly or saying anything else would pitch her into imminent peril.
    They’d talked about some meaningless details—appointment times, Dr. Williston’s credentials—and then she’d booted him outside to tend his orchard while she got supper ready.
    Might be some kind of weird infection . . .
    Oh, she loved Frank Bishop more than she’d ever loved anyone, more than she ever could love anyone. But Jennie was very grateful that her husband wasn’t here. She wasn’t in any mood to hold somebody else’s hand at the moment.
    Might be cancer . . .
    Well, she’d know soon enough what it was. She looked at the clock. Where was Dr. Williston? She didn’t mind hospitals, didn’t mind having unpleasant tests, but she hated waiting. Maybe there was something on TV. When did The Young and the Restless come on? Or she could listen to the radio, maybe—
    A squat nurse wheeling a medical cart pushed into the room. “Morning,” the woman said in a thick Latino accent.
    “Hello.”
    “You Jennifer Bishop?”
    “That’s right.”
    The nurse hooked Jennie up to a vital functions monitor mounted to the wall above the bed. A soft beep began to sound rhythmically. Then the woman consulted a computer printout and looked over a wide array of medicines.
    “You Dr. Williston’s patient, right?”
    “That’s right.”
    She looked at Jennie’s plastic wrist bracelet and nodded.
    Jennie smiled. “Didn’t believe me?”
    The nurse said, “Always double-check. My father, he was carpenter, you know. He always say, ‘Measure twice, cut once.’”
    Jennie struggled to keep from laughing, thinking that this probably wasn’t the best expression to share with patients in a hospital.
    She watched the nurse draw some clear liquid into the hypodermic and asked, “Dr. Williston ordered an injection?”
    “That’s right.”
    “I’m only in for some tests.”
    Checking the printout again, the woman nodded. “This is what he ordered.”
    Jennie looked at the sheet of paper but it was impossible to make sense out of the words and numbers on it.
    The nurse cleaned her arm with an alcohol wipe and injected the drug. After she withdrew the needle Jennie felt an odd tingle spread through her arm near the site of the injection—a burning coldness.
    “The doctor be with you soon.”
    She left before Jennie could ask her what the injection was. It troubled her a little, the shot. She knew you had to be careful with medicines in her condition but then she told herself there wasn’t anything to worry about. The fact that she was pregnant was clearly shown in the records, Jennie knew, and surely no one here would do anything to jeopardize the