Where the God of Love Hangs Out: Fiction by Amy Bloom

different, really, than a girl going off to be a Deadhead or driving to Los Angeles with some badass to become a porn star. When people in the neighborhood asked where Sherri was, Mr. Cairn said, “We lost her,” and nobody pressed him and they certainly didn’t know he meant she’d gone to join the Exodus Ministry in Indianapolis. Sherri sent a Christmas card every year, and other than that, it was just Frances and her father, the storyteller.
    S.S. TERRA NOVA
    “This one’s a day brightener,” Mrs. Shenker said. “This guy’s an amputee himself, and a world-class athlete …” Mrs. Shenker skimmed ahead a few lines. “Well, not a world-class athlete, clearly. But athletic, and he’s invented these special responsive feet that give energy back to the leg, so you don’t just walk around, clump, clump, clump, and there’s a special suction cup so the whole leg just goes on—” She makes a sharp, sucking sound.
    Mr. Shenker stood up. “I’m going to take a little walk,” he said. Mrs. Shenker and Frances saw him through the glass block wall of the solarium, chatting with Theresa the charge nurse and, like magic, two more nurses showed up and they passed a box of doughnuts around and Theresa disappeared for a moment and then reappeared, carrying real coffee cups and giving one to Mr. Shenker. Mrs. Shenker had the solarium and the doctors and Mr. Shenker had the nurses. Frances had bumped into him a couple of times when he was walking out of an empty exam room, straightening his tie, and when she looked over her shoulder, she saw a nurse come out and lock the door behind her. The nurses looked transformed; they looked as if they had been handed something immensely valuable and fragile, whose care could not be entrusted to ordinary women. Mr. Shenker looked as he always did, handsome and doomed.
    Frances said to Mrs. Shenker, “I have a few patients to check on. Do you want to sit with Beth?”
    “Isn’t she napping?”
    Frances admitted that Beth probably was napping. (Although napping was not the right word; Beth Shenker was on enough methadone to anesthetize a three-hundred-pound man and the only thing that woke her for the first eight days was a gnawing pain of the kind you get with pancreatic cancer. On the bright side, while almost no one survives pancreatic cancer, Frances thought that Beth Shenker, like most necrotizing-fasciitis victims, would survive into old age.)
    Mrs. Shenker said, “All right, it’s almost time for Judge Judy . I’ll go watch that with Beth. Tell Mr. Shenker where I am, when you see him.”
    Beth was dreaming. She was five, jumping up and down on her new big-girl bed in the middle of the night, clean sheets under her soft, pretty feet, the cool air tickling her soles as she jumped higher and higher, and in the dream, her little feet lit up the dark room like fireflies.
    Lorraine Shenker smoothed Beth’s sheet over the metal hoop that protected her legs and straightened out Beth’s IV line and kept her eyes on Judge Judy, who was looking over her bifocals to tell a fat nineteen-year-old African American mother of twins that she deserved to lose custody of her children. The way Judge Judy waved her hand dismissively and then slipped off the bifocals to award damages to the girl’s attractive, well-dressed brother, whose car the young mother had totaled while he looked after those twins, was wonderful. It would be nice if there were a Dr . Judy, handing down diagnoses and reversing the decisions of other, dumber doctors. Dr. Judy would have taken one look at Beth and said, firmly, This young lady is not going to have a gross and permanent disability. Case dismissed.
    Frances walked past Beth’s room, reading over Beth’s chart, and by the time she got to the nurses’ desk, Nathan Silverman was taking the cruller she wanted. Nathan Silverman was Beth’s surgeon, and he’d done a great job and he told everyone he’d done a great job, and Frances thought, Narcissistic