L.A. Weather

by María Amparo Escandón

  “The girls? Where?”

  The cheap ashtray’s image, bird’s-eye-view and sideways, remained in Claudia’s mind, looping intermittently with other loose, random thoughts, during the entire drive to the hospital. While zooming down the freeway, she imagined a gigantic glass ashtray filled with water and the lifeless bodies of her nieces lying at the bottom. Surely Olivia would kill herself for having lost her daughters in such a careless way.

  Why was her sister’s life like a soap opera while hers was so predictable? “Wait a minute,” she said aloud. “Soap operas are predictable.” Where did the difference lie, then? Perhaps in the fact that Olivia’s life happened to her, while Claudia planned her life and accomplished her goals. She promised herself to revisit this insight some other time when she wouldn’t have to pay attention to the road. She’d already missed a few exits, and that set her back ten minutes.

  As she corrected her route, she wondered if she’d have the strength to cater the funeral, God forbid, and concluded that she would. In situations of deep grief people tend to get busy and helpful as a way to alleviate sorrow, and she knew that’s what she would do. She quickly put together a menu of finger foods and stored it in her memory, just in case one or both girls did not make it. She’d avoid the chicken taquitos with guacamole held together with a toothpick, a greasy cliché. She’d also stay away from the tortas ahogadas. A dish with the word “drowned” in its name could not be part of the menu. Instead, she’d serve the small squash-flower tamales. Edible flowers were sensitive and appropriate to the occasion, she thought. Then she’d add to the menu the grilled lobster tail skewers with tamarind dipping sauce, the silver-dollar quesadillas with chilorio, the scallop ceviche tostadas from Culiacán smothered in lime juice, plenty of tequila to drown the despair, and she’d also bring a sample of fine wines from Baja’s Valle de Guadalupe, smuggled through Tijuana to avoid the excessive export tax.

  She stepped on the accelerator and jumped into the car-pool lane. She knew she could get fined, but ever since she’d allocated a budget to pay for this kind of ticket a few years back, she’d only gotten busted four times, which proved that she didn’t overuse this self-awarded license. Her strategy had been so successful that in the past year she had saved hundreds of hours of dreadful Los Angeles traffic at a very low cost, considering that her tickets averaged out to just a few dollars for each time she sped along the car-pool lane with no companion in the car.

  “They’re in stable condition,” Keila told Claudia as she walked into the waiting room of the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, where the girls lay in adjoining beds. “Olivia is inside. We’re only allowed to go in one person at a time.”

  Claudia didn’t seem to hear the last part. She rushed past Keila and Felix without offering a greeting and went straight to the unit, opening random doors along the way until she found Olivia. Seeing the girls hooked up to respirators and tubes and monitors finally made the crisis real. I will never have children, she vowed to herself.

  Olivia hugged her long and tight. “Thanks for coming, sis,” she whispered. “They’re going to be fine.”

  Claudia clearly heard “They’re not going to be fine.” She could always tell when her sister said words to convince herself of anything she didn’t really believe. It was the nearly unnoticeable tremor in her lips, the way her voice struggled to find its way out of her mouth in hesitant little bursts that told her the truth.

  “The doctor said they’re doing more tests to check for any brain damage, and there’s a possible risk of infection, since they inhaled a lot of contaminated water, but I’m praying, we’re all praying,” said Olivia.

  “Is there anything I can do before I go?”

  “But you just got here,” Olivia said.

  “I have to run to the fish market, but call me with any news.”

  Truth is, fish was not on Claudia’s menu that day, but watching her nieces in such a state provoked a feeling of hopefulness that she tried to repress, as in her view resorting to hope meant she did not have control and that angered her. Regardless of how much she loved those girls, there was nothing she could do to save them. She measured life’s events on a scale of hope versus control. The less control one had over a certain situation, the more hope one needed to face it. Once, when she was illustrating her theory to Olivia, she used a medical example: one had to have much more hope for a positive result when afflicted with terminal cancer than when healing a scraped knee. To her, that was the core principle of hope: people turn the management and resolution of a situation over to a higher authority—whether it’s a doctor or God himself—when they are incapable of handling it directly, therefore demonstrating the need for high hopes in desperate situations. Because she refused to relinquish her power to third parties, she left vowing never to set foot in a hospital again.

  * * *

  Patricia, the youngest of the Alvarado sisters, learned about the accident in Minneapolis, where she was visiting her client, Target, at their headquarters, as she did every other Monday. Known in her industry as the Social Ace, she used digital media to connect brands with their audiences at their deepest emotional levels. There was no consumer want or need that she didn’t know how to identify, address, and help her clients satisfy with products and services. “I don’t tell my friends about your brand because I like your brand, but because I like my friends.” This was her ultimate rule of engagement when posting messages and ads on her clients’ behalf on digital platforms.

  Keila had called Patricia in the middle of a meeting where she was discussing Target’s social presence at the upcoming Billboard Latin Music Awards, and Patricia had ignored the call, as she always did. Several text messages later, finally responding to her cellphone’s nonstop vibrations, Patricia excused herself from the conference room to call Keila back.

  “The twins drowned in the pool and were resuscitated.” Keila’s voice trembled as she delivered the news. “We’re at Cedars-Sinai. Olivia is undone.”

  Patricia left immediately, promising her client she’d work on the awards’ social strategy over the weekend, and got on the last flight out of Minneapolis before an impending blizzard shut the airport down. A savvy economy traveler, she preferred a bulkhead seat or an emergency exit to have more legroom. Clients didn’t always pay for business-class tickets. But this time she didn’t care that she was sitting in a middle seat—the only one available for her last-minute booking—two rows from the back of the plane, where people wanting to use the bathroom congregated to fart. All she cared about was that she had been able to get out before the storm hit and was on her way to comfort her sister. But the ride was a bumpy one and she felt nauseous and weak. She wondered if it was due to the plane shaking or a genuine physical reaction to the emergency. Being on day seven of a juice cleanse probably didn’t help either.

  She tried to distract herself with work, but couldn’t. Somewhere over Nebraska she caught herself praying to a God she did not believe in, asking the clouds that swelled outside in the big void to spare her sister yet another tragedy. Everyone knew how much of a mother Olivia was, how much she had wanted those babies, and all she went through to have them, but no one talked about the miscarriages and disappointments. It was as if they had never happened.

  What was so mysterious about suffering? Why did people avoid talking about misfortune and grief? Except for a few death announcements and surgeries, people didn’t discuss pain or hardship. She had made it her mission to address the good and the bad, to share the joy as well as the drama and bring out into the open the full spectrum of human emotions and experiences—“the open” being social media. But at that moment, on the plane flying over Colorado, she tried to take her mind off her anxiety, so she focused instead on purchasing a hot meal from the flight attendant, resigned to go through one more dreadful airline-food experience. Maybe it was time to take a break from the juice cleanse and eat something solid. This time she got a plate of chilaquiles, but could have sworn it was vomit. She thought ab
out shipping it to the airline CEO in a refrigerated container for him to taste, but instead took a picture with her phone and made a note to herself to post it across all the social platforms on her dashboard as soon as she landed.

  It was clear to Patricia that she and Olivia had a bond that didn’t exist between her and Claudia: motherhood. Even before Olivia married Felix, a rather mediocre Realtor who sometimes irked Patricia with his sexist jokes, and started fertility treatments, she had demonstrated her maternal instincts by helping Patricia raise her son, Daniel, while she, Patricia, the teen single mother, finished high school, dated boys, got drunk, used drugs, crashed the car, fucked guys, went to traffic school for speeding (twice), broke up with boyfriends, bungee-jumped, skydived, went to college, traveled abroad, got summer jobs, crashed another car, changed majors, graduated, got more jobs, and married Eric Remillard on a whim.

  “Infinite Text” was how she titled the story of her life with her husband. She lived in Los Angeles, Eric was based in San Francisco, and they both had busy business travel schedules. They had agreed to live in different cities, but they managed to spend every weekend together, here or there, or wherever they happened to be. Texting was their preferred way of communicating. They sent each other selfies, links, news articles, ideas, GIFs, memes, and everything that might help keep them in the same realm. This arrangement allowed Patricia to be close to her parents, and more important, to Olivia.

  As a sign of her profound appreciation for her help with her son, Patricia had built her sister a social presence as @theothermother_sis, regularly posting and praising Olivia’s motherly accomplishments. What would she post now?

  During the Uber ride to the hospital, Patricia was able to talk to Olivia on the phone and piece together the details of the girls’ accident and what the doctors were saying in terms of their recovery. She had time to google the particulars of the diving reflex condition in which, in rare instances, a child who drowns in cold water experiences a decreased heartbeat and less need for oxygen and stands a chance of surviving if she’s resuscitated within forty-five minutes and tweeted this important piece of information to her thousands of followers. As her Uber sped down surface streets, she cherished the sight of mini-malls with nail salons, frozen-yogurt joints, laundromats and hole-in-the-wall ethnic restaurants—surely family run, surely immigrant owned. She felt at home. The Los Angeles afternoon light—with its oranges and reds overly saturated like a bad Instagram filter—bounced back a distorted reflection of her face in the window. At twenty-seven, she had a complexion devoid of imperfections, except for a zit on her cheek that she’d squeezed during the flight. “You’re the spitting image of your great-grandmother,” Keila would tell her oftentimes, showing her a faded photograph of a young woman whose days would soon end in a concentration camp in Poland. She sighed and went back to her phone. There was a text message from her client Benjamin.

  Everything all right?

  No. More later, Patricia replied quickly as the car pulled up in front of the hospital.

  Visiting hours were in full swing. The line to get on the elevator seemed too long for Patricia to wait, so she climbed the seven flights of stairs to Pediatrics, skipping steps (remembering as she stepped on the last landing that she’d forgotten her carry-on suitcase in the car) and running until her sister was in her arms. All of a sudden, with no offense to Keila, she wished Olivia had been her mother.

  Tuesday, January 12th

  The twins went home after infections were ruled out. They were to undergo brain function as well as cardiac and vascular tests periodically throughout the year, but the overall prognosis was positive. “A miracle,” the doctor had proclaimed upon delivering the good news, implicitly diminishing his own accomplishment in bringing the twins back from the dead. Keila, who had been camping out in the waiting room since the first night, leaving her seat only to use the bathroom and make short trips to the hospital’s cafeteria, continued to nurse her guilt, a weight on her chest that would limit her breathing capacity for the rest of her life.

  In the car ride back to Rancho Verde, she turned off the radio, rolled up her window, and as she drove down the palm-tree-lined streets of Los Angeles, where the homes’ front lawns were screaming for water, she allowed herself to think about Oscar. She fanned her disappointment in the way he had handled the situation into a spiteful rancor. In fact—she corrected herself—he hadn’t handled anything at all.

  Had the twins’ accident happened two years before, Oscar would have taken charge of the emergency with authority and intelligence. Throughout their marriage Oscar had proven to be an astounding problem solver and fast thinker—like the time when Olivia, then nine years old, had played with a neighbor’s puppies while visiting her grandparents in Mexico City, only to find out two weeks after she’d returned to Los Angeles that the entire litter had contracted rabies. At the time, the vaccine was not easy to find in the United States, as the disease had been eradicated, so Oscar flew with Olivia back to Mexico to get her the painful shots. And what about the time when the earthquake destroyed the bridges along the 10 Freeway back in 1994? Repairs would take over a year. His daily commute to the office would increase to an hour and a half each way, maneuvering through crowded detours, so he temporarily moved his office to a nearby executive suite and subleased his own office to someone else. When Patricia became the victim of a rape that resulted in a pregnancy at age fourteen, Oscar immediately had her identify the boy, report the assault to the police, and press charges. He had found a therapist for her, removed her from school to protect her from potential peer scorn, hired a tutor, and when she decided she wanted to keep it, provided the best possible medical care. When little Daniel was born, he welcomed the baby into the family; a true Alvarado. But now Keila expected to find Oscar where she left him: sitting in front of the TV watching the Weather Channel, oblivious to the crisis that had unfolded around him. She had spent hours wondering what could possibly have changed in Oscar’s life, but nothing came to mind. His descent into apathy had been dizzying and inexplicable. It was then that the word “divorce” intruded in her mind like a YouTube ad that could not be skipped.

  * * *

  When Keila arrived home, she did not find Oscar in front of the TV. Instead, he was looking out the window with mild curiosity and said without taking his eyes off the cloudy sky: “El Niño is about to drop four inches of rain in the wrong place, right in the middle of the city.”

  “Are you even aware of what’s been going on? I’ve been gone two days and you haven’t noticed? I could have been dead, decomposing in some ditch.”

  “Where were you? I was looking for you.”

  “You mean since Sunday night? Weren’t you worried about us? I waited for your call.”

  “I did call. You left your phone on your nightstand. I figured you were with one of the girls.”

  He was right, but instead of acknowledging her error, she attacked: “Your granddaughters almost died right in front of you while you were staring at the wall! We’ve been at the hospital all this time.”

  “What do you mean? What happened?”

  “You just won’t see what’s in front of your nose.”

  “You should have called me! Olivia surely had her phone with her. Where are the twins?”

  “What do you care? You’re not even present in your own life, let alone anyone else’s. I have no idea what’s going on with you. Why are you giving up? Look at you!”

  Oscar scanned his clothes: an old coffee stain ran down his pajama pocket and his sleeve had a tear at the elbow. His tongue felt acrid. Had he brushed his teeth? He didn’t remember the last time he’d gotten a haircut or clipped his fingernails. He scratched his overgrown beard and wondered if the pang behind his sternum was a new, undiagnosed health issue, or even worse, shame.

  “I want to divorce you, Oscar.” Strange words to say after thirty-nine years of marriage, Keila thought as she said them. But there they were, her feelings turned into words that floated l
istlessly in the air trapped in the room.

  Oscar sat down in his chair and said nothing at first, but then in a rush of strength he was able to whisper, “You do what you have to do.”

  Wednesday, January 13th

  El Niño did not deliver the much-needed rain that evening, as expected. Palm trees wilted from thirst. Isolated fifty-five-mile-per-hour gusts of wind pushed small cars out of their freeway lanes, like tumbleweeds, across western portions of the San Fernando Valley. Dangerous eight-foot sneaker waves along the Santa Monica coastline were expected due to elevated surf. They were known to wash people off of beaches and rock jetties. Rip currents could pull swimmers out to sea. Surely the ocean would claim the life of another surfer. Surely Keila would follow through with her threat. Or not.

  Saturday, January 16th

  What is there to say to your spouse after learning she doesn’t want you anymore? Oscar walked around the house as if spooked by some demon, looking over his shoulder, hoping not to bump into Keila. She’d return home from her multiple errands—supermarket, cleaners, pedicure, art store, and maybe coffee with one of her friends from book club—and he would run to lock himself up in the smallest and darkest closet among coats and pants as self-punishment. He was well aware of his guilt. She had a solid reason to leave him. But later at night, when the house was finally quiet, he’d go to bed, lay down next to Keila facing the wall and pretend to be asleep.