L.A. Weather

by María Amparo Escandón

“He’s still harassing people, but not me, at least not to my face. I know he talks about me behind my back. He’s a stupid jerk.”

  “Are you still upset?”

  “It makes me mad. Now other people think I’m gay.”

  “And how does that affect you?”

  “I don’t know. I’m angry, I guess. What do they care if I am or not?”

  “Would it be a terrible thing for you if you were gay?”

  Daniel kept quiet until they reached the top of the trail. They faced the enormity of the Pacific Ocean shimmering in front of them. Both took a deep breath at the same time.

  “Would it be terrible for you if I was?” asked Daniel finally.

  “Of course not,” said Patricia in her most determined voice. “I accept you and love you no matter what. I will always protect you. I’ll be your forever fan. I will turn into a vicious panther to defend you. You know that. If we were living in the eighties I’d be worried about your health. If we lived in a repressive country where being gay is illegal, I’d be worried about your safety. There will always be people who have a hard time accepting what’s only natural. But here we are in twenty-first-century California. It can’t get more progressive than this. What do you think?” she said, feeling discomfort deep inside, knowing that even under those favorable circumstances Daniel would eventually endure expressions of hate one way or another. But she wasn’t about to discuss that with him, not just yet.

  “I don’t know, Mom. I guess it would be okay. Bubbe always tells me that you have to be true to yourself. Does that include being gay?”

  “It sure does,” said Patricia, silently chuckling at Keila’s predilection for quoting self-help books.

  “But how do I know if I’m being true to myself? I don’t know if I’m gay.”

  “What would be the signs?”

  “Maybe that I like a boy?”

  “Do you?”

  “Yeah, this one kid in swim team, but I’m not really sure. There’s also a girl. Sometimes we swap our lunch. Her mom’s a really good cook.”

  “I suppose your true self, as Bubbe says, will reveal itself eventually. I have gay friends who have always known, with no doubt whatsoever. For other people it’s a process. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way. It just happens. Why don’t you take this one step at a time?”

  Daniel flung a stone down a small ravine. In the distance, the ocean, contained by the bay, minded its own business, oblivious to the momentous conversation that had just taken place.

  “We can always talk about this again, you know that, right?” said Patricia, hugging Daniel. This time, he didn’t wiggle out of her embrace.

  Monday, April 18th

  After Daniel finished his homework, after he played a video game, after he went to bed and turned the lights out, he hugged his pillow and thought about the boy on swim team.

  Saturday, April 30th

  Passover was always at the Alvarados’. They owned the holiday as if they were observant. It didn’t matter that they weren’t. No one really cared. It was all about tradition. Thirty or so family members and friends gathered every year to conduct the same rituals, sing the same songs, and eat the same food.

  They all sat around the same three rental round tables for ten settings laid out on the patio, served by the same waiters, and catered by someone other than Claudia, who refused to cook Seder food. Did they talk about the same issues? Yes. Did they tell the same jokes? Yes. Did they feel they were stuck in a comfortably predictable loop, repeating the event over and over, in which whatever happened the rest of the year was just the in-between? Of course, except this time it was different for two reasons.

  First, Olivia had to make up an excuse for Felix not being at the dinner. As with most lies, hers was convoluted: “Felix went to pick up one of those trees the city was giving away for free today. It’s a program around Earth Day, you know. They’re handing out free trees. He was planting it in the canyon and he threw out his back. Nothing serious. But he’s in bed, watching TV.”

  Second, and most important, at least for a family who didn’t much care about Felix’s absence, Prince was dead. The entire Alvarado clan, as hard-core fans of his music, spent a good portion of the dinner talking about crying doves and purple rain. They discussed drugs and brought up names of other celebrities who had died of overdoses in the past couple of years.

  “We’re losing all the talent to drugs,” sighed Patricia.

  “And what about the thousands of people killed with illegally exported American guns in the Mexican drug wars, many of them innocent bystanders?” said Keila, whose indignation rose to red-flag levels every time she watched related news on Univision.

  “I’m glad none of you girls has ever used drugs,” said Oscar, with 100 percent certainty.

  An awkward silence fell over the group. Patricia picked up her cellphone, casually avoiding looking directly at her father. Olivia was about to say something when she felt a kick under the table. Since she was sitting between her two sisters she couldn’t tell who had warned her to shut up. Claudia behaved as if she weren’t there. She took a not-so-enthusiastic swig of wine and with her fork dragged the food around her plate, perhaps hoping to improve the taste.

  Keila had noticed Claudia’s enlarged pupils. She hadn’t said a word throughout the entire dinner. She seemed distracted, like a teenager in a school test who doesn’t know the answers and, defeated, decides to daydream instead until the bell rings. Keila knew that there was plenty of drug abuse among chefs. She had known a friend of Claudia’s who had overdosed and died right in the middle of his restaurant kitchen. To her knowledge and contrary to the trend among cooks, Claudia had no tattoos and had not become addicted to any substance—but looking at her now, in her high heels, her slinky dress (was that a price tag peeping out from under the armpit?), and her normally perfect hair now in disarray, she wondered if she had missed a sign that could have helped Claudia remain clear of the danger.

  As Keila tried to shoo away negative thoughts about her daughter and instead focus on the rituals of the Passover dinner, Claudia suddenly got up, clumsily knocked her folding chair to the ground, and wobbled toward the house, zigzagging erratically across the patio until she reached the cement scar in the middle of the lawn, where she collapsed facedown.

  May

  Sunday, May 1st

  There is nothing benign about a benign brain tumor. Even a small one the size of a blueberry can cause irreparable damage. Keila wondered why people always compared tumors to fruit: it’s the size of a grape, the size of a kiwi, the size of a lemon.

  “Claudia’s tumor is the size of an orange,” said the neurologist the day after Passover, when he explained the results of the MRI to Keila and Oscar.

  In the immediate confusion, after Claudia collapsed, Aunt Belinda had poured a pitcher of ice water on her head, thinking she had passed out from alcohol ingestion. Someone took her shoes off. Someone else loosened her belt. A third cousin even slapped her in the face repeatedly until Oscar made her stop. Eric shouted orders in French that everyone ignored, but Claudia remained unresponsive. Keila desperately shook her and yelled, “Stay with me!” This was the only phrase she could think of, a catchphrase characters in TV series always seemed to say to a victim who has been shot and is about to die.

  In the chaos of the emergency, no one realized that the paramedics who responded to the 911 call were the same ones who months before had rescued little Diana and Andrea from the pool. With such knowledge of the terrain, they deftly whisked Claudia away and rushed her to the hospital. Several friends of the family, each in their own car, followed the ambulance, forming a procession eerily similar to those of funerals, only at twice the speed. Needless to say, the party was over.

  Once Claudia was admitted to the ER, a number of tests were performed, a process that lasted well into daybreak. The MRI revealed a monster meningioma situated where Claudia’s right frontal lobe should have been. The tumor had pushed the brain back to
make room for itself, proving once again the undeniable law of physics: no two objects can occupy the same space at the same time. And since there was only so much space inside Claudia’s skull, the right side of her brain had been wrinkled into a smaller area behind the tumor, causing all kinds of consequences that would surface later, if she survived the surgery.

  Monday, May 2nd

  Gabriel, who flew back from New York as soon as he heard the news and went straight from LAX to the hospital, missed the initial chaos, but he had been filled in by Patricia while in transit, thanks to the in-flight Wi-Fi. By the time he arrived in the hospital Claudia had already been sedated.

  “It’s going to take a few days to assemble and prepare the team of surgeons for Claudia’s operation,” said Patricia.

  “I want to know who these doctors are, what are their credentials,” said Gabriel, who as Claudia’s husband felt entitled to start making decisions on her behalf.

  “One of them will fly in from Phoenix. The others are local. I’ll give you all the information so you can take over.”

  “Email me everything,” he said, using his executive voice. “What are her chances of survival?”

  Patricia struggled to answer, her mind shifting from scenario to scenario, all of them devastating, until she finally gathered strength and said, “Slim.”

  Tuesday, May 3rd

  On Keila’s orders, Olivia and Patricia went to Claudia’s house to pick up pajamas, clothes, makeup, and sundries in anticipation of their sister’s recovery, or would it be her burial? God forbid.

  After they parked on the narrow driveway and got out of the car, they noticed the first obvious sign of their sister’s illness (not that there hadn’t already been plenty of overlooked signs): the overstuffed, neglected mailbox. Those brochures, catalogs, magazines, and unsolicited preapproved credit card applications that did not fit in the slot anymore had been stacked on the entrance steps, some held together with rubber bands, clearly the work of a tidy and dutiful mailman. Because of Gabriel’s two-week trip to New York to close a large movie deal, it had been up to Claudia to bring the mail in, but she didn’t bother. Olivia sorted it on the spot, keeping the bills and throwing away the junk mail in the recycling bin at the end of the driveway. Once they were inside, Ramsay and Velcro greeted them as if they were goddesses from another dimension. Olivia fed the starving animals and filled their empty water bowls, while Patricia went to the bathroom to gather Claudia’s shampoo and creams. The toilet wasn’t flushed. The shower dripped steadily, which might have saved the dog and the cat from dying of thirst. Several turds of dog poop were sprinkled around the hardwood floor and the rugs. Olivia had to carefully skip around so as not to step on them. The kitty-litter box overflowed with little brown sticks resembling Tootsie Rolls peeping out of the sand. It seemed as if Claudia had gone on a trip and abandoned her pets for several days, but it couldn’t be. When Olivia had asked her at Passover dinner where she’d been, since she hadn’t answered her phone, she said she had spent the last few days at home. And then, what about the other signs of neglect? In the bedroom, clothes, shoes, and towels were strewn about. Uneaten food lay on plates and on the floor, probably dragged away by Velcro. Ants crawled in a trail over the armchair, hauling tiny bits of wilted lettuce. A glass of wine had been spilled on the bed, the stain now dry. How long had their sister been holding on, trying and failing to lead a normal life?

  “How the hell did she manage to drive to Mom and Dad’s for Passover?” said Patricia aloud, shocked by the utter chaos.

  “Uber,” Olivia yelled from the kitchen. “Her car’s outside,” she said, proud of her detective ability.

  Then came her strange discovery: “Come here! The whole place smells of gas.”

  Olivia turned off one of the burners on the stove that was slightly on and opened the window.

  “How did she not notice this stench?” said Patricia.

  “How did we not notice that she was so sick?”

  “I feel awful.”

  “We’re not doctors. How could we know?”

  “It’s all so obvious now. She was practically screaming at us that she was not well. We just didn’t want to hear.”

  “Let’s not blame ourselves. It’s not going to help her now.”

  “What if she dies? We should have seen what was going on.”

  “We could have caught the tumor when it was the size of a cranberry.”

  “Or a wolffia.”

  “A what?”

  “Google it.”

  “You don’t have to get so snippy!”

  “Sorry, I just feel like a live wire right now. It’s the smallest fruit there is.”

  There was so much to take in and understand about Claudia. So many questions about her recent behavior had been answered just in the past few hours, since they had learned her diagnosis. It seemed years since the family had gathered for Passover dinner only a few nights before. Her enlarged pupils. Her lack of interest in daily duties. Missing appointments and deadlines. Falling asleep everywhere. Not answering her phone. Not feeding her pets! She picked up Ramsay and hugged him tightly. She tried to hold back her tears but something inside, perhaps where sisterly feelings resided, seemed to burst. She walked outside, to the deck, and the sensor lights came on. The lit-up pool water lay still. The ocean waves could barely be heard slapping the beach below. She wished she could stay there forever, feeling the nearly imperceptible breeze on her face, but she had to gather Claudia’s things, drop off the pets at her house, and return to the hospital.

  In selecting a few clothes and pajamas from Claudia’s closet, it was no surprise for Patricia to find several dresses with tags on, mostly from Barneys and Saks. But wait a minute, wasn’t that sweater hers? She remembered losing it at a dinner party that she and Claudia had gone to together. Looking further, she found a shoebox full of sunglasses, many of which she recognized as hers, lost here and there over a number of years. Then she dug out another box filled with knickknacks that Claudia would never have bought or owned, at least rightfully, like one of the Emmy Awards for Best Actress given to Claire Danes for Homeland. This discovery of the coveted statuette led Patricia to inspect the entire closet. What else had her sister picked up from celebrity parties around town? Among all sorts of chef’s uniforms, clogs, and Crocs were stilettos, designer sandals, and a large collection of jeans and bikinis, many of them surely bought (or stolen) at sample sales at Dover Street Market New York, one of her favorite shops. Claudia favored quirky fashion and had the model’s body to show it off. Patricia wondered how someone dedicated to making food for a living could remain a size 2, but there it was: Claudia was not only thin as an asparagus, but surpassed her two sisters in height by several inches, and might be dead by forty.

  If Claudia died, would it be Patricia’s duty to return all the unused clothes to the stores? Would she and Olivia pick out some of the remaining clothes to keep, or would they donate the entire wardrobe to charity? Would she be the one to return the Emmy to Claire Danes? She had a legitimate reason to meet her in person and apologize for her deceased sister’s theft. She’d also congratulate Claire for Temple Grandin (fuck, she was so good at playing personality-challenged characters). And Romeo + Juliet, well, that was her masterpiece, right up there with Little Women and The Hours. Patricia was definitely a fan to the core, but suddenly stopped herself, ashamed to be fangirling as her sister fought for her life.

  “Pats! Get over here! Look at what I found in the scullery!” yelled Olivia.

  And there it was, in the small room adjacent to the dining room along with all the china and table linens, neatly stacked right on the shelf: Keila’s mom’s Seder plate set.

  Friday, May 6th

  As in the preamble of a joke, a priest and a rabbi walked into the hospital’s waiting area. In light of Claudia’s emergency, Keila and Oscar had called a truce and joined forces to help their daughter, harnessing the fullest range of celestial support on her behalf.

  “T
hank you for coming, Father. Thanks, Rabbi. As I told you on the phone, the tumor is the size of a grapefruit. They’re operating now.”

  Oscar silently wished Keila’s description of the tumor’s size would go in the direction of smaller fruits, like figs, apricots, or better yet, blueberries, but she had the habit of exaggerating when she was worried, and he feared she would eventually compare it to cantaloupes or even watermelons.

  For a change, Oscar wasn’t thinking about the chance of thunderstorms predicted for the San Gabriel Mountains. He didn’t pay attention when the National Weather Service warned about the risk of dangerous lightning, flash flooding, gusty winds, and hail. Possible mudslides in areas deforested by previous wildfires were not on his mind that morning. It was Claudia, his girl, his firstborn, who occupied his thoughts.

  After saying a few prayers, both priest and rabbi settled side by side in a far corner of the visitor room to soothe anyone who might need comfort. Olivia and Eric sat with them for a while.

  “It’s been several days of tests and preparation. One of the surgeons flew in from the Mayo Clinic’s Phoenix campus yesterday. The prognosis is bleak. She has a ten percent chance of coming out of the surgery alive. And if she does, there’s a ninety percent chance of her never waking up from a coma.” Olivia’s voice sounded shivery and brittle.

  “We should be prepared for the worst,” said the priest, a man in his sixties with a bald head as polished as a light bulb, who for sure knew better than to resort to a heavily overused, prefabricated phrase that meant nothing.

  By midmorning, after four hours in the operating room, the two surgeons came out and gave the Alvarados a quick update.

  “We’ve managed to block the artery that was irrigating the tumor. That saved us about eighteen hours of surgery. Still, we’re just getting started. We’re doing everything we can, but we should be prepared for the worst.”

  Olivia had heard this nonsense enough times that day and felt sick to her stomach. She called Lola to check on the girls and followed the surgeons, who were heading to the cafeteria. Perhaps some chamomile tea would help her feel better.