The Five Wounds

by Unknown

  From Angel, Amadeo has gathered that Marissa has never been lacking for romance. He hopes Marissa doesn’t ask if he’s seeing anyone. Occasionally a woman at a bar will catch his eye, and they’ll chat, and even more occasionally he’ll go home with her. His last actual girlfriend was four years ago. She moved in with him and his mom for about twenty minutes before getting fed up. Since then, he’s spent a certain amount of time on free dating websites, carrying on endless text conversations—conversations that are less conversation than clumsily phrased juvenile flirtation and premature disclosures of sexual preferences and deadly serious negotiations over what each person is looking for in a partner—over the course of which the relationships rise, peak, and crash, so that he already feels smothered or rejected or resentful before the women have even consented to meet him.

  There’s something defeated in Marissa’s manner that he’s never seen before, in her slump, even in the snarled knitting on her lap. Amadeo finds himself feeling generous, sorry that she didn’t achieve the astonishing future he always imagined for her. He doesn’t even feel compelled to make up a girlfriend.

  “You look good.”

  “Thanks.” Marissa regards him. “What happened to your hands?”

  “Nail gun.”

  “Both of them? Shit.”

  Apparently Angel hasn’t said a word to her mother about the procession. Amadeo is peeved for a moment, before he remembers he told her to keep it a secret, and then he is filled with admiration for his daughter.

  Marissa pinches her hairline, then yanks a long strand out of her ponytail, inspects it. “So you’re doing construction again?” Amadeo is surprised to see gray at her temples. She’s only thirty-one.

  Amadeo shrugs. “You’re still working at State Farm?”

  “Yeah. Same old. I’m office manager now, though.” She jerks her thumb at the delivery room door. “I can’t stand it in there. It’s ten times worse watching than going through it yourself.”

  This is the same thing Amadeo’s been thinking all afternoon, but hearing Marissa say it now rankles him. “Angel is terrified,” he says, indignant. “Poor kid.”

  “Remember how little she was? God, she was cute.”

  “I always thought she looked like a naked mole rat. At first.”

  Marissa laughs. He wonders if they could ever end up together again and then wonders if the possibility has occurred to her, too. Amadeo imagines wrapping his arms around her, being naked with her, wonders if it would feel familiar. It would make a good story: Angel’s parents brought together after sixteen years over the birth of their grandchild.

  “Hey, has she ever said anything about the”—he lowers his voice—“the father?”

  Marissa flattens her lips. “No. I don’t get the sense that he counts for much.” She clears her throat. “I’m not even sure she knows who it is.”

  “Not something a dad wants to hear.”

  Marissa laughs harshly. “Yeah.”

  “I guess it’s better than some guy trying to control her.” He thinks of a guy he knew in high school, a dealer who did well for himself, who was always demanding that his babies’ mothers dress the kids better, criticizing their mothering, even as his own contributions to their upkeep were paltry and inconsistent.

  “You don’t think anyone”—he forces himself to say it—“hurt her?”

  Marissa shakes her head, twisting the hair around her fingers. “She’d have told me.”

  She stretches the hair in and out, as though putting it through a stress test. “I just hope she’s okay. I don’t know what I’ll do if something happens to her. Nothing will happen to her. Still. Things aren’t great between us now. As I’m sure she’s told you.” Marissa slumps.

  Amadeo nearly asks what happened—it’s gratifying to know that someone else has screwed up with Angel—but he’s afraid. “She’ll be okay.” He nudges Marissa’s soft upper arm with his elbow. “She’s in her best childbearing years, did you know that?”

  Marissa looks at him quickly, alarmed. “Did you tell her that? Is that why she went and got herself pregnant?”

  “You think I encouraged this?” No way is Amadeo going to be blamed. “Before she showed up I didn’t see her for a year. There’s no way this is my fault. You’re her mother.”

  Marissa sighs. “Fuck. I know.”

  This baby is amazing. His tidy red ear, his miniature round nostrils, his funny flattened nose. The flimsy little nails. Those perfect Cupid’s-bow lips. There’s a kind of scrim on his face, like the white coating on a purple plum. Angel palms Connor’s clean new skull, feels his pulse through his soft spot. Fontanel, it’s called, and Angel loves this word, thinks it would make a beautiful name for a baby, if Connor were a girl. Fontanel.

  They’ve both been cleaned up. Angel is wearing the most enormous maxi pad she’s ever seen in her life, a pillow wedged in her crotch. A mattress. But even this is a kind of comfort, buoying her. She is floating, as though this bed were set adrift in a wide, warm ocean. The two of them, Angel and Connor, and for a moment it feels as if they are all either will ever need.

  And her father is with them, asleep in a chair in the corner. His features are smushed comically where his cheek is propped on his hand.

  Angel closes her own eyes.

  “Sweetheart?” A nurse drums her nails on the doorframe and glides in. “Time to give this little one a test.”

  “What kind of test?” Angel asks, determined to advocate on behalf of her child, to be an informed consumer of health care.

  “PKU.”

  Angel tries to remember which one this is. Brianna gave them a handout that enumerates the newborn screenings, but Angel doesn’t have her binder with her, and she forgot to ask her dad to bring it. “PKU?”

  “Phenylketonuria. If he’s got it, it means there are certain foods he won’t be able to process. Just getting the info we need.”

  There have been so many nurses and medical assistants. At first, bearing in mind something Brianna said about the importance of always trying to use people’s names, Angel did her best to remember them, but every few hours a new batch descends, and she’s so tired. This one is animated and wears scrubs printed with fruits and vegetables. She leans over and lifts Connor away from Angel, unwraps a minuscule purple foot from the flannel swaddling. “A li’l pinch,” she says, and jabs him with a pin.

  “Oh!” cries Angel. Connor’s features freeze, as if he’s surprised by the existence of pain. She is shocked by how deeply she feels his hurt.

  And another shock: her dad leaps to his feet. “What the fuck are you doing?” Connor’s face splits and pours forth red, bleating wails.

  “It’s fine,” says the nurse soothingly, speaking at once to Amadeo and to Angel and to little outraged Connor. With one expert hand, she pinches Connor’s heel and dabs the blood onto a strip of paper. “Just making sure he’s doing okay!” And the nurse is already coming toward Angel, rewrapping the baby, smiling cheerily.

  Angel reaches for Connor and pulls him close to her, patting and rocking and murmuring until his cries quiet.

  “It’s bullshit, stabbing a baby that little,” Amadeo says after the nurse leaves. His eyes are bright with tears. Amadeo jingles the coins in his pockets, looks around, tense, as if searching for someone to punch.

  “Definitely better to stab a bigger baby,” Angel says, trying for levity, though she, too, is rattled. “It’s okay. Look, he’s calm again.”

  Amadeo gives his hands a shake, as if ridding himself of some uncomfortable thought, and then leans over Angel to peer into Connor’s pinched face. The baby’s color is subsiding and he blinks his nearly closed eyes.

  If her father has surprised Angel with his immediate interest in the baby, her mother has been, on the other hand, a disappointment.

  For weeks Angel was waiting for Connor’s birth, not just because she was excited to meet him, and sick of being fat and gassy and sour with heartburn, but because she’d been certain he’d be the occas
ion for reconciliation with her mother. Even as she spent all those weeks in a silent rage, refusing to speak to her mother, all the while she believed this particular fight would end once the baby was born. She expected her mother to swoop in with apologies and love and firmness, to take charge and comfort her and fill her rightful role as joint caregiver of this creature.

  Instead her mother chose to wait outside while Connor finally forced his way through those last inches of the birth canal. Her mother had, in fact, waited until Angel and baby were cleaned up before stopping in, and even then, she stood barely inside the door, shifting her weight from foot to foot, as if she were only an acquaintance, offering the most generic and self-evident observations a person could come up with. “God, he’s little, isn’t he?” and “I can’t believe you have a baby, Angel.”

  When Angel asked if she wanted to hold Connor—she couldn’t keep the chill from her voice—her mother smiled and looked so grateful and pathetic that Angel relented toward her. Angel’s seen her mother with babies over the years, and she’s never looked this uncomfortable: stiff, cautious, terrified. Her cradled arms were somehow too high and tense, and Marissa had looked down at him, rapt and unsmiling. Watching her mother with her son, Angel felt compassion that vexed her, because she doesn’t owe her mother anything—compassion least of all. Is this what motherhood means? Being suddenly able to pity the adults in your life?

  Shouldn’t her mother have had something to say to Angel? Shouldn’t she have offered her own story of childbirth and given advice? She should have filled her role as grandmother. Instead Marissa seemed almost deferential to Yolanda, who sat in the chair next to Angel and held the baby with ease and compared him knowledgeably to other babies she’s cared for. “You had those same long legs, Angel.”

  Marissa leaned over Yolanda. “And Angel had a potbelly like that, too, didn’t she?” she asked, as if she’d hardly been present for Angel’s babyhood.

  “Listen, Angel,” says her dad now. “I had an idea. When you’re feeling better, when you’re up for it, would you want to be the Creative Windshield Solutions driver?”

  Angel looks up at her father, at the sweet uncertainty in his face, and she can’t help smiling. “Sure, okay, but you’ll have to pay me.”

  “I know that,” he says, and she laughs at his discomfort. “Of course I will.”

  “Me, Gramma: you’re going to be cutting checks left and right.”

  NOW EVERYONE IS gone and Connor has fallen asleep, his little pursed mouth sucking industriously at nothing.

  She just changed his diaper for the first time, under the supervision of the nurse, gently swabbing with alcohol the swollen blue nub of umbilical cord. Her son’s penis is a healthy little grub nestled between his red thighs.

  He’s wrapped snugly in flannel, all his skinny flailing parts contained and safe. Angel frees one arm from underneath Connor, and reaches warily for the oversized plastic sippy cup of ice water they left for her on the rolling tray. All the while she expects Connor to open his eyes, catch her out. But no! He sleeps on, as if he trusts she’s actually doing the right thing.

  Angel is so happy. She never knew she could be so happy. Lying here against these pillows, Connor bundled to her chest, the body heat passes between them, indistinguishable. The dim afternoon light slants through the thick pane of the window. They feel clean and warm—she is sure she is feeling for both of them—swaddled by this hospital, with the nurses just outside the door, ready to make sure they’re okay. She could stay here forever, lying on these fresh sheets, looking out the window at the wide blue sky.

  This person was in her, part of her, and now he’s not. He was once hers alone, and now, for the rest of her life, she’ll be sharing him with the world. It’s amazing to her how the human body can stretch, and she thinks that if the heart can, too, maybe it can stretch big enough to fit them all.

  It’s late, long past when Amadeo should be asleep, but he’s pacing the living room, the grin pulling at his face. When he and Yolanda left the hospital this evening, Angel had been dozing, the baby asleep beside her in the Plexiglas bassinette. His mother, who had been quiet all night, went to bed almost immediately, neither eating dinner nor preparing anything for Amadeo.

  Amadeo posts online about the birth. Within an hour, two distant cousins and a friend from high school whom he hasn’t spoken to in years like his post. He refreshes his social media pages again and again, but no new congratulations come in. He flips through channels, pages through The Santa Fe New Mexican. He needs fresh air, he needs to leap and run. He needs to drive fast down dark roads. He’s a grandfather!

  Amadeo lets himself out quietly, taking his truck keys from the hook by the door. His mother will kill him if she hears he was driving. If he gets caught, he could spend a year in jail and lose his license for three. But that old Amadeo already doesn’t exist anymore. Out here, nearly two in the morning, there’s no one to catch him, and the night is bright with stars, a fattening half-moon high and small in the sky. The cool air smells of juniper and seems saturated with possibility.

  He starts his truck and, without headlights, reverses down the dirt drive. He turns onto the cracked paved road, and then he is on his way, heart full and airy.

  When he’s out of sight of his house, he flicks on his headlights, piercing the darkness. Not ten feet in front of him is a coyote, head canted over its pointed shoulder, red eyes. It’s small, thin, its wiry fur too white. There is something malicious and hungry in its narrow face.

  Amadeo slams on the brakes. The coyote stares through the blinding brightness of the headlights and right at him in the dark cab of the truck, though of course that isn’t possible.

  Amadeo taps the horn, once, twice, but the coyote doesn’t flinch. “Scram,” Amadeo says, his voice strange and quiet. He considers rolling down the window and yelling, but an irrational fear tightens like a cord around his chest. Amadeo can’t explain the way he feels; he has the sense that an unseen hand took a scalpel and cut a hole into the fabric of the night, letting in something supernatural.

  When the coyote still doesn’t move, Amadeo eases off the brakes, and the truck advances slowly. He wants to scare the coyote off the road, tip this moment back into normalcy so that the night can resume. But instead of fleeing, the coyote takes a step toward the truck, eyes glowing.

  With shaking hands, Amadeo flashes his brights, but the coyote doesn’t flinch. He snaps his headlights on, off, on, off. The coyote remains there, motionless, until, in the space between light and dark, it vanishes.

  AND THEN Angel and the baby are home. Angel lays Connor out on the couch and peels the diaper off him. Black tar-poop is smeared across the narrow red bottom.

  “Come on, Angel. Do you have to do that here?”

  Angel lifts her head from her scrubbing with the baby wipe to train a look of contempt on her father. “When you change his diaper, you can do it wherever you want.”

  Amadeo is disturbed by Connor’s soft spot. The fontanel, Angel insists on calling it, pronouncing it with panache, like it’s a French pastry. Amadeo watches it throb. It’s sickening that a child should be born so delicate and precisely formed, bluish red with such long thin limbs, obscenely fragile fingers, the veins on his temples and across his skull netted and pulsing under the impossibly thin skin. Even wrapping him in a blanket could cause injury, let alone lifting him.

  He’s not a beautiful baby, despite what they all keep telling him and each other. Connor Justin Padilla has patchy long dark hair over a peeling, crusted yellow scalp (“crib crap,” Angel pronounces with authority), cheeks so full they squish his lips, and an oddly dented skull that narrows at the top. His unnervingly large black eyes make him look like some nocturnal woodland creature, except that they’re unfocused and slightly crossed. Two weeks old, and he already has a little mustache, heavy eyebrows, a furry forehead. His grandson is a manimal, thinks Amadeo.

  And yet, Amadeo can’t stop looking at him. The second the baby falls asleep
at her breast and Angel deposits him in the crib, she collapses on the couch into the sleep of the dead, unwakeable by ringing phones or television commercials or conversation, until Connor’s piteous little mewl breaks through.

  As his grandson sleeps, Amadeo stands over the crib, watching: the little frowns and smiles that pass over his face like thoughts, the pursed, suckling lips. Once, as though he hasn’t been asleep at all, the baby opens his eyes and Amadeo’s breath stills. Before the baby can scream, Amadeo lifts him, holds him against his chest. The baby’s eyes are murky brown, the edges of the irises touched with blue, like the eyes of a very old man. He frowns at Amadeo, head wobbling, his eyes crossed with the effort of pulling his grandfather’s face into focus. All at once, those eyes roll in his head, and he is asleep again.

  This baby: such a massive force with so little actual personality. Everyone is in a foul mood. Yolanda keeps giving Amadeo jobs to do while she’s at work—laundry, dishes, trash duty—then getting mad if he forgets to do them. Angel, home for a month on “maternity leave,” as she insists on calling it, has been storming around, snapping at Amadeo, the limp baby a permanent fixture in her arms.

  She cries at minor frustrations—when the hot water in the shower runs out, when she can’t find the ointment for Connor’s scabby purple belly button—and instead of telling her to get a grip, his mother will pull her into long hugs, letting Angel soak the shoulder of her shirt with snot and spit and tears. Only when visitors stop by does Angel cheer up, long enough to accept their good wishes and gift cards and to snooker them into believing she’s bright-eyed and balanced and worthy of their gifts.

  The house has been transformed. A woven fabric basket slouches by the couch, filled with baby toys that his mother or visitors will shake in Connor’s face until he blinks his cloudy eyes or yawns or registers some other minimal awareness of their presence. Irritating classical music plays on the radio constantly, the first time ever, to Amadeo’s knowledge, that classical music has been played in the house. Connor’s belongings are everywhere: seats and bouncers and changing pads and wadded spit-up rags patterned in goldfish and dinosaurs. Crowding every surface are canisters of butt wipes and lint-covered pacifiers and board books that Angel insists on reading to his unresponsive form, to, she says grandly, “promote early literacy.” Then she follows up with viciousness: “Not that you cared about my early literacy.”