by Unknown
Shoulder to shoulder, brother and sister stand before the figure in the hospital bed. Amadeo tries to ignore the bandage swaddling her head like a turban. He tries instead to look into her drawn, clay-colored face, and to see his mother, but the familiar lines around her mouth only make the full effect more chilling and unfamiliar.
She’s sleeping, motionless and small under the light blanket. Oxygen tube in her nostrils, IVs in her arm. She’s lost a lot of weight, Amadeo realizes with a shock. Can she have lost all this weight since this morning? Surely not. But how has he not noticed?
Amadeo puts his arm around his sister, and she sags against him. He thinks of those afternoons on the couch when they were kids. But after a moment she steps away and sits heavily in the vinyl chair.
“Mom? Are you awake?” Yolanda’s eyes slide back and forth beneath her thin purple lids. Valerie stands abruptly. “She must be cold.” She starts opening cupboards, revealing only cleaning products and sterile supplies.
Amadeo’s last visit to the hospital, to the Española maternity ward, had been stressful, sure, and scary, too, but exciting. He didn’t actually believe that anything truly dire could happen to his daughter. Here, though, the air is leaden. He should call Angel, he thinks, but then Valerie slams a cupboard.
“Why would they give her just one shitty blanket? It’s twenty fucking degrees in here.”
Were they supposed to buy flowers or something to brighten the place up? “Hey, Val. Should we buy flowers?”
“She’s not going to be here that long.”
Amadeo jerks his head back.
Valerie turns slowly, pale. “I mean,” she says, “she’s going home soon. We’ll get her flowers at home.”
At night, the sounds of the hospital are more pronounced: the whirs and ticks and pulses, the murmurs from the hallway. On the other side of the room, behind the patterned green curtain, there’s another patient, a Marcella Tran, according to the whiteboard, but she’s so quiet Amadeo doesn’t believe she’s there until he peers behind the curtain. A heavy Asian woman wearing a satin shower cap gazes at him impassively, and Amadeo retreats. He sits in one of the chairs, and only then does Valerie settle beside him.
From underneath the bandage, a tuft of hair emerges, bristly and dry against the pillowcase. They didn’t shave her whole head, the doctors said, just a semicircular line for the incision. They then peeled back their mother’s scalp and, with a delicate power saw, cut into bone. They’ve left the skull open, accessible for more surgeries. Amadeo can’t think about it, can’t think about it. He only realizes that he’s grabbed his sister’s forearm when she puts her hand on top of his. She rubs the back of his hand with a thumb. The gesture seems automatic, the kind of comfort she might offer one of her daughters. Again, he flashes to when they were children, clutching each other.
“Val,” Amadeo whispers. “Do you remember when Dad died, how every day after school we sat on the couch hugging?”
Valerie looks into his face, startled, then suspicious. She withdraws her hand. “Why?”
“I was just wondering, is all. If you remembered.”
“I don’t,” says Valerie, but her color has risen and her voice doesn’t sound as guarded as usual. “Why are you asking me that now?”
Amadeo shrugs. He wants some confirmation that those afternoons happened, that they don’t exist in Amadeo’s memory alone, wants some reassurance that comfort might still be possible between them.
“I don’t remember it,” repeats Valerie.
Amadeo must have dozed, because time collapses. Beside him, the chair is empty. Valerie must have gone to check on the girls.
When his mother wakes, a sob escapes him. Her face is calm, her eyes low-lidded and glazed. She gazes around the dim room, barely lingering on her son.
“I’m sorry, Mom! I’m so sorry! When were you going to tell us?” Tears stream down his cheeks. But Yolanda’s eyelids drop shut, as if flipping a switch to turn off his voice.
All at once he remembers Angel. His ringer has been off, and he hasn’t checked it. Nine missed calls, fifteen escalating texts. Hey Dad! How’d the job go????? Where RU guys? Where the heck are you? It’s after eight! Pick up your phone!!!!!!!! God!!!! Where ARE YOU????? Please call me I’m really really worried. The last, sent nine minutes ago, 12:35 a.m., reads, If you don’t call back in ten minutes, I’m calling the police. He dials.
AND SO BEGINS the time of the caretaking. She’s going to die at home, Yolanda informs them. “No more hospitals, no more surgeries.”
“But what if they can save you?”
“They can’t save me,” Yolanda says, which is more or less what the doctors said.
“I don’t like to give prognoses, because they can so often be off,” said Dr. Konecky, “and there isn’t much evidence that they contribute to quality of life.”
Only when Amadeo pushed, did she admit, “I’d say we’re looking at two or three months.” Valerie gripped his arm.
Amadeo can hardly believe that they discharge his mother. They’re going to let them take her home? They’re just going to trust her care to Amadeo and Valerie and Angel?
It’s dreadful, the inevitability that his mother will hurt herself, knock into things, fall, draw a cup of hot coffee onto her lap, that even worse things are to come.
But they manage, more or less. Once a week someone from hospice checks in on them. Valerie visits on weekends, arms full of lasagnas and plastic containers of mixed greens. She lets the girls watch TV and play with the baby while she sits by Yolanda, dabbing her eyes and talking about the old days. Angel dashes around gathering laundry.
Amadeo begins to change Connor, sometimes even without being asked. Connor kicks his bare brown legs and chuckles at the novelty of his grandfather involving himself with his diaper. Each time, the second the old diaper is peeled away, Connor pees, his face going serious until the stream ebbs.
“Oh, nah!” Amadeo swabs his jeans.
“You got to be ready to cover him with a cloth!” Angel cries, laughing. Angel holds her grandmother’s arm as they make their slow, shuffling way to the bathroom. “Amazing. It only took brain cancer to get him to help out.”
Yolanda laughs, whole body, clinging to the doorway and to Angel, and Amadeo laughs, too, because he’s so grateful that Angel can still make his mother laugh.
“Hey now, that’s not fair,” he says, but they all know it is, and Connor cracks up, too, like a slightly daft dinner guest dying to get in on the joke.
“What a bunch of lunatics,” says Angel, shaking her head.
In a notebook, Angel has introduced a complex record-keeping system to track Yolanda’s medications and meals and bowel movements.
“Oh no you don’t. Don’t you be marking down those things. That’s embarrassing.”
“Why?” Angel brandishes a second notebook. “I’m in here. And Connor’s in this one. I don’t see what’s so embarrassing about knowing what your body is doing.”
“Can we keep track of my craps, too?” Amadeo asks.
“Sick,” says Angel, and Connor and Yolanda dissolve into laughter again.
It’s just over a week since Yolanda’s been released from the hospital, and she can get up and move around, with a walker for balance. She doesn’t mind using the walker, and considers this a personal failing. Her grandmother, who, when given a walker at the age of ninety-six and implored by doctors and Yolanda’s mother and Yolanda herself to please for the love of God use it, would lift it clear off the floor and lug it around the house.
She never thought she’d say it, but it’s a blessing having Amadeo unemployed. He’s so unnerved by the fact of her dying that he’s started helping around the house. He doesn’t vacuum, but she’s seen him plucking larger bits of debris off the carpet by hand. He runs the dishwasher. “Where does this go, Mom?” he calls from the kitchen, waving a measuring cup, as if he hasn’t lived in this house his entire life.
Yolanda lifts her head carefully from where it is
nestled in the wing of the armchair—it’s so heavy on its stalk—and focuses on the cup in his hand. “In that bucket.” Not bucket. “Carton?” Not carton. She feels the shape of the correct word, the particular thrust and heft, but then, when she opens her mouth, the word will not emerge. “Craze?”
Amadeo watches her, his mouth ajar, lower lip trembling. He sets the measuring cup on the counter, shuts the dishwasher.
Here, in the living room, the blinds are lowered, the afternoon light thick and insinuating against the closed slats. Did they leave them drawn for her sake?
It seems only moments ago that Angel helped Yolanda dress, changed her gauze, then, with a kiss on the forehead, left for school with the baby. Yolanda’s mind is keener with Angel around. Possibly because she doesn’t want to let the girl down or scare her. It makes her long for Angel’s return, though she brings with her a wincing clatter.
Time has become strange: too swift, then gummy. She marvels at how much she used to accomplish in a day: all those hours at work, the grocery shopping, paying bills, cooking, sometimes even getting her nails done. Yolanda examines the chipped pink polish. She chose that color from the gleaming array on the wall, but can’t recall when, or whether it was in the salon in Santa Fe or the one in Española. The nail bed is purple where the nails have grown out. The skin around them is fragile, waxy yellow, taut.
“Dodo? When does—that girl come home?” She shakes her head in irritation. “Angel. Angel.”
“Soon. Can I get you anything?”
Outside, a car on the gravel. Yolanda turns again to the closed blinds. She’s trapped in this dusky, closed house. “Open the shades, would you, hijito?”
He hops to, eager. “Maybe that’s Angel, home early.” Then: “Oh, shit.” Outside, the black BMW comes to a stop behind his truck. Casting a cringing look at his mother, he slinks down the hall to his bedroom and shuts the door. Amadeo was to fix Monica’s windshield, she recalls, but the events leading to her seizure are wispy and dreamlike and her head hurts when she tries to concentrate on them. It must have gone well, because Monica is here.
As she pulls herself up, she decides not to care about what she’s wearing—faded sweatpants, an old sweatshirt of Amadeo’s with frayed cuffs, that disconcerting bandage taped to her head—but when she opens the door, Yolanda registers, in the slow, shocked way Monica takes her in from behind the massive bouquet, just how bad she looks.
“Oh, you sweetheart.” Monica makes as if to hand her the giant crayon-colored roses and lilies and plasticky greens, but seems to think better of it, and instead inches around the walker and sets the vase on the breakfast bar. “This is from everyone at the office. We miss you.” Technically, Yolanda is on medical leave, but, based on the size of that bouquet, it must be clear to everyone else, too, that she won’t be returning.
Monica gives Yolanda a gentle hug over the walker. Yolanda’s hands tighten on the rubber grips; she’s afraid she’ll tip. Over her boss’s shoulder, she sees herself in the mirror by the door: the dull clumps of hair emerging from the bandage, her dry, creased face free of makeup.
Monica herself is neat in black, fragrant as always. Yolanda wonders if she considers this visit a professional obligation. She should be able to tell, having worked with her every day for three years, but Monica is so adept at social niceties. “Come sit,” Monica says, as if she is the hostess. “Can I get you water? Make you tea?”
Yolanda rolls the wheels over the carpet, back to her armchair, the maroon jacquard puckered from her many hours sitting, and lowers herself. “There’s a bucket,” she says. “For the flowers.” She flaps a frustrated hand at the cupboard above the breakfast bar.
Monica pauses in unwrapping her scarf, a fine, transparent black wool. Her face contorts in a showy effort to understand. “Oh? It came with a vase. See?” She taps the vase. Her voice is high, sunny.
Monica has also brought a card. When Yolanda sets the sealed envelope on the cushion beside her, Monica tears into it herself, handing the open card to Yolanda so she can read the cramped, cheery messages of goodwill. “We all signed it.”
“Ah,” says Yolanda, setting it down without reading. “That’s nice.”
Yolanda tries to see her house through her boss’s eyes: the gold-framed photos of her kids and grandkids, diapers and wipes stacked on the table, the toys scattered across the floor, half a cold frozen pizza languishing on the coffee table that her son served for lunch. There was a time when Yolanda would have been powerfully moved to have Monica visit her, when she would have cleaned and shopped and cooked in preparation.
Monica sits on the edge of the couch, smiling brightly, doom in her eyes.
“How are you, Yo? Everyone misses you at work.”
At the window, a hummingbird visits the feeder, glinting blue and green. The heat kicks on, sending the plastic blinds at the patio doors clacking. The scent of the flowers stirs, syrupy and artificial. She thinks of her dead mother, laid out for the Rosary, that pale little body rigid with embalming fluid in her broad-collared floral dress.
“Well, you haven’t missed much. Bunny had one of her vertigo attacks on Thursday. Janice Sena said she stood up from her desk and slammed right down again, clutching her head.” She looks sideways at Yolanda, her awareness of what she’s just said hitting her, and rushes. “Then she gave her head a good thump, left, right, like she was getting water out of her ear, and just started typing again.”
“Oh, that Bucket,” says Yolanda, then grimaces. Words are misbehaving today. “Bunket.” The word pulses, replicating, making distorted copies of itself. Yolanda grabs one of them, holds it before her in her mind, but cannot for the life of her think what it connotes.
She understands that she’s freaking Monica out, that she should muster her old personality, but she’s too tired.
“Are you here alone, Yo? Is anyone taking care of you?”
“My son,” Yolanda says, dismissing the parade of bucket, relieved that these other words, singular and meaningful, click into place. “My Amadeo.”
At the sound of his name, Amadeo appears in the doorway. He is barefoot, hangdog.
“Ah,” says Monica. “Good.”
“Hey.” Amadeo avoids Monica’s eye, and she avoids his.
“My son can fix your car,” Yolanda says. “You can, right?”
Monica hesitates. Amadeo clears his throat. “I’m sorry I . . .” he starts, then trails off.
“Yes?” Monica regards him. “You’re sorry for—? Please go on.”
Amadeo licks his lips.
“People make mistakes, but to run off like that, that was wrong.” Monica is trembling. “You didn’t even apologize.”
Yolanda looks on with interest.
“Listen, lady, you want work for free, you can—” Amadeo stops, looks wretchedly at Yolanda.
“What am I doing?” says Monica. “I shouldn’t have brought it up. I’m sorry, Yolanda.”
Just then, Angel crashes through the door with her bags. “Hi, everyone!” Connor is limp in her arms, asleep. Yolanda closes her eyes against the noise, but nonetheless relaxes.
“You must be Angel. Monica.”
“Oh, the chief clerk! My grandma really admires you.” She shifts the baby and sticks her hand out.
“She has only wonderful things to say about you.”
“I’m here,” Yolanda reminds them, opening her eyes.
Her son is still in the doorway, as if he doesn’t know whether to come into the room or flee to the back of the house. Yolanda pats the arm of her chair as if to invite him over to her, but he doesn’t see.
“So my dad fixed your windshield?” Angel squints through the front window. “It looks great, Dad!”
Monica regards Amadeo steadily. What is between them? Could they be attracted to one another, her boss and her son?
“Well,” says Amadeo. “Actually.”
“It turned out I had to get a new windshield, anyway.” Monica stands. “I should let you rest, Yol
anda.” In a moment, she’s rewrapped her scarf, kissed Yolanda, and the BMW is backing down the driveway.
Yolanda didn’t even ask who has replaced her, but as soon as she thinks the question, she loses interest.
At school, Angel does not have to think about her grandmother. The ruckus and noise and the sheer inconsequentiality of the daily schedule is a comforting distraction. If Angel is taking GED practice tests (up ten points on Reasoning Through Language Arts!), she’s not thinking about her grandmother at home staring at daytime television, her head cocked strangely. Angel isn’t thinking about her father making some sad lunch of canned beef stew, or their lurching conversations, her father’s attempts to be comforting and upbeat, a performance that can’t possibly convince either of them.
Angel has all but quit keeping her emotions journal; she doesn’t want to think about the sheer injustice of it all. Just as things were becoming bearable, just as she’d hit a kind of rhythm in her days and Connor started sleeping through the night, just as her father was beginning to be engaged, this disaster hits.
Angel hasn’t told anyone at school. Instead she applies herself with renewed devotion to counting her sleep hours, Connor’s sleep hours, to noting the time and length of his feedings, even color-coding her own meals by food group with her gel pens. In this way the school day passes in manageable, unthinking chunks, until the time comes to zip shut her backpack and to gather Connor’s baggie of soiled clothing and to load him into his car seat.
But as she gazes out the classroom window at the stark city, everything she hears and sees and does is filtered through her new understanding that she will lose her grandmother.
