The Caregiver

by Samuel Park

  Octopus and his men tried to run for cover, but they were out in the open street exactly where Lima wanted them, stark easy targets in the daylight. A shot reached Pacifier, who immediately clutched his arm and then fell to the ground, as he tried to open the driver’s door. I saw Octopus point his gun at Lima. A second later the glass in the windshield of the police sedan shattered. Another second later Octopus fell backward in a thud. La Bardot fired her gun at the police while running for cover, strangely graceful. I was dimly aware of pedestrians shrieking and running. Janete pulled me to the ground and dragged me behind a green Fiat.

  “Stay with me,” said Janete, her mouth right above my ear. “We are coming out of this with all the same body parts. I’m not going to let you get hurt, you understand?” She was panting.

  There were no shots coming in our direction, but we could hear them loudly, and it felt as though they were. I saw a woman a few meters away running, holding a child in her arms. She’d been pushing a stroller and left it behind, and for a moment I couldn’t take my eyes off the stroller. It simply sat there right in the middle of traffic, waiting to be hit. Cars in the lanes next to us sped away from the scene, no rubberneckers here. A man walking toward us had been holding a sack and he dropped it on the ground as he also ducked behind a car. Oranges—heavy and plump—flew out of the sack and rolled on the ground, seeming to gain momentum.

  Janete hissed a prayer: “Our Lady of Aparecida, protect us!”

  The gunfire continued, and Janete eventually looked out through the window of the car we were hiding behind. She covered me with her body, keeping her hands and her arms over my head, a human shield. I carefully broke free and peered out the same window. I glanced in the direction of Lima’s car, but I could not see my mother. I prayed she was crouched, keeping herself hidden from view, from the bullets. I saw Octopus on the ground, a bright red line on the road, pointing toward La Bardot, who lay only a meter or so away.

  Lima and his men emerged from the car. The doors to the station burst open as a bunch of police officers joined him. To my shock, they kept shooting the bloody corpses in the streets, even though Octopus and La Bardot and the others were long past dead.

  I saw my mother emerge slowly, tentative. I found myself gasping in relief, my heart beating fiercely in my throat. She looked changed—disheveled and confused with her hair different, too big. She stood, orienting herself. As Lima and the police officers trampled over the bodies to investigate the van, my mother wandered in the opposite direction. She didn’t run, as though all she was capable of doing was taking one step after another, her body guiding her on instinct and reflex. I wished to scream for her, let her know I was here, let her pet my hair, let her tell me everything will be okay, hushing me with whispers. But there were too many officers, too many guns, and Janete’s tight grip. She just kept walking, as though she could not see the horrible scene behind her. I followed her every step with my eyes, praying she’d move quicker, praying an officer wouldn’t see her, gun her down. I was grateful for each step she took. On and on she went, as people around her screamed and ran, until she finally disappeared into the chaos of bodies on the horizon. I stumbled and fell, my gaze steadily focused on my mother, and Janete hurriedly pulled me upright. I screamed, “Mom!” but only half the word escaped my mouth before Janete clapped a hand over it, a grim, determined look on her face. She took my arm firmly in hers and pulled me forward on the sidewalk.

  It was as though our legs carried us home without me realizing. All I could think of was my mother, the bodies in the street, how one could have been her. In the bus, in the streets, we must’ve bumped into people without apologizing, stumbled enough to worry the homeless. Did we talk? Did we say anything to each other? I just remembered Janete holding my hand, stroking my palm like my mother would.

  We opened the door.

  My mother was already there, sitting on the sofa, cupping her forehead with her hands. Crumpled-up tissue paper all around her. She looked up when she saw me, threw her arms akimbo, and I ran to her. I buried my head on her lap and cried, and she cried with me. She ran her fingers through my hair, caressed my wet cheeks with the back of her hand. Janete watched from the door.

  “Where were you, Mara? Why weren’t you here when I got back?”

  “I’ve never seen something so awful in my life,” said Janete. “Those young people. They were babies.”

  My mother turned sharply to her. “You took her there? Mara was there?” Janete backed away, shaking, and closed the door behind her.

  A few feet away from the couch, I spotted a dead beetle on the floor. It didn’t look like my mother had killed it; it just lay there, as if it had given up on its own. My mother didn’t like insects and was especially merciless about killing flies, chasing them around with a plastic swatter, her shoulders moving up and down rhythmically like an ape. But my mother had a weakness for beetles, especially ladybugs, and when I once asked her why, she said it was because they were beautiful. When I was starting first grade, a ladybug once sat between the pages of a book I was reading. Surprised, I was about to slam the book shut on impulse, when my mother stopped me. She put her hand next to the red-carapaced insect and we both watched as it hopped onto her indicator finger. My mother then walked swiftly to the backyard as I ran behind her and she led her passenger to a leaf.

  My mother lifted me so she could see me.

  “We need to clean you up,” she said. She was far dirtier than me, but I didn’t question her. She brushed my tangled hair, wiped the tears off my face. I was covered in dust and soot, and dried sweat and panic.

  My mother ran a bath for me, and she washed me in a way she hadn’t since I’d been a baby. She took a scooper that I used to dig through sand at the beach and used it to pour water over my arms, my legs. She cleaned the back of my ears, the parts of my neck hidden by my hair, in between my fingers. She soaped and shampooed me last, and we watched as the water turned bubbly.

  She dried me off and then led me to bed, though it was not evening yet. I did not protest bringing the day to an end. Then, she left to take her own bath. I was so scared of being alone, though, that I slipped out of bed in my pajamas and stood by the bathroom door, waited for her to be done.

  What happened today? I wanted to ask her. What went wrong? Did Lima come back to the station for reasons she couldn’t control? Did the Police Chief say something that made my mother go back on her word to Octopus? Did he see through her act? And why was she in the station for two and a half hours? And why had they let her go? Did he mean to?

  As we lay in bed that night, my front glued to her back, I broke our unspoken pact to ignore the events of the day. “What happened?” I asked.

  She did not turn to me. Staring out toward the window, she said, “He didn’t believe me at all. The Police Chief. He didn’t buy my performance. He saw through it right away.” Her voice cracked. Nearly whispering, she said, “He beat me and tortured me until I told him the truth. I told him everything. I gave away their plans. I told him everything I wasn’t supposed to. I resisted as long as I could, but eventually, he broke me.”

  I could feel her heaving back against my belly. I tried to breathe, the shock from her body rippling into mine. I closed my eyes, not sure how I would ever open them again. All those people who died, had died because of my mother.

  Bel Air, California

  The early 1990s

  Mara, age twenty-six

  chapter seven

  BENEATH THE SOLID LAYERS OF routine lay another one, rife with risk, hurt, and loss. It turned everyone into actuaries. There weren’t a lot of good reasons to be up at four in the morning. When Kathryn got in the car well before dawn to head to the hospital for her surgery, I had the engine already running. Like a getaway car. On the way, Kathryn swore that her heart had relocated to her stomach. Said she could hear the thump thumping from her abdomen, sadness, fear, and frustration welling up from that landmass behind her belly button. She’d never noticed before the
way her belly rose and fell with each breath. She’d never noticed how her hand instinctively cradled her belly against shock or disappointment.

  Now, in its diseased condition, the belly, the preferred target for the world’s punches, took center stage. The fists of the world liked a soft landing. Her new heart didn’t want to be cut out and disposed of—where would it go, her organ, once they separated it from her? Kathryn wondered aloud. But what choice was there other than surgery, given the rapidly multiplying cancer cells breaking through the walls of the mucosa?

  It was inside of her, the cancer, right in her belly, and the obvious symbolism didn’t escape her. She’d given birth to it—the cancer had come out of her, her own cells, not some airborne virus or poison pushed down her throat. It was growing, growing, over the many months it took to move from its first battle in the stomach on to spread to the lymph nodes; unnoticed, giving no hints of its existence, silent even as it tirelessly colonized more territory.

  I felt revulsion at the creature growing inside of her. In a few hours, the surgeon would remove it from her, but there was no true way to separate the victim from its killer—locked in an embrace—the good would have to be rid of with the bad.

  When we reached the labyrinth of small roads abutting the complex, it was eerily quiet, no cars or people anywhere, the sky that odd hue of ascendant blue overpowered by traffic lights and lampposts. Moments like these made me think of that entire catalogue of incidents outside regular, planned life.

  We valet-parked at the hospital, the massive gem financed by Ronald Reagan open and empty, miles of marble on the floor. The giant lobby echoed our footsteps, and there were no signs of human life until we arrived at the check-in room, and found twosomes everywhere—a few married couples, a father-and-daughter duo, sisters. A kind of Noah’s Ark. One by one they were swallowed into curtained prep bays.

  As Kathryn lay on the hospital bed, I sat on the chair next to her. Doctor after doctor stood at the foot of the railing introducing themselves. She shook some of their hands. She was told by the anesthesiologist fellow that she’d be getting an epidural—news that probably made her feel even more the parallels with childbirth, given the look of anguished irony on her face. The surgery chief resident reviewed her case—a partial gastrectomy, a D2 resection due to gastric cancer. They were going to cut into her; take her stomach out and put only the clean part back. But even with surgery, her odds of survival were not good.

  Watching Kathryn suffer made me wonder what was worse, being tortured or having cancer. Both changed the meaning of the body. No longer the purveyor of pleasure, but instead a battleground. Both dulled the spirit, and were the means to break down the afflicted. Both led to death, and when they didn’t, their effects were long-lasting, leading to continued hardship. Both entailed prodigious amounts of pain, though they differed in the forms of dispensation. Both rendered the victim completely vulnerable, stopped her in her tracks, demanded and gained total submission. Both involved a clear enemy.

  The torturers laughed at any private fantasies of autonomy. They chuckled in unison at the concept of self-reliance. As I waited next to Kathryn, I thought of all the men and women who’d been murdered by Chief Lima. They were all around us, surrounding us in the hospital bay—Octopus, La Bardot, even Pacifier—all of them regarding Kathryn with the same mix of pity and sorrow, accepting her as one of their own.

  The ICU had the texture and consistency of a bad dream. We were in the tiny, curtained room for what felt like hours. There was loud and constant coughing, chatter, beeping. So much neediness clumped in such proximity.

  Kathryn was a lump. Something a construction worker might’ve complained about carrying. She was the sum total of her weight, her self measured in pounds. In her loose hospital gown, with the buttons on the back, there were only faint traces of her normal self—her gestures, her book tented on her chest as she rested.

  When dawn came, a tired-looking Filipino orderly came to transfer Kathryn to a private room on the sixth floor. He pulled her body toward the gurney like a slab of meat. The orderly struggled to roll her onto the gurney without breaking her free of her tubes and IV. He pushed her—as slowly and painstakingly like a janitor—down the empty hall and toward the bank of elevators.

  “I wish things had turned out differently,” said Kathryn, when she finally woke. She tried to slide up on the bed, but couldn’t. She looked like the chalk police outline of her own body.

  “You’re up. How do you feel?” I asked, getting up from my chair.

  She lay back again, closed her eyes. “Did Mr. Weatherly call?”

  “No,” I said.

  Her eyes remained tightly shut, as though she were willfully trying to remain elsewhere. “I don’t wish that he’d love me again, but that he had never stopped loving me in the first place,” she continued, in her reverie.

  The sunlight behind her made her look like overexposed film.

  “I don’t wish that we’d fix our relationship, but that it had never been broken in the first place,” she repeated, slurring her words a bit, adjusting from the anesthesia. “So I could wake up in this hospital bed with my marriage still intact and the divorce was just a bad dream.”

  I couldn’t imagine fighting cancer and a divorce. She remained calm, resolute even, as though she finally realized that this—compounding catastrophe—this was the reason you had to keep your life in order.

  “I’m sure he’ll come to visit you soon,” I said, offering her some useless, rote optimism.

  Kathryn looked at me unhappily.

  Outside the window, we could see Bel Air from a distance. From that angle, it resembled a large arboretum. The stately houses looked tiny, swallowed up by the miles and miles of magnolia, eucalyptus, and sycamore trees.

  “I wonder if . . . it’s feeling like you threw away a flashlight just before the lights went out?”

  “Yes,” Kathryn nodded. “You phrased it so perfectly. That’s something I admire, when someone knows what to say to make you feel understood.”

  “I have a lot of experience with that,” I said, sitting back down and crossing my arms.

  “Do you? When you’re so young?”

  “My mother . . . she had a lot of issues when I was growing up.”

  Kathryn reached for the plastic cup on the movable tray in front of her and took a sip of water. “So you had to take care of her?”

  “Yes. You remind me of her, actually.”

  Kathryn set the cup down and batted her eyelashes. “Oh, so she’s talented and beautiful and fun?”

  “She’s a little crazy.”

  “I see,” said Kathryn. She didn’t look offended. “So out of all your clients, I’m the one who inspires the most devotion, yes? Because I remind you of your nutty mother.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she—is she in America, too?” asked Kathryn.

  I shook my head and got up.

  “She’s in Brazil,” I said, standing, gathering some trash that had accumulated on Kathryn’s tray. “I had to leave her behind.”

  Kathryn furrowed her brows, but she didn’t press.

  “I’m sorry that . . .” she began, tentatively, “you’re estranged. I’ll bet it’s been a while since you two talked on the phone.” I knew she meant this kindly. She had a lot of painkillers in her body. “If you want, you can think of me as your mom. Even though I’m too young to be your mother.” I looked down at her, withering away on the bed. She was and she wasn’t. She was eighteen years older than me. “Actually, if I think of you as my daughter, it’d make it easier for me to leave you my house.”

  I shook my head, not wanting to indulge that strange kind of talk again. “You’re very kind,” I said. I slung my satchel over my arm and prepared to leave. “I’m going to take my break now that you’re awake. You know you’re supposed to press the red button for the nurse, right?”

  Kathryn held up her palm as though to stop me. “I have a favor to ask. A mission of sorts. Cloak-and-da
gger.”

  I didn’t like the sound of this, but I let her go on. “I need you to go to Nelson’s condo and get him to come visit me. Maybe convey the depths of my suffering. Try to appeal to his sense of compassion.” I knew her better than that. What she really wanted was to confront him, to demand satisfaction, to find out why he hadn’t come to visit her yet.

  I mulled over her request as I stood by the curtain next to the door. “I’m just your caregiver. Don’t you think this is something you ask a friend to do?”

  “Yes, I agree. As a matter of fact, this is the sort of thing that I’d ask a daughter to do, if I had one,” said Kathryn.

  I pulled my car out of the parking spot as it started to rain. I waited for a couple of UCLA students whose backpacks looked like giant cancerous lumps. I turned onto the road and felt a slight bump against the back of my car. The bump, however, was so slight that I ignored it and kept driving. Much to my surprise, the car that bumped me was suddenly by my side, the driver gesturing wildly at me as though I was running away from the scene of a crime. I wasn’t sure what he wanted me to do. I slowed down a little as I tried to figure it out. The car got in front of me and stopped, in the middle of the road. I braked as hard as I could, and I almost hit him from behind, missing his bumper by an inch. The man got out of his car, leaving his lights on, and within seconds was banging on my windshield.

  My window was closed, but I could hear him yelling, “Don’t you have eyes? You almost caused an accident back there.”

  “I’m sorry,” I mouthed out of politeness. The doors were locked, but I tentatively cracked the window. Had I really almost caused an accident?

  “Show me your insurance papers,” he demanded, his eyes peeking through the slit of open window. He had a beard, his shirt stretched over his bulging belly, and he looked to be middle-aged but had none of the warmth and kindness I associated with American men. I could hear in his voice the cheap amusement of someone used to having power over powerless people. And I pictured him using it in a DMV, Social Security office, or airport Customs.