by Roy, Deanna
After she had disappeared inside, I asked him, “Manuel, do you understand me?”
He ignored me, now making truck noises around the wad of gum. I wasn’t sure how to relate to him, what to do. I had the crazy urge to pick him up, to crush him against me, to know his weight, to feel how real and substantial a boy he was.
“Do you know who I am?” I asked.
He looked back at me, one hand on the truck, the other propping him up as he crawled along the porch. In that glance, I could see myself as a boy, the small face that had looked back from the mirror, one that was caught in photographs my mother tucked inside albums.
Rosa was right, he was mine, but I didn’t know what to do about it.
A beautiful woman in a velour sweat suit pushed through the door, holding two boxes that she could barely manage. I stood up as she brushed by.
“Can I help?” I asked, but she ignored me, dashing down and dumping the boxes in the back of the pickup. I realized now that there were several others already there. She was packing.
“Are you Letty?” I asked as she passed.
She halted, turning her face to me, the perfectly styled hair and heavy lashes out of sync with the panic in her eyes. “You cannot have the boy,” she said. “I love Rosa, but she tells many wild tales.”
I stood up. “I’m pretty sure he is mine.”
She straightened to her full height, and up on the porch, she towered over me. “That would be easy for her, no? Some American boy come in and save her? What, you plan to marry her and make more little babies?”
“I’m not sure what is going on here. She brought me here to see him.”
Letty whirled around and snatched up Manuel. He was too large to carry easily, and he fought her, but she pinned him against her hip with practiced ease. “He is all I have now, and I must keep him safe. So get out of here and let us be.”
She opened the door, then closed it behind her again. I could hear the twist of several locks.
Bloody hell.
The truck sat forlorn on the porch. I leaned over and picked it up, moving it next to the tub of gum. I knew I could knock on the door, or go around and find another way in. But hell, I didn’t know anything. Maybe you could line up a half-dozen dark-haired kids, and I would see something of myself in every single one.
I waited until the sun dipped low in the sky and the lights began to pop on in the houses. Rosa never came out. Finally I knocked on the door. No one came, but I could hear voices, shouting and crying. I wanted to smash in the door, get to them, but damn it, I had no clue what was going on. Rosa could be lying. I couldn’t just snatch the kid.
I didn’t have any choices here.
I had to walk away.
The thud of my boots on the hollow stairs echoed on the quiet street as I stomped back down to my Harley. The roar of the engine was tremendous, bouncing off the stucco facades and down the lane. I turned the bike around and headed back the way I came.
I would forget it all. Pretend it never happened.
15: Gavin
The hospital corridors were quiet, the visitors either gone for the day or settled in for the night. I hesitated at the end of Corabelle’s hall, bracing myself for another confrontation with her father. I’d texted her a dozen times on the way home from Ensenada, pulling over every few miles, but I hadn’t heard back. For all I knew, her father had taken her phone.
The door to 425 was ajar. I knocked and stepped inside, but the bed was stripped, the flowers gone. Had they sent her home?
I had her keys. Maybe she’d been able to get a set from her complex office. I rushed back down the hall to leave, but when I passed the nurse station, I decided to make sure she had been discharged rather than moved.
“Corabelle Rotheford in 425? She’s gone?”
An unfamiliar nurse looked up. “And who are you?”
I hesitated. “Her brother. I was supposed to bring her clothes when she got out, but I guess she already went home?”
The nurse clicked on a keyboard. “No, she was moved to ICU.” She glanced up at me. “But you won’t be able to visit her there. That floor has strict visiting hours.”
Panic coursed through me. “Did she relapse?”
She put on a sympathetic face. “Maybe you should talk to your parents about it.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s the second floor.”
I took off down the hall.
“You can’t get in there after hours!” she called out.
Like hell I couldn’t.
I lunged into a stairwell and raced down two floors. When I flung open the door, I was greeted with a long desk flanked by entrances that required badge access. A hallway opposite the desk went to the elevators and the hospital’s center atrium.
A lone staff member behind the counter held a phone between her cheek and shoulder, facing away from me. I backed into the stairwell and left the door open a crack. I could watch from here for a chance to go in. Maybe if someone came out, I could race in before it locked again.
A nurse came up behind me. “Lost?”
I jumped, then straightened, hoping I didn’t look like a stalker. “Is this the second floor?”
“Yes.”
“And visiting hours are over?”
She glanced at her watch. “Yes. You can visit again starting at ten tomorrow.”
“But I can visit.”
She smiled. “Of course. You just have to be buzzed in. It is limited to family and doctor approval.”
“She’s my sister.”
“You might want to check with the nurses. In ICU there are no private rooms. Did you talk with anyone?”
“No. I just got here.”
She pushed open the door. “Tamara?”
The nurse nodded on the phone and held up a finger.
“She’ll fix you up,” the nurse said and crossed over, flashing her card at the sensor. The door buzzed and popped open. I watched the light. It held for about five seconds and then the door closed again, latching tight.
If I asked the Tamara person for help, she’d just tell me to come back tomorrow. I didn’t want to come back. I wanted to find Corabelle now.
I headed to the elevators. An opening looked down on the hospital’s hub, and all the floors dumped into a central shaft with plants hanging from the various levels, bright and green. I backed up against the rail until the nurse at the desk couldn’t see me, and waited. Surely another nurse would come off the elevator and head to the ICU. Then I could wait for her to buzz in and I could — hell, do something. Get in somehow.
The elevator doors slid open, but the two men who came out went the opposite way. I waited another agonizing ten minutes, but the only other passenger was a maintenance man pushing a mop bucket on wheels.
He did, however, head for the right ward.
I followed him partway down the short hall, wondering if I could possibly pull this off. When the man got near the desk, Tamara waved at him, then turned back to her monitor. He went in the door at her back. Perfect. I waited for the buzz, let him push through, counted to three, then blazed across past the desk in a flash.
If the woman looked up, I didn’t know it. As soon as I got through, I halted.
A large room was curtained off into several sections, each holding a bed surrounded with monitors. A nurse was checking something on a machine near the one in the center, bent over. When the maintenance man caught her attention, I ducked behind a curtain on the end next to an elderly lady.
“Sorry,” I whispered, but the woman was unconscious.
My heart hammered as I waited to see where the nurse would go. From here, I couldn’t spot if any of the beds held Corabelle.
The maintenance man mopped around the equipment, passing in and out of my field of vision as he moved. I was going to get caught any second.
But the nurse paused beside him and asked him something quietly. He followed her through a center section that I guessed connected the two halves of the unit.
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I stepped out of the curtain space quickly and walked along the semicircle, praying Corabelle was in one of them. A teenage boy. A middle-aged woman. A man in traction.
Then I saw her. She slept, her dark hair tied up in a knot high on her head.
I almost dropped to my knees.
She had a tube going into her mouth, a blue one just like Finn’s. Her heartbeat registered on a monitor, as well as her oxygen levels. I tried to shake the vision of the NICU, but the noises were too similar, the wheeze of a ventilator and periodic beeps.
I stumbled toward her like a dying man. What had happened? My stomach felt lined with rocks. I sat on the bed and brushed back a wisp of hair from her forehead. She slept really hard, not shifting at all with my touch. They must have given her something to knock her out. Even the first two nights when she was sick, she would still shift around, sometimes making little sounds. Now she was so flat to the bed.
Like Finn had been after I’d signed the papers to disconnect him.
Remorse crashed over me like a wave. I had screwed everything up. Walked out on her. Gone to Mexico. Possibly even fathered another child. And here she was, barely holding on.
“I’m so sorry, baby,” I whispered.
I shouldn’t be in her life at all. She’d been doing fine until I came along. Going to school, planning her future.
Now she was here.
The monitors continued their steady sounds.
I heard the nurse talking and panicked. I would not leave her now. The machines were to the left of the bed, so the nurse would probably approach there. I ducked to the opposite side and folded tight into a ball, tugging the curtain in front of me so that I sat between it and the concrete wall.
I couldn’t see anything, but the footsteps grew closer, paused, then faded away again. The maintenance cart began rolling, wheels clattering on the concrete floor.
When the room was quiet again, I peeked out. Corabelle had not moved. Her elbow was bent near the edge of the bed, and I shifted forward to lay my forehead against her cool skin.
I wished we could go back to that first night at the astronomy star party, when Corabelle stretched out beside me on the roof, and we realized the world had pushed us back together after four years. But I’d gotten angry, and taken off. If I could just do that night again, I wouldn’t have left then either. If we’d been better from the beginning, she wouldn’t have walked into that damn ocean.
I just kept leaving. I just kept walking away.
Until I figured all this out, I could not be the man who always stayed the course. I would continue to be the one who wasn’t there when things got tough.
I didn’t want to be that person. I had to figure out how to beat this urge, to kill it. But first I would have to admit where I’d gone wrong, four years ago, that first time I deserted her, on her worst day. The funeral. Those black, black days.
~*´♥`*~
I was pretty sure the whole funeral business was a racket. Corabelle sat in the corner of a room full of coffins, staring blankly at the row of tiny ones in pink and blue and pewter. Who could give a shit about the color? Pointless decisions. All coffins should be black. Or white. Or something.
Her mother leaned over to hug her from behind. I hadn’t been able to touch her myself, not since last night in the room with Finn. She flinched like I’d struck her every time my hand grazed her skin. I didn’t understand it. I just had to wait. I could wait.
A bunch of our friends were sitting out in the waiting area and this pissed me off. They weren’t here to be supportive or helpful. They wanted to cry and be part of the drama. Just picturing them out there with their Kleenex and their mascara streaks made me want to punch something.
In fact, hitting something had become a preoccupation that bothered me quite a lot. It was almost a reflex, the urge to strike. I’d always felt it to some degree, and saw it in my father when his anger hit a certain level — time to get out of the way. I had a sixth sense about it in him, developed over eighteen years. Possibly the biggest relief in moving in with Corabelle the last few months was to relax. I knew he couldn’t show up suddenly to jerk me out of bed.
We couldn’t afford any of this. Six hundred dollars for a coffin. There were funeral fees. Graveside fees. Processional cars. Flowers. Headstones.
Corabelle’s dad had been working insurance angles. She was still on his health insurance — one of several reasons we’d waited to get married. He wanted the baby covered through him too, to spare us the problems of trying to get a policy retroactively since Finn hadn’t lived long enough for us to arrange it. That would get us a little money to cover the funeral.
The man in the suit held out a folder, asking Corabelle once again which coffin she would like to select. Her mother finally said, “The blue one is nice.”
No one looked to me for any opinions. I stood against the wall, feeling strangled in a shirt and tie. The funeral wasn’t for another two days. I wasn’t sure why I had to be dressed up now. But I did what was expected. I didn’t know anything else to do anyway.
I walked up to the blue coffin and looked inside. The metal walls were lined with white satin. The salesman nodded approvingly. I tried to picture Finn lying in it, but the image made me want to knock the little box off the stand. Babies shouldn’t be in boxes, but Finn was just moving from his enclosed crib to this. He’d never smelled anything but controlled spaces, never rolled around in open air.
I had to ball my hands into fists to keep myself from pushing over the whole row of coffins like dominoes falling. I backed up against the wall, arms at my sides. I wondered if this was how my dad always felt. And if, like me, it hadn’t started until he had a kid. Maybe I was the reason he was so angry. Maybe that responsibility — that obligation and demand — activated the chain.
I couldn’t take another minute and strode out of the showroom, through the empty chapel space, and past the girlfriends, who took up their sobbing when they saw me. I felt jaded, bitter, brimming with disgust at everyone around me. I didn’t know how to get past it, how long it would last, or if, now that I had come to this place, I could ever go back to caring about anything.
Corabelle’s father caught up with me in the parking lot, jerking me back by the arm. “Don’t you walk out of here right now,” he said. “She needs you.”
His face was hard, and I could see the change in him. He was being forced to be strong. His quiet kindness evaporated in the face of protecting his daughter.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “I was just sick of coffins.”
He sighed. “I don’t think she’s up for any more decisions. Why don’t you sort through the pictures for the slide show?”
“She’ll want to do that.”
He laid his hand on my shoulder. “Right now, she needs you in her corner. I saw Maybelle through a lot of hardship. Four miscarriages. Her mother died two days after one of them. She acted like she didn’t want me, but I finally figured out that it was because she didn’t have any way to put into words what she needed me to do.”
“I don’t know what to do. I can’t fix this.”
He ran his hands through his thinning hair. “Neither could I. But walking away breaks it even more.”
I sank down on a concrete bench outside the door. “I don’t see how things could get any worse.”
His lips pinched together like Corabelle’s did when she was concentrating. “Nobody can walk these paths alone. Even if it seems she doesn’t need you, you have to stay by her side.”
“She doesn’t even want to talk to me.”
“The moment that she pushes you away is exactly the time when you should hold her even closer.” He stood up. “I’m going to get us out of here for a while. Why don’t you bring her over to the house? We’ll pretend to eat something.”
He opened the door to the funeral home, and I forced my body off the bench and back inside. His hand clapped against my back as we headed through the building. “My Corabelle doesn’t choo
se lightly. I know you can do this. For her. For all of us.”
When we got back to the coffin room, Corabelle was holding a silver urn. “Maybe we should cremate him. Then we can keep him with us always.” Her eyes had this shell-shocked look about them, both seeing and not seeing anything in front of her.
“You wanted a grave to visit,” I reminded her. “You were worried about having the ashes move from place to place.”
“You’re right. I did want that.” She set the urn back on a shelf. “There is no good way to do this, is there?”
“None.”
She turned to me, and finally, I was able to hold her in my arms for a moment. The salesman led her parents back into the chapel and we were alone, the empty boxes propped open around us, revealing their silky interiors. The air smelled of pine and fabric and a stale sort of newness, like a car that’s been closed up too long on the lot at a dealer. “Did you go with the blue one?” I asked.
She nodded against my chest.
“Like the ocean,” I told her, and her shoulders heaved.
I hung on to her, the only things upright in a room full of horizontals, the boxes for the living to lay their lost.
~*´♥`*~
The morning of the funeral was stupidly beautiful. Birdsong, sunshine, a warm breeze off the desert. I wanted to pummel Mother Nature for thinking it was okay to celebrate spring on a day like today.
Corabelle sat on the end of our bed, holding a black dress in her hand. “It doesn’t fit,” she said.
I stood at the mirror working on my tie for the hundredth time. I hated these things. “It will be fine,” I told her.
In the mirror I saw her list forward, and I whipped around to catch her. “Are you okay?”
Her belly heaved with tears that were all dried out. “My boobs are leaking.”
I sat on the bed next to her. “What will make it stop?”
“I don’t know. They gave me a pill to dry them up but it’s not working.”
Her bra was soaked. I headed over to the dresser and pulled out a new one. “Didn’t you get some of those pad things?”