by Unknown
“Whoa,” he tells Angel. “I’m feeling really light-headed.” But she doesn’t even glance at him.
Across from them, a woman scrolls through her phone. Her young daughter—seven, eight—swings her feet restlessly, and a rhinestone-studded flip-flop drops to the teal epoxy floor. With both hands she grips a bag of cherry cough drops. Her eyes are wide and fixed on his bloody towel.
“Are you sick?” he asks the girl as nicely as he can, trying to rein in his annoyance.
The girl raises her eyes from the gore in his lap with some reluctance. Her hair is ratty and she wears a pilled yellow pajama top. “I might have foot-and-mouth disease.”
The mother looks up warily from her phone.
“Maybe I could go before you, then?” Amadeo raises his swaddled hands, shrugging regretfully. “I’m bleeding out.”
“We been here three hours,” the woman says, voice flat, and she returns to her phone.
“You are not bleeding out,” says Angel, louder and meaner than necessary.
But what does she know? Angel is a high school dropout, not a doctor. People die all the time from slit wrists, and the palm is basically the wrist.
He moves in his chair and gasps when the bandage on his back shifts. After the second nail, the hermanos helped him right down and gave him water, offering their congratulations. At first his hands didn’t even hurt—his feet did, from clinging to the block on the cross. Al Martinez had bandaged him up gently. “Keep pressure here and here,” he said, his voice low. “You did good, son.” Still, the man is no professional, and Amadeo can already feel the medical tape coming unstuck.
To Amadeo’s surprise, Tío Tíve didn’t show any of the kindness of the other hermanos, didn’t even seem proud. And the old man didn’t call him an ambulance, either, just got one of the hermanos who lives in Española to drop them at the hospital. “Nail gun,” Tío Tíve warned. “You got in the way of a nail gun.”
“Anyway,” says Angel, turning the page of her magazine, “it would serve you right if you did bleed out.”
He looks at her, disbelieving. “Hey. Come on.” What a thing to say. “Where did that come from?”
All of a sudden, he remembers that today is Angel’s birthday. Sixteen. She didn’t mention anything this morning; he wonders if she forgot herself, or if she wanted the day to be his.
“Listen, Angel. I’m sorry you had to be in the emergency room on your birthday. I apologize. Is that your problem? Is that what’s bugging you, that you’re not getting the attention? Listen, I wouldn’t have asked you to come if it wasn’t an emergency. I’m wounded.”
Angel says nothing. Thank god she’ll have the baby soon, Amadeo thinks, because he’s not sure how much more he can take of these moods.
“Did you see the whole thing?” he asks in an undertone. He wishes he’d had her take pictures, but, he reflects, that wouldn’t have been in the spirit of the occasion. Still, he wishes there was a record of his success.
Angel riffles through the magazine too fast to be reading anything. Amadeo watches the article titles as she flips past them: Oral Fixation: Take-Along Snacks Your Child Will Love!; Milking It: Your Toddler and Lactose; I Feel You: Raising Empathetic Children.
Amadeo taps this last article, and Angel pauses her frenetic page-turning. “Hey, that one looks good. Wish I’d known about raising empathetic children.”
Angel gives him a shriveling, disgusted look. “You got to be joking me.”
He turns away from her and looks instead at the television mounted in the corner. Cable news plays too loud. A cruise ship has lost power and is floating free in the Caribbean; the toilets have flooded and the king shrimp have gone off. Big deal, thinks Amadeo. So they get a longer cruise. So they eat Fritos. It’s not like they’re facing a medical situation. It’s not like there is blood involved.
In the corner, a skinny tecato with patchy facial hair clutches himself, shivering and moaning, his eyes squinted as if under full sun. “I’m hurting so bad,” he mumbles to no one. He smells like he’s shit himself. He extends his legs and then draws them in again, shifting on his skinny butt, as if he can’t find a position that doesn’t cause him agony. He’s got las malias, heroin withdrawal, and Amadeo turns away. He thanks God that he can’t stand needles.
Amadeo hurts much worse than after the cutting of the sellos on Ash Wednesday, worse than after those lashes. Earlier, on Calvario, he seemed to have risen to some heightened space that pain didn’t penetrate. He was cloaked in grace, he supposes.
But now he really, truly hurts, and Angel is giving him neither the praise nor the sympathy that he deserves. The pain clusters in his palms, shimmering, ever-changing. The blood is messy, coagulating thick and black, ruining his white pants. He wants, suddenly, to put his daughter in her place. “Don’t you even got a boyfriend?”
Angel turns and looks at him like he’s stupid. “What do you think?”
“Didn’t your mom never teach you not to sleep around?”
“All the girls in my parenting class, not one of them has a guy that matters. Not one. You think you mattered?”
“You shouldn’t have come. You think you have a right to just barge into my house and make yourself at home.”
Angel’s eyes widen, and then she narrows them. “It’s my grandmother’s house. You don’t have a house.” She turns back to her magazine, resolute.
At long last the girl and her mother are called. Amadeo looks at them piteously, and the girl looks back at him with interest, but the mother gathers their things and walks away, refusing eye contact.
“Hey,” he says, ready to reconcile. “Why are you so mad at me? I did good today.”
Angel finally sets the magazine on her lap and turns to him. “So,” she says deliberately, “tell me: What was that? You never said anything about actual nails. You never said anything about actually getting crucified. What good is that to anyone?”
Her words are like a slap. “What’s it to you, Angel?”
Her voice thickens and lowers. “In three weeks, I’m due. Three fucking weeks.” She swallows and turns away, and her eyes rest unseeing on the television. For a moment Amadeo thinks Angel is going to cry. When she turns back, however, her eyes are dry, her face splotchy, gaze shuttered. Very quietly, so quietly he has to lean toward her to hear, Angel says, “How’re you going to hold the baby? Or didn’t you even think of that?”
It’s Easter Sunday, the day of the Lord’s Resurrection, and in honor of that, and of her own return home, Yolanda is going to gather her children around her, feed them the perfect Easter dinner, and break the news that she is dying of a malignant brain tumor.
When she pulls in front of the house and cuts the engine, Yolanda thinks, So this is what it looks like: her home without her. She’s lived here her entire adult life, and has been away for less than two weeks, but somehow the house seems lower and drabber than she remembered it, crouching among the dusty juniper. It’s an adobe-style house, soiled pink with iron bars on the windows that her daughter Valerie says will trap them all in a deadly inferno should there ever be a fault in the wiring, but that make Yolanda feel safer just the same.
Anthony built it in the first year of their marriage, while the two of them shared her childhood room at her parents’ house. “You’ll have a washer and dryer, babe,” he told her. “Dishwasher, picture window, any color carpet you want.”
She remembers bending over the plans with Anthony and her parents after dinner, clutching his hand under the table: the three little bedrooms, the dining nook. At his happiest, Anthony could be genial and loving, laughing too loudly at family parties, keeping up affectionately with old aunts. She’d grown up with him—he’d been her cousin’s best friend—and she’d loved the clarity of his vision of their future together. Finding the land had been so easy it had seemed fated: four beautiful acres surrounded by hills, just outside of Las Penas, the asking price five hundred dollars under what they’d decided they could manage. Each day, while
she went to answer phones and sort paperwork at the legislature in Santa Fe, thrilled with the importance and glamour of her first job, Anthony drove out to the land with the bed of his truck filled with cinderblock and cement. Yolanda sometimes forgets how competent and hardworking her husband could be—talented, even, she thinks, looking at the flagstone steps he fit together with geometric precision—and she feels sadness—less at his absence, than that all those good memories were overwritten by what came after.
Stop, thinks Yolanda. Above all she must not let herself get depressed. But who wouldn’t be a little blue? Three days ago, she was a woman with a boyfriend and a normal life expectancy, a woman vacationing in Las Vegas.
For the last month Yolanda has been holding the headaches at bay with increasing doses of Aleve. Headache, singular, really, since it never actually goes away, and has, in fact, worsened.
“You’re stressed,” Cal said two weeks ago, always chivalrous, over a too-expensive dinner at the Steaksmith in Santa Fe. She’d set down her fork to press her head into her palms when the pain nearly scooped her eyes from their sockets. “Come away with me.” And he described the fountains and lights, the shows and the escape. Cal is thin, a carpenter with shot knees. His jowls hang loose and pink and clean-shaven, giving him the kindly sad-sack look of a basset hound, and Yolanda agreed.
Who wouldn’t agree to a vacation in Vegas, to being cared for so completely by a good man? She met Cal when he came to install the new prefab shelves in the chief clerk’s office (a job unworthy of his talents, she discovered later when she saw the shelves in his own house), and for over a year now, he’s treated her to dinners and movies and taken her back to his tidy condo, where he lets her pick the show they watch and then, after, is incredibly attentive in bed.
He is so easy to be with, and Yolanda is impressed with the version of herself she is when she’s around him: laughing and quick and unencumbered by the past. Unlike any man she’s dated, he’s never expected her to cook for him, has never asked anything of her, except once, when he was remodeling his master bathroom and wanted her to weigh in on whether he should get a Jacuzzi tub. “I don’t have an opinion,” she said, because it wasn’t fair to let him make permanent decisions based on her preferences.
Cal is, in fact, so perfect that Yolanda cannot understand why she can’t love him. Yet the more time they spend together and the more he seems to love her, the more aware she becomes that part of her remains remote.
When she went to Urgent Care in Las Vegas, it wasn’t for the headache, but for her acid reflux, which had gotten bad enough that she was eating only saltines. She couldn’t enjoy the seafood buffets or the inexpensive cocktails, or even drink coffee anymore, and the caffeine withdrawal certainly wasn’t helping her head. Twice she woke in the night so nauseated she had to throw up in the tiny cardboard bathroom of Cal’s travel trailer in the Mojave Oasis RV park. Each time she was afraid Cal would wake up and find her, but he was always dead asleep when she crawled back in beside him.
Her acid reflux was not acid reflux, but an ulcer. “Why are you taking so much Aleve?” the RN asked, alarmed. “That’s fully six times the recommended dose.” When she explained about the headache, he sent her down the road for a CT scan, just to be sure.
The technician blathered cheerfully about her son’s trip to France. “I’ve never been, myself,” she said, inserting the needle into the top of Yolanda’s hand for the IV of contrast dye. “Why go, when we’ve got an Eiffel Tower right here in Vegas?” Woozy, Yolanda tried to determine if she was feeling the tug of the needle or of the tape. “You’ll feel a little warm when we get this dye flowing, and then you’ll roll right in. Just follow the instructions over the speaker.” Yolanda barely heard the technician shut the door behind her, because a strange metallic heat grabbed the back of her throat. Before she’d even processed this, the heat shot down her torso, settling in her groin like a violation.
After the scan, doors began whooshing open to welcome her. She was ushered from the dingy emergency facility to a fancier wing of the medical center with grassy courtyards and curving palm trees, where she, Yolanda Padilla, VIP, was treated to an immediate MRI. As she rode the elevator up and down from chilly floor to chilly floor, from Radiology to Lab to Neurology, receptionists treated her kindly, nurses told her not to worry, medical assistants brought her little Dixie cups of cold water to sip. At first Yolanda hadn’t worried. She read magazines in the plush chairs and ate a peanut butter cup from the vending machine and rubbed her sleeveless arms, wishing she’d brought a sweater. How pleased and impressed she was with the health care offered in Nevada. What speed! What service! Las Vegas was surely a special place, with its apparent surfeit of doctors and their wide-open appointment books, with its hale and hearty population kept busy at the slots.
But the growing tightness in her stinging, sour stomach belied Yolanda’s understanding that such attentive patient care could only mean bad news.
Oncology was located on the top floor of the medical center. A great deal of effort had been expended to mute the essential horror of the place. At either end of the hallway was a cozy little alcove with couches, dim lights, every surface punctuated with tall pink vases of dried pussy willows. Sheer curtains covered the large windows overlooking the city, as if an unimpeded vista might taunt patients with the world they were so close to losing. Or, thought Yolanda, her heart urging flight, inspire them to jump. A small room near the reception featured calming classical music, cushions on the ground, reclining loungers. Shh . . . Meditation Room, read the sign on the door.
In the examination room, the comforts were fewer. Pink and green linoleum floor tiles. On the walls, disconcerting desert landscapes of nowhere in particular. And it was even chillier here, the air-conditioning cranked high against the hot atmosphere that pressed itself into the bowl of the valley. Yolanda shivered in her sleeveless shirt.
The appointment could be said to have gone well, insofar as it started on time and the conclusions were clear. Pressing on the left frontal lobe of her cerebral cortex, the scans revealed, was a tumor the size of an almond.
Her oncologist, Dr. Mitchell, sat beside the examination table and pointed out the various fuzzy regions of her brain on the scan. “Here you see the occipital lobe, which is responsible for converting light on the retina into images in your brain. And this is your frontal lobe, which is responsible for voluntary movement and other higher functioning, planning, social navigation, and whatnot.” Even Yolanda could see the problem: a mottled white island in her brain.
“Unshelled or shelled? The almond.”
Dr. Mitchell paused and smiled. “I always get those confused. Shell on.”
Behind Dr. Mitchell stood a very young Chinese man who’d introduced himself with an impossible accent. Dr. Mitchell had explained that he was a med student from UNLV. The boy kept tugging at his stethoscope.
“Can I have a blanket or something?” she asked. “It’s cold in here.”
Dr. Mitchell looked vaguely at the student. “Get her a covering cloth.” He waited, sympathetic and patient, while the cloth was found, and then he unfolded it and set it across Yolanda’s shoulders as though she were his date to the opera. Yolanda was grateful that she was in her own clothes, hadn’t been made to undress and put on a gown.
Dr. Mitchell scooted his rolling stool closer. He was just below her eye level. He might be about to propose to her or fit her with new shoes. It seemed absurd that she was sitting so close to this glossy man—she could lean down and kiss him.
Yolanda had a lot of respect for the medical profession—for professionalism in general—but she found herself looking hard at this man with his tanned face and lean body. His gray hair was as short and glossy as a squirrel’s pelt. There was something suspect about Dr. Mitchell, and maybe that something was that he was a doctor in Las Vegas, where everything was show and surface. Maybe Dr. Mitchell was just playing the part of doctor, and really behind the scenes he was a craps dealer at Har
rah’s. Or a Chippendale in a little zebra-print loincloth. Yolanda could picture that. From her perch on the high bed, she looked out the window; no sheer curtains in this room; this room was all about facing facts. Below her, lush green golf courses spread like patches of carpet across dry desert floor, and swimming pools were blue lozenges pressed into the dirt.
“This is serious.” Dr. Mitchell tapped the brain scan with his ballpoint, leaving little hatch marks on the tumor. “Given the size and the worsening of your headaches and fatigue and the rest of your symptomatology, I’m concerned. I understand you’re on vacation. Do you have anyone who can be here with you?”
Yolanda shook her head. “I’m fine,” she said. She couldn’t bear Cal’s sad eyes, his big dry hand squeezing hers, his assumption of their intimacy. He’d spent the whole vacation doing nice things for her: getting up early to bring her muffins, proposing dinner at fancy restaurants on the Strip, walking proudly past their neighbors in the RV park with his hand around her waist. He thought they were headed toward marriage. “Please just tell me what I need to know.”
She remembered an appalling joke Amadeo had brought home from school when he was nine. Do you have HIV? Are you positive? She’d whirled on him, her own son, breezily bringing such terrifying, hurtful words into her kitchen. “Never, ever joke about that,” she’d said, and his smile had vanished at the urgency of her tone. “People die from that.” She’d known the word die would frighten him, and she was glad to see his stricken expression. “But not you, right, Mom? You’re not going to die?” Amadeo had asked, and she’d relented. Of course not, she’d said.
Behind Dr. Mitchell, the med student had removed his stethoscope and was now occupied with stretching the headset wide, then bringing the ear tips to meet each other, over and over.
Dr. Mitchell inhaled. “Based on the presentation, my guess is that this is a glioblastoma multiforme.”
The med student stopped fiddling with his stethoscope and looked up, alarmed.