by Unknown
From the television mounted in the corner, Judge Judy snaps at bedraggled defendants who don’t even have the wherewithal to pick a nicer sweatshirt for their televised court appearances.
“Where’s my mom?” Angel asks her grandmother with a little whimper. “I thought she’d be here by now.”
“I left a message.” Yolanda checks her phone, then both her hand and the phone drop back to her lap. “She’ll be here.”
“She hasn’t seen me in over three weeks.”
When he looks at his daughter, Amadeo sometimes has the sense that he’s looking at one of those holographic postcards—she’s a woman, she’s a child, she’s the tiny kid she once was. He can’t get her image to hold steady.
“Hey, you’re okay. You got us,” Amadeo reminds her.
What Amadeo didn’t expect was how boring it would all be. It wasn’t so bad when they let Angel walk the halls, but as soon as a bed became available, they stuck her in it and plugged her into machines. For long periods nothing happens, just the tedious comings and goings of people with brisk walks. They write baffling things—numbers and abbreviations and impossible-to-read drug names—on the whiteboard opposite her bed, check dials and digital displays and make marks on plastic clipboards.
A heavy lady packed into banana-printed scrubs—nurse, nurse’s assistant, doctor?—pats the arm of a chair. “Why don’t you take a seat, Dad, out of the way?” Amadeo sits obediently, the vinyl exhaling under him.
But Amadeo is still in the way, and it doesn’t matter where his chair is. “Excuse me,” says first one medical professional and then another. “Excuse me.” Amadeo scoots this way and that, and each time he moves he loses one shoe cover or another. His big feet in their yellow leather work boots stick out into everyone’s path. Finally, he wedges himself into a corner next to a red biohazard bin and behind the swinging IV line. A nurse administers an injection, and with a rapidity that can only be carelessness, passes the needle under Amadeo’s nose on its way to the biohazard bin. She pops the bin open with her foot and then lets the lid drop, subjecting Amadeo to a puff of contagion.
Everything becomes hazy; sound is fuzzy, his vision clouded. The vinyl of the chair is damp beneath his thighs. He looks at the floor, the walls, the arms of the very chair he’s sitting in, and because he just saw a segment about it on the news, he thinks of the MRSA bacteria that must be coating every surface. The Band-Aid on his hand flaps off.
“I gotta go,” Amadeo says, and murmurs something about the bathroom to a medical assistant as he staggers into the clean bare cold of the hall. He leans against the blank wall, breathing heavily, willing himself not to vomit.
If only Angel could be like her friend and just crap the baby out.
After taking a spin around the hospital, though, he feels better. He goes down to the cafeteria, pressing the elevator button with his elbow. He feels useful, trucking around like he has a purpose. “I got you a Jell-O snack,” he informs Angel, pushing back into the room.
His daughter turns a dark look on him. “I’m about to blast a watermelon out of my pussy and you think I want a Jell-O snack?”
Yolanda flinches. “Angel, mi hijita, please.”
“Fine.” Amadeo places the Jell-O on the rolling tray. “You could have it, Mom.”
“You go ahead.” But there’s no way Amadeo is going to carry a spoonful of Jell-O snack through this thick viral air and into his mouth.
A nurse assures them that Angel is dilating, slowly but surely, not that Amadeo wants to know the details. He sees very little change in Angel’s state, except that she is becoming increasingly irritable.
When Angel was being born, Amadeo remembers, he sat in the waiting room watching VH1, clutching a package of peanut butter crackers from the vending machine and concentrating very hard, as if he were going to be quizzed later on the video for TLC’s “Waterfalls.” The whole time, Marissa’s mother had been in there with Marissa, and her sister and Yolanda, too. All those women united over Angel’s birth as they never would be again once, just a few months later, things began to disintegrate between Marissa and Amadeo.
He doesn’t know why he wasn’t there with Marissa. He’d wanted to be—or part of him had wanted to—except that the prospect felt scary and intimate and he sensed that the women would have been surprised if he’d presented himself at the delivery room door.
Now, five hours in, Yolanda stands, presses the heels of her hands into her eye sockets. She unties her smock and folds it neatly, removes her shower cap. “I’m going to go home for a while, hijita.”
“Wait, what?” Angel scoots up, alert. “You’re leaving?”
“What can I do, honey? I’m not helping anything, just sitting here. It could take hours and hours. And you’ve got your dad.” She gathers her purse. “I have a headache. I just need to lie down. I’ll be back in an hour or two. Call if anything changes,” she tells Amadeo.
“You’re not leaving, are you, Dad?” Angel’s hair is tangled, her face pale. The caked mascara looks ready to crumble into her reddened eyes. She looks a little unhinged.
“No,” he says meekly. He hadn’t known leaving was an option.
They both watch in shock as Yolanda follows through with her threat, pulls out her car keys, plants a casual kiss on Angel’s head, and is gone.
“What the hell?” says Angel. “What is with her? What is with all of you?”
“Hey now. I’m right here.”
Angel is right. Yolanda has been strange. For instance, her comment earlier: What was she thinking, bringing up some kid’s murder at a time like this? And then up and leaving at maybe the most dramatic moment of their lives, the moment when Amadeo is going to become a thirty-three-year-old grandfather? Yolanda is not behaving like the mother he knows, the one who cooks for them and buys them socks and hands them money when they need it. She has a responsibility to be the mother they’ve come to expect.
He nearly says something along those lines to Angel, but a parrot-faced guy with the wavy hair of a rock star hustles past him to check his daughter’s blood pressure.
Amadeo dawdles at the end of Angel’s bed, watching the nurse pump the blood pressure cuff. Despite his profession, he’s still a man, the guy’s demeanor seems to convey. There’s something delicate and efficient and assured in the way he pumps the bulb. He juts his chin and stares thoughtfully into the middle distance, as though posing, listening through his stethoscope. As Angel gazes through tears at the ceiling, waiting for her arm to be released, Amadeo thinks about blood pressure, about the actual pressure of blood—thick blood, red blood—pulsing through his own veins, and he thinks about needles. He eyes the biohazard bin grimly.
“Would you just relax?” snaps Angel. “Sit down.”
“Sure.” His voice sounds faint in his ears. “I’m relaxed.” He doesn’t want to blame Angel while she’s lying here frightened and in pain, but no one can deny that it’s because of her that he’s in this hospital teeming with hordes of pathogens. Why none of this occurred to him when he was sitting in the ER on Good Friday is beyond him.
“Looking good,” the guy tells Angel, marking the number on the clipboard.
“Hey,” says Amadeo. He tugs the nurse’s sleeve, hampering his rush from the room. “Do you think everything’s been sanitized? I mean, what about MRSA?”
The nurse shakes his head warningly. “We have very few cases here, sir.”
“What the hell is mersa?” Angel looks from the nurse to Amadeo and back, her face alight with terror.
Amadeo turns to his daughter regretfully. “It’s this infection that’s totally drug-proof. Hospitals are full of it. You can get it from, like, a hangnail, and they usually have to amputate. Don’t you even watch the news? They’re always talking about it.”
“Dad!”
“You don’t need to worry,” says the nurse. “It doesn’t help to worry.”
Amadeo’s knees liquefy and his vision wobbles. Come on, he tells himself. Get a grip. He mus
t be strong. “Don’t worry,” Amadeo tells Angel, and then he leans over and vomits.
The vomit slaps the linoleum and achieves an impressive range, splattering the far wall, Angel’s sheets, even the biohazard bin.
Angel wails.
“Okay, sir,” says the male nurse firmly, leading him away by the elbow from the awful intimate sight of fully formed corn kernels and diced tomato. He deposits Amadeo in the hall before calling for backup, as if they have to get rid of Amadeo before they can begin to get rid of his mess.
TWO MORE HOURS PASS. Amadeo sits in the corridor on a plastic chair in his smock. He slouches like a disgraced child, cast out of the classroom. Throwing up had a salutary effect; he feels strong now, actually, and clearheaded, despite the scourging taste in his mouth. But it doesn’t matter, because he is not allowed back in the delivery room. Of course, of course, he puked in front of the one male nurse.
His mother returned, summoned on her cell phone by both Amadeo and Angel, and is in there now, in her rightful place. Amadeo expected to be reprimanded—I can’t leave you for a minute—but she just patted Amadeo as she passed. “It’s okay, hijito. Your dad almost fainted when Valerie was born, and he wasn’t even in the room.” Then the door clapped shut behind her, leaving Amadeo with this comparison to his father. He knows they will hold this fuckup against him forever, his mom and daughter. In the decades to come, they’ll laugh at him, shake their heads, but deep down they’ll see it as the deeper failing it is.
He jabs his hand. The crucifixion feels very far away, not at all like something that happened to him in his own life. Angel is right—there’s enough pain in the world, lurking darkly at the edges and poised to spring. Shame floods him; his limbs are engorged with it.
The whole hospital seems to be buzzing and beeping—the lights, the intercoms, the computer monitors, the phones at the circular nurses’ station. The place is a complex machine, and at the heart of it is his Angel, his beautiful child in pain.
Amadeo peers at his daughter through the narrow window in the door, sees the spasms that tighten her pale face. She lapses into a light, drugged sleep before being yanked awake once more.
Amadeo pokes his head in. “I remembered a joke. Did you hear about the hurricane that passed through Española?”
A nurse is doing something between Angel’s spread legs, so Amadeo rushes. “Ripped right through town and did two million dollars’ worth of repairs.”
A smile passes over Angel’s face, as brief and pained as a contraction. “You shouldn’t be talking crap about Española. It’s my hometown. And you went to high school there.” Then she looks beyond him to the hallway, carts and gurneys and visiting families passing. “I’m practically naked! Shut the door!”
Amadeo withdraws his head. Now other jokes present themselves to him, jokes he remembers from his own high school years that he’ll never tell Angel. Why’d they cancel the driver’s ed program? They needed the cars for sex ed. Why wasn’t Jesus born in Española? Because God couldn’t find a virgin.
Amadeo is filled with an electric jangling fear that doesn’t expend itself. He presses his thumbs into his palms and prays to Jesus, but he isn’t comforted. What does Jesus know about waiting for one’s daughter to give birth? Nothing. So he prays to God, who’s a father, too, but he can’t picture God except as a woolly jovial guy. He’d pass out cigars, clap Amadeo on the back, call out hearty congratulations, and Amadeo doesn’t trust that. Finally, he prays to Mary, who does know what he’s talking about, having had a kid herself and having had to watch that kid go through big troubles. Let her be okay, he begs. Please let her be okay. But he can’t give the prayers the kind of lift they need, the lift he was able to give his prayers in the morada. Amadeo can almost see them catch in the drafts from the air conditioner and drift to the floor, skate around the linoleum like dust bunnies.
Amadeo remembers praying as a child, listing the people he wanted God to bless. He lay in the dark, stiff with anxiety that he might forget a name, scouring his mind for even the most forgettable of his classmates lest God, to punish Amadeo for his omissions, take that person out. Amadeo still remembers the Technicolor cartoon violence of those visions: anvils plummeting from heaven, chasms splitting the floors of buildings, fires leaping unbidden from the sidewalk. It must have been boring for his mother, having to sit there at the edge of his bed, holding back her final kiss until he’d finished droning. But these prayers were important, because hadn’t his father—whom Amadeo hated, whom he feared for his rages and silences, whom he intentionally left out of his prayers starting the year he turned five—died just such a Looney Tunes death? Descending La Bajada on I-25, crashing through the guardrail, the car (as Amadeo imagined—still imagines—it) flying in slow motion through sky until the tires once again touched earth and the car erupted in flames.
Even now when he thinks of his father, Amadeo remembers with a pang his little vinyl case of Matchbox cars, which he’d left in his father’s trunk and which never made it out of the wreckage. He’d loved those cars, each of which somehow had its own personality—the serious, studious police cruiser and the sassy delivery van and the peevish chipped blue convertible with the doors that opened—those beloved cars that had met their own miniature fiery ends. He wept a lot for those cars, though even at age five, he knew better than to let on. Surely he’d been weeping for his father, too. But amid those memories, Amadeo remembers the exhilaration of his own power, the sense that God was listening carefully.
Fuck, Amadeo thinks now, looking at his palms, disgusted with his exaggerated sense of his own importance in the eyes of God.
He wonders now how things between him and Marissa would have turned out if he had been in the delivery room with her. If they’d held hands, united and ready to welcome their daughter, while their mothers waited outside, would they have moved in together? Would they be together to this day?
As if conjured, Marissa stands above him now, a purse and a canvas tote bag over her shoulder. She’s put on a little weight since he last saw her, nearly two years ago, but she’s still hot, in tight black pants and a sweater that slides off a shoulder. She wears glasses now, oversized and hip. Her skin is smooth and flushed, her hair pulled back into a coarse ponytail. A few strands, too short for the rubber band, fall around her face. “Hey.”
“Oh. Hey. You’re here.” He straightens, runs a hand down the front of his shirt. Of course Amadeo knew he’d see her today, but he didn’t expect this nervousness. “She’s dilated to three centimeters. I was in there a long time.”
He smells the cigarette cloud on Marissa. Amadeo is about to tell her she’d better not go in there smelling like that, that it will snag in Angel’s lungs, make the breathing even harder on her, but he doesn’t want to start a fight, and he also isn’t sure she won’t go in anyway just to spite him.
Marissa tips her head and gives a bleak half-smile. “She okay?”
Amadeo nods with more conviction than he feels.
Marissa pauses before the door and seems to gather her forces. Is she nervous? Amadeo wonders with surprise. She repositions her purse strap higher on her shoulder and then turns the knob and goes in.
Amadeo jiggles his leg and regards the wide hall and the other loitering men. They all look unkempt. Shirts untucked, assorted smudged shoes, exposed hairy arms. They tug at sideburns and uneven facial hair, they wander out to the elevators and back. A few talk on phones, but their voices are muted, as though they’re aware that this place is not theirs.
“You threw up?” Marissa says when she comes out after only ten minutes. She seems cheered. “Why? She hasn’t even started pushing. There isn’t even any blood yet.”
“I’m not good with needles. You know that.”
“I didn’t know that.” She drops into the chair beside him. “It’s a real hurry-up-and-wait, huh. It’s good to see your mom.” He feels her studying him. “It’s good to see you.”
“How’s Angel?”
Marissa’s e
xpression tightens. “She’s fine,” she says testily.
“She was waiting for you. For hours. We must have put in twenty calls.”
“My cell was out of juice. No one tried me at work until your mom just this minute, and then I came right over. Smart Starts! has my work number, so I don’t know what’s up with that. Plus, you know where I work. I’ve been at the same damn place for ten years.”
Amadeo should have tried calling her himself. Or suggested his mom stop by Marissa’s house and office, neither of which is more than ten minutes from the hospital.
After a moment, she says, “Really, she was waiting for me?” She indicates a tangled wad of lavender acrylic at the top of her canvas tote. “I’m knitting her a blanket. For the baby. A lady at work is teaching me. I hate it.” She positions the mass on her lap, scoots the loops up and down the needles, then gives up and spears the snarl.
All at once Amadeo is struck by the oddness of the fact that it’s been so long since he’s seen his daughter’s mother. Their visitation schedule was always casual at best, and these last few years, Amadeo has hardly seen his daughter, despite the fact that she lives just forty minutes away, in a city he goes to literally all the time. Marissa never asked him to do pickups or take Angel to doctors’ appointments; she turned instead to her mother and his. She never had the faintest flicker of faith in him, and was right not to. Again that hot wash of guilt sluices over him, and sorrow, too, because all those years he could have known Angel and didn’t.
Two years younger than him, just a year behind him in school, yet Amadeo used to be in awe of Marissa’s determination. She did better in school than Amadeo, and he always figured that she’d end up a successful real estate agent or lawyer. He figured she’d move up and away and marry someone equally successful and sneer from her great heights at that first boyfriend—that mistake—who didn’t know how good he had it.